Springs To Mind

Rain and hail on the third day of spring with temperatures falling twenty plus degrees in a few hours behind winds that define male shrinkage blues. It's all good inside, though. I'm still healthy. I am a little shaken (not stirred) after reading my monthly AARP magazine about Superbugs.

Superbugs is not a new alt-metal band, but deadly new bacterial diseases that resist anti-biotics and kill 90,000 patients a year right here in the good old USA. We have twenty times more people die in hospitals and clinics yearly from staphloccocus strains(notably MRSA) and clostridium difficile than the US has lost during our nation's entire time in Iraq.

This past week we saw President Obama go on the talk show circuit to pitch his stimulus package efforts and the new bazillion dollar budget. Of course, his off-the-cuff self-deprecating comment on the Jay Leno set regarding the Prez's bowling skills being the equivelent of a special olympics achievement was what the speaking tour will be remembered for. The opposition party hates government spending on anything not related to defense, or to the oil and natural gas services industries, and radically expanded health care coverage could be the line in the sand where all swords will be drawn to prevent government intervention.

I'm sure most people reading this little blog of cyber-nonsense know that America is the only major industrialized nation in the world that does have a universal health care system for its citizens. It is the only nation where a person, or family, can be wiped out financially due to illness, or accident, from medical bills.

This is an excerpt from a Reuters article published on March 13, 2009 by reporter Donna Smith.

"The Business Roundtable, which represents the largest U.S. corporations, released a study showing that for every $100 spent in the United States on healthcare, a group of five leading economic competitors -- Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France -- spend about 63 cents.

"While today's economic challenges span the globe, companies in other countries may be better able to weather the storm in part because the value that their healthcare systems deliver," Business Roundtable Chairman Harold McGraw told reporters in a telephone conference. McGraw is chairman, president and chief executive of The McGraw-Hill Companies.

U.S. President Barack Obama has made reforming the expensive and inefficient U.S. healthcare system one of his top priorities and Democratic leaders in Congress hope to get a bill to him by the end of the year.

The United States spends more on healthcare than any other country, but some 46 million Americans are still uninsured.

Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and chief executive of Verizon Communications, said an overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system "should have been done yesterday."

The United States, where most workers get healthcare insurance through their employers, faces an even bigger competitive disadvantage against rising economic powers Brazil, India and China, the Business Roundtable study said.

It said those countries spend about 15 cents on healthcare for every dollar spent in America.

The Business Roundtable executives said their study showed that despite the money Americans spend on healthcare, U.S. workers are less healthy than workers in other countries, putting U.S. firms an even greater disadvantage."

So today's American workers are less healthy on the job, spend more of their money for worse coverage than their counterparts in every other major nation, and have to stress over new strains of microbes whenever they visit a doctors office, but must listen to bullshit arguments about the evils of socialism and why universal coverage must be stopped or America will be ruined forever.

If the Superbugs don't get us, the stupor bugs of health care intransigence certainly will.