The State of Affairs In The United States
Reader comment on item: Obama Would Fail Security Clearance

Submitted by Alice Ann Stern (United States), Nov 14, 2008 at 16:24

In order to rescue the economy and certain special interests, the government is literally pulling the rug from underneath of all hospitals, schools, and universities. Most, if not all, departments of medicine at the leading, first and second-tier university hospital facilities are in extreme debt, left holding huge deficits. The reason for this phenomenon is because the Bush/Cheney administration cut off all federal funding for university hospitals for the past eight years. Top professors of medicine are either fleeing for employment at the pharmaceutical companies or going abroad to the European universities to continue their research work. Our finest clinicians are now fleeing in a continuous, overflowing stream. We are literally losing all of our best clinicians of medicine. Hospitals are turning patients away, literally refusing to treat them. By law, these university hospitals must treat the patient, so they are giving the patients typed statements, offering 90 days of emergency treatment for free, but when the 90 days are up, all treatment will be withheld. Depending on the type of Medicare one possesses will determine whether that patient receives any type of medical care whatsoever. Hospitals are literally turning away patients solely for financial reasons. If you want to self-pay, the hospitals will now refuse the cash from your pockets and bank accounts. They want nothing to do with Medicaid, Medicare, and self-pay patients. These are the first and second-tier university hospital facilities, upon which the elderly, the chronically ill, and catastrophically ill patients depend. So for the meantime, I would seriously forget on what's happening with Islam and the Middle East and concentrate on what's happening here in the United States, if you have any concern for your own welfare and the welfare of your family and friends. There's a war right here at home. If things continue on tract, Americans will be literally murdering each other in a most heinous, tortuous manner. Meanwhile, GM wants $75 million for innovation. GM's CEOs have been calling global warming a crock and deliberately manufacturing gas guzzling trucks. Their cars are of such poor quality that they don't last much more than three years. American manufactured cars and other types of vehicles are deliberately built to be inferior and not to last.

Why should the American tax payer give money to these miscreants, while they themselves are literally dying of untreated cancer or from infected, untreated broken bones and wounds? Instead of worrying about the Middle East, I would worry about what is now taking place here at home. The EU doesn't have any of these problems; only the United States has these problems.

One cannot continue to keep one's head buried in the sand, because one may not have a head to dig into the sand. One may find one's entire body buried six feet under, because one will not have been able to receive medical treatment here in the United States -- never mind in a timely fashion. For those wealthy industrialists and financiers, who possess their own private Lear jets, they will not be able to find the necessary clinicians at their disposal to stabilize their condition before they can hop onto their jets to the European Union for medical treatment to save their lives. Medical research has been at a virtual standstill for almost the past eight years. The very defibrillator implanted now in Vice President Cheney's chest would not have been developed or available during his administration. In fact, many people, who desperately require a defibrillator implant to save their lives, cannot receive one due to their healthcare insurance coverage. Whether one has Medicare, Medicaid, or is self-pay does not make a difference; most people will find enormous barriers in place, preventing them from receiving any type or quality of medical treatment of any degree. People, who suffer from chronic pain, resulting from accidents or disease, will find themselves going to the emergency room every three days or committing themselves into university psychiatric wards every few weeks just to receive their prescriptions of morphine or other similar types of analgesics to combat pain. This will cost the tax payer even more money, while forcing the patient to suffer horrifically and to relinquish all of their civil liberties.

Patients, who once were able to work and go to school, will now be sitting in emergency rooms and lying in hospital beds in psychiatric wards. The United States is becoming more and more like the former Soviet Russia or Soviet Union each day. So as one writes about Islam and the Middle East, just think about what's happening right under your nose here in the United States. Look at the person in the car adjacent to yours and wonder whether that person is really one of those patients not receiving his or her care. You never know when one of those patients may snap, and you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The problem is: there are so very many of those patients today, who are being denied their treatment. Don't blame the crazy patients; blame yourselves. Americans have become very complacent and apathetic, while always being on the defensive, whenever one confronts them for their lack of responsibility, laziness, and lack of awareness.

One now realizes how the Nazis were able to take over Europe and murder millions-upon-millions of people. One just has to look at what has transpired over the past eight years, and what is now being allowed to take place. Most universities are now firing all of their adjunct professors. Soon there will be no money for the associate and assistant professors. In fact, many assistant professors are finding that their contracts are not being renewed, because the universities do not have funds. The Bush/Cheney Administration literally cut out all federal funding to universities and hospitals for the past eight years. Do research about that and write about that. Who cares about Islam and the Middle East -- right now, that's not the priority. If you love the state of Israel and consider it a second home, you should be alarmed at what is now happening here in the United States. If most American Jews are preoccupied with their own survival and those of their loved ones, they will be unable to help Israel. And if they decide to flee to Israel, she will be overwhelmed and definitely unable to care for all of the elderly, the infirm, and the indigent American Jews.

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