spc_wspc_ThymeWarp_0045

 

Direct link to the episode:

 

m4a -> http://media.libsyn.com/media/msb/spc_wspc_ThymeWarp_0045.m4a

 

Video Links

 

YouTube -> "Money" by: "Pink Floyd"

. .

 

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Money, get away.

Get a good job with good pay and you're okay.

Money, its a gas.

Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.

New car, caviar, four star daydream,

Think Ill buy me a football team.

 

Money, get back.

Im all right jack keep your hands off of my stack.

Money, its a hit.

Dont give me that do goody good bullshit.

Im in the high-fidelity first class traveling set

And I think I need a lear jet.

 

Money, its a crime.

Share it fairly but dont take a slice of my pie.

Money, so they say

Is the root of all evil today.

But if you ask for a raise its no surprise that theyre

Giving none away.

 

Huhuh! I was in the right!

Yes, absolutely in the right!

I certainly was in the right!

You was definitely in the right. that geezer was cruising for a

Bruising!

Yeah!

Why does anyone do anything?

I dont know, I was really drunk at the time!

I was just telling him, he couldnt get into number 2. he was asking

Why he wasnt coming up on freely, after I was yelling and

Screaming and telling him why he wasnt coming up on freely.

It came as a heavy blow, but we sorted the matter out

 

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This is episode 45

 

I've been converting my 400 or so albums from vinyl to CDs, to MP3s, and you're going to reap the benefits of my vastly expanded iTunes catalog.

 

Here comes some more Louis Armstrong aka Satch'mo.

 

But first I'm going to reveal why I am about to  leave you for, uh, snowier pastures, for my health … care, abandoning you to your own fates.

 

---- vvvv The Media Squat vvvv ----

 

As a Canadian, a member of a civilized and industrialized country, I would like to give some explanation as to why I am choosing to head back to Canada for my health care instead of staying here in the 'States.

 

Basically, I'm choosing to go the Snowbird route because Americans don't understand probability. (Which sort of explains all of "Las Vegas," doesn't it?  A town whose entire "raison d'ètre" owes to the fact that Meir Lansky understood all too well the innumeracy of his fellow citizens.)

 

On the one hand this lack of understanding gives them endless optimism, even in the face of statistical certainty.

 

On the other hand, it puts them entirely at the mercy of their own ruthlessly efficient rapaciousness.

 

And smack in the middle is the unpleasant truth that there is a word for people who keep on repeating the same stupid mistake, hoping that this one time they'll get a different outcome, and that word is [bleep].

 

Lets look at the statistics gathered by the misnamed World Health Organization (I say misnamed because, for the purposes of this little "exposé," its really the view of the world as seen from the vantage point of the very 1960s, "looking for all the world like a enormous, humongous Fram air filter sitting in front a wall of dirty glass wall," building of the Pan American Health Organizations on the corner of East 23rd Street and E Street in Washington DC,) and those statistics, as revealed in actuarial tables, are that 15% of the population at some point, for some reason, for some duration of time is disabled.

 

"But the US is not the entire world," I hear you cry.

 

No, it most certainly is not.

 

That is reflected in the fact that the US is on par with really third rate, third-world countries, at the very bottom of a list of health care providers, 39th out of a list of 39 industrialized countries, surpassed even by Cuba. [ http://www.opednews.com/articles/Cuba-Has-Bypassed-the-US-i-by-John-Little-090512-856.html ]

 

(Who would have thought that. even after a forty year long embargo, a tiny little country, a single island in the Caribbean, deprived of access to the rest of the world by the mighty United States, would still be better able to take care of a poor mother and her new born infant, than the short shrift she would get in Washington DC.)

 

The individuals might change, that is shown as some fuzziness on a graph, by a wider bar delineating the arbitrary separations thereon, but the numbers are remarkably stable.

 

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The citizens of the USofA must face that they have a corporate monster in their midst, one that is entirely within their power to vanquish.

 

That monster dictates that it be fed first, last and, since it does not care about anything or anyone, that it be fed even if that means that you starve.

 

Like all parasites, it does not consider its host until it is dead. The "it" can refer to either the parasite or to the host and the parasite.

 

Lets consider the costs of not excising this fiscal cancer which is metastasizing in plain sight, right in your midsts.

 

Consider that the costs of health care are far more than just the formidable tab of illness in this country, (already by far the highest in the world.

[As an aside, did you know that your stay in a hospital is called hotel services?

Do you think any hotel or even "We'd leave a light on fur ya" motel X in the world would not be a smoldering pile of embers if it tried to pull the [bleep] that you're put through in a night in the hospital?

{And I spent five weeks in the Ottawa General Hospital, and no time at all in a Brooklyn hospital

(and guess which one has left me using a cane since, maybe I should have, uh,

[hint, it wasn't Ottawa,]) so I know that whereof I speak.}])

 

Consider that it constricts your movements. (Your "God Given" right to "head on the highway of your choice, tossing out Big Mac and artery clogging Freedom Fries wrappers onto the road, smoking big ol' fat Dominican cigars, looking for whatever opportunities lie over the next blighted ridge," is being curtailed and your horizons are being shrunk much closer, much tighter than those of the poor South American migrant workers you have to hire now 'cause there's nobody left to mow your lawn or to haul away your toxic wastes for the skin-flint wages you're willing to pay. [Except when you aren't even willing to part with that much and screw 'em out of the money. {Why not? What are they gonna do? Call the cops? (Bwahaha ha. I slay me…)}])

 

Consider that you don't dare go anywhere to look for a better job either, because you might lose your coverage, so you are stuck in dead-end jobs, working for peanuts and feeling your life ebb joylessly away.

 

Consider that you better not dare get sick either because that might be considered cause for denying you coverage. (Think about that for a minute. "You don't dare get sick because that might be considered cause for denying you coverage." Then why are you paying for a policy?)

 

Consider that you'll probably get sick anyway, everybody does, sometimes severely (the actuarial tables say you're fighting one in eight odds to be the one in eight who does,) and then you'll discover that the insurance company may decline to cover you anyway.

 

(I'm sorry you got cancer but you didn't tell your doctor you had acne as a teen-ager so we're declining you your chemotherapy. And you owe us for the clinic visit because we decided to challenge it retroactively. [I wish I was kidding but the case, the HMO policy it exposed and congressional testimony where it was recorded has been well covered in the media and documented.])

 

Consider that the The #1 reason for personal bankruptcy in America, responsible for more than half of bankruptcies filed nation-wide, happens to be failing health. [ http://www.thedigeratilife.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/10/3-top-reasons-why-people-go-bankrupt/ ]

 

Bush made it rougher to declare personal bankruptcy, and still about 2 million personal bankruptcies per year can be traced to medical expenses [ http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/briefs/other/hb050202c.htm ]

 

If the HMOs thought could get away with it, death would just transfer the debt to a person's inheritors so the survivors could just keep on paying for systemic failure.

 

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Consider that personal bankruptcy is rarely limited to one person.

 

People are rarely alone, so their wives or husbands or life-partners, children and pets are bankrupted right along with them.

 

If a parent fall sick, it usually means an abrupt end to the children's education, regardless of how well the children were doing.

 

That costs everybody every cent of what that child could have been earning (and of what taxes could have been collected on those higher earnings.)

 

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Consider that of those people, broken on the wheel of medical bills, have had to sell everything at fire-sale prices; house first, furniture as part of that, then car (which everywhere but the major metropolitan centers means you have just developed a bad case social leprosy,) clothing … everything.

 

Consider what your chances are of recovering from a severe illness when you're made homeless because of that very illness. Are they slim, or none?

 

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Incidentally, that cheapens the value of everything that anybody else owns.

 

The cost in dollar amount, an arbitrary figure at best, but nonetheless a reflection of the price of a product and/or or its production, and the value of things are shrunk before your very eyes.

 

Treasured pictures and "objets d'art" are immediately reduced to the cost of their constituent parts; thus a van Gogh is reduced to an assemblage of used old canvas and a few scrapings of pigment, an Annie Leibowitz photograph is reduced to the cost of a roll of used film; a Rodin sculpture is reduced to its weight its weight in metal, clay or stone.

 

That's part the true cost of not having health care in this country.

 

Lost opportunities squandered like so much chaff because of the greed and rapaciousness of some companies, some corporations, some eternal infernal problems that are holding you by the throat tighter and tighter and squeezing the life, the fun and the free will out of this country.

 

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Insurance companies are at a tipping point in their battle with the citizens of this country.

 

Are they really bigger than the 15% of the economy, of the population they are alleged to serve?

 

Then something is dreadfully wrong. [ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1213783/UKs-doctors-write-letter-U-S-politicians-battle-lies-NHS.html ]

 

The UK health-care runs at about 8% of GDP and provide universal coverage.

 

In the US it runs at around 16% of GDP and there are 45 million uninsured, 25 million under-insured.

 

The insurance only applies for the first time because after that its a pre-existing condition, and we have congressional testimony as to what that means.

 

The 'States is beginning an accelerating  decline into irrelevance because it has frittered away the so called "Peace Dividend" that it got with the end of the "cold war", at the collapse of the Soviet Union, by countless fruitless pursuits.

 

The stock market started the Bush regime at 9,605 and eight years later, it stood at precisely 9,605. For business, the experiment with uber-capitalism has been a wash.

 

For the citizens stuck in a couple of trillion dollars of extra long-term debt, they've watched their future get mortgaged away.

 

Bush also took sympathy at the loss of the World Trade Center and turned it into universal opprobrium and hostility.

 

Bush managed to take The United States from a position of pre-eminence in all endeavors and reduced them into an economically and militarily deflated also-ran.

(Why do you think Kim Jong Un is laughing at you? He's leader of isolated, rinky dink North Korea and he's got more pull than the USofA. What he says goes. What Obama says is open to ridicule, endless debate and downright hostility.)

 

Oh and insurance company executives, don't think you can wave the flag like a magic wand.

 

Returning veterans have an entirely different view of combat  and armed conflict that you do.

 

Don't think that the people who are thrown out of their homes are magicked away into a never-never land.

 

They may end up filling the trailer parks, but the memory of having owned a ranch house is gnawing at the insides of the people you have so disposed.

 

Don't think that you aren't at risk of joining them either

 

There are millions more of them than before Bush took office. The edifice of commerce is getting shakier by the day.

 

As the HMOs toss people and corporations aside to avoid doing their duty by them, you may get a surprise and suddenly discover that you have tossed out the wrong person or corporation, one who can hurt you, big time.

 

Those darn survivors are an inconvenience aren't they?

 

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Consider that the never mindful, ultra capitalist "Wall Street" firms who are in bed with the HMOs, locked as they are in a mutual-fund embrace, and looking to squeeze the populace of the United States for the profit they should have had over the past eight years.

 

Consider that the stock market debacle, has erased all their gains and stands once again at 9,605.

 

Consider that the mortgage meltdown has left them holding their noses and holding their breath as they hold worthless paper.

 

Consider that the credit crunch has left them painfully exposed and forced to risk their own money instead of just screwing around with your money.

 

Consider that that means charging you, not mythical people, but you, ever increasing amounts for health-don't-care coverage while constantly and consistently denying any and all charges against that coverage, with ever increasing ferocity.

 

If you think it won't happen, look around you… It already has.

 

The testimony is in your congressional record.

 

Health care for profit is not only an impossibility, but it is an obscenity; something only a parasite can regard as a right.

 

No one has a right to make a profit from the  death and misery of the sick and the dying.

 

By the end of this decade, I'm heading to Canada, because I can… Its my home...

 

Come to your senses.

 

If you lined up all of the high priced doctors end to end, they have not done as much for the common weal as the equivalent length of sewer pipe.

 

If you piled up all of the expensive drugs, recreational and otherwise, they haven't done as much for the common weal as the equivalent weight in mosquito netting.

 

A cost benefit analysis of the health-don't-care system you've got should clue you into the fact that you're getting screwed.

 

And don't tout the achievements of the drug companies too loudly.

 

If it hadn't been for the government finally walking the [beep] up because Rock Hudson looked like [beep] when he died of AIDS, most of the developments in pharmacology, therapies and genomics wouldn't have happened; not without the National Institutes of Health ponying up the money for some real research.

 

Health for profit is only good for preventive medicines, therapies and regimens, and those aren't covered by any of your damned health-don't-care policies.

 

I'm opting out because Americans don't understand probability.

 

What were the odds, unh?

 

That may be good for running a casino, but it sucks if you're the one betting your health on life's little lottery.

 

I've already lost that bet once and I'm not going to risk going through this twice.

 

I'm going to Canada for my health … because I can.

 

Home is where they have to take you in when you show up at the door.

 

I refuse to get sick in the United States.

 

Consider that Nicole Hollander once remarked in her cartoon strip "Sylvia" [ http://www.gocomics.com/sylvia/ ] about growing old in the United States: "You're best to do it elsewhere."

 

That's a sad commentary on what the children of the self-proclaimed "greatest generation" have become.

 

---- ^^^^ The Media Squat ^^^^ ----

 

Now, adelante la musica.

 

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This episode featured the following music:

 

"Dusky Stevedore" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"Solitude" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"Swing that Music" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"Darling Nellie Gray" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"Alexander's Ragtime Band" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"Red Cap" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"I Wonder" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"Some Day" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"You Rascal You" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"Song of the Islands" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"Avalon" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

"Someday Sweetheart" by: "Louis Armstrong" here on WSPC's ThymeWarp with your host Charles Rovira

 

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The show notes, incuding the complete text of this episode, and any and all links to the artists featured, are on a server ... somewhere.

 

And this show is also being podcast in m4a format, which means that it you use a compatible player, like iTunes, you get the content divided up into chapters with images and "hot links" to the the web, on the topic of the chapter or to accompany the music.