[from 8/5/09]
Let's talk about health care!
First thing I want to say is, how much I hate talking about health care. I'm a guy. I hate thinking about it. I hate going to the doctor, even for a routine check-up. Even though my doctor is hot. I hate needles. I hate pills. I hate the crappy magazines in the waiting room. I hate the posters on the wall with cut out views of guy's pink guts in glorious airbrushed over-saturated over-highlighted realism, which are always directly in front of me when the nurse is taking my blood pressure, so that my blood pressure can be driven as high as possible. I hate that the guy whose guts are exposed in the poster is always in better shape and better endowed than I am in spite of having exposed guts. And so forth.
It's all about abuse. You go to the hospital to be stabbed, wrapped, gagged, drained, doped, spotted, set, and spiked. Then they sew you and tape you back together, and there's usually some pieces left over they don't know where they went so they toss them, and then they send you home before you wake up enough to protest.
Who's so into S&M they would want all that AND not mind paying for it? In my experience, most of the people who say they like to be spanked don't really want it to burn.
This is one reason why we have insurance companies. Nobody wants to pay for the health care they get, so they pay an insurance company to do it. The other reason is, we're all afraid we'll be the exceptional patient that needs the the radical reassembly or the high-tech bionic replacement, or the Darth Vader suit, and we aren't billionaires.
In other words, no one who uses health insurance at all, is relying on paying their own way in every instance. If you could be sure you could always pay your medical bills out of cash or credit, you wouldn't need insurance. We have insurance, and you use it, because you aren't sure. You think that you might very well die if your life depended on the state of your bank account. So you get insurance.
Let me rephrase that. YOU use what money you are able to make each pay period to pay for insurance (or what your company pays for you that they otherwise could have paid you in wages or salary), in order that you might someday be able to get critical health care that you wouldn't have been able to pay for on your own, even if you had saved all the money up you sank in premiums. The money to pay for your critical health care comes from the other people who bought the same health insurance, who lost (but really won!) the bet that they would need it.
The fact that all of you insurance consumers are in this desperate game of trying to guarantee your health with each others money would, one would think, predispose you all to understand why people that don't have enough money to pay your insurance premiums at all might feel left out in the cold.
But it doesn't! And that's all right, because you're all only human, and you're mostly pink inside and you have cute little human foibles, and that's why we love you and we write about you. You don't have to care about other people's desperations in order to keep on being adorable.
However, you still can't let the uninsured die en mass for the crime of being poor. That used to be allowed in this country, back in Dickens' day, but not any more.
So here's where things stand. You already have universal health care!
It's called Emergency Room Care. It's free by existing law to anyone who can't afford insurance and it's unbelievably inefficient and if you have insurance or if you pay your own medical bills you are paying for the inefficiency of it.
If you're happy with that you should stick with it.
First thing I want to say is, how much I hate talking about health care. I'm a guy. I hate thinking about it. I hate going to the doctor, even for a routine check-up. Even though my doctor is hot. I hate needles. I hate pills. I hate the crappy magazines in the waiting room. I hate the posters on the wall with cut out views of guy's pink guts in glorious airbrushed over-saturated over-highlighted realism, which are always directly in front of me when the nurse is taking my blood pressure, so that my blood pressure can be driven as high as possible. I hate that the guy whose guts are exposed in the poster is always in better shape and better endowed than I am in spite of having exposed guts. And so forth.
It's all about abuse. You go to the hospital to be stabbed, wrapped, gagged, drained, doped, spotted, set, and spiked. Then they sew you and tape you back together, and there's usually some pieces left over they don't know where they went so they toss them, and then they send you home before you wake up enough to protest.
Who's so into S&M they would want all that AND not mind paying for it? In my experience, most of the people who say they like to be spanked don't really want it to burn.
This is one reason why we have insurance companies. Nobody wants to pay for the health care they get, so they pay an insurance company to do it. The other reason is, we're all afraid we'll be the exceptional patient that needs the the radical reassembly or the high-tech bionic replacement, or the Darth Vader suit, and we aren't billionaires.
In other words, no one who uses health insurance at all, is relying on paying their own way in every instance. If you could be sure you could always pay your medical bills out of cash or credit, you wouldn't need insurance. We have insurance, and you use it, because you aren't sure. You think that you might very well die if your life depended on the state of your bank account. So you get insurance.
Let me rephrase that. YOU use what money you are able to make each pay period to pay for insurance (or what your company pays for you that they otherwise could have paid you in wages or salary), in order that you might someday be able to get critical health care that you wouldn't have been able to pay for on your own, even if you had saved all the money up you sank in premiums. The money to pay for your critical health care comes from the other people who bought the same health insurance, who lost (but really won!) the bet that they would need it.
The fact that all of you insurance consumers are in this desperate game of trying to guarantee your health with each others money would, one would think, predispose you all to understand why people that don't have enough money to pay your insurance premiums at all might feel left out in the cold.
But it doesn't! And that's all right, because you're all only human, and you're mostly pink inside and you have cute little human foibles, and that's why we love you and we write about you. You don't have to care about other people's desperations in order to keep on being adorable.
However, you still can't let the uninsured die en mass for the crime of being poor. That used to be allowed in this country, back in Dickens' day, but not any more.
So here's where things stand. You already have universal health care!
It's called Emergency Room Care. It's free by existing law to anyone who can't afford insurance and it's unbelievably inefficient and if you have insurance or if you pay your own medical bills you are paying for the inefficiency of it.
If you're happy with that you should stick with it.
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