Cosmic Irony

I met a man last night with M.S., a disease that eats away at a person’s nerves until they are completely incapacitated and die. He used to be a mechanic. He will never be able to do that again. He trains companion dogs now for people with worse disabilities than his.

He is on Medicare. Medicare does not cover the drug that can slow the degeneration of his entire body and that enables him to walk. The cheapest he found was a treatment for $935. That price is per month.

Tell me, Republicans and Neo-Cons out there: How does personal responsibility have anything to do with this situation? Why should our health care system help a man like this? Why should be have to give up his health because he can’t work anymore in the trade he knew for years? Why can’t we, as Americans, take care of our own?

This man didn’t wake up one day and say, “I think I’ll go get M.S. today so I can leech off of the system.” Republicans always talk about how people take advantage of services and how people who work shouldn’t have to pay for the people that don’t work. But it’s a fallacy to assume that most of the people being helped by these services are just cheating the system. When a man with a debilitating illness can’t even pay for his meds, how is this paradigm helping anyone?

I work with people everyday who your tax dollars are going to for support. Their food, their housing, their bus rides, their services are mostly paid for by SSI or SSDI. At this point you can stop assuming I work with welfare mothers. I work with developmentally disabled adults. They didn’t choose Down Syndrome. They didn’t choose autism. This isn’t some decision they made that got them into this mess. How does personal responsibility factor in to this?

Republicans would scrap all social programs. The reasoning behind this is that when people are coddled, they never stand up and do anything on their own. It would force all the people using government services to “take personal responsibility” for their lives. But what about the rest of the people being served? The majority that honestly need the services? Where’s your personal responsibility now?