Guide to Staying Alive and Healthy under Castro Care

Coming in contact with the “new and improved” American Castro Care for the masses that squeaks like a rusty wheel wrapped in cellophane and tied with a red bow, I realize that quality healthcare for American citizens and their undocumented brethren, who crossed the border illegally or were brought here by our government to fulfill the quota of Democrat voters and to alter the “racially unjust” and “bigoted” profile of sleepy little towns, might soon be a thing of the past.

If you take a handful of antibiotics before you have a medical procedure, your chances of survival double, especially if you know that your doctor’s handshake to improve his/her bedside manner passed to you all the germs from the previous eight patients because surveys say that doctors only wash hands after every eighth patient they touch. Very reassuring, isn’t it? But, it could be worse.

And then there are the foreign nurses and orderlies who come from third world countries where soap and water are scarce and sanitation is hard to grasp, especially since bacteria and viruses are invisible to the naked eye. Too much washing is bad for human skin and not part of some cultures. Who are we to judge, liberals ask rhetorically. Hand-washing may be against their religion as well.

You better thank your lucky stars that you get freshly cleaned and bleached sheets. As Marean Menghelie wrote, in eastern European socialized medicine, you could find yourself wrapped in a sheet with Crayola graffiti, with dried up blood that does not belong to you, ketchup stains when ketchup is not served in the hospital cafeteria, motor oil stains from the previous patient who cut his finger in an auto shop, suspicious yellow stains, or even dried-up vomit if you are really lucky.

And don’t dare to use the shower or the bathroom on your own, especially if you are hooked up to a tree of life with glucose and other happy drugs that can stop your heart. Why take the chance to pull the needle right out of your vein and spray the walls with a spritz of fresh blood.

Always ring the bedside button. When nobody shows up, and they seldom do, try to crawl out of bed carefully so as not to set off the bed alarm and watch out – the floor is really hard. If it rings anyway, hurry up to the bathroom and lock the door. There is always a young college student in nursing school assigned to babysit you and force you into compliance with hospital rules.

Menghelie suggested that you should be careful what you eat from the socialized medicine hospital offerings. Smell it suspiciously, wait for other patients in the ward to try it first, and consider eating only if nobody croaks right away.  Better yet, don’t eat at all. If you wanted to eat, you should have gone to a restaurant, not a hospital.

If you must have a procedure, you have to bribe the doctor (it is expected) to make sure he/she does an extra good job and you emerge alive. Watch to make sure they put the bribe money clearly labeled with your name in an envelope and ask, in case you don’t make it, if there is a refund policy payable to the family for burial expenses.

Menghelie even recommended a nice payoff for the RNs, the next in line to make sure you are properly sedated and cared for after surgery. Bring proper amount of cash as they are not ATMs to make change. It is good insurance that they will smile, give you shots properly, or draw blood on the first try without bruising your entire arm. Make sure, he advised, you bribe two nurses so that the second shift won’t leave you thirsty, in pain, or with your diaper wet.

Socialized medicine is great and it works well in the small bankrupt countries of Europe when you have the sniffles or the flu. It will work wonders for our 308 million Americans, give and take a few million undocumented arrivals that the government does not seem to be able to count accurately.

Dental care in socialized Europe is another story. There is a reason why so many Europeans don’t smile. It’s not that daily life is harder or that they are in a perennial bad mood. They are just either sporting gaps in their pearly browns or yellows or have ill-fitting dentures.

Aren’t you glad that the U.S. is going to finally join the rest of the civilized world? What took us so long? We’ve been overpaying for services, good doctors, and good insurance for so long. How could we have been so ignorant for so long? Lucky us that the ‘wise’ progressives came along to set us straight and give us Obama Care!

I can give you lots of savvy advice but it suffices to say that it would be better if you could stay healthy and away from doctors and dangerous pharmaceutical products that tend to cause more harm and mortal danger than the actual disease. And take your vitamins. You are going to live as long as God intended you to live no matter what you do.

Cyprus and Venezuela, Castro Care

Cyprus, a tiny island of less than one million people, is a small scale study in “big banking out of control,” “insane spending like there is no tomorrow,” coupled with “socialism runs out of other people’s money.” While researching the bailin and bailout of early summer, I found disturbing accounts of their socialized health care.

In return for a 10 billion bailout for Cyprus, the EU bureaucrats have demanded a bailin (read confiscation) of Cypriots’ savings and checking accounts. One bank offered worthless shares but another did not. Cypriots felt that they were used as “guinea pigs” to test if the scheme worked before they tried it in other places like Italy, Spain, and Greece. The confiscation of depositors’ money was dubbed in Cyprus the euphemism “the haircut.”

The European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, a.k.a. the Troika* (Russian for a three-way alliance) have required 40-60 percent confiscation of depositors’ money from the Bank of Cyprus in exchange for worthless shares and 100 percent confiscation from the Bank of Laikh; if a person had 100,000 euros in the bank, he/she was lucky to get a few cents back, said The Foreign Correspondent in a 30 minute documentary. Even the capital of small businesses had been commandeered and frozen, leaving employers unable to meet payroll and thus laid off workers. The economy became so depressed, the unemployment grew to thirty percent.

Cypriots were allowed to withdraw small amounts of money per day (200 euros) in order to prevent a run-on-banks. Easy credit and off shore investments encouraged by low taxes and relaxed regulations attracted a lot of banking to Cyprus and real estate exploded.

Michael Sarris, Finance Minister, said, “We were financing consumption beyond our means, causing a real estate bubble.” Following the Troika’s announcement of the “haircut” which the producers dubbed the “scalping,” the bubble burst and the real estate market crashed, causing a drop in property value of 50 percent.

“We do not deserve this harsh and cruel treatment,” said Sarris. Retirement savings were partly gone. The poor and the sick were hurt the most. The government did not provide the socialized medical care it had promised its citizens. And we are only talking about a small number of people, this island has less than one million inhabitants. Because the government was out of money and could not and would not pay for hospital care and other essential medical care for cancer patients, charities had to step in via month by month donations.

Charities such as The Association of Cancer Patients and Friends lost about 100,000 euros in the forced confiscation (30 percent). Narcissistic EU bureaucrats thought they knew better what was good for the people. Charitable donations were barely trickling in because so many Cypriots were still unemployed, broke, and dependent on food banks.

Why would EU and Cypriot bureaucrats not take into account the human cost of their decisions? The answer is simple, arbitrary and deep cuts made from a nicely appointed office do not carry the faces of individuals suffering the results of their cutthroat decisions.

The cancer palliative care to the end of life of 1,500 patients is run in people’s homes; a nurse visits every day to administer treatment. A relatively young patient in a lot of pain who had had a radical mastectomy was treated at home.  Her dressings were changed daily by a nurse who came to her home. Her husband, an Australian citizen residing in Cyprus, had to take a job in Australia in order to ship home needed money.

“Many patients like her will die at home without any medical support,” said the palliative care nurse. “It is a human right to give pain medication.”

It is certainly inhumane to let people suffer physically, mentally, and economically the consequences of the actions of a few who took advantage of unregulated banks and gambled with other people’s money, overinvesting in real estate and then making the poor and innocent bailout the country, rewarding the bank hucksters for their greed.

Hollywood has told us repeatedly in commercials, testimonials, expertly done glossies, and documentaries how wonderful medical care is in Europe, Venezuela, Cuba, China,  and how we should emulate those Fabian socialist/Marxist models.

The reality is that the health care system in Venezuela is in severe crisis after years of “government mismanagement and currency controls.” There are 19,000 cancer patients but 70 percent of radiotherapy machines are not operable. As it is the case in other socialist/communist countries, patients must buy their own medical supplies because the medical system is overwhelmed by supply shortages and inadequate or broken down medical equipment to treat those with otherwise treatable tumors.

Venezuela’s healthcare is free and universal, guaranteed in the 1999 Constitution, but what good is that guarantee if treatment and drugs are not available? It’s not that Venezuela cannot afford to foot the bill – the country sits on the largest proven oil reserves.  In spite of that, according to the AP, nine out of 10 hospitals have only 7 percent of the supplies they need. When Hugo Chavez took office, 200 public hospitals “were largely replaced by a system of walk-in clinics run by Cuban doctors that won praise for delivering preventative care to the neediest but do not treat serious illnesses. There are now 100 fully functioning public hospitals.” (Frank Bajak, Doctors Say Venezuela’s Health Care in Collapse, Associated Press)

A friend sought chemo treatment in one of the 400 private Venezuelan hospitals that rely on importation of drugs, equipment, and supplies. She did not make it. Her mom had knee replacement surgery in Caracas a few years ago. For 24 hours, no nurse checked her vital signs, they just stuck their heads in the door and did not disturb her because she appeared to be sleeping. She was paralyzed from a blood clot and never recovered.

My friend always told me how much cheaper procedures were in private hospitals in Venezuela. She flew there often for private care. She did not understand that the government price ceilings (caps) on procedures did not reflect the actual economic cost for the hospital – her government-enforced price was just a fraction of the real cost. The hospital had to absorb the difference.

Although Venezuela’s private hospitals have only 8,000 beds, said Frank Bajak of AP, “they treat 53 percent of the country’s patients, including 10 million public employees with health insurance.” Bajak quoted Dr. Jose Luis Lopez, “The health care crisis is an economic crisis. It is not a medical crisis.”

And it looks like the United States is going in the same direction with the unaffordable Affordable Care Act. The non-existent health care crisis will be turned into a nightmare. Instead of fixing the insurance system and promoting tort reform, the government is destroying the best health care system in the world. Instead of expanding care to a few million uninsured or underinsured, we are destroying the existing health insurance and care of half of our population because liberals have been salivating over one-payer government insurance and rationed care for years. Progressives are now succeeding because the low information masses have chosen Hollywood’s heavily advertised Castro Care.

What is happening in Venezuela today has happened in communist Romania I experienced. There was no anesthesia for elective surgery or dental care, equipment was broken, held with duct tape, inoperable, leaky and rusty pipes were present everywhere; foul odors, an overwhelming stench, and blood stains on peeling walls and floors overwhelmed the senses. Medical personnel fled abroad just like Romanian doctors fled to the European Union.

The wasteful socialist system in Venezuela buys medical supplies via Cuba, China, and Argentina instead of directly from the supplier. “The Cuban-run program of 1,200 clinics is a politically motivated waste of billions,” said Dr. Jose Felix Oletta as quoted by the AP. The clinics do not vaccinate or perform PAP smears resulting in a comeback of diseases like malaria, Dengue fever and more women dying of cancer or in child birth.

The problem with Chavez’ utopia was that poor people believed his rhetoric, they adored him for establishing anti-poverty programs and clinics for sniffles, they constantly voted for him, but many who applied for government benefits did not get them and neither did they get treatment when they became seriously ill with cancer or other ailments.

*Troika, for any Russian generally means a Tribunal consisting of three persons, each representing the prosecutor, the defense, and the judge. They served as an instrument of terror, condemning to death dozens, sometimes hundreds of people in one day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Obamacare, This Won't Hurt a Bit

Thousands of articles have been written and commentaries made since the Affordable Care Act nobody can afford had passed. In spite of the vociferous demands to defund it coming from the majority of the American people who work for a living instead of voting more welfare for themselves, the best health care in the world will gradually disappear, replaced by a radical form of socialized medicine that most Americans are not prepared to understand or accept.

Obamacare is now the law of the land for some, depending on which parts the president decides to implement and which to delay. The elected representatives have turned a deaf ear to all the calls, rallies, faxes, letters, op-eds, and direct visits to their offices. They were so sure this type of medical insurance/care that John Roberts termed a “tax” was right for Americans that they exempted themselves from its burden. Furthermore, when our Congressmen who make a six-figure salary complained that the exchange rates were so prohibitively expensive, they received a special 75% subsidy to defray the cost. Who is going to help Americans who make too much income to qualify for subsidies?

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas made a 21 hour valiant effort in the Senate to give a final voice to the unhappy Americans who wanted to keep their private medical insurance, their doctors, the affordable insurance rates and plans, their full-time jobs, and the ability to see a physician or have a test in a timely manner. Sen. Cruz was ridiculed and maligned not just by liberals. Supposed conservatives and RINOs were tripping over themselves on the way to the microphones in a chorus of criticism to attack Sen. Cruz’s character, credentials, experience, and his noble intentions.

The government computers were not properly working and interfacing yesterday to tell Americans exactly how much they would need to pay come October 1, 2013. And these bureaucrats are going to tell us whether we can or cannot have certain medical procedures and are going to be the repository of more than 307 million people’s medical records, including our sexual habits, and the most intimate details of our lives from birth to death.

A neurosurgeon called into a nationally syndicated show telling the host that the infamous death panel is already at work, advising him on whom he can operate and to whom he must refuse surgery. I wonder how that would square off with the Hippocratic Oath doctors have taken upon medical school graduation.

Even the Teamsters union, the main supporters of the Obamacare, have change their tune now and asked for another exemption from a law that will destroy their Cadillac insurance plans and medical care.  They were denied.

Since 85 percent of Americans had some form of medical insurance, The Affordable Care Act was supposedly designed and passed to help the 15 percent uninsured. At the end of the full implementation of Castro Care, there will still be 30 million uninsured and millions of workers relegated to part-time work to help employers avoid the penalties of the law. Employers could not continue to offer highly expensive private insurance plans whose cost have been driven into the stratosphere by the onerous demands of Obamacare.

Obamacare has turned our country’s labor market into a part-time work nation. It is debatable that it was an unintended consequence. If this law was about health care, wouldn’t it have been cheaper to just purchase insurance for the 15 percent uninsured through some federal program? After all, we waste billions and trillions on wars without end and purpose, and we have enough money to arm Al Qaeda terrorists and the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East.

Come January 1, 2014, people who chose not to buy insurance because they cannot afford the bare minimum $20,000 a year Bronze Plan for a family of four, they will have to pay a fine/tax of $95 or one percent of their incomes. Since taxes are paid for the previous year when the ACA was in force only three months (October-December), would the fine/tax for 2013 be prorated? I don’t think so.

We have been bombarded by doctors, including our cat’s vet, to create a portal into the electronic compliance that the doctors must submit to the federal government in order to make sure that all of our medical data is out there for the world to hack into. The emails keep coming with messages from family doctors to create these portals and I keep ignoring them.

Concierge medicine is more and more enticing to a lot of people until Congress will pass an amendment to the Obamacare that will ban medical services for cash. In northern Virginia many doctors already do not accept any form of government insurance and concierge medicine is quite popular. But some people cannot afford the upfront membership fee being that it is higher than the yearly premiums they used to pay for comprehensive insurance through their employer.

Trader Joe’s part-time employees and other companies’ employees had really good insurance for affordable monthly premiums. Not anymore, Obamacare made sure that it was destroyed. I hope that these very people who voted so enthusiastically for President Obama twice, and have now lost their health insurance, realize that this law was not about insuring the uninsured or improved health care delivery or fairness, it was about control. “Evil” capitalist choices who kept people alive and well, the envy of the rest of the world, have been eliminated with the stroke of a presidential pen. Americans have nobody else to blame but themselves.

My sweet Mother, who is 81 years old and way passed Castro Care’s cut off age for any meaningful medical care, visits, tests, or procedures, has become a “unit” and must already beg her physician for her arthritis medication refills. They are too expensive when computed into the death panel formula for her usefulness to society.

Mom helped raise three children and survived the oppressive communist regime in Romania. She immigrated to the United States, the land of abundance and freedom, to live the rest of her life in peace and free of worries.

My Mom is a lucky octogenarian who does not have any major health issues. If she did, she would be told by the IRS, our new doctors, to go home and take a pill, she had lived a long life already.  It angers me that Obamacare makes mom’s life irrelevant and inconvenient.

The worth of any society is dictated by how well they treat the sick and the elderly and how much they value life. It is shameful how low we have fallen since we’ve allowed a liberal minority to control who lives and who dies. As a society, we have lost our humanity.

Dental Floss and Castro Care

The economy is not experiencing scarcity yet but I did notice lately that the range of choices for various goods has diminished. It has been three months or longer since my favorite dental floss and toothpaste have been missing on store shelves. They finally reappeared recently, to disappear again, an obvious sign of manufacturing shortage. This prompted me to check out the new sonic care air flossing gadget. The price alone could buy 40-80 rolls of floss, not to mention the need of electricity to make it work.

People don’t realize how important their teeth are. There is a direct correlation between the health of one’s teeth and the overall body health stemming from the ability to chew and eat nutritional foods, including the health of one’s heart, which can be adversely affected by oral bacteria and decaying dentition.

I am not sure when flossing was revealed as a necessary dental hygienic tool. Anthropologists found evidence that ancient peoples and even isolated tribes used sticks for interdental cleaning. Credit for inventing the dental floss goes to a New Orleans dentist in 1815.  In 1896 Johnson & Johnson patented its silk version produced out of the same thread used for surgical stiches.

Some toothless 45-50 year old Europeans might have saved their teeth and the troubles of finding a dentist who would properly fit them with dentures if they had known about flossing. Come to think of it, the Eastern Europeans, in their utopian socialist/communist states, did not have floss and had difficulty finding toothpaste and toothbrushes, much less adopt a daily brushing routine. On my last trip, young women were selling Crest toothbrushes and handing out leaflets in a strip mall with instructions on how to properly brush your teeth, including the tip that it had to be done daily. When I asked her if I could photograph her booth, she refused.

Growing up in the village, Grandma and Grandpa had two toothbrushes made of rough and uneven bristles, stored outside by the water pump, hanging on a wooden board with nails for hooks. The tube of gritty toothpaste hanged in a cloth bag. The water coming out of the ground was as cold as a mountain spring. Each family member used the same two brushes once a week, making sure they were properly hanged on the hooks. Flies loved to land on them during the day. After a year of two, when the bristles were so bent out of shape or have fallen, a new toothbrush was purchased.

The socialized medicine dentists who were paid the same as everybody, a miserable salary decided by the communist elites, could not care less about the people’s dental hygiene or keeping their teeth. They got paid the same whether they did their job well or poorly. Anesthetics were non-existent. I had root canal at the age of 15 without any anesthetics, howling and wriggling in the dental chair, and the torturous “treatment” stretched over six months, at the end of which he had to pull the tooth out anyway.

When braces became popular, a close relative, who is a dentist and had terrible misaligned teeth herself, chewed me out for putting braces on my two young daughters. “What kind of ignorant mother are you, did you not know that braces cause cavities and ruin people’s teeth?” Thank God, her “stellar” socialist medical training was wrong, my beautiful daughters have gorgeous pearly-whites.

Western European dental care did not fare that much better. There is a good reason why so many Brits have yellow and bad teeth. Their national medical care rations healthcare and the waiting period is so long for many procedures, tests, and labs, including dental care, that people pull their own teeth out after weeks and months of agony while waiting to be seen by a doctor.

I can still see my dentist, buy floss, see my doctors; I can have a needed test within a reasonable amount of time because capitalist competition works well. Come 2014, under the “new and improved” unaffordable socialist and misnamed Affordable Care Act, our medical care will more closely resemble the care we used to get under socialist medicine – rationing, special polyclinics for the elites, black market for needed drugs, empty pharmacy shelves, bring your own drugs and syringes to the hospital, and shortages of basics, either over the counter drugs, vitamins, and prescription drugs.