This is just sad, but I have to mention it.
Because this just plain SHOWS YOU how America treats our most frail, poor and downtrodden. We show up, do the LEAST and then refuse to change a thing, for DECADES. Read this. Read the whole thing. This is happening NOW in the 21st century, so yeah, if you have a conscience you either need to be angry or deeply ashamed, if not both.
New pants to replace Alex Morisey’s tattered khakis will have to wait. “How many years do I have left?” asks 82-year-old Morisey, who lives
The short of it is, if you end up elderly and too frail (from bad health) to live on your own, you go in a nursing home on Medicaid. A condition of this is that ALL income you have goes towards the nursing home bill, and you ONLY get a monthly allowance. That allowance is expected to cover everything from new clothes and shoes to denture supplies to the occasional vending-machine grade snack, for a whole month. It started at $25 a month in 1972 and was only raised ONCE in to $30 in 1987. Those are minimums: a few states have raised it to $40 but not much more. Alaska has raised theirs the most--and keep in mind that this is ALASKA we're talking about here, where warm clothes are at a premium for everyone. You would expect the northern-most state of the Union, and the one with the most spare petroleum money, and the least population, to do more.
But the point is that most of our most impoverished and frail elderly live in deliberate and mandated EXTREME want. These are people who can't afford a pen and paper to write letters home with. They can't afford their own toothbrushes and toothpaste (or denture goods that work). They're basically forced into beggary for every last thing at the end of their lives.
And you wonder why some people choose to die instead of living like that. This shit's depressing even for someone younger to deal with. I get that. But this really and truly shows you how cheap and back-biting America has become. Nobody cares. Nobody gives a fuck. If we did we would have done right by these people in the first fucking place, instead of doing the LEAST and letting conservatives ruin that.
Yes, other people suffer similar kinds of mandated poverty in the United States. I'm not here to invalidate any of that. I'm just pointing out one of the most extreme versions of a phenomenon that America really needs to give up on. We really need to stop trying so hard to betray and destroy our own people.
