Hamm On Wry

If you missed the novel I wrote before, you might want to read it just to understand what sort of a rant I’m on. I would point out that I’m leaving the comments open for you all to bash away at my foolishness, just remember that you get what you deserve when I filet you for not paying attention.

In addition, I’ll add this one quote of myself that sums up the first part of this diatribe:

Massachusetts has created a law that is set to backfire. Since they went bonkers and killed an industry and shackled it’s citizens right to the government teet. A professor at PRINCETON who teaches economics but apparently doesn’t understand how his field applies to reality is cheering this on. I’m waiting for pigs to fly, the Four Horsemen to appear at my door with a Domino’s Pizza, and for Bush to declare every Friday is “Fryday” and that pot is legal. Not one of those things is more ludicrous than this law.

And I would point out that no matter what you think, you know I’m nuts. I readily agree. But anyway, here’s the solution, in all it’s gory glory.

1. Patents on research are abolished. I know this sounds crazy, but the fact that the best minds in medical research are pressured to find a new drug for the patent rather than being free to focus on research of every kind to find new solutions with proven drugs is nuts. The fact that nutrition isn’t studied by these minds is the greatest issue, but until they don’t have a reason to follow the money, they won’t do anything else. Their corporate bosses won’t let them.
2. Medical Malpractice is abolished from the court system. Here there are a few reasons for this change.
• The malpractice laws have made doctors into lotto tickets. Every time someone brings a malpractice suit against a doctor, every other patient and potential patient pays the price. Higher premiums for the doctors are passed onto the patients, and unless a doctor ends up having their license revoked, nothing medicine-related really happens. In cases where a medical professional loses their license there should be court proceedings, but not until then. Remove the ability to get money from a doctors just because their treatment wasn’t perfect and we’re all better off.
• Malpractice is a useless function of the law. If a doctor betrayed her position and killed or maimed a patient, first would be the revocation of her license, via the peer panel outlined next, followed by criminal and civil proceedings. If the patient died, that is called “murder” and if they were just maimed, it’s called “assault” and possibly “attempted murder”. Those cover most everything that a doctor could do to intentionally harm a patient.
• Peer Review Panels would be the grand jury before a doctor could be taken to court. I don’t mean just doctors reviewing doctors as that’s a recipe for a mess as well, but having lawyers and programmers and linguists and others of high education review the procedures, the events, and the reasoning that the doctor used would be the first step toward recommending criminal prosecution of a doctor for their actions with a patient. Only after that would a patient be allowed to sue, and then, as they don’t have malpractice or the insurance behind it, the lawyers won’t be able to ‘go for the gold’ because there really won’t be any.
3. Money is set aside, and awards are given for proven, duplicatable research that improves life. I’m not generally fond of phrases like “improves life” for an idea, and I’m not a doctor or researcher, but I would bet that a panel of them put together to review a peers research, including original and supporting evidence, any duplicated research data, etc., could reasonably decide if the resulting treatment or drug is a good thing for humanity and therefore Award the original researchers. I’m thinking with money, which we get from…
4. The Practice and Research of Medicine becomes as Social Construct. Just like we pay for streets, schools, parks, subways, and every other social-whether-we-realize-it-or-not project, we should pay for medicine. Medicine should be funded by all of us, because it helps us all in the end. Does this mean higher taxes? No, just means that the money we current foist to private industry in the form of insurance payments we’d instead pool into a public trust system.
5. Medical training and education is free to those who qualify for the schooling. Now that is Northern Exposure and it makes sense Ð You need a doctor, pay to make one. This person wants to be a doctor and has the requisite foundation classes all in order, then no problem, it’s done and paid for. And why do we do this? Because if it doesn’t cost $150,000 to get a medical degree, these new doctors aren’t under the pressure to make more than $150,000 to just survive their first few years.

Now, for those of you think I tried to pull some sleight-of-hand by breaking the article apartment having this section be separated by a few weeks from the other in the hopes that no one would notice that I’m suggesting a fully-socialized system in this section why complaining that Massachusetts is going to force it’s entire citizenry onto the government’s teet. And that couldn’t be farther from the truth, because that’s exactly the point.

Or do you not get it?

You see, when you socialize a section of social need but not the entirety of that social need, you create disparity for the citizens. If only the basics of care are socialized, but the specifics like high-price cancer drugs are not, the system is designed to punish the less well off, which, depending on the treatment can actually start quite high in the social strata.

By socializing the entire system, from research to treatment, education to retirement, we can easily give rise to a system with substantial rewards still available to researchers, but no more huge profits for pharmaceutical corporations to wring from the populace. We can give huge grants and support to companies doing research on tools, such as fMRI machines, and let them use the technology developed in other ways outside of medicine to make money, and we can buy the machines at cost-plus-points towards the next grant to keep manufacturing costs down. We can build hospitals because everyone is paying into the system a substantial amount of their own money. We can reduce costs overall by eliminating the legal waste of the current malpractice system. We could socialize and still remain stable and capable.

It won’t happen. But we could.

Perhaps the best part of the night was seeing so many people having such a great time because the music rocked, the dance floor was packed, the people were crazy brilliant and the night was a HUGE FUCKING PARTY!

I don’t always know what it takes to get people out to the club, which is a hard thing to admit since it’s my job to market and promote the damn place, so it’s really nice when it all works. I suspect that people just want ’something’ instead of ‘just a night at the club’ which means some themes will have to be planned.

But that also means every party from here on out will be simply amazing. You gonna be there? I thought so…

It apparently gets stupid. Look, I’m all for having clumps of stupidity in life so that there are, by lack of those clumps, hopefully equally-large or larger clumps of non-stupidity, which isn’t the same as intelligence, mind you. You see, stupidity is when two friends die within 3 days of each other, randomly, unexpectedly, and in ways you wouldn’t have bet or thought up in your wildest moments of suffering through Alanis Morrisette proclaiming all things ironic, followed a mere month later by your car getting hit in the driver’s door, with a loverly dent resulting, followed by a windshield chip from a rock falling from the 610 loop interchange at Hwy 59 as it crosses like a high-flying ribbon of concrete through the smogged air, followed by having a manhole scrape the oilpan from the bottom of your car. Oh, and let’s not forget that someone decided they needed the antennae more than me and removing it. I suspect there is a homeless man now learning to fence with it.

I will ask that you go back and re-read the bit about a manhole removing an oil pan. I will be filming the area a bit later today, both for my insurance and for the world at large, and perhaps the local news, which has lacked for any other news outside of Iraq, D.C. or my personal favorite, The Hammer, Tom DeLay. I prefer to call him the wrench, as he’s much more likely to twist something out of you than actually smack you upside the head. Regardless, he’s a tool and should be forced to ride Houston’s lightrail which he deliberately mucked up. He should be strapped to the front of the lightrail car and forced to pray that it doesn’t hit another car.

But I digress. Anyway, the car is gong to be towed to the dealership to be looked at, and hopefully all is well and it can be fixed for relatively cheap, but I suspect I’m going to have to pitch forth the deductible yet again.

Oh well, at least this time the car hit a manhole and not the Mormons. I don’t know that the LDS Church would have been too damned pleased to get another accident report like that, although I’m sure that Our Lady of Bourbon and Bowel Movements would love the story!

I find a certain poetic balance in the fact that a group of bigots are calling for the U.S. Senate to vote on an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban gay marriage on Sixth Day of the Sixth Month of the Sixth Year of the New Millennia - in other words, “Doing the Bidding of the Beast” it seems.

I followed that link in this Slate article by William Saletan which is a good read regardless of your stance on gay marriage, provided, of course, that you’re not a unreasonable bigot. For those too lazy to follow the link, he discusses “Covenant Marriage” which is apparently much harder to dissolve than the normal piece of paper. The ad campaign should be “NEW & IMPROVED!! Ball & Chain: Now with more Chain! for those fundamentalists who really want to prove their devotion to another.” Never mind that it just takes a bit more time and/or ammunition to end the marriage anyway. (And by “ammunition” I mean either legal or the kind you buy at Wal-Mart with a gift card. Whatever you want; consequences sold separately.)

In their foundational statement on marriage, Catholic, Baptist, and evangelical leaders claim to be defending it against cohabitation, divorce, and “diminishing interest in and readiness for marrying.” They call for “mentor couples” and “influence within society” to promote marriage. Can you imagine a more powerful influence than finding out that the gay couple down the block has a stronger marriage than you do? Can you imagine a more powerful way for that couple to earn society’s respect? Here’s a chance to get more marriage, less cohabitation, and less divorce. Is that what conservatives want? Or would they rather keep out the gays?

Numbers are clearer windows to the soul than eyes. If you sign the petition to stop gay marriage but won’t solidify your own commitment (even in this only-nominally effective way) then you are proclaiming your bigotry, which isn’t very big of you at all.