I'm not a freeloader, 1 percenters

I had a car accident (not my fault) about two months ago. I try to have some reasonable, non-Pollyanna gratitude, like noting it was the arm itself and not hand/wrist bones, and the left not the right. (It still was a serious accident, and assuming I get full recovery, that will take longer than normal.) Here's one big part of that.

On my arm, one other thing to be grateful for.

The US, of course, does not have a national health care system. (I know that in some Western nations, part of the healthcare is delivered through private insurers, and it's not totally single-payer, but said insurers are generally better regulated than the US and there may be some structural differences.)

My insurance has a pretty high deductible (between Obamacare bronze and silver, I'd guess, fellow Americans).

However, because I was driving to track down a possible news story (an alleged gas leak) ...  this is deemed on the job. And hence, workers' compensation system.

With allowance for deductibles, it's what private health insurance should be like, but sadly is not, in America.

I hadn't even thought about it, but company HQ started the paperwork either that Friday 6 1/2 weeks ago or the Monday after.

If anything, the gas company being extremely cheap on the amount of PR people it employs and the lack of proactiveness when an alleged leak happens, let alone when it becomes public knowledge, is the freeloader — freeloading on the public trust.

That said, workman's comp has its downside too, which includes sometimes being even slower than regular insurance to approve claims and procedures.

This is also yet another way in which the portion of the 99 percent who vote Republican vote against their own interests. The Republican master class thinks workman's compensation, like unemployment benefits, is freeloading. Of course, much of the moneybags that feed the Democratic master class, if not (yet) the master class itself, also feels the same way.