Doctor Day

Shower and shave before throwing down a fruit bar with the usual java gulps to get the day off to a proper start. I've got some old Genesis on the Beamer's audio system. When did progressive rock go bad? Your Own Special Way still sounds good through the trimmed forest in the ear canal. {Too little on top, but plenty where you never want to see it. Hair. Might just shower in Nair one day.}

Dad's got another doctor's appointment with the professional system he loves to hate, that offers no cure, but remains the only source of the lung candy he requires to gasp along in the sedentary stasis of his twilight years. Dad realizes he finds himself as one lucky guy having a chauffeur when the need mandates, and possessing insurance as well as Medicare to cover all the incidentals. My sister, former agricultural specialist for the US government, finds herself driving a truck cross country everyday without any health insurance as she approaches 55 years of age.

{"Got your chips cashed in.... Truckin'......"}

The doctor goes through dad's brief check up. He's lost a few pounds. Too much effort trying to breathe burns through the calories. Eat before bedtime is the suggestion. See you in three months. Bye. Another appointment made and disease management triumphs again with a suitcase of pills as your ticket for the long slow decline. Those pills cost a lot, but he is covered and one of the very lucky ones

My in-laws are in much worse shape. I won't bore you with the details, but I will say they too are both with terminal ailments, take lots of expensive drugs and get managed by the system to pay as high a tab as possible for these drugs while having been denied some more expensive up-front solutions a few years back that might have mitigated both the drug intake and the disease. The proposed solutions could also have failed, but having an HMO rather than a doctor make the final decision just seems wrong.

America finds itself as a really sick nation, and the reason we are so sick has to do with our health care system. Frontline just put together an exceptional program looking at this issue. The report is call Sick in America, and it follows another exceptional program done last year, Sick Around The World, in exploring the growing health care crisis and the now urgent need to fix the system here in America.

We cannot afford to pass the buck on universal health care any longer. For those who stop by this blog to check on the musings of this Thrasher, I recommend strongly that you check out the links provided in the posting and view these informative programs. Some of the stories will bring a tear to your eyes, or remind you of some of the people you know struggling to survive in a market that cares more about profit than people.

Lisa Girion from the Los Angeles Times, one of the several featured people in the Sick in America story, has an article in February of this year on California health insurers exceeding the state issued rates for last resort health coverage. This type of coverage is designed for people who cannot get coverage on the open market due to a previous condition or when they have lost their job. Vulnerable people in the worst circumstance are the ones the insurance companies prey on for maximizing premiums and when they get the chance to drop you do so out of hand.

April Fools

Sun's up. A morning breeze cools the french roast in my hand with doves, jays and sparrows taking their usual breakfast places underneath the plum tree. The dog trots on patrol from one side of the yard to the other letting out various low sounds of growl indicating a feline intruder wandered the grounds recently. The morning commute echos in the air, forming the usual wall-of-sound din that serves as the sonic background to my urban lifestyle. My big cat inside the house peers through the french-door windows with a look of disgust at his imprisonment. I walk inside with the dog to cheer him up. It's not my endearments, but the offering of dried salmon which rescues the awkward reality. The lady inmate cats appear quickly to receive their usual ration of dried fish, which always must follow the big guy's preferred bribe.

The cracks in the stucco need a patch and quick touch of paint. I retrieve my tools and arm myself with latex gloves. I cover the spider web lines of separation at a corner and underneath a few of the windows. I complete the fill in the back of the house where a broom handle marks the final area of wear. A fast brush after getting the paint put back together with a quick stir ends the project.

Several kids move up and down the street with ipod cords bouncing in rhythm to their steps. I see a lot of kids out and about throughout the town everyday. Apparently school schedules must be on flex time these days.

NPR buzzes with Sam Donaldson. Sam serves up some memories of Nixon, and actually praises Oliver Stone's film of the same name. Sam tells a funny story about questioning Ronald Reagan amid his popularity slide in the early eighties when the economy was about as bad today. Reagan, as Obama does today, had a habit of always reminding the nation that the previous office holder and party created the mess. Sam's question was when would Ronald Reagan accept responsibility for some of this financial crisis. Reagan's response was funny. He acknowledged that, yes, he had once been a Democrat.

I need some tunes on to calm the critters before heading out the door. I put on a collection of oldies the Nixon chronicles had tweaked into my brain. Arthur Lee exclaims, "I just got out my little red book the minute you said goodbye......................... There's just no getting over you."

Night time for the Car Biz

Rick Wagoner steps down from GM this week. What a long strange trip it has been from the post WWII heights, where the phrase "What's good for GM is good for America" defined the company, and the nation, to the depths of these past six months.

General Motors is the company that was behind the great American train robbery. I mean by that phrase that GM systematically removed from US cities our public transportation rail system line by line from the 1930s through the 1950s. This was uncovered in a 60 Minutes story that aired back in 1986, and spawned a seldom seen but important and riveting documentary, Taken For A Ride, written and directed by Jim Klein.

This is the company Michael Moore earned his documentary film chops covering in the still pertinent Roger & Me. Today all Americans can now share the pain and frustration exhibited by those seen in Flint, Michigan twenty years ago, which were captured by Moore's film crew.

How does a company create an electric vehicle and then have management decide to destroy the model in less than a decade, and expect any sympathy from the car buying public today? If you're interested you can check out Chris Paine's documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car? on Google video.

I, and I'm sure everybody else today, feels terrible about the many workers losing jobs, homes, health benefits and all traces of former dignity with each successive mismanaged turn this conglomerate has undertaken for the past forty years. John DeLorean left because the company was so unwieldy. The book, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, offers his recollections about the company. DeLorean was really GM design for the entire decade of the 1960s, the last decade the company had real relevance as an automaker. It became a bean counter's company from the 1970s until the last bean counter, Rick Wagoner, signed off.

Good night, and good luck, General Motors.

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.

Snake Oil Exposed- Jim Cramer paved by Jon Stewart

When I tuned in to the Daily Show last night I was expecting about five to eight minutes of Jim Cramer with Jon Stewart, and some Batman circa 1966 bubbles of comic book emphasis -Pow! Oomph! Crack!- popping up at chosen moments to keep our wandering attention span focused on the interview. I expected Jim Cramer to be apologetic, a little funny and chagrined at Stewart's ability to point out the obvious dilemma a Wall Street homer network has when the home team has been consistently losing.

What I got was Jon Stewart deadly serious, and armed with evidence as damaging as Nixon's basement tapes. Stewart kept dialing up taped video camera confessions about rigging movement on Wall Street from the former hedge fund manager turned TV star, Jim Cramer, and repeatedly hammered this defenseless shill of CNBC.

Now we know where all the money went.

It was a reawakening of the Edward R. Murrow spirit in the body of one of the nation's best satirists. This was brilliant, but only a first step. The time has come to focus some legal clout and time on putting into prison the liars and thieves who stole so much money from the world. Those principals at Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers and so many more Bernard Madoff types deserve the Bernard Madoff sentence.

Thanks Jon Stewart.