Friday, October 14, 2011

The Coming Epidemic, redux

If you search the box at the top left of the screen, you'll find I've already talked about the coming epidemic multiple times. We're making a lot of poor people and forcing them to live under horrific living conditions with poor nutrition and in jobs that pay no sick leave so they go to work sick all the time and spread their contagion. But the biggest reason we're going to have an epidemic is not because of the poor living conditions and poor nutrition of our poor. The poor in hundreds of other countries have it even worse. It's because we give them just enough healthcare to stay sick, whereas in other third world countries they die. This provides an incubator for mutation of germs to resist antibiotics and antivirals, since the poor cannot afford a full course of either and thus breed resistant germs.

This is a problem. It's a problem that needs solving. So how do various groups solve this problem?

  1. The GOP solution: If you're sick and you're poor, die quickly.
  2. The Democratic solution: If you're sick and you're poor, patch the current broken system with band-aids and rube goldberg contraptions and pretend it works, except it won't and can't, so nothing changes.
  3. The solution if you're not a sociopathic lizard person: Free access to healthcare for all, paid for by a payroll and/or income tax dedicated to healthcare. This solves the problem of access, mostly.
But we are ruled by cold-blooded lizard people from Planet Sociopath, so that last one -- the solution that any caring human would support -- will not happen.

And lest the rich think they can simply stock up on antibiotics and antivirals and survive the epidemic -- the whole point is that the epidemic bug will be resistant to any existent antibiotic and antiviral. So they'll get sick and die just like everybody else. But because lizard people have lizard brains, apparently they think being cold-blooded sociopaths will save them. It is to laugh.

- Badtux the Warm-blooded Penguin

15 comments:

  1. Well, I'm doing okay, so to hell with everyone else.

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  2. But I must admit, it's a bit of a challenge finding a place to empty my porta pottie at times. These monkeys don't like public restrooms smelling like shit, hehehehe

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  3. I know who I vote for being the first to get old and sick and die alone in his tin shack on wheels, not to be found until the rats have eaten more than 90% of his body!

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  4. Why Bukko!? You have a mean streak. LOL.

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  5. One thing that I do not understand is that our current healthcare "system" actually costs the government more money in the form of people ending up in the emergency room for relatively minor things or who cannot pay. Since there are many people who cannot afford proper preventative medicine, this means having to spend massive amounts of money on things that could have been staved off with a comparatively small medical procedure.

    Even if you were the most selfish of bastards like those that currently rule our country, you would think that they would opt for some sort of government subsidized medical system just because it would save everyone's money in the process, including the government's.

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  6. Why Bukko!? You have a mean streak.

    If I was to have a blog (actually, I started one, intending to write about the struggles of the people I see dying in front of me in the hospital) I'd call it "Bukko the Surly Beaver."

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  7. Neurovore, Americans never turn down a chance to be vicious towards their fellow Americans, regardless of the cost. Take our gulags, which imprison as many people as Stalin's gulags did. These gulags cost a huge amount of money. But Americans think it's worth it, because most of those incarcerated in the gulags are *those* people. You know, *THOSE* people? People not like you and me?

    - Badtux the Misanthrope Penguin

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  8. I know who I vote for being the first to get old and sick and die alone in his tin shack on wheels, not to be found until the rats have eaten more than 90% of his body!

    We all die boy, we all die, you have a problem with that?

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  9. Annnd yet another entry for Twitter feed @ShitBBCsays :).

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  10. Re: Neurovore's comment, never underestimate the failings of the human brain that lead to short-sighted thinking. It's a mental defect, the inability to see that seemingly simple things will have expensive or even disastrous long-term consequences. Seriously, lots of people's brains don't work that way.

    For many of us, it's natural to be able to see that forcing people to ignore routine health problems like diabetes or high blood pressure until they get so bad that they need an ER visit is going to result in extremely sick people with high bills. Bills that the hospital is going to eat most of. And the ill people are going to be damaged, less healthy, less economically productive. Even if you don't object to the immorality of that, it's uneconomic.

    But thinking that way requires adding 1 + 1 + 1 mentally. During several stints where I've been a nurse in psychiatric facilities, I've had to contemplate the way divergent people think. Not everyone can make the simple leap of logic Neurovore cites.

    Now it may be that the Corporate Lizard Overlord class knows that setting up a system that thwarts people from getting routine health care will destroy peoples' lives and reduce economic productivity. The CorpoLizoLords don't care if people die, just as long as they profit. But their Overlordiness rests on a base of average Schmoes. If those Schmoes all could see that the system was screwing them too, they might get restive enough to fuck shit up. Thankfully for the Lizardy Ones, there are enough people who can't do that 1 + 1 math in their heads, due to their mental function blinders. And so they system grinds on, grinding the little stupid people into the dirt.

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  11. We all die boy, we all die, you have a problem with that?

    BBC, I reckon I've seen more people die than you have, die right in front of me. Several times it's been while my hands were on their bodies, pumping away at CPR or listening to their last flickering heartbeats through my stethoscope. It's just that I don't take any spiteful pleasure from it. In your case, though, I will make an exception.

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  12. Bukko, you are so right. Our health care system is a joke.

    A relative of mine used to be an analyst at the GAO. He once told me that the USA spends more *tax* dollars on health care per capita than countries like Canada, France, etc where they cover everyone. Our system raises costs for everyone, including those on Medicaid and Medicare. And where are your tax dollars going? Into the deep pockets of big health care companies and especially pharmaceutical companies.

    That is the kicker. We could take an evidence based approach to medicine and cover *everyone* and it would SAVE us money.

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  13. He once told me that the USA spends more *tax* dollars on health care per capita than countries like Canada, France, etc where they cover everyone.

    On a scale of exchange-rate dollars, perhaps. But that's more a measure of international currency flows than of the real cost to a society. As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. is currently spending about 9% GDP in tax money on health care. France spends about 11% GDP in tax money on health care. So clearly the U.S. could have a French-style system (the French system is basically Medicare For All with Medi-Gap for things not covered by Medicare) with only a minimal hike in payroll taxes (3% split between employer and employee ought to do it), but that would imply caring about the health of the plebes, a notion that would only confuse our cold-blooded lizard people rulers (and far too many of the American people).

    - Badtux the Health Care Penguin

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  14. Yeah, I ain't exactly holding my breathe.

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  15. One thing that I do not understand is that our current healthcare "system" actually costs the government more money in the form of people ending up in the emergency room for relatively minor things or who cannot pay. Since there are many people who cannot afford proper preventative medicine, this means having to spend massive amounts of money on things that could have been staved off with a comparatively small medical procedure.

    Yes, but your problem is that you're thinking in terms of what will deliver the most good most effectively.

    If, instead, you see health-care as a moral issue, with the wrong sort of people getting punished by getting sick and dying, but the right sort of people ushered into the holy land of hospital care, it all makes perfect sense.

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