Healthcare reformist TR Reid visits COS to say universal coverage not possible

The Healing of America: a Global quest for better, cheaper, and fairer health care.COLORADO SPRINGS– [UPDATED]
My question to TR Reid, who speaks tonight at CC’s Palmer Hall, is how can voices for health care rights get past the corporate media editors?
As Washington Post Denver bureau chief and NPR reporter, Reid’s answer will reveal his earnestness, because most clearly his editors have kept the upper hand. The Independent, which is sponsoring tonight’s event, has invited two respondents to offer rebuttals, but both represent the health care status quo, there is no one advocating for socialized medicine, automatically framing Reid’s centrism as the people’s best hope.

I remember a TR Reid interview on NPR, which left me with the distinct impression of a hobbled argument. Look at the subtitle of his Frontline documentary: Sick Around the World: Can the U.S. learn anything from the rest of the world about how to run a health care system? They don’t say “what can the US learn” but can it. That’s the same false question the corporate media use to approach Global Warming. Though the answer is a multiplicity of affirmatives, the headline posed as a question leaves the viewer with the impression the conclusion is his to decide. The moon: is it there?

A follow-up Sick Around America was famously, in alternative media circles at least, altered to endorse insurance mandates. Reid broke away from the final product when PBS refused to mention his conclusion that health insurance should not be for profit. Reid chalked it up to a disagreement, not specifically a motive.

The book Mr. Reid will be signing is titled The Healing of America: a global quest for better, cheaper, and fairer health care. His own disjointed title reflects why he returned empty-handed. Can you imagine if it had read simply: a global quest for health care?

Better, cheaper and fairer are redundant qualifiers and load the theme with false perspective. “Better” assumes American care can be ranked on a scale, this book is obviously only for those getting care. “Cheaper” assumes health care must have a price — Universal health care is free. “Fairer” again assumes that our current equilibrium is in some measurable aspect fair, besides which, the concept is a fallacy. There’s unfair and fair. Moving from one toward the other, fairness is unfair until it is fair. Besides which, every schoolchild knows “fairer” is expressed as “more fair.” If Reid had been honest, he would have phrased it “less unfair.”

TR Reid applauds the health care available in other developed countries, but notes the other systems are not without their flaws. Is this some sort of psychological inducement to feed the American ego, that US reform can aim higher than the health care as a right provided elsewhere? I think it’s a loophole with which to scuttle his proposal.

It seems TR Reid is ignoring the chief obstacle to health care. It’s not reason, it’s not taxes. The chief obstacle is capitalist greed, it’s class warfare, and the social systems of our like nations are under attack as well. The shortcomings which TR Reid sees in Europe are the result of legislative meddling with systems enacted by the people.

Americans aren’t going to get health care by waiting on their legislators, or the benevolence of the corporations. The audience tonight may be impressed by TR Reid’s findings, but he’s offering nothing but placebo. Talking about health care, visualizing it, salivating at its proximity, is as much taste as TR Reid, the Washington Post and its corporate health industry advertisers will have us get.

UPDATE: TR Reid spoke to a standing room only crowd and received a standing ovation. As per usual for journalists, he provided his own disclaimer for venturing from objectivity when he posited that providing health care for all could be a moral obligation. But on the matter of The Politics of Health Care Reform, the topic of his speech, he had nothing to say.

Really, he threw the question back at the audience. Why won’t the USA provide universal coverage to its people. I’ve thought about it a lot, he told us, and I don’t have the answer.

When it came why some countries pay for Viagra, while others do not, TR Reid was humorously inquisitive. His rundown of the various medical systems throughout the world was decidedly comprehensive. But on the question of the hour, Reid was the customary incurious newspaperman which might explain his success in major media.

Not once, even at someone’s prompting, did Reid mention the for-profit worm in America’s medical system’s rotten apple. We’re told that Reid walked away from the second Frontline documentary for its whitewash of his criticism of the for-profit incentive which prevents payment systems from serving the public good. He’s excised the subject from his own presentation too. Instead, Reid focused on the millions of uninsured Americans, without a mention of the bigger population of victims, those insured who are denied care nonetheless.

Reid was pessimistic about the chances for near-term reform, based on anecdotal evidence of comments he’s received on the Frontline website. A year ago his documentary got mostly supportive comments. This year they are predominantly critical. Thus, Reid concludes, Americans do not want health care reform.

His audience tonight applauded every punchline about health care as a human right, yet Reid held that we did not want it badly enough. I hate it when the best of our spokesmen blame the audience.

US health industry tells Vic to snuff it

vic chestnutVic Chesnutt took his own life on Christmas Day. By coincidence, he’d just given an upbeat interview to NPR’s Fresh Air in spite of an ongoing battle with his health care providers. The segment seemed to pierce the celebrity veil we imagine insulates our talent castes from the worries of everyman. When he died, I reflected on the interview. I was reluctant to mar a eulogy with the villainy of the US medical system — but then NPR re-aired the piece, en memoriam, minus the damning testimony. They added in its place a remembrance by three colleagues who concluded: “To say poor health care killed Vic Chesnutt would be very reductive.”

Reductive? These corporate musicians, at the behest of NPR, have to throw an artisan spin on Vic Chesnutt’s legacy because his art should transcend his mortality?! Vic’s art, real art, is about mortality. Vic’s death was real and the anxiety he expressed in his interview was real. He hadn’t chosen to keep his troubles to himself for the sake of the listeners’ seamless pleasurable enjoyment. Who are these commercial artists to mute Vic’s story? It made me sick.

Others wonder aloud why Vic’s rich musician friends couldn’t have offered to pay for the medical procedures he needed. Perhaps they did, who knows. And perhaps their concern not to be “reductive” was extracted from a much longer session where Vic Chesnutt’s struggles were discussed at length.

Vic’s talent may not have been lost on these would-be eulogists, but we can’t fault them for not being artist spirits enough themselves to know how to shepherd an honest narrative about Vic.

I point my finger at NPR for the rewrite, and I’ll take issue with one of the musicians. At a wake, there’s always someone who uses the opportunity for self-promotion, and at this one it was REM’s Michael Stipe. He discovered Vic Chesnutt, let’s get that out of the way. Michael’s remembrance of Vic was an anecdote about a lyric he thought he’d stolen from Vic. It was so good, he must have stolen it. Stipe was so honest, he called Vic to confess. Vic’s response was gracious, no it’s yours. Stipe insisted, and so did Vic. Such was Vic’s grace, and so elevated was Stipe’s regard for Vic, and evidently so great is Stipe’s humility and –in the end it turns out by Vic’s own lips– his genius. He transcended his master. Much of the draw of coattail opportunism at funerals is that dead men tell no tales.

NPR’s problem, and shall we imagine, the problem of its underwriters, the major health insurers, was that Vic Chesnutt killed himself right after telling an NPR audience he could succumb any day for lack of proper medical care. Chesnutt died from an overdose of pain killers, which raised the disquieting suggestion to listeners that he lived in a lot of pain. Sure Chesnutt had attempted suicide before. He’d written a love song to suicide. The trouble was, he declared in his interview that “Flirted with You All My Life” was a break-up song with death. “I don’t want to die” Chesnutt exclaimed most earnestly.

While our nation’s health insurers have been content to let the common sick extinguish themselves by attrition, their PR crews come to the rescue of high profile victims, usually the focus of mass protests, even if they come late. Vic Chesnutt had given them no time, between the airing of his interview, and his Christmas day demise.

To listeners who heard the first airing, especially ones who might never have heard of Vic, the tragedy of this internationally renown artists being unable to get health care was a climax. It was a moment when entertainment rang dissonant.

For the rewrite, Terry Gross removed the critical segment, leaving the focus on Chesnutt’s earlier suicide attempts. Gross sounded like an insurance interrogator the way she made Chesnutt clarify that his first attempted suicide was actually before his debilitating accident, before health issues would have been a motivation. I would like to see Gross dissect her guests’ responses with such scrutiny, I wonder why she began with Vic.

Thus the rewritten interview became an indictment of Vic Chesnutt’s propensity to self-destruct. Forget narrowing Vic to health care failure, Terry reduced him to habitual suicide. The character assassination continued by next highlighting his song “I’m a Coward.”

In place of the dramatic, redemptive climax, Gross interviewed Michael Stipe, Guy Picciotto and Jem Cohen. Just before wrapping up, Gross raised the issue of Vic’s health care. All agreed the system failed him, but their pre-discussion consensus was not to be “reductive.”

As if the songwriter’s legacy wasn’t going to speak for his whole. Here his colleagues were concerned that their characterization of his death would define him. If Vic had died mid-song, would there have been a need to say his life wasn’t just about that song?

Little did they suspect that NPR would “reduce” Chesnutt however they wanted. Once again where Vic Chesnutt’s sentiment connected with his audience, the industry hovered to intercept.

If you didn’t catch Chesnutt’s original interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, here’s how it ended:

GROSS: I read that you’re in debt like $50,000 because of health insurance issues.

Mr. CHESNUTT: That’s right.

GROSS: So – and this is because you had a series of surgeries and although you pay a lot for your health insurance, it didn’t cover all of it. Is that – do I have that right?

Mr. CHESNUTT: That’s exactly true, yeah.

GROSS: Uh-huh. So, what are your thoughts now as you watch the health care legislation controversy play out?

Mr. CHESNUTT: Well, I have been amazed and confused by the health care debate. We need health care reform. There is no doubt about it, we really need health care reform in this country. Because it’s absurd that somebody like me has to pay so much, it’s just too expensive in this country. It’s just ridiculously expensive. That they can take my house away for kidney stone operation is -that’s absurd.

GROSS: Is that what you’re facing the possibility of now?

Mr. CHESNUTT: Yeah. I mean, it could – I’m not sure exactly. I mean, I don’t have cash money to pay these people. I tried to pay them. I tried to make payments and then they finally ended up saying, no, you have to pay us in full now. And so, you know, I’m not sure what exactly my options are. I just – I really – you know, my feeling is that I think they’ve been paid, they’ve already been paid $100,000 from my insurance company. That seems like plenty. I mean, this would pay for like five or six of these operations in any other country in the world. You know, it affects – I mean, right now I need another surgery and I’ve putting it off for a year because I can’t afford it. And that’s absurd, I think.

I mean, I could actually lose a kidney. And, I mean, I could die only because I cannot afford to go in there again. I don’t want to die, especially just because of I don’t have enough money to go in the hospital. But that’s the reality of it. You know, I have a preexisting condition, my quadriplegia, and I can’t get health insurance.

GROSS: Is it true you can’t get good health insurance?

Mr. CHESNUTT: I can’t get – I’m uninsurable. The only reason I have any insurance now is because I was on Capitol Records for a while. And I had excellent health insurance there. And then when I got dropped from Capitol, I Cobra’d my insurance for as long as it was legally possible. And then – and which was insanely expensive to cobra this very nice insurance. And then, when that ran out, the insurance company said they could offer me one last thing and that is hospitalization. It only covers hospital bills. That’s all it covers. And it’s still $500 a month. So, it doesn’t pay for my drugs, my doctors or anything like that. All it pays for is hospitalization. And yet, I still owe all this money on top of that.

GROSS: Wow. Well, I wish you the best with your health and your music. And I really want to thank you–

Mr. CHESNUTT: Thank you.

GROSS: –a lot for talking with us.

Mr. CHESNUTT: Oh, I’m honored, honored beyond belief.

The Doug Lamborn health care town hall

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
          –the words of 19th century robber baron Jay Gould were on my mind as I contemplated the loud mob at Congressman Doug Lamborn’s health care town hall meeting. No one had to hire them to speak against fixing America’s medical system. Citizens of other developed nations surely pity Americans for ranking 37th in the world. They can puzzle at the American idiot’s unwillingness to improve it, but how simply pathetic the idiot’s preoccupation that no less fortunate should share it.

We arrived at the Woodland Park event a couple hours early, and so from our car were able to overhear several earlybird teabaggers rehearse their arguments. They discussed lines that had impressed them from other town halls. As the wingnut numbers grew, the most frequent introductory joke was to cajole each newcomer as the insurance industry plant.

I’m not cynical enough to suspect that any of the Woodland Park shrunken heads could have been paid agents. But I was emboldened to anticipate that without Rush or Glenn Beck present, these dittoheads might easily be disarrayed into a cacophony of bobbleheads, and I was right.

Kenneth Lewis’s Bank of America!

kenneth lewis panhandlingYou know until this week, I don’t think I had ever known about the US government’s ‘stress test’. You probably have never heard of such a thing either, and might have a picture in your head of Alan Greenspan, shirt off, walking rapidly on a treadmill at Dr. Sam’s office? Put the guy on Lopid for God’s Sake! Or is that Lowbid? These medicines have such cutesy names, don’t they!

However, it is Kenneth Lewis’s Bank of America that needs some medicine (and not Alan), and about $34 BILLION of it! That’s a lot of money and I just know the economy is doing great now! Bank of America to need $34 billion in capital: source

Gosh! That’s a lot of money and I wonder where they will get it? Kenneth for some reason is no longer with the firm, so he can’t help out. And Lord knows that I have helped out BOA enough already, though when I went over my account by 2 cents to the red they left me with a $120 bill and a bad credit report, so I guess my money is no longer welcome with these nice people?

So where will they at Bank of America get the money from for their medical bills after failing their stress test? We have a strange Medical System in America it seems… Wonder how my heart is doing? Got no insurance for one of those government stress tests. Maybe BOA’s rich uncle can help the company out?

Diabetic care in America is a total mess

insulin injectionDiabetics skimp on lifesaving care in recession *Note, too, that how diabetes is treated in the US is a key indicator of how the Medical System as a whole is doing since diabetes is now such a common disease of aging. The system as is is actually a total failure as this Denver Post article underlines.
 
So how’s ‘National Security’ really going with all that money going for soldiers and hardly none of it going to help pay for the American people’s needed medical supplies and treatments?

Obama restores Federal funding to family planning clinics

Obama reverses Bush abortion-funds policy Now let’s see what he has in hand to help deal with the current catastrophic mess called the US Medical System? As the layoffs build up, there is not much time left to ‘reform’ the misdelivery of public health care.

Dr Sanjay Gupta the US Quack General?

Telegenic doctor Sanjay GuptaCNN is leaking inside information that its own TV health care pundit Sanjay Gupta is being tapped for US Surgeon General. What do you suppose Barack Obama would have in mind, to chose a Big Pharma / medical industry / insurance interest / media shill to be the American people’s health care ombudsman?

Were you among those hoping that Candidate Obama was going to bring health care reform, instead of seeking out a second opinion to say we’re all doing just fine?

In 2003 Sanjay Gupta was an embed in Iraq for Chrissakes, reassuring American viewers that our boys were receiving celebrity care and that Hippocratic attentions were being paid to Iraqi wounded too. Did that turn out to be true? CNN embed Gupta was a propagandist! It requires what scruples to do that? Maybe Obama should pick Geraldo for FCC chair. How about Ollie North for Military Industry Czar?

More recently Gupta was the chief critic of Michael Moore’s health care documentary SICKO. Gupta led the corporate media charge to discredit Moore’s scathing assessment of the corrupt US medical system. Ask yourself, pray tell with what arguments could Gupta raise to redeem today’s pitiable state of affairs?

No surprise, Pricko Gupta has also proven to be an outspoken advocate of Gardasil, the tragically flawed inoculation being foisted upon our nation’s young girls.

To call Dr. Sanjay Gupta a quack would do disservice to chiropractors. He’s in a league with Republican Bill Frist. Take two bitter pills and call me an asshole in the morning.

Maybe being a CNN talking head comes with having to shill for whoever are your advertisers. At CNN, that would be the pharmaceutical advertisers, the HMOs and the insurance companies.

If Gupta indeed goes to Washington, will he feel the same obligation to represent his sponsors? It won’t be a matter of changed allegiances, they are the same corporate interests who fund both major parties. This time ’round that would be the Dems, including Barack Obama.

Anyone who had hope that Obama would bring change to America’s health care system, say hello to the brick wall’s new face. It’s the same face.

The US depression torpedoes the US medically sick ‘Health Care’ System

doctor doomToday, Wall Street broke 8,000 going the wrong way… DOWN. Tomorrow will it be 7,500 on the road to national bankruptcy? Who knows. But one thing is for sure, the already sick US Medical System is going down alongside the US stock market and companies like Fannie Mae and General Motors. Report: Economy is sickening US hospitals. Data shows decline in admissions and increase in patients who can’t pay. Don’t get sick!

And don’t get old either… since Uncle Sam will now just let you flounder if you do. The US economic depression is torpedoing the US For-Profit Medical System and so far nobody in government has much of a plan to do anything about it. How much ‘bailout’ money is there left from your taxpayer’s money?

So what are the more alert companies doing about staying afloat? Why they’re heading to Mexico! See Newsweek’s report Ultimate Outsourcing Now, Mexican medicine What a deal, right? If you or somebody in your family gets hit by a car and don’t have insurance because you don’t have a job, then take a trip Far South! If you have any savings still? A big IF????, I know.

You might want to check out the US’s Christus Hospital Chain for where to go to a hospital in Mexico? They’re a US outfit building new hospitals all over Mexico like mad, to help take in those fleeing American citizen refugees from the lack of a functioning US Medical System! That’s right! Not only are the American patients running off to Mexico, but so are the US chains of For-Profit hospitals, too! Que bueno! Y que pendejada tambien… Isn’t this all rather sick?

American medical facilities are spreading more dangerous runs of infectious diarrhea into the community

diarrheaMom, your kid has just come down with the Runs-from-Hell and you are without medical insurance, so what do you do? He needs hospitalization, but incredibly enough, it was probably hospitalization of Junior’s aunt that gave him what he has in the first place! Your kid picked up C-diff, an infectious diarrhea, during his visit to her in the hospital!

Diarrhea bacteria common in hospitals: survey

According to the the American Journal of Infection Control,

“Antibiotics don’t kill it and most germicides used for environmental cleaning don’t kill it. Only bleach does,” and by the time patients are diagnosed, they have had a day or two to contaminate their rooms and everyone who has had contact with them.

This study gives a really low undercount of this problem, too, since most facilities are not doing the testing and do not have the awareness about this disease that they should have. One big cause of the problem is the simple misappropriation of funds away from hiring enough nursing assistants to do decent care of the elderly in US hospitals and nursing homes. The money flows to the top reaches into the hands of people who do little to no actual hands-on work caring for the elderly and sick. I’m talking about insurance companies and all the administrative layers they create to pilfer funds away from the actual care givers themselves.

The Business of Medicine

pet dogDoes ‘your’ doctor care? Of course he doesn’t! It’s simply a business relationship and his ‘care’ is quantified by money. Don’t look to a doctor for understanding

Got more money? Then you will get more ‘care’, though not necessarily care. You won’t get it from the nurses either. Being sick, old, or both is a lonely situation. Your paid ‘care’ givers rarely show genuine care in our dollar society. They are not allowed to really. Our affections are reduced down by the business community to a paycheck at best.

If you want genuine care you’d do better to turn to a dog or cat rather than to an American doctor or nurse. Heck, American business even tried to monetarily quantify that real care as a brief trip to a Petco or Petmart will have you lectured about being ‘responsible’ to their ‘companions’ whose supplies they want to sell to you. But the dogs and cats don’t buy it unlike the nurses and doctors who do. They’re not into money and thus can actually deliver the real McCoy… CARE. The doctors and nurses will mainly deliver a business service to you, and badly at that.

We will miss you Elizabeth

Elizabeth poses with fellow arrestees the day after the 2007 St Patricks Day debacleWe will all miss Elizabeth. Despite the press, the city government , and The Gazette all dragging her name through the mud last year, me and my family will miss Elizabeth because she was a loving person who gave a lot of herself for, and to, others. This was the real Elizabeth, and not the fake ‘antiwar dissident’ that the killers amongst us wanted to be portrayed to the public.
 
The sad truth about Elizabeth’s last days amongst us, was that she ran a foul of our pathetic US Medical System, which quite frankly killed her with its negligent and defective ‘care’ as it does millions of other older people. Like Elizabeth, these elderly that this business kills, are our friends, neighbors, and family. It makes one weep that we have to endure such a destruction of life and spirit at this sad and reactionary moment in our country’s history.

Elizabeth knew what the world was about. She, earlier in life, had been a rather conservative though nominally liberal woman cruising through life. But somewhere, she began to question what she was seeing and living, and became a true American ‘dissident’.

She hated the racism she saw around her when she was a teacher and resident in Chicago. She hated the endless and stupid wars that our government pushes with a passion. She grew to despise the American Medical System’s uncaring and thoughtless approach to the sick and aging. She grew to want a fundamental change to the society that she had had to live with all her life, and she began to work with others constantly to see that things might begin to change.

Elizabeth was always welcome in our home, and she always welcomed us to hers. We knew her as one easily to anger, but one who was just as easy to forget and forgive. In fact, she was more likely to forgive others for their differences and bad habits than she was ever likely to bear an unnecessary grudge. That was the Elizabeth we knew and grew to love. We knew a loving and kind Elizabeth. We knew an Elizabeth who cared deeply about others.

Elizabeth and Tony at Peterson AFB

Thank you, Elizabeth, for your gifts to my daughter, who began to think of you as her adopted grandmother. In fact, you were just exactly that. And thank you for making the peace dog welcome always. This dog loved you, too. Yeah, she did. Ruf, ruf.

I remember the time when we went up to Palmer Park and I was poo-pooing your concern for this highly trained (yeah, right!) dog who was leaning out the open window. I was paying your words no attention as I rambled on about some other esoteric and stupid political point. Then lo-and-behold, Ms. Beastley did jump out of the window of our moving car and rolled over entirely once or twice after hitting the ground, then looked up stupidly at us, and then promptly proceeded to run after the squirrel! I will remember that moment between us for a lifetime, Elizabeth. You always saw what others refused to see.

My daughter will remember you for the doll you gave her, the one that has a striking likeness to you. She cherishes that doll that you so kindly gave to her. My daughter cried with the news of your death, and we are so glad that we visited you at least one more last time before you passed away so suddenly. My daughter was ready to try to get you to play a game of Risk with her. She knew you would be a good one to try to keep her from taking over the world.

At that last visit, I tried to cheer you up by saying how good you looked upon just then having escaped from the hospitals that had held you. However, you had this way of looking through others superficial chit-chat and reading the real truth in their minds. I saw it in your eyes then. I saw the despair on your face about what had been done to you by the surgeon, but by the time I realized what had been seen in your face I was already in the car.

Elizabeth advocated for health care for allMy only regret is that I did not return to inside your apartment and give you the big hug that you needed right then, even if it was to be a hug given right in front of your other 2 friends who were with you at the moment. I thought to myself, aw… you need the rest and less people around at this time, more than the hug. I was wrong once again.

Elizabeth, we will miss you. You were a good friend, and you talked the talk, and walked the walk. You were kind and had a heart of gold most of all. They tried to tear you down, but they never did, and that spirit is what we most will remember always about you. That, and the love you gave others. You made an impact on all our lives and without you around, we will find a big void.

If there is a heaven, I have no doubt that you have already spoken to Jesus and have begun to argue politics with him right as I write. Give him Hell, Elizabeth! Somebody needs to hold him and his dad accountable, and you are the one with the spirit to do it, too.

Our love…

For our children’s sake, ban food dyes

Food dyes are a completely unnecessary product from a consumerist point of view. They add no value other than to hide away the bad visual effects of artificial food and badly handled food, so as such, they have value only for large manufacturing concerns trying to sell us trash foods.

They are the true sign of factory produced food that looks like Fruit Loops, tastes as bad as Fruit Loops, and is as nutritionally harmful as this pseudo cereal is for your kids. Plus, food dyes are linked to hyperactivity. So why not just ban them altogether?

Banning food dyes is just good public health policy. Of course, in the US there is no real public health policy at this time, since the capitalist ‘free market’ mentality is running rampant and destroying public health. It’s time to change that. Ban food dyes in our US diet.

Your Salud

‘Salud’ is a new film about the Cuban medical system, and since Sicko, the film by Michael Moore, contrasted the US medical system to that of Cuba’s, the film ‘Salud’ should be of interest to many Americans fed up with the rot of the corporate system of US medical lack of care. Kaiser Network has a clip of about 30 minutes of this film that was the topic of a forum by the Rockerfeller Foundation. Just clip forward to 10:45 into the long video of the forum and you can watch the 30 minutes shown of ‘Salud‘.

Also of note, is the graduation of the first crop of Cuban trained American med students last week.

Hepatitis C and the US recipe for disaster

How incompetent is the US medical system? Take a look at Hepatitis C to find out. Over 1,000,000 US prisoners have acquired it and most are unaware and not getting treatment for it. Meanwhile, prison and medical authorities sleep on. Let’s build some more prisons, how ’bout it? Prison’s deadliest inmate, hepatitis C, escaping

Sicko government goes after Michael Moore

Amidst reports that the US medical debacle rivals the US occupation of Iraq as being the biggest boondoggle in the history of the universe, the film Sicko is being displayed at the Cannes Film Festival. And amidst reports that the US medical system is the most expensive in the industrialized world and delivers the worst care, Bush chooses to go after Michael Moore for exposing this to the American public. Sicko!

Vets have to battle nasty US medical system like the rest of us

The bad conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center has brought many US soldiers from killing Iraqis into a new battle with their own US government. Now they and their families are not waving US flags so much as they discover what many of the elderly and sick amongst us already knew. The US government doesn’t give much a damn about Afghans, Iraqis, nor the majority of US citizens either.

Did the youngsters signing up for the US killing machine think they would get something special? Some sort of privileged status for themselves for being hired killers for Dubya, Cheney, or whomever might come along whenever as their top officers?

The whole military medical system has big nasty holes in it much as does the civilian medical system does, too. When you sign up and go abroad to fight people you haven’t a clue about you might want to think you are a big hero/ heroine, but you are not. You are somebody looking to get special treatment, that’s all. You want that spiffy uniform, the perks, the respect by the people in power and their suck ass supporters at the lower economic levels. But once you get hurt all that fades into the background. Now you become much more like the rest of us, and the rest of us have to deal with sorry, don’t give a damn, medical care. So tell any younger sisters and brothers, to deal with the real problems back home, before getting all psyched up to supposedly go solve the world’s problmes by high tech killing. Didn’t make any sense to begin with, but you let yourself get suckered, didn’ you?And now the chickens perhaps have come home to roost, right on top of your own lonesome shoulders?

When somebody tells you to jump off a cliff by joining up as hired killer, you don’t have to go along smirking and thinking how smart you are. Yes, many vets that previously played the fool have to eventually battle the nasty US for-private-don’t-give-a-damn- except-about profits medical system like the rest of us. You’ll not get quality care like the top dogs are sure to give themselves.

It was a dummy thing you did joining up, and we wish you now the best, just like we wish all of us the best in getting the decent medical care that is our human right…. one that our rulers ignore all the time. How many of the wounded vets wish they could frag the same people they signed up to blindly follow? After all, they fragged you did they not? If not yet, then you are one of the more fortunate. Thank your lucky stars up to now. Because the nasty sorry ass US medical system is more likely to kill you in the long run, far more likely than any ol’ Osama. That’s whether you or vet, or not? What you heroes going to do about it? When you fight back (if you do?), at least you’ll be on the right side this time.

I need a joint

I need a joint, but religious people won’t let me have one. I need a joint at times because I suffer from the itch (pruritus, caused by mild pedal edema and skin allergies). No seriously, I do, really and it can be quite uncomfortable.

Marijuana relieves this condition but I won’t smoke it as long as it is illegal and my smoking it could put me in jail, wreck my ability to hold a license to work in my profession, etc. There is another medicine available fo this condition, but it is not over the counter for the same reason that marijuana isn’t over the counter legally. Religion makes for bad medicine, that’s why.

Religion has a long tradition of practicing medicine without a license. Look at all thee food laws in the Torah, Bible, etc. Think of what Hindus are not allowed to eat? Muslims prohibit pork amongst the meats because infested pork causes disease. If you are a Muslim, any medicine such as a ham sandwich is prohibited. Not even with a doctor’s prescription may you have one. Similarly, alcoholism is prevented theoretically for Muslims, by being flat out banned. Uh, for good health reasons I am sure. Hindus are not even allowed good chicken soup! Food is medicine and all religions practice medicine, often quite bad medicine, with their food fetishes. But they practice medicine in other ways too.

Christianity is just as bizarre as the other faiths are in regards to their ideas of what is good medicine. But at least with God’s food laws Christians don’t seem to obey them much anymore. But Christians do yank coca out of coke, the codeine out of cough syrup (despite it truly being the best drug for the condition of having a cough), and marijuana out of personal use and paper making, and make Atarax (a great med for itch of throat and skin) prohibited without an expensive visit to a doctor’s office.

Strangely enough, almost anything that reduces affliction in an effective manner is viewed with paranoia by Christians! Notice how ‘drug stores’ no longer are called that? That’s because drugs DO work, so our new word for drug distribution centers is now the word ‘pharmacy’. That’s because prescriptions most often don’t work, so they are considered superior to what does actually work within our overly religious society! That would be drugs chosen through one’s own efforts, rather than the efforts of the priestly docs.

Have you ever noticed how the major industrialized country with the most religious Christian nuttyness, the USA, has the nuttiest, most preposterous medical system in the entire industrialized world? It is not a mere coincidence. Lots of medicine here is considered good only because it hurts like Hell, delivers you to a Hellish-like state, are delivers you directly to Hell. Not a mere coincidence. Christians like Hell more than they like good medicine. That was a fact way before the Prohibition Era.

Well, since I don’t have the money to get a $5 drug (Atarax) with a $150 visit to the doctor’s office, nor have the illegal mota at hand, tonite I will just whip my feet with thorned branches in the manner of some wild extreme Christian penitent once again, as the itch comes across me after the swelling of my feet and the itch begins, shortly after the socks come off (pedal edema). And if I have a hard cough from a cold then I’ll do without the codeine, all because my Christian neighbors are all so damn nutty as Hell. They’ll let you rot ’till half dead, then spend a million dollars keeping you half alive. I need a joint. It’s too depressing thinking about it.

Iraq- the nursing shortage in Hell

Somehow it’s not too surprising that Iraq, too, has a nursing shortage like in the US. Management would like to hire foreign Philippine or perhaps Palestinian nurses I bet, instead of treating Iraq nurses with a little more dignity. But recruitment must now be quite low… lol. And then there’s the pesky problem of the US soldier maniacs tearing everything apart.

Still, as one can see from this article, nurses there have so many problems identical to what nurses here at home face within the US medical system, that it is eery. Iraqi nurses do seem to finangle 2 hour breaks for mid day meals, yet I doubt that too many US nurses would much like to trade places with them. 150 patients a day is quite a heavy patient load I think. In fact, Good god almighty how horrible that would be.

What must it be like to be a nurse in Hell one can only imagine? Here’s a glimpse. See