COURTESY: RANTRAVEWRITE.COM
This open Rant to Congress really got to me today and it should get to you, too. If you haven't already been pissed off enough by Bank failures, Car company bankruptcies, companies that rake in dough and provide no service (Google, I'm looking at you) and just the general malaise that affects every transaction in business, then this should be enough to get you roused up. Lynnette Conroy over at RantRaveWrite has written a humdinger of a rant, but rather than just rant, as I do if you have the stomach for my turgid prose after her elegant writing, what is our breaking point? Are we going to get to the "3 meals from a revolution?" as Lenin once asked? What does it take for us to get so seriously pissed that we DO something. If you read on, be warned, I may be past being helped. I may be dying, or I may be a hypochondriac; I seem to have 9 lives. But if it's the former and not the latter, there are a bunch of people in this country who need to really look at this system. Lots of people have died because of the shitty non-care or paper-shuffling and "not my job" attitude. It took me 7 weeks to get my anti-depressant mess fixed. This is AFTER receiving Medicare. Chrpesamighty! What have we come to? Thanks, Lynette.
I am
57 years old and am legally blind; after being visually impaired for over 10 years, yet I worked for 35 years and at age 54, after a lifetime
of work, found myself sick and homeless. I
got that way through a series of events, that anyone who reads this blog knows.
For those who don't, let's just say, it was a perfect storm of a bad
personal lifetime from childhood through adulthood, although I had 2
very good professional careers. No one starts out life and thinks as a kid, "Gee, I think I'll become homeless and near death's door at age 54."
I
went blind in 2004, with cataracts, but as I was under the age of 50,
my health insurance would cover only 1200.00 of what would be a
7,000.00 operation. At the time, I was married to a man who was
looking for any possible excuse to get me out of his life, after we
had worked together. We had 2 acres in the country and a Palm Harbor
home. I thought I could slow down on both my professional playing and
my work in IT, when my mother died. Life had other plans.
He
and I were already having trouble, as I was finding it harder and
harder to trust him. He didn't want to add me to his insurance, and
he had a small inheritance left over from when his uncle died. When
my mother died, he decided unilaterally he would quit his high-dollar job and
return for a B. S. in Social Work. You can read about this episode
here: http://www.homelesschroniclesintampa.blogspot.com/2013/05/row80-wednesday-check-in-post-9.html
as
I really want to get to the point of Lynnette's post.
After
all was said and done, I had to leave. I ended up with some type of
settlement, but less than half, as I was weak and sick, I was trying
to buy a house in Tampa, to have something for a retirement. The
people I was buying on a rent to own plan, went bankrupt and I spent
the next 2 years fighting banks and another stupid choice I let into
my life, although I didn't marry this one.
In
September 2010, I ended up in TGH, Tampa General Hospital, under
protection. I spent 2 months getting back on my feet, learning to
walk again. I was homeless and placed in a shelter. I was under the
auspices of Homeless Recovery and as they had already filed for Full
Disability for me, with the blindness, life-long depression, failure
to thrive from childhood, and a host of other things, I received my
SSDI in record time; 5 months, October 2010, checks of 1080.00 per
month beginning in March 2011.
Now,
here's the Catch-22, as long as I was on Homeless Recovery and
receiving 200.00 worth of Food Stamps, I had ALL medical care
covered. Getting me back on my feet cost the State of Florida and
HIllsborough County roughly 500k. Yet, once I started to receive an
SSDI check in March of 2011, being under 55, there is a waiting
period for Medicare and Supplemental of 2 years. I was placed on
something called, the "Medically Needy" program here in
Florida.
So, basically, everything that had been fixed and had to be
maintained began to slide away. I ended up being committed, or Baker
Acted in March, 2012, during Mental Awareness Month. I could not
afford the meds I needed. I found out I am bipolar, as well as
depressed. I have Asperger, too. We used to say "doesn't play
well with others." I developed some kind of Parkinsonism, and my
COPD and CHF have worsened. I would have had to meet my "share
of cost" every month of 960.00 before Medicaid or the State of
Florida would pay a dime. I had the choice of paying rent or sleeping under a bridge. My food stamps were cut to 16.00 per month.
I've
never played the system. I ended up in the ER a few times, when lung
infections forced me to go, or I was on the verge of a nervous
breakdown. But there are people who live around me who have no
scruples about calling 911 at the first of every month and gaming the
system. That's one reason why the system's broken.
As
of now, today, October 2, 2013, I am sitting here, with a pile of
papers for blood work, more wheezing tests, another colonoscopy,
which shouldn't be until I am 60; 2 years and 2 months. My white
blood cell count is high-ish (or so I tell myself -- I worked in a
teaching hospital during college -- my sugar is all over the place,
335 to 51. My red blood cell count is low-ish. My eyes are changing for the worse, yet again.I have dementia, at times. I am going to be screened for
lipoid disorders. This ALL could have been avoided. One reason, is my
3rd ex-husband, Bill Nunnally, and there should be a law where he
could be tried for attempted murder. Yes. It was that bad.
I pretty much think the GOP is irrelevant. Gone are the Barry Goldwaters. The only person that comes off with any kind of credibility is Chris Christie.
There's
tons of blame to go around for the mess we're in. Lynnette properly
pinpointed the cause of the ignorance of the masses with her Jimmy
Kimmel video. People know longer know how the government is supposed to work and then the government agencies deliberately obfuscate the matter by attaching cute little nick-names to the bills. It isn't "Obamacare." Mitt Romney actually had a version of that type of care in play when he decided to run for President, but has since turned against it because, politics. It's the ACA, but let's throw a few more words and terms around to confuse an already confused public, who doesn't want to pay attention, because it will never happen to them. I'm living proof that it will. I never, ever planned to be sick and homeless and every, fucking minute of every fucking day is a physical struggle and a war inside my head. I will probably live another 10 or 20 years, if I'm lucky, but it will suck. That 2 years with no medical care made a difference. I have had a blood disorder for many years and I can no longer rely on my youth to make up the difference.
But,
it goes so much deeper than that. What have we wrought when we we
have pictures of the GOP so shit-faced in public, they can barely
stand up? What kind of people are we electing? Why aren't we madder
than this?
We
should be storming the gates of Congress with pitchforks and torches
and raising 81 kinds of hell. They will sit up there and do what
they've been doing all along, NOTHING! Because we don't do anything. We write a few polite letters; sign a few MoveOn.Org petitions and
go back to our lives.
While these FUCKS fuck with our lives. They are not going to do anything unless they are made to. President Obama can orate and he's a fine orator, the likes of which I haven't seen since, Martin Luther King, Jr., when he's on, but that's not gonna cut it.
Voting
the bastards out for a new group of bastards isn't going to cut it.
We have the Bastard of all Bastards down here for Governor, Rick
"Crowbar Charisma" Scott. He lied, cheated and used his
poorly-made medical equipment on Florida prisoners to hurt and in
some cases, kill them. I know this first hand. Why? Because I live
with a man who was a Florida prisoner. This was not a
bad life choice.
People
like the poor here where I live expect marginalization. They expect
to be pushed aside. I say Bullshit! By pushing the American public
aside 40+ TIMES we are ALL being marginalized. We are already
seeing the erosion of our Constitutional rights and hard-won Civil Rights by the alphabet
groups; NSA, FBI, CIA and I would wager that Habeas Corpus has been
violated as well. We are no longer citizens of this country. The
State exists only to ensure the continued existence of the
State. Think about it.
Lynnette,
thank you so much my dear friend for letting me reblog your post. Get
better soon!
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