Hostage Racket
Not to put too fine a point on it, but didn't that cunning rogue
Chief Justice John Roberts pour a jug of Karo syrup into the gas tank
of America's twelve trillion cylinder engine? Or, put another way
(forgive the metaphor juke), didn't he just give President Obama enough
rope to hang himself? Out to dry, that is. Roberts must know exactly
what he is doing: prompting x-million young and/or poor voters to an
election year tea party tax revolt. The Obama health care reform will
henceforth be defined as a tax against people too economically strapped
to buy health insurance - in other words, a gross injustice, courtesy
of Obama.
Or call it a poison pill. Obama gets to brag
that the heart of his 2700-page reform package stands - at the expense
of the very people it was designed to protect. Forget about the
niceties regarding the interstate commerce clause and other chatter
points. This was all about Chief Justice Roberts interfering in a
presidential election in a most mischievous way. He might as well have
just heated up a branding iron that spelled out T-A-X and applied it to
Mr. Obama's forehead.
Of course, with or without the
so-called reform, the American health care system remains a hostage
racket. When you are sick, you will do anything to get better, and the
system knows it. You will sign onto any agreement to keep yourself
alive, even if the health care system ends up taking your house and
your children's educations. It is a well-established fact that the
chief cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA is unpayable medical
bills on the part of people who have health insurance. It is considered
bad manners to inquire of a surgeon what his fee might be for a
life-saving operation. Anyway, you don't want to know because it will
be a figure with no anchor in the reality of hours spent or services
rendered. Ditto the folks who run the hospital, where there is no
reality-based relationship between things dispensed and prices charged.
It's simple racketeering and true health care reform would be the
vigorous application of Department of Justice attorneys on the doctors,
pharma companies, insurers, hospitals, and HMOs who are engaged in
routine, systematic swindling. But the truth is, we don't want to
remove the swindle and the grift, we just want to find some way to get
the American public to pay for their own shakedown.
Before you get too exercised over the multiple idiocies and injustices
of the current American medical situation just reflect for a moment
that the whole creaking system cannot possibly survive no matter what
the Supreme Court might have ruled or whatever Obama sought to
accomplish. The US economic system is about to blow up. The banking
sector has been kept technically alive on the life-support of
accounting fraud since 2008, but that artful racket is coming to an end
because sooner or later the abstraction called "money" must make
truthful representations of itself in relation to reality, or else
people cease to accept its claims of value. Without a functioning
banking system none of the rackets organized into US health care can
continue.
The eventual destination of health care, like
everything else in society categorically, is a much smaller, more
modest, more local scale of operation. We'll be lucky if the people
with medical expertise can reorganize the wreckage of the system into
something resembling small local clinics with all the costly and
pernicious racketeering bureaucracy peeled off it. The insurance
companies will be in the elephants' graveyard of failed institutions.
Let's hope the doctors and their support staff remember to wash their
hands.
A couple of side notes:
Anyone
seeking to understand the deplorable physical condition of the general
public need only stroll through the supermarket aisles and see the
endless stacks of manufactured sugary shit that pretends to be food in
this culture. That whole matrix is coming to and end, too, by the way,
but probably not soon enough to save the multitudes programmed into
metabolic disorder. They will just have a shorter life-span, aggravated
by loss of income in a cratering economy and everything that comes with
being impoverished. The doctors themselves by and large know almost
nothing about nutrition, and make no organized effort to militate
against the homicidal processed food industry - which brings me to the
second side note.
Namely, that the diminishing returns
of extreme bureaucratization and turbo-specialization in medicine has
only made the doctors generally stupider and more inept. My own
situation is a case in point. For two years I suffered an array of
peculiar symptoms ranging from numb hands to supernatural fatigue. My
ex-GP showed no interest in investigating the cause. Even my request
for a toxicology workup was essentially shrugged off. I had to become
my own doctor. For a while I suspected Lyme disease, which is raging in
my corner of the country. I went to see a Lyme specialist who didn't
accept insurance (because the insurance companies did not recognize his
aggressive treatment protocols as falling within the current "standards
of practice" - and this because the medical establishment doesn't know
its ass from a hole in the ground about Lyme disease).
Anyway, I asked the Lyme specialist to include a test for cobalt
levels in my bloodwork because I thought there was an outside chance I
had cobalt poisoning. The reason I thought this was because Google
searches of my symptoms kept pointing to metal-on-metal hip replacement
failure. I had gotten just such a metal-on-metal hip replacement in
2003. The hardware was developed because the orthopedists wanted to
give younger patients a longer-lasting implant. That's when the
diminishing returns of technology stepped in and kicked everybody's
ass, including mine.
My cobalt blood test came back
off-the-charts high. (My many Lyme tests all came back negative.)
Wouldn't you know, though, that the Lyme specialist wanted to treat me
for Lyme anyway. He ignored the cobalt numbers and wrote out a
prescription for $400 worth of antibiotics. He was the proverbial guy
with a hammer to whom everything looked like a nail. I declined that
course of treatment and instead went to my new GP for a first
appointment and asked for an additional cobalt test, along with one for
chromium. (My hip implant is an alloy of titanium, cobalt, and
chromium.) They both came back way over the toxic level. Apparently,
the rotation of the metal joint has been shedding metal ions into my
system for nine years.
Next I went to the orthopedic
surgeon who put the implant in. He ordered an MRI and xrays and
appeared rather concerned. Eventually I was routed to yet another
orthopedic surgeon who specializes in "revising" hip implant failures -
in particular ones of the type I have, which have been failing at such
a staggering rate that the lawyers have assembled one of the greatest
litigation feeding frenzies in history. They are going after the
manufacturers of these devices.
I have health insurance
but I am quite sure that I will be soaked for many thousands of dollars
beyond the coverage to resolve this problem, which will involve at
least the changing out of the terminal bearings of my implant - if I am
lucky. In the meantime, I have to become exactly the kind of
pain-in-the-ass patient who asks too many questions so I don't end up
crippled, or dead, or taken for ride like a purloined human ATM
machine. I suppose I am also lucky that this happened to me soon enough
to even have this kind of remedial surgery. Another year or two and I
would have just steadily turned purple and croaked like some poor 19th
century foundry worker.
There's an excellent chance that
I will be on the operating table at the same moment that another
financial crisis erupts, one that will be orders of magnitude worse
than the 2008 Lehman collapse. Won't that be something? I hope that the
surgeon and the anesthesiologist, and whoever else happens to be on
hand, don't all run out of the room at once to call their investment
managers while I'm lying there inert, like a boned-out Thanksgiving
turkey. Pray for my ass. I'm a hostage in the system.
