Sunday, February 25, 2007

2-25-07 Complete Overload

The trick to turning a whole population of free people into a population of slaves is to completely overwhelm them. Sensory overload, intellectual overload, financial overload, emotional overload, ...I sometimes wonder how much of this a person can take before they end up collecting returnable cans and bottles on the street, just to get enough money to buy a bit to eat every day.

The first thing a person would have to do in order to not slide down that slippery slope into oblivion would be to turn off the television and stop reading the newspaper. It's really very simple. The mass media in America is the main source of confusion. It's quite effective in capturing people's attention, warping it into focus upon things that truly have no direct bearing in their day to day survival, and addicting them to the premise that if they don't keep watching and reading... well, they might miss something important.

When was the last time that anything really important happened, and your only source of the fact that it happened was the television? Never. The only "news" that the major media has ever "broken" upon the attention of this nation has been the aftermath, and "the official story". As they brought that aftermath and official story closer and closer to the point of actual occurence, the illusion of any of these events being an actual "experience" became more and more believable.

For instance, the events that took place on 9-11-01 were broadcast in "real time", and everybody who watched them on TV felt they were right there, experiencing these events as they happened. It was horrifying and shocking.

But WE, as a nation, did NOT actually experience those events. The only people who DID actually experience those events were there AT the places where they happened, and THEY WERE NOT WATCHING TELEVISION.

Now, I'm not saying that our sources of second hand information about what's going on the world have no valid place in our day to day lives. I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is that, in order to remain sane in this world, one should be able to differentiate between first hand experiences and second hand experiences.

There's a big difference.

So far, my own day to day life has been entirely unaffected by the events of 9-11-01, the suspension of Habeus Corpus, the insanity of the current administration, or the Patriot Act... Yet, these (and many other) things "feel like" they have because of all the second hand information I've taken in regarding them.

I have never witnessed a murder. I have never known anyone personally who was murdered. I only know one person who has had a person that they know who was murdered. Yet, it "feels like" the prospect of me or someone I know being murdered is a constant, day to day possibility because I see so many news stories of people being murdered, almost every single day.

I don't argue for burying one's head in the sand and ignoring what's going on in the rest of the world. But it will drive you completely insane if you fail to notice that the major media are NOT providing you with personal experiences. They are providing only second hand information, and the bulk of that so-called "information" is all designed for one purpose and one purpose only... to get you to keep watching and reading and being exposed to the advertising.

Since all that "information" is specifically designed and packaged and "spun" to addict you to it, the simple process of withdrawal can reveal how unimportant it actually is for your real life, the one you experience first-hand on a day to day basis.

Try this experiment. Stop reading the newspaper or watching any commercial TV for two weeks. Cold turkey. It won't take too long before you begin to notice that your ability to keep your head while everyone around you is losing theirs will be quite profound. Believe me, real life is much easier to live when it's your main focus.

Monday, February 19, 2007

2-19-07 How Medicine Works

It has been only ten years since the laws governing prescription drugs were changed to allow the marketing of these compounds on TV and the rest of the media in the United States. Since that point, there has been a deluge of advertising for prescription drugs. Along with this marketing activity, there has been a tendency for doctors to willingly prescribe medications that their patients have been convinced will "do the trick" for them. If you don't believe me, then the next time you go to your doctor, tell him that you feel you have a need to take some prescription drug that you saw advertised on TV, and see what happens.

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen that someone would artfully create some manner of spoof on this whole thing, and here it is... "Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder" is a new malady that can be addressed with the new drug, "Havidol".

Here's the "Havidol" website, and here's an article about what it really is.

It's a hilarious demonstration of just how far we have come in the development, refinement and implimentation of marketing techniques, and how low our society has sunk on the subject of "healthcare".

Saturday, February 10, 2007

2-10-07 Making Healthcare Profitable

This story from Friday's L.A. Times reminds me of exactly what it is that turns my stomach about making healthcare "available to everyone".

Once upon a time in America, hospitals were non-profit, beneficent organizations. They were staffed by people who had chosen to work in medicine because they had that ingrained sense of wanting to do something in life that had meaning. Helping the sick and needy was always a virtuous purpose. The Hippocratic Oath was displayed prominently on the wall...

But then the public schools changed from being education oriented to being "career oriented" and began focusing on the idea that the best and brightest should be steered towards future careers that would maximize their earning potential. Naturally, it was seen, coincidentally, that healthcare was ramping up as a career area where really smart kids could become nurses and doctors and technicians, and make a lot of money. So, you got people who basically wanted to make a lot of money taking this career path, rather than choosing it because they wanted to help people.

Then the lawyers started going after the money, suing doctors that weren't perfect. It was such a lucrative, money-making activity that suing doctors became a legal specialty called "malpractice". The "ambulance chaser" had moved up to the big time, big bucks venue.

It got so bad that doctors found themselves in the absurd position of having to purchase "malpractice insurance," since all it would take to destroy their entire careers would be one shyster lawyer and a jury that, clearly, would not be comprised of their actual peers. After all, where the hell would they find a jury of doctors? Naturally, a jury of average folks can be presented with the results of an imperfect science, and because they believe that medicine is a perfect science, the imperfect doctor would easily be seen as deserving of punishment...

Before too long, doctors found that the cost of malpractice insurance had risen to the point where practicing medicine the old-fashioned way (one doctor, one office, with house calls) became unviable. They had to band together, forming clinics with a group of other doctors, in order to get the "group rates" for their malpractice insurance payments. It soon became obvious that the whole practice of medicine was changing in America, and the larger the group a doctor joined, the less they had to worry about insurance costs and the more they could focus on tending the sick and infirm.

The cost of everything in medicine went up. Even the ambulance guys had to be "covered" by special insurance, lest some shyster lawyer found a crack in the wall to extort even more money.

But it really started to evolve into the mess that is today after it was seen that there's a LOT of money flowing around these services. In order to have that "perfect science" deliver "perfect service" with what the public would always believe were "100% guaranteed results" they had to buy only the "best" drugs, only the most "perfectly engineered" tools, and have only the "most prestigious looking" facilities... The costs of everything took off like a rocket!

But it could've still worked if the profit mongers hadn't been able to turn the non-profit hospitals into corporate cash-flow machines. Anywhere there's money to be stolen, you'll find that monster entity called "the public corporation" moving in and raping the area "for the stockholders". Once these guys moved in and bought hospitals up, turning them into what they are today, the game was already over. In order to make medicine more profitable, you have to run it differently.

Forget the Hippocratic Oath, now you've got a quota. The cash flow machine can't continue unless the stats are always on an uptrend. The whole thing is a self-feeding mechanism focused on continued increase of profit. As long as profit continues to increase year after year, the machine just runs happily along. But as soon as the inevitable tick in the statistical graph arrives, where you couldn't squeeze another ounce of expansion, acquisition, or efficiency out the thing, and profits suddenly hit that plateau... well, now it's time to make cuts. The stockholders demand it.

Eventually, the machine will find that it is "necessary" to eliminate the pro-bono work, and this is where we start seeing stories like this.

Yes, this is the same link to the same L.A. Times story I started off with, but it needs to be read by anyone and everyone who ever thought that "healthcare" bears any slightest resemblance to a beneficent activity. It is a blood sucking, profit making activity now.

The "healthcare crisis" in America isn't about whether people can "afford" to get treatment for what ails them. It's about maintaining the current trend in this corporate nightmare, because they've reached the point where they have to physically eject anyone who has no "coverage". The basic legal structure of profit making corporations demands that they do this.

A CEO who allows pro-bono work will, by the very nature of the profit making corporation, be at risk of losing his job if he doesn't "throw the bums out" and refuse to expend the corporation's assets on these deadbeats. "Pay or go away" is, essentially, written into the legal structure of the whole thing. The stockholders will demand it.

It was inevitable, the minute that healthcare changed from being a non-profit, beneficent activity into a profit making activity. The "healthcare crisis" in America cannot be "solved" until healthcare is returned to its former status as a non-profit, beneficent activity.

The only way to make healthcare "work" as a profit making activity is to extort the money to pay for it from EVERYONE. So this seemingly high-minded idea of "universal healthcare" has nothing to do with solving the problem, it's only about raising the bar on the extortion. This is what Mitt Romney managed to get passed as legislation in Massachusetts last year, only the prospect of actually implimenting it has suddenly become a big problem.

Duh!

The only thing that this type of legislation can actually accomplish is to extort more funds, establish another revenue stream, for the corporate income of the healthcare industry. It won't actually make healthcare "available to everyone", it will only make more income available to the corporate structure that's in place.

Healthcare, in its present form, has to be made more profitable, otherwise it will continue on its present course of evolving into an even more frightening monster, where only the rich can afford to avail themselves of these services.

Anyone can see this. But the blinders on the public eye are made of this fabric that says "healthcare" is a perfect science, and that it forestalls dying, and that it has fully matured into something that can always deliver 100% predictable success. What it actually is, however, is a machine that extorts money by having the victim believe that if they don't get "the best" that medicine can deliver, then they'll die.

"Take this drug every day for the rest of your life... or else you'll probably die."

"Sign this form, and we'll perform the operation that will save your life."

This isn't science. It's marketing.

There's absolutely no slightest doubt that medicine can be a very expensive practice, but to add the burden of making big profits on top of it is the ultimate in extortion and shameful practices. This society can not bear that burden, and anyone who tells you that it can is lying. There are just some things in society that cannot be carried along in a sane manner by "free market" economic theory...

You have to draw the line on ideology versus public trust somewhere.