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Who Is Paying?

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My mother has peripheral neuropathy. It has left her bound to a wheelchair and unable to use her hands for much more than holding a spill-proof mug (and even those get dropped pretty frequently). She is still very independent, but she can’t work anymore (she can’t type or write) and was approved for disability benefits after months of haggling with the government. Something that was so easy for a certain meth addict I know was a nightmare for my mother, who genuinely needs disability.

Until she was approved for disability, she was getting social security benefits – with that money came enrollment in Medicaid. It paid for base-level treatment (treatment – not physical therapy) and prescriptions (as long as they were generic). Guess what happened when the SSI stopped and the disability kicked in? She was kicked off of Medicaid. While trying to re-apply for it, she discovered something unbelievably ridiculous…

Disability pays her $100 a month over the official threshold. She doesn’t qualify for Medicaid because she is only 130% of the federal poverty level. You have to be at 140%. Our state healthcare system uses the same standard and she won’t qualify for that, either.

What does that leave, boys and girls? Obamacare! Guess what she qualifies for there? Nothing she can afford. Even if she paid the bare minimum of $80 a month, she would still have a deductible and copays. That bronze plan doesn’t cover much, either. Oh, and food stamps? Thanks to her slightly increased payments through disability she only gets about $15 a month.

Nobody in my family is wealthy. My sister paid her bills for months while we waited for disability to be approved. Mom was afraid at one point that she might lose her wheelchair because it was being rented through Medicare. Before the advent of Obamacare, it wouldn’t have been nearly as difficult for my mother to get the coverage she needs. She has to pay for rent, utilities, and groceries on an extremely limited income. Now the government is telling her to buy coverage or pay a “shared responsibility fee”.

Who is paying for Obamacare? People like my mother, who struggles just to maintain even with help. She makes what amounts to chump change above the limit that the government has put on who they’ll help take care of and she can’t get anyone to give a damn. She is mortified that she needs this kind of help. The fact that she is a military mom means nothing – the government does not give a damn. Hell, we can’t even get the liberal-led Senate to care more about our troops than they do about illegal immigrants who are leeching billions of dollars off of our system. Why should they care about the mother of a distinguished soldier?

The more I see coming from our government, the more anger I feel. I had a liberal tell me a couple of weeks ago, “oh, the government isn’t making anybody buy anything!” Oh, really? What do you call Obamacare? “Well, that’s just responsible!” Okay…who gets to determine what is responsible? If that’s the measuring stick you’re going to use, it’s responsible to stop smoking. Are you going to force people to stop smoking? It’s responsible to limit alcohol consumption. Are you going to bring back prohibition? It’s responsible to avoid sleeping around. Are you going to start teaching abstinence? It’s responsible to allow a person to live with the consequences of their actions so they can learn from them. Are you going to stop trying to save people from their stupidity, too?

Until and unless you are willing to get into that kind of debate, don’t preach to me about responsibility. Things like disability and Medicaid were put in place so that people like my mother could benefit when they needed them after years of being productive members of society. Instead, we have entire generations being taught to leech off of the truly responsible ones to avoid having to do anything that resembles work. I hope you’re all proud of yourselves.


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