|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Alabama NewsAlabama Politics
Bingo for Bed Pans?
By Gary Palmer
Posted on: March 13, 2005
Here they go again…gambling legislation has made its way up for debate once more in the Alabama Legislature. Last year it was "Bingo for Books" and this year it is a gambling bill to save Medicaid and the General Fund. Maybe we should call it "Bingo for Bed Pans." Frankly, there are probably some Alabama legislators who would sponsor a gambling bill to save the Ten Commandments if they thought people would buy into it.
Okay, maybe "Bingo for the Ten Commandments" would be going too far even for the elected representatives of the gambling industry who keep promoting gambling to save the state's little children and elderly. But "Bingo for the Ten Commandments" is not much more ridiculous than the statement from Rep. Yvonne Kennedy who introduced a gambling expansion bill she said is going to "…support health care for senior citizens."
What is so ridiculous about this statement is that across our country senior citizens are being devastated by the gambling industry. Nationwide, the elderly are losing their homes, retirement accounts, Social Security, insurance and the money they need for food and medicine to compulsive gambling. One recent study revealed that some elderly women were gambling away 249 percent of their monthly income. Another report stated that the gambling-addicted elderly often stop taking medications and even skip meals in order to have gambling money.
Alarmingly, industry trend-watchers tell us that the elderly are the fastest growing group of gamblers in the nation.
Recent reports indicate that the elderly are twice as likely as younger gamblers to become addicted. According to a study published in the January edition of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, a significant percentage of older Americans may be "at-risk" gamblers who tend to bet large amounts of money or more than they can afford. Moreover, it has been reported that 65 percent of the revenue at Atlantic City casinos comes from the elderly.
No wonder the Mississippi casinos sponsor buses for elderly gamblers. They pick them up in Alabama, take them to Mississippi, and bring who knows how many of them back financially ruined. Maybe Alabama should consider suing the Mississippi casinos and the Alabama gambling joints for recovery of social and health costs imposed on the state from gambling problems like we did the tobacco industry. That might raise a few million dollars to pay for health care for our state's poor and elderly.
To make matters worse, the elderly are reluctant to seek help when they have a gambling problem. It is usually a hidden addiction that is not discovered by their children until after they have amassed insurmountable debt. The elderly cannot get jobs and start over, so they are frequently forced into bankruptcy and, sadly, often become a financial burden to their children who become responsible for their parents' gambling-associated debts.
The vulnerable elderly are not the only population suffering from the ravages of gambling addiction. As if the plight of the elderly is not enough to cause you concern for your parents, grandparents, or aging neighbors or to prick your civic conscience, consider the effect rampant gambling is having on the poor in our nation. The very people who are most dependent on the Medicaid service, the ones that pro-gambling legislators continually claim they are trying to help, are the ones who are hurt the most by gambling.
A recent study of gamblers in the Detroit area found that the impact of gambling on low-income, single-mother-headed, black households was disastrous. The report found that 38 percent of single mothers reported having gambled in a casino in the past 12 months. And as a proportion of total household income, "…low-income families lost approximately 2.4 times more money gambling in casinos than did higher-income families. Also, according to another recent study done in Texas, those making $20,000-$30,000 will spend four times what those making over $100,000 will spend on gambling.
After reading the above facts about the impact on the poor, consider what a Norwegian researcher had to say about governments legalizing gambling to raise revenue:
"As the regressive nature of gambling revenues will become better known in the years to come, there will be doubts about the ethical appropriateness of financing beneficial causes by imposing a regressive tax, and as experience accumulates over time, an increasing proportion of the population will have to discover the fact that legalized gambling is practically never a way of getting rich, but is often a way of getting poor."
When you read these facts, you have to question the sincerity of state legislators who bring up gambling bills year after year. Out of the "goodness of their hearts" they come to the people time and again with a gambling bill to fix education, or to help the children, or as is the case this year, to fix health care for our pour and our senior citizens. By now it should be absolutely clear that if the legislators who keep bringing up gambling bills every legislative session are ever successful they will have fixed one thing and one thing only the pocket books of the big gambling interests.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
| |
|
