Tag: politics

Soylent Green, M.D.

If you are having “issues” or “a situation” or “some problem of a personal nature” at my job, you get referred to these assholes, who will recommend an appropriately inexpensive short-term fix for what ails you, and counsel you out of long-term psychotherapy or expensive drugs for your madness or drug habit.

If you’re just sick, the insurance company will push you pretty hard to call these other assholes, who will recommend an appropriately inexpensive approach to what ails you, and counsel you out of surgery or expensive drugs.

They’re both promoted to the employee as caring, committed professionals who will help you through hard decisions, and to the business as cost control.

This is how we ration health care in my country, by hiding triage behind a helpful smile.

Our here now medical system in these united states

Since I had a visit to the E.R. brought by paramedic ambulance last week, I’m experiencing the classic aftereffect symptom: financial panic. I’m tensed for the blow when the bill arrives, prepared for my insurer to deny everything, ready to fight collection agencies and complain to commissioners and end up paying the whole thing outright on my credit card at 14% interest.

The old joke about bleeding heart liberals is that the difference between a liberal and a conservative is a police report. Good point; no one likes getting their ass kicked, and it doesn’t do much for your progressive values to have the pain and fight-or-flight chemicals running.

I’d add another rule, though. The difference between a conservative and a liberal is a hospital admission. Prosperous middle-class Americans who’ve never been seriously ill and have confidence in their medical plans are fooling themselves. They’re all only one illness away from total financial ruin. The insurer will deny claims, the hospital will press them, a collection agency will buy them, and no one will forgive anything. Welcome to Ayn Rand Memorial Medical Center, folks!

My pharmacist is now required by law to counsel me if the prescription is new. This is a fine idea in theory, since physicians don’t know everything about a drug and don’t take the time to discuss it. In practice, it’s a joke. I go to a 24-hour pharmacy in a drugstore chain and it’s understaffed. With my latest, I waited ten minutes before a rumpled and worried Indian man rushed out and said “It is diuretic. Do you have questions?” and then ran off. This is his usual practice.

When I got home I looked at the bottle and there was a sticker on it saying that I should stay out of direct natural or artificial sunlight. Sure enough, looking up the stuff revealed that it increases sensitivity to the sun and that special attention to sunscreen and protective clothing is strongly advised. What if the clerk hadn’t put the sticker on the thing, or I hadn’t looked? People around here have the hobby of lying in the sun.

Requiring professionals to do something vital and then giving them no time to do it doesn’t work. The invisible hand just punched me in the nuts again.

Welcome to the richest hick town in California.

Our local rag, the Orange County Register, now has a “blog”.

In their case this means boring, self-satisfied right-wing slop. It’s not even a blog really. No commenting, no syndication. It’s all the high-quality writing and careful fact checking of the bloggers with all the spontaneity and interactivity of a newspaper! I think I’d rather watch FOX News. Their goebbeling is snappier and sometimes there are cute girls in the shampoo ads.

It does have these losers’ email on it, though, so you can goatse them at least.

Yes, we are still a provincial backwater with no style or class. We’re just a very, very rich one these days.

America! FUCK YEAH! (from the Guardian)

We are all the Tuskegee Syphilis Study now.

US agency ‘giving green light’ to human toxin tests

“In violation of ethical standards, the experiments appear to have inflicted harm on human subjects, failed to obtain informed consent, dismissed adverse outcomes and lacked scientific validity,” the report found. “In many of the experiments, the subjects were instructed to swallow capsules of toxic pesticides with orange juice or water at breakfast.”

The “informed consent” forms were often loaded with jargon, hard to understand or deliberately misleading about potential health risks. Some studies dismissed unfavourable results. In one test, all eight subjects became sick after exposure to a pesticide, but in the report their symptoms were discounted and attributed to “viral illness”.

I’m just sayin’.

Has anyone in mainstream politics or media, anyone with access to a loud mic or a big transmitter, anyone who can make a dent got the gonads to publicly say that we’re in the midst of a no-apologies, unfiltered, classic revival of fascism?

Anyone?