The Best Health Care System in the World

Congrats to Heath Kufahl, who sunk a basketball from half-court at an OKC Thunder game to win $20K. The catch is that, instead of enjoying the windfall like he should be able to, he gets to spend it instead on what are euphemistically described as his wife's (who has stage 3 colon cancer) "mounting medical bills".

And whatever you do, pay no attention to that doodoohead Steve Brill's plaintive jeremiad on the racket we call our health care system. Why, it can be taken on good authority that the newspaper industry has a higher rate of profitability than the poor ol' country doctor at your local HMO. That must explain why newspapers are doing so well, whilst hospitals are just dying on the fucking vine, everywhere you look.

As I get older and closer to the eventual strike date we all face sooner or later, it gets more and more difficult to be sanguine or find the humor in this sort of obtuse skullfuckery. The facts are these:

• The "health" "care" "system" is a racket, pure and simple. It is and has been a demonstrable collusion of the pharma, insurance, and HMO industries, all of which (especially insurance) are to some degree utilizing a business model which is predicated on not having to provide the services for which they've already been paid.
• U.S. per capita medical spending is twice that of any other OECD country.
• Health care costs are sapping productivity and fucking up the economy.
• The opponents of "Obamacare" are right about one thing -- it changes nothing in terms of what things cost; in fact, it would be no surprise at all to see costs rise for certain procedures and/or demographic groups.

Take admin, marketing, lobbying, and middle-management spreadsheet-optimizers out of the mix, and you'd be surprised at how quickly costs would normalize. No honest observer could scrutinize the tripartite cartel of price-gouging and not come away realizing that a good chunk of health care costs are a complete waste, and that as 20% of the overall US GDP, that, combined with the amount of waste, fraud, and excess we already know is built into the defense procurement and financial services sectors, a substantial portion of the actual economy is just smoke and mirrors.