Skip to main content

They've Lost the Plot

The other night, the Democratic presidential candidates all said they'd provide free health care to illegal immigrants. Not free emergency services, but free health care. Free in this case means paid for by the taxpayers.  I don't get free health care and I'm a veteran who works for a living. I pay both health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses because 1) I have a high deductible and 2) I order my own tests because most endocrinologists and gastroenterologists have no idea what they're doing.

When these socialists are not pandering to illegal immigrants, the same people also say


  • We have food deserts where poor people have a hard time getting groceries
  • Some people struggle to afford health insurance
  • Some people struggle to afford health care and medications
  • Migrants in detention centers aren't being taken care of
  • We have homeless people not being taken care of
  • Health care costs for Americans are steeply rising (which we can all agree on)


In other words, we're not even taking care of the people who are already here. Yet somehow, we'll take care of all of the people we're currently not taking care of, plus the millions who'll pour in over the border for free shit. The moderators should have asked the candidates how much they've paid out of their own pockets for other people's health care. In reality, it's going to come out of the pockets of the taxpayers. The cost is already so great that Warren Buffett called it "a hungry tapeworm on the American economy" as he teamed up with Jamie Dimon and Jeff Bezos to bring health care costs under control. I don't know what they're cooking up, but it probably doesn't involve adding a lot more non-paying users to the system.

I don't know the answer to health care costs for people already here, but it doesn't involve uncoupling goods and services from prices. Elective surgery like Lasik has gone down in price over the years. Food and shelter are just as important, if not more so, than health care for most people, and yet prices for those generally aren't regulated. Probably, solutions involve getting rid of middlemen, directing current cynicism in the direction of much of the useless health care available (e.g., expensive tests for healthy people with no risk factors), and finally officially ditching the myths about healthy whole grains and artery clogging saturated fat. It's probably no coincidence that after low-carb diets became popular, the rate of new cases of diabetes fell. That would be no thanks to help from our government.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...
21 comments
Read more