the whole death panel thing

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[before i begin, may i point out that while our obama-nation is idiotically occupying itself with rearranging the deck chairs of healthcare and cap-and-trade on the sinking american ship of state, the heathen red chinese are quietly and busily shedding our t-bills and buying up all the oil, gold and copper futures they can get their hands on in anticipation of the coming inevitable hyperinflation of the american dollar?

whatever--if healthcare is the current shiny object the criminal bankers are using to distract the cattle from what really matters, then fine, i'll talk about healthcare. just remember--mkf never takes his eye away from the real ball.]

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in my last post, i cited (1) the insurance industry, (2) the american medical association, (3) the american bar association and (4) the pharmaceutical industry--four of the most powerful lobbies in existence, which collectively have bought and paid for every politician in washington--as not only four of the main reasons for the ridiculously high cost of healthcare in america, but the reason why true healthcare reform is not possible.

maybe i'll elaborate on what seems so screamingly obvious to me in a future post--but not today.

today, i'm gonna talk about the fifth reason why healthcare is so expensive in america. and it has nothing to do with lobbies or partisan politics; on the contrary, it's an issue so deeply ingrained in the american ethos as to transcend simple ideology.

you ready?

(5) sanctity of life.

it's a concept all pampered americans embrace--for conservatives, it's all about the unborn fetuses; for liberals, the death-row inmates. but whatever the political stripe, everybody comes together when it comes to protecting babies and old people.

and that's where the issue of healthcare really gets interesting--and expensive.

see, back in the old days, if a baby was born flawed or premature, its mother or midwife simply held it until it died.

if an old person suffered a heart attack, stroke or other inevitable affliction of old age, his/her family gathered round their bedside until they limped off to join jesus in heaven.

today? technology has changed everything--we have developed the ability to preserve, extend and enhance life to a degree that boggles the mind.

consider:

crack-baby or one of a fertility-drug enhanced litter born four months premature and five pounds underweight? yesterday it would've died, but today we can save it.

geezer with a stroke, cancer or heart condition? yesterday he/she would've have died, but today we can keep 'em alive indefinitely with surgery and chemo and bypasses and pacemakers and shit.

grandma falls and breaks a hip? no need to put her on an ice floe and push her out to sea--today we can give her a new one.

in other words, the definition of "sanctity of life" has expanded with our man-made ability to preserve and extend life.

problem is, all this miracle-shit costs money--lots and lots and lots of money.

whereas in the past we'd have just let these people limp off and die and be ok with it because that's all we could do, today we have granted ourselves the ability to play god at both the beginning and end stages of life.

and today, we demand that such technology as exists be brought to bear in every case, because life is sacred, goddammit--"should we preserve or extend life beyond what should be normally expected?" isn't even the issue anymore; instead, it's become all about "fuck the cost--we can't let them die!"

[which, btw, is the main reason why these days so many americans' life savings are wiped away in their final six months of life--but i'm getting ahead of myself.]

the ugly truth is, between all the preemies borne of uteruses that by all rights should never have supported life, and the multitudes of baby-boomers about to enter their healthcare-sucking golden age who should've died six months ago, there will soon be an infinite pool of need for our healthcare resources, versus an ever-shrinking supply.

and who's gonna decide who gets what?

ultimately--and yeah, it'll take us awhile to go from a to z--it'll be the idiot sarah palin's death panels, of course. and anybody who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.

this will happen whether we pass "healthcare reform" or not--i don't see any way it can't.

do you?

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the reason this post is appearing so goddam far after the fact of its relevance in the news cycle is because ever since palin made her "death panel" comment, i've been searching far and wide for anybody who would lay out the issue like i just did.

so far? nobody, anywhere.

the fact that this blog doesn't have an audience usually doesn't bother me much--except for when it does, like now.

comment if you wish, but understand: i'm gonna be uncharacteristically merciless in my response if you're even slightly off-point.

a simple healthcare quiz

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as i've mentioned here once or twice, i was hospitalized for an extended period of time a few years ago.  it's not something i think about much these days--until the subject of healthcare comes up, that is.

it went like this:

back in the autumn of 2004, when it got so bad i couldn't stand it anymore, i drove myself to cedars-sinai, where they took one look at me and my insurance and admitted me right away.

testing revealed the presence of a particularly potent batch of bacterial meningitis which had happily taken up residence in my spinal column.

i was flat on my back for two full weeks, over the course of which time my doctor and every specialist in his rolodex [first rule of medicine:  don't let good insurance go to waste] examined, poked, prodded and tested me in ways i can't even begin to describe here; lemme just say that virtually no square inch of mkf's virgin territory was left unmolested.

at the end of those two weeks, full to the brim of the industrial-strength antibiotics they'd been iv-ing into my veins the entire time, i was pronounced well and ready to go home.

i remember being uneasy with this decision, because i sure didn't feel well--but what the hell, they were the professionals, it was thanksgiving week and i was dying to get outta there.  i figured i could rest up over the long weekend and be ready for work monday.

yeah.

sunday night i was back in the hospital, and it was critical this time--that first course of antibiotics had apparently only succeeded in killing off all but the really tough bacteria, which little critters had used the holiday respite granted them by my doctors to regroup, multiply and come back strong for the kill.  this time my doctors didn't fool around; they brought out the big guns--some super-duper, last-resort antibiotic that, within a week, brought me back from the brink.

this time when i was sent home, it was with a picc installed in my left arm and two weeks' worth of daily doses of iv penicillin administered by this really cool british nurse who came by every day around 2:00.

and then, i was well--until i got the bill, that is.

and this is where the quiz comes in--your task, readers, is to take a guess as to the total amount of money cedars-sinai hospital and its army of specialists deemed it necessary to charge mkf and his insurance company in order to relieve mkf of the burden of his pesky spinal meningitis.

before you answer--because i wanna make sure you have all the necessary facts in order to make your best guess--let's recap:

• private room at the hospital to the stars--22 days
  
• army of specialists
  
• shitload of tests
  
• shitload of iv antibiotics
  
• daily half-hour homecare visit by lvn--14 days
  

and there you have it--a room, some bad food, some doctors, some tests, a traveling nurse, some drugs. note that there was no surgery of any kind.

tell me--how much?

i remember the day i got the envelope from the hospital--thick, straining to hold its itemized, tri-folded contents--ripping it open and just sitting there in numb, open-mouthed shock as i stared at the total.

i remember going over each page line by line, appalled by the numbers--$4,500 a day for just the crappy little room?

i remember repeatedly calling the hospital's billing department and my insurance company, trying to find somebody--anybody--in either place who'd review with me the line items of my hospital bill i'd found so objectionable.  nobody would, because nobody cared.

i remember pointing out to my doctor that not only had all the buddies he'd called in to feed at the trough ended up being totally useless, but that had they given me the right antibiotics in the first place, i might have been spared at least a week of agony and additional hospital bills.

and, finally, i remember thinking that all the pundits were right--an american can work and save his entire life, and if he's not covered, see it all wiped away with one short illness.

there's something deeply, fatally flawed in our american system of healthcare, folks--and until our dumbass, cowardly, bought-and-paid-for politicians are actually willing to take on the insurance industry, the ama, the aba and big pharma and really get down-and-dirty and solve it, i'm not about to support some half-assed quick fix that'll do nothing more than drive up costs even more and allow the government to intrude its ever-seeking tentacles even further into our lives.

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oh, and the answer to the quiz?  if you guessed even a penny less than $318,000, you are as sadly naive as i once was.

a little reader advice

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one of my few cherished female readers emailed me the other day with the following question:

in light of recent events, i need to ask you this:

if I were a  gay man, would I (personal I, not general) have this much of a problem finding decent guys?

knowing as i do that the woman in question is smart, attractive, articulate, reasonably young and not without charm--i.e., by most definitions, a catch--i hereby answer her as follows:

of course you would.  see, here's the thing (and i'm not telling you anything you don't, on some basic estrogenic level, already know):  men, by their nature, are pigs--guys will only be as good as women demand they be, and they'll only be as bad as women allow them to be.

historically, women have always held all the cards--i.e, the power of collectively withholding the pussy.

problem is, in the last 40 years or so, women have gotten this idiotic notion into their heads that equality with men can only mean equivalence to men--i.e., they can't be truly "liberated" unless they match their male counterparts in sluttiness. which they've done, with admirable alacrity.

and thus, they've given away their golden ticket--for free.

great deal for the man, but maybe not so great for the liberated woman who, ultimately, wants what most women (straight and gay) want--a hearth and home of her own.

because why should a man settle for just your pussy when he can easily have so many other pussies simply for the asking?

it's a question to which the enslaved women of yesteryear knew the answer, but the enlightened women of today seem to have forgotten.

that make any sense, faithful female reader?  and if not, what were you expecting from a reactionary like me?

boycott whole foods? really?

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tonight i stopped at the whole foods at third and fairfax to pick up my weekly organics, only to find a couple sign-waving protesters outside urging me to boycott--i figured they were worked up about grape-pickers or something, ignored 'em, went in and bought my usual shit.

when i got home, still curious, i googled "whole foods" and "boycott", and found the real reason.

see, this is what happens when i sober up and slack off on my blog-reading--i lose touch with not only the idiot right, but the idiot left as well.  sorry this one's a day late and a dollar short.

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i remember a couple years ago, abc's john stossel devoted a whole hour of 20/20 to healthcare--called the show "sick in america."

i like stossel a lot--he's a pure libertarian so i don't always agree with him, but he's one of the smartest guys on tv (not saying much, i know), and he has a way of cutting through all the bullshit surrounding a given issue in a way i admire.

what i remember most about this particular show was a segment he did with john mackey, the hippie-vegan who not only co-founded what would become whole foods back in 1978 with a few thousand dollars, but who then masterminded its mass success throughout america and the united kingdom.

this was a guy who, even when faced with razor-thin profit margins and fierce competition from non-organic grocery chains who could offer food for far less, still managed to not only take his company public, but then turn a healthy profit for its stockholders, while at the same time offering great pay and primo health-insurance coverage to his employees--i.e., the prototypical american success story.

how did he do it?  well, that's what fascinated me--in fact, everything he said in his segment with stossel made so much goddam sense to me that i've never forgotten it, and it's informed my opinions on healthcare ever since.

i managed to find the segment (thank god for youtube).  watch it--you'll find it instructive.

basically, what he did was involve his employees in the cost of their own healthcare--which is, of course, as it should be.  in so doing, he saved his company a bundle of money, which allowed him to offer insurance to part-time employees as well as full-time employees--and how many corporate employers can you name who have done that?

even better--after initial resistance, the employees fuckin' love the new system.  win-win, right?

yeah, you might think.

problem is, he made the grave mistake of laying out not only his philosophy but the principles by which he made health insurance so affordable for his company and employees in a recent piece in the wall street journal--and omigod, the fallout that has ensued.

he was immediately branded an evil capitalist by the left for even daring to propose that healthcare should be cost-effective, and the boycott was on.

good god--the rhetoric i've just read on liberal blogs and other websites concerning this issue easily equals in both stupidity and ignorance anything i've seen from the right-wingers who wanna see barack's "real" birth certificate.

case in point:  on the one hand, the boycotters are slamming whole foods because it's expensive (and therefore, elitist)--and then at the same time, slamming mackey because he's anti-union (because god knows, going union wouldn't make the place even more expensive).  in other words, he's being pilloried because he stubbornly refuses to take his company down the road to bankruptcy hell previously paved by gm and chrysler, and thus put most of his employees outta work--that bastard.

and do these same critics take into account the fact that whole foods' employee salaries and benefits are such that people fuckin' fight for those jobs when they come available, even without union "enhancement"?  somehow that subject never comes up in the boycott hysteria.

but back to the topic at hand:  am i saying mackey's way is the entire solution to our healthcare mess?  of course not.

what i'm saying is, it's thinking like this--from successful, bottom-line-oriented professionals who have been in the trenches and solved the problem in their own companies--that needs to be brought to bear in order to cost-effectively and comprehensively solve the healthcare problem on a national basis.

and this is my main bitch with obamacare--i see this bottom-line thinking nowhere in obama's solution.  has he brought john mackey (or anybody else who's actually figured out a way to make healthcare cost-effective) into the process?  hell, no--instead, it's all pie-in-the-sky horseshit from a bunch of politicians and policy wonks who have never met a payroll or turned a profit in their whole goddam careers.

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maybe here's where i should reveal my own bias:  in austin, texas in 1979, if you were a college student like me and wanted real food, you had but two choices:  wheatsville co-op up on guadalupe, or this ramshackle little store called whole foods market down on south lamar.

30 years later:  wheatsville is long gone, but today i can walk into any one of hundreds of slick new incarnations of that original whole foods market and not only find the same high-quality foodstuffs i found back then, but even inhale deeply and be greeted by the same smells i smelled back then when i walked in the goddam door for the first time.

yeah--let's punish this company for its success in bringing the ethos of healthy food to fat america.

idiots.

because i was asked

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the reason i personally think obamacare is in such well-deserved trouble?

simple: it's because we humans are endowed with a very finely-tuned sense of danger--it's what's kept us around all this time.

and this hasty, ill-considered, heedless plunge into healthcare collectivism barack's trying to shotgun us into--on top of all the other radical crap he's pushing--has rightly set off all the alarm bells in that portion of the populace which still has some faint recollection of those qualities which propelled america to the head of the pack in the first place.

the problem is, our state-sponsored educational system has, by gradual dribs and drabs, effectively dumbed us down to such a degree that most americans, when faced with an issue to which they object, are incapable of mustering the critical-thinking skills necessary to do anything much more than wave crudely-crayoned misspelled signs and scream at the other side in incoherent fear and rage.

such is the state of america today.

what camille said

i'm not drinking these days--which, in guttermoralityland, means i'm not writing.

but even if i was (and this is the sad reality i live with, my readers), even at my drunken best i can't hold a candle to that select group of social/political commentators whose talents for self-expression i truly respect.

take camille paglia, for instance--even when i don't agree with her words (which is often), i invariably can't help but admire the seemingly-effortless elegance with which she spits forth and arranges 'em.

but this last week? she just about nailed to perfection every topic she tackled, and said many things i've often thought but only wish i could articulate even half as well. for instance:

on obama-care:

It isn't conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

and more to the point:

What was needed for reform was an in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Instead what we've gotten is a series of facile, vulgar innuendos about how doctors conduct their practice, as if their primary motive is money. Quite frankly, the president gives little sense of direct knowledge of medical protocols; it's as if his views are a tissue of hearsay and scattershot worst-case scenarios.

on the present-day democratic-party ethos:

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills.

on the idiot palin's very-effectively playing to the cheap seats with her "death panel" rhetoric:

I realized that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives.

on gates-gate:

Both Gates and Obama mistakenly assumed that the original incident at Gates' house was about race, when it was about class. It was the wealthy, lordly Gates who committed the first offense by instantly and evidently hysterically defaming the character of the officer who arrived at his door to investigate the report of a break-in. There was no excuse for Gates' loud and cheap charges of racism, which he should have immediately apologized for the next day, instead of threatening lawsuits and self-aggrandizing television exposés.

and, finally (and maybe most importantly), on our lady of the golden recordings:

Yes, you know who the Big Bad Example is of obsessive gym culture gone to seed -- that increasingly artificial construction of paraffin and chicken wire, our Madonna of the Shallows. Jesus Luz must be blessedly myopic.

what more needs to be said about any of this shit, really? read the whole piece and find out for yourself--agree or disagree, you'll be the better for the effort, i promise.

[and yeah, i had one tonight--you know, just to prime the pump.]

weekend update

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the best thing i can say is that at least the mornings-after were relatively bright-eyed and regret-free for a change.  maybe we'll go another week.