What happens when a liberal meets Medicaid head-on?

American Thinker has the answer.

Those of us in the healthcare field have seen up close what government programs like Medicaid mean in terms of a “right” to medical care.  Our emergency room happens to be in a major southern urban area.  If any one of the 20-somethings who voted for Obama would be willing to volunteer for at least a month at our facility, I can almost guarantee these same hoodwinked young people would be singing the praises of capitalism, warts and all.

Just ask Samantha (name changed to protect identity).  With so many college graduates looking for work, we recently hired the 24-year old at our registration desk.  Samantha is a die-hard liberal, but it just so happens her boyfriend is a 28-year-old conservative-minded accountant.  When first hired about three months ago, she talked a great deal about their political differences.

Samantha was very sympathetic to the plight of the poor and their need for assistance.  Moreover, she felt her boyfriend didn’t understand the situation with this segment of the population which would be unable to survive without help from the government.

After one month of doing her job registering 45 ER Medicaid patients daily for various reasons like STD‘s, painkillers, child abuse, infected fingernails from having their nails done, old gunshot wounds, and pregnancy tests for as young as 12 years old, Samantha was visibly on the verge of a breakdown or a breakthrough, I couldn’t tell which.

By the end of 90 days, Samantha told me what really affected her was the cold reality that most of the Medicaid patients treated her like dirt.

. . .

My father said there are two kinds of education — the kind you get between the ears and the kind you get between a rock and a hard place.  Both are valuable.  Samantha’s getting the second kind now.  Unfortunately, she says, the first kind didn’t prepare her for this job, or the fact that she’s helping to subsidize the kind of craziness she sees every day.  She says the DC politicians that have made her complicit in this madness sometimes make her angrier than the patients do.

Since she’s open to real conversation, I’m trying to fill in the historical blanks for Samantha.  I tell her, for example, that when a progressive/Democrat/so-called liberal says the word “right” they are not talking about the kind of rights our founding fathers had in mind.  It’s the pursuit of happiness we have a right to, not happiness.

All the free cell phones, subsidized housing, phony mortgage loans, education programs, ADC payments and trillion dollar healthcare plans have made most people more broke and miserable, not happier.  She now agrees.

There’s more at the link.

I learned the same lessons working with prison inmates and their families.  The level of ‘entitlement culture’ was and is absolutely staggering, even after incarceration.  It’s mind-boggling to hear a man convicted of multiple murders, rapes, assaults and other heinous crimes complaining bitterly that he’s been ‘disrespected’ by a prison guard, or isn’t ‘getting his rights’, and he’s going to sue us for every cent we’ve got to make up for the suffering (physical, mental, spiritual and cultural) that these slights have caused him.

As an instructor at FLETC said to me one day, “In his first year the Correctional Officer can’t do enough for the inmate.  In his second year, he can’t do enough to the inmate.  In his third and subsequent years, he just doesn’t give a damn any more.”  Faced with this caliber of ‘customer’ – the same that the author of the above article encounters every day in his ER – can one blame him?

*Sigh*

Peter