The Sunday Comics, Lightning Man Style!!!

As always, culled from various sources and sometimes even made by me!

Another stab at Health Care

A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog that might have been missed by my newer readers. The topic was this pending disaster called Socialized Medicine, or if you prefer, Obamacare. I even received a great comment from a practicing British dentist who told us to avoid socialized healthcare at all costs. That was pretty damning evidence indeed. When my lil’ ol’ blog gets read by a physician in Britain, and the good doctor agrees with me, I can’t be completely fulla crap now, can I?

See: http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/got-any-pliers.html

Now, a late-comer opted to leave me a comment that kinda got me ticked off, so I’m gonna pull the comment, and my reply, and use it to preface this post.

“Nrq” said:
I used to live in France and I love socialized health care. You don't have to worry if a doctor is in your "network," you don't have to wonder if giant bills for your "percentage" of the cost will come in the mail, doctors actually have time to talk to their patients, no one worries about whether they can afford the drugs or treatment they need. And the French are healthier, spend less on healthcare, and live longer than Americans - as do many Europeans. America pays more per capita on health care, receives less of it, and is less healthy than just about any industrialized country. We die younger, we have more heart attacks, we weigh more...Wake up America! Get off your fat asses and join the rest of the industrialized world!

God, how I wanted to just say that if you loved it so much, move the hell back.

However, I countered with:
I actually rather like my health insurance. Insurance is just that, insurance. You pay for it in the event you need it, just like with your car. Should we just get rid of car insurance too and have the government repair our cars when some asshole runs into it?

I'm in good health over all and have never worried about the cost of prescriptions for myself or my wife. In fact, her monthly scrip (which isn’t even done on our insurance) costs us four dollars, less than a fancy cup of French coffee. I had an elective procedure done 18 months ago that cost me a whopping 70 dollars instead of a thousand, it was over in 12 minutes, my pain meds were about $3.64 on my insurance, and I had the consult done WHEN I WANTED, not in weeks, and had the procedure scheduled and performed within a few DAYS, not months.

I'm not ready for some government lackey to decide whether or not I can have a procedure or even see a specialist.

According to http://www.marininstitute.org/alcohol_policy/french_drinking.htm , "France's rate of heart disease is actually similar to that of neighboring Italy, Spain, and southern Germany - lower than many countries in the world, but hardly as remarkable as reported in the '80s and early '90s.

The French drink one-and-a-half times more per capita than Americans and their death rate from liver cirrhosis is more than one-and-a-half times greater than that in the United States. According to WHO, France has the sixth highest adult per capita alcohol consumption in the world. (The U.S. ranks 32nd.) Alcohol may be involved in nearly half of the deaths from road accidents, half of all homicides, and one-quarter of suicides, according to the French equivalent of the U.S. Institutes of Health. And while coronary heart disease may be less pervasive in that country of 60 million people than in many others, it is still the number one cause of death. "

The London School of Economics reported in 2007 that "Previously ranked by WHO as the best performer, the French health system is not without problems. It has traditionally operated with little regard to efficiency or cost containment. It has the highest rate of pharmaceutical use in the EU, while, until recently at least, there has been little attempt to incorporate cost effectiveness into policy making."

And the French chain smoke like bonfires…



To my previous comments, I add this:
Britain's National Health Service is paid for out of a social security tax. Services are free at the point of provision. No co-pay, no reimbursement. They operate on a budget of about £90 billion (about $148 billion). That makes the average cost per person about £1,500 ($2,463).

The NHS is big HUGE. With 1.5 million employees it is one of the largest employers in the world. Only China's People's Liberation Army, India's state railways and good old Wal-Mart employ more folks. Sixty percent of the NHS budget goes toward salaries, leaving only 40% of the money to go to actual treatments. Those salaries aren’t just for the doctors and nurses. That pays for all the administrative and executive wonks too. So, even though I live in mathematically-challenged America, I can see that less than half of the money goes to the patients.

The French system is run on a compulsory purchase of insurance through the workplace. The insurance cost is based on how much a worker earns. Low-income workers pay nothing. The average contribution per person is about $4,000. The government sets fees for services and negotiates the price of drugs with pharmaceutical companies. That’s doublespeak for “we take money out of your check whether you want us to or not in order to pay for what you think is insurance but is actually socialized medicine”.

Service is not free at the point of provision. But reimbursement for costs is swift and in the case of catastrophic illness all fees are waived. People are free to purchase supplementary insurance from private companies.

With a compulsory insurance plan, as in France, German care is universal and equitable. Germans pay approximately 14.3 percent of their earnings to buy this insurance. As in France, people are free to buy supplementary private health insurance.

I personally pay about $4,000+/- a year for my health insurance. However, that’s for both my wife and me. The money comes out of my check, and her check goes untouched. In France or Germany, we’d each be paying that money out; in essence the health care coverage would cost us twice as much for what comes out to be far less care and coverage.

Less coverage? Yup.

Some facts I borrowed from a report in an article by Scott Atlas for The National Center For Policy Analysis and brought to my attention by Greg Knapp on The Schnitt Show:

Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.
Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.
Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.

Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.
Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit from them are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians
Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate and colon cancer:
•Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
•Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a pap smear, compared to less than 90 percent of Canadians.
•More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a PSA test, compared to less than 1 in 6 Canadians (16 percent).
•Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with less than 1 in 20 Canadians (5 percent).


Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K.
Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long - sometimes more than a year - to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K.
Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade. The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.

Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.
The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single developed country. Since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.

At a recent “town-hall meeting” (Democrat-speak for Obama Socialist Rally full of jackboot thugs), nearly a hundred doctors showed up to voice their disapproval of socialized healthcare. These weren’t angry crackpots, as the Left likes to label us, but rater educated professional physicians who wanted to voice their opposition to this crapfest, a right guaranteed as Americans.

The doctors who have to implement this bullshit don’t want any part of it.

What in he HELL is this CRAP?


Let’s try instead to overhaul the current insurance systems, no? I mean, out of that 4 grand I drop every year to be insured, I admittedly use virtually none of it. I’ve been to a doc 5 times in the 4 years I’ve been under this insurance plan. Two office visits and an ultrasound of my gall bladder, and then two other visits a year later to the specialist who did a procedure on me. My wife uses it more than me and goes to a doc maybe 3 times a year. It would actually be cheaper to pay outta pocket for as little we use it, but then what if something happens? My co-worker had a heart attack last October, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, and after the insurance paid out he still owed close to 12 grand. I dunno about you, but I ain’t got a spare 12 grand sitting in a coffee can buried in the yard. So, even though I have far better uses for four thousand dollars a year, it’s better to have & not need than to need & not have.

And furthermore…if socialized medicine in Europe is so freakin’ great, why are they all running shit-scared over the swine flu? They have people with runny noses jamming up the 911 (or rather 999) systems like it was Armageddon-meets-Outbreak, when we’re living normal lives and not in a panic.

So, in closing, here’s a plan for you:
Get thee over to this website (http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3200/text) and copy the entire shitty House bill on healthcare, and post it in an email to Obama’s Gestapo spies at flag@whitehouse.gov . Maybe that way someone will actually read the effing bill. If not, maybe the spam will shut the thing down. WARNING—do not become a member of opencongress.org, as it is a governmental site that wants all your personal information. It won’t let you participate in the opinion poll unless you register, and that sucks, but of the people that have registered, only 13% are in favor of the bill, and THAT is also some damning evidence that this bill sucks.

Got any pliers?

We begin our adventure at 1915 Hours Eastern, 23 July 2009……

Okay…it’s T-minus 45 minutes and counting until once again my television viewing is interrupted and curtailed by an address from The Messiah, His Obamaness. This week’s interruption is so we can all be lied to about Health Care, or at least fed enough mushroom food (i.e. bullshit) to keep everyone appeased until it’s too late. It was slated to be a 9:00 PM address, but it was moved forward so that NBC can air its interview with Susan Boyle. Moving a healthcare reform speech from a jumped-up community organizer in favor of a frumpy Scottish woman who sang her way to stardom on “Britain’s Got Talent”…this country seriously has some ate-up priorities.

The basic crux of things (and admittedly I have done very little homework on this because it’d drive me batshit to read all the articles) is that we are looking very shortly at being forced into “free” government healthcare. That, my friends, is Bad Medicine.

Why? Well, the glaring question when it comes to Free Healthcare is of course: who the hell is gonna pay for it and how?

The answer is simple. You & me. The American Taxpayers. We’ll pay for it by getting jacked by the Feral Gummint™ into paying higher taxes. And then we’ll pay by receiving shitty healthcare.

What’s that, you say? This is America, Steve; how can we get shitty care from the greatest healthcare system of doctors and other medical professionals in the galaxy?

Because, friends, you get what you pay for. When you ain’t paying for it, you tend to get crap.

Wait…let me clarify. Generally, when you pay a bit more for quality, in general quality is what you get. And when you buy cheap shit at the Dollar Store, you’re getting some cheap trinket painted in lead-based Chinese paint that’ll break in a week.

In other countries where socialized medicine has been the norm for many moons, the quality of care kinda, well, sucks ass. And that’s what awaits us: Generalized Suck-Assedness. Why do you think that everyone who can afford to COMES HERE for treatments?

Wake the hell up and smell the Oxycontin, America. Why the hell do you never really hear about people packing their shit and leaving America for heart treatments overseas, or cancer treatments overseas, or brain surgery or reconstructive plastic surgery or to have 600-pound tumors removed or giant hemangeomas removed? That’s because we have the best here, and other places have Generalized Suck-Assedness.

Why do so many Canadians hop the border and pay for treatment here out of their own pockets rather than stay at home? Because Canadian facilities either suck, or you’re waiting weeks/months for a doctor visit. I have family in Toronto that have run down to Buffalo rather than wait. For many years the Fraser Institute in Canada has published a list of waiting times in the various Canadian provinces based on the care needed. In some cases the wait can last for months.

The problem with socialized government-controlled healthcare is that you have no real say-so in anything. Some governmental bureaucratic wonk will decide by committee whether or not you need an MRI or need to see a specialist or if you’re sick enough to have a surgery. Doctors will have a certain number of patients that they’ll be allowed to see on quota and after that, well, then “Screw the next patient because I can’t see any more no matter how sick they are”….


Over in Jolly Olde England, the headlines concerning the National Health Service (NHS) scare the shit out of me:

FROM LONDON'S DAILY MAIL, June 2008: “Twice Katie asked for a Pap smear test, but was told she was "too young" to need one. Now 24, she is dying from cervical cancer…”

FROM THE YORKSHIRE POST, March 2008: “A man with terminal cancer has been refused a drug by the NHS that could extend his life, despite offering to pay part of the cost himself. ... David Swain's offer to meet the monthly £2,000 cost of Erbitux was refused, he said, because the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence ruled it was too expensive.” (Well, that comes out to be $3294 a month; a bit steep admittedly, but the dude was gonna pay for it. However, they said "Go ahead and die)

FROM THE TIMES OF LONDON, March 2008: “Health service dentists have been forced to go on holiday or spend time on the golf course this month despite millions of patients being denied dental care. ... Many have fulfilled their annual work quotas allotted by the National Health Service and have been turning patients away because they are not paid to do extra work. This is despite the fact that more than 7 million people in Britain are unable to find an NHS dentist.”

Indeed, The Times of London ran a story in 2006 asserting: “Patients are being denied appointments with consultants in a systematic attempt to ration care and save the NHS money, The Times has learnt. . . . Leaked documents passed to The Times show that while ministers promise patients choice, a series of barriers are being erected limiting GPs’ [general practitioners] rights to refer people to consultants.”

FROM LONDON'S DAILY MAIL, July 2009: “Thousands of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers face a lifetime of agony because they are not being treated quickly enough, a report says. Guidelines state that patients should receive treatment within three months of the first symptoms appearing. But the average wait is nine months - and GP’s are not trained well enough to know what help to offer.”

Back in February of this year came the story of 42-year old Iraqi War vet Ian Boynton who asked more than two dozen dentists in East Yorkshire to take care of his teeth, which were causing him severe pain. But since he couldn't provide private insurance, he was turned down, he said. Instead, the former British Army medic removed a tooth with a pair of pliers in 2006, and eventually removed 13 of his own teeth inside of two years. The dude couldn’t find any local dentists who wanted to take on any new patients with the government health insurance and he had no other form of insurance, so he took matters into his own hands.

Ian Boynton and his Magical British Smile. Dude is 42 but looks 72. Gotta love free healthcare!


British dentistry has long been the butt of jokes. Here in the States, dentists generally recommend that you get at least a cleaning every six months, and a full exam in addition at least once a year. Most private insurance carriers, including mine, are cool with that. Over in Dear Olde Blighty, the NHS guidelines call for a checkup every two years and they find it almost absurd that a dentist would want to see you that often, calling it “exploitive”. (http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/health/1815032/Steve-needed-198-of-dental-work-so-why-was-he-charged-more.html)

They tried to make me brush with flouride but I said No No No...


Recently Dave Gahan, the singer for my favorite band, Depeche Mode, came down sick with gastroenteritis in Greece on tour and they had to cancel some shows. Dave is an English citizen living in L.A., but rather than go back to the UK for some free healthcare, he didn’t even stay in Europe. He flew back to his well-paid doctor in the U.S. of A., where in addition to the gastroenteritis his docs found and removed a malignant tumor in his bladder.

Look, in countries with socialized medicine, you’re waiting days to weeks to get an appointment, and weeks to months for treatments if you even get approved. And then you’ll get your illegal immigrants or transients who drain the system even farther.

Does that sound like your idea of a great health-care system? The British press — as well as the media in other countries with socialized medicine — regularly runs stories about patients who are denied treatment because they are too old or too young or too sick or just too costly. Do you want some government hack determining whether or not you get a referral to a specialist, or a second opnion, or an? expensive test? Or if you’re really sick enough to get your gall bladder out now or two months from now?

Granted, our health care system here isn’t perfect. Each week I watch 15% of my paycheck get swallowed by insurance premiums. I very very seldom use my insurance, but I gotta have it, just in case. It was quite handy when I had my vasectomy last year, a procedure that cost me only $70 out of pocket instead of a grand. But each year my premiums go up, oddly enough at the same rate as my annual pay raise. What the fuck is THAT all about? I never actually see my pay raise because the extra ducats just go to Blue Cross.

Try pricing out an ambulance ride. In looking around the web, I read where one patient was charged $6200 for a 110-mile ambulance trip. Another source said that the average trip was about $645. Hell, if you need a helicopter medevac flight, you’re looking at a good $50,000 or so. An aspirin that costs me $4 a bottle at WalMart for 24 pills costs you like $16 a pill in the hospital. My mother in law paid $13,000 for her gall bladder surgery a couple years back. Her husband is a self-employed trucker so without insurance, it was a major devastating expense. But they cut her a break; if she’d had insurance the carrier would have been billed over $15,000.

We’d be better served to reform the healthcare system as it exists today rather than gutting it putting us all on the Gubmint Tit™. Sure, The Messiah can say all he wants that we’ll all still be able to choose to have our own private insurance if our employers provide it, or we can use the government’s…but face the facts.


In today’s shitty economy, where everyone is cutting employees and cutting wages and cutting benefits, how many semi-scrupulous employers are gonna say “Hey, why should we offer up insurance when you can get it free off the government?”, and just up and eliminate the expense of offering insurance? Trust me, kids, it’s gonna happen.


Fast-forward to 2138 Hours Eastern on 24 July.

No, I did not watch the speech last night. Why watch bullshit when I could watch something better, like “Rescue Me” on FX?

However, my buddy Guest Blogger Chris offered up this recap when I asked him via text message what I missed:

“OK, in a nutshell: I am the best; healthcare is good; immigrants good, U.S. bad; we’re sorry; blah blah blah ad nauseum. Rinse, lather, repeat.”

*sigh* seems I didn’t miss shit last night.


The government can’t bugger it up too badly, can it? I mean, it’s gotta be just like running the DMV, right? That’s always a pleasurable experience. They do great with the postal service. I mean, they only raise the rates every three months or so. And folks is just lining up to get on Amtrak. My local train station in North Charleston looks like Beirut circa 1984.

Yeah. Can’t wait to have this big, open-faced turd sandwich stuffed down our throats. It’s coming. It’s inevitable, just like it’s a shoe-in that Her Wise Latinaness will ooze her Jabba the Hutt-looking ass onto the Supreme Court. They own the House. They own the Senate. They own the Oval Orifice. Soon they’ll own the Supreme Court.

And you know what we’ll own?

The fucking bill.


Someone should bring the Wise Latina Solo & the Wookie...