Awww, poor baby. Somebody call the waambulance - only he can't afford it, cuz he ain't got coverage. Oh, the outrage!A conservative Maryland physician elected to Congress on an anti-Obamacare platform surprised fellow freshmen at a Monday orientation session by demanding to know why his government-subsidized health care plan from the government takes a month to kick in.
Republican Andy Harris, an anesthesiologist who defeated freshman Democrat Frank Kratovil on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reacted incredulously when informed that federal law mandated that his government-subsidized health care policy would take effect on Feb. 1 – 28 days after his Jan. 3rd swearing-in.
“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange.
Harris, a Maryland state senator who works at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and several hospitals on the Eastern Shore, also told the audience, “This is the only employer I’ve ever worked for where you don’t get coverage the first day you are employed,” his spokeswoman Anna Nix told POLITICO.
Well, ain't he special? I've never yet had the joy of working at a job where I don't have a waiting period for coverage. Even my union-negotiated insurance didn't kick in until I'd been employed for 60 or 90 days - I don't remember quite which, because I was just so damned happy the company had a physician's assistant on the premises I could make use of immediately. Came in useful when I had that ear infection that nearly turned serious. Without them, I'd have let it go until it became critical, because as I mentioned before, I wouldn't have insurance for months.
All in the audience who've either had to endure a waiting period or no coverage at all, please raise your hands. Yup. It's what I thought - there are a fuck of a lot of us.
Maybe someone who knows how to do such things should start an online petition for Andy. Maybe he'd feel better about having a waiting period for his government-run insurance to kick in if he knew all us peons working for private companies have to wait even longer for crap insurance that costs a fortune and, before the evil Obamacare law passed, could drop us like a hot rock at the first sign of our coming down with something expensive.
And don't forget to remind Andy at every conceivable opportunity just how ironic it is that the man who hates guvmint-run health care so can't bloody wait to get himself some.
3 comments:
This same guy also talked about how no Americans go without health care during the health care debate, because they can always go to an emergency room where the law states they cannot be turned away.
It's bad enough that Tea Partiers are so badly misinformed, but to see their elected officials being so divorced from reality...
TPM did a little investigating and found that Harris was, indeed, far luckier than most American workers.
I don't know where he has worked before, but maybe it's a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease.
*raises hand* No medical insurance since, umm, 2001 at the latest. Self-employed, y'know, but not making enough to afford non-group-rates. (OK, realistically, I'm probably not making enough to afford even the cheapest commercial health insurance plan in existence.) I apparently don't qualify for Medicaid, according to the rejection letter, because I'm not disabled (or a minor).
Harena's kids get Medicaid as long as she doesn't get a job and start earning too much -- though she doesn't get anything herself, i.e. she would have to get a job with a health insurance package... that made enough to afford insurance for the kids, too, since their Medicaid would promptly go away. (She'd be lucky to break even, I think.)
Oh, yeah, and last I checked I owe Duke Health nearly $8k for an emergency operation about a year ago. Sure, I got the health care (they didn't turn me away even when I said I had no insurance) -- chalk up one for the American system -- but now I owe $8k which I'm not expecting to have anytime soon, and there was nothing at all I could do to prevent this, and the hospital didn't get paid for their excellent work.
But I'm sure this is all our fault, somehow, since "the system works" and "there are no victims".
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