It wasn't bad enough that this fucker was a secessionist before the GOP primaries even started.  Nor the shit that came out of his mouth while he was running for the nom.  I hated the shithead before, but now it's personal.

I got a letter in the mail a couple days ago saying that Texas/Medicaid will no longer be paying for my medicare shit.  That means around 250 bucks in my March check in back payments they already haven't made and about 120 bucks or so out of every disability check from then on.  I don't get that much, and this is gonna fuck me until I balance it back out somehow.  My mother tried to blame it on "your precious nigger president", but if I understand it right, I'm pretty sure Medicaid is run mostly - if not solely - by the state.  Doesn't matter for shit though, because after researching it, I found out that the reason Perry and his administration are doing it is to balance out the state budget that they fucked up.  Yes, they're sacrificing (in some cases literally) the poor and disabled to fix their financial shit.

What really pisses me off?  I'm certain they could probably find other ways to balance this shit out besides slashing medicaid, but doing it this way further enrages the ignorant fuckwits in this state to rally behind Perry against the "socialist nigger commie" in office when Perry blames it on him.  And it'll work.  I know it'll work, because I see it working already.  Just a few weeks ago my mother actually said that a nurse told her that the new medicare system that "obamacare" was about to put in place would give you only a certain amount of doctor visits before they cut you off, meaning that if you have to go to the doctor again after that, then tough.  You die.

PEOPLE ACTUALLY BELIEVE THIS SHIT.  GROWN FUCKING PEOPLE.

For fuck's sake, I need to get out of Texas, but I couldn't afford it.  They should nuke this state and everyone in it, and I would gladly sacrifice myself to let it happen for the betterment of all mankind.

Americans are stupid.  It's not just Texas.  Witness Southern Mississippi students chanting about green cards at a basketball game...to a Puerto Rican player...who, you know, is a citizen by birth like everyone born in a US territory.  And that's just an example from last night.

Our cultural philosophy and knowledge has disintegrated to the point that I'd say it compares most closely to the disjointed nihilism of a teenager whose primary hobby is cutting school to huff gasoline. 

The Southern Miss student crap is like a not funny version of this:


Flight of the Conchords - Racism

We're ALL fucked ...
... someone, just FINALLY admit it!

The Southern Miss student crap is like a not funny version of this:


Flight of the Conchords - Racism

I like those guys, and love that show, but Garfunkel and Oates are funnier.  And sexier.  And they're supposed to get their own HBO show too, soon.


I Don't Know Who You Are by Garfunkel and Oates

Medicaid/medicare is really one big clusterfuck.

My husband was on Medicare when his transplanted kidney started fucking up. He hit the "donut hole" in payments about 6 months after his last transplant and was paying close to $100 each month in copays on his meds. Mind you, he is on disability and at that time was only getting about $500 a month. After he hit 36 months post-transplant, he got kicked to Medicaid where he now pays between $1.00 to $3.00 per script.

It really sucks finding a decent dentist in Iowa if you are on Medicaid. The place that took me in 2004 was a hellhole that placed a temporary filling in a tooth they said needed either a root canal or removal. Turns out closing the cavity caused the bacteria to multiply due to lack of oxygen. Within 24 hours, I was back there with a swollen face and eye asking "what the fuck?". Instead of giving me antibiotecs, they decided to pull the tooth. The infection kept eating up the novacain they kept injecting in the roof of my mouth. I felt everything. It was worse than when I gave birth to my oldest who was 9lbs. Even better, it was an open office, so the 30 or so people around me getting work done had to witness me being held down and screaming.
I didn't see a dentist again until this year. Found a super nice lady who takes mostly disabled clients. She is awesome. Gave me extra shots so I wouldn't feel anything during my fillings.

I do wonder if this "universal healthcare" plan they want to do will be anything like medicaid. So many doctors don't want to take medicaid because they don't pay enough to keep the office running. Also, those damn forms I have to fill out every 3 months stating "yes, we are poor, yes we have a disabled adult in the home, yes we still have 3 kids.."

Damnit, I'm all pissed about it now. I think I'm gonna smoke a bowl to calm down (which, oddly enough, is cheaper than meds. )

Move to Canada.

... or just get dual residency like my friend did

Medicaid, since it's administered at the state level, is one of the first things that gets defunded during a budget crunch.  Or you get partisan bickering like Florida refusing Medicaid funding because they don't like the healthcare bill.

There's a lot of problems with the way healthcare is operated in the US, from the professional side explicitly constraining the supply of doctors, to keep salaries high to byzantine billing codes designed to make it easier for epidemiologists to conduct studies rather than to make the business side of medicine run smoothly, to our deeply flawed system for intellectual property.

I'm still trying to figure out why my peritoneal dialysis supplies cost $9,000 a month. It's dextrose in bags...

I'm still trying to figure out why my peritoneal dialysis supplies cost $9,000 a month. It's dextrose in bags...

How's the dialysis going?

It was great for the first year. My kt/v results were 2.4 and 1.9.  Now I don't clear the minimum of 1.7. so they upped the script. I'm doing another one this April to see if the increase pays off. My blood pressure is much lower now. Used to average 140/90, but as of late down to 117/77.

One of the reasons for the cost structure being stupid:

Hospitals price things based on what insurers & medicare are willing to pay.

A hospital, for example, wants to make a big capital investment into some fancy new MRI machine to compete for doctors, research grants, whatever.

No one is going to pay extra for an MRI just because their MRI machine is new and fancy.  The final product is more or less the same.  So what do they do?  Mark-up the cost of other things they can charge for, from bandages to aspirin all the way up. 

(also why no medical or pharmaceutical manufacturers want efficacy studies - multi-million dollar machines don't necessarily produce better outcomes, nor does some new fangled pill necessarily produce a better outcome than one which has been on the market for 50 years).

So medical pricing is sort of like going to the theater, paying for the ticket, then getting gauged on a box of sour patch kids because that's where the movie theater is trying to make up all of its costs.   


There are a lot of other weird economic distortions and long-term planning failures in the system. 

It starts at the universities where the doctors are trained-charging outrageous tuitions that make the graduating doctors (and by extension the entire health care field) so corrupt and greedy.  The dollar numbers they deal with on a daily basis isolates them from the experience of the common man.

Well, the medical professional boards/medical schools have also...strategically avoided?...addressing bottlenecks in the process of training doctors to meet the needs of the population. 

I also still think one of the biggest problems is that the government socialized the costs of medical care for the elderly and really poor, but left the rest of the market as for-profit.  That creates huge distortions - on top of the anti-competitive carve-outs they offer for various aspects of the industry.

It really sucks finding a decent dentist in Iowa if you are on Medicaid. The place that took me in 2004 was a hellhole that placed a temporary filling in a tooth they said needed either a root canal or removal. Turns out closing the cavity caused the bacteria to multiply due to lack of oxygen. Within 24 hours, I was back there with a swollen face and eye asking "what the fuck?". Instead of giving me antibiotecs, they decided to pull the tooth. The infection kept eating up the novacain they kept injecting in the roof of my mouth. I felt everything. It was worse than when I gave birth to my oldest who was 9lbs. Even better, it was an open office, so the 30 or so people around me getting work done had to witness me being held down and screaming.
I didn't see a dentist again until this year. Found a super nice lady who takes mostly disabled clients. She is awesome. Gave me extra shots so I wouldn't feel anything during my fillings.

This got my attention. There is no dental coverage in Missouri with medicaid. I have medicaid for disabled persons, and I either have genetically thin enamel, or because of a little OCD, I brush my enamel off..... Anyway, I have had a couple molars extracted..... and the last one was similar to what you describe here. I had one tooth extracted at the dental college, but I really didn't like the way I was treated, so I found a dentist instead for the last one. I went through two doses of laughing gas and twelve shots of Novocaine and Lydocaine and I still wasn't numb. I had a round of antibiotics first for a slight infection, so it seemed odd that the novocaine/lydocaine wasn't working. the dentist had gotten as far as pushing the gum away from the tooth, and each time he began to yank on the tooth, I would scream. He would put in another couple shots of novocaine or lydocaine, and start tugging at the tooth again, and I would scream. It felt like the roots of this tooth were in my fucking feet! So, I'm crying hysterically, off and on (that's what laughing gas does to me) and he decides to send me to an oral surgeon, says he wants to take an ex-ray to send with me. So we do that, luckily I'm numbed up because those plastic things they shove into your mouth for the ex-ray are painful. He gets to looking at the ex-ray and gets all excited and uppity, calling the other dentist into the room. The other dentist, who had shaggy hair and strong onion breath gets all excited and brings out a huge syringe and smiles. I'm like, What The Fuck Are You Gonna Do With That? It was some kind of extremely potent, amphetamine(?) numbing shit that they rarely use and is kept locked up. All I know is that they saw the roots of this particular tooth were Twisted and Curved around the roots of Other teeth, and the Novocaine never fully reached them to numb them. This new pain med was WEIRD... it had my heart racing and my body twitching... BUT I didn't feel a fucking thing- Finally, and they were able to extract the tooth.

I was told by this new dentist that my teeth "are like granite". The problem is made worse by the fact that the medication I take causes dry mouth. And I still smoke, which can also dry the mouth. Dry mouth means all the bad shit stays on my teeth longer which causes tiny little cavities that go deep.

Wish they gave me an amphetmine painkiller when I had that tooth taken out.

I shudder at what genetics may or may not have in store for me on the dentistry side of my future ...

hmm, looks like I may be getting my medicaid back, sorta.  At least the part that paid for my Medicare part A and B.  I got a thing in the mail tlaking about a federal program called the "Medicare Savings Program" that I could apply for to pay for the premiums, that's distributed through Medicaid. but fedrally funded (I think, at least it's not state funded) so Perry can't fucking touch it.   I made some calls and applied for it over the phone and she sounded like there was really no chance that I wouldn't get it.  Nice.

OK, so Johnny got his medicare back... Moving along.

FUCK STEVE PERRY IN HIS GOD DAMNED ASS.

discuss.

Sadly, I live about five miles outside of Cook County. If I did not have health insurance and needed a check-up or medical help, I could go to Cook County hospitals/clinics for free. The worst thing about those places is that they are under-funded, under-staffed, and over-crowded.

Recently, I had to go to the ER for chest pains (which I found out was a skeletal-muscular pull). I went to the urgent care center in Kane County instead. They said they didn't have the facilities/equipment to take care of a myocardial-infarction. So the doctor said I needed to be rushed to the ER by ambulance. My girlfriend, who works for an insurance company (aka the devil), asked him to make sure that this ambulance ride (two miles to the ER) was under his referral. Sure, he says. I go to the ER and its over-crowded but they whisk me past the waiting room and plant me next to the nurses' station. I'm a friendly guy, but the doctors and nurses treated me like I was a convict. I suppose at the age of 32 the only reason I would have an MI is if I were snorting coke/speed, which I was asked several times (I drink booze, that's it). After hours of waiting, my blood work comes back and the doctor says I must have pulled a muscle(!!).

Now, I've paid about $400 in urgent care and ER bills, my insurance took care of most of it (something to the tune of $2500). But what irks me the most is the ambulance bill: $565! WTF. The doctor at the urgent care center fucking lied! He lied to me and used an MI to scare me into taking an ambulance ride instead of my own transportation. I might add that when I saw the distance charge it stated sixteen miles instead of two. Is there something wrong with this picture? Yes.

Health insurance is hyper-inflated because the legal ramifications of malpractice suits are expensive--even for small, privately owned practices; plus, doctors/hospitals/clinics need insurance and lawyers to keep hefty malpractice suits tame. Not only do doctors need that money for legal uses but they also have student loans to pay off.

Health insurance is also paying for pharmaceuticals, which is based on current markets and supply and demand principles. A medication, like the ones for liver transplant patients--so that their body doesn't reject the organ, might cost $3,000 per sixty count bottle which he or she needs to take twice a day for a month. Pharmaceutical companies are setting the prices for life-saving medications that are well above an average person's income. These companies know that insurance companies are splitting the costs for these medications and are driving up the price because its a necessity. Forget about the demand for the product; if a pharmaceutical company (or any company) knows they can get more for their product, they will set the price well above the practical retail price, causing more people to suffer and die because they want to profit.

I am for reforming health care, but I don't think the focus should not just be on insurance alone. There are several players in the health care racket: law firms, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, lobbyists, medical schools, and hospitals. The object of single-payer health care, imho, would dispel the life-threatening greed associated with any person's health.

It's funny to hear that Rick Perry wants Texas to secede from the union. If Perry had any knowledge of American history, he would know that the reason Texas became a part of the US is because they were constrained by debt and the inclement war between themselves and Mexico. Texas was basically crawling on hands and knees to the US for annexation and intervention between themselves and Mexico.

. . . fuckin' nut.

Canada's health care is great in the sense that I have had 3 babies for free, but if you have an emergency you could be in the waiting room for 6 hours or so.
It's also hard to find a family doctor. We were waiting for a couple years to get one. Luckily everyone is pretty healthy, the worst thing that happened during that time was chicken pox, and I took care of it.
Drugs aren't part of it, either, you need to have a good job that comes with dental/drug benefits.

I'd pay for drugs over inflated medical costs ...
I can get those from Mexico ...

OK, so Johnny got his medicare back... Moving along.

FUCK STEVE PERRY IN HIS GOD DAMNED ASS.

discuss.

Fuck you I love Journey.

I shudder at what genetics may or may not have in store for me on the dentistry side of my future ...

You already live in the south, losing a few teeth is only going help fit you in with the local hillbillies...

True dat ...
I love having teefz though ...

OK then, fuck COMMODORE PERRY in his god damned ass...

I'm on this:
Mosh, reread it, he said COMMODORE PERRY, not VIC20 ...

The fuck is commodore perry.