11/03/12
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
AristotleModeration, which consists in an indifference about little things, and in a prudent and well-proportioned zeal about things of importance, can proceed from nothing but true knowledge, which has its foundation in self-acquaintance.
Plato
Our nation is a bunch of psychotically and sociopathically partisan piss-ant morons on both sides of the razor-wire philosophical fence. Most people I’ve heard foaming at the mouth wouldn’t accept a heart transplant from someone of a different political persuasion if their life depended on it unless the donor was alive and kicking.
This is what is going to doom our country for the next four years no matter what happened this past Election Day:
there are too many people out there who would gladly drink the Kool Aid if their own candidate handed them the red Solo cup but wouldn’t accept the antidote if it was served up in a Waterford crystal goblet by the other guy.
Can I get a show of hands? You know who you are.
I don’t plan on crossing over any ideological fence I see standing in front of me, but I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to reach over that fence to snag a particularly tasty looking apple, and I most assuredly wouldn’t mind if my neighbor helped himself to one of our juicier peaches.
In some circles, that used to be referred to as being a “moderate”… like that was a bad thing.
While we had the war that is still dragging on over in the Middle East (although I seem to remember some people insisting we had pretty much won it at one point or another before Obama inherited it and moved it somewhere else) and we had The Economy to deal with, and unemployment was an overwhelming concern, the two hottest flash points I kept seeing get fanned and fueled were Medicare and Social Security. At least those were the ones that could realistically affect everyone, everywhere, from every walk of life
I’m lost. Someone care to or able to explain to me why some people deserve a higher standard of healthcare than others do merely because they can afford it? I understand that theory when it comes to luxury SUVs and used AMC Pacers, but is it the same thinking behind being able to afford the right to life?
Fact is, if someone came up with the medical means to eradicate cancer within the next four years, and the government could actually fund it by taking all the money away from the caribou and polar bears and public TV without raising taxes – if it was labeled “ObamaCure” there are shitloads of people who would fight it to the death. Call it “Gee-O-P Juice” and others would hold it in the same reverence as Jesus’ blood on the Cross.
I finally figured out why certain people have such a hard time getting behind the Affordable Health Care Act:
First off, it’s the fact that it’s even referred to by anyone whatsoever as “Obamacare”. Many of the people who find that distasteful didn’t seem to have a problem with it when it was formerly known in Massachusetts as “Romneycare” (after Mitt Romney. Remember him?) even if it was Ted Kennedy who largely pushed it through;
But more importantly, it would mean that everyone, as in “EVERYone” would be entitled to the same standards and availability of health care, with health care contributing to their quality of life.
And those certain people actually believe that they deserve to have a higher standard of health care, a higher quality of health care than that deserved by (take your pick) Mexicans / Asians / Blacks / “white trash” / ghetto trash / Democrats / Liberals / gun control advocates / environmentalists / Welfare recipients / anyone who disagrees with them.
Got news for them: they don’t deserve it.
They haven’t earned it.
Maybe they have earned the fancier car or the larger house or the designer clothes or the iPhone 5 that are beyond the reach of less enterprising folks, but they’ve earned nothing more than a myriad of luxuries. I don’t find it that unsettling that they might even be able to afford luxury suites in Cedars / Sinai and the best cardiologists their stock dividends can buy
It just pisses them off that the people they so contemptuously look down upon will have the same “right” to live long and healthy lives as they do.
And if they have a problem with their taxes (after all the right-offs) helping to subsidize them poor Middle Class folk’s co-pays, would they also like us to stay off that part of the highway they paid for or to stay the fuck out of their part of Yosemite? Do we just get to have one firetruck come over to our house and use our garden hose if our 1,300 square foot home is in flames?
We’re talking about people’s health
It’s not Obama’s Socialist agenda that will give that right to those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder:
God gave it to them a long, long time ago.
I spent a good part of my life in the medical profession. I remember when everyone just about could afford it and a hospital room in the ward was $10.00. (if you couldn’t afford it the county would pay for a room in the ward) A four day and night stay in a private room was just over $100.00. The patients got better care, better food and someone answered their call light. They got a snack between meals and at bed time and a back massage before retiring. Getting well is relegated primarily to good nutritious food, rest, confidence your doctor is doing his/her best and the patient’s body doing the rest as God designed it to do. That hasn’t changed. The cost have increased exponentially. The care is lousy. You could die waiting for someone to answer your call light or remember you are down the hall in the ER. I don’t think socialized medicine is the answer to the problem. The more money we throw at things the worse they seam to get. Our school system is one of the best examples. It cost 8-15,000 dollars a year to educate a child in public schools. Private schools, particularly religious, can give them a better education on $1-3,000 dollars a year. Big difference. Too much waste, graft and dishonesty in anything our government runs with our hard earned dollars. Let us make the choices, build and support the hospitals. We can do it much cheaper and patients will get much better care. And the best part is we get to keep some of the money we will be taxed for to pay for socialized medicine.
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Hi Mary. Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts and experience.
I can remember the days when my pediatrician would stop by our house at two in the morning ’cause I woke up with a horrendous earache and a fever of one-hundred-two. Talk about confidence, I felt a bit better the minute he walked in. That certainly has changed: my wife had to deal with six different doctors regarding he ruptured discs and fusing vertebrae and each one had a different opinion of what the best route to take was. That part of health care has most assuredly changed.
“Getting well is relegated primarily to good nutritious food, rest, confidence your doctor is doing his/her best and the patient’s body doing the rest as God designed it to do.” Two things I look at a bit differently:
I’ve lost confidence that my doctor is being allowed to to his/her best by the MBAs that are running health care these days. The bottom line takes precedence over the Hippocratic oath. I was recently denied a referral to a Dermatologist to have some crusty patches on my blond-haired, blue-eyed face, shoulders and chest; my Primary Care physician took pictures of them with a commercial grade digital camera and uploaded them into Kaiser’s computer system; the dermatologist reviewed them, had my PC physician prescribe two creams for dermatitis and eczema. Left Kaiser back in January, signed up with Blue Shield, went to a Dermatologist a year later without a referral: he said they were pre-cancerous lesions by actually examining them and he froze them.
I have a really hard time with the P&L wizards making the decisions for the doctors.
As far as our bodies doing the rest as God intended, did God take into effect the crap we have BP and the Koch Brothers flowing into our lungs every time we leave our house or the poisons Monsanto seeps into our water supplies or the atmosphere slowly disappearing?
On the subject of schools, most of our Public School teachers are just phoning it in. Nobody is being held strictly accountable for the dismal shape of American education. Private schools? Sure, doing a better job, but I think that has a lot to do with student / teacher ratio. Our grandson’s performance in school has improved greatly going from the 30-student public classes in Fresno to the 15-student public classes in Morro Bay. And the cost? Some (let’s make that SOME) of the private schools / parochial schools might cost as little as $1,000.00 per year, but there are also some pushing upwards of $8,000.00 annually. In either case, less than public schools, but let’s not pad our numbers. In my line of work, I saw the tuitions parents were paying for some of those schools on their under-penalty-of-perjury Income and Expense Declarations. And I saw the receipts.
The private schools usually don’t have to deal with school districts loaded up with minor league, nickle-ante politicians for decisions regarding curriculum and policies, leaving those decisions to educational professionals … similar to the problem with the Health Care industry and their CEOs.
Let the people who know how to address the problems fix those problems:
I wouldn’t want my cardiologist deciding how to run my local big box store any more than I would want some retail giant from Bentonville deciding if and when I need an EKG.
The problem with Health Care is not who’s going to pay for a cancer medication that “costs” $1,500.00 per does as much as it is how in the name of Jonas Salk an HMO or pharmaceutical company can get away with charging that much? I have a prescription that runs me $5.65 for a month’s supply when the “retail” price is over $230.00.
Really? REALLY? The Sinaloa Cartel doesn’t have that kind of government sanctioned markup. Nobody but the people who can’t afford insurance will ever be expected to pay “retail”.
A friend of mine was going through radiation and chemotherapy five days a week for six weeks after surgery for a four-inch brain tumor, and one of those treatments was running him $7,500.00 per week. Can’t afford that on an Assemblies of God Pastor’s salary, and the Church couldn’t make up the difference. But with his insurance coverage, it cost him virtually nothing.
This die-hard, Black-belt, weapons-grade, Obama-hating Republican – three days before he passed away – was in tears wondering how people without insurance could ever expect to survive what he did without insurance. He made it through surgery, an intermittent four-week stay hospital stay, follow-up treatment and he beat cancer. A blood clot traveled from his leg to his lungs the day after he was declared cancer-free. We lost him.
Call it “Obamacare” or “Socialized medicine” or “entitlements” or whatever buzzword Rush and Sean are fond of these days – it made no difference to a Man of God, it was not a matter of politics. It was his avowed Christian duty to take care of his less fortunate fellow man. He was referring to The Bible, not to someone’s Explanation of Benefits or campaign rhetoric.
I look to the Government to provide us some sense of direction, and then let the experts lead us in that path. I don’t want all the decisions to be made by men and women whose greatest abilities and talents and goals are buying votes and selling influence.
I don’t want a financial marketplace immune to the responsibilities and the ramifications of their questionable, sometimes immoral, occasionally illegal but always self-serving practices.
I don’t want the NRA spending billions of dollars buying politicians who will try to convince the Amish and Mennonites that they need to stock up on assault rifles and ammo because of some paranoid wet dream they have that every (liberal Democratic) administration is going to rob us of all of our Constitutionally granted rights.
I don’t want our country run by politicians who hold their Party platforms in such sacred regard that they might even consider dismembering their first born to pass a measure that appeals to the corporations that bought their allegiance.
It might help if more than three per cent of the budget went to education.
I don’t want a government that will allow some of its less fortunate citizens to die before their time because Health Care cannot fit into a budget that already has twenty-two per cent going towards (the best) Defense (is a good offense) that is already much more destructive than we would ever need it to be.
My two greatest fears are that we might have already passed the point at which nations are no longer divided by geographical boundaries but by the size of, the respective boardrooms of their most powerful corporations, most of which get along better than their homelands do,
and
I fear some people actually believe that politics is a religious issue.
I agree with you entirely on taking back our health care system, taking it back from the government and the corporations running it, but I think there are a lot of other ways to get our tax dollars back in our pockets.
We could start with the twenty-three per cent going to U. S. government pensions.
Thanks again, Mary, for your thoughtful comments. You gave me something to think about, and I’m always willing to learn.
God bless,
Harris
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