She is putting on her show from a remote location, using her family as her video crew. She points out that 70% of the labor force does not have the option of working from home and have little savings. One in three Americans say that they or an immediate family member has lost their job because of the pandemic measures and more than half report a cut in pay or work hours. Many are going to be seriously hurt by the social distancing and shut down protocols and will need immediate relief measures, like this couple in Kansas City.
Even when they were working, Brown and Smith earned only $2.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage for servers, plus tips.
“We’ve maybe got two or three weeks before we run out of food,” said Brown. “It’s on the razor’s edge for sure. We don’t have any way to pay the rent. I’ve talked to the landlord and let him know what’s going on. I’m trying to prepare for the worst.”
Smith is worried. “He could definitely put us out,” she said.
Then there’s the question of what happens if either or both of them catch coronavirus. “We don’t have health insurance,” said Smith. “At home sick is pretty much what we would do.”
With some people hit with hospital bills for tens of thousands of dollars for treatment, Brown and Smith are not alone on Kansas City’s east side asking whether they would run up a debt they might never be able to pay or take a chance on shutting themselves away and hope to make it through. Even if they catch coronavirus, it may not officially be confirmed. Getting a test in Missouri is still a challenge, even for those showing symptoms of the disease and they require a prescription from a doctor who all too often has to be paid as well.
Brown and Smith earned only $2.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage for servers, plus tips.
“We don’t have health insurance,”
That is obscene.
We are not overly generous but in Ontario a Liquor server’s minimum wage is $12.20 per hour (plus tips). And insurance.
For all those landlords who are planning to evict tenants who can’t pay their rent this month, I have a question: How soon do you think you are going to fill the vacancy? Especially if a lot of other landlords also evict tenants, then there will be a sudden glut of available rentals on the market and you will probably have to lower your asking rent to compete. And the majority of people looking to rent your place are people who just got evicted from other places for being unable to pay their rent.
I’m kinda liking these various at-home versions of these shows.
Although I was slightly concerned with Samantha Bee’s first one where she was splitting wood…
So, even if the test itself is free (and I remember seeing an article about how Congress had to lean on the Trump-appointed head of the CDC to have any chance of that happening) you can’t get it without a prescription, which requires a doctor’s appointment, which requires payment.
As if we didn’t have enough other evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the American ‘health care’ system.