If anyone is saying on this forum that Snyder died of HIV, and he did die of pneumonia, is it slander or libel since it's in permaprint in this forum?
No. You can't libel a dead man. One of the first thing about torts you learn in law classes.
The salary that the campaign staff was paid, given the location they had to live in order to work at the Arlington headquarters WAS peanuts.
An annual salary of $71k in the DC area, is not exactly exhorbitant.
From what I have heard from staffers during the campaign, the campaign HQ was set in Arlington ONLY because Kent Snyder lived there. It was said by the staffers that the best location would be in Texas along with Dr. Paul's Congressional headquarters, where much of the work was done anyway and where there would be plenty of volunteers-- the campaign was always begging for volunteers in Arlington.
So, as campaign manager Kent would have controlled the location of the HQ and the salaries of the staff.
There are few pre-existing conditions I can think of that totally and completely rule someone out for a health insurance policy; the most likely culprit has been mentioned many times in this thread, and there are possibly some rare genetic diseases. My mom had cancer a few years ago, and even she can get a health insurance policy.
However, $71k for a single man almost 50 years old is enough of an annual salary to have substantial savings built up. Dr. Paul said Kent left a very well-paying job in California to go to work for him in Washington, DC. He should have had a 401k or other similar type of retirement account from that job, with substantial savings left from it.
$71,000 a year is a well-paying job even for someone with a family, let alone a single person. A single friend of mine makes $45,000 a year and has built up $20,000 savings in his first year of working alone, simply because he doesn't have a family to provide for. My friend doesn't live like a pauper, either. A person living similarly on $71,000 could build up close to $50,000 a year in savings and $40,000 at the least. This is especially true if the campaign reimbursed him for food and things he'd normally be paying for anyway.
Over the more than 25 years that a 49-year-old man has been working, that sort of savings should collect substantial interest over time with sound money management. Kent seemed like a very intelligent guy in his interviews; I can't imagine that he had no savings collected. I think it wouldn't be over the top to imagine that unless he had some sort of huge debts or expenses that a normal person wouldn't have (such as those associated with certain long-term illnesses), he could have had several hundred thousand stored up due to prudent investing. Something just doesn't add up.
While I don't object to the idea of a Chip-In, I just don't see how a man in Kent's position could have not had this sort of thing planned and saved up for. It seems contrary to everything we came to know about Snyder, and it leaves him, Ron Paul and all libertarians open to the sort of idiotic babble that someone linked from Huffington Post earlier. It just feeds on the universal health care arguments.
