Is a fucktard. A real, honest to goodness fucktard:
Greg Hartman was waiting tables to support himself through college in the fall of 2010 when his hometown of Manitowoc, Wisc., experienced an outbreak of HIV and the hepatitis C virus. After finding out his best friend had been infected with hepatitis, the uninsured 22-year-old decided he needed to get checked out as well — but the tests were going to cost him more than $300 out of pocket.
“There’s no way I could have afforded it on my own,” said Hartman, who brings in only $150 to $200 a week from his restaurant job.
Hartman said he went to the University of Wisconsin’s campus health care center and applied for BadgerCare — the state’s Medicaid-funded family planning program, which reimburses low-income men and women for sexually transmitted disease testing, birth control services, cancer screenings and other preventative reproductive care. Through BadgerCare, Hartman was able to afford to get tested for both HIV and hepatitis C — he tested positive for the latter.
“If I didn’t qualify for BadgerCare, I would have just said ‘fuck it’ and not gone into the clinic in the first place,” he told HuffPost. “I would never have known I had hepatitis.”
Although the BadgerCare family planning program doesn’t cover Hartman’s treatment, he was able to afford two different HIV tests, a liver panel and potentially life-saving hepatitis tests through the subsidized program.
But the nearly 7,000 other low-income Wisconsin men who use BadgerCare may soon be out of luck. Scott Walker, the state’s Republican governor, has proposed eliminating men entirely from the program in his latest budget bill. That move could cost Wisconsin all of its federal family planning funds, policy experts warn.
What will it take for these jerks to understand that it is important to the public good that everyone has access to healthcare? Do we have to have another flu pandemic like in 1918? It just baffles me, the inhumanity of it all. Is it the idea that if everyone has access then there won’t be enough “care” to go around? Or will their stock portfolios plunge in value or the contributions from the “health care” industries dry up ( I hope so.) HIV and hepatitis needs to be controlled and treated for everyone’s sake!