Rep. Virginia Foxx: ‘There Are No Americans Who Don’t Have Health Care’

[babylonsister]

Teh stoopid! :argh:


http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/24/foxx-americans-health-care/

Rep. Virginia Foxx: ‘There Are No Americans Who Don’t Have Health Care’


Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC)Earlier today, several female Republican House members held a press conference today to attack President Obama’s push for health insurance reform. “The Democrat way is not reforming healthcare, it’s destroying it,” announced Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

Perhaps the most attention-grabbing moment occurred when Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) announced that “there are no Americans who don’t have healthcare”:

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) disputes President Obama’s claim that 47 million Americans lack healthcare. “There are no Americans who don’t have healthcare. Everybody in this country has access to healthcare,” she says. “We do have about 7.5 million Americans who want to purchase health insurance who can not afford it,” she says, urging Congress to adopt a new plan for healthcare reform that wouldn’t “destroy what is good about healthcare in this country” and “give the government control of our lives.”

Listen at link~

Unfortunately, Foxx is not the first conservative to push this argument. In July 2007, then-President Bush claimed that “people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.” Despite what these conservatives say, the fact is that many Americans are forced to go without care:

The chances of working-age adults experiencing at least one access problem due to costs (delaying care, forgoing medical care, forgoing dental care, or forgoing prescription drugs) grew from 18.2% in 1997 to 21.3% by 2006. While the size of the problem and the growth rate may seem small, combined with growth in the population, they translate into substantial numbers of people. The number of working-age adults who experienced at least one access problem due to costs grew from a total of 29.8 million in 1997 to 39.3 million by 2006.

In November 2008, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that “nearly half of Americans report that someone in their household skipped necessary health care in the past year because of the cost.” As ThinkProgress has previously noted, uninsured Americans are less likely to seek health care and more likely to die because of a lack of insurance. In 2002, the Institute of Medicine estimated that there were 18,000 unnecessary adult deaths because of a lack of insurance while the Urban Institute estimated in 2006 that 22,000 died for the same reason.

Finally, studies have found that the uninsured “are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be hospitalized for an avoidable condition” and if they do seek care in an emergency room, “they are usually sicker than patients who have health insurance.”

[gratuitous]

1. People this delusional used to be institutionalized

Now they're elected officials from the Republican Party.

[Warpy]

2. I wish there were a mechanism for we the people

to strip these ignorant conservatives of their gold plated socialized medicine and throw them all into the world we confront, where any chronic condition will be excluded and any blood test that a physician failed to inform us of can be grounds to rescind the policy, even after we've paid for many years, as soon as we get sick.

I would love to see them go into hock for care the insurance company is stonewalling and I would love to see some of our fine public servants facing bankruptcy because paying for their care cost everything.

It's only then that conservatives would understand that we are outraged at their stupidity and inaction. We wouldn't be this angry had for profit insurance worked.

It doesn't work. It's killing us.

[TheKentuckian]

5. I see this all the time but if we strpped them of their care then they'd still

be rich and just fine. Most of these folks are at least millionaires and/or married to one. You could take away their benefits and even the pay and it wouldn't matter in the least they go to Congress to get power and connections. The rest of the shit is pure bonus and matters not to them.

I can't believe that folks think these people take jobs based on the same motivations as those of us in steerage. They could give a crap about their health coverage if it came to it.

[Warpy]

6. A million bucks doesn't go that far when you've got cancer

and the chemo and radiation fail several times and you're looking for a bone marrow transplant.

It doesn't go far when you've got a premature baby with birth defects that you desperately want to survive.

All it would take, though is for one of these shitbags to be denied cheap coverage because of hypertension or seasonal allergies and we'd get action.

[spanone]

3. crack head

[valerief]

4. Yeah, that's why ambulances drop off sick, johnnyed patients onto the sidewalks.

Drop a piano on Foxx, please.

[county worker]

7. I recently went to the emergency room.

I was at work and had symptoms similar to heart attack. My co-workers convinced me to go to the emergency room. I have insurance but I have a $1,500 deductible.

They gave me an EKG, blood tests, a scan and a few more tests. I am healthy the tests showed. The cost of the visit to the emergency room was in the thousands. I had to pay my deductible since it was the first time it came into play.

I can afford to pay the deductible but without insurance I would have been billed the thousands it cost for the tests. At that the hospital pressured me to pay the $1,500 bill or they would send it to a collection agency.

Now if I didn't have health insurance my choices would have been to do nothing hoping I wasn't having a heart attack because I couldn't afford thousands of dollars of medical bills. Or I could have gone, had the tests done and would have been sent to a collection agency for the thousands of dollars I cannot pay.


So though I had medical coverage at the emergency room, my choices were to not go and possibly die or go and get hounded by a collection agency for money I don't have.

So the Repubs are technically correct but in my opinion they should go fuck themselves.

[csziggy]

22. And budgets have been so tight in some communities there are no emergency rooms

I am not certain of the current status, but the small community hospital in a neighboring county has been closed as often as they have been open over the last thirty years. Sometimes when they are open, they do not re-open the emergency room since they do not have the funds to staff it with qualified doctors and nurses. It depends entirely on the help the little county can get from state and federal funds to have the hospital open at all and to offer special services.

If that hospital or its emergency room are closed, as it was for at least a decade, people in that county have to either come east to the regional medical facility or west to another community hospital that also depends on supplemental funds to stay open and offer services. So if someone has a non-life threatening health problem, they can drive fifty miles one direction or another or try to find a private doctor and work out payments.

Effectively the people without insurance in that county have little or no access to health care.

[lapfog_1]

8. Dear Ms. Foxx...

I am currently unemployed. When I was employed, my employer provided me with no health care coverage (and this was a "good paying" middle class white collar job - writing software under contract with IBM).

I have a pre-existing condition, namely Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, or WPWS. The last time I had any health insurance was when this condition was diagnosed and I had corrective heart surgery. That surgery cost my insurance carrier (John Alden G.T.) about $50,000, it cost me my deductible (about $1000) plus an additional $10,000 because the surgery required a second cardiologist that was not pre-negotiated by my primary cardiologist before surgery and my insurance denied it as "unnecessary" after the fact. The bill ended up on my door. In addition, within a month of having that surgery, John Alden dropped me. BTW, WPWS is a genetic condition, not something that I could have avoided through any life style choice.

I have tried to get some insurance, any insurance, to cover me since then. Blue Cross of California would, but not for the WPWS (there is a good chance that I might need a new heart or another surgery before the end of my life). The cost... $1200 a month WITH a $10,000 deductible. I shit you not.

That was 15 years ago. I've been "self insured" since then, paying for my own medical bills. Fortunately, not much has gone wrong with me... however, I don't go for routine checkups and tend to not have any tests done other than occasional blood tests (HIV, colon cancer, etc). Even those are a strain when I was employed, and impossible now. I also need a full body scan because I have constant pain from certain areas of my body that shouldn't be in pain. I was quoted a price of $2700 last time I checked... and couldn't afford it. I also have a tooth that needs a root canal, but at $1000 to have it done (the root is curved so I need to see someone other than my dentist to have this done) I can't afford it either. That's been almost a year since the dentist xrayed my teeth and figured out why one tooth hurt all the time. Eventually I need to have it removed or something because I worry about the infection. But I can't afford even that right now.

In summary, FUCK YOU!

[MADem]

9. Her double negative makes my head hurt. NT

[Supersedeas]

27. but it's calculated to make her loonies constituents feel good

[kestrel91316]

10. Ms. Foxx, let me introduce myself. My name's kestrel91316, and I

haven't seen a doctor in 5 years because I have no insurance. It's a good thing I am healthy for now. If I get sick, I won't be able to just walk into a doctor's office and get care, because I lack the funds to do so. And people without insurance get billed many times more than insurance companies do.

[3waygeek]

11. Well, there's at least one American

who doesn't have mental health care.

[Vinca]

12. Virginia Foxx is far and away the nastiest, most hateful crone

to ever step foot in Washington, D.C. It boggles the mind this witch is always re-elected. Unless I discover a diamond mine in the back yard, I do not have access to the medical care I need. ERs do not perform surgery.

[taterguy]

13. Not necessarily stupid, opportunistic

She represents a district that covers a large geographic area with multiple media markets.

It's very expensive to run a campaign there, especially when you calculate what your media expenditures have to be to reach all the potential voters.

So she occasionally makes outrageous statements that will inspire people outside her district to send her checks, and will only inflame people that wouldn't consider voting for her anyway.

[babylonsister]

17. Not stupid? Ooh, I beg to differ.

How hard is it to google and actually read up on some facts?

Calculating? Maybe so, but she's earned the disdain of anyone who reads this b.s.

[taterguy]

18. She might know the facts, she just chooses to disregard them

Because she's smart enough to know what works, for what she's trying to do.

See:
Ronald Reagan
Jesse Helms
George Wallace

She's not quite as articulate or as good on television as those folks but she's carved out a nice little niche for herself.

[ms liberty]

25. Exactly. I live in the western area of her district...

Very rural, tends to vote conservative, and less than 40,000 residents in the county.

It would be interesting to know how many people in her district are uninsured, but I do know that there are some...a large chunk of our main industry (furniture) went outsourcing over the last 10 years. My county doesn't have a hospital, or even a 24 hour emergency clinic of any kind, and the nearest hospital is about 18 miles away.

[TexasObserver]

14. Recommend

[knitter4democracy]

15. Tell that b**** to visit Michigan and talk to people up here.

I know scads and scads of people with no jobs, no insurance, and no way to pay for meds/doctor visits/medical care of any kind. Heck, in another month or so, I´ll be one of them. I have bad asthma, but when I lose my insurance, I will not be able to pay for the meds. I hope to keep going with what I have stockpiled already.

[The Doctor.]

16. Kilo+Romeo

How the fuck are these people so stupid?

[Wednesdays]

19. K&R

:kick:

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

20. If you can't afford it, you don't deserve it

It's the Republican mantra, and sadly there are many poor working class voters who buy right into it, even about themselves.

[NC_Nurse]

21. She's taken the torch from Bachman and is running the next lap of the clown

races. Sheesh!

[ldf]

23. it is amazing how people will try to justify their own "agenda"

of course, i may be just as guilty of that as the next person....

but it reminds me of a luncheon i went to a couple of years ago. it was for the purpose of "reporting" back to a philanthropic foundation of the use (amounts, numbers of student recipients) of a particular low interest loan funded BY the foundation, awarded by schools, to high need medical students. it was sort of a show and tell, with representative student recipients attending, from the area medical colleges.

as we all sat around eating, the students discussed the specialties, or areas they were planning on going into (although most probably hadn't received their residency matches, yet).

one student couple, husband and wife, got onto the subject of "universal health care" and made the following observation:

"We already have universal health care. It's called the emergency room."

my jaw hit the floor. i was so taken aback that i had no idea how to respond.

it was actually scary.

[Toasterlad]

24. This Is the Same Douchenozzle Who Said Matthew Shepard's Death Was a Hoax.

It sure would be swell if she had terminal cancer of the jaw, and no health insurance.

Edited to somewhat soften my wish for Ms. Fox.

[Name removed]

26. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[NRaleighLiberal]

28. Many people, even Dems, don't get it. We had dinner with a self-labeled

"liberal, Dem, Obama supporter" the other night. We got into Health Care, and he indicated the same sort of thing - that anyone can get health care if they need it. We talked a bit and it came down to the fact that this couple loved their "things" - as long as they were OK, there are no problems.

Where Health Care cuts across party lines is Greed. Or, perhaps, is the world one organism and we all get lifted together (or work toward it), or is it every person for themselves. I think too much money/stuff can really dull the thinking, caring brain and soul.

[spanone]

29. she means 'all congresspersons have health care'