Sunday, July 22, 2007

msb-0180 Nu? So?

msb-0180 "Nu?" So?

intro


---- "Project Snowbird Freak Mix - On the Money and Dope Kid" by" "Trap Door" http://www.realtrapdoor.com/

Feedback comes first, so...

My downloads are climbing and climbing and climbing. I'm over 19,500 as of this posting.

That means that about 100 of you are listening on a download. (Of course, that's just an average as some episodes have practically no downloads while some others have over 250 downloads.)

Its not always the same 100 people as some people come and some people go; and some people are downloading prior episodes on a single visit, which explains the disparity between the "visit counters" on my sites.

And my ad for "insideMS" hasn't even appeared yet...

---- "No Money - A song for Christmas by: "The Erm" http://music.the-erm.com/

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop me an email: charles at MSBPodcast.com

---- "For Money or Love" by: "The Like Young" http://www.thelikeyoung.com/

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: charles (at) MSBPodcast.com

---- "MONEY MONEY MONEY Dub Version" by: "ITALIANS" http://www.myspace.com/theitaliansspace

Main Topic: "' Nu?' So?"

"Wat's wid da yiddish? Enuff all ready... Oy! Vey ist meir!"

So... Where was I?

Oh yes, the lamentable state of the health-[don't]-care system.

Make that our own lamentable state under the health-[don't]-care system.

If it was administered properly, under a single payer system, we'd likely recoup "billions" annually (after some public outcry and demand for summary execution on some judgments. There will be some grumbling that "hanging is too good for 'em," but lets know when to cut our losses, instead of some peoples' jugulars.)

That takes care of paying exorbitantly for everything; just because, at some point down the line, we let the doctors get the better of us and now they and the hospitals, their suppliers, equipment makers and pharmacists and drug manufacturers "et alia" all have their hand out and their other hand is a fist clenched around a cudgel. We need to scale down the salaries by an order of magnitude. "What, you can't live comfortably of a few hundred thousand a year? Funny, your patients manage it just fine."

Where does that leave the insurance companies? (the HMOs [Health Management Organization] who instead manage to hang onto their profits by doling out denials to all those sick querents. [The first thing they do is deny a claim. It doesn't matter what it for, who its for or what the consequences of the denial will be... {They have certain unpleasant names for people like that, ("Torquemada" comes to mind, "Pol Pot" springs unbidden to my consciousness, basically any sociopath will do,) but I'll just refer to the systematic denial of claims as a prudent stock holder value protection move.}])

In fact, since the insurance companies don't want to be in the business of managing health, beyond the health of their stock portfolio, I say "lets let them get off the hook!" "just walk away and nobody needs to get hurt, well needlessly anyway, any further."

Just set a date by when we will have set up a single payer system, replaced the staff (bought out and transferred staff from the HMOs more likely, [Imagine, your company can save the US economy billions of dollars annually and your name isn't plastered on the side of a spitoon anymore; you don't have to pretend to be caring and compassionate another fuckin' minute {and if you "are" caring and compassionate, you don't have to pretend that you're "not", as you deny yet another claim. (Imagine being able to just fuckin' quit that dehumanizing hell-hole of a job, without having to worry about health care.)}])

---- "Save your money " by: "Lee Maddeford" http://www.leemaddeford.ch/

Main Topic, part deux:

The gummint is not, would not, and should never be, in the business of health care.

But they would be in the business of footing the bill. Since that's "our tax dollars at work", how about if they work for "us", for a change.

For less money than the US Gummint's currently wasting in Iraq, (when all that that's accomplishing is painting targets on Americans backs everywhere,) Americans could regain a competitive advantage and pay for health care.

Nixon was not the brightest bulb on the tree when he signed into law the "prepaid group health care plans", which became known as "Health Maintenance Organizations" a.k.a. HMOs, and provided profit as the incentive.

The problem is that the mix of health and wealth, health for all (all who can pay anyway, the rest of you can go crawl into a ditch and die for all we care,) and wealth for some, is that it sets up a dynamic tension where the system will oppose its own function.

Systemantically, it makes perfect sense that health maintenance organizations don't have anything to do with health, or with the maintenance thereof.

In fact, because money is an escalating principle kind of thing, HMOs have long passed the stage where they decided on your treatment based not on any health factor but instead based on their own financial health, and now the profit motive makes it a given that your claims will go unpaid or that payment will be deferred until nature takes care of the problem. (Sick people come with their own "solve by date". If you didn't solve the problem by then well it no longer matters; they're dead.)

When we were paying out of pocket for our health, we "weren't" rich. All illnesses were catastrophic.

Then came HMO, and now "they're" rich because they were siphoning the money straight from our employers' pockets, but we're "worse" off. Not only are we tied to a job with chains of fool's gold, but they now deny claims as a matter of course.

Economic improvements since the seventies have come from the increase in productivity, and we'd actually be better off "not" carrying these parasites.

After all, we're already supposed to be engaged in a symbiotic relationship with our gummint, we pay taxes after all, let's extend and deepen the connections.

---- "Best Things In Life -Don't Put Your Faith In Money" by: "Shelly Niebuhr" http://www.shellyn.com/

Outro

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey this is The Erm, thanks for including my music in your show.

Charles-A. Rovira said...

My pleasure.

Keep on playing such great music.

Miss Chris said...

Every time I see the title HMO, I see the word WHORE. Same thing in my book.

Charles-A. Rovira said...

Nixon was right in one respect when he started the HMOs.

Individuals need to protect and insure themselves from illness but they can't afford it.

Putting the burden for paying for it on the employer was not the right thing to do but the gains in productivity masked the sheer wrongness of the decision for years.

But now the chickens have come home to roost and everybody (not just we the interested parties) can see what's wrong with HMOs.

Combined with the multi-payer billing games that everybody's playing, its a cluster fuck that's killing us with greed.

And don't pick on whores... They perform a service, unlike the HMOs (Who's getting screwed and how much is it costing? :-)

Miss Chris said...

LOL "Don't pick on whore's. They perform a service". Too funny and so true!