When something bad happens, like a Crank feature article, our instincts are to say, let’s make sure something like this never happens again, usually via a better life through litigation.  But this build-a-new-law strategy is usually counterproductive.  Have you heard about the family who took pictures of their kids in the tub?  They turned some glossies into Wal-Mart to develop and ended up losing their kids for a month to CPS.  Who knew long term babysitting could be so easy?  Fox News, sensationalism with zero forethought, dons its red cap of justice and flies in for the rescue.  The same shortsighted binary-thinking imbeciles who championed the laws that made this fiasco possible are now the most surprised by the ramifications of their deeds. Sadly, this is their usual MO (hint: they’re not horribly bright).

Bill O’Rielly flits scantily clad teens all day long on his program to prove how much he hates and despises such practices.  Mr. Reaction Formation would have called anyone who questioned any aspect of the constitutionality of child porn laws a pedophile.  Yes/no, right/wrong, good/bad.  You are either with the pedophiles or against them.  Sith happens.  If someone ever said, “but this law might be draconian because if someone innocently goes to Wal-Mart to develop some pictures of their kids in the tub”—(Insert your favorite O’Rielly rant here, pedophile appeaser!) 

People are doing a lot of time for pics on their hard drive. No proof of distribution, no proof they tried to go near any child, no proof of anything, really.  In fact, someone jumps onto your unsecured wireless from next door and they still come after you.  These have turned into modern day witch hunts.  By all means, monitor the internet and nail these perpetrators to the wall, but can we stop before we arrest grandma at the Fotomat booth? (Remember those?)  According to Megan’s Law anyone possessing a nude picture of someone deemed under age is subject to five years in jail (per picture).  Why isn’t this Wal-Mart family in jail then?  Throw the book at em’.  My parents need to report to prison and yours probably should too.  Megan’s Law was another one of those classic let’s never let this happen again moments. 

Did you ever end up on the wrong website?  You’ll have five years to think about your egregious clicking.  Remember that photo attachment that was big laughs at the office?  She might not be 18.  We’ll let a jury decide.  That should tack on five more years to the tally.  No one apparently IDs these girls, it’s based on the subjectivity of the jury.  So I’m sure Howard Stern’s ‘collection’ could land him in jail until long after the sun depletes its supply of hydrogen.  Forget Howard Stern, I own Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy.  According to the letter of the law, I should turn myself in, along with the million or so other Zep fans, on child pornography charges. I asked a federal attorney during a trial once (I was there professionally, really), how does this shit happen?  He said that any politician who tries to reform child porn regs is doomed.  The media will spin the shit out of it and paint that politician as being pro-child pornography. 

Enter Fox News.  Fox, particularly Bill O’Rielly, championed this bullshit the loudest.  Now people like him are the most outraged by the results of their idiocy as it spills into one family’s Wal-Mart nightmare.  There are quite enough actual perpetrators out there to keep law enforcement busy, isn’t there?  I don’t think marching half the country into jail right now, wrongly, is the best way to handle this issue.  I had the same conversation with the Crank a couple of years ago.  He sided with O’Rielly (imagine that) and I’m sure this Wal-Mart story outraged him as much as any Foxer.  As if limiting child pornography laws to, er…perpetrators is a bad thing.  But, to be fair, there are only those two switches in their head. 

As for behavioral health, one case in Arizona, Arnold vs. Sarns, has brought the system to its knees. Two kids died at the hands of a serious mentally ill individual and it’s all over. Granted, this guy should have been monitored better, but the real culprit is this: society has never made this a priority—never has, never will.  Behavioral health is under funded, increasingly more so by the minute, and with our let’s never let this happen again mentality, we cripple the few case managers left who could actually do something about it.

Foxers are also the first one’s to go: “Why wasn’t this nut being watched before he killed all of those nuns!”  Well, Foxeteers, as the least common denominator, you’ve systematically helped to decimate services.  Remember?  You championed each and every budget cut, when in reality every dollar spent in behavioral health is likely to save society three.  But they’re not interested in the facts.  They’d rather continue breaking news down into tiny shards of sensationalism.  Good luck with that. 

Before that ‘nut’ killed those two kids he received two phone calls and his case manager attempted one home visit.  They couldn’t find the guy and shortly thereafter the two kids are dead.  Today, post the Arnold vs. Sarns decision, post the investigation on mental health-land, post all the revamping, post the additional monitors, post the additional forms to fill out, post the misallocated dollars. Today this same man would receive one phone call (we’d fudge the other one) and, forget the home visit…at 30 mph we’d throw a rock with a note on it that says ‘please call us’ as we speed passed toward client number 412.  Feel safer society?  This isn’t litigation, this is shitigation.  Hint: if a case manager has considerably more paperwork due to shitigation and is even further under funded, they’re going to see their clients even less.  This isn’t calculus, kids.  We do need monitors, but not to death.  And we do need to fund things as a society that are important, or guess what?  Shit is going to happen.  I would like to see a senator or congressman try case managing several hundred severely mentally ill people for a day.  You can film it for entertainment purposes. It would be rather like listening to a baseball announcer broadcasting a hockey game.

Invariably, the overblown reaction to never let this happen again causes a legal shit storm that further handicaps the very system that erred in the first place.  This results in more, not less, people getting substandard care or, for our first example, police focusing their time on grandma at the Fotomat booth instead of area pedophiles.  This shitigation is happening in every quadrant of our society.

One doctor a little hungover in Cleveland makes a mistake and, after court, all docs from sea to shining sea have another form to fill out. End result: my one minute of actual doc time is whittled down to forty-five seconds.  Is this form going to stop the next hungover doctor from making a similar mistake somewhere?  Hell no.  That’s called supervision. That involves that doctor and his supervisor (or in this case, his bartender). But national forms are fun!  Kill a forest for victory!  So each lawsuit designed to help protect the consumer actually puts and increasingly debilitating strain on the entire system.  As a therapist, if I have to fill out one more form I’m going to just start mailing my clients a letter that says, “Tell me about your mother” with an enclosed bill. 

 I think there should be a law about over reacting.  That’s it!  I’m going to make a law about over reacting, so that this never happens again!

You, Dave Atsals, have listened to the liberal rational for socialized health care.  You’ve drank the proverbial Kool Aid, so to speak, and it’s a batch the Ghetto Shaman wouldn’t even touch.  Like a good Pelosi minion, you’ve accepted the premise that we’ve survived the last 240 years in spite of free-market capitalism. How could we ever have survived the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf twice, pandemics, the depression, polio, and yes, even eight seasons of American Idol?!  Without Obamacare, this country should have been dead 200 years ago.  How the hell did we ever survive without the chosen one?  …without the Messiah, the once and future clown? If our healthcare system is so horrible, then why do we have people coming to America for medical treatment from all over the world…for what?…the hospital Jello?  Granted, the hospital Jello is good and there are so many places in a hospital room where a green cube of Jello would look great stuck to, but I really think there is more to it than that.  I know there are other colors, but you’re making light of an important topic, Dave, and I won’t have it!  Frankly, this issue is beyond the scope of all gelatin products and their derivatives. 

We need reform, Dave, but we need the kind of reform that gets government regulation out of the healthcare industry, entirely.  No Jello for you!  It has no business being there, kind of like you have no business frequenting those ‘clubs’ of yours (which reminds me, Dave, we really need to talk).

We need to be able to buy insurance across state lines; we need to get rid of trial lawyers, liberal judges, and their junk science that makes malpractice insurance premiums unaffordable for doctors, who then have to pass the cost of these premiums onto their patients because some dumb-assed broad was stupid enough to put her coffee between her legs instead of the car cup holder.  Can you say Scarbucks?  She should have been liable for being a moron, nothing more.  Hey, that’s an idea. Instead of taxing our healthcare, let’s tax stupidity. I’m afraid such a tax won’t bode too well for you, Dave.  You may have to move back in with your parents.  Oh, that’s right, you’re already back with your parents.  You see, no harm done.

But back to taxing stupidity, I think I need another blood pressure pill. Maybe if I become a good democrat, I can get some rich guy to pay for it.  Cubes of Jello all around folks, on someone else. 

Did you know that if you rip a Jello cube in half, it sticks to the ceiling better?  No shit.  It really does.  Try it when you’re in a hospital bed and having some other tax payer flip for the whole inpatient stay.  Just flip the Jello right off the spoon, well, half the Jello (you must cut it in half, remember. It’s like you’re not even listening) and then you can count how long it sticks to the ceiling.  Stay as long as you want in that room.  Get all the tests you want.  Have them X-Ray the damn Jello for all Obamacare.   Maybe there are bones in Jello.  It’s worth a few extraneous MRIs.  Don’t worry, you’re probably not paying for it.

I just love med changes. It’s like “let’s see what parts of my body and/or mind THESE little fuckers will decide to play with next.” It’s always a hoot. Well, as I sat home recovering from my latest foray into the netherworld of psychotropic medication (NPM), I decided to watch CSPAN for a while, never having done so. I have heard that there are two things you never want to watch being made, laws and sausage. In my past life, in the retail food industry, I saw sausages and frankfurters being made many times. Now, having seen how laws are made, I prefer the sausage thing. While it is definitely NOT for the easy queasy, it is quite interesting. Various parts of “formerly living things” (the parts you won’t see brightly packaged at you local Safeway Meat Dept.) processed into beige goo, inserted into intestines of other “formerly living things”, like libertards, and cooked, salted, and food-colored into something that looks good on a bun. Now there’s something to watch between games on Sunday. Seeing laws made, on the other hand, not so much.

I have seen two basic series of events. For the first part, one party had the “goods” on another party’s guy, and wanted to discuss the guy’s problems on the “floor” of the House. The other party, having the majority, wanted to avert any discussions of the guy’s problems, and did so quickly by passing off the “problem” to the House Ethics Committee (A.K.A. the black hole of democracy). The whole thing took less than fifteen minutes…efficiency at its finest.

The second part involved the issue of awarding U.S. citizenship to a Polish person posthumously.  He was apparently heroic some eons ago during the Polish Mexican War or some such. For the rest of the afternoon, most of the members presented their very own hour long speech as to why this is truly the most Earth shaking legislation EVER. It was like a bad trip during Woodstock. I swear I heard the faint sounds of “don’t take the brown acid. It’s not good for you. Take the white acid only.” repeated over a loudspeaker in the background of my mind. I also heard “The white zone is for loading only; mind the gap”, and track two from my Iron Butterfly 8-track.  But, it could just be the new meds talking.

After enduring this for some time I reflected on the sheer amount of problematic individuals in both the Congress and the executive branches of our present government. But it did solve for me the mystery behind the disappearance of McCain’s campaign managers. They are now vetting for Obama and the congressional Dems.

You got the guy who is at the head of the House Ways and Means committee, you know, Mr. Way off on his own income taxes (two million dollars).  “Oops, sorry, ah he he he, forgot to carry the 1.” If you don’t like him, it’s because you are racist. 

You got the head of the House Banking Committee who got caught running a male brothel out of his Massachusetts townhouse. You know, the guy whose boyfriend was running the Fanny Mae back when they were asked to make subprime loans to poor people to get them into homeownership, even if it was temporary. The guy that almost single-handedly caused the recession. The guy with no teeth, ‘cause his boyfriend likes it that way. “I’m thucking wabbit dicks, huhuhuhuhu”.

You got the lady that got to be House Speaker. Wow, Pickins must have been Slim (sorry for that one). Doctor Sardonicus’ old lady.  Michael Jackson in a pants suit.  You know, the bitch from Libertard Prime.  Then you got the Senate Majority leader, whose own constituents hate him. It seems that what happens in Vegas goes to Washington and then fucks everything not in Vegas.

Then you got Czars. The FCC Diversity Czar, Mark Lloyd, is the guy who says the Fairness Doctrine doesn’t go far enough. He’s actually advocated forcing people to step down from their media posts so they can be replaced with minorities. An avowed Marxist, he wants to “overthrow the capitalist system” itself. Geeh, I bet he’d be a real hit at Constitutional Convention re-enactments.

You have the Regulatory Czar, who I believe oversees all fiber products, saying: “The absence of a European-style social welfare state is certainly connected with the widespread perception among the white majority that the relevant programs would disproportionately benefit African Americans (and more recently Hispanics).”  Who ever said fair ever had to be fair?  The Obama czar’s controversial comments were made in his 2004 book “The Second Bill of Rights”. In the book, he openly argues for bringing socialism to the U.S. and even lends support to communism (although, enough fiber can really help bring on a much-needed case of the Trotskys).

You got the Safe Schools Czar who is an admitted admirer of Henry Hay, the founder of NAMBLA, the National Man-Boy Love ASSociation. This guy actually wrote a forward in the book, while bending over: “The queering of elementary schools.”  This guy openly admits wanting to teach the benefits of homosexuality to elementary school students. No lie, folks.  Look it up, if you can still read. (Mommy, how do you spell sodomy?)

You have the Energy and Environment Czar who worked on the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which argues that the global community must work collectively to address environmental policies. They orchestrated private discussions between the White House and auto industry officials on vehicle fuel efficiency standards, while keeping their talks as quiet as possible.

Mary Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board, said, “We put nothing in writing, ever.”

There’s that transparency thing again.  And Obama hisself, the first Used Car Salesman ever elected to the White House.

I ♥Liquid Dinosaurs

The Crank

The Crank and the Mick have both missed the point on the topic of health care.  Therefore, I need to put in my three cents.  My three cents includes something they tend to overlook, common sense (or dollars).  I may be jumping the gun a little bit about Crank and Mick’s articles and opinions, but I doubt it.  Truth be told, I read only the titles of their posts, that seems to be more than enough for me this week.  My guess is the Crank is of the opinion that any form of public health care will ruin the country outright, and Mick feels nothing will ever work because George W. Bush was once our president.  Mick probably related this to the ever-growing national level of consciousness and seven different political talk show hosts so obscure it would take a PhD in C-span 2 to decipher.  The Crank probably related it to a funny colored big ape, perhaps the same one they were testing The Ghetto Shaman’s latest “cures” on.  He probably attacked Mick’s position in the form of very colorfully worded outbursts of CAPITALIZED SENTENCES!!! 

The fact is the ape, the shaman, and I have reached the same conclusion.  Something needs to change.  Keeping the government completely out of everything is not the answer.  It has been tried before and the results are breaking down as we speak.  Complete government control is never the answer either, that is why many of our ancestors came to this country in the first place (or was it for hookers?).  I know personally over a tenth of my earnings goes for my family’s health insurance.  This does not include any additional expenses, such as co-pays, or actual procedures.  I also know the current system makes no sense to me or the ape (see my past article $28.00).  I have looked into some other options for insurance in Pennsyltaxme.  I can insure my kids on the cheap, through something called CHIPS.  The problem is they have to be un-insured for six months before they’re eligible.  Yes, you heard right.  Let’s drop insurance on the children for six months, keep my fingers crossed that nothing happens, and then the Calvary arrives…or the coroner.  THIS IS NOT COMMON SENSE!!  (Hey, the Crank’s onto something. That felt good.  As good as a hooker,  WELL ALMOST!).

My pet peeve involves my pets.  They get better health care from the vets than I do from my doctor.  My pets get little cards in the mail letting them know it’s time for their appointments, and what shots and services are going to be needed next.  If X-rays are needed they are performed on site.  If small surgeries are needed they can be done swiftly and conveniently.  Blood work is run on site, with results within twenty-four hours.  Someone even brings them their dog gone tick medicine right to the damn door.  I wish I had heart worm. 

Me, on the other hand, I never know when an appointment is needed at my Doctors; it takes me six months to see the doctor after a routine physical is scheduled.  I am normally seen by only a nurse practitioner anyway, who tells me the doctor is a swell guy.  When I finally see my doctor all he does is type on his laptop and ignore me while I turn my head and cough.   If blood work is needed, so is another appointment at a local hospital. If X-rays are needed, so is another appointment at a different hospital.  And they don’t even clip my nails; they have to send you to a specialist for that.   I think I am getting heart worm.

Common sense requires me to do a little research stating the pro’s and con’s of Obamacare.  Maybe even propose a solution or two, something Zano never does. 

Facts:

• The United States is the only industrialized nation without coverage for its entire population.  Granted, some of our people may not deserve it, but we should be a nation that should lead not follow.
• The number of un-insured in the country continues to rise.
• Canada’s much maligned health care system costs only a 10^th of their GNP, currently ours costs are almost a 15^th.  Theirs covers almost everyone.  Their life expectancy is higher, and their infant mortality lower.
• We are currently ranked 19^th in the world.  That’s too damn low.

It makes sense to me why people go on welfare, they get free insurance.  If all American’s were insured it would be a reason for people to move from welfare to lower paying jobs saving the country a ton of money.           

Cons:

• There is nothing in the Constitution guaranteeing health care.  Next they will want the government to provide everyone cars, boats, and flush toilets.
• It is just another way to take from the well-off and distribute to the terminally-lazy.
• Why should we pay medical expenses for the obese, alcoholic, drug addicted, and smokers of the world?  I’m talking to you Ghetto Shaman.  Oh, that’s right, the cocaine is helping your weight problem, isn’t it?   My bad.

Pros:

• The sickest already receive hospital care and are unable to ever pay, raising all of our insurance and medical expenses.
• Huge companies make billions of the current system using this money to pay overpaid CEO’s and lobby officials to keep the current system in place and their standard of living the same.
• National health care replaces insurance premiums with taxes.  In most cases the taxes will be lower than what people are already spending on health care.
• Over 25 cents of every health care dollar is wasted on paperwork, advertizing, and other things patients don’t need (like referrals to quack psychiatrists “ZANO….ZANO…”).  The other 75 cents usually falls behind the couch.

Yes, common sense math is simple: 4 pros to 3 cons.  It is time for change and some sort of publicly funded health care.  After all, are we all not part of the public, and paying for health care?  This means the entire public is already paying, except those without, which is entirely un-acceptable. 

Health insurance is basically a slush fund where everyone pays into the same bin, even though not everyone is going to need the same.  Therefore, it protects us all from financial disasters if there is a medical necessity.  Having this funded and administered by private insurance companies only makes prices go up, because they need ever-increasing profits.  Take profits out and lower the prices.  Maybe we can do the same with auto insurance, etc.  I wonder how much payments each month goes to un-deserved bonuses.  Do I believe in capitalism?  Sure. The better educated you are effects the better role one should have in society, therefore the better compensation you should receive for that role.   This is why I am studying up to pass my high school equivalency.

SOLUTION:  let the government tax you fairly for healthcare and you chose what form of health care, and where you will go to get it.  If different levels of health care need set up, then so be it.  I do not want to hear that it’s unfair; it is a “YOU” problem.  Work harder, move into a higher income bracket.  After all we all have different levels of health care now based upon what insurance we have, or don’t have.  I know we are all sick of taxes, but some of them actually are used for things, like plowing our roads when it snows, providing education to our young, and protecting our Borders (but not our Starbucks) from foreign invasion.  All of which are useless if you’re dead.

Amidst much chagrin, chest-thumping, and gnashing of teeth, this post highlights the problems of expanding public healthcare.  Sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do.  After all, the truth is the truth is the truth, lied Zano.  Government funded healthcare is complicated to the point of absurdity.  In fact, Managed Care has created whole swaths of self-important middle men and middle agencies that both spend and make oobs and gobs and loads of tax payer’s money while desperately trying to justify their own existence.  This is not uncommon in super capitalism land, which is another reason why this house of cards called the U.S. economy has less sustainability than a freshly baked Krispy Kreme in Crank Manor.

Today’s post focuses on behavioral healthcare, because when I’m not bitch-slapping nuns during wild crack binges, I’m out here in the field (fighting for my meals).  OK, that’s an exaggeration, I rarely use crack.  The fact is, some of these “big brother” agencies were created by Hillarycare.  They function as liaisons between the state and the actual behavioral health providers on the ground.  So, the state comes up with dumb, unrealistic—I really don’t have a clue about healthcare—mandates, and these middle agencies complicate the matter, add forms, shake, stir, and pass-on the love to those folks supposedly treating Uncle Louie for his tendency to wear aluminum foil on his head to block out the government transmitted microwaves (GTMs).

Many of these agencies are even for profit, which translates thusly: they get all the state money to distribute to the behavioral healthcare networks that they oversee, and, if they don’t spend it on the schizophrenic crack addicts in our streets, they get to keep it! It’s unconscionable…like appointing Dick Cheney Prison Reform Czar. 

These swaths of middle men siphon off tons of money from those most in need—the money allocated to actually treat people.  They create monitors to watch the mental health and the substance abuse providers on the ground, which, in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but in this peer-reviewed society gone wild (PRSGW), the pendulum has not only swung too far, but it has lodged itself into the side of Manute Bol’s head.

When you translate 500 “best practices” into 500 monitors, people in the trenches, the ones actually providing services can no longer function.  We stop having time to actually treat people and embark on a daily juggling act that even Squidward would find challenging. Let’s try this example: say some bean-counting, pencil-pusher decided that it’s best practice to see all 235 people on your caseload each week.  So some case manager somewhere will then run around to all 235 people and say, “Please sign this form to show that I was here.”  They will then—whether the person is drooling, tripping, or has a gun to their head—jump back into the agency van and speed away toward client 167.  But, hey, it will look great on that report for that bean counter.   My agency is not doing this, by the way (yet), but you get the idea.

This is happening all over the country.  The field is collapsing.  Put your stock in aluminum foil, folks, because the Uncle Louies of the world are going to need it.  The best example happened as my agency just announced the next round of massive budget cuts.  On the same day my agency raised our health insurance (a lot), slashed our PTO, and discussed lay offs, I heard a radio commercial during my drive home: Have you considered doing next to nothing while mental health care providers are being laid off in droves?  Join our middle men, bean-counting band of bad-karma case-manager cops.  Why actually do shit for a living, when you can move to a cushy, nearly pointless position in the heart of an entire colony of middle-management, like-minded Stepford Czars.

Now, I’m not saying all these folks are baby killers.  I have friends in several of these agencies, so I don’t say this lightly.  There are some impressive individual efforts, but overall this is a failed experiment (like American capitalism today).  But, overall, wrong career choices do have negative karmic consequences (just ask the Ghetto Shaman).

So the money these middle men receive for sanctioning mental health providers goes to hiring more of “them.”  So over time we end up with more monitors, monitoring less people that actually do stuff.

Someone at work joked recently “Therapy? We don’t have time for therapy.”

But you can bet we met all of our monitors for that month.  Rah!  If we can avoid treating anyone, we’ll do just fine.  These people must sleep at night by saying things like, we’re holding them accountable.  Of course no one’s holding them accountable. Hey, let’s have another layer of bureaucrats oversee them!  Yeah, that’s it, and eventually our healthcare system will resemble one of those Escher paintings from hell.  Oh, that’s right, it already does.  Fact: these folks shouldn’t be sleeping at night (not without Jacko levels of downers).   They are diverting money from places where it is sorely needed (aka, my checking account).

Our current healthcare reform debate is embarrassing.  To have important debates overrun with bullshit is depressing. This is important stuff, peeps; I’m talking to you Foxeteers. Just the facts, thanks, and leave the middle school rhetoric out of it.  The second healthcare wrinkle is legalese. Someone sues anyone anywhere in the U.S. and reams of paperwork are created in every nook-and-cranny of our system to assure this never happens again.  Oh, it won’t, because I don’t have time to see anyone on my caseload, let alone sleep with them. Lawyers, as usual, are at the heart of the problem.  This is where Tort reform is a must.  If a driver for my agency decides to have consensual nooky with a client in the back of the agency van (we call it the Mystery Machine, by the way, because of the mysterious things we find in it), of course, that staff person should be fired. The victim should not, however, be able to close the agency by successfully suing for millions of dollars in “damages.” Although, it is kind of fun watching a dissociative person drive a Dodge Viper through a county fair.

So each lawsuit designed to “help protect” the consumer, actually puts an increasingly debilitating strain on the entire system.  As a therapist, if I have to fill out one more form for the lawyers or the Stepford Czars, I’m gonna start mailing my clients a form that says, “Tell me about your mother…” with an enclosed bill.  Speaking of which, this IS a bill.  Subscribe to the Daily Discord, now, or it’s your turn to clean out the Mystery Machine.