Saturday, July 11, 2009

Everybody Should Watch Bill Moyers' Journal

Last night listening to Bill Moyers and Wendell Otter discuss the insurance industries' "texts, lies, and video-deceits" over the past 30 years, the one fact that hit me between the eyes is that the amount of the paid-in dollar that goes to actual patient care has decreased from $.95 when Clinton was trying to pass a health care initiative to $.80 today—because of pressure from Wall Street [ironic to hear that phrase in this context too!] in order to increase shareholder profits.

Wait!...Shareholder profits in Health Management Companies? Companies that deliver patient care services also deliver earnings to investors? The physician in me just automatically knows that there is a conflict of interest in this proposition, as surely as the consumer in every patient knows that it is unethical for physicians to have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. Health care companies should never have any incentive not to deliver the best possible medical care, and they surely should never have any incentive to withhold medical care for the purpose of delivering monies to somebody…anybody else!

This country believes it has the basic premise for the set-up of insurance exactly right. And it is exactly wrong. Not only was third party payer wrong in the first place. The people of the United States sat idly by and allowed Richard Nixon to implement Henry Kaiser’s middle-man HMO/PPO plan in which now an entire extra middle layer of bureaucracy executives reap extraordinary benefits while their underlings (for paupers’ wages) do nothing more than slow down the delivery of appropriate, expedient health care.

What the people of this country need to do is get everything having to do with “for profit” as far away from the delivery of health care ASAP. Then they need to make physicians, hospitals, and hospital staffs accountable via numbers of successful surgeries, infections rates per hospital, per surgery, per physician, etc. available to the public. These kinds of numbers are being collected from hospitals on a voluntary basis today; they could be collected and published for the public by law if enough of the public overcame lobbies like the AMA, AHA, etc.

If we haven’t learned from AIG, Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Chrysler, General Motors, and the phrase “Wall Street” itself that “for profit” in the twenty-first century means that institutions take care of themselves and to hell with everybody else, that Adam Smith’s theory of the basic good man at the root of conservative economic theory died along with the definition of the word “usury” sometime in the nineteenth century…then we just aren’t facing facts. In which case we deserve whatever the weak hearted Democrats and the theory blinded Republicans in Congress give us for health care legislation.

But if we, the people, are willing to accept the fact that they, the “Stan’s with a Plan” [to make a buck] got it entirely wrong the first go-round, we can re-create a health care plan that makes common sense, makes nobody rich, and gives everybody who needs it just about exactly what they need. It will take a lot of work, but not nearly as much work as commitment, and not nearly as much commitment as belief in ourselves when the “Stan’s” start their “Harry and Louise” tactics to try to make us quit believing in ourselves.

But the “Stan’s” have had their turn; they’ve gotten rich and left us with a rotten system. They can’t make us quit believing in ourselves. Only we can do that. And how can we possibly give up on a revolution when nobody knows that it won’t work?! The worst that can happen is a return to a system that we know for sure doesn’t.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Blogitition

Has anybody noticed

that it takes the makings

of a Nobel composition

to just maybe get one

comment out of any-

one on what you wrote?

We pour our little hearts out

to...
to whom exactly? Oh! That's

right..to each other.

But everyone's so caught


up in blogeting


that not one of us has


time to tell the other,


"What you wrote was Thought


provoking... Clever... Tender


...Quite arousing... Just a little

bit amusing..." No.


We're all submitting our

own entries to the


Blogitition.


Certainly can't give the other


guy a psychological advantage


(or a few more readers,


God forbid!)


So let that buttjoke keep


on sending updates that we're


5 degrees from Brad, and


we'll pretend acknowledgment


of one another isn't one

degree of human decency.


We'll write, we'll read, and
definitely

we'll blogete
as if someday your page or

mine will win


the Blogitition.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

The Sudden Scream of a Sadomasochistic Life

Those rare instances of lucidity, the rare knee-buckling moments of absolute clarity into one's true nature come not by invitation, but as if hurled into consciousness by a cosmic force beyond all comprehension. These are the realizations that cause sea changes in the way one thinks about oneself, about one's life, death, worth, necessity, raison d'ĂȘtre.

These emotional/mental/spiritual experiences, for of such magnitude are they, may concern realizations of lifelong habitual neurotic patterns inflicted upon the self and others, truly chronic delusional throught patterns, or other insights of astounding depth and breadth.

But among the most disorienting and devastating is the coming into focus of a lifelong tradition of a sadomasochistic nature of interaction with the world at large, stemming from beginnings in which the sadistic and masochistic patterns were at work in the family of origin in such a precisely well oiled, smoothly functioning process as to not be consciously noted by anyone within or without the family at all.

The sudden awareness is that one has carried on the majority of transactions in life with a major unconscious emotional stake in the tallying of suffering, counting every point from the most egregious to the most minute, and placing an appropriate percentage of that point in the column for each participant.

For the suffering stemming from sadomasochism is complicated: vastly more so than the Marquis would have led us to believe. For instance, the masochist is capable of inflicting great pain upon the torturer who cannot cause enough punishment and humiliation in his target to give the sadist pleasure. Likewise, the masochist is only too happy to receive that amount of pain which pleases him/her, even if it is more than the sadist had in mind to deliver and who is now feeling, God forbid!, the pain of guilt. Thus, point percentages can fly in all directions.

Later, in the rapprochement stages (for these must occur in order for any given sadomasochistic relationship to continue) the relieving of pain must occur and must, per force, overstretch and under reach, as is human wont: thus another redistribution of point percentages and another tallying...which is maybe the fun of the dysfunction.

When the masochist comes out on the short end, the cry may be, "Hurt me!" The sadist's response may be, "NO!" It is in this shrouding of the true dynamic that the whole venture can be carried on in blissful denial in so many well-ordered, normal looking households while strictly regimented, controlled patterns of behavior are in fact carried on by parents and children all.

For example, everyone in the home knows that Daddy blows his top when, after his second drink in the evening, he hears impulsive childish laughter. Everyone knows that Mommy will have the children dressed, with teeth brushed and beds made before Daddy comes home for 11:00 lunch hour on Saturdays. But sometimes Mommy feels lazy on Saturday morning and not at all in the mood for Daddy's rules, and so one of the children ends up screaming behind the bathroom door while being spanked naked. Or one of the children forgets to mind his/her tongue and tells a joke to another child after Daddy has had his second drink in the evening, and Mommy slaps both children in the face to quiet them so Daddy won't hear.

What makes these the strictly regimented, controlled patterns of behavior in this home is the fact that such slip-ups happen inevitably, week in and week out, always with the same cruel outcomes, and with the resulting enforced patterns of fear, shame, and guilt in all parties (excluding, perhaps, Daddy; he is inscrutable).

What can be taken to the bank, and invested for a lifetime's worth of behavior, is the children's responses. Practicing what they have learned in childhood, they will repeat behaviors that encourage their lovers, their bosses, their mentors to treat them in ways that humiliate, degrade, and dehumanize them just as they were so naturally and normally humiliated, degraded, and dehumanized from the time they could call out their parents' names.

Indeed, they will be recipients of visions from the gods if ever in their lives they are struck down by the heart rending realization that they are not leading lives of random suffering, but rather, have the means within themselves to control how the world deals with them by taking full responsibility for learning new ways to allow themselves to be dealt with: as the dignified, loveable, loving human beings they always have been.