Speaking of healthcare, as we do often around here, the chief programmer of our www.nostracodeus.com project, Grady up in Alberta, just laughs whenever I begin to whine about how the US has the more f/u’d healthscarce system in the world due to three major factors.
The first, of course, is the pharmaceutical industry which lies about every alternative treatment that comes along if they can’t patent it. There’s no money is a great vitamin regimen, something I totally believe in (and feel great because of).
The second point is that there are natural medicines that have been around since time immemorial that do absolute wonders. A leading physician we know who holds many patents in his specialty, practices in one of the enlightened marijuana states. He’s gone the alternative medicine route after conducting more than a year of exhaustive research on the elementals of marijuana. It’s not the THC (the getting high part) that is the miracle drug, although it does chance how music sounds. No, in terms of ridding people of cancer and a whole shopping list of other ailments, it’s the cannabinoids (CBDs) that yield results that shame many FDA approved drugs.
And third, of course, there’s the how it all gets paid for.
In a rational government-run program there would be no profit. Not that profit is bad, but the whole point of government is to provide profit-free services, although most (like fire and police) do provide jobs. In the USA we have a wonder-kluge that pretends to provide healthcare yet at a price that is absurd compared to other places.
Grady, up in Alberta, pays $44 a month for whatever comes along. And, he assets, most everyone else does, too.
So as you watch your lifestyle ratchet down over the next couple of years as healthscarce ramps up, pay attention to what this one lawyer/reader shared with me about the healthcare mess:
My version of your I Ching in box is what our family used to call “The Book Fairy” but now call “The Information Fairy”. Open a book and the page you open to will have the answer to your current pondering. Now it’s expanded to multiple media. And weeks now have themes. Last week was “Liberals can’t do math” week, a version of which one sees in every French election.
I love my many left leaning friends, but last week when the Obamacare bills were unleashed after the election, I posted my brother’s new rate, which went up 36%, or by $450 a month, and politely thanked Obama for nothing. I also asked liberals, who are in denial that the country is sick of their policies, to stop trying to help me. The storm of blue jerseys was astounding. They all bought the subsidized ultra high deductible plans for peanuts, and some couldn’t get insurance at all before. Fine, we should all be in the same risk pools, and preexisting conditions should not be used to cull the pools. Every president since Eisenhower said essentially the same thing. But have they tried getting surgery without the deductible? I found that the hospital would do NOTHING without the deductible, when I went to surgery. Like not even take my temperature. Later, I went to the emergency room, and it was different. Not sure what they would have done had I not had the deductible, but they were actually more concerned about my condition, at first. Of course my lungs sounded like they were full of diet coke, fizzing away. Still, they knew I have a silver plan. How much could they lose??
Meanwhile, a narrow band of earners is shouldering a huge portion of the subsidies.
Anyway the comments from the happy lefties who love Obama were very instructive. For one thing, they blamed their employers for having crappy plans not as cheap as ACA plans.
As an employer I found no small business plan that could touch the government guaranteed ACA plans. Of course not. This year. Maybe next year. Meanwhile we can’t afford to offer insurance, after over 50 years of doing so. And ACA forbids subsidizing employee salaries to buy insurance. I also lost tax deductibility for buying insurance, so add almost 30%. A cruise in Europe, I’m told, costs less. Many of these blue jersey people pay little or no income tax, and have government jobs with splendid benefits. Or their spouse does. Or they are on disability, literally playing golf. They have no clue where their money comes from. Or should I say “came from”?
And ACA rules apparently discourage paying for the compounded bio identical drugs I use, so my supposedly reduced costs were the same last year as before, but with lower coverage. Next year it is going up 16%. $20,400.00 for my family of three. Not tax deductible. A nice used Lexus.
But what scares me is the lack of arithmetic comprehension. The lefties seemed to actually think their premiums cover the cost of their insurance, rather than government subsidies and guarantees. It was supposedly only gouging that made insurance costs so high. Right. One fellow proudly said his deceased wife’s insurance only cost $150 a month and covered most of her cancer care. Had no clue that Medicare paid the bulk of the costs. The lefties actually don’t know if their insurance will pay anything if they can’t come up with their deductibles. I suspect they plan to drop their insurance and show up indigent if they need expensive care, as before. They have a surprise awaiting them. But mainly, they only see the immediate benefits to their immediate circle, and are hostile to the idea that people like me don’t actually have $20,000.00 in discretionary funds to throw at subsidizing their insurance each year, much less the economic catastrophe that adding, essentially, a car payment or two to the nondiscretionary spending of middle class workers nearing retirement will have. Unless some new revenue stream is found, this must crush other bits of the economy. But the slow motion of economics seems invisible to the arithmetically challenged. Of course they don’t understand marginal profits or, really, anything about what is actually required to run a business or an economy. That explains a lot about how people of both parties vote. It was like magical thinking to discuss how all this will be paid for.
But, it seems, not paid for by me. I have no real choice except to shrug, and self insure with a higher deductible. And sharply reduce discretionary spending, which has been coming out of savings for some time. I may even reduce my income and do other things with my energy than work for these well meaning but clueless people. After two cancer surgeries and a week in the hospital with complications, over the last few years, my insurance companies have still come out ahead. Largely because I do alternatives out of pocket that actually work, but their out of pocket was less than my premiums. My personal bills would have been 10 times what the insurers actually paid had I not been insured. Literally. So the gouging theory has some merit. But as for my friends who think I should subsidize their insurance, that game is now over. See those dead geese with the odd colored eggs over there? Take note. The “change” is about to hit the framistat.
I think I’ll call it “bullchange”.
Bullchange is a fine term, and as luck would have it, it applies to many other government programs. Like the soon to be announced loss of the Mexican-American War, which some 160-years past America’s victory there, is about to be reversed by the double-talking Double-Dealer-In-Chief.
Again, America isn’t as dumb as politicians seem to believe, although by re-election results that may not be clear. The Rabid Right and the Alinsky Left are both raving about what the elections just past really meant.
It’s clear to see if one strips the crass politik out of it: American wants what politicians promised.
We wanted National Health Care. We got a National Health Screwing.
We wanted to stop eternal spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. What we got turns out to be only an intermission.
We want reasonable opportunity to legal Mexican immigrants. What we’re getting is a tolerance policy that is designed to end the traditional majority in America and give future neighborhood street-corner rabble-rousers fresh hotbeds of discontent so that our United States will from this moment on become the Divided States of America.
Thanks, Obama. Thanks, Congressoids.
We elected Obama to bring change. And what we have now is Bullchange. Not just in healthcare but across a broad spectrum of government agendas like Border 21, the CANAMEX highway, serial wars over resources with no end. And runaway spending to support crooked money and the whims of the one percent. Serial failures of the FCC to maintain equality of data, or serial failures of the SEC to punish financial criminals. (Pay a billion dollar fine and skip jail? In China there would have been a $1-round of ammo and the State would have confiscated everything!)
My, ain’t bullchange great?.
Along the way we’ve streamlined from three branches of governor (Congress, President, Courts) to the much simpler CorpGov. That’s the very essence of bullchange. So in addition to spending hate clicks on banksters, consider saving a few for lobbyists who write the checks and pull the real levers of power in These Divided Sates.
Woo-Woo Central
Before you read this one, you need to know that a lot of “weird shit” goes on in in sparsely inhabited Southeast Colorado. We know because our friends in the Castle (the real one) in the mountains northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, have many oddities in their area, not the least of which is the center of cattle mutilations as well as an extremely high incidence of UFO activities, speculatively due to the alien/or secret military test facilities in the mountains near Dulce, NM.
So any time I get a woo-woo report from the region, I pay particular attention, and so should you:
Hi George: I never thought I’d be sending in a woo experience, but I sure can’t figure out a reason for it happening. It has to do with a nifty little five-gallon Channel Lock wet/dry shop-vac going on all by itself in the middle of the night.
It happened again night before last. I awoke to what I thought might be the “Taos Hum”, but quickly dismissed that because I think that’s pretty far-fetched. I made myself get out of a warm bed around mid- night to go investigate the source.
Nearing the kitchen, I could tell it was coming from the attached garage, and upon opening the door leading out there, sure enough, my shop vac was happily singing away. This has happened before, but I always attributed it to the cat, a twenty-one year old guy who finally used up his last life a few weeks ago, so it wasn’t him. In fact, the garage was empty of all life except the spiders living up in the door opener light, and I otherwise live alone.
This vac has a feature that enables you to set the switch on the canister to allow a signal to be sent to it by hitting a button on the nozzle which turns on the vacuum. This switch was in that position, so an outside radio signal, say from someone’s garage door opener, could have set it off. The problem with that theory is that I live in the middle of the southern Rockies where there are no neighbors within miles and radio signals have a devil of a time dodging all the trees and hills.
So, it’s either woo, or it’s due to a satellite going overhead and beaming down a radio signal that’s turning on my vacuum. But what are the chances of the frequency being just exactly right?
I can’t figure it out. Woo.
I can’t say for sure, but I have a theory: There was a very loud boom series over Ohio on Sunday night. My speculation? Something from somewhere like Wright-Pat going supersonic and then heading off into low space.
Since we suspect that the government really has anti-gravity at least in the development stage, and since introducing it now would collapse the global economy (picture the auto, airline, car rental, and hotel industry all failing at once) let’s suppose they needed secret bases.
Well, that leads us into the mountains of northern NM and southern CO. And since southern CO is where many oddities are already taking place, it doesn’t take more than a pencil and a map to draw the lines.
My expectation is that anti-gravity has an odd after-effect, perhaps causing timeline disruptions. That would explains all the missing time reports in the vicinity of UFO’s which al likely antigravity inter-dimensional vehicles.
Imagine now that they leave behind what pilots call “wake turbulence.” As a pilot we train for this stuff all the time: I’ve encountered it a few times when a busy tower clears us for departure behind a heavy jet and at 500 feet over a crossing runway, you suddenly find your airplane going 45-degrees one way, and then the next, as you bounce through it. Look up wingtip vortices.
Expand this concept to space-time manipulation and what do you have?
Perhaps – and it’s only a wild guess – a shifted reality vortex drifting through the garage.
Either that, or you have a serious haunting going one. In which case some basic experiments in electronic voice phenomena ought to answer things.
It would depend on the switch on the vacuum. If it is momentary contract (press on, press off) then that would leave the radio possibility open. Strong AM signal, odd propagation from far away. But if the switch clicks on and stays there (like a rocker switch) then we’re back to the gravity wake turbulence issue…or haunting.
OK, more Thursday…
George george@ure.net