Your Health Care Should be Yours - Not Up To Others

The "Affordable Care Act" Established That You Are A Commodity

Keep these things up front where you can remember them:

• "Health insurance", as discussed today, is simply socialized medicine. Be honest and enforce that term.

• The entire purpose of "health insurance" is to pay doctors, not you. Someone has to be paid to treat you, because nothing is free. Money is not coming to you.

• If you do not pay, you are not a customer, you are a commodity. Things will be done by policy, not the way you desire. Your wishes simply will not be considered, however much you believe Santa is real.

• A policy is not treatment. If you do not make the market favor health care providers, no one will treat you. Your policy, subsidized by government or not, will be worthless.

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Basic questions do not get asked as often or as loudly as they should:

• Why should I ever pay for something I DO NOT RECEIVE?
• Why should government - really "other people" - pay anything you can handle?
• Do you recognize that all resources, government included, are limited?
• Do you know what your insurer's current practices are, and their relationship with your doctor? How about with other doctors? What do they have to say about non-routine procedures? Prescription painkillers?
• Why are thousands of people who have nothing to do with actually treating you involved?
• Why does the Explanation of Benefits - from an insurer - have dollar numbers on it that no one was paid?
  

Supposedly, a doctor will provide services for less than a "list price" in return for guaranteed payment - as the system pays money obtained by force from taxpayers.

What?

Really? The doctor doesn't adjust his prices to deal with the overhead of hundreds of forms he has to submit, and the correspondence regarding his services? Extra people in the office and at the insurer's offices do their jobs for free?
Of course not.
So, people want government to step in?

Why? 

Aren't you really, seriously nuts, proposing that? You don't like what government is doing in the Middle East, you know public housing sucks...
The IRS is not your friend. Why would you even begin to think a Federal medical authority would be? Is it really that important for you to think that you GET something for "free"? You don't!

The Veteran's Administration has been proven to let veterans DIE to reduce their workload. THAT is a government-run healthcare system. Its administrators, just as is the case with health-care insurers, suffer no immediate penalty from withholding care.

Yet the Affordable Health Care Act has penalties in store for you if you get care other than by Federally approved means. Your health care plan cannot be better than Federal authorities decree unless you pay a surcharge - and the bulk of you will pay thousands of dollars before you get one Band-Aid™.
Yes, you're sick; sorry, fill out the forms and wait. Wait some more. You've been promised that no one will be denied care. 

"I'm sorry, you'll have to wait," says the receptionist. "You're not being denied care, it just isn't available right now. Have you submitted your paperwork? Then, the system is working perfectly." Oh, you want to go somewhere else to get treated, because some bureaucrat has not got it through their thick head that disease does not wait? 
Sorry. You can't.

No.

So, you are sick. The clerk is not sick. You will do as you are told. Cry. Watch in the mirror as the disease eats you alive, count the bandages in the trash basket as you wait for the permission of someone whose income will never be challenged and who states that the system is working perfectly because paperwork is filled out.
Oh, wait...
In addition, this monstrosity is set up so that not only initially, but after you are signed up for it, it will reset and CANCEL the arrangements you have made with your doctors.

Doctors and hospitals are charging more and closing locations because of the costs of the "Affordable" Care Act - and small businesses cannot extract enough value from your labor to cover you if you work full-time and are therefore mandated coverage. So full-time jobs have been lost by the million.

Oh, joy. Did you vote for this? It's what happens when the ignorant clamor for government to give them something for "free".

"Free" does not exist.

Did you notice that the Affordable Care Act supersedes medical decisions made in your presence? Not only can you NOT keep your doctor, you cannot even keep the treatment she prescribes unless it is approved by someone who has never seen you.
Perhaps you have been told, “your insurance will not cover that” when your doctor wants to do repeated analyses, like MRIs, X-rays or lab work for rapidly-changing conditions. There you go: the “system” will work against you. You were charged for your policy, given a deductible to prevent you from using policy money, and then denied service... maybe in such a way that it's difficult to pay out-of-pocket for uncovered items.

The President of the United States LIED about this Act. It was pushed into law by "public servant" Nancy Pelosi, who said, "We have to pass this law to see what's in it." Why would you even think about supporting it? Why aren't you thinking about jail time for Ms. Pelosi?

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I have another proposal, which will still ensure medical professionals get paid, which must happen. Here's a message you may wish to send your Senators:

Dear Senator:

I believe I have a model for health care which could revolutionize the industry, improve efficiency and make you the object of public admiration. Bold claim? Well, let's see.

We should set up a new "Medical VISA Card" to change the system to a CREDIT model - like this:

• This card would be issued by an existing Federal agency or contractor to every person attaining majority, or to the guardian of every person for whom one is appointed, upon their voluntary acceptance of a contract. Chipped, this card would establish positive ID for that person. I call this a VISA card just because that company now has all the assets in place to do this. The program could bear another name; I suggest Galen , after an astonishingly well educated medical researcher of antiquity.

• The card would be for prescription medicine and for visits to licensed doctors and dentists.

• The card would enable the consolidation of medical records and practices into  "portable" form. Some states today insist that "your" medical records are the property of the attending physician, and some consider them to be yours. Neither of these views serve the public well, but with a secure chipped card, all records can be accessed with the card in a chip reader at registered office locations. This feature could allow vast improvements in the administration of opioids and psychotropic drugs by preventing or reducing hoarding and prescription fraud. Software can easily track the daily use of these drugs, exposing when usage exceeds the prescribed amount for a particular patient.
The secure database can allow research discover new way of combatting disease as new medications and their efficacy are studied. This will allow those who truly suffer to regain an effective dose.

• Procedures designed to improve the accuracy and monitoring of diagnoses can be approved and paid for by the patient, on demand. There are many conditions where lab work and imaging can’t reasonably be restricted to one or two tries.

 • The card would have a "threshold". Reaching this number would trigger agency review and participation. The agency would take over treatment costs and decisions once they are beyond patient capabilities. Think of a value determined by a person's assets - the method by which credit is responsibly extended today. This is not a number a person has to reach - it is the current value of assets as officially reported.

• The balance would be due from the holder to the "medical VISA" agency, exactly as bank and other credit cards are handled today.

• An interest rate on outstanding balances would be established to pay the direct cost of the program (overhead), and to support an investment fund to be used for catastrophic illness and disability of all participants in the program (benefits).

• Card holders could be shown instructions for getting medical attention, and encouraged to avoid using emergency rooms for routine care. Hospitals could issue the medical card (facial recognition software can prevent multiple, fraudulent accounts) to send patients to other clinics.

• Medical VISA card holders could build a positive, interest-paying balance in their medical account, as this is portable medical insurance. It doesn't depend on where you work!
This feature will eliminate the impossible burden now placed on business owners by removing the hiring and hours thresholds for "insurance" coverage through work. That never made sense.
Bingo. More full-time employment.

• This system does not discriminate between individuals based on anything but their documented assets, and then, only to determine when the agency steps in. It doesn't care about citizenship or race. If you are a non-citizen, you would be positively identified by this card.
This relieves the nation of the medical burden of transients. Also...
There will always be a percentage of the public who cannot pay for their medical care. This is a difficult situation, but until the system is self-financing, it cannot pay these charges. If you value health care programs as humanitarian and representative of the goodwill of the United States, funding MUST be established. Lying about this will do no one good.

• The card and contract is voluntary for those who wish to avoid identification and to make their own medical arrangements, in order to avoid identification and bureaucratic complications some may find intrusive and/or impermissible. These arrangements may be obliged to register upon first use of public funds for treatment, a reasonable protection against fraud.

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Make no mistake about the fundamental nature of this card: up to the "threshold" amount, the holder MUST pay. People simply won't be careful with other people's money. This is true, even if it is unpopular.

Current rhetoric insists on calling today's medical plans "insurance". It is not, because there is no one who will not receive benefits.
A credit model for the delivery of services makes more sense by far, immediately removing the opportunity some have taken to lie, to characterize health care as "free" - which is completely impossible.

Senator, people understand credit cards. It's time to re-establish and strengthen the patient-doctor relationship.

This will do that. Need treatment? See available doctors, check their reputation for service and prices. Get treatment. Hand the doctor your card. Pay the balance.  

If you find merit in this, feel free to add to or subtract from it and pass it on - because there is a truth you cannot escape or deny:

You will not get to say what happens unless you are the one paying.

 

 

Faith - versus the Real World

If you have anything at all to say about Faith, you need to be objectively correct when you speak about anything else, or you will be dismissed for not knowing what you're talking about.

Both at work and away, I am frequently at odds with people who have not studied how things work in the real world. A subset of these is represented, locally and nationally, by those who would replace reason with faith, as if cities can be supplied with a loaf of bread and a fish, with some prayer.

The most conspicuous of these people use terms designed to lie about the purely religious bases of their proposals.

The lies and misrepresentations cannot succeed against an educated audience. This has been known for a long time.

Over 1600 years ago, Saint Augustine - Augustine of Hippo - had this to say about evangelists who open their mouths without knowing what they were saying:

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion." – De Genesi ad literam 1:19–20, Chapt. 19 [AD 408].

Yes, the faithful have a burden: they must show that what they propose has objective support and is useful. I suggest that evangelicals are no different from any other public agency seeking attention. 

To be seriously considered, they must have merit, and beyond that of simply mouthing platitudes.

Gays

This time, it IS all about you.

There's hardly a better way to start a group of people arguing or giggling than to bring up homosexuality. Some people have this idea that human sexuality is binary - that you can only be male or female.

Sorry - that's not true - and this is not just my opinion.

Go look up Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome.

Whether you think God Almighty™, the Invisible Pink Unicorn or the Flying Spaghetti Monster is in charge, thousands of people in the USA and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are born with serious genetic differences from "normal".

You may not properly address them as "Mr." or "Miss", and this is NOT a matter of their personal preference, as we have seen in the news recently - some are without gender. They have both traits, or neither. This is not an observation of personal opinion, but of biology. It's about what ER personnel have to do with what they find coming out of an ambulance.

Do you think you have the experience and expertise to tell the whole story about this issue? I suggest that is not the case - in fact, people who have spent their entire lives practicing medicine, in the research fields, at the most prestigious hospitals on the planet still have questions, as illustrated in the following link:

[Warning: content contains descriptions which may seriously disturb the reader]

Johns Hopkins on pediatric gender reassignment

Yes, surgeons and parents cut children.

Now, there's a funny thing: the US Constitution doesn't let anyone's life, liberty or property be stripped without due process, and you cannot show how someone born in the USA isn't automatically a citizen and remains one.

Now, the linked article shows that "how you are built" doesn't stop with external appearance. Libido and sexual orientation, two different things, are determined by genetics. Yes, some behavior is learned, but to make an analogy, it is the internal parts that make a car move. You can't see them.
You should have noticed that the "CSI"-type TV shows have shown you that detectives do not have to have genitalia present to determine the gender of the deceased...

There's a lot of fear in the straight community. The evidence is in their own words, such as "Gay marriage will devalue the concept of marriage", and so forth. Some of this fear is understandable (although such people are notoriously silent about their own misbehavior in bars). How could anyone be in doubt about the attractiveness of a healthy member of the "opposite sex"?

Go read the links. Sometimes, there is no "opposite".

But there is an awful lot of foolish noise, brought on by fear and sustained by ego. Have you heard the cry, "...but science hasn't found the 'gay gene'!" Umm, fearful fellow, there's no single "straight gene". Why would you even try that argument?

Are you on the other side of this argument, trying to make points about individual responsibility, autonomy and so forth, trying to get people to let you live the life you imagine others are having? You still have to beware of logical fallacies.
For instance, it isn't "homophobia" when a gay person is called a name. Don't believe me?
Do you think when somebody calls a black man a name that they have an unreasoning fear of blacks? No. Of course not. You're engaging in the fallacy of projection, because people who calls homosexuals a name are not afraid of gays - they are afraid of themselves. They have never, not once, had genetics or any other human behavior explained to them in a rational manner. They learned an automatic response from a loved one who cannot be challenged, sometimes cherry-picking a part of a religious text to back their, umm, mistake.

For those of you who think, "being gay is only a choice": not only should the above links show you how you are completely wrong, you should ponder the irony of insisting that it is only choice that caused you to pick Miss Pink or Mr. Black for the dance.
Gee, that means that with a simple choice, you could have porn-star sex with someone of your own gender!

Of course not.
Mechanical ability doesn't mean anything in gender determination. Some people are left-handed, some are ambidextrous, some are right-handed. Using your left hand doesn't make you left-handed. Using both doesn't make you ambidextrous. Using your right... you know.

You should know. But somehow, you're afraid to think. Maybe that's because you have been taught that sex or other intimacy is always dirty. That's completely unreasonable, so perhaps you shouldn't think that.

Bases, Part 2: Principles

Not morals, principles. The things that establish relationships between ideas, objects, observed phenomena, etc.

If you learn about principles, you have a ready way to determine if what you are watching is fact or fiction. If you've been shocked at the amount of learning you have to do to understand something you might take for granted, like DNA or the JPEG 2000 standard, well, that's understandable. But the people who figured this stuff out couldn't forget fundamental principles, and so, neither should you.

One thing to look out for: these are not subject to personal opinion. If you think so, check yourself and start over.

Some, but by no means all of these principles are:
1) At least 4 fundamental forces work on matter and energy all the time: gravitation, magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Look them up; magnetism, especially, isn't what you might think.

2) The conservation of mass and energy; a little-observed correlation of Einstein's famous equation is that it is only true if the sum of matter and energy in the Universe is a constant, and for short periods of time such as you might observe, there isn't much to contradict this idea.

3) Demonstrated by Newton's laws.

4) Cause and effect.

5) The inflexibility of definitions. You don't get to call something a "soul molecule" without showing your work. You can find a standard for a Bohr magnetron at the NIST's Web site - which means somebody actually uses that thing on a regular basis! - but the point is that definitions enforce logical rigor. That is the only way you can produce useful results.

6) Statistics. This is one thing people shy away from, because their only experience with stats is when someone lies to them. You can get a toehold on what statistics really are with a couple of simple observations.
Zero (never happens) and One (always happens) are rare. One is so rare that it practically means the event predicted already happened.
Every stat has a domain. If I told you that the probability of Hank Aaron hitting a home run in Williams-Brice Stadium was zero, that's because it's a football field. So you have to establish what the domain is when someone cites a statistic.
The word random is an absolute. Commonly, it is used for things that are just unpredictable, like the lottery - but notice something here: the lottery has a domain, within which the result always appears. The lottery is NOT random!

7) All measurements have uncertainty factors and lengthy descriptions of the method used. This is repugnant to those who prefer everything explained to them in nice neat packages, but the world is not that way. Get used to it.

I'll add to this later. Some principles are really obscure, and I have to figure out how to explain them.

Bases, Part 1: Definitions and Standards

So - you form beliefs. You can't help it.
What can you do to avoid serious mistakes in your thinking? You have to ask yourself some serious questions.

What definitions are you using?

In order for Man to examine the world collaboratively, common terms had to be established. At first, this was a matter of cooperation for survival among the members of tribes. Later, common terms had to be invented to describe discoveries.
Discoveries are not just things. They are also the relationships between things, and these two categories of discovery immediately presented problems of precision in describing each.
When a discovery reveals the presence of a new thing, such as an animal, mineral or celestial object previously unknown, the description runs into the millions of words as the nature of the new thing is discussed. However, when something fundamental is investigated – something which will affect the evaluation of a myriad of other things – two things occur: a need for brevity, so as to enable the widespread use of a fundamental description, and a need for precision, so that measurements or other action stemming from the use of the fundamental property are consistent.

Note the word, “consistent”. Definitions must be selected such that personal opinion doesn't change them; in discussion, care must be taken to be sure that your audience is thinking about the same thing you are when the word is used.

What standards are you using?
If you look around, you’ll find that some things do not have terms of uncertainty. These are Standards. A Standard is a fixed definition of a concept, most commonly thought of as a physical property.
You may notice that a standard is exact. That’s because it is a special category of definition: a standard. Note that the word means something entirely different to the layman, like many scientific terms.
An example of a standard is the Systéme Internationale unit, the second: a second is the interval required to complete 9192631770 oscillations between the two hyperfine ground states of the Cesium-133 atom. Exactly.

Surprise! There are timepieces which cannot measure that tenth digit. Yet the standard remains.

You can find a fair bit about standards at the National Institute for Standards and Technology. One of the big "WOW!" moments for you should happen when you realize that having a standard means a practical use is present for the standard. Yes, somebody needs to know a value for a Bohr magnetron!

Reality: nature does not “care” – is not influenced – by what we call parts of it. If we used 100 “beats” instead of 24 hours to describe a “day”, no physical effect occurs. As you might have noted, our definition of “second” leads to a “day” which differs with the movement of the Earth, and it is we, not the Earth, who must change our clocks now and then to synchronize with the Earth’s motion.

So, to sum up Standards and Definitions:
1) Definitions are terms we invent to communicate commonly, and they must be understood by all parties, such parties being aware of the “rigidity” and other limits of the definition;
2) Standards are definitions with recognized purpose and limitations.

Now, if you find you can’t stand being pinned to something you defined, that is a sign that either your argument or the definition you've used is incorrect. It hurts to be wrong, but only you can fix your position.
Others, relentless about establishing the bona fides of the information they’re viewing, will pass you by. It’s being done all the time, and right now.

Take a look around, and you might notice that many of the things you read and view are editorials - articles presented to emphasize a particular point of view. Take a few minutes to determine if the media you're watching is actually talking to an information source. If not, an element of hearsay is present. You should use standards and definitions to make sure that if a mistake is present, you don't get sucked into the hype.

Here's the hardest test of all:
Examine an opinion you have and see if the terms you use have any "special" meaning mixed into them so you can feel better. If so...