Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing surprise medical bills. Plenty of folks get them, and they don't get them because "they don't take care of themselves" or because "they don't read the fine print" or because they've screwed up in some other way; they get them because our privatized health insurance system loves exploiting holes in provider networks to deprive you of money. Do folks "deserve" to get billed in the thousands of dollars because their surgeon was in-network but his anesthesiologist wasn't? Or because their hospitals subcontract to out-of-network air ambulance providers? Or because they get life-or-death service (please attend closely the words "life-or-death") at an out-of-network hospital? No, they do not. That is not the "free" market at work, nor is it the work of "makers" as opposed to "takers" and "looters" -- I'm fairly confident, in fact, that were Zombie Ayn Rand to visit us today, she would tell us that the corporations that issue these surprise medical bills are the "looters." If not the "takers"!
Meanwhile, you won't be surprised to learn that our government doesn't regulate location tracking very well, to the point where Google still tracks the location of people who've turned off all the location tracking functions on their phones and computers, so Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our digital private data a whole lot better than they've been doing. Remember: Congressfolk have done little about this issue not because it's a "hard issue to understand." "Protect my privacy" ain't that damn deep -- it only becomes "deep" when Congressfolk take campaign money from corporations that want to sell your private data, and it only becomes "deep" when law enforcement wants to get location data without going through the trouble of getting a warrant for the information. Certainly don't believe that corporations know this issue better than politicians, because that's a little like saying we should let the fox, not the farmer, run the henhouse.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass meaningful paid family leave legislation, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. By "meaningful legislation" we most certainly do not mean "legislation that would steal from your future Social Security benefits to pay for family medical leave now," like right-wingers would have us do. No, meaningful paid family leave legislation would more closely resemble H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act. The FAMILY Act would create a national paid family leave program, and when your Tea Party uncle asks HOW WILLZ YOU PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ HA HA HA SNORT STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!, you can respond that the FAMILY Act would pay for itself with an 0.4% payroll tax -- that's four-tenths of one percent, not "four percent" or "40 percent," "liberal" media! -- and the employer would pay half, meaning someone making $50,000 annually would pay $8.33 monthly. That's not even five cups of coffee at Wawa monthly, and for peace of mind? What an easy choice.
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