Cassi Creek:
The GOP/teavangelists’
endless complaint about Government participation in health care delivery has
centered around their fear that their access to health care will somehow be
decided and delayed or denied by a “bureaucrat” working to keep the cost of
health care down.
I’ve had to
listen to that song and dance many times, as it has been repeated by people
with employer-funded insurance, people with privately purchased insurance,
people with no insurance, and people who could and have bought their own
insurance company. Everyone of them
believes that they will be overcharged for health care with the overage being
used to pay for “the 47%,” illegal immigrants, illegal immigrants children and
families, and any other group they can single out for blame.
They’re
right. They are being overcharged. They are being overcharged to pay for the
uninsured – all categories.
They are at
risk of having their badly needed health care delayed and/or denied. But, not by a government bureaucrat. Rather, there is a cubicle dwelling clerk who
matches policy numbers, cost of procedures, and factors in the amount necessary
to be milked from the pool of premiums in order to pay out the bonuses and
other rewards that the company executives have voted for their selves. That’s who , and that’s where. And most of all that’s why the insurance companies
want the GOP/teavangelist base to remain at the mercy of propaganda factories, misinformed
congressional candidates, and other fear mongers who are happy to shift the
blame for anything to anyone for the right fee.
Take note of
the Wilkinson cartoon above. What a
perfect scapegoat for botched care, for care that was authorized too little and
too late, and for care that was denied to provide another round of drinks at a
tropical resort during a insurance companies sponsored junket for legislators
from solid red states.
Now, with the
teavangelists blocking rational thought throughout the red states, it has
become acceptable and convenient to blame any medical mishap on a supreme
being, one which is claimed to be omniscient and omnipotent. That outbreak of shingles could have been
prevented with a cheap vaccine. But you
wouldn’t want a politician or an insurance executive to attempt to ignore the
directives of a deity that punishes with pregnancies and dispenses diseases to
enforce dogma. Even better than the faceless government bureaucrat is the invisible
deity that rewards executives who hear “his” (was there ever any doubt)
pronouncements and relay them to the grievously ill and the merely morbid.
What then,
for the rational who trust double-blind studies and who place their trust in
the careful, repeated collection of data and the application of the conclusions
drawn from such scientific methodology.
Who do they blame when the universe pokes them in the eye with a dirty
conclusion? If they are honest, true
observers who reach the same conclusions in every application of their
hypothesis against their observations; they accept the conclusion and begin
looking for a palliative procedure, a golden fungi, a vaccine or a treatment –
did we say palliative?
The things we
know about the herbicide called Agent Orange include its long incubation period
in human bodies, it’s extremely heavy usage in the area of South VietNam called
III Corps, and its apparent capacity to induce Parkinsonism decades after exposure.
The things I
can apply to those observations include my presence in III Corps during that
period of heavy defoliation, and a disturbing number of symptoms that strongly
suggest “atypical Parkinsonism.”
These facts
and questions generate a real conundrum for the GOP/teavangelists. One hand, they wish to appear supportive of
veterans with service related injuries and illnesses. On the other hand, the Ryan budget includes
some large cuts in funding for veterans medical concerns. Given my utter contempt for the
GOP/teavangelists, I’m of the opinion that they would like to assign me to the “get
sick – die quick” ranks. Given my absolute willingness to write letters
exposing such treatment of veterans, and my belief that such neglect is
suffered at the hands of other humans, not at the random displeasure of a fairy
tale deity; I find no reason or rationality that lets me blame anything but chance
for the diagnosis “atypical Parkinsonism” on my chart.
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