How Is the Author Like a Bloated Fish?

[from 9/2/09]

I've been trying to understand this country's health care system. Why are we stuck with such a lousy system? I think I have it figured out. It's the rationing, stupid.

Everybody is afraid of rationing. No one wants the government to ration medical procedures. But when it's pointed out that insurance companies ration all the time, and that they're stingier than a government program would be because they have to hold back profits, people go glass-eyed and say, "We don't ration health care in America."

Technically, we don't. Let's say you're the worst insomniac the world has ever known. "Worst", we'll say, as in the sense that you "need" nightly infusions of propofol. If you rely on insurance for medical care, sure, those bastards are going to refuse your reasonable demand for surgical knockout juice. But, this is America, by gum, so since you have a credit line of half a billion even though you're so deep in debt you've hocked all your giraffes, you can shop around and buy enough propofol to put Connecticut asleep and a doctor to administer it.

What's that you say, whiny liberal? We don't all have credit lines of half a billion? Well, who cares? What part of "technically" don't you understand?

As long as we technically don't ration health care we can always picture ourselves as one of those French people or Canadians who prove that the respective systems of those countries aren't as great as ours by coming here and spending cash to get care that France or Canada either wouldn't give them or took too long at it.

Our system works great for people who work hard and know how to exploit it. Here's how you get the best care in the world. You hope you stay healthy long enough to go all the way through medical college and become an oncologist. You make money hand over fist treating desperate dying rich French and Canadians and French Canadians. You live in a one room studio, never get married, save every hard earned dime. Then, when it's your turn to die of cancer, you can afford yourself!

So it's not a lousy system after all! It works perfectly as a non-rationing system should. People who have the cash get the care they want, people that don't have the cash get what insurance companies let them have. If you don't like that, you're in favor of rationing, and that makes you either a socialist or a Nazi, depending on the content of my last nightmare.

Further Explorations In Freedom

1. Can we restore America to its fundamental values without eliminating the public education option? If your answer is "Yes", please tell us all which you are, socialist or Nazi. We've been having trouble telling you guys apart.

2. Write a 500 word essay explaining why individual Americans shouldn't have to pay for other American's roads. If you get stuck coming up with reasons, feel free to peek in the National Review or read speeches by Republicans (post-Eisenhower) for ideas. Hint: You have the right to go road-nekkid through the woods.

3. In Communist Russia, the state provided you and your extended family a box to live in, and you didn't complain. Now you are in America, where you and your nuclear family are free to covet the dream house of your choice, get a loan, move in, lose your job(s), be fore-closed upon, be separated and sleep on mats at different shelters around the city. List the ways you are happier. Type with fancy fonts and bullets, and scribble wacky psychotic notes in the margins.

4. The author of this column seems to think that if you are the world's worst insomniac you should just suck it up, no matter how rich you are. He probably thinks that because he's had insomnia many times due to chronic nocturnal flatulence, and could never afford a doctor to fix it. So, compare and contrast the author to a bloated fish.