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BCBS - $76 a month for single coverage. Stop smoking and you could buy health insurance. You have no idea how many patients have had a "duh"moment when I tell them they can afford their meds if they get rid of the cancer sticks in their pockets.
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Rand also believed that the scientific consensus on the dangers of tobacco was a hoax. By 1974, the two-pack-a-day smoker, then 69, required surgery for lung cancer. And it was at that moment of vulnerability that she succumbed to the lure of collectivism.
Ayn Rand sang a new song after she came down with lung cancer (after many years of smoking) when she gladly accepted government help as an indivdual.
I see this argument come up a lot about people accepting "government assistance". The only hypocrisy would be if she had applied for these benefits without ever being forced to pay into the system. She has no choice in the matter, it's a government mandated program that we all must participate in.
There is nothing wrong with helping someone out, I'm no Ayn Rand expert and some of her views are borderline but overall they are sound. She touches on this in the following Mike Wallace interview. The line is drawn when you are forced into helping someone whether they are deserving or not. As I've mentioned before being in the fuel delivery business I had many customers that were lower income many of whom I helped get through tough times either giving them extended no interest credit, reduced prices and in a few cases free product.
This decision was left up to me and only those I deemed worthy of my generosity received these breaks based on many factors like have you paid me before? Do you have or had a job? When I get there are you the guy that jumps up and wants to help or are you the guy getting a delivery paid for by heating assistance that expects me to shovel 2 feet of snow out of your driveway to get to the truck window? That's true story and the guy learned a valuable lesson because I left.
Ayn Rand's amphetamine addiction is apparent by her nervous movements in those videos.
Quote:
"There was her 30-year use of amphetamines, beginning with Benzedrine in 1942, as she was rushing to complete The Fountainhead, and continuing with Dexedrine and Dexamyl into the 1970s. Until now it has been described as a two-pill-a-day prescription for weight control, but evidence in Heller's book indicates that it wasn't seen that way by everyone. As early as 1945, her then-close friend, journalist Isabel Paterson, was berating her in letters with passages such as, 'Stop taking that benzedrine, you idiot. I don't care what excuse you have — stop it.' Heller presents other evidence that Rand had periods of heavy use in the 1950s and '60s. But the exact extent of her dependence on amphetamines is peripheral here to the broader self-delusion. As anyone who has had the experience knows, a good way to get a really, really distorted sense of reality is to swallow a couple of Dexedrines. If you want to take them anyway, don't go around bragging that you never 'fake reality in any manner.'"
I see this argument come up a lot about people accepting "government assistance". The only hypocrisy would be if she had applied for these benefits without ever being forced to pay into the system. She has no choice in the matter, it's a government mandated program that we all must participate in.
Since Medicare was enacted in 1965, Ayn Rand took far more out than she paid in. If she were not a hypocrite, she could have only taken what she paid and then taken responsibility for her own choice to smoke.
I 100% agree with a large militarized border fence and ANY attempted invaders should be shot.
As far as health insurance goes, those that don't have any coverage(either private or Govt. supplied) must pay in CASH (no credit cards) when service is provided.
Ayn Rand's views have to be seen in the context of her life. She left an authoritarian (actually a totalitarian regime, IIRC), so it's understandable why she soured on things like collectivism. But imagine this in reverse: what if someone left America during the Great Depression and used the 1920s as their proof that free societies don't work? She takes an extreme example of collectivism to denigrate all forms of collectivism, which is a fallacy.
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