Comments on: AARP’s Tradition of Betrayal

By: hmmm

hmmm — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:54:00 +0000

i knew they were a horrible ripoff (a Trojan horse, really) when:

a) they supported and fought for that cretin in chief’ s medicare plan, including the gift to the pharma companies and prohibition of buying meds from Canada or having government negotiating lower med prices.

b) kept singing odes to the Massachusetts’ health care “plan” in which the poor (they call us “middle class”) are required to pay astronomical sums to “health” insurance companies (in return for nothing) or face stiff penalties (all the time braying about “personal” responsibility to be insured, and the costs that are incurred by the society because of the irresponsible uninsured (nothing about responsibility of the rich and powerful));

c) kept sending me invites to sign up for “affordable” health insurance, but when i called i would always get some totally lost person who didn’t know the first thing about this and then in the end it turned out they “didn’t offer” it in my state;

d) kept sending me life insurance solicitations over and over and over again even after i informed them i wanted nothing to do with this;

e) kept sending me invites to sign up for their “fantastic hospital indemnification plan”, by which, if you’re a total idiot and can’t do basic counting on your fingers, you will pay hundreds of dollars up front per year in exchange for the right to some pocket change (enough to buy a daily Coke from a vending machine), in case you should be hospitalized. (And this, couched in dire warnings about how a single day at a hospital costs thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, but what they were offering would not, in any way, alleviate any of this, or be even applicable to these costs. But here’s ten bucks each day for you, so you can go out of your intensive care unit and buy a decent meal for yourself, maybe call your loved ones from a pay phone);

f) kept sending me solicitations for car insurance, promising average annual savings of $531.74 (or some such scientifically precise number), when in fact, when i checked, they were significantly overpriced over my current insurance company.

g) kept sending me urgent solicitations to extend my membership two years before it was up; and it looked and sounded so convincing, my membership was up, and i was tempted to just send the check and get it over with, but then i looked at my card and saw the true state of affairs.

By: Anita Bellin

Anita Bellin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:47:25 +0000

I used to be a “member” of AARP. I stopped sending them money or responding to the letters which promised a vague grouping of goals for those of us who were willing suckers when I discovered that they were making a profit from the Gap insurance program which was only exceeded by the profit they were getting from the home and auto policies which they were hawking.
I am a retired state employee of the State of Vermont with a Governor who has worked for the past five years to eliminate those of us who are covered by the health insurance program because we cost too much and he has other plans for the dollars. So what if we are left without coverage.
Vermont is a beautiful place with wonderful people (mostly) and a vibrant political system which should protect us but — we have greedy and arrogant Governor, a glut of elected legislators who are blissfully unaware of the trials and tribulations of most of the regular (not part-time visiting) citizens who support their lifestyle and smile at their follies. Single payer health care is anathema to them — It might provide care and concern for the poorest of the Vermonters who are seen by many of the legislators as too lazy to work and who view the doctors who work to keep them healthy as a servant class who don’t deserve any more compensation than they now receive from insurers who workvery hard to maintain their personal profits.

By: thecelt

thecelt — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:24:22 +0000

Any organization that claims to work on behalf of the aged, an ever and increasingly vulnerable part of the population, that doesnt support a full-on single payer health system with an emphasis on dignified care for the elderly, is quite simply a gang of traitorous scum. I see the AARP mailings in my parents home, with the names and logos of insurance companies emblazoned all over it, and I think to myself….is this it? Is this what the aged have to turn to when they get screwed and abused? The AA f#cking RP? I kid you not, I have watched the insurance companies completely ruin my parents lives and drive them into pauperism and poverty, where once they were solidly middle class. I fear for them, daily. No insurance, massive health problems, including life threatening cancer, and they made payments out of pocket, until their money ran out, of 3000 dollars a month to BCBS for coverage. BEFORE the cancer diagnosis. Oh, did I mention that, for whatever reason, they dont qualify for medicaid? (how thats the case, ill never understand) This country makes me sick (although hopefully not too sick—id rather not see the bill) How many others are there out there with the same exact predicament? And who do all these aged people turn to? The Democrats? The Unions? The AARP? Traitors to our class, the whole lot of them. Its so easy to talk of these things like they are some sort of hypothetical problem. When they destroy your life and your loved ones, the anger consumes you. Not having an outlet, a way to get together and force change now, depresses you. And to see groups like the AARP claim to speak for our family members is enough to drive you mad.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:50:21 +0000

Well Stephen I knew it was to good to be true and I get an AARP letter in the mail about every two weeks wanting me to sign up with them and different things they tell me I need and usually a card with my name on it that looks so official. What I have done for a few years now is tear it up in little pieces and put it in the trash. To be truthfully honest with you I think health care is the least of our the our being all 6 billion plus of us problems. It appears that in about 4 months we will know if Nostradamus was on to something as so far the low road looks like the path. Low road doesn’t begin to explain the strangeness we see now no it sure doesn’t. Corruption, greed, illusion where fiction is fact and fact is fiction. Has it always’ been that way probably but now at new heights and this time no second chance. Could that be what many from the past have been trying to tell us?

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. ~Cree Indian Proverb