Health Care Debate - Pikeville, KY

i think ever sence they started talking about the health care policy everything has went down hill.

robert wrote:

i think ever sence they started talking about the health care policy everything has went down hill.

You got to start somewhere. Not acting would be stupid.

Just about every coal patch had a Company Store, so-called because the coal company owned it. See below to learn how the coal companies took the miners’ pay right back from them by forcing them to shop at the Company Store. This photograph was made in about 1900 by the Webmaster’s grandfather, George A. Baughman. If you remember the Company Store from a later era (it was open through the 1950’s) you remember it looking much different than it does here. At the time of this photo the front of the store faced northward toward what is now the doctor’s office; the railroad tracks (now Rt. 51) would have been to the left in this photo and the original Rt. 51 and the churches to the right. When the store was enlarged the original facade was walled over and a new facade was built facing westward toward Church St.
Below is an enlargement of the men and boy. Please e-mail the Webmaster if you can identify any of these people.

Above: Two examples of miners’ scrip from the late 1800’s. The coal barons were in the business of making themselves rich, not the people who labored for them. One of the means they employed to achieve this end was to pay the miners (outright slavery having been abolished) and then take the “money” they paid the miners right back from them. I say “money” because sometimes the miners were not paid in money at all, but in “scrip,” which could be spent only at the Company Store. It could not be exchanged for real currency; note that both pieces of scrip above state that the scrip is payable “in merchandise.”

Right: This pay envelope belonged to the Webmaster's maternal great grandfather, Adam Baughman, who was a coal miner for the Washington Coal and Coke Company in Star Junction. The envelope reveals a great deal about the financial situation of a typical coal miner in the late 1890’s. Adam loaded 79 five-ton wagons in the two-week period from March 1 - 15, 1895. If we assume that he worked six days a week, he shoveled 32.9 tons--about 66,000 pounds--of coal each day (39.5 tons per day if he worked a five-day week). He was paid 40 cents for each five-ton wagon that he filled, which gave him a gross pay of $31.60. The deductions tell the story of a coal miner's life. He had to shop at the Company Store, where his bill for these two weeks was $17.00. The company owned his house, of course, and his rent came to $3.00. The company owned the tools that he used--a pick and shovel--but he had to pay the company $0.25 for sharpening. These deductions would have left him with a take-home pay of $11.35. But the company also owned his doctor. After deducting the $9.10 that Adam owed Dr. Cook, the company doctor, his take-home pay for two weeks, during which he shoveled 395 tons of coal, was $2.25--less than a penny per ton.

The company owned the store Adam shopped in, the house (and indeed, the whole town) that he lived in, his tools, and his doctor. For all practical purposes, the company owned Adam Baughman. Adam died as a result of a coal-mining accident—more here.

http://www.perryopolis.com/sjcompanystore.sht...

Now lets remember these coal miners lived in company housing and the law where they lived was purchased and enforced by the employer. No child labor laws, children getting black lung and a host of other slave elements. Capitalism at it’s finest my friends.

Better get off the tea!

Ru is right. He's trying to say the free market can be very unforgiving. All those free market enthusiasts miss the point. They could care less about the employee, and they focus on the bottom line "PROFIT".

TV MAN wrote:

Ru is right. He's trying to say the free market can be very unforgiving. All those free market enthusiasts miss the point. They could care less about the employee, and they focus on the bottom line "PROFIT".

And we wonder why it was a natural progression from being owned by the coal mines to welfare living; letting someone else take care of you. The only difference is now they don't get your money and soul, just your soul.

Still rising, they want to get rid of the last attempt to contol cost but the republicans have nothing to replace it with but thier insurance lobbyist grabbing more money for their companies. Health Care is out of reach for all poor and half the middle class. There are less middle classs because health care cost puts more people at poverty level.

the name was not obama care, the tea party health care company lobbist are trying to stiffle any attemt to get cost controls on medicine and health care.

Rick Perry says social security is a ponzi scam. Here's why it isn't.

1.Social Security isn't automatically doomed to fail. Played out to its logical conclusion, a Ponzi scheme is unsustainable because the number of potential investors is eventually exhausted. That's when the last people to participate are out of luck; the music stops and there's nowhere to sit.

2.In the case of Social Security, no one is being misled. Social Security is exactly what it claims to be: A mandatory transfer payment system under which current workers are taxed on their incomes to pay benefits, with no promises of huge returns.

3.Social Security is morally the polar opposite of a Ponzi scheme and fundamentally different from what Madoff allegedly did. At the height of the Great Depression, our society (see "Social") resolved to create a safety net (see "Security") in the form of a social insurance policy that would pay modest benefits to retirees, the disabled and the survivors of deceased workers. By design, that means a certain amount of wealth transfer, with richer workers subsidizing poorer ones. That might rankle, but it's not fraud.

There will be no significant recovery in the United States of America while Barack Obama is President. The evidence is overwhelming: everything Obama has tried to fuel a recovery (with his Democratic allies in Congress) has failed. Statistics claiming jobs saved by the stimulus package were mostly fiction, and cost American taxpayers about $275,000 each. Nearly 2-1/2 million fewer Americans have jobs than before the stimulus.

Barack Obama has been President for 30 months—2-1/2 years. He spent the first year obsessed with passing Obamacare, a program that doesn’t create jobs, but might destroy a lot of them. He “bailed out” GM, but many believe that his interference didn’t save GM; it merely cost taxpayers an extra $15-20 billion, and stole from legitimate investors to buy off the UAW. His broken campaign promises are too numerous to list. At some point, his statute of limitations on blaming Bush runs out. The latest joke is that the White House is that named the location of East Coast earthquake near DC “Bush’s Fault.”

He is an i diot backed by i diots.

The real TV MAN doesn't come from Bailey,CO

liar Obama

It doesn't fix the problems