We got a lot of folks down here on the South End who can\u2019t afford health care insurance.\u00a0 You can bet your next CAT scan bill it\u2019s a hot button topic from the Marina and Bait Shop to the Pretty Pooch Pet Grooming Salon.\u00a0 You\u2019d be pretty lucky to get more than minimum wage\u00a0anywhere down here — which may or may not explain either the high rate of unemployment or our entrepreneurial zeal — but you can surmise for yourself what the health care benefits are for any employees lucky or unlucky enough to have a job.\u00a0 Even the owners of what few businesses we have left down here rarely have their own coverage much less cover some group plan for all two employees.<\/p>\n
Oh, it goes without saying that our rural lifestyle, our lack of stress, our generally upbeat esprit de corps, should assure us plucky South Enders a healthy, doctor free existence.\u00a0 But accidents do happen and none of us can be certain what creepy genetic pre-disposition has in store for us.\u00a0 And so, when a neighbor falls prey to a stroke or cancer or some other malady not even nettleopathy can cure, we have to circle the wagons and form a tighter knit community to deal with expenses and carpooling to the clinics or generally just helping out.<\/p>\n
A lot of the newcomers with health insurance aren\u2019t accustomed to living in an outback where hospitals are 40 miles away and 911 call might arrive 30 minutes after the onset of their heart attack.\u00a0 They want clinics and paramedics and they want taxes raised to pay for that.\u00a0 But definitely not to pay for our health insurance.\u00a0 Don\u2019t want government in that!\u00a0 Although, in all honesty, even a lot of us without insurance don\u2019t want government involved either, if the chatter down at the Diner is an index of public opinion.\u00a0 I tell em maybe lay off the chicken fried steaks and the four egg omelette a couple times a week, put that money in the stock market and you\u2019d be pretty much on the road to a health care plan.\u00a0 Hazy Jake says, \u2018Are you kidding me?\u00a0 You think I could save enough money that way to pay for even a sprained finger much less cancer?\u2019\u00a0 He\u2019s got a point, of course, but I was mostly thinking about avoiding that next French fry heart attack.\u00a0 Then again, the stress of playing the stock market might be even worse\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We got a lot of folks down here on the South End who can\u2019t afford health care insurance.\u00a0 You can bet your next CAT scan bill it\u2019s a hot button topic from the Marina and Bait Shop to the Pretty Pooch Pet Grooming Salon.\u00a0 You\u2019d be pretty lucky to get more than minimum wage\u00a0anywhere down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2033"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2035,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033\/revisions\/2035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}