Did you know that a man robbed a bank for $1 so he could be arrested and sent to jail for free medical health care.
Franz Kafka novel, but what James Richard Verone did on June 9th 2011 belies more about the peril of the US healthcare system and what people like Mr Verone feel they are compelled to do in order to get what they need when all other routes have been exhausted.
gastongazzette: James Richard Verone woke up June 9 with a sense of anticipation.
He took a shower.
Ironed his shirt.
Hailed a cab.
Then robbed a bank.
He wasn’t especially nervous. If anything, Verone said he was excited to finally execute his plan to gain access to free medical health care.
If you think this is a joke, you should stop laughing now. But then again if you think this approximates the bizarre nature of what it has become to live in America today then feel free to continue ruefully crying smiling.
“I prepared myself for this,” Verone said from behind a thick glass window in the Gaston County Jail Thursday morning.
Verone spoke calmly about the road that led him to a jail cell he shares with a young man arrested for stealing computers.
The 59-year-old man apologized for squinting. He hadn’t gotten his eyeglasses returned to him since being arrested a week ago.
He smiled from the other side of the glass, sometimes gesturing with his hands. A plastic, red bracelet with his mug shot clung to his left wrist.
Until last week Verone had never been in trouble with the law.
Now he hopes to be booked as a felon and held in prison where he can be treated for several physical afflictions.
With his back against the wall, Mr Verone felt compelled that his only one remaining option was to break the law so he could finally get the healthcare assistance he finally needed, because at least a convicted felon is entitled to healthcare where as a free man who has no means of paying for the cost of health care will sometimes be forced to come up with other alternatives.
But before you go thinking Mr Verone is a capricious man looking to take advantage of a broken system one should bear in mind that for most of his life he has played text book with the rules. He held a job with Coca Cola for 17 years before that job ended (one can safely assume Mr Verone was not offered a pension or a health care benefit as an exit payment, unlike something many senior executives can expect to receive). After that he got another job as a delivery man before that job ended and yet another job as a convenience store clerk which led to him eventually incurring physical pains. Something on his wages and lack of health insurance could hardly attend to.
Nevertheless Mr Verone applied for disability and early social security, instead all he got was food stamps. By then his physical pains now included a protrusion in his chest, arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome. Ailments which he had no way of dealing with until Mr Verone finally decided to exercise his last resort.
A man robbed a bank for $1 so he could be arrested and sent to jail for free medical health care
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