So I'm hesitant to do this just because in the end nothing is going to get resolved on here and as the poster above said, it is pretty trivial... but anyway, here are my two cents (and I being with the caveat that I worked on the Obama campaign for the past half year in VA).
For one, yes Emergency Rooms (I'm pretty sure) are not allowed to turn anybody away (thats why if you have ever had to go to the ER for something serious you usually see your city's finest there because they have a toothache).... what is often overlooked, however, is that the taxpayers pay for their trips to the ER as well....
Both political parties make a living out of providing fear to the public (see the Cold War, Nuclear Arms race, and most recently Terrorism). The assumption that the Democratic Party gets giddy about taking money from the working classes' pockets and puts it in the hands of those that do nothing is pretty absurd... 2 reasons. 1) You make it seem that people that were rich under Reagan and the first Bush were on dang food stamps under Clinton.... and 2) Those that are born into poverty are over 85% likely to die in poverty... You offer this perception that these social services are single handedly making the poor class rise above the middle class..Sure, it is discouraging when you look at a Housing Project and see a new Cadillac Escalade, but is it not equally upsetting to see a newly married couple buying a house/car/flat screen TV, etc that they cannot afford either? As we all know, there is a difference between owning something and borrowing/leasing it...Greed is not constrained by race or even wealth....
The most difficult part about social service programs is that pretty much everyone wants to make sure the children are taken care of (the reason why politicians always make it be about the children) mostly because the children can't really be blamed for their parent's failures - whether they were self inflicted or not... Yet how do you propose this be done? As a whole this country has agreed that certain ideals and principles should be used as a guidepost to public policy - to ensure that everyone is given a fair shot, etc.
For example, we have agreed that as a society everyone should be granted access to the Fire department if there house is on fire, access to police department, postal service, telephone service, etc... Yet at what point, did we exclude healthcare from being a necessary element for all of society???? Say what you want about the ER, but I don't personally think that is good enough for our children... I worked for a non-profit organization here in Boston last spring and we had reports of children dying from a toothache....
I end on this. As someone that worked on the campaign I interacted with the poor quite a bit, and there are too many skewed images of who they are, especially the black community... The black community are some of the most religious people I have ever met. Furthermore, practically everybody that I encountered had a job (do you really think one is able to live off of $7.50 an hour, even if they are tight with their money?).... I would go so far as to say that there are more spoiled suburban white collared kids in their twenties who don't have jobs because mommy and daddy still pay for anything than there are jobless folks in the poor communities....
It is sad though, because at some point in our relatively short history we replaced a sense of community for individualism... Everything is about the individual. Hell, even some churches are saying that Jesus wants you to be rich....The question is, is it more important for Donald Trump to have that second yacht or for us to try and help the "least of these." At least that is how I see it. Peace and God bless.
