Highest prison population in the world by both per capita and total number, and people get thrown in jail because they can't pay their medical bills. How much more corrupt can this country get?
What do we do when voting doesn't make a difference?
What do we do when voting doesn't make a difference?
One of the biggest problems in American politics is that everyone is caught up in the blood sport that is Federal politics while not paying attention to what's going on in lower offices. Yes, healthcare is and will always be a Federal issue, but it's never too late to get involved in politics at any level.
Denmark’s population is that of Wisconsin.
The least populated state (Wyoming) would have a larger risk pool than Iceland, which seems to be doing fine.
But it is just math - bigger pools have more resources over a larger population, and so are better positioned to survive shocks.
My point is that you can have adequate risk pools at a lower administrative level (the states), while not having to deal with having to build up political will among a large, heterogenous polity.
It is a complex topic, and the variety of "solutions" to the problem give us a lot to chew on.
I don't personally think that's optimal - there are a number of problems US states have that nation-states don't. (Deficit financing, exclusion and latitude to make its own rules being larger ones.) Also, one cost of running "laboratories of democracy" is that some of them fail, and some of them are run incompetently or corruptly or cruelly.
But if you like the idea of state level fixes, by all means pull for that. There is no single right answer.
That is true of nation states as well, and yet we trust them with sovereignty.
In our Union, states have to abide by a baseline set of rules per the Federal Constitution (free speech, right to a fair trial, equal protection before the law, etc). US States aren’t run by Kings and Queens, they’re democracies with checks and balances, state Constitutions, judiciaries, legislatures, and executive agencies.
Insofar as a state would be run corruptly or cruelly, it would be the will of the people of those states.
But yes, people looking for a reason to blame the victim will use process arguments like that to ignore the reality of what is happening.
[1] We're talking about people with medical issues and no money; that can mean no car or no house or no personal mobility.
[2] As anecdata, someone I know was sued for nonpayment of a loan. Papers were served by mail and arrived the day of the hearing; postal carrier timing meant it arrived right as she would have had to appear, even if she hadn't been at work. Default judgement, and she didn't have the money to hire a lawyer to contest it. See how that works?
> He made sure no one was arrested unless they’d been reached by personal service or certified mail.
> As long as the defendant had been properly served, the judge’s answer was always yes.
I'm not trying to justify anything else, but the experience of being arrested without being properly served does not align with the article in question.
Being poor is illegal ;)
The bigger problem in this case is that the people being sent to court probably cannot easily walk there, because they are unhealthy.
It’s effectively criminalizing illness.
There are so many reasons poor people find it difficult to appear in court. A huge, and very easy to imagine, issue is that poor people tend not to have time flexibility; with everyone screaming at them to pick up another job, how could they possibly appear in court as well?
Another very easy to imagine issue is getting healthcare outside of this “town” everyone seems to live in in the above argument, could make appearing in court difficult as well.
The argument that “all poor people are fat and ill” is not just lazy, but outright ridiculous.
If you happen to live in town and that town happens to be where the State put the courthouse for that county.
Plenty of counties in this country are bigger than Rhode Island -- not just in the middle of nowhere, either.
[1] For the record, Palm Beach County, Fl (main city: West Palm Beach) and Broward County, Fl (main city: Ft. Lauderale), respectively.