There is an old medical joke about a man with a very bad leg. The leg first became cold then blue and finally black. The man's doctor tells him that it must be amputated. He protests that then he will have only one leg. His doctor responds that it would be better to have one leg and live than two and die.
So the man agrees to let the doctor remove his leg. After the procedure the man awakens in Recovery and sees his doctor at the bedside. "You don't look very happy" the man says. "What is the matter?"
The doctor says that he has good news and bad news. "Give me the bad news" says the man. "Well, we mistakenly removed the wrong leg" says the doctor. "Oh, no--now I am a legless man!" cries the man. "No, that's where the good news comes in" says his doctor. "We think we can work with the bad leg."
This is a bit like our current Health Care Debate inasmuch as the people responding to polls now say that they are on balance happy with their health plans. Nobody likes his/her insurance company. Not if there has been any dealing with the company. But, when compared with the government behemoth coming our way people decide they might prefer the devil they know. And so they'll "work with the bad leg."
In terms of the ideal organization of America's Health Care Industry one would enroll everyone who is elderly in Medicare and all others in Medicaid. The structures are in place and time tested. Give care to all persons in the country who need it--foreign or domestic, legal or illegal, citizen or not. Up the co-pay and tighten the list of approved diagnostic and therapeutic procedures and allowed drugs. Have a provision for people to purchase additional insurance as they wish.
Now how to keep the system efficient? Have insurers bid on contracts to manage the plans by state or region. Do away with Veterans' plans, House/Senate/Executive plans, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Railroad workers, and other plans. And the government should own up to the fact that these obligations were incurred but not funded.
The Big Government Ponzi scheme for Social Security and Health Care for Seniors and Veterans and others never banked the money that we put into it. The Best Government that Money Can Buy just dipped in and spent it for other projects. This is bait and switch AND Ponzi. We should hear an apology from the man who goes around the world apologizing to all others for USA crimes and lies.
I want to hear an apology for what he and those before him did with our money. Next year I will have paid into Social Security for fifty years. And not a dime was ever put away for my retirement. I will be means tested out of Veterans' Care, taxed out of Social Security, and rationed out of Medicare. Whatever it was that King George III did to our founder generation to provoke so much anger must pale in comparison with what our present Leaders are doing to this present generation of Americans. Can this be set right?
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David Nonpareil Atom (DNA) Harter, MD (Madoff Donor) -
ReplyDeleteI do admire your profundity.... unfortunately while you are certainly edible, your sound bytes are too big to swallow in a world of quickie fever. Americans do not read anymore and they don't have time to even listen.... living in the United States is like getting a drink out of a firehydrant. And beside that no one seems to give a crap.
I have the same problem. I write to people who cannot read. Nor do they have much of a penchant for math. Congressmen do not know that a million is twenty minutes but a trillion is 400 years. (Now check me out on that with your calculator. By the way, walking at 3 miles per hour, it would take 20 minutes to walk off 1 million dollars in one hundred dollar bills laid end to end). Another little assignment would be for you to calculate how far back you would have to go to start spending one trillion dollars at the rate of 1 dollar per second. Hint is only 11 days to spend a million dollars that way.)
A Congressman should not be allowed to run for office unless he can pass this test. They are the ones spending our money, they should at least be able to count it (for Tidwell's sake.)
I am emailing you the letter I wrote to my closest Congressmen in Columbus, GA. Beware, it requires some amount of focus. and time that only the retired have.... so we are doomed on all accounts.
See you in Heaven.... we can keep an eye on how the survivor roaches are doing on Earth.
Jack