This Will Hurt A Bit

It seems you can't fart these days without someone passing comment on the great US healthcare debate. There are clearly two sides to this issue and I have to say, as a dispassionate observer, that they both appear to be fucking clueless. Now I say this having lived for many years under the UK national health care system (the NHS) as well as the US system. Let me summarize the difference for the hard of thinking:

In the UK everyone has access to healthcare but it's pretty crap, so many employers offer supplementary private insurance as a benefit; in the US the healthcare system is great if you're insured but you're buggered if you're not. The merit of the UK system, at least as far as consumers are concerned, is that should you ever need urgent care you'll get good treatment and won't have medical bills bankrupt you. The downside is that for the less urgent stuff you might be waiting a while. Oh, and you might die in hospital from a MRSA or C-Diff. infection.

I clearly remember on the few occasions I went to my primary care physician (GP) in the UK the advice was always "Take two aspirin and come back in a week if it's no better". Didn't matter what was wrong with me - sore throat, broken bone, strange skin disease - it was always two aspirin and come back in a week. I was brought up on the "Don't Go Unless You Need To" philosophy, so by the time I'd decided to go I would have waited a week and taken loads of aspirin, but that didn't matter. I still had to wait another week and then come back again. And in the meantime I'd probably come down with something else, contracted from the dozens of wheezy, infected, spluttering bastards who clog up waiting rooms in the UK. The NHS worked on the principle of attrition - care was rationed according to your willingess to put up with their shit.

Contrast this with the US: here parents take their whiny brats to the doctor for every tiny fucking thing. Kid's got a temperature: let's go to the doctor. Kid fell over: let's go to the doctor. Kid threw up: let's go to the doctor. Kid threw up twice: let's go straight to the emergency room for IV fluids. I puked my ring up for two days solid in the UK and my mum never took me to the fucking emergency room, but here I've lost count of the number of times I've heard about IV fluids for some kid who just had a bug.

And this is perhaps the crux of the whole debate: if something is free, people will use it like crazy. Without some disincentive (and in the UK it's crap service) people trot along to the doctor for every little thing. Now combine this with the other bane of the medical world - litigation. In the US juries of tiny-minded halfwits will throw out multi-million dollar sympathy verdicts to just about anyone who ended up in bad shape, never mind if medical science had a hand in it or not; someone has to pay, and it's only a faceless insurance company, right? So doctors practice defensive medicine, ordering endless tests, and insurance pays for them so the consumer doesn't mind. The hidden costs of all this waste get rolled into health insurance premiums; employers get stung every year for increases and private buyers are priced out of the market completely.

Here's the problem: if you want to have limitless, unrationed healthcare for all it will bankrupt the country. The cost of healthcare in the UK is astronomical, and it rises every year out of all proportion to the cost of living. It's the largest drain on the UK treasury and it's out of control. If the whole US population starts showing up at their doctor for a sore throat and ordering MRIs for a stiff knee it won't matter what the world economy does, the resulting tax rate on income will stifle growth like a stranglehold and the dollar will sink like a stone with the massive borrowing.

So where's the middle ground? How do you have a safety net so that people can get treatment if they fall badly ill, while not creating a sudden and massive new "entitlement" that everyone else has to pay for. Because you know damn well that what starts out as "Don't Let Poor Cancer Patients Suffer Without Morphine" will soon become "Gastric Bands For Fat Fuckers, Transgender Surgery, Breast Enhancement, Hair Removal, Fertility Treatment, Boner Pills, Insemination For Lesbians and New Livers For Alcoholics are a right for all".

This is where the wankers on the right, like that mental pygmy Sarah Palin, have it wrong. If you want to provide the maximum benefit to society as a whole (a humanist perspective that I kind of like) you have to ration healthcare. This means that not every operation should be performed, not every life should be extended and not every condition should be treated as a right. You have fertility issues? I sympathize. Now save up for treatment or have your insurance pay if you're lucky - we're not short of babies in this world and the population is exploding; your problem does not equal my obligation to help pay for it. A safety net health service should be just that - for serious health problems, not lifestyle issues. Think that's harsh? It's just practical common sense, a commodity which appears to be in very short supply on either side of this debate.

Republicans seem to want limitless healthcare, but only for people with insurance; Democrats want limitless healthcare but have no fucking clue how to pay for it. And neither side should, under any circumstances, be trusted to set up a national healthcare system. Let's face it, Congress couldn't run a lemonade stand. Not without running up a million dollars in debt to lemon suppliers, failing to deliver any actual lemonade and pocketing half a million in campaign contributions from the lemon industry.

One thing of which you can be very sure: neither the left or the right has YOUR interests at heart. If the Democrats wanted to fix healthcare the first thing they'd do would be remove the massive cost imposed by meritless litigation, but to do so would hurt their friends in the tort industry (trial lawyers) who bankroll their campaigns with donations, so it doesn't matter what is in your interest, it will never happen. If the Republicans wanted to fix healthcare they would insist that the prices offered by hospitals to large insurance companies are the same prices you and I would pay if we bought the procedure ourselves (rather than the poorest users having to pay the highest prices). Fair and equal pricing is not a new principle in business - that's why we have the Robinson-Patman Act. And the religious right would have to grow up and realize that at some point we need to stop extending worthless life so that we can do real and practical good for more people.

At this point I'd make some comment on the Obama "plan" but he doesn't actually have a plan. Most of the details are "to be defined later" meaning that no-one figured it out yet (or, possibly, that it's figured out but the public would shit a piano if they knew the facts). In the meantime all I know is that the current system is fucked, the new system will be worse, it will cost a fortune, benefit everyone but the working taxpayer and be larded with right-on new lifestyle entitlements that the rest of us will have to bankroll. Just see if I'm wrong.


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Walk Or Ride?

I've spent a fair amount of the last week meeting people for lunch or dinner, all in the noble cause of "networking". The venue has varied, according to where the other party is driving from and what we feel like eating, but it's amazingly easy to eat a lot of crap in a week. Sure, I tend to go for sushi a fair bit, and I'd happily eat it every day, but there are a couple of problems. Firstly, there are some people who can't get their minds around raw fish or, indeed, anything that doesn't come with fries. And secondly, sushi comes in unsatisfyingly small portions or, if eaten in decent quantity, is ruinously expensive.

It's easy to see how people can pile on the pounds eating out. There are some very nice restaurants around, but if you want "convenient and reasonably priced" in this area then you end up with a lot of chain restaurants, where the emphasis is on heavy, carb-and-fat dishes, bread, fries, glutinous salad dressings, pizza, pasta and batter. You could blame the restaurants for offering all this shit, but they're not stupid - they sell what people want to buy. At the end of the day, unless you're getting your meals through a tube, you're directly responsible for what you put in your stomach.

Look, I've got nothing against fat people per se ("some of my best friends are fat") but there are degrees of lardiness. Most of us are technically overweight, and are none the worse for it; obsessive food nazis and nutrition weenies can fuck right off - if you want a piece of cake you should have it. But there has to come a point where you figure that you crossed the line. Different people might draw the line in different places - for some of us it might be a pant size, or being able to run after your kids without a sharp pain in your chest, a bright light and the voices of dead relatives in your ears, but regardless of this I'd hope that we could all agree that once you can no longer walk, you should step away from the buffet line and sort your fucking life out.

So why is it that WalMart is so infested with obese fuckers on mobility scooters? Surely the last people who should be riding around on their arses are those fat wankers who can't walk anymore. This is nature's way of telling you that you should eat less and GET SOME FUCKING EXERCISE. Rather than pander to their self-inflicted flabbiness and lazy self-indulgence, perhaps we'd be better off if society expected them to get off their fucking backside and walk to the cheesecake aisle.

Don't give me any of that whiny crap about glands, or heredity, or "I tried dieting". I don't want to hear about how it's not their fault - of course it is. At some point on the path between eight pound baby and six hundred pound bloated lardarse, surely you considered cutting back on the donuts, or maybe going for the occasional walk? No-one did this to you; you were free to slow down at any point. You CANNOT get to be that big without MASSIVE overeating.

But no, society doesn't just fail to criticize, it has become a blatant enabler of this gross over-consumption. Not only do we accept that fat bastards can now ride through a supermarket, we also classify obesity as a disability, and employment legislation can be used to force companies to buy scooters just so their fatarse employees can ride around instead of doing their job properly. If you want to know why America keeps getting lardier, how about the fact that enabling lardiness has become government policy; I'm only surprised that the stimulus package doesn't have a special donut credit for anyone over three hundred pounds.

Maybe it would help if fast-food chains were forced to use someone other than skinny teenagers in their commercials. How about the next time Pizza Hut advertises its foot-long, one pound, pizza dough, cheese and meat P'Zone, the person chowing down on it is a four hundred pound balding man with an oxygen tank to assist with his breathing? Or the woman buying the P'Zone rides away from the counter on her mobility scooter? Yeah right.


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Vertical Challenge

Apparently one of the things you have to do as an unemployed person is have networking meetings, where you attempt to make a good impression with someone who is in a position to introduce you to other people, one of whom might be willing to offer you a job. This makes good sense, at least in principle, so today I found myself driving to such a meeting. Obviously the "make a good impression" part is kind of important - if you're going to come across as feckless, irresponsible twat I would imagine you'd be better off staying at home.

So, step one in the making a good impression stakes is showing up on time. I once had a boss whose motto was "five minutes early is ten minutes late", and while I thought the axiom was a bit wanky I do agree that allowing a bit of extra time for the unforeseen is a good plan. I also believe in making sure you know where you're going, and where you'll park when you get there: in this case no problem since the parking lot was underneath the building where I was meeting.

So all went according to plan and I pulled up outside the building in my (coincidentally freshly washed and surprisingly shiny) truck. That's when I noticed the sign on the ramp down to the parking lot that said "No full size trucks or vans", along with a height limit of 5'9". Being unfamiliar with that part of town I had no idea how long it would take me to find somewhere else to park, how far away it would be, whether I would be on a meter that would expire (resulting in tow away), or how much of a sweaty bastard I would be having hiked six blocks back in the summer heat. I watched two mid-size SUVs drive down into the parking lot and decided, on the basis of no calculation whatsoever, that I would chance the height limit. After all, I could see where the roof line was and it didn't seem that tight to me.

I drove down the ramp and turned to begin looking for a space. Oh fucking hell. Above me was not a simple roof but a maze of hanging pipes, beams and rafters that seemed to be about an inch above the top of my truck. Something snagged my aerial and twanged it back. All the spaces on that level were occupied and so I drove around very slowly, now wondering if at any moment something was going to pierce the top of the cab and peel it back like a large sardine can. It also occurred to me that this would be a great introduction: "Good morning, I'm here to see Reginald Arbuthnot. Oh, and I just got my truck wedged immovably in your car park, so no-one's going home tonight. Is that a problem?"

As I turned the corner in the car park the floor began to slope down to the lower level, temporarily opening up some headroom, but at the bottom it bore down on me again, only this time even closer; I got out to check if I had any room - there were literally a few inches at that point, but it was impossible to tell if any of the pipes or other hanging impediments would pierce the top of the truck further down. But What was I going to do? Back up a full-size pick-up? There were already people behind me, driving regular cars, unconcerned with the risk of roof removal and obviously wishing I would drive faster. Faster? Fuck, I could end up in the very first GMC Sierra cabriolet.

About fifty yards further on I found a spot and managed to back into it. I could have used a small scotch to recover but I doubt that gives a good first impression either. "It's 9am and he smells like he just got off a park bench after necking a bottle of supermarket own-brand whisky." After the meeting I retraced my route, at least with some hope that I could exit the parking garage damage-free, but the exit was on the other side, necessitating the negotiation of a new stretch of hanging pipework, and more aerial twanging.

Eventually I got out in one piece and went home. When I got out of the truck I couldn't help noticing that it was about as tall as I am. That's 6'2". And when I checked the specs for the thing the height was confirmed at 74". In other words "Nowhere near 5'9", you dumb shit."

Effective job hunting is all about emphasizing your strengths. I'm going to point out in future that I'm "a bold decision maker, comfortable taking risks and not afraid to challenge perceived limitations". And I'll take Mrs Bison's car next time. And I'm going to have that scotch now.


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Can I Have A Free Car?

So the "Cash For Clunkers" money has run out, and members of Congress are running around like headless chickens trying to get more of this "stimulus" money to give away. But before they do, it would be nice if they thought a bit about where this money comes from.

Lesson One: It doesn't grow on trees, fuckwads. All that cash you're giving away in the name of "stimulus" has to be earned by the rest of us and paid in taxes. (I say "has to" rather than "was" because the US Congress is addicted to spending money it hasn't collected, putting off the day when someone somewhere has to cough up.)

Lesson Two: If you designed a program to create 250,000 new sales, surely you should be happy that it succeeded, and move on. Just because more people out there want free cash (there's a novel concept) doesn't mean that you should give it to them. If it was such a good idea for more people to get a handout, why didn't you design the program that way in the first place? This just smacks of opportunistic politics from people who just LOVE to give away other people's money, so long as it buys them popularity.

So 250,000 vehicles at $4,500 a time means $1.1 billion in cash given away like candy. Hey, I'd like some of that cash please! On what basis did the twats in Congress decide that those people with the most worthless, crappy cars should get free money from the rest of us? Socialism, that's what. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." This is the very antithesis of the American way, the philosophy whereby you work for what you want, rather than getting it via redistribution from other people.

If you really wanted to get 250,000 extra cars sold, why not give the money to anyone? Why only target the shittest cars? I imagine the idea is that at that end of the car-buying spectrum the people involved would otherwise buy pre-owned cars, so now you get them to buy new. On the other hand, the free cash from the government helps the car industry sell cars at higher prices than they would otherwise have to: without the extra handout they would simply have to increase the amount of incentives to get regular people to buy. So in that respect this is as much a handout of a billion dollars to the auto industry as it is to people who own ultra-shitty cars. And no-one has had their hand deeper in our pockets than the auto industry, so this represents yet another Socialist propping up of a weak industry that has been hijacked by unions.

Don't get sidetracked by the hype about getting gas guzzlers off the road - this is pure gesture politics, to dress up for the green lobby what is just another handout to the auto industry. What's so special about that sector of the economy? You could just as easily have pumped a billion into some other part of the US manufacturing economy (what's left of it) and spurred demand there.

Bottom line is that I'd find it a refreshing change if some of the relentless taxation found its way back to the people who paid the taxes, rather than continually being siphoned off as free cash to people who didn't earn it. Every dollar the government gives away has to be earned by us, and the interest burden has to be carried by us, just so fat wankers in Congress can play fucking Santa Claus and buy votes for next time around among people who aren't paying the bill.

Breakfast Sausage

It's a week now since I returned from vacation in Oregon, and the joy of falling asleep to the sound of the sea has been replaced by the irritation of trying to sleep under a ceiling fan that whines if you run it in one direction and clicks if you try the other. Piece of shit.

It was a good holiday, meaning that there was no planning, no list of things we had to do or see, and lots of relaxing. We also ate a lot of good holiday food, including a few cooked breakfasts; there really is nothing quite like bacon and eggs in the morning. Sucks to be a vegetarian, because, let me tell you, fried tofu is not going to get the job done. Sorry. Strips of dead fatty pig, with eggs, fried bread, mushrooms and sausages. Only thing missing was the black pudding and HP sauce.

We ate most morning and evening meals in the house we'd rented, which had a great booth-style table which looked out over a neighbor's garden, towards the sea. And almost without fail the neighbor's overweight labrador would amble down into the garden and take a massive shit in front of us just as we were sitting down to eat. Didn't matter if we ate early or late, the fucking thing adjusted its schedule so that it could curl down its load for us, twice a day.

Down on the sandy beach there were a few families clustered where the steps descended from the road, and quite a few surfers. The beach was blocked off at that end by a rocky point but in the other direction it curved round to a distant lighthouse. We walked along the beach one day, doing pennance for a pizza and some mint Oreos, I think. The tide was in so you could only walk about a mile, to a stretch where the tide washed right up against the sandy cliff above which was the main road. At that point there was also a stream running down to the sea, under a bridge which carried the road. Obviously there was some kind of campsite up there because, in contrast to the completely empty stretch of beach we had just walked, there were more than a hundred people clustered around this stream.

I can remember as a kid how we'd go to the beach, and no sooner had we got on it than I'd want to get out my bucket and spade, or go in the sea. My old man would insist that we walked further along the beach, to where the people thinned out a bit (they never thin out that much in the UK - fucking people everywhere), and it would irritate me, because I was a kid and I just wanted to play. Now.

So it bothered me that here were maybe two hundred people all stuck together in one of the least attractive parts of the beach (road noise overhead, rocky stream, no dunes, trees or scenery) all practically falling over each other as they staked out their tiny piece of sand. There were several blokes trying to fly kites over the heads of other people (without much luck), and absolutely no-one was in the slightest bit inclined to walk a few hundred yards along the beach to have a space to themselves, with driftwood logs to sit on and clean sand.

And they were fat. Not all of them, but for the most part they were chunky bastards, and there were a fair number of absolute bloaters - you know, the kind of people who should have been walking along the beach, or just walking anywhere (other than a donut store). Fat families with grossly overweight kids, all piled together because they couldn't be bothered to walk a few yards further down the beach where it was deserted for a distance of about a mile. What the fuck makes people do that? I mean, it was great that they couldn't be bothered to walk, because we had a mile of beach to ourselves, but there had to be something wrong with them.

In many respects they reminded me of the labrador. I'm sure each day they walked down to the same piece of beach, turned around a few times and just sat down. I guess I should be grateful that they didn't actually take a shit there. Now that would have put me right off my breakfast...


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison