Burning Down

Yeah, because the system is socialist. To GOP supporters, socialism = so bad the whole universe will immediately implode, yet they probably still use services like USPS, libraries, and send their kids to public school.

The Batlord

Shh.

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Trollheart

No moreso than anywhere else. As everywhere, drink plays its part and you'll find a lot of those coming in are blitzed or high. Also, we have a large-ish East European immigrancy and they tend to apparently settle perfectly simple arguments not with words or a punch or kick but with knives, screwdrivers or, in one case, a smashed mug...

It will of course be busier at the weekend, when everyone seems to think it's ok to go crazy in town just because you've spent five days either at work or hanging around street corners. Then there's the junkies, plenty of them. As Steph says, emergency patients first sure, but ffs my sister had a pain in her chest and her arm ws numb and it was still hours before a doctor came to see her. That could have been a heart attack (although they did sort of rule that out both in the ambulance and triage): I don;t want to see her as yet another statistic where they say oh we thought she was ok so we're sorry she died. Happens rather a lot here, thank you Fne Gael and Labour, our wonderful coalition government and your constant savage cuts in the health service while you ****ers all go private...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Scarlett O'Hara

If you go to A&E here you have to wait minimum of 1-2 hours and it can take up to 12 hours to be seen. I have had many health issues in the past 8 years and have had to go with Ambulances which tends to get you seen faster (one of the times I had a seizure). I spent many days in the women's unit due to my endless cysts and Endometriosis pain and it took a long time before I got my surgery. Luckily the nurses from the Women's Unit would get me right up to be admitted rather than 3-4 hours in emergency to be then sent to the Women's Unit anyway.

The health services are free, everything is covered (ultrasounds, CT scans, etc) but you have to pay $80 each time you go by ambulance unless you pay $40 a year to be a member.

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djchameleon

wow 80 bucks is so dirt cheap for an ambulance ride.

Some people get billed close to 1,000 dollars for an ambulance ride.

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Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Trollheart

Well in Ireland you're not charged for the ambulance. Do they charge you for calling out the fire dept too?? Surely these are community services paid for by, in our case the State, in yours, well, the state I guess? No?

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Engine

Haha, no an ambulance is not paid for by the government in the US. You get a huge bill, no matter what your financial situation. Poor people can appeal to the government to help them pay for it, or just refuse to pay and ruin their probably already ruined credit.

Local fire departments are a government service and they seem to respond to fires quickly, depending on the wealth of the locality. In the grey area are police departments, which are paid for by the state but do not necessarily respond quickly or even at all.

EDIT: the US and Ireland are both free-market capitalist societies on paper but in reality you have to consider land area, and especially population size. You can't compare Ireland to the US in terms of government programs, but you can apparently compare it to those of the state of Indiana, which of course has to answer to the federal United States Government, unlike Ireland. Look at this.

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Janszoon

That is some very attractive web design right there.

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Engine

That's what you get for free.

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Freebase Dali

What are you even talking about? The ACA being signed into law had nothing to do with Republicans/Conservatives not passing it. The Republican-controlled House was working on their own version of the ACA but had previously sent a completely unrelated tax bill (H.R. 3590) to the Democratically controlled Senate, and that Senate completely stripped the wording out of it and replaced it with what we now know as the ACA in its place in order to get it passed in the Senate legally as a tax bill, because revenue-related bills can only originate from the House. (Which is why the supreme court was able to call the individual mandate a tax, and not a penalty. Had the Senate not replaced the content of a tax bill with the ACA content, we wouldn't have ACA right now)

Sneaky? Hell yea. But apparently it was legal.

When the House sent over a completely unrelated bill to the Senate, they weren't expecting the Senate to turn that into the ACA and effectively nullify the entire point of checks and balances in government. They should have expected it, but Republicans are retarded a lot of the time. Democrats knew that, and holding a majority in the Senate, Democrats knew they could get their free tax bill called ACA to the president's desk with no real opposition at all.

So, yea, I think it's reasonable to be a little opposed to having a tax bill leave your jurisdiction and be hijacked, only to have your minority members in the Senate completely unable to do anything about it.

As far as the not working thing, that remains to be seen. I'm sure most of us want it to work out, but if we're going to substitute wishful thinking for fact, then that's probably not going to go over well. So, hey, if the sh*t goes downhill, I'm not going to put blinders on and pretend sh*t is great. The right is probably jumping the gun on a lot of things, but I see the left doing the same damn thing.

Irrelevant of all the above, though, there is one simple fact that people should know: If you subsidize a public service, you'll need to take more taxes. And in relation to ANY insurance, if you reduce the amount of money insurance companies get from otherwise healthy people, there is simply not enough money for those companies to cover the sick. This is how insurance works. And that's why you see sky-high premiums in a privatized system when more people are subsidized by tax dollars in a government-run insurance program. But on the same token, if people aren't getting private health insurance, the same thing happens. At least people will be forced to choose between public or private, and maybe a greater number will choose private and drive down the private premiums. But if the public option is cheaper because of subsidies, that's what they'll choose, and the government will win out in the end.

Just give it time. The system will provide its own evidence as time goes on.

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