Week 11
11/16/12
Thinking back over the past week-what would you say were three most informative and useful things you learned this week from the reading... and how do you see them informing your practice today?
One of the informative things I learned was in regards to government spending on welfare. I believe that there needs to be a time limit on how long people can be on welfare. Not two years, or five years, but at most one year to a year and a half. Anymore than that and people start to get lazy and reliant on the help. They stop looking for work and eventually don’t have a reason to look anymore. The way I see it, right now people on welfare can get food stamps for food, section 8 for housing, cash assistance as long as they look for a job or go through job trainings, Medicaid for health insurance and prescription coverage, substance abuse recovery treatments for when they start abusing those prescriptions, transportation if needed, and child care, so that just shows that government is helping people to be lazy. I understand that some may truly need help, and in those cases I have no problem with government swooping in to help, but what about all the people that do work 40 hours or more a week to provide for their families, they have to pay out of pocket to be insured, have higher co-pays when they do see doctors and get prescriptions filled. How is that fair when people on government aid don’t have $0-$1.00 co-pays? The internship I am currently at is funded through the government. The government funded sources give people 21 days of residential treatment, whereas people that are paying premiums for their insurance every month only get 5 days at most to recover from substance abuse when they have been using for so long. I don’t understand how that is fair or why this is how it is in our society. People who work hard should be paying no co-pays and getting more days of treatment, versus people who are not working hard and abusing the system. But that’s just my opinion, and I don’t mean to offend to anyone by it. Another thing I learned was in Chapter 11 about Children, which was that that transracial adoptions started to grow in 2001. I did not know this nor realize that it was a big deal back then to be able to adopt internationally. Reading about all the complications that went on in regards to African American children being adopted to white homes was very interesting. Lastly, I found that reading about the aged was also interesting. Defining old age has definitely changed over the years. I thought it scary to know that life expectancy for when a child was born use to be 48 years old. Now times have certainly changed because of all the research and technological advances that have been made. I see this information helping me in my practice today by allowing me to see the differences of how it use to be, how it has changed, and that things will continue to change until the day we die. It will also helps me to know that for the most part things have changed for the better, but a lot more things need to be done or changed in regards to welfare for it to not be abused and actually be beneficial for the whole society.