misery in the USA....

Now, at the end of her life, my mother is faced with doubts and insecurities which are new.
That, in itself, is grounds to indict the USA for cruelty and lack of basic humanity.

Old age, in and of itself, is cruel and crushing.  To be faced simultaneously with fear, and
the threat that no one will help is unforgivable, uncivilized.

What Medicare provides is inadequate, and it is delivered in an insulting manner.

My mother is supposed to be getting help with the medicines she manages ---between eight and ten for herself, and a similar number for my father.  Yet, she remarks, every time a nurse has come to
help, the result has been that she (the nurse) has created a mess---disorder in my mother's system---and my mother has had extra work....

She didn't want to complain, and she wasn't angry, but she did say the nurses screwed it up every time.

Not to mention the insulting, bossy manner of the nurse "supervisors".  Not to mention that strong perfume is not pleasant to breathe in.  And, I'd even say that it's distracting when a bossy nurse is chewing gum on top of all that.... A stranger comes into your house, behaves in a demanding manner, but chews gum?  Sorry, isn't chewing gum causal?  Isn't it something people do to relax, when they are not working?  To come into a home---a stranger's home----to meet people you've never met before, and boss them around, and all the while you are chewing gum? (I am going to boss you around, and make idiotic suggestions, ask ridiculous questions, all the while with an air of superiority-----and at the same time I'm going to chew gum???!!!  Jezis Maria!  That's behavior worthy of the secret police in communism......)

The behavior I've just described manifests zero self-awareness, zero consideration for the people you are supposedly helping...

So, the help provided by Medicare is total crap----with the exception that one very decent man gives my father a shower.  And that man is paid considerably less than the bossy nurses.

So, there's not much to be happy about in this miserable country----a country capable of racist killing at home and imperial wars abroad, but a country which shits on its elderly......

I keep remembering something the economist John Quiggin said recently at the blog, "Crooked Timber":

Speaking from Australian experience (both personal acquaintance, and the disappearance of aged poverty as a political issue) , it’s possible to live in reasonable comfort on the Age Pension (28 per cent of Average Male Weekly Earnings), given decent health care, rental assistance for non-homeowners and some ancillary benefits. Most of the old people I know are reasonably happy campers, at least as far as income is concerned, and many have little or nothing beyond the pension.
comment 31 ;  08.06.2012

commenting on:  Guaranteed minimum income: how much would it cost? (updated)
by JOHN QUIGGIN on AUGUST 5, 2012

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/08/05/universal-basic-income-how-much-would-it-cost/#more-25394

Australia must be a very  diffent place than the USA!