Health Care: Part I

For the next few weeks I'll be posting on the Health Care Bill that recently passed both Houses and landed on the President's desk. I'm trying to understand exactly what happened, therefore I've decided (under some urging) to do some research and interpret the information back into words. This will be disorganized, chaotic, meandering and full of opinion and my flaws. I make no apologies and I have no real opinion on the matter - I'm far too ignorant. So if at a certain point in these following posts I seem leaning to one corner, I apologize. Hang tight and I'm quite sure in the next post I'll be viewing things from a different perspective.

Part I

Despite the health care debate monopolizing much of the airwaves for the past eight months and every media outlet having numerous opinions on its effects, I’m still confused as hell. I feel like I just woke up in an alley with blood on my jeans, no shoes and wearing someone stranger’s toupee – what the hell just happened and how is this going to change my life?

I’m not smart; I’m not that well-informed; I’m not a doctor and I can barely count to ten let alone calculate budgetary estimations, but when has an inherent deficiency ever stopped me from playing the expert before? So in the next few posts I’m going to try and make sense of the health care reform, sifting through the partisanship surrounding it and what exactly it means for us.


First off I think it’d be necessary to look at the health care system prior to this bill, focusing in particular on the twin monstrosities of Medicaid and Medicare, as well as the state of the uninsured in America. This is essential to understand the Bill just signed into law by Obama and the political turmoil surrounding it. It will also do a lot to deflate the sentiment that the Federal Government should keep their hands out of the public health sector – a sentiment in my opinion that is ridiculous considering our history (you’ll see what I mean).


Brief History of the Federal Government’s sticky hand in Health Care:

Think of the most badass President – be quick. Don’t wait. Just blurt it out! If you said Jimmy Carter, you’re a dumb ass; if you said Ronald Reagan, you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid; if you said Truman or Ike, I’ll let it slide but you’re still wrong. The correct answer and most badass Prez by far is Teddy Roosevelt. In a full-on death match, I’d take TR against a tiger.

And it’s surprising to note that this mustachioed man-bear of a President campaigned under the Bull Moose Party for health care way back in 1912. That’s right, in between hunting big game and getting shot TR was a proponent of social welfare. TR lost his presidential crusade in ’12 to the sniveling douche bag Woodrow Wilson, but the notion of universal health care was far from lost.

Labor Unions and Consolidated groups of the elderly have consistently pushed the Federal and State governments to guarantee health care for their members, trying a variety of shared-cost initiatives throughout the years. Much of these initiatives fell flat, primarily due to lack of a concerted effort by reformers and the opposition by special interests groups (sounds familiar). Despite the laudatory efforts of reformers, the fact that beer became outlawed during this era makes the entire Progressive Movement the work of a bunch of teetotaler in my opinion. The fact that health care reformists were not connected with abolitionists means nothing to me – I’ve never been restricted by facts or common sense.

On a side note, it was right around this time that the opponents of government run health care came up with the notion of “socialized medicine”; it’s important to remember that this was during an era of intense backlash against anything seen as socialist or the even more vile communist (Look up Palmer Raids in your free time). Anything connected with “Socialism” was anathema to most Americans.

Next Post:

The Great Depression to Medicaid

Factors of Twelve

I don't carry much most days. Wallets are even too cumbersome for me - I travel light, staying spry. Though, one thing I always try and remember is a notebook and a pen - always a pen, what good is a forest of paper without the tool with which to inscribe? It's like having a naked, riving woman beneath you and no erection.

But just as important is a tablet. I have a long history with pocket sized pads, from the much-touted moleskin of Hemingway to thick, ornately designed paperblanks. I've washed words, lost to a garbled wad of lint; lost them in drunken, hazy evenings, some turn up, some are gone for good. Some sit besides my bed, glimpses of who I was, where my mind swirled.

Reading an entry from this month:


I am not made the same as them
Perhaps I am a metric
Broken into tenths
While they divide into twelfths
A dozen divides separate us

We are not there
Time is not lost
A stand still
Do they know?

They do not.

I ain't no monkey but I know what I like

there is nothing fake about this song
stripped of its pretension
expectations kicked aside
it is
sunlight through tree limbs,
a warm cup of coffee,
morning in the warm embrace of your bed.
it is all that is right
all that is good
with none of the take.

To know

I'm a man of mercurial tastes and fancies. Ideas slip in and out of my head like clouds skirting across a Buffalo sky. Plans are formed and discarded, convictions flame and burn in a moments time. Sometimes I feel like I need to escape to the farthest reaches of the globe, at others, to surround myself with those that I love. A future in the army, faced with certain death, all in an effort to experience the absolute certainty that comes with such an environment. To search out a grounding love, filled with the unnamed moments that stir the soul. All options I've considered in less than 7 days.

I worry that this is a trait that I will forever carry. It's not exactly a feeling that something is perpetually missing or a 'grass is greener' syndrome. More of a resistance to complacency. Does this make me constantly unhappy and unfulfilled? I think not, but then again, these thoughts will change again before this beer is finished.

Ah, such is life. Such is the soul I have created for myself. Such is...

Landslide

As I drove to work this morning Fleetwood Mac's hit Landslide came on the radio. Stevie Nick's acknowledgment, "I'm getting older too," resonated in the truck cabin, the melancholy way she accepeted it, like a love that is over.

"I'm getting older too." It's the mantra of the schizophrenic age in which I find myself; over a quarter century old, caught between twin impulses. - to settle down, find stability and start a family, or flee, run, seek out the new and mysterious.

I sat at my desk and twin monitors stared back. Reports, quotes, orders, specs, configurations, skus blinked by. Each voice on the phone anxious, convinced their deal was of the utmost importance. I was struck with the absurdity of it all. Of the neatly lined hushed rows of souls transfixed by computers, locked to the phones. Could anything be as inconsequential?

It's not that I'm unhappy. It's the lack of anything significant - the feeling that days tick by and no movement is made, no hills conquered, no love burning.

I've had brief encounters with love and lust over the past two years. A fluttering of feelings quickly scorched to ash. Vagueness. I experienced a hint of something real that fizzled with inaction, miscommunication, and stupidity. It ended with her boarding a red-eye flight to Australia, someone else's kiss on her lips, while I sat at home and smoked another bowl while Townes Van Zandt played in my head.

I don't know if I'm propelled by the desire to flee what it is that I've created or simply to accept Fate's invitation for something new.

Life is plagued/blessed by dualism everywhere - so why not both?