Tag: Healthcare

GOP Senator Wants to Take Away Health Coverage So People Find God

Mark Green, Tennessee, Medicaid, poverty, health care
Mark Green, Tennessee, Medicaid, poverty, health care
Tennessee state senator Mark Green opposes Medicaid expansion because it keeps people from knowing God. (Screengrab)

GOP State Senator Mark Green of Tennessee needs a Congress “Come to Jesus” talk. His radical, perverted, and twisted preference is for Tennessee to reject medicaid expansion because health care somehow prevents people from finding God.

Poor people, at least. I don’t see Mr. Green volunteering to give up his own medical coverage so he can get closer to Jesus.

That’s what he said. And Mr. Green now wants to go to congress. His opponent, Democrat Justin Kanew, shared this video where Green confesses to his death-panel mentality, sharing his desire to deny the people of Tennessee health coverage because the federal expansion of Medicaid would keep people from finding Jesus.

Disgusting.

From Justin Kanew:

NEW VIDEO: My opponent Mark Green explains the radical religious views behind his decision to reject billions of our federal Medicaid expansion dollars – which caused many rural hospitals to close and 300,000 Tennesseans to go without health coverage, including 30,000 veterans.

Here’s what Green says in the video:

… every person who came to Christ came to Christ with a physical need… People go to God because of a physical need and they walk away with a spiritual need met. That’s the story of the Gospels. And so government has stepped in, at least in this country, and done all the work for the church. And so the person who’s in need — they look to the government for the answer. Not God. And I think, in that way, government has done an injustice that’s even bigger than just the entitlement — creation of an entitlement welfare state. I think it’s even bigger. And in this setting, I’ll share the story… I think it interrupts the opportunity for people to come to a saving knowledge of who God is…

How easy it is for some of those who have to deny those who have not.


Race in America: The Transplant Gap

The Chicago Tribune has an extraordinary piece on the disparity in treatment between African Americans who suffer from kidney failure vs. just about everyone else in America:

With transplant lists growing, it can be daunting for a person of any race to get a life-sustaining kidney. But many African-Americans face additional hurdles—whether it’s piecing together insurance to cover expensive anti-rejection drugs or searching for loved ones healthy enough to serve as living donors.

The result is a glaring racial disparity in which many black kidney patients remain on dialysis, a treatment associated with lower quality of life and higher death rates.

African-Americans account for 37 percent of people receiving dialysis but make up only 19 percent of the transplant population, according to the United States Renal Data System, a government database.

Think our healthcare system isn’t broke?

I know.  Republicans and our other friends on the right will say that we all have to do our part, provide for ourselves, and the private market and charities are somehow supposed to respond and pick up the slack, miraculously insure everyone.  Wealth is supposed to “tricke down” as Ronald Reagan once dreamed.  Cut taxes, and people have more to give away.

Except they don’t give away.  The rich get the tax breaks and buy more yachts.  Government has to step in to make sure people find the basic treatment they need.

I’ll grant that the United States Constitution does not say we have a right to privacy — except for those rights guaranteed in the Fourth Amendment.

But we do have a right to life.