POOOOOOOOP! I fling da poop at youuuuuu!!!!!111!!!!

You mean back when it truly lived up to being a “health maintenance” organization?

I remember my first HMO. Early 80s. I went for a check up. I was seen by four doctors all in one building, and put through about two hours worth of tests. I paid twenty bucks, total, and told to come back in a month for a follow up regarding some irregularity noted in my heart beat (they found a small prolapse, nothing serious).

Today, that same visit would extend to four separate offices, over two or three months, with follow ups for years beyond. I’d have been medicated for even the slightest hint of trouble, given no nutritional guidance, no exercise recommendations, nothing.

And that’s assuming some doctor didn’t decide to up his billables by fudging a result or two.

The main one being that the Medical-Industrial Complex doesn’t make nearly as much from prevention of STDs and TB as it does from treatment.

The US pharmaceutical industry is gloriously abusive in that it has state sanction to force “market prices” down consumers’ throats. Even in an ideal market situation, we would want pharmaceutical producers to be quasi-public – they’d need to have specific charters set up to allow for overproduction geared towards cheapening and liberalizing the product, kind of like power and services before the supply-siders got to those.

But even a market situation, in which if you can’t pay five digits a year for insulin you’re just not economically efficient enough, would be preferable to the current one – the US government typically does an enormous amount of research, funds studies and equipment and development and everything but readily-available raw materials out of taxpayer money, and then proceeds to award or auction off exclusivity agreements. So Republican intervention turns it from an abusive oligarchy to a murderous monopsony, and with drugs like AIDS with lots of rich victims the equilibrium prices for the various exclusive providers of needed drugs wind up being in the high tens of thousands. This is for medication that would bring in a profit at a hundredth or a thousandth that.

Between that and state sponsorship of systematic insurance fraud in hospitals (long story short: the insurers break every procedure up into 10 separate billables, charge the patient whenever a member of the staff (always on salary – so they get to keep doctors and nurses on call for 60-80 hours and residents more or less expect to spend less than a full day at home) takes a fart, assess routine debridement and bandaging in hundreds of dollars and otherwise produce markup by factors of hundreds for procedures of little real importance – with the copay being a ridiculously inflated estimate of the most the consumer will tolerate paying for a given procedure and the remainder being passed on to the hospital system and gov’t, and non-insured clients being billed for the full insurance-dictated amount), basically everything about privatized medicine in America is vicious and evil.

Of course, before ‘HMO’ became a household word, the social tendency was to project all of that onto the professionals and apparatus – exorbitant and uncaring doctors, unnecessary medication, etc. Which is a neat trick when you’ve got people pulling in millions a year in insurance and administration for having an MBA and the right connections.

The Republican ideology consists largely of, upon learning your savings account has been looted, trying to cover up for the innocent embezzlers by pretending to have been robbed by a Mexican. (In this case, literally – one of those fantastic outside-the-box sci-fi guys, I believe Niven, pushed the idea of ‘rumors in Spanish that hospitals were stealing organs from illegals’ as a way of solving America’s medical crisis, which is all spics’ fault, we swear.) In the specific case of healthcare, you just cannot possibly believe how fucked-up it is – and how much of what people talk about in re. it being fucked up is irrelevant bullshit. Our choices, the Village sez, are to learn to love the HMOs, enslave the entire country to them, or drink silver until AIDS disappears down the road to serfdom.

God, just having this shit on the table again is so wonderful. It’s like coming out of an asthma attack – we’ve just had to slog through their asinine bullshit, their constant recycled trash about hte Clenis and libtards and blar-har-har Hussein, and all the while the fucking country has been going to pot. It’s a non-repeatable bug for the peons like RS75, who desperately want to believe their beautiful masters are right about everything, and a feature for those beautiful masters, who will eventually decide they’ve stolen enough and buy one-way tickets to Dubai, leaving their idiot manchildren behind to contemplate going John Galt against momofascism.

Don’t get me wrong: Admittedly, it’s funny that you’re so stupid, but the joke just isn’t as amusing the 100th time around. You can only watch an orangotang smear itself with its own shit for so long before the entertainment value wears off.

So I guess in Moonbattia a Church where the preacher says the government invented AIDS as a means to racial genocide, and screams “GODDAMN AMERICA!” is mainstream? ROFL!

Well, most churches that I know claim that there is a giant sky fairy that has ultimate power yet still gives a flying fuck about us. Now that is crazier than any AIDS conspiracy theory

So I guess in Moonbattia a Church where the preacher says the government invented AIDS as a means to racial genocide, and screams “GODDAMN AMERICA!” is mainstream? ROFL!

It does look an awful lot like Greater Reich Wingnuttia is a land where facts are non-existent, Flush Limpballs is teh graytest jeenius EVAR111!1!1!eleven except for Commander Bunnypants, and anything you can spew that unjustly and dishonestly smears DhimmicRATS is magically 150% correct.

Stay classy, Republican’ts!

Ah the smell of santorum in the morning…

At least, not out loud.

There are good reasons to oppose this, of course.

The main one being that the Medical-Industrial Complex doesn’t make nearly as much from prevention of STDs and TB as it does from treatment. Especially if the STD is incurable, like AIDS.

But of course, you’ll never hear the BrainDeadStaters say THAT.

She’d better keep that skanky hole under wraps.

Damn librul nannystaters made damn sure it was fried in unsaturated fats.

You guys will be the ones with the tears in 2012!

Bookmark this, libs. 2012: Republican Landslie.

Who’s making the Freudian slips now, laughing boy?
Yeah, cunning move there – because that whole “bookmark this, liberals” thing worked SO well for the last troll who used it.
Enjoy your scabies.
For those of you wanting to keep score at home, it’s now:

Sadlynauts: 227
RedState75: 1

Yes, this could go EITHER WAY!

The current electoral college setup was defined in the 12th Amendment.

This is an obvious lie: there are only two amendments, and the first one is No Fat Chicks.

BOW NOW NOW BOW NOW NOW