{"id":5487,"date":"2009-10-01T06:35:38","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T11:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5487"},"modified":"2009-09-30T18:59:11","modified_gmt":"2009-09-30T23:59:11","slug":"blood-in-the-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5487","title":{"rendered":"Skin In The Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

If\u00a0 this particular Andrew Breitbart piece<\/a>were about nothing other than the hypocrisy of Hollywood eminimenta lecturing and scolding the rest of us about not paying more in taxes for healthcare – and their inability to carry on a coherent argument to support nationalized healthcare that doesn’t submerge itself immediately in ad homina\u00a0<\/em> – it’s be totally worth the read.<\/p>\n

But that’s only the beginning:<\/p>\n

Vera Wescott was a single-mother who worked in a factory and sprinted home during her half-hour lunch break to check on her kids during the summers. She had no high-school diploma and late at night after making dinner, cleaning the house and putting the kids to bed, she worked and worked, until she\u2019d earned it. She went on to have a nice quiet life, remarrying a man named John, and the two traveled together, eventually retiring.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So far, so good.<\/p>\n

But as they aged, the two decided to return to Canada so that their health care would be provided for. In the summer of 2004, Vera slipped in her apartment and was taken to a Canadian hospital. While there, they discovered that she had mid-stage, but treatable colon cancer. But because the government of Canada has to \u201ccut waste\u201d (sound familiar?) to have enough money to treat people, Vera was told she would need to wait 6 months for treatment. She was sent to a Convalescent Home near Toronto where she died in September.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was a pallbearer at Vera\u2019s funeral. She was my grandmother.<\/p>\n

In the United States of America, her cancer would have been treated, and the treatment would\u2019ve begun on the day they discovered it regardless of her insurance or ability to pay.<\/p>\n

[Film director] Adam McKay [of Ron Burgundy <\/em>fame] has never had to lower his grandmother\u2019s casket into the earth because the government, acting as the final arbiter of life and death, decided it was time for her to die so that they could worry about someone a little younger or a little more healthy. I don\u2019t expect him to understand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anecdotal?<\/p>\n

Yep.\u00a0 Over and over and over again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If\u00a0 this particular Andrew Breitbart piecewere about nothing other than the hypocrisy of Hollywood eminimenta lecturing and scolding the rest of us about not paying more in taxes for healthcare – and their inability to carry on a coherent argument to support nationalized healthcare that doesn’t submerge itself immediately in ad homina\u00a0 – it’s be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}