Am I the only one who thinks this was just plain ODD?
It felt as though my thoughts of Obama’s ineptness was being manifest right before our eyes.
“I can’t do this, Slick. Can you come up here and handle it for me? (just leave the damned cigars in your car, my ass has been reamed enough lately).
Dammit, no one said I was going to have to face the music someday for selling out America. I’ve been tricked! Tricked I say!”
**walks off stage shaking head, mumbling**
“Goddamned politicians, they never tell you the whole story, they’re just lying motherfuckers saying anything to get what they want”
Clinton holds court in Obama's White House - The Oval: Tracking the Obama presidency
Bob, I love Bill Clinton but I thought the whole thing was horribly done! What an embarrassment! It looked to me like Obama called upon Clinton to calm the fears of the public, to try and convince us to roll over and accept this hideousness of a "framework legislation" The only person showing guts and smarts is Bernie Sanders. I finally after 4 drafts put up a little post....I'm so confused....
ReplyDeleteOK, my head is spinning. I shouldn't say hideous legislation. There are many good benefits to this bill. It's those GOPpers I don't trust. There just has to be some sinister plan behind their compromising and agreeing with the huge price tag for this bill...
ReplyDeleteIt was utterly pathetic.
ReplyDeleteO showed once more that he is not his own man.
He left Bubba standing there pitching this surrender while O went to a Xmas party.
Sue
Do not worry about paying for it.
The repubs will see to that come January. They will cut all social services big time. Then they will go after privatizing Soc. Sec.
And yes many dems will go along to get along.
We live in a Uniparty that caters to the Corps.
Interesting that Bernie is a socialist.
And he had to stand up for the dems.
The dems will not fight the Corps, they have been co- opted.
Socialists will, they have not sold out to the system.
Sue
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I were talking just this morning about all this. We're Boomer kids and the conversation turned into; "what if this economy is an intentional effort to destroy the Boomer Generation?"
I thought about it for a moment and connected some dots:
1. Social Security is not only unsustainable for the Boomer generation as the generations behind us are much smaller it was originally set up as a trust fund for the purpose of taking care of the elderly and infirm but has been raided for decades to shore-up poor economic practices.
2. The Boomers are starting to retire and use Medicare, another unsustainable government program. I just retired from a 30 year career in health care and I can tell you, Medicare reimbursements to hospitals are being slashed almost annually. AND the Medicare benefits are being reduced for the patients. This is going to have a massive negative impact on the ability for health care organizations to provide services. The organization I worked for has a 5-hospital system in Las Vegas. The system was writing off 10s of millions of dollars in indigent care every year (indigent care meaning those who cannot afford to pay the bills and what Medicare refuses to cover).
3. The hospitals began laying off nurses and support people in volumes I've never seen during my entire career. Soon, people are not going to want to work in health care, it's a very tough environment and with shortages of personnel, it's going to become tougher which will all equate to poor health care (Boomers are going to begin dying off, saving lots of money for the feds/elite in payouts for SS and Medicare)
4. Unemployment for Boomers is massive right now and what companies are going to want to hire very experienced people who are in their late 40s through the mid 60s when they can hire younger people at lower wages for a longer duration which also cuts their retirement benefit costs AND guess what – their health insurance costs, both in terms of benefits. The Boomers are expensive to the health care system from an insurance perspective, very expensive and I see in the news that they’ve already begun cutting health care options for children coverage – so eliminating the expensive Boomer coverage would be a wind-fall.
5. Since companies are going to be unwilling to hire Boomers, they’re going to continue needing benefits from the government, creating more indigent health care expenses, driving the single largest industry in the nation, health care, deeper into the financial abyss and costing the feds even more.
It’s a vicious circle and being the suspicious sort that I am, I’m willing to wager that the powered elite have devised a means to save themselves a bucket of money – let us Boomers simply fade away into oblivion.
What do you think?
Boomer, you last comment to Sue is spot damned on. Brilliant analysis!
ReplyDeleteBob I think you sound gloomy. I'm an optimist I guess because gloom and doom scares me. I've been like this since I was a wee tot.
ReplyDeleteWhy can't we go back to the day when we paid a small fee to the doctor once a year, got our meds right from his office, sometimes for free. The cost of surgery was even affordable without insurance. Then along came HMO's and insurance paper work from your employer and it was all down hill from there...
I have no insurance, haven't for a year, but I don't fear it either. We are consumed with the fact we MUST be insured. Even my doctor said we don't need health insurance, just catastrophic coverage. Maybe we should reform healthcare cost, not insurance cost.
Sue - Not really too gloomy really, my wife's mother died in the hosptial 6 months ago today which prompted a discussion on the state of health care and the political scene today.
ReplyDeleteI got a little caught up in it because of my health career. Few people know what goes on in health care so I wrote the blog mentioned below on Open Salon. Check it out. It's knowledge every U.S. citizen should have, but very few people know of it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For those of you who read the warning in my post "A thought and a question for the weekend" http://open.salon.com/blog/boomer_bob/2010/12/11/a_thought_and_a_question_for_the_weekend/comment , here's some very important information. Several commented on the warning - here's the unadulterated truth of the matter.
The first link below should be made familiar to anyone entering a hospital. You'll find it very revealing and informative. I worked for a very short time for the hospital (Sunrise Medical) and the corporation (Colombia/HCA) in the article until it became an embarrassment to be associated with them. I rarely divulged the company I worked for then, it became very well known in this area for its corruption and maltreatment of patients. Things haven't really changed much and hospitals don't like the public to know tht it's illegal to refuse service and they are now, as I mentioned, trying to fleece the public with their new promissory notes.
There's another interesting note about this - Senator Bill Frist and his family co-founded HCA which became Colombia HCA after some typical mergers such as those which have destroyed health care in this country. Pay particular attention to the section where Marc Gardner states; “MM: When did you become unhappy with your work at Columbia?” and to a patient by the name of “Rodolpho Augiano.” He was refused service at Sunrise Hospital for chest pain because he was homeless, walked out onto the front lawn and died of a massive heart attack. Even then it was illegal to refuse service to patients, but was a common occurrence and the law was kept very quiet.
http://www.allbusiness.com/specialty-businesses/685958-1.html
The "corporation" was found guilty of fraudulent Medicare billing in the early part of this decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_Corporation_of_America
Interestingly enough, Frist was also investigated for insider trading for selling off his shares when HCA was being investigated (how did he know that was happening? It was supposedly kept secret until they were raided). As HCA hospitals across the country were raided by the FBI, we were suddenly not even allowed to delete e-mail messages off of our computers until after the investigation.
I left the organization shortly after the first FBI raid in El Paso, TX. The organization I retired from is very, very similar to Colombia/HCA. Corporate health care is corrupt to the core and has been since the early 80s. The early 80s saw the introduction of “Diagnostic Regulatory Groups” (DRGs) initiated by who other than insurance companies. Hospitals began forming loosely associated groups for purchasing power and to manipulate the industry. They later became what we see as corporate health care.
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/dissent/documents/health/columb_update.html
Sue - Not really too gloomy really, my wife's mother died in the hosptial 6 months ago today which prompted a discussion on the state of health care and the political scene today.
ReplyDeleteI got a little caught up in it because of my health career. Few people know what goes on in health care so I wrote the blog mentioned below on Open Salon. Check it out. It's knowledge every U.S. citizen should have, but very few people know of it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For those of you who read the warning in my post "A thought and a question for the weekend" http://open.salon.com/blog/boomer_bob/2010/12/11/a_thought_and_a_question_for_the_weekend/comment , here's some very important information. Several commented on the warning - here's the unadulterated truth of the matter.
The first link below should be made familiar to anyone entering a hospital. You'll find it very revealing and informative. I worked for a very short time for the hospital (Sunrise Medical) and the corporation (Colombia/HCA) in the article until it became an embarrassment to be associated with them. I rarely divulged the company I worked for then, it became very well known in this area for its corruption and maltreatment of patients. Things haven't really changed much and hospitals don't like the public to know tht it's illegal to refuse service and they are now, as I mentioned, trying to fleece the public with their new promissory notes.
There's another interesting note about this - Senator Bill Frist and his family co-founded HCA which became Colombia HCA after some typical mergers such as those which have destroyed health care in this country. Pay particular attention to the section where Marc Gardner states; “MM: When did you become unhappy with your work at Columbia?” and to a patient by the name of “Rodolpho Augiano.” He was refused service at Sunrise Hospital for chest pain because he was homeless, walked out onto the front lawn and died of a massive heart attack. Even then it was illegal to refuse service to patients, but was a common occurrence and the law was kept very quiet.
http://www.allbusiness.com/specialty-businesses/685958-1.html
The "corporation" was found guilty of fraudulent Medicare billing in the early part of this decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_Corporation_of_America
Interestingly enough, Frist was also investigated for insider trading for selling off his shares when HCA was being investigated (how did he know that was happening? It was supposedly kept secret until they were raided). As HCA hospitals across the country were raided by the FBI, we were suddenly not even allowed to delete e-mail messages off of our computers until after the investigation.
I left the organization shortly after the first FBI raid in El Paso, TX. The organization I retired from is very, very similar to Colombia/HCA. Corporate health care is corrupt to the core and has been since the early 80s. The early 80s saw the introduction of “Diagnostic Regulatory Groups” (DRGs) initiated by who other than insurance companies. Hospitals began forming loosely associated groups for purchasing power and to manipulate the industry. They later became what we see as corporate health care.
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/dissent/documents/health/columb_update.html
Sue - Not really too gloomy really, my wife's mother died in the hosptial 6 months ago today which prompted a discussion on the state of health care and the political scene today.
ReplyDeleteI got a little caught up in it because of my health career. Few people know what goes on in health care so I wrote the blog mentioned below on Open Salon. Check it out. It's knowledge every U.S. citizen should have, but very few people know of it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For those of you who read the warning in my post "A thought and a question for the weekend" http://open.salon.com/blog/boomer_bob/2010/12/11/a_thought_and_a_question_for_the_weekend/comment , here's some very important information. Several commented on the warning - here's the unadulterated truth of the matter.
The first link below should be made familiar to anyone entering a hospital. You'll find it very revealing and informative. I worked for a very short time for the hospital (Sunrise Medical) and the corporation (Colombia/HCA) in the article until it became an embarrassment to be associated with them. I rarely divulged the company I worked for then, it became very well known in this area for its corruption and maltreatment of patients. Things haven't really changed much and hospitals don't like the public to know tht it's illegal to refuse service and they are now, as I mentioned, trying to fleece the public with their new promissory notes.
There's another interesting note about this - Senator Bill Frist and his family co-founded HCA which became Colombia HCA after some typical mergers such as those which have destroyed health care in this country. Pay particular attention to the section where Marc Gardner states; “MM: When did you become unhappy with your work at Columbia?” and to a patient by the name of “Rodolpho Augiano.” He was refused service at Sunrise Hospital for chest pain because he was homeless, walked out onto the front lawn and died of a massive heart attack. Even then it was illegal to refuse service to patients, but was a common occurrence and the law was kept very quiet.
http://www.allbusiness.com/specialty-businesses/685958-1.html
The "corporation" was found guilty of fraudulent Medicare billing in the early part of this decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_Corporation_of_America
Interestingly enough, Frist was also investigated for insider trading for selling off his shares when HCA was being investigated (how did he know that was happening? It was supposedly kept secret until they were raided). As HCA hospitals across the country were raided by the FBI, we were suddenly not even allowed to delete e-mail messages off of our computers until after the investigation.
I left the organization shortly after the first FBI raid in El Paso, TX. The organization I retired from is very, very similar to Colombia/HCA. Corporate health care is corrupt to the core and has been since the early 80s. The early 80s saw the introduction of “Diagnostic Regulatory Groups” (DRGs) initiated by who other than insurance companies. Hospitals began forming loosely associated groups for purchasing power and to manipulate the industry. They later became what we see as corporate health care.
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/dissent/documents/health/columb_update.html
RZ - it was pathetic wasn't it.
ReplyDeleteJaded - thanks man, it's all a bit worrisome.
You guys check my response to Sue and my blog I mentioned. You should now about it.
http://open.salon.com/blog/boomer_bob/2010/12/11/a_thought_and_a_question_for_the_weekend
ReplyDeletethanks for that info about the paper signing. My mom has been through that shit with getting hospital bills and she has Medicare and Medicaid. She just paid a thousand dollar hospital bill!! I couldn't believe she did that!
ReplyDeleteSo, Open Salon is where you hang out, I've never been there! Cool.
One of the comments there said insurance was a scam, I believe that way too.
Hospitals love to bully the elderly. You'd think they were con-artists. Oh wait. They are :-)
ReplyDeleteYea, I've been blogging on OS for a few years and occasionally here for about 5 or 6 years. I spend most of my time on OS due to the artists there, it's a very fascinating place.
I never had much skill with words and OS is loaded with professional writers, poets, teachers, etc. I like to read their stuff and learn a bit about writing. Check it out. Most of them are very liberal and intelligent (excluding moi)
Holy cow but who is the president again? What was he chicken to do it himself? Has this ever been done before....I need to contact a few professors that I know because I am really wondering if this was a first..
ReplyDelete