Tag Archives: Tricare

Enough Sniping at Health Care

ACA_logoEvery time in every nation throughout history we have had those hold-fast sniveling snipers who cower at advances that favor others because they “got theirs.”

We are now undergoing the latest attack against the daunting national effort to insure health care insurance for millions of Americans who have none and who will pay for it out of their own pocket (unless they are too poor).

9.2 Million Americans participate in a single payer system called Tricare that provides health care for service men and women.  Medicare, another single payer system, provides for anyone over 65.  Others have employer-sponsored health insurance coverage, and there is small-group and individual insurance coverage.  But many millions more have no insurance at all.  There are those too poor to afford insurance or health care; the emergency room is their sole source of health care.

Still we have those who decry the need for an Affordable Care Act – for “Obamacare.”

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Remember Vets – By Doing Something!

We have had another Veterans’ Day and remembered the sacrifice of the men and women who served this nation.

But we really should be doing a lot more than simply – “remembering them.”

We must do better and demand that our elected and appointed officials “do something.”

My late uncle, Charles Flannery, served in the armed forces led by General Patton when the Allies attacked by way of Sicily the beaches of Italy.  Charles was shot in the chest, lifted off his feet, spun around, knocked unconscious, and taken prisoner.

Years after the war, Charles died in a hospital in the Bronx that, according to my elders, refused to give him more blood, to save him from that earlier war wound.  Ours was one family, as young as I was, that resented the nation’s unfulfilled promise to our Uncle Charles.

Our nation has been long on promises to vets when leaving our shores to serve our nation abroad, and quite uneven, often indifferent, to their needs upon their return home when broken by the war.

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