Sanity Pills

I don’t want to jump to conclusions…..

Mr. Frist (I refuse to call him Dr. after the shit he pulled during the Schiavo fiasco), sold his shares of HCA a month before the company gave an earnings warning and the stock price dropped. The SEC is now investigating and issuing subpoenas. Frist denies that he had any foreknowledge of the company’s earnings. Right.

The sale wouldn’t seem that strange if it weren’t for the company involved. HCA is the largest U.S. hospital chain, founded in 1968 by, guess who, Thomas Frist and Thomas Frist Jr., Billy’s father and brother. Thomas Frist Jr. is on the board, and was chairman until 2002. Billy wouldn’t have any idea how to find out how the company was doing, would he?

Now maybe Frist could get away with this if he had a loose relationship to the company, although Martha still couldn’t get away with it, but that’s clearly not the case.

I think the potential charges could also be a lot more severe than what Martha got hit with.

First, the poverty line is bullshit. It ignores people marginally above the line, the people that few would call financially sound, the health care workers, the janitors, the Wal-Mart employees. Some people call them the working poor, I call them the utterly fucked because they’re poor as hell and completely ignored. A more in depth look at the numbers makes the situation much scarier.

The number impoverished increased to 12.7% of the population, or 37 Million, in 2004. 37 FUCKING MILLION!!?!?!?! This is the fourth consecutive increase in the number living in poverty, which also coincides with the number of years Bush has been President.

The number of uninsured also grew, to 45.8 Million. You know what these people making $9,000 a year need? That’s right, a health savings account and a pat on the back. Three jobs? That’s great.

Bush is hopeless and he’ll never understand this issue, I wonder if he’ll understand anything besides acting like a dickhead from Texas.

The question is: how long will the poor take it? They, as one would expect, will be ignored by the Right and given lip service by the Dems.

The poor are the great sleeping giant of the world, I think we all better hope that they stay that way.

Hey guys, I found a good article… no seriously, I swear. I did. One exists, seriously. Stop laughing damnit.

Several years ago, two Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, “Uninsured in America.” They talked to as many kinds of people as they could find, collecting stories of untreated depression and struggling single mothers and chronically injured laborers—and the most common complaint they heard was about teeth. Gina, a hairdresser in Idaho, whose husband worked as a freight manager at a chain store, had “a peculiar mannerism of keeping her mouth closed even when speaking.” It turned out that she hadn’t been able to afford dental care for three years, and one of her front teeth was rotting. Daniel, a construction worker, pulled out his bad teeth with pliers. Then, there was Loretta, who worked nights at a university research center in Mississippi, and was missing most of her teeth. “They’ll break off after a while, and then you just grab a hold of them, and they work their way out,” she explained to Sered and Fernandopulle. “It hurts so bad, because the tooth aches. Then it’s a relief just to get it out of there. The hole closes up itself anyway. So it’s so much better.”

Lots of interesting tidbitty things in this article. Worth a read.

Link (Source: The New Yorker)