Please keep it clean and civil.
Kill ‘em Off, Who Needs Those Old and Decrepit People Anyway?
I know I’m cheating today and not writing much, while giving you links and videos instead, but it is so freakin’ hot (110 degrees), I can’t sit here and swelter for more than a few minutes at a time.
I just saw the following over at Flopping Aces and I feel sick after reading it. As one who is fast approaching the age where these #@$%^ think I should just give up and die, I have to wonder if they expect to off themselves when they reach, say, 65 or 70? Good lord, Reagan was 70 when he became President, my Mother was 89 when she went off to live a life-long dream on a 3 week tour of China, I had an Uncle who invented some little part that no jet airplane can fly without when he was 77, Thomas Edison was active right up to his death at 84, as was Andrew Carnegie who died at 83 and was a friend and mentor to my paternal Grandfather, Dr. Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine was still working at the time of his death at age 80, searching for a vaccine for Aids, Pablo Picasso was still creating his art right up to his death at age 91, Grandma Moses lived to be 101 and didn’t even start painting until the age of 70 . I’m sure with only a small amount of research I could list dozens, if not hundreds, of persons over the age of 65 who not only were productive and contributing members of society, but who, in many cases, had their best and most productive days in their later years.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research ... believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ‘96).
Since I’m partially disabled after breaking my back, this is frightening. I guess those like the great Helen Keller would have been thrown away with yesterday’s garbage along with all those who might have diabetes, Parkinsons, MS, and a whole host of other problems and diseases that people live with daily. I have a friend who is severely disabled because of a bout of polio when she was only three. Suppose she’d been denied care and left to die. Her body may be broken, but her incredible mind is as sharp as ever. She is a mathematician and programmer for NASA. It is ignorant and it is wrong, wrong, wrong and it makes me physically ill to even think about the attitudes prevalent in this excuse for an Administration.
My hobby is genealogy and much that I’ve learned about my own family and about history has come from long conversations with the elderly. Without them, we have no history. No one to tell us what it was like “back then” or to warn us about the pitfalls and mistakes we are making as they draw from the lessons learned in their vast store of memory. Who will teach the young if there are no older people left to impart their wisdom and knowledge? I learned first hand from my Great Aunt what it was like during the 1889 Johnstown Flood, I leaned from my Mother what it was like to be a young girl with her brother stringing wire out on the roof so that their home built crystal radio could pick up KDKA in their attic in Oakland, CA, I learned from my Aunt the stories of her Grandmother and Grandfather’s journey out to the Great Plains where they lived in a sod house and my Great Grandfather was the only doctor for 500 miles around. I learned first hand from my Uncle what it was like to be with McArthur when he returned to the Philippines, and from all my older relatives I learned the value of a dollar since they’d all been through the Great Depression and were warning we of the younger generation to be careful and not get carried away with gambling on the stock market or with real estate.
I hope I’ve made my point. And I pray that I never become so selfish, so self-centered that I’d be willing to toss the elderly under the bus and I hope that I too can impart some wisdom to my grandchildren and someday even my great grandchildren, God, and not the pseudo-Messiah in Washington, willing.
These folks play by the rules of science, not myth and superstition.
New Age Junk Science, that is.Even Darwinists spoke of the Grandmother Effect, back in the day.
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Ruth Bader’s comment sure seems to have been sucked into a Black Hole, so to speak.Posted by Doug
07/25/2009 at 07:55 PM
Dear Sara,
Just wanted to say your comments and posts at Belmont Club have been most entertaining and thoughtful. Without meaning to set myself up as any sort of supreme arbiter, I’m just glad to have you join the conversation.
Meanwhile, I look forward to visiting your blog from time to time.
Posted by Mad Fiddler 07/25/2009 at 11:31 PM
Supreme arbiter he’s not, just one hell of a writer.
(and I assume, animator)Posted by Doug 07/26/2009 at 12:48 AM
Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.
Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they’re “associated with longer waits” and “reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices” (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001). But he calls it “debatable” whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you’ll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)
Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically deivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.
In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist “embedded clinical decision support”—a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.
Americans need to know what the president’s health advisers have in mind for them. Emanuel (Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel) sees even basic amenities as luxuries and says Americans expect too much:
“Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy . . . physicians’ offices are typically more conveniently located and have parking nearby and more attractive waiting rooms” (JAMA, June 18, 2008).No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views.
Nor have most people heard about the arm-twisting, Chicago-style tactics being used to force support. In a Nov. 16, 2008, Health Care Watch column, Emanuel explained how business should be done:
“Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda.
If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”Do we want a “reform” that empowers people like this to decide for us?
fPosted by Doug 07/26/2009 at 03:09 AM
Sorry, I had not followed the Flopping Aces link.
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Belmont Club » Getting betterPosted by Doug 07/26/2009 at 03:15 AM
Frank McCourt
Patrick O’BrianPosted by buddy larsen 07/26/2009 at 03:46 AM
Rush’s Grandpa worked ‘til 2 years prior to his demise @ 104
Posted by Doug 07/26/2009 at 05:56 AM
Sara,
I want to second Mad Fiddler’s comments, above.
And as a physician (I started out as a family physician, and am now a psychiatrist) I completely concur with your take on Obama’s “health Care reform.”
Jamie
Posted by Jamie Irons 07/26/2009 at 08:36 AM
Hi and welcome to everyone.
If you want to know what government run healthcare is like, ask someone in the military or better a military dependent.
Let me give you a typical example for non-emergency care.
But first, I want to say that in 26 years, I never had a complaint about the doctors or the care from that perspective, but getting the care was another matter.
A typical day:
You wake up and realize you’re sick and sick enough to seek medical help.
You drive to Navy Hospital to the Walk-in Clinic, where first you have to stand in a long line to pick up your chart from Central Files and then into the Clinic where you are met by a couple of hundred others waiting to see a doctor. You take a number and you wait and wait some more.
Finally it is your turn. You are taken to outside an examining room where you sit in another line of maybe 5 patients and finally after another hour you get into the room and the doctor shows up.
Now first thing he is going to do is determine what kind of patient you are. I divide them into 3 categories:
1. Those, like myself, who never go to the doctor unless they think they’re dying.
2. Those who spend the day at the Clinic because they have nothing better to do and enjoy the company of the others waiting. It is a social outing for them.
3. The hypochondriacs who come for each and every little bump, scrape, or hangnail.
Once that is established, you get examined and now it is lab time. You’re given a slip to walk over to the lab, where you are met again with maybe a hundred others waiting to get blood drawn or to pee in a cup. Finally, you see the tech, they get what you need and then you have to wait maybe up to 2 or more hours to get the results, which you then have to carry back to the Clinic to give to the doctor.
If you are sent to x-ray instead of the lab, add at least another hour and a half to the wait time.
When you get back to the Clinic, you have priority to get back in to see the doctor, but, of course, he is busy seeing other patients and you have to be fitted in between these new patients, so another hour or more of time.
He looks at the results of the labs, rechecks his findings from the exam and writes you a prescription, say for an antibiotic or pain med and sends you off to the pharmacy.
The pharmacy, of course, is waaaaaaay on the other side of the facility, so you walk, feeling like death warmed over, because you were there because you were sick enough to put yourself thru all this and as you approach the pharmacy you see maybe 300 people all waiting for their prescriptions. You take a number and if you are lucky, you may get it after only a 2 hour wait, although I’ve waited as long as 4.
So, you can figure that a 9 AM doctor visit might get you out of there by 4 PM, if you are lucky.
On the other hand, I’ve found emergency care to be very good. In fact, over the years, I tried to make sure my only visits qualified as bona fide emergencies: a broken leg, a dislocated shoulder, a tubal pregnancy where your whole insides have burst, etc.
I had to have surgery at Navy Hospital while my husband was in a combat zone. I was admitted, put in a room with 4 other patients, one dying, the others there for various problems requiring hospitalization but not life threatening.
The night before surgery they send in a Red Cross worker who takes all the info down on how to reach your spouse, in case you die on the operating table, which isn’t exacting comforting right before they put you under.
Then you are in recovery and some big black nurse who looks more like Aunt Jemima than anyone else is screaming at you as you lay there fighting for consciousness that when you leave her floor with a gown on you better come back with that gown on, she is responsible for her gown count and you’ve somehow screwed her over because while you were knocked out you ended up with a different gown.
The following morning, you’re begging for another pain shot when a corpsman comes in and leaves you a bucket with a sponge, toilet brush and cleaning supplies and a clean set of sheets and you are told that you are expected to be ambulatory by that afternoon and to clean your own bathroom and change your own sheets.
There are no TVs in the room, but you can bring in your own and use rabbit ears, there is no phone unless you can make your way down the hall, dragging your IV pole to the pay phone on the wall.
You are a patient for 10 days, had major abdominal surgery and you are released and the whole thing cost $10. $1 a day.
You say, I guess it was worth it for that money, but you know that you are scheduled for post op follow-up so you are back to allotting the time for the Walk-in clinic song and dance.
Now I have the benefit of being able to compare two types of treatment for almost the same types of problems. Treatment at Navy vs treatment in a civilian hospital.
I had a bike accident where I dislocated my shoulder and was taken to Navy Hospital. I was told to get on a table and a big burly corpsman comes and tells me to lie on my back and reach out my right arm. He hands me a paint bucket filled with cement and the weight of the bucket yanks my arm down and pops my shoulder back in place, I’m bound up and sent on my way.
I fell down a long stairway and dislocated my shoulder a few years ago and was taken to a civilian hospital emergency room. They hooked me up to an EKG machine, gave me two shots of morphine, sent in 3 different doctors to “discuss” the problem and then they sent in a nurse to start an IV. The doctor comes back and tells me they are going to put me to sleep for a few minutes while 3 of them yank on my arm to pop my shoulder back in place. When I was awake again, they kept me there for the next 6 hours for observation, 3 different sets of x-rays and then sent me home with three prescriptions for heavy duty pain meds and told me to follow-up with my doctor the following week.
So there you have my observation of government care as well as a single incident comparison of government vs civilian treatment for a similar injury.
I remember after I had my accident that blew out my knee in Baltimore, they took me to a civilian hospital. My first time ever to be in a civilian facility. I felt like a Princess. Warm blankets wrapped around me, nurses offering to wash my hair, TV, phone, people stopping by my room all day offering all kinds of goodies like soft drinks, teddy bears, magazines, books, or just to talk and comfort me in my “time of pain and travail” (yep she actually said that). A volunteer to take me to therapy or to x-ray, catering to me really. It was an amazing experience compared to having to get “ambulatory” to clean my own toilet and change my own sheets. Of course, the bill to insurance was over $30,000 (included the knee surgery & hospital stay, but not the doctor’s or anesthesiologist’s fee.)
I cannot see Michelle Obama or the Congressional prima donas putting themselves through the hours and hours of time it took to get government care, nor can I see most people willing to accept the bare bones care (albeit quality) care that I got at Navy Hospital. But, on the other hand, at this time of my life, living below the poverty line on limited retirement income (not yet eligible for SS) and with chronic pain, I’d take the bare bones care in a heartbeat. Yet, that said, I’m against this healthcare plan as I understand it now. But, just from my own experience I can see so many areas where money is wasted or spent on unnecessary niceties that drive up the costs.
Posted by Admin 07/26/2009 at 01:16 PM
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