Needed: Responsible, Capitalistic And Concerned Citizens

Healthcare implies that your health will be cared for.  Who better than you to ensure this happens!  Not an employer, not the government, not an insurance company.  YOU.  Here's how it works:

1.  ALL federal deductions for health insurance premiums by employers and self-employed workers are eliminated, gone, kaput.
2.  Employers pay that equivalent amount to employees as earned income, which is taxed.
3.  Employees take that extra pay and buy health insurance on the OPEN MARKET.  Capitalism as it's shiny best.  Insurance can be purchased from any insurance company, in any state, thru private/public co-ops, thru work, thru any organization that sets up to provide more customers for a lower rate per customer.  Now, the user is the buyer, the customer is the consumer, no middle-man distortion.  You just want major medical, fine.  You want laser hair removal covered, fine.  Buy what you want or can afford.  Insurance companies will clamour for your business like they do for car or life or disability insurance, and they will provide simple, easy to understand policies or consumers will go buy from someone else who doesn't try to fuck them over.
3.  Lower premiums are offered for healthier people.  That's the way life insurance works.  A break for normal blood pressure, cholesterol and BMI are offered.  Provide FINANCIAL incentive for people to get off their fat asses and get healthier.
4.  Tort reform put in place that states, simply, LOSER PAYS - LOSER PAYS - LOSER PAYS.  You want to sue your doctor?  Make sure you have an iron-clad case.  The majority of doctors are good people who care about doing a good job, but they're not fucking perfect.
5.  That extra dough the feds now have with the elimination of the medical premium deduction?  This MUST be used to fund healthcare clinics for people unable to afford health insurance on the open market.  Clinics are located in areas by population and they are administered and operated by cities, so you get down to a civic level of people who actually give a shit about their neighbors.  Free annual exams, free birth control, free pre-natal, etc.  It's cheaper to prevent health problems that to treat them!!!   How to determine if someone is unable to afford private insurance?  Simple!  Every tax return with adjusted income below a certain dollar amount is eligible to receive a card with a fool-proof encryption like a fingerprint.  You don't file taxes?  You visit a clinic and register, but there is a standard waiting period to verify your past.  Eliminates illegals, scammers, tax-dodgers, whatever.  Also, these places are not the Mayo Clinic.  They would be staffed by medical residents, bored retired doctors, maybe even compulsory for a year for new doctors in order to get a license in that state.  They're adequate, clean, but not the first choice of someone with a job.

Now, I can't come up with every little damn detail, but that's the outline.  And maybe it's not all that simple, but it banks on 2 things that Americans profess to be - capitalists and concerned citizens.  Does it restrain soaring medical costs?  Beats me as I've never heard or read anyone's reasons for the out-of-control escalation that made sense.  Tort reform, taking more people out of hospital emergency rooms (they now go to clinics with runny noses), increasing preventative care - it seems to me all these changes would help.  And, charging people higher premiums who clog our medical facilities with their larded up bodies is the first step toward making health insurance a level playing field for everyone.  So get out there, get in the game and for Christ's sake take some responsibility for your health.  Like I said, YOU need to to ensure your care, and quit expecting my healthy lifestyle to subsidize your sedentary, fast-food fueled, prescription overdosed, diabetic existence.  I quit!!

Hypocrites & Healthcare

It turns out I wasn't through hammering the AZ state legislature in last weeks rant.  This time, the hypocrisy of these wackos is too, too much.  Out one corner of their collective mouths is proposed legislation to tell cities and counties how to run their finances.  This has Phoenix, in particular, up in arms and rightly so.  Then, out of the other corner it's talk of succeeding to show the Feds they can't tell these state lunatics what to do and how to to do it while they eagerly suck up every Fed stimulus, Medicaid, highway and whatever dollar possible to balance a budget they badly mangled.   And it's not just Arizona.  The same shit is going on in Utah.  That legislature is rallying against a recent wilderness designation for federally owned land while at the same time a scumbag Repube representative wants to pass a law that allows the State to force city and county planning committees to accept development of privately owned land and screw their zoning and planning laws.  The throat jammees become the throat jammers.  No hypocrisy there.

Around the time of Archie Bunker's "the big one" (World War II), wages were frozen by the federal government as part of the war effort.   Employers were still competing for workers but could obviously not offer increased wages to get them.  So, the War Labor Board declared fringe benefits nontaxable and employer sponsored health insurance was born.  Like nearly every other dumb-ass idea that has come to roost in this country, the situation was temporary and the measures temporary.  But when the war ended and wages started to climb, it was too late.  Unions demanded that employers continue to provide tax-free health care and employers figured out a way to make it a profit center (for a while anyway).  The U.S. is the only country in the world to do this.  Why?  Because it doesn't make any sense!   The consumer of the product cannot be taken out of the fucking equation for obtaining the product.  If my employer is paying, and the federal government is subsidizing it, I don't give a shit what it costs - especially for something as personal as healthcare.  Duhhhh!!  This has been, in my humble estimation, the overriding reason for healthcare cost escalation over the decades.  It was the primary reason for the bankruptcy of General Motors, who had become one of the largest health insurance companies in the world.  The only problem was, oh yeah, they make fucking cars!  During the entire healthcare debate, not a single politician (that I'm aware of - could be wrong) brought this boondoggle up.  Well, in the next rant installment, this Frog will present the cure for this healthcare mess, and it's so simple it hurts - and it hurts right here doc.

We Gotta Get Out Of This Place

With apologies to Eric Burdon for borrowing his song title, it's never been more applicable than today for any Arizona resident with half a brain.  Let's see, after a brutal, senseless killing spree down Tucson way, the Repubes of the state legislature want to LOOSEN gun control laws.  Because, you know, everyone would jump at the chance to be carrying a loaded weapon to the supermarket on a Saturday morning and someone could have been in the parking lot at exactly the moment the shots started and ended it right on the spot.  Oh, Gabrielle was hit with the first bullet fired.  Well I guess no one can draw that quickly, except maybe Rooster Cogburn or some other fantasy hero that always arrives at the right moment in the movies.  And how many people would then get hit with errant lead fired by an insecure, big-buckled and little-dicked NRA member who has zero training and zero experience handling a firearm in such a situation where, for a few moments, you can't actually believe what your eyes are seeing.  Fucking idiots.

And there's talk of succession!!!  A proposed law would create a panel of state legislature folks (old, white guys) who would meet to determine if a federal law will actually be recognized by the state.  If the Feds try to enforce it, the armed citizens of this state will have something to say about it, by God!  Anarchy rules!!

And there's no money to save a small group of people's lives who need organ transplants.  But there's not one cent being cut from the prison budget.  If a dude on death row needs medical treatment, no problem.

And there's more:  squash the 14th amendment birth rights, make fireworks legal in the state while the City's still prohibit them and, of course, the breathing while brown bill HB1070.    Start packing.

But wait, there is a glimmer of hope!!!  Two separate recall movements to get rid of Russell Pearce are picking up steam.  One is spearheaded by a Repube no less.  That's how embarrassing this racist moron is.  Even the Mormon church has officially come out against his 14th amendment shit and bill 1070.  Good people of Mesa, I implore you to sign this petition and send this creature back under the rock from whence he came.  You elected him so stand up, admit your folly and get 'er done.  Your church is watching....



 

The Commie Pot

No, I'm not talking about marijuana grown on the steppes of Russia.  Actually it's a stolen line from Bill Maher's New Rules last Friday, the last rule actually, and it is fucking brilliant.  Bill's final rule was a comparison of the haves to the have-nots, using Major League Baseball (haves) and the NFL.  In MLB, each team sucks up all the money possible from TV contract, ticket sales, merchandising, etc.  In the NFL, this money is mostly put into a large "commie pot" and in a share-the-wealth, socialistic move the booty is divided up between ALL the teams.  Guess which sport is on the up slope and which is on the down slope?  Guess which sport has, for the most part, the same old tired teams in the playoffs each year?  The New York Yankees have a payroll of 200+ million.  The Pittsburgh Pirates, a payroll of 60 million.  They will NEVER be playing each other in the World Series.  However, the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers are in the Super Bowl - and playing a team from a mid-size Wisconsin town called Green Bay!  The New York Jets didn't make it. Parity exists in the NFL.  In MLB, it's every team for itself and fuck the rest of you.  Sound familiar have-nots?

There are, no doubt, millions of super pro-capitalistic, anti-socialistic men that would tell you thew NFL IS the best sport.  It's certainly the most watched.  What would they have to say about this sharing the wealth situation? 

The new Republican House majority will soon get a lesson in the haves versus the have-nots.  How interesting it will be to watch as they decide which federal programs, subsidies and agencies to cut to fix the government's spending problem.   Which senior assistance hand-outs will be slashed, thereby enraging the tea-party demographic of retired old white people driving around in their medicare purchased scooters?  Which farm subsidy cut will put a bunch more poor farmers out to pasture?  With the extension of the existing tax rates, the cuts MUST be enormous to get even close to taming the yearly deficit.  It's gonna get ugly, and when the masses of the ever shrinking middle-class wake up to the fact that the deficit is going to be tamed by cutting their programs/entitlements, not the defense contractors, big oil and bankers (hey, the House is under Republican control), ugly might not be an adequate description.  Of course, it's just as likely very little will be cut as the Repubes will find they don't have the spine to do it.  And down the road the deficit can will roll, again.