Poker for Healthcare

So there’s this guy named Scott Kowalske, not Kowalski that likes to grink meat (Ren and Stimpy joke….never mind), but Kowalske that’s a poker player. Scott suffers from a condition called chronic wasting disease, it’s kind of a different and very painful version of mad cow disease. He likes to play poker while he waits in different cities for his many, many treatments that keep him alive. This disease is rare to, so rare in fact that only a tenth of one percent of all people in the United States suffers from it. Imagine being in excruciating pain 24 hours a day. He’s got to get so jacked up on pain killers to even get himself to a 5 on the 1 through 10 pain scale. Think about that everyone, every moment of everyday he just suffers like he’s on fire, I don’t know how he doesn’t just take a gun and end it all.
But a guy like Scott Kowalske doesn’t want anything to do with death. In fact he fights like hell to keep alive, trying everything he can to raise the little bit of money needed to keep him alive, 45,000 as a matter of fact will save him. But when that’s all it takes to survive is less than one third of what the most run down house in our city costs to buy, he can’t get it. He’s been having all sorts of issues getting this thing to go through, it’s not from lack of interest because many people across the country know his story, it’s from promoters backing out and messing it up. All this man wants to do is live, same as most of us.
I go back to what I’ve been saying for years, socialized health care is the only way to save people like this. Imagine living with a disease this bad and you can be saved, the treatment exists but the money isn’t there. What kind of crap is this? This man should be able to just walk into the hospital with his appointment sheet and walkout after the treatment case closed. No big bill, no worrying about losing his house or his car because he didn’t want to die, just too stupid to figure out for me.