I did not confuse the two, and I think you didn't read my post very carefully.
First of all, most middle-class people without insurance can become a leach very easily with a bad enough accident. What do you suppose the average savings from a middle-class household would be? Let's just figure $20k. You know how fast you can burn through $20k in an emergency room, or even worse with a chronic illness, like cancer or leukemia? I have a coworker that got leukemia in his early 50s & needed more than a year's worth of care & rehab. Even with our insurance negotiating a significant discount, insurance payouts were pushing half a million. It doesn't take long to turn someone into a leach (my coworker, being properly insured is not a leach).
I'm pretty sure that the dead poor & welfare leaches don't get everything for free & don't live a very good life. I bust my tail working lots of hours & spending months at a time away from home. I wouldn't trade it for welfare in a million years. I might also add that my kid in middle-class America will be eligible for free primary & secondary education. Childcare and pre-k education are offered as a tax-advantaged.
My doctor refuses to see patients who can't pay the bill. Seems pretty simple.
The biggest problems with healthcare are gold-plated, tax-advantaged, 3rd party payer systems which distort the costs of healthcare across the board. Next, a MUCH bigger problem from a fiduciary standpoint than the poor is retirees on Medicare. Medicare is a time bomb which will bring the American economy crumbling down within the next few decades. It is unsustainable, impractical and puts a insurmountable burden on future generations. People consume the most healthcare statistically in the last couple of years of "life." I don't want to hear anything about people paying into Medicare either...what goes into that program is a joke for what people expect out of it.
I'm not fan of handouts either. I'm all for letting people starve or live under bridges. That being said, I think you're overstating their contribution to the overall problems with healthcare in the USA. The really big problem is that it is difficult to fix & politicians don't like hard work or presenting tough realities to their constituents. Easier just to blame the rich or the poor or the gays or whatever.
