An actual online post: “Anyone know what was going on this morning on midwest trail off 10th st (sik)? Looked like a movie crew, counted 50 vehicle’s (sik) down the street.”
People yapped on: A crew was shooting a Tom Hanks video in West Lakeland this week. But no Saving Private Ryan. Or Forrest Gump. Forget The Green Mile. (The voters these days would more likely cater to the now-innocent fluff of Bachelor Party. Note not The Silver Bachelor. The Golden was in many ways taken by The Donald. Maybe Tommy Boy should try a music video? And not a reaction video, as that would be an actual rapper, Molly Boy.) So not an hour in and out, and can edit later, and then back to Minneapolis?
Then a third responsorial came in, also. Green Day video? That career, although with killer moments, could use a bit more reviving …
East Lakeland is pissed. (Would that actually be Hudson? Downtown, most likely.)
Who else is pissed? Not just a lone editor, but eastward, most everyone in Washington.
Because they either can’t close their yaps, or don’t say anything that matters.
So I will deflect from the bull shit and hyper-analyze the shutdown closure coming out of Washington.
But first some real world ICE-type moments, and not Vanilla Ice, but more like Ice Cube and even Ice Tea:
What would happen if:
— While I was waiting for a taxi (immigrant driven?) who was Two Minutes To Midnight until being off of on-time, I saw a beaten up truck pull up to a yellow stripe just past an intersection and stop not squarely in a space largely used by all as a loading zone, but edging toward the arterial. He got out, (with a limp), looked at his front end for a few moments, then got back in and drove off. This shortly after yet another person with an SUV made a questionable U-turn on the busy street, albeit in its middle, by a nightclub. Thus an older guy I talked to assured me this was illegal, although like running a yellow light gone on too long.
— Same street, many a night, closer to midnight. A younger guy, obviously Mexican, walked daintily along. Pleasant enough, has always said hello. I’m guessing he’s a cook downtown. Maybe that shows my own bias. But he is decided bowlegged, maybe making him a marked man. I will decline to make the bad cowboy joke, of riding a horse too long. But Shooop, there I go. And it really isn’t funny, at all, if you think about it. Stops to rest, looks in a twin store window too long. In the dark.
In both cases innocent and in the latter, almost shameful of our culture (and me) in multiple ways.
And in both situations, if your skin is too dark, a dead ringer I would guess, especially if living in the inner city, for fast becoming an ICE detainee.
We’ve all done stuff like this. If you’re a white redneck you probably get at most a token lecture and a basically free pass. And if a European disabled man who often sits in that same spot, they’ll mostly look the other way, because he’s very disabled and always pays his Section 8 on time. And right now he gets Medicaid. These two are crucial, even if just for staying underneath the radar. But there could be exceptions to the way cops in general, and maybe ICE even more, treat these situations. More on that later …
These actual examples, with a couple of slight embellishments, of how people tend to be treated differently based on their status, also illustrate more what you need to know about our shutdown-blame-game debate.
The GOP has painted the Democrats with a brush that is not only broad but baseless. They say the Dems want to give what is basically free health care, and eliminate the large and tied-into-it insurance premium increases, to undocumented immigrants, and that is simply flat-out false. As in completely, based on reports from numerous news outlets, not just the ones left-leaning.
Right now, in Wisconsin, if you are an ordinary as in fully legalized citizen low-income person, you will be in pretty good financial shape as far as medical care — for now. You paid little or nothing, but that has already started to go up. For much of the Biden years, you paid nothing for a prescription co-pay, and also often that much for a doctor visit. Now the rates range, as chaos rules, by one case study from $1 to $3 to $25, and who charges what and when seems random.
With the issues that are these-days topical, there is a lot of such randomness to be found. These myriad types of inefficiencies are probably a bigger money-waster than fraud in programs under question. Most of that inefficiency, ironically, is created from government efforts to quell it.
But now to the idea of being considered fraudulent until proven otherwise, and even then lied about to keep the myth going.
To start with, keeping current the health care insurance reforms put in place under Obama, like subsidies, not basically cutting them, has NOTHING to do with giving this type of assistance or free health care to undocumented immigrants. Where does this lie come from?
Yes, there is a government rule that, in about the only example of alleged fraud that is repeatedly cited, hospitals cannot turn down people who do something like go to an emergency room. They do by law have to provide certain vital services, but look at the sign on the wall there, this is not a free-for-all, the immediate care given regardless of the ability to pay has a group of limitations cited. So, in essence, stabilize you and beyond that, if not even before that, there will be lots of insurance questions.
I would bet my left nut — wait it had been surgically removed while that option was still viable, bad joke — that the money dolled out in this way to illegals is more than matched by the many studied economic benefits of having a healthier more productive populace, that doesn’t miss work or find employment virtually impossible to do. (And if you are on the margin, and one of many thousands at risk of losing their health care insurance, chances of fraud for getting on Medicaid or disability increase, so this actually defeats the purpose that is the subject of GOP fears.) Those cited workability benefits are in severe jeopardy because of the proposed GOP changes that would keep many people from obtaining health care — blocked by lack of funds, since they had been cut, keeping them on the dole. These include increased premium costs and virtually no chance, in some cases, to get catastrophic care.
My way to have them meet in the middle is this. Allow an increase in Medicaid and Medicare premiums, but make it scant, not a literal backbreaker. The rich-getting-richer health care giants will be able to absorb that cost difference. The same with proposed co-pays of around $35. Maybe cap them at around $7.50. If there are viable and verifiable upticks in productivity due to reasons I cited a moment ago, offer some of it back as a reimbursement to the health care corp. et al for their trouble. But make exempt Big Pharma.
Kick this in gear, as of the end of the year, and reopen the government, now. After all, those working-for-free-for-now government workers might run out of money to gas up and commute to work, since in so many cases they were furloughed from working at home.