America the FREE--as long as you can PAY for it

A friend of mine wrote me a heartfelt email about his mother, who is in assisted living. He writes,

My brothers and I are a bit wide-eyed right now in we thought our parents would do okay until they died, and now my mother and stepfather are each in assisted living. My mother's breathing is so bad, her care costs $14,000 a MONTH. She'll run out of easy cash in a few months, so we're trying to sell her house. None of us expected this, and my mother always said, "Don't worry about me. I have long-term disability insurance that will pay for 24-hour nursing at my house, if necessary. She's been paying on it for years. It turns out it'll pay up to $80 a day. You can't get hotels for that anymore. $2400 a month is not close to $14,000.

People like to think they're prepared for the future. We also liked to think we couldn't have another depression but that looks like a possibility now, too, due to the massive fraud, greed, governmental debt, lack of oversight, and just all around corruption.

In Australia all her needs would be taken care of--at home if she wanted. If you're sick or in an accident in Australia, they not only take care of you, they clean your house, cook your meals, take care of your kids.

But, according to my Republican friend, this is the terrible socialist big government we must avoid at all costs (let's not get into the reality of how Republicans create the biggest, most expensive governments, while cutting taxes to also create the biggest, most dangerous deficits--they like to have their cake and eat it too--while sending the bill to their children and grandchildren).

My Republican friend and I are having email debates, yet we're not convincing each other, because he's sure he's right.

Of course, I'm sure I'm right, too, which only makes me doubt myself--but I don't know if he ever doubts himself. He's SO sure, which is nice for him.

To him, socialism is bad. Bad. Bad. so bad you must repeat the word three times at least. Don't get into details of the difference between a socialist regime and democratic socialism, the whole idea of government helping people is a "nanny state' and is bad, unless they're spending trillions on defense, in which case it's a "daddy state" and it's good. This doesn't make sense to me--but then, I don't have all the answers and I'm not always right. Even so, it does seem hypocritical, doesn't it?

I chalk up a lot of this kind of "total assurance of the truth" to many religions, which teachers people from an early age that they are in the "right" religion, that God is on "their" side if they just follow the rules set up by the very political money and power bureaucracy that is the church. It's not just destructive, it causes many people to stop thinking for themselves--they don't have to, they've ceded their power to someone else ("a higher power" which is all fine and good if you're talking about true spirituality, but sad and empty if you're talking about organized religion, which, after all, is just a bunch of people.)

So here, in our "free country" it's free as long as you can pay for it. And my friend's mother worked all her life and paid for it--or thought she did.

Now she and her children find out now that the coverage she's paid for has profited the insurance company rather than her. And multiple families loses because of it--through worry about how to pay for it, and though the actual loss of the accrued work of their forebears.

The Republicans spout off about inheritance tax, calling it the "death tax." In reality, an estate of less than $3.5 million doesn't have this tax, so only few people pay it.

In the mean time, this shattering REAL "death tax" is that each generation is losing what the previous one built so they can pay for their care and death. That's so deeply wrong.

So don't let your fear of a word like "socialism" cloud the issue, that Americans are being bled dry by a government that does NOT help them, and would be far better off paying higher taxes to support a government that DID. A government that would help them even when they couldn't afford to help themselves.

That's the dirty little secret of socialism--it helps everyone, even when they can't pay for it. Geez, that's clearly not the way in the home of the free, is it? If you can't pay, it must be your fault and you must suffer. Right? You don't want to help no stinking loser who hasn't helped themselves.

And all that's OK, because it'll never happen to you, because you're prepared. You've paid all your life to make sure you're prepared. Right?

Except, as in the case of my friend's mother, who was a church-going, hard-working, well-compensated successful woman. She was as prepared as she could be--just as you may be. And when circumstances change, and all your work and investment and preparation isn't what you thought, isn't what all the experts told you it would be, then do you want to suffer, to have your family lose everything? Or do you want a government of good socialism to help?

That is your choice, after all. Because we still live in a democracy. Where you talk to your representatives and tell them what's important to you, whether it's "lower taxes no matter what," or "let's do what we can to help make people really taken care of."

Because, in the end, you may be the one who needs taking care of. You don't know. So it's good to have a social safety net, even if it's called socialism.