Speaking from experiance, as someone who has worked as a Vollie EMT in several vollie EMS/FF stations...
So, Obamacare forces firestations and cities/counties to give health insurance to follie EMTs/FFs... SO THE F**K WHAT?! I'm not a fan of obamacare, but this is a good thing, even if you greedy SOBs don't know it. The majority of Firefighters and EMTs who do get paid, are paid minimum wage, and in places like Kentucky, who follow the federal minimum wage level of 7.25$/hr hour, they have to work double shifts, or sometimes work more than one station, just to afford to feed themselves and their families, and if they have to go to the hospital for a flu shot or something, then they're just plain Sh!t out of luck. Nevermind what vollies have to go through. When I worked vollie EMS, I put in upwards of 40hrs a week at the station, while working at a paid private EMS provider for 8 bucks an hour for 30-40hrs a week. Unlike police, EMTs and Firefighters don't normally have unions, or free reign to a city/county's bank account, and I know A LOT of Follies, and paid, FF/EMTs who are well below the poverty line, and often will try to use their wits and knowledge to heal themselves and families, because a trip to the ER would darn near bankrupt them.
So before you heartless b*stards go whining and b!tching about how obamacare is going to force counties and cities to buy health insurance for their paid and unpaid staff, maybe you should spend a few years in a small town EMS station working 50+ friggen hours a week for a weekly paycheck that, in a month, barely gives you maybe twenty bucks of extra money after you pay electric, rent, food, phone, and gas to go back and forth from work.
But no! that'd be below you. You sit in this thread and other threads, and b!tch, and moan, and complain about how evil and how bad and how unconstitutional, and how horrible it is that Obamacare will make employers pay for, or help pay for, insurance for their employees. Have ANY of you ever even worked in a h#llhole enviroment for next to nothing for 8, 10, 12, or more hours a day?! I seriously doubt it, because if any of you did, you wouldn't be filled with enough hot air and things you know nothing about, that you could fill a friggen zepplin fleet! Get off your darn high horse and try thinking about what it's like to be poor, or below the poverty line, or working for a factory that makes tens of millions of dollars a year from one plant, but only pays its workers bare minimum wage, and makes them work in hellish conditions for 10+ hours a day! AND NO! 99% of the time, there are no better jobs that they can just up and quit and go work for, because unlike in your republican fantasy pipedreams, companies and corporations are not good organizational bodies that want the best for its workers, and care about them, and if the government didn't have pesky labour laws the corporations would pay its employees ten times what they do now.
Jesus christ, everytime I see that darn tiresome propaganda about how evil and horrible obamacare is, it makes me want to violently back-hand the person spouting off the same GOP-brainwashed B.S. And take away all their money and all their pretty items and make them live life as a dirt poor american for a few years.
This is why our country is going to hell in a hand basket, because ignorant white collar republicans who hate the idea of paying a coupel hundred bucks a year in taxes so some poor guy breaking his back in a ditch line to feed his family can afford to have a surgery to fix his hip, but have no friggen problem with forking over much of their income to the government so we can have a military that costs more per year than all of our rivals and enemies and allie's military budgets cost in ten years!
And the ignorant Democrats that care more about fighting everything the republicans say and do, instead of doing what Bobby and John tried to do and help the poor like Democrats are supposed to do.
We need a friggen dictatorship. The United States needs to be taken over by a communist, or nazi-fied dictatorship, and impose absolute martial law, and start killing off people like stalin and hitler did. Because ONLY THEN will the dumbarse republicans and ignorant Democrats drop their pretentious BS and actually think "Hey, there are tens of millions of people who go hungry every night because they cannot afford an education with which to get a better job, and there are tens of millions of people who cannot afford health insurance, maybe if we taxed some of these companies making more money in a month than all of america's middle class makes in a year, then maybe these people can live past the age of 60 years!