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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.
Today is the official publication of my new book, Too Much
Magic, which is largely concerned
with the diminishing returns of technology as illustrated above.
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