THINKING ABOUT HEALTH SERVICES IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH

(This post moved from previous blog spot http://diggingdeeper.wordpress.com/, where it was first posted January 25th, 2006)

Now that the Medicare prescription law has taken effect it’s become clear that no one understands it — not even the people in the administration and congress who supposedly wrote it. That’s because they never thought about seniors having to actually use it. Their goal was to shovel more money to their paymasters — the drug, insurance, and HMO Mafias.

I said “supposedly” wrote it because, like all legislation dealing with real money, it was created by the corporations themselves and passed on to their government schlemiels to prance around it at midnight in a voodoo blood ceremony I’m not supposed to say much about. I wish I could tell you no chickens were harmed.

Some of the people who voted for this swamp puss of a bill are considered friends of the people – Senator Diane Feinstein, for instance. I wrote and asked her how she could defend her vote and her little staff person got back to me in with an email that said she figured she’d rather get a start on some kind of prescription payments than have no bill at all. Which is like saying, hey, if I can’t get a health care bill that aids our health, why not vote for one that screws it up? Good plan, Feinstein. She also voted to kill the estate tax. Don’t get me started about that vampire. She looks damn good for 73. She’s juiced up her system of replacing her worn-out parts with organs from desperate Third Worlders. But that’s for another column.

We get people like Feinstein and her corruptomaniac friends in the House because it’s nearly impossible to dislodge incumbents anymore. Ninety-nine percent [no exaggeration] of all House incumbents who run for re-election are re-elected. And some Senate seats – Feinstein’s for instance – are even better protected.

Gerrymandering is now married to computerization and has produced a bastard zombie of a system that’s even more predictable than the old Soviet model.Remember when we used to laugh at Soviet elections because incumbents got 95 percent of the vote? The commissars were Jeffersonian Democrats compared to the jerks we have running Washington these days. If the Founding Fathers were around, the cockamamie rulings from this King George would be at risk. But our system has failed to react to the power of multinational corporations, and while we weren’t noticing, they bought the government. They’ve legalized so many bribery schemes that taking down Abramoff and his network will be like pissing into a hurricane. (For my zero salary, I figure I’m entitled to at least one crappy cliche per column)

This country has already been sold. Bush is just more blatant than the others, because he’s been brought up to hide nothing from servants because after all, they’re just servants. We are a nation of bozos, lulled to harmlessness by electro-media, Prozac, and other news-o-tainment from the same forces that bought Feinstein.

But these Enron-esque lunatics are programmed to keep acquiring new assets no matter how lopsided the ownership equation gets. Maybe when all of us are running around in rags enslaved to the last dauphin, some of us will ponder our go-along-get-along attitude.