Why Many Poor People Will Not Vote for Kamala
The Economic Apartheid of Welfare State Liberalism – Examined in the Context of New York City’s Teaching Hospitals
By
David Gottfried
As a staunch Zionist, I am not the sort of person who usually quotes Palestinians. However, something a Palestinian once said, regarding Israel, provides a very clear explanation as to why many poor people, in America, will not vote for Kamala Harris and generally shy away from participating in the electoral process.
I read about this Palestinian’s comments in an article in the New York Times at the end of 1990 or the beginning of 1991. The Palestinian said she wanted the Jews to suffer death on an epic scale. The Palestinian was asked if she was afraid of Sadaam’s scud missiles, intended for the Jews, since she lived close to Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. The Palestinian said that she did not care if she died just so long as the Jews died.
She did not care if she died just so long as the Jews died. That, in a nutshell, explains why many poor people will not go to the polls to vote for liberals.
Poor people are often dependent on state benefits. They know that the ousting of liberals from government may endanger the programs which give them benefits. However, they have such immense hate for the condescending, unnecessarily complicating and humiliating and soul-destroying features of the behemothic welfare state that they would be very happy to lose all their benefits and starve to death just so long as the pompous, parsimonious, niggardly human nuisances who work in social welfare organizations all lose their jobs.
The City of New York has well in excess of 300,000 employees. With such an ample workforce, the City should simply gleam like a wine glass expertly washed and dried. Instead, the wine glass is not only cloudy with soap residue and bearing a few food particles in the groove where the base of the glass meets the wall of the glass; it also has a faint but plainly visible fault line going from the very top to the very bottom of the glass. When our welfare clients drinks from this veritable forbidden fruit of a glass, the glass will shatter in their mouths like humanity suffering from Eve’s consumption of the wayward fruit of Eden.
Economic Apartheid and the way the Welfare State Mismanages Health Care in New York City
The City of New York, priding itself on being bluer than the most exquisite sapphire in Fortunoffs, is very much in love with itself for its imagined abundance of health care. And it is so busy admiring its countenance in the mirror that it is blind to its numerous deficiencies.
In 1963, when liberalism was virtually unchallenged in academia and riding high with JFK in the saddle, a very grotesque version of liberalism was established, in black and white, in the form of an agreement between the City of New York and the City’s very highly esteemed teaching hospitals.
The agreement gave the teaching hospitals a Gift: Poverty stricken patients the interns could practice on. In return, the teaching hospitals charged the City very little for the substandard care rendered to the poor shlubs.
(This agreement was neither annulled nor impaired by the numerous governmental modifications to health care effectuated after 1963)
Of course, at all fine teaching hospitals, much of the care is rendered by students who are still being trained to be doctors. However, in the New York City teaching hospitals, poor people will often be treated by student doctors who receive a minimum of supervision. Very simply, people who are only partially trained are let loose on people who have so damn little, and are so glad to get any attention at all, that they put up with the inattention and often rank and rabid malpractice meted out by these august and arrogant institutions.
For example, I knew a Medicaid patient who went to his Hospital’s Clinic with respect to a cough. He saw someone who purported to be a doctor who seemed oblivious to the most rudimentary facets of medical care. The medical provider prescribed a drug. The patient wanted to know what sort of drug it was. He wondered, among other things, if the drug was an expectorant.
The so-called doctor said that she did not know what an expectorant was !!!!
An expectorant makes the mucous in one’s bronchi less viscous or thick. This makes it easier for the patient to cough-up the bacteria laden mucus is his chest. Sometimes an expectorant is the perfect thing, and indeed the only thing, that the patient requires. However, the medical provider who assisted the Medicaid patient in question did not even know what an expectorant was. Perhaps the drug was actually a cough suppressant. Sometimes cough suppressants are the WORST thing one can offer because cough suppressants will impede the body’s effort to expel noxious substances from the chest.
However, I have seen other patients, with sparkling policies of insurance, and rich, polished relatives whose bourgeois demeanor dictated that their relatives were to receive only the best care, who received amazingly good care from facilities such as Columbia Presbyterian and NYU Medical Center.
I have seen wealthy people given complex surgeries for cancers, that usually resulted in fatalities, who were completely cured. And at these same hospitals, I have seen poor people die in their hospital rooms, unattended, the hospital unaware that the patient had been on the precipice of death, utterly ignored, unwanted, mislaid like an old bill that is best forgotten.
I have seen patients with stage 4 bladder cancer who were too depressed to make their appointments, and I have seen hospitals not bothering to ask their patients why they failed to make their appointments.
And I have seen New York’s elite institutions use technology to make the patient appear irresponsible so no Courts will ever hear him out. (And of course all middle class people solemnly swear that all poor people are irresponsible) For example, I have known many patients who have gotten text messages which purport to remind the patient of a certain appointment. However, the patient never made this appointment (In the world of welfare medicine, nurses just give patients appointment times without apprising them of the appointment), and the message does not indicate who the appointment is with (A patient with chronic health problems may see scads of different doctors) or where the appointment is located (Columbia Presbyterian has at least 10 different addresses in the five boroughs of New York City alone). Finally, the text message will infuriatingly state that one cannot respond to the message.
Very often, these patients are too sick to travel by themselves or to climb the requisite steps or other obstacles to use public transportation, and they are too poor to hire a cab, and the welfare state’s favorite poverty program gluttons make a killing charging the government for car services to ferry patients to their appointments.
The cabs are routinely more than an hour and sometimes two hours late. The patient’s appointment is abbreviated, and the doctor doesn’t have the time to fully diagnose the maladies. Because this patient was late, the people in the medical office often arrive at the proper bourgeois conclusion: The shabby patient was late because the patient is poor and therefore stupid or inept or congenitally worthless.
The shoddy performance of the cab company makes the cab company richer. For example, three different cabs are assigned to pick up one patient at a given locale, two of the drivers will lose their way or manage not to see the patient, but the thieving welfare vendor will charge Medicaid for three rides when in fact only one ride transpired.
However, I am perhaps making a big mistake by talking about cab company corruption. Welfare state grafters generally go for much bigger bucks.
For example, not too long ago, the New York Times reported that every single patient in a home, in Brooklyn, New York, for emotionally disabled and troubled adults were given surgery for cataracts. There are no mental diseases which are known to cause cataracts. Why did every single patient in the home have cataracts ?
The corrupt doctor who owned the home for disturbed people had a deal with a cataract surgeon. He referred every resident of the home for cataract surgery, and the cataract surgeon gave the owner of the home for disturbed adults very hefty kickbacks.
Because the patients were alone and rejected by society, and because they were deemed disturbed, Ninety Nine percent of the people who heard their lament just laughed at the inventiveness of their paranoia.
Suffice it to say that poor and sick people have a clock that is ticking very, very fast. If most people with similar health problems would live for another 20 years, they will live for another 10 years, if they are lucky.
These poor souls are not stupid. They can plainly see that Donald Trump is a psychopathic maniac who has nothing but disdain and contempt for America’s poor and unfortunate. But they know that the infuriating social workers also have contempt for him, and they would love to see half of the social services rabble, who would never hold down a job in private enterprise, lose their jobs after a Grinch of a Republican amputated the ghastly poverty programs.