Posted on 12/29/2013 2:12:20 PM PST by Libloather
**SNIP**
She is among the 15.3 million people in the United States who receive the Lifeline telephone service because they meet income guidelines or are enrolled in programs such as Medicaid or food stamps.
But the fundamental feature of the program on which James relies — 250 minutes of free wireless service a month — is at the center of a legal battle linked to a new tactic to reduce fraud in the program.
Alarmed by accounts of households that have more than one subsidized phone — a breach of federal guidelines — and other allegations of fraud, the Georgia Public Service Commission voted this year to make the state the first to require phone companies to collect a fee of at least $5 a month from Lifeline users.
(Excerpt) Read more at dispatch.com ...
And Husseincare hasn't even hit yet.
Well, this most definitely is raaassiisssss............
The Lifeline landline phone costs around $19/month. I’ve never understood why the cells should be free, except to attract voting constituents.
Slapping a fee on ObamaPhones? Isn’t that racist?
What? You mean those ‘poor’ downtrodden democrat voters defrauded the government? What a surprise!
...this is what was intended with the handicap parking placards, not free parking downtown at meters for every sore knee and sore back, or just too tired patron.
..Portland ore is considering limiting the free parking available...
..the free parkers some who work in various places are taking up all the parking spaces and no actual paying customers can use them....
All you have to do is to hold the wireless companies liable for the fraud, and they will do the screening properly.
I hate the program as much as anybody, but can someone explain to me how a $5 monthly fee will cut down fraud?
Where there is no Free Parking, there are usually other (real) freedoms missing.
Five dollars......should be $25 at least. 10 cents per minute. Let them pay like everyone else does.
The whole program needs to be trashed IMO. I thought the original purpose was so that people would be able to call 911 in the event of an emergency and to help them find a job. One phone on a land line with no long distance capability would seem to better fill that bill. But then, of course, BO’s friend in Mexico who provides most of the cell contracts couldn’t be raking in the big bucks.
$5 a month will just come out of their EBT allocation and do absolutely nothing to prevent fraud. I do suspect if they were forced to have just one limited use land line many of them would opt out.
I may be mistaken but this aimed at the free 250 minutes you get when you refer someone into the program....
What happens is people are getting 250 free minutes for bogus referrals .... Five dollars will cut that fraud down....
Face it.... 250 minutes a month is nothing for a alphabet soup named feral ghetto rat female....
If it costs them 5 dollars to talk more than 4 hours.... They probably won’t...
Lifeline my ***! Why would anyone need a “lifeline” while shopping at Walmart or piggin’ out at McDonalds?
It is pitiful how the modern culture willfully ignores the effects of socialism. Hundreds of years ago the French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote that to understand the cost of something, we must not only account for the effects we can easily see, but we must account for the effects that we cannot easily see.
There is not a better example than ObamaPhones, which many people think are “free”. Nothing is free as in without cost. It cost someone something. We have just allowed government to distort and regulate so that some people can get an ObamaPhone without having to pay the cost.
But someone pays the cost, either now or some time in the future. Always and without fail. We take money from people who are efficiently using it and give it to people who are not as efficient. We pay for these phones in many ways, not the least is that a small percent of people decide that if they get a job or work one more hour or earn one more dollar of income that they will no longer qualify for a “free” ObamaPhone, so they decide to accept a phone paid for by money taken from someone else.
These “free” ObamaPhones phones cost us on net balance more than we can ever know.
I believe you are taxed for that as well on your phone bill
so if they start charging a fee does that mean I don’t have to pay for it for others on my phone bill?
Congress will immediately increase their food stamps by $25/month to ease the pain.
Make these things landlines only, and with only a set number of calls that can be made per month outside of 911.
I think they were landlines only prior to King Barry
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