Let us speak further of Medicare thuggeries, since that subject seems to have everybody riveted. This will not be a long post, since the principles are pretty easy to explain. But the discussion in our nation will still be a long discussion and debate, largely because Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked.
But here it is in short form. I have described Medicare (not that it is the only goverment program that does this, but work with me) as thievery. But it is thievery both coming and going. The thievery I have been referring to earlier is that of ransacking the taxpayers. As Hillary Clinton once famously noted, while promoting her attempt at health care reform many years ago, “It takes a pillage.” Any taxpayer who wasn’t paying attention and allowed himself to make more than the national average found himself filling out the long forms, with shorter and shorter results. So that is one kind of theft.
Now, just so everybody knows, I do not hold that all taxation is theft — just most of it. If it is possible for a government to steal, and it is, then there must be a line which that government crossed when it went from paying for a simple fire department with one truck to paying for a prospective wetlands park on the moon. Since there is a high degree of likelihood that we have crossed that line, our debates should center on how we might go about finding that line again, and we should cease and desist with debates on whether we ought to spend any more. Ya know?
Okay, what is the other form of theft? Let me describe how Medicare works. You get better deals from the hospital through Medicare for largely the same reason that you would get better deals if your cousin Vinnie, well placed as he is in the Mob, promised the bill collector at the hospital that he would get some busted caps if he kept on sending you those nasty grams about unpaid bills.
The way it works without Medicare is no beauteous sight either, but let us say that your insurance company took umbrage at the seventeen MRIs done of your ankle. They send a note down that says, “What? Your radiologist having a slow day? We ain’t paying that.” The hospital sez, “Yeah?” And the insurance company sez, “Yeah.” The hospital comes back with “sez who?” and you get the drift. Both the hospital and the insurance company are big boys, and they both know how to play a little smash mouth, and so it goes back and forth. If they can’t settle their differences with a little health care sumo wrestling, they can take it to a court, which occupies the place of an impartial referee.
But when the referee becomes the insurance company, and remains the referee, son of a gun, the win/loss record starts to look a little lopsided. Now Medicare tells the hospital, “We’re not paying that. That’s the amount. Get used to it.” This is an interested party in the dispute, and this interested party has all the guns, control of medical licences, regulatory power over hospitals, the power of taxation, an enormous aptitude for self-interested lying coupled with narcissistic grandstanding. In the first place, Medicare steals from taxpayers. In the second place, it steals from doctors and hospitals.
Speaking of grandstanding, they will say that all they want is “fairness.” If you believe that, then maybe we do need universal health care, with psychiatric care included, because somebody needs their head examined.
Somebody might say that my comments are dripping with contempt for the policies of our elected officials, and that I ought to be more respectful. And I am respectful of their persons, and their offices. But of their policies? Look. I am a grown up. I know how to read. I can count. You know. I have singular disadvantages when it comes to respecting their policies.
But even so, I don’t think my comments along these lines drip with anything. I mean, you wouldn’t say that a sponge on the bottom of the ocean drips, would you?