Hot damn, it makes me happier than a o'possum eating its own manure to be RIGHT! I had trouble in my family for years, they couldn't tolerate me; they said I was too cynical! Too cynical, maybe, but always RIGHT.
Ah, why is it so wrong to be CYNICAL? Cynics foretell by rejecting the norm and observing characters in their roles and witness their obligations in performing those roles and see who is directing those roles. Cynics are too intelligent. Through their either natural or learned abilities, they are able to see the dark sides of things presented to them as brilliant, as guiding! They are able, through cynicism to see through the curtains surrounding deceit. Here's the Wikipedia entry on "Cynicism"--and yes I'm cynical about Wikipedia on the one hand and think it's grand on the other. The idea is what's grand, not the information it offers.
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Cynicism (Greek: Kυνισμός) originally comprised the various philosophies of a group of ancient Greeks called the Cynics, founded by Antisthenes in about the 4th century BC. The Cynics rejected all conventions, whether of religion, manners, housing, dress, or decency, advocating the pursuit of virtue in a simple and unmaterialistic lifestyle.
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In the 19th Century Cynics because of their negativism got condemned as a bunch of filthy vermin who saw no "good" in anything, even our fantasies. I'm not that kind of Cynic. I don't think either I'm really even a Cynic in the "true" ("Wikipedia") explanation of it. I'm empirical by nature and reading and being instructed in Sociology, my favorite subject because it's so full of everything, observations on snake handlers up to above-the-clouds potentates.
Friday I wrote a post telling the "tender few" who read this blog to forget any kind of single-payer health insurance...in fact, I carried on, We the People weren't going to get any kind of healthcare reform, none at all...and I added another "in fact": in fact, healthcare is gonna get more expensive and we are stuck with a "pay or die" healthcare system no matter what we deserved in putting President Obama in office.
Just think the Brits are laughing at us over in London as we pander to the Healthcare Industry's Power Elite and condemn their healthcare system by saying if Stephen Hawking had been under the English healthcare system, he'd have been left out on the dock to wait for Charon and his dog, Cerebus, to come along in his boat for a trip to Hell on the River Styx. In case you hadn't heard a Republican Swift Boater Congressman said exactly that about Stephen Hawking. Turns out Stephen Hawking was born in London and has lived in England all his life. Hawking replied with the opposite, that the British system was the reason he was alive and all rigged out in his special chair and ability to speak in understandable English all the complicated solutions to questions that infest his mind.
My old pal, L Hat, sent me a Winston Churchill quote a few back that said, and I paraphrase, "The US has to first get it wrong over and over until they get it right." And Winnie, whether you love his old half-American Power-Elite ass or not, was certainly on the money with that statement. We do have to get things wrong over and over before we get anything right. As a cynical Sociologist I add, "Winnie, you could have added that everytime we get it right we come along soon and reverse that right and start doing it wrong again." I call that backwards thinking.
So, yesterday, President Obama's Health Dept. head announced, all public options for healthcare reform were not only off the table but in the garbage.
Here's what we're getting instead:
1) We are getting watered down coverage from the "Pay or Die" boys--and, yes, there are some very evil women in the healthcare business, too. I said Friday that this would mean actually more expensive healthcare for us and a boondoggle for the doing-just-fine-thank-you insurance monopolies since Obama's going to force anyone without healthcare to now obtain healthcare from a big gaudy insurance company or be penalized by the IRS once a year, as though taxes aren't high enough on us poor and bewildered folks already.
2) Guess what the "Pay or Die" industry has come up with next in this new compromised bill? (a compromise between We the People's representatives and the Healthcare Industry; remember, no single-payer advocate was ever allowed to meet with Obama or to be heard in Congress--NONE). The insurance giants have gotten President Obama to agree to allowing them to now lower their payable part of your bill--80% with you paying out-of-pocket 20%--from now on, their going to pay 65% and you're gonna pay 35%. The deceit in this: these crooks are getting a whole new ton of customers, those the government is going to subsidized, plus, though they said this will allow them to provide "better" services and care, I'll bet you my bottom dollar the HMOs who own all our hospitals are going to charge higher fees for everything, which means, your health insurance is going sky high and NOW definitely YOU ARE EITHER GOING TO PAY...or guess what? You're fucked body will be hauled out to that terminal patient dock on the River Styx where you'll be left to die.
So there you go, folks. If you don't make enough money to afford "the best healthcare in the world"--that's what the slogans all say--first of all, your government's going to penalize you with taxes that you may not be able to pay--if so, we suppose you'll be expected to die in an IRS jail (except they do have socialized medicine in prisons). (Remember, Obama has not rescinded any of G.W. Bush's harsh bankruptcy laws, so don't count on bankruptcy getting you out of debt to these chislers.)
Unitedhealthcare is one of the biggest players in the Pay-or-Die health insurance scheme. They own a company called The Lewin Group. The Lewin Group crunches statistics and makes them come out favorable to Unitedhealthcare (one of the worst offenders in denying care to people who need a life-support system to survive or who need immediate organ transplants and such) and unfavorable to government-assisted healthcare. Congress quotes verbatim statistical reports sent to them by Unitedhealthcare's Lewin Group. Oren "Mormon Nutjob Repugnican" Hatch quoted the Lewin Group over and over on a radio talk show, rattling off their statistics like a fundamentalist Christian carrying a weapon strapped to his leg and quoting Bible verses like a demon on speed (yeah, a guy in New Hampshire came to an Obama Town Hall meeting with a pistol openly exposed strapped to his leg--when people protested, the cops told them it's perfectly alright to carry a weapon in New Hampshire as long as you keep it exposed. Doesn't that sound like a John Wayne movie to you? His movies all ended in gunfights, the Duke drawing against the snotnose kid gunman or the old worn-out professional gunman. As the Duke would say, "This is all re-goddamn-diculous!").
The first required course I took in my beginning trip up the Sociology highway (a boundary to a Sociologist)--a truly broad path--was Statistics. The first book I was required to read in Statistics was How to Lie With Statistics. All I have to say, for instance, is "According to these Lewin Group reports and evaluations, we're all gonna be left to die if they allow We the People to have our own Healthcare system run by our representatives (sworn on Bibles to represent us equally and fairly) in government. Also, according to the Lewin Group, a public-option insurance would be outrageously expensive (remember, use backward thinking when you hear these statements) and leave us with a 114 trillion-dollar deficit!" [Why do we have a deficit? I ask, and nobody answers.] Except, here's a statistic I believe: $800 out of every operation or the tons of pills doctors are going to stick you with goes to pay the salary of Unitedhealthcare's CEO. I say We the People march on Unitedhealthcare's Minneapolis headquarters and put him up on a table and cut his guts out, sew him up with a needle and thread, give him a swift kick in the ass, then take all his money and give it back to the people who suffered so he can live like a duke or an earl--"Pass me one of those illegal Cuban cigars, Rush, and pour me another couple of drops of that Power Elite brandy." Check out below why you should have gone to Wharton, Tuck, or the Harvard Business School and majored in Tom Fool's Management 101: (the following is from fiercehealthcare.blogspot.com.)
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Top Healthcare CEO Pay 2008
FierceHealthcare reports the following top 10 CEO salaries for 2008.
* Ron Williams - Aetna - Total Compensation: $24,300,112.
* H. Edward Hanway - CIGNA - Total Compensation: $12,236,740.
* Angela Braly - WellPoint - Total Compensation: $9,844,212.
* Dale Wolf - Coventry Health Care - Total Compensation: $9,047,469.
* Michael Neidorff - Centene - Total Compensation: $8,774,483.
* James Carlson - AMERIGROUP - Total Compensation: $5,292,546.
* Michael McCallister - Humana - Total Compensation: $4,764,309.
* Jay Gellert - Health Net - Total Compensation: $4,425,355.
* Richard Barasch - Universal American - Total Compensation: $3,503,702.
* Stephen Hemsley - UnitedHealth Group - Total Compensation: $3,241,042.
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Ron Williams by the bye is a Black man--I just say that because a lot of Blacks don't have any healthcare at all--but that's of no concern to Ron Williams. Ironically, Aetna was the insurance company that insured Slaves as chattel mortgage in those good ole days of Slavery when the economy of this country was BOOMING! Like Obama says, Ron says, "Hey, that Slave shit is all in the past--I don't wanna deal with the past--I'm thinkin' about how much more of the White man's money I'm gonna make next year--unless the White sons of bitches on the White Board fire my Black ass."
Those above figures, not from the Lewin Group, by the bye, do not include the millions these birds make in stock options and bonuses. Those figures would put these goons way up over 2oo million bucks a year. Ah, how sweet is that!
So there you go, folks, the old thegrowlingwolf is telling you, if you're broke, hungry, and facing bad health, you'd better move to England, Canada, or at least Massachusetts where they have a sort of a free healthcare.
The Repugnicans are brewing up storms with their exaggerated lies because of the coming 2010 Congressional elections and gubernatorial elections and some mayor races, too.
Don't you think it is terribly ironic that these same people who say the government should stay out of people's lives are the same fools who backed Bush no matter how stupid or murderous his proposals all the way, standing firmly behind his "made up" wars, his wrecking our judicial system in favor of corrupt judges as long as they're Repugnicans, wrecking our bankruptcy laws, and trying like maddened fools to steal all our Social Security money by privatizing SS, a subject which about a year ago Larry (Worthless as a College President) Summers said was back in the hopper again. That's scary, because Obama would probably flip-flop on that, too, and we'll end up doing just that, privatizing Social Security and thereby finally completing the separation of the POOR from the RICH!
I'm gonna say something I'm gonna get a bucket of shit thrown in my face for saying, but Black men live under constant stress. (The Secret Service (our SS Troopers) say President Obama gets a brickbat load of death threats every single day.) Black men have a lot of high blood pressure. Black men hold things inside their guts and get ulcers. No matter how tough and elegant they sound, they are so beaten down so badly by the White Cultural mores they have to "survive" under extreme pressures. Black men have a difficult time holding their frustrations in and usually drink and smoke heavily. I'm generalizing, yes, except my best friend ever in my life was a Black photographer, a great photographer, and photography teacher; yet, the company he worked for come promotion to staff photographer time always passed him over for a White guy; eventually sticking him in an important (a photo archivist for a big sports magazine) job but a dead-end job that also kept him from ever again being considered as a staff photographer, his dream. My friend was angry all the time. He was a good poet, too, but all his poems were about getting screwed around, getting shuffled off to Buffalo by partners who worked with him and bosses who patted him on the back, said he was great, and then, the worse thing they could do, buy him a martini, then another one. One time this famous sports writer took my friend to lunch. Once at lunch, this dude, a notorious drinker around the office, says, "How 'bout we start with some martinis?" And he ordered a round. My friend loved Beefeaters-straight-up with a spray of vermouth and one single olive. This writer/boss kept ordering martinis; by the middle of the lunch they were both feeling no pain when the writer looked up at my friend and said, "You know your problem? You drink too much."
My friend when he was drunk was very mean and threatening, especially to his women, though I know for sure he never struck a woman but he was constantly being tempted to. He dated Black women exclusively. He said a white woman's pussy tasted like sour milk but a black woman's tasted like cherry wine. (That's true, I can vouch for that, too.) My friend wore Brooks Brothers clothes and had several Nikon cameras, one Hasselblad, his pride and joy. He took some really beautiful photos, but nobody that I know has ever seen them. I know where he stored them; I've seen them in boxes and in a couple of portfolio cases he had. He never let even me look at them--I saw one, a couple of sea gulls he caught in flight with a highspeed shutter that showed all the feathers in their wings as their wings were beating in flight.
My friend eventually died of throat cancer that quickly spread to his brain--hopeless in Sloane-Kettering Hospital here in NYC--though always given hope by his money-grubbing surgeon..."Hey, my man, you ready for me to cut all your jawbones out of your mouth? I'd say, you've got a 70-30 chance of beating your cancer with this surgery." And that surgery failed, etc., and soon he was shipped off to the Little Nuns of Charity to die still believing he was getting better til one night he was watching teevee and found out he was in a terminal patient "carecenter." Why was he sent to this dump? Because his insurance had been maxed out--it only covered a million--and the cost was now over that million--so they dumped his sweet ass into the care of a bunch of syrupy sweet nuns. My friend was 43 when he curled up in a ball and died.
My black friend was also constantly being stopped and questioned by White cops, especially the White cops of Scarsdale, the Westchester County town in which he lived. Once when he was walking back to his apartment from the grocery store, a cop stopped him and made him show a receipt for the groceries. My friend didn't protest; he kept his anger inside him; it eventually killed him.
Warren Buffett is rich enough and through his financial firm I'm sure he's even richer than rich enough. This one man is so rich, he can manipulate the prices on the stock market simply by selling off several million shares of some company he's no longer interested in. Anybody worth 200 billion dollars ain't sufferin' one god-damn bit--nor is he gonna let his buddies suffer either. Warren Buffett for instance didn't pull himself up by his bootstraps like Repugnicans say we powerless folks have to do. Oh no, Warren's seed money was from his old rich daddy, a money-bags-first political hack. Remember, these birds all know each other, too, some of them actually going to private school and college together.
Warren Buffett yesterday told the world he was moving his major investments out of "petroleum products" and into medical supply companies. Now, you ask, why is he announcing so precisely what he's up to?
Now here's the problem with that statement. First of all, using backwards thinking, Warren is not giving up his Exxon-Mobil stocks--maybe his Vaseline Petroleum Jelly stocks--or maybe he's simply moving some of his hedge-fund profit--into medical supplies. Warren's right. He sees a boom coming in the healthcare industry--and, yes, he's right to say he's doing in terms of his stock buying. But to say he's divesting his oil stocks is bullshit. Warren ain't giving up a rich company like Exxon-Mobil--the greatest profits in human history--or Halliburton or KBR--no, and he's not selling his stock in HMOs either or in healthcare insurance companies--nor is he divesting his pharmaceutical stocks.
Here's Our "How to Get Rich" Tip of the Day:
Follow Warren Buffett. Sell your now-worthless house for whatever you can get for it; max out your still-viable credit cards; take out your savings, and take your big wad of money down to Charles Squab, Swab, Schwab and invest it in Exxon-Mobil, and also buy into those medical supply companies (like U.S. Medical Supply Co. of Atlanta)--soon, you, like Warren Buffett, will be rolling in the dough. Even if the stock market crashes, you'll cash out in time like Warren will do and everything's gonna be alright. You believe that and you're headed for that back dock where you'll die waiting for Charon and his boat. "And they rowed a little boat about halfway cross the pond" (Bessie Smith sang that--Bessie Smith who had plenty of health insurance; yet she still died in a Southern hospital who refused her care).
I listened to a bit of a documentary on the crookedness of Unitedhealthcare (pops and moms seniors, this is the healthcare company AARP uses for their supplemental Medicare schemes). In this film, a woman said she was suffering from a colon disease that was drying her up literally. She got to the point she couldn't eat solid foods--they just rushed right through her digestive system--SWOOOSH--none of their nutrients being absorbed by the system, none of the water she drank staying in her system--her colon disease at the same time sucking what little water she retained out of her. In order to live, her doctor prescribed this process where they pump liquids into her on a sort of constant basis. At first, Unitedhealthcare told her doctor that they would pay for the treatment but that they were behind in their paperwork on this case at the moment but one day they would definitely pay. So the woman started these treatments. Six months went by and still no pay from Unitedhealthcare. After six months, one day the woman got a letter from Unitedhealthcare telling her they had squashed that treatment because they felt it was unnecessary in her case. This not only left her without treatment but in debt for the treatment she had gotten. When she called Unitedhealthcare to beg them to approve the coverage, she talked to a lady, and pled with her. "Please, Lady, I'm going to die if I don't get this treatment," to which the kind lady replied, "OK."
So get your checkbooks out if you have any health problems coming up--and we'd suggest you stop driving a car, stop eating red meat, stop smoking cigarettes, stop eating at McDonald's--and stop believing what government officials promise you. You're truly on your own in this country now--you are truly captured by Capitalism--and as Marx taught you, though you've never read (read: RED) Marx, there's only one way to put this system out of profit-making business and that's a REVOLUTION, folks. Now, I'm not so self-centered to believe we're gonna have a revolution over anything, much less a crooked and wealth-draining economic system. The revolutionary things we could do is turn back all our cell phones; turn back our CABLE teevee boxes (wasted money because all teevee is the same no matter how many channels you can get on your 56-inch teevee screens); max out our credit cards and then cut 'em in half and send them back; take your money out of the big bailed-out banks and put it in a good little local bank; stop buying food at grocery stores--go to farmer's markets and organic food stores (yep, you're gonna pay more money for this food, but think of the healthcare expenses you'll cut out--like expenses for diabetes (type II), cancer, kidney and liver problems, etc.).
I recently saw a commercial on teevee for a drug called Abilify (a deadly toxic drug by the way) that went, "You know, a lot of antipsychotics don't get rid of all depression--you may still get depressed on your current prescription--the solution is Abilify! Where your prescribed antipsychotic doesn't relieve your depression, Abilify WILL!" In other words, what Abilify is is an antipsychotic drug that supplements your original antipsychotic drug. They've got poor manic depressives now taking two antipsychotic drugs. Plus, look at all the other pharmaceutical ads--they all claim "success" except if you read the fine print closely as the ad is coming to an end and listen to the disclaimers they're spewing off at the same time, you'll soon know you could DIE taking these overpriced drugs.
By the way, old fucks, in your new Medicare D plan your drugs will be going up--no chance your government's going to negotiate fair drug prices for you or use generic drugs in Medicare--NOPE, that's off the table. Medicare Plan D was the unfair drug pricing practices G.W. "Well Cared For" Bush stuck the old folks with, a great boondoggle given to the Pharmaceutical behemoth industry (we're still paying Bush and his old Pappy their presidential salaries, you know, $350,000-a-year plus medical benefits out the wazooo plus office improvements and a new security system ever so often for their mansions and faux ranches. The Bush Family, by the way, are doing just fine living off We the People's wealth--Pappy still gets his presidential salary, too--his son raised it from $250,000-a-year to $350, ooo-a-year--not bad for men who got us into unendable wars and wrecked our economy and sent us spiraling down into the hells of Chaos. The extinction freaks may be right--it is time for the extinction of the stupid human race. Don't worry, some Chimps will survive and carry on the culture
From apes to essence....
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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