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Mon Apr 9 17:02:08 BST 2007

Rick,

I think the lack of child care is an important barrier. And certainly we
need to rethink what our government should/can do and what kind of a social
contract we want to have. I don't hear too much honest discourse or real
thinking about this.

BTW, I've been in the projects in South Boston and Roxbury and a lot in the
former Robert Taylor homes in Chicago. I actually never saw any nice
possessions in those places, just grinding impoverishment. If somebody had
something nice I think it would have been stolen. But what I saw in those
awful places was certainly a testament that welfare had become a permanent
state of being and it didn't seem like it was helping the people I saw get
to a better place.

Rob Smith, MD

-----Original Message-----
From: trauma-list-bounces at trauma.org [mailto:trauma-list-bounces at trauma.org]
On Behalf Of Moore, Rick
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 10:53 AM
To: Trauma &amp; Critical Care mailing list
Subject: RE: [ccm-l] Employment and benefits manipulations

Pret,
You are correct, I am jaded and I know that tax cheats and corporate
profit margins are a big part of the problem too. I am not blaming the
"stupid lazy reprobate scumbag poor people" as much as I blame the
entire system for allowing it. The real problem with public assistance
is that it is designed to keep people on it. A good example is the poor
single Mom who gets a job at McDonalds for $7.25 an hour and then
completely loses her child care assistance. Of course she is going to
quit she can't pay for child care on $7.25/hr. The system needs to be
revamped so it allows incentives to those who become gainfully employed,
rather than allowing continued benefits for the lazy.
Rick 

-----Original Message-----
From: trauma-list-bounces at trauma.org
[mailto:trauma-list-bounces at trauma.org] On Behalf Of Bjorn, Pret
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 9:15 AM
To: Trauma &amp; Critical Care mailing list
Subject: RE: [ccm-l] Employment and benefits manipulations

By your own reckoning, between 25 and 33 per cent of welfare recipients
willfully manipulate the system.  Call me Pollyanna, but I think this
overestimates the real-world by several fold.  Your visits to the
projects have left you jaded.  

And I notice that you aren't complaining about the fifteen per cent of
Americans making more than $100k who cheat on their income taxes by IRS
estimate.  That alone comes to something like $50 billion every year --
barely exceeding the quarterly profits of any given Big Oil company, or
those of the pharmaceutical industry, whose contracted prices for U.S.
public assistance programs are unabashedly inflated, and non-negotiable
by of federal law.  

That's a lot of entertainment centers.  But then, it's easier to blame
the stupid lazy reprobate scumbag poor people.

Pret

-----Original Message-----
From: trauma-list-bounces at trauma.org
[mailto:trauma-list-bounces at trauma.org] On Behalf Of Moore, Rick
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 9:24 AM
To: Trauma &amp; Critical Care mailing list
Subject: RE: [ccm-l] Employment and benefits manipulations

Pret,
I agree with you, that for every one welfare cheat there are at least
two or three honest hardworking families that just flat need a hand up.
I disagree with you that "....99% of them have a huge entertainment
system of some kind...." is "more than an exaggeration or reprehensibly
malevolent lie". Having worked both as a law enforcement officer and
field paramedic, I have been in those projects and other public funded
type housing areas, and the majority do have top of the line
entertainment centers, computers etc. Spend some time in your ED triage
room sometime, Mom and Dad bring all 4 kids in for the sniffles, when
asked why they did not see the family doc, they say they can't afford to
pay him, yet both Mom and Dad have top of the line cell phones, and each
kid is listening to his or her own I-pod and Dad excuses himself to step
outside and smoke. My guess is that again you are right, Paramedic
Caruso does not have a lot of exposure to "America's honest poor"
because they
 don't routinely call EMS when sick or injured, they just suck it up and
keep on keeping on.
You should get out once and a while, you would find that you are not the
only one in the world that knows what he/she is talking about.
Rick Moore, RN,LP
College Station, Texas

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[ccm-l] Employment and benefits manipulations