to your health

TO YOUR HEALTH

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note: I wouldn't think I'd like this guy, because as a doomer, who needs investment advice, right?  But he really is interesting and writes well.
http://www.epsilontheory.com/
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There was an article on July 25, 2017 over at The Daily Impact, which of course should be re-titled The Monthly Impact since that is about how often the guy posts an article as if he is now all old and crotchety and drawing a retirement check and needs not be affected by market forces at all and can’t even remember why he started a blog in the first place although there are vague recollections of promoting this kick ass but long ago printed book ( which I heartily recommend ), all about some tent revival health fair deal which pointed out the authors dismay at how poor people were allowed to rot away due to lack of money.  Now, the guy is a Canadian, so he grew up with free medical care, so of course his perception is a bit skewed.  Not because he believes medical care should be “free”, as we all know that taxpayer medical care is just as expensive as American style for-profit care, although it could be less and we’ll cover that below, but because he has that strange view that medical care is a right. 

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In some craphole corner of Virginia ( but, I repeat myself! ), once a year a British guy organizes a free medical clinic for those stuck down in the hollers and shut down mining town shacks.  One of the commentors said they do something similar in Seattle at a sports stadium, but that is neither here nor there.  At this tent event folks line up and get teeth pulled or get shots or whatever.  Deplorable?  Sure.  I mean, it is embarrassing enough you must troop down to a cattle call industrial factory service event as it is, since you know everyone there are related cousins ( I’m kidding!  I actually wouldn’t mind living in an area like that, tucked away and hidden, but for the fact you wouldn’t be accepted in time for the collapse ), but then you add in remedial care by “professionals” that are anything but, at worst getting cosmetic treatment and at best starving off the wolves for another year. 

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Now, don’t get me wrong.  On one level, these doctors and nurses volunteering are providing a great service.  It is defiantly a Better Than Nothing deal.  But on the other hand, this also highlights what is wrong with our medical industry which is that it is for-profit.  I don’t blame the players but the system, although the players do share a part of the blame.  Way back in the day, prior to the system breaking ( when the FedGov got involved in the old profit system, which was supply and demand, competition and competence, adding regulation and cost incentives and population pressure through its open borders policy ), a hospital visit was literally barely worse than getting a mechanic to fix your car.  Back then, a private medical industry competed with low prices and innovation.  The countries with public systems were burdened with bureaucratic costs.  The choice seemed logical that you get better care here, cheaper.  Well, that was pre-collapse and is in NO way still even partially true and was not true way before ObamaCare.

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Remember, for our purposes here the collapse is fifty years old.  You certainly under no circumstances could claim it is any younger than 47 years old, but my contention is that we were falling apart economically as well as culturally about fifty years ago ( and you’ll also remember that the average age of an empire throughout history is about 250 years.  Do the math ).  Give or take a football season.  Close enough.  As collapses are known to go, things started out looking pretty much the same, the turning point only visible through hindsight.  But just as our economy turned, our culture turned, our energy supply, so too did our medical industry.  LBJ put his snout under the private tent and ever since medical inflation has reigned.  Not just inflation because the dollar delinked from gold, not just because oil EROI started falling, but also because the medical industry was able to latch on to the public tax gravy train.  When you look at the horrendously sharp spike of medical and college inflation, that is directly related to government money availability.  The “for profit” medical industry gladly welcomed Medicare and Medicaid, first for increased customers and then for costs rising.  By scuttling the boats of the poor, all their boats rose with the inflation tide. 

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Medical inflation costs now come from many sources. Forget ObamaCare.  That was just the bullet to the patients head.  Prior to that, as everyone dog piled into the “service industry”, the medical industry started taking on sinister aspects.  The lawyers started suing anybody and everything not nailed down.  The medical schools started exhibiting the same greed and incompetence all other schools of lower learning adapted.  Which of course just fed on the lawyers ability to find malpractice, as well as enabling the doctors to use the excuse of high medical school costs and malpractice insurance to jack up their salaries-sure, mostly justified but also, if someone is bidding for a decreased supply due to increasing costs, you don’t turn down free money now do you?  The monopoly on schools and oversight-the AMA- that was a century old didn’t help ( as well as not helping patients who were only allowed approved practices such as mortality inducing radiation and chemotherapy ).  Drug companies didn’t help matters any, a few dozen articles on to themselves.

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All in all, the collapse of the medical industry has been going on for fifty years.  Now, compared to state run medical industries, we aren’t looking so hot to trot any more.  Sure, we still MIGHT be leading with innovation.  Which means any rich person from any other country can come over here and receive very good care.  They don’t have to be a waiting list like back home.  That used to be the huge selling point of our system-oh, look, those commies and socialists are dying waiting for care.  Now?  We wish we could be placed on a waiting list for free care.  Besides the once a year tent treatment which is only going to cover remedial procedures.  Now public care is far superior, even with the wait, since there is only, at most, the increased drug costs ( due to the monopoly globally of a few players-who I won’t get started on with their poison for profit and their pricing the poor out of the market ) to factor in.  There is no medical school costs, no inflated doctor or nurse costs, no insurance companies ( here, all the idiots living on flood plains and dry tender boxes jack up the home insurance costs and the insurance industry gets their profits back in the medical field ) and no lawyers inflated the costs in the public medical industry.  And, no, you really can’t compare Canada or Cuba to the VA hospital, as they are apples to oranges.  The VA is stuck with a lot of the private industry cost increases and is burdened with budget problems and bureaucracy. 

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So, there you have it.  Our medical industry has never been interested in altruism, at least not since they started to collapse.  The folks that give three days a year to charity are doing great, but at this point it is more akin to assuaging guilt than anything else.  Granted, a doctor making $200k a year is only making about $50k take home pay, after the highest tax bracket, insane medical malpractice insurance costs and college debt, so no one can blame him for being a selfish prick, but while he only sees net everyone else must cover his gross, and you know that is going to tend towards resentment no matter what the logic dictates.  Do you think most folks say, “gee, what a nice guy”?  Or are they more prone to “rich prick, it’s the least he could do”?  Just like all our other outdated thinking-”best system in the world-go capitalism!”-there is also the preconceived notion that doctors get rich.  So the free services period is kind of buying good will for both themselves and patients. 

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When the author of The Monthly Impact shows shock and revulsion of our medical situation,  he is ignoring his own writing on collapse.  Our medical care has been getting to substandard for fifty years and is now at the point systematically of true collapse.  Not just crappy care and dangerous care and expensive care, but absolutely no care.  ObamaCare, by everyone’s favorite socialist ( Trump is a meany!  He Doesn’t Care!  No, bitches, he doesn’t care-nor can he afford to care at this point.  It ain’t politics now, it is preservation ), took our medical industry from really bad to, well, nonexistent.  In just a few short years our dysfunctional system became unaffordable to most but the 10%.  Quadrupling insurance costs and the deductibles tends to have that effect.  And the old stand-by of going to the emergency room has degenerated due to abysmal standards of care.  You will be misdiagnosed about 90% of the time.  You will get an aspirin for a fracture, and it won’t be cheap.

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In a collapse, as I mentioned in the comments section of the Impact web site, more than just sewer pipes and bridges are neglected and fall apart.  So do medical systems.  Ours is toast.  You can expect more of those tent charities once a year in more places, far too crowded to treat everyone, and probably soon to be a Patient Zero public health threats.  Other countries with public health systems far better than ours, only are able to do so because long ago they chose health over luxury.  We pissed away our surplus on highways, Happy Motoring and three thousand calorie Happy Meals.  We live in our cars, and those societies without cars get to have a functioning heath system.  We HAD both, but that was in an energy growth system, and now we get NEITHER as our energy supply shrinks.  We still have our motoring, as all those crippled sick rednecks driving over to the revival tent show, our culture long ago rebuilding to suburbia, nothing in walking distance unless you really work at it.  But that is as sick as our health industry although we don’t know it yet because the last of the functioning transportation infrastructure will be the last of what we give up ( not that we have a choice at this point-it isn’t just our jobs but our food that is long distance ) with our lowering energy supply.

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How can anyone express shock when a dysfunctional system finally fails?  Optimists, that’s who, those ill bred evolutionary dead ends with their head and ass in an inverted position permanently.  Do collapse authors have any business being optimistic?  Nay!  A thousand times, NO!  They just embarrass themselves and us, and mislead us with their rosy portraits and their wishful thinking.  Oh, don’t worry about that thirty year mortgage on the concrete retreat in the redoubt.  You’ll never lose your job, so keep buying FLIR scopes.  Oh, the humanity, how could we keep poor people from medical care?  That’s what RESOURCE CONTRACTION does, bitches!  Repeat after me, RESOURCE.  CONTRACTION.  That means, for those of you who were public school graduates, that less resources are available.  Resources are what we need to do anything, including living.  How can this crap possibly be frigging rocket science?  Sweet Baby Jesus On A Trampoline!  Am I the only sane one here?

END ( today's related link http://amzn.to/2uZBapj )

 

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