On Eating Meat

People who survived the Soviet satellites of the former Iron Curtain, socialist countries run by their respective Communist Parties, can attest to the lack of food and especially meat they were subjected to daily.

One person who recently talked about his experience with food in Poland brought back painful memories. It was common for hungry kids to bully or beat up weaker kids for their sandwich, he said; their parents were members of the Communist Party and thus had access to healthy food. He reminisced about his mom buying a sliver of meat to flavor the soup or stew she was making. Drago was so shocked when he was first offered a piece of steak in the U.S. He thought it was the food ration for the month.

My mom bought bones with which she flavored our soups and potato stews. She could not have bought even a sliver of good meat if she wanted to because it was not available or it would have been too expensive for our meager budget to buy it on the black market. At best, she could have bartered something, but she had nothing of value to exchange for meat.

Such was food rationing on coupons under tyrannical regimes – empty stores and long lines for bread and other necessities that were always in short supply.

I visited Dachau’s Nazi concentration camp 31 years ago and I saw a list in German with the food rations for the camp’s prisoners. They received every morning 350 g of bread and half a liter of ersatz coffee, 3 liters of soup for lunch each week, one noodle soup and other two liters white cabbage soup, and for evening meals four times a week 20-30 g of sausage or cheese and ¾ liter of tea. No wonder the prisoners who survived were skeletal. Meat was almost non-existent in their nutrition; they were starved on purpose.

I watched my mom kill a chicken sometimes and grandpa slaughter at Christmas the pig he raised; it kept many in the family alive throughout the year. In retrospect, it did not look like a humane killing and the pig knew what was happening to him but we needed meat in order to survive and stay somewhat healthy and functioning.

I also remember grandpa burying a pig one year in the back yard because the village vet tech told him that it had trichinosis, and it was not fit for human consumption. But some villagers did eat their sick pigs and died or survived through treatment. A few of my childhood friends died of parasitic infections - they were not lucky to be close to a free medical clinic for treatment.

Some village kids drowned in the creek or in the Proava River when it rained a lot, and the muddy brown water concealed their bodies until the level dropped. Nobody knew how to swim. I never learned until I was almost 21 and living in the U.S.

My aunt Nuta used to take me and my best friend Steluta to the Prahova River - the water was clear and so cold, coming down from the mountains. There were pockets between large boulders where the water was deeper, and the fish were trapped in. We bathed with fishes swimming around us. We were hungry all the time, but it never occurred to us to try to catch the fish. We were afraid that someone would report us to the communist government, and we would go to jail.

Finding abundant meat to eat in the U.S. reminds us of the reality that every day we live, a creature dies to keep us alive. We just do not realize how much killing we do because someone else does the killing for us.

I am obsessed with the show ALONE for several reasons. One is the killing of animals in a survival setting where they are truly alone and must find meat protein, clean water, build a good shelter, and provide heat. Part of finding food is not just picking berries or edible plants which can be boiled and turned into soup. They must hunt and catch wild animals; unless trained, we lost that skill a long time ago. Most of us today would not know how to humanely trap and kill an animal to eat. We do eat meat but are squeamish about the actual killing.

A lady survivalist snared a squirrel, and the momma squirrel came and was trying to revive her baby and she was making all these crying sounds. It was heartbreaking to hear - animals are sentient beings.

A survivalist from West Virginia who hunted and killed with his bow and arrow a beaver in Labrador, Canada, contracted giardiasis, a parasitical infection from the beaver meat - he called it ‘beaver fever.’ Worse still, he had to undress down to his underwear and swim in the freezing river water to retrieve the dead beaver which was floating in the middle.

He got so sick after eating undercooked meat and fat from this beaver that he had to tap out to seek medical help. This was the revenge of the beaver for killing him and leaving his mate alone for life.

But we know that in the circle of life animals eat other animals and maul humans as well if they are in their habitat or vicinity, and they happen to be hungry. Some even slaughter humans for the sport even when not hungry.

Meat has been part of the human diet for 2.6 million years despite the modern time push for vegetarianism. We are lucky in the U.S. that we have such a supply of meat, enough to trade with other nations.

The Not So Golden Epoch of Communism

Photo: Web

A photograph came across my desk depicting an arch of triumph of sorts which declared 1965-1985 “The Ceausescu Epoch – The Golden Epoch of Romania.”

If you ask any Romanian, this twenty-year period was one of the most tyrannical and oppressive regimes in its known history. It was a painful period of dark and repressive communist dictatorship maintained and characterized by brute force, fear, mental control, and constant food rationing.

The young pioneers, communists in training, “soimii patriei” (The Country’s Eagles), euphemistically “named” by Ceausescu himself, adopted the motto “Tot inainte,” (Ever Forward). A pioneer’s guide indoctrinated them how to behave as young communists. It seems that both communists and Socialist Democrat lefties are very fond of pathetic euphemisms which misrepresent reality.

On any given day the self-described Democrat Socialist left is trampling on the opposition’s rights, turning us into a collective guy facing a communist rolling tank in Tiananmen Square.

The two communist run television channels broadcast from 1 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily with a heavy dose of political indoctrination via carefully crafted and chosen entertainment and documentaries such as “The works of Comrade Ceausescu – Huge horizons opened for the revolutionary theory and practice,” the unfailing and tireless activity devoted to increasing the communist party role in society, “Science and Scientific Socialism as remarkable forces of production,” “We live decades of grandiose fulfillments,” choreographed literary-musical production aimed at bamboozling the proletariat into blind submission, and “From the big book of communism, the patriotic revolutionary responsibility of youth in Romania’s future in the Ceausescu Epoch,” more indoctrination for the generation of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Epoch, euphemistically and deceptively named “the generation of the revolutionary spirit and actions.”

In the painful daily reality, the proletariat and their children were forced to sing, march, and praise the dear leader, and the population in general was starved on a meager diet and bombarded with a false sense of wellbeing and daily doses of deviously crafted lies.

The communist subjects of all ages were forced to “recognize, apply, and respect the principles and norms of the labor and life of communists, of the ethic and equity of socialism – order, discipline, responsibility, and liability in all activities.”

Western visitors commented on how beautiful Romanian women were, thin as twigs but foreign guests did not understand the real reason for this forced thinness – the lack of food, the rationing of food via stamped cards, the endless daily lines, and the Communist Party prescribed caloric rations.

“The Program of Scientific Nutrition” decreed in July 1982 that men should have 37 g of protein and women 29 g of protein per day. The recommended caloric intake based on the type of activity - light, medium, forte, and exceptional - ranged from 2,000 to 2,700 calories for women and 2,700 to 4,000 for men. It seemed like a reasonable schedule except for the fact that most people would have been hard-pressed to find much food to deliver enough protein and nutrition. The obvious thinness of the population bore testimony to the lack of food. https://adevarul.ro/locale/ploiesti/programul-alimentatie-stiintifica-populatiei-comunism-trebuia-manance-cantareasca-persoana-1_57ac8f245ab6550cb8ab50f6/index.html

The “recommended” food intake was even lower for the rural population and their rationing cards entitled them to less food. If a villager wanted to raise a pig for his family’s use, he had to raise another one and donate it to the state.

People were not allowed to buy food anywhere else except in the area in which they lived. In other words, the rationing cards were valid only in one’s neighborhood stores.

The light activity category was comprised of office workers and housewives who owned stoves and other electric appliances.

The medium activity referred to workers in the light industry, men in construction industry, agriculture, students, and the military.

The forte activity category included miners, workers in the heavy industry, women in agriculture, soldiers in the field, dancers, and athletes.

The exceptional activity category encompassed metal workers, workers in abattoirs and butcher shops, dock workers in ports, and women in construction. https://cultural.bzi.ro/programul-de-alimentatie-stiintifica-a-populatiei-elena-ceausescu-daca-vor-sa-manance-mai-mult-riscul-este-al-lor-7053

Monthly rations of food for the average adult included:

-          300 g of daily bread

-          Chicken (1 kg)

-          Beef or pork (500 g); in case of severe food shortages, the party guidelines suggested buying canned meat from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

-          Cheese (500 g every three months)

-          Butter (100 g)

-          Sugar (1 kg)

-          Corn meal (1 kg)

-          Flour (1 kg every three months)

-          Eggs (8-12)

Workers involved in harder labor were entitled to extra 300 g of basic foods listed every month. Their families had to stand in line for the extra food, if available, and present extra rationing coupons issued to them by the state.

Depending on the year and the type of shortages, usually caused by irrational exportation of food to foreign countries in exchange for hard currency and bad centralized planning by communist ideologues who had no idea how to run any economy, rationing cards were issued for shoes, clothing, food like flour, beans, cooking oil, sugar, rice, and other necessities.

Ceausescu’s Golden epoch of failed socialist rule by the Communist Party was nothing but a tarnished and empty goblet of promises and lies for the hapless proletariat who barely survived on an equal pay survival level that would have shocked even other Stalinist satellite countries.

Toilet Paper with Wood Chips

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Huffing and puffing, I lug the large package of toilet paper from our local Costco into the house. It’s not that the price is better; I just don’t want to go to the store more often than I have to. I stood in lines enough during my twenty years of living under the boot of communism.

I am always tempted to ask the cashier if that’s enough toilet paper for the average food intake. I never do it because the cashiers are all foreign, barely speak English, and my meek attempt at potty humor would be met by strange stares.

I kept a pink sample of pink toilet paper I brought with me from our first trip back to Romania after communism had “fallen” 25 years earlier. The tissue looks like crepe paper with splinters of wood embedded here and there, visible to the naked eye and painful to the rear end. Progress after decades of dictatorial communism is very slow in some aspects and fast in others.

It is still an improvement from the years I grew up when toilet paper and other necessities Americans take for granted were so scarce, people lined up for blocks to buy a couple of rolls and many left disappointed when the month’s delivery ran out.

People carried emergency walking-around cash and jute expandable shopping bags just in case they ran into a long line which may have been formed for something they needed, i.e., toilet paper, shampoo, oranges, butter, bananas, flour, oil, and sugar. Nobody knew exactly what was on sale that day; asking people around did not help, they did not know either; eventually, as they inched closer to the window, they found out what was delivered that day that people lined up for blocks for a chance to get the rationed amount.

Now in the twenty-first century America, the Snowflake college students are “triggered” by banana peels carelessly discarded on a tree. It makes one wonder, what is the progressive-approved non-racist method of disposing of banana peels after one eats a banana?

During the 1977 earthquake in Romania, the American Bible Society donated Bibles printed in Romanian which were meant to be distributed to the thousands of people who had lost their homes, their loved ones, and felt defeated. Biblical passages would have been inspirational and calming at such a time of profound grief. Instead of distributing them, Ceausescu’s regime recycled them into toilet paper. The print was so good or their recycling so bad that, one day, I found an entire roll of toilet paper with faint words, still legible, which turned out to be passages from the Bible. As scarce as toilet paper was, we kept it in the pantry because it was too sacrilegious to use it in this way.

As Americans, we never think how grateful we should be every day to the Scott Brothers of Watertown, Massachusetts, who invented the toilet paper in the 19th century!

Since people were embarrassed to buy it, the Scott Brothers thought they had a dud invention on their hands until they had the brilliant idea to give it freely to hotels. Hotels agreed to place it in rooms because they were fed up with their small pipes being clogged all the time. Until then, people used corn husks and newspapers which clogged the small sewer pipes. Customers loved the toilet paper for that very reason too and began buying it. And the rest is history.

In Romania's outhouses, we used corn husks and communist party propaganda newspapers because we did not have Sears and Roebucks catalogs or any catalogs for that matter. Once in a while a German tourist would leave behind one of their catalogs and we enjoyed looking at the abundance of everything we did not have, so we never used those for toilet paper. We especially enjoyed wiping with pages which had the dear leader Ceausescu's face on them.

Later on, when toilet paper was finally made, it was coarse light brown paper with wood chips still embedded in the paper, or, if white, it had faintly visible words on it from the books which were recycled into toilet paper.

I still have the few strips of pink toilet paper embedded with wood chips. I showed it to a lot of my former students but it did not seem to make any impact on brain-washed students who love communism and Che Guevara. Listening day and night to Hollywood and the academia extolling the wonderful virtues of communism, young people aspire to overturn their wonderful country built by capitalism and replace it with the tyrannical and egalitarian notion of communism. They believe this because they are young, idealist, often fat and well fed, restless for violent action, and never had to stand in line for anything except the latest electronic gadgets or concert tickets.

 

 

Do You Take Your Grocery Store for Granted?

Bread line during the 1980s
Photo credit: adevarul.com

The Ceausescu clan and their communist useful idiots were quick to remind us of what an enchanted life we lived under his leadership and how terrible life was under evil capitalism and how their people suffered under the boot of the bourgeoisie.  We were so protected and full of hope under “mother” Elena and “father” Nicolae’s leadership, we were told ad nauseam, while the opposite reality hit us in the face every day.

Commies lied to us in order to cover up their mismanagement of the economy, the disastrous five-year plans, the gross misuse of the land, squandered resources, sold produce and grain to the west for hard currency while people were on rationing cards and hungry, and funds stolen from the treasury or from citizens accused under dubious circumstances of treasonous activities such as enemy of the proletariat.

The five-year plans had impossible to achieve goals set by those apparatchiks with high ranking in the Communist Party.  People would go to jail for not meeting these goals in the time frame dictated by the Stalinist bureaucrats, illiterate community organizers, who understood nothing about the economy, about industrial or agricultural planning.  When things went missing in factories, and they did often, accountants and managers would go to jail as theft occurred under their blind watch.

More tight lines for food
Photo credit: adevarul.com

At some point, they ran out of cattle feed and Ceausescu had to distress-slaughter cows. I remember mom saying that beef was tough to chew and purple-looking. To this day, we don’t eat beef. The meat was rationed to 2.5 kg per family per month.  Butchers would chop up bones in the meat which turned it into a purplish grey mass thrown on the counter with contempt. We had to bring our own wrapping newspapers and expandable jute shopping bags to carry food home. In addition to this shopping jute bag, people carried extra cash in case a line developed somewhere which meant that they could not pass up the opportunity to buy whatever was on sale.

This type of pathological lying to the people is not unlike the Democrats covering up their failed economic policies by telling Americans for eight years now how the economic status quo is our new normal, we should get used to the global economy, to the manufacturing sector moving entirely outside of the U.S., and how our jobs are never coming back.

Living under the boot of communism, we could not compare our meager existence with how other people lived because we were forbidden to travel, television programming was tightly controlled, and so were radio broadcasting and the press. 

Once in a while those in power slipped and broadcast successful mini-series like “Dallas” which gave us a glimpse of the opulent and dreamy life of the Ewings in Texas, the faraway Shangri La where money grew on trees and oil bubbled out of the ground.  American movies were smuggled into Romania, translated by a very courageous lady, and sold on the black market when VCRs became available.

Romania was not the only Iron Curtain communist regime to treat their people this way, but it was one of the worst.  Joe Keller described in a recent post, “When Victor Belenko defected and flew his Mig-25 Foxbat into Japan, he was taken to a safe house in Warrenton, Virginia, for debriefing and subsequent resettlement. Warrenton was not much of a town at the time. We had Peebles, shoe stores, grocery stores, an IHop and a couple of other restaurants and a bunch of gas stations. Belenko thought the Agency had staged the entire town for his benefit and did not believe stores had clothes, and restaurants had food in America. It ran against everything he had been told.”

The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a man with no formal education, ordered in 1982 the passage of the “Program of Scientific Nutrition for the Population,” a law that established the rationing of food, how many calories a person could eat, and how much one could weigh.  Two years later, the nutritional standards were reduced even more.

Portions and consumption were controlled through the issuance of cards which could only be used at the local neighborhood grocery store where residents had to register each family member, present proof of identity and residence, and the number of people living in the house, including renters or temporary visitors.  Food could only be bought based on the number of people registered.

Lying was impossible as the police informers, the beat cops, and the housing registration office knew exactly where each person lived or if they moved and where. Cards were color-coded by cities and towns. Urban residents could buy more food while farmers were given less rations on the assumption that they grew some themselves. Those who tried to purchase in excess of their rations, when found out, were sent to jail. It was considered speculation punishable by law if a person tried to barter goods or sell food on the black market.  Many enterprising Romanians were clever enough and were never caught. http://adevarul.ro/locale/alexandria/ce-mancau-romanii-vremea-ceausescu-jumatate-paine-zi-litru-ulei-kilogram-zahar-luna-pui-marimea-porumbeilor-1_555f0c0acfbe376e3578994d/index.html

Imagine how mesmerized I was when I first entered the one and only grocery store in a small town in the south, population 3,000, Horn’s Big Star. It was filled with food to the rafters.  I was in awe and I kept filling the cart to the brim. My husband was laughing, putting things back and telling me that they will be there tomorrow. I did not believe him at first, I expected empty store shelves on my second trip.

I was so incredulous! I went to the grocery store every day to buy nectarines and Red Delicious apples. I was so shocked that I could buy fresh fruit in early January. I just knew that it was all staged for my benefit. Albert, the owner, who was a friend of the family, always greeted me with a big smile which I thought odd. Why is this man always smiling?  I was used to sour employees, shouting and treating us like animals, while we pushed and shoved each other in endless lines, often getting to the front of the line and finding out that they ran out of whatever we were waiting to buy.

We have an abundance of food and people get irritated in the U.S. when they can’t find their particular brand. Few have any idea that our grocery stores only stock a three-day supply of food. When major storms strike or even the potential of inclement weather in the U.S., shelves of milk, water, and bread disappear really fast at Walmart. 

Until you have to stand in endless lines to buy food and basics for survival, such as bread, milk, sugar, oil, flour, butter, or toilet paper and vitamins, until you have to live in the dark and cold when lights, heat, and electricity go out daily, when you have no running water at all or hot water is a rare occurrence, you cannot claim that you are poor, living in an “unjust country.” What you really need is a lesson in history, a trip to Cuba, to some other third world country, and an attitude adjustment to reality.

Food Lines Coming?

Food line in Venezuela
Photo: Wikipedia

Americans willingly stand in line for hours waiting for a store to open during Black Friday or to purchase tickets to a sought-after football game or concert.  They don’t mind freezing in the cold, sleeping in a tent on the side-walk hours and days before the store opens – they want to save $50 for a television set, find a toy that everybody else wants for Christmas, a popular electronic gadget, first issues of geek gear, or tickets to a favorite concert.

What if Americans had to get up early in the morning every day and run around numerous stores in town in order to find food, basic staples, and gas? Ask anybody this question and they will roll their eyes because, in their lifetime they’ve never had to suffer shortages of anything, they only remember abundance in the land of plenty.

Could that ever change? Of course not, most Americans would say. I and my fellow survivors of communism know better because we stood in such lines, I call them the lines of survival. We suffered the indignity of having to do without food, even after standing in lines with thousands of other people, only to find out that the supply ran out, or eating spoiled food that had to be boiled again in order to destroy the bacteria and make it edible.

This is what happens when a previously successful free market society is turned upside down by the socialist ideology utopia -- the free market collapses and is replaced by an inadequate and inept government control of the economy which results in serious disruptions to planning, production, and delivery of goods and services. The economy is no longer driven by supply and demand but by the central planning of government socialist bureaucrats who fill their coffers first and ignore the needs of the population at large while making grandiose speeches about how much they are helping the poor.

Most recent case in point is Venezuela. Hugo Chavez destroyed a formerly prosperous nation with his social justice drivel. He brought the Castro-style clinics to Venezuela and destroyed the country’s healthcare.  He disrupted the food production and supply. Now that the oil revenues are down due to collapsing oil prices, the country is really suffering. Foreign currency is in short supply, inflation was 64 percent in November, and imports caused shortages of toilet paper, detergent, and car batteries.

According to Andrew Rosati and Noris Soto, the food shortages are so serious that the food distribution was placed under military protection. Thousands of people lined up for blocks, trying to find chicken, toilet paper, and detergent. Price controls imposed by government will guarantee that the lines and shortages will continue. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-09/venezuelans-throng-grocery-stores-on-military-protection-order.html

Americans have had their experience with price controls at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and it did not end so well. Washington’s army almost starved to death. Farmers sold their produce to the British for gold instead of feeding the continental army for a measly price that did not cover their costs and survival of their families.

Dealing with a serious economic crisis in a socialist manner, the Interior Minister, Carmen Melendez, sent “security forces to food stores and distribution centers to protect shoppers.” While stores after stores show empty shelves and security does not allow photographs, rationing forces citizens to fight over whatever is available for sale, jumping the line and starting fist fights, shoving, and hair pulling incidents. Bloomberg reports that one shopper looked for diapers for 15 days. “People are so desperate they’re sleeping in the lines,” a shopper was quoted.

Because President Nicolas Maduro promised to tweak by decree the government-controlled exchange rate system set at 6.3 bolivars per U.S. dollar, companies fear devaluation and are not sure if they’ll have enough resources to restock inventories or even find inputs needed.  Meanwhile the black market is booming with an exchange rate of 187 bolivars per dollar.

The country was in bad economic shape previously due to years of Chavez’s mismanagement of the economy but at least they had good oil revenues which accounted for 95 percent of Venezuela’s exports. With oil prices dropping so low in recent months, revenues from oil exports were cut drastically.

How Obamacare is Destroying our Health Care

Romanian hospital 2014
Photo courtesy: Digi24 on line

Virginia is one of the few states in the nation who has taken the bold step to automatically enroll all Virginians covered by the traditional Medicare/Medicaid plan into a Humana managed health care plan. By managing elderly care (read rationing), money will be saved by denying needed medical tests, surgery, care, and physical therapy to elderly Americans who have paid into Medicare/Medicaid for decades.  How else will millions of illegal aliens recently granted amnesty by executive action receive free ObamaCare?

There is an option to opt out of the Humana managed care in Virginia and return to the traditional Medicare/Medicaid plans but few patients understand the language in the letter or are able to read it for themselves. This is one of the veiled moves to strip Medicare of $719 billion dollars in order to help fund and support the (Un) Affordable Care Act.

If you like your rationing of care, you can keep your rationing of care. If you like the loss of your well-trained physician, you can keep your third world doctor who is yet to be licensed in this country.

If you enrolled in a plan that fit your budget and your medical needs last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has proposed the rule to strip that option from your list of choices, they are going to enroll you this year by December 25 into a cheaper plan of their choice. Too bad you forgot to choose a plan annually. They will select what is best for you, without knowing your medical history, your financial situation, your current treatment under a specialist, and maybe take away access to your favorite doctor who did not play by the new government rules.

When the open enrollment ends, the government would have effectively stuck you with a plan you did not want. Rep. Mark Meadows from North Carolina wrote, “I sent a letter to CMS demanding they immediately strip this provision from the pending rule and abandon any future attempts to single-handedly choose Americans’ healthcare plans.” I am sure the bureaucrats will listen, just like they listened when a majority of Americans asked them to defund ObamaCare. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/19/rep-mark-meadows-obamacares-christmas-surprise/

Because there is a “war on doctors,” as Dick Morris so aptly described it, we will eventually have a sort of CastroCare in this country that Americans are not prepared to deal with but will be forced to accept it.

The double reimbursement for procedures that doctors in a hospital setting receive when compared to doctors in private practice, will eventually regulate doctors into a 8-4 hospital employment which I witnessed recently when my mother was in a hospital for 8 days and I never saw the doctor visit her once, she was treated by a nurse practitioner the entire time. There was not much hands-on care, just robotic, computer-driven medical care delivered by inadequately trained people. They were more concerned about her falling out of bed and a lawsuit from a potential fall than anything else. She was discharged without a proper diagnosis.

The forced electronic medical records-keeping will make it more difficult and expensive for private practice physicians who would be forced to spend a large part of their day on record-keeping and data entry instead of treating the patient.

In addition to reducing doctors’ income, physicians retiring early because they do not want to practice government-regulated medicine, Congress won’t expand residency programs to train more doctors.

Residency programs are funded by Medicaid/Medicare which gives higher reimbursement rates to teaching hospitals. Since the government refuses to pay for more residency programs, Americans should prepare themselves for substandard care delivered by nurse practitioners, nurses’ aides, and ER treatment replacing high quality medical care.

Hospitals are busy buying up private practices of retiring doctors in order to “capture their patients.” Most physicians are busy forming Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) which combine multiple care providers under a hospital umbrella which has better access to capital.

This will lead to a doctor passing the care of his/her patients after the end of the shift to someone less qualified whom the patient has never met.

I recall the EU-modeled socialized medical care in 2012 Romania where I saw no doctor or RN anywhere in the large hospital in which my uncle was a patient. His wife delivered all his care, meds, diabetic shots, bandage changes, bed linens, bathing, towels, food, and trash removal. She was the de facto medical person caring for her own husband who would otherwise die of medical neglect in one of the largest hospitals in the capital. Incidentally, the courtyard was littered with stray dogs and we had to pay 5 euros to the gate guard to gain access into the hospital with five dingy floors and no operational elevator.

Online magazine Digi24 reported on December 17, 2014 that patients’ rights are often trampled on by medical personnel who refuse medical services unless the patients offer them personal benefits in the form of bribes. The accompanying photograph published by Digi24 is visual confirmation of the unsanitary conditions in some socialized medicine hospitals. http://www.digi24.ro/Stiri/Digi24/Actualitate/Sanatate/Ministerul+Sanatatii+intreaba+pacientii+Cat+de+multumiti+sunteti

According to Zoel M. Zinberg, associate clinical professor of surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, “The new breed of physician-employees will split their allegiances between their employers and their patients.” The employer’s goals of making money and saving a buck every which way and the patient’s welfare will not coincide, and the physician will seldom be allowed to use his best judgment in treating a patient. He continued, “Salaried employees and independent professionals behave differently.” http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon1218jz.html#.VJO-l_vj7J4.facebook

Dr. Zinberg cited a recent study in Health Affairs which found that …”practices owned by hospitals had 50 percent more preventable admissions than practices owned by physicians.” He concluded that “The days of the family physician who made house calls are long gone. The doctors who would squeeze you in for a visit on short notice and take your calls after regular business hours are disappearing.” http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/33/9/1680

The less discussed issue of economic side effects of the Affordable Care Act should not be overlooked. Casey Mulligan, professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, in his speech
delivered to Hillsdale College on October 24, 2014, explained the three taxes in ACA, two taxes on full-employment and one on income. All three combined have a net effect on employment (3 percent less) and on Gross Domestic Product (2 percent less).  He concluded, “If you like your weak economy, you can keep your weak economy.”

Eating to Live Not Living to Eat

Photo credit: Ileana Johnson, 2014

I don’t look at food the same way most Americans do. I grew up on my grandparents’ small farm in the village. Everything we ate came from our garden and our livestock – fresh vegetables in season, canned vegetables in winter and spring, goat and cow’s milk, butter, goat cheese, eggs, smoked meat, lardy bacon, fatty sausages in natural casings, and eggs.

We ate to live; we did not live to eat. Food was for nourishment not for entertainment, gorging buffets, or for bourgeois socializing. From time to time, adults ate better meals with family and friends at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Kids were generally not included in such occasions. They stayed home.

When I went to first grade, I moved to the city with my parents, 6 miles away. Our food then came from the benevolent government planners who made us wait every day in endless lines at the grocery store, the butcher store, the dairy store, the bakery, the greengrocer, and the farmer’s market if we could find food, if the store did not run out, if there was enough for everybody, if we had rationing coupons, and if we could afford it.

Occasionally grandpa would ride his bike to the city with a fisherman’s netting bag filled with a dozen eggs, a piece of cheese, one smoked sausage left from the pig he butchered at Christmas, and a live chicken which my Dad killed in the most gruesome way in the yard, by cutting his head off. Mom plucked the chicken after dunking it in boiling water. The poor thing was jumping in agony around the yard. I would not have eaten the chicken except I was starving.

There were restaurants in the city, patronized by the ruling elites because they were the only ones who could afford the pricey meals. Their salaries were huge compared to ours. They received special treatment and gifts of food and services in exchange for loyalty to the communist party.

Allegiance and love for family and conscience went out the window when the specter of hunger hung in the air. It was easier to snitch on your family when you got extra food each month and were allowed to shop in underground communist party stores laden with abundant supplies from the west, fresh vegetables and fruits year around, expensive wines, liqueurs, beer, juices, chocolates, oranges, bananas, and other fine things that most Americans take for granted. No EBT, SNAP, or WIC credit cards.

Someone who entered such a store explained to me that it was as if you had died and gone to food heaven, that’s how much food there was everywhere. No money was necessary. All you had to do is sign your name in a book, leave your conscience at the door, and spy on your closest relatives – each monthly report sufficed and you were fed quite well.

My first encounter with a grocery store in America kept me in awe for hours. I could not tear myself away from the shelves, bright lights, the cleanliness, the colorful and hygienic packaging, the refrigeration, and the fresh fruits and vegetables in January! I kept filling the cart with everything, and then remembered that I had a budget, and I would start over. People were laughing, could not understand where I came from, and what we ate.

American buffets are an inexplicable form of gluttony that Europeans have a hard time understanding. Is it an indulgence because food is plentiful, always available without long lines or rationing, and cheap? Why stuff yourself to the brim if you’ve never felt intense hunger pains or experienced near starvation?

As the girth of Americans is expanding, the nanny government is stepping in to regulate portion size, control the type of foods they eat, the salt and sugar intake, and mandate three “healthy” meals in school, replacing the parents as the providers and decision-makers for their children. After all, the children belong to the community, we are told, and they are no longer a parental responsibility.

As small family farms that provide wholesome food are slowly disappearing, replaced by large corporate farms, we are importing more and more food from other countries, putting our food supply in jeopardy, at the whims of exporting countries. Fruits and vegetables are imported from Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, Columbia, and other South American markets. Even chicken, seafood, pork, and other meats come from China.

Having to go hungry is a concept that Americans are not willing to entertain. Abundance and endless supply will last forever! As long as the big and mighty government is in charge, we will never want for anything. Self-reliance is not necessary, not even for food. Few people know that grocery stores only supply their stores with food for three days.

We never had “fun” cafeteria food fights or filled the trash cans with free taxpayer-supplied food we disliked like American high school students do. That is because we did not have a cafeteria, the communist state did not feed us, food was so scarce, and we would not have turned down anything edible.

The American journalists in Sochi, accustomed to a life of plenty in our free market-based economy, experienced an unpleasant taste of a communist economy in their hotel rooms; they complained on Twitter – they wanted the comfort provided by our capitalist economy.

Perhaps this experience in Russia will change the rhetoric about the utopian communism, and the nonsensical race for “collectivism, equality, and social justice” will stop. Everything about communism was unjust - it was oppressive, unequal, and inadequate. And it was not just about the lack of food – it crushed the human spirit.

As long as there is plenty of food and no suffering from hunger, people are happy and satisfied, no matter how enslaved their existence may be. As long as there are generous Americans who go to work every day and pay taxes, there is money for welfare for those who either lost their jobs or choose to be on welfare permanently in order to find themselves, relishing in their new-found freedom from the drudgery of work. That is how government officials spin their inability to create jobs for the massively unemployed that would otherwise starve without food stamps and welfare.

 

She's Too Old for an MRI under ObamaCare

It is not easy to find a doctor who takes Medicare in our area. When we found one that did, mom accepted him, no questions asked, based on his sweet, smiling demeanor. I was not so easily convinced. Call me from the Show Me State if you’d like.

We arrived for our dual appointments - there was nobody in the waiting room so we waited just a few minutes before we were taken to the same examining room. The nurse came, very polite, took our information on her laptop and left, and we waited and waited. Finally, mom’s favorite smiling doctor showed up with his laptop in tow.

He told us his office was one hundred percent compliant with the Obama Care electronic patient portals. We could not have cared less about his electronic compliance. Without touching her, he made mom walk back and forth to see what her right-leaning gait looked like. He determined that she needed a rolling walker because she probably had a mini stroke at some point when the gait commenced. He was not going to order an MRI because she is too old and Obama Care will not approve payment.

He did not touch her on the previous visit either when she fell but had not broken anything; she was in severe pain and covered in ugly, deep bruises. He did not order any x-rays then because she did not seem to be in terrible pain, he said. Mom is stoic and put up a good front in the doctor’s office; she lingered in bed for three months, healing from the awful fall she took outside in the grass.

I complained of a terrible earache and a sinus infection. From three feet away, without touching me, he shined a flashlight into my throat, typed something into his laptop and told us that he will order our meds into the system which is connected directly to the pharmacy. We paid for the visit and drove to the nearest apothecary.

The prescriptions were not there just as I had feared. The doctor’s office had closed for the day and the pharmacist could not call to check where in cyberspace was the order trapped for meds that we both needed right away. On the positive side, at least the meds are available for now, rationing in pharmaceuticals has not begun yet.

As all these computers communicate with each other through the various electronic portals, do not expect any medical privacy or cyber security of any kind. Your entire life’s history, health, meds, warts, skin lesions, bunions, surgeries, hospitalizations, Social Security numbers, income, addresses, smoking history, salt intake, soda drinking and fat-eating habits, sexual preferences, gun ownership, and biometric data are up for grabs for all to see and use. All your private medical history and information will be sent to a clearing house with or without your permission in January 2014. That’s worse than some medical transcriptionist overseas threatening to make everyone’s medical records public if she does not get a raise.

Obama Care is not just very expensive insurance that most of us cannot and will not afford without drastic changes in lifestyle. It delivers lousy service, uncaring and poorly paid doctors, inadequate reimbursement, longer wait times, and selective rationing.

For people 65 and older, doctors who will accept Medicare and Medicaid will be harder to find and specialists even harder. These patients will be forced into a second class medical care akin to what I’ve witnessed growing up under socialist nationalized health care.

When more and more people will be forced into Medicaid and Medicare, costs will escalate and so will taxes to support care for 30 million more patients who were previously without insurance.

Because there are no eligibility requirements in place, Illegal aliens and those seeking asylum with a certain religious bent will receive free care ahead of the line based on age, increasing wait time and reducing the amount of money available for the treatment of American citizens.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) will have to cut costs by approving or disallowing medical services based on how expensive they are, the age of the patient, and utility to society. Rationing will become an important factor in the quality, quantity, and expedience of our medical care.

If IPAB denies treatment, there is no appeal because IPAB is only accountable to President Obama. The courts or Congress cannot override that decision. At least under private health care insurance, if you are denied treatment, you have an appeal process in place to defend your ability to have treatment paid by your insurance plan.

If Medicare denies medical care, the patient is not allowed to pay cash to a Medicare-contracted doctor, hospital, or other health provider. Under such circumstances, a patient can seek care from an independent doctor or hospitals, which are harder and harder to find, or look for treatment outside of the United States.

It is foreseeable that by 2015, most private plans will be gone, replaced by a single-payer IRS/HHS government-run insurance.

 

 

 

 

 

The Baby Boomers and the not so Affordable Care Act

Why is it that we needed the Affordable Care Act? Was it because everybody was told inaccurately that Americans were dying in the streets untreated? If you ask Europeans and people from other continents that is exactly the perception they have about the United States. They do not know that any American can walk sick into an emergency room and he/she will be treated immediately. They don’t have to wait weeks and months to have a doctor’s appointment, tests, and procedures before they are actually treated as is the case in all socialized medicine countries.

Why was it that Obamacare had to have a 15-member “death panel” that rations care based on age and utility to society, a complicated formula that only a bureaucrat can devise, not a doctor who took a Hippocratic Oath to care for all sick, regardless of age?

Will a person past the age of 55 be able to receive expensive treatments such as chemotherapy for cancer? We do know that anyone over the age of 70 becomes a “unit,” they are no longer human beings.

Between 1946 and 1964, there were 76 million Americans born, the so-called Baby Boomers. Four million had died by April 1, 2000. However, the U.S. Census counted 79.6 million due to “net immigration, the number of people coming into the United States from other countries, minus those moving the other way, outweighing the number of deaths.” http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/JustHowManyBabyBoomersAreThere.aspx

In 2011, the oldest Baby Boomers turned 65 years old, eligible for Medicare and Social Security. According to the Pew Research Center, for the next 19 years, 10,000 Baby Boomers will turn 65 every day. By 2030, all members of the Baby Boom generation would have reached 65. http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/baby-boomers-retire/

Every year approximately 3.65 million Baby Boomers receive an average $1,500 in earned Social Security benefits for a total of $5,475,000,000. The first wave started receiving their payments in 2011. In 2012, 3.65 more million Baby Boomers became eligible for the same benefits. In 2013, 3.65 more million Baby Boomers became eligible for $1,500 in Social Security, bringing the total outlay in three years to $16,525,000,000. Each year until 2030, $5,475,000,000 will be needed additionally to meet just the Social Security outlays for Baby Boomers.

Given the excellent state of medical care in this country at the moment, the nutrition, and the level of exercise, it is reasonable to assume that Baby Boomers will live 20 years past the age of 65 if their health care is not rationed.

Meanwhile, the employed labor force as reported in September 2013 was 144 million, shrunken by 11 million. Numbers did not specify how many of those employed were part-time and many discouraged workers were not reported or underreported, having dropped through the cracks of bureaucracy.  http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/laus/us/usadj.htm

Part-time employment has been on the rise, prompting some economists to call U.S. “a part-time employment nation.” We do know that labor force participation has been stuck at 63.2 percent for at least two months. This labor force participation rate is the “share of the population 16 years and older working or seeking work.”  http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

If you divide the Social Security outlays for Baby Boomers each year for twenty years by the number of workers, the number is astronomical. It is mathematically impossible for the current labor force to support that many Baby Boomer retirees and other Social Security recipients and still have money for everything else in government.

Money paid to current Social Security recipients comes from the current number of workers and their employers paying an equal share of Social Security taxes. Self-employed pay both halves.

The ever-shrinking labor market will make it more difficult to meet the commitments made to the Baby Boomer generation and to other recipients. Once 11-12 million illegal aliens are amnestied, more individuals will be potentially added to the recipient rolls, particular SSI and disabled.

Is this not painfully obvious why politicians were eager to give us government socialized medicine, $719 billion cuts to Medicare over ten years to fund this socialized medicine, rationing of medical care, and a 15-member bureaucratic “death panel” to accomplish the rationing?

 

 

Socialized Medicine Is Dangerous to Your Health

Twenty-four years after communism went underground in 1989 (and is resurfacing with a vengeance today), medical care has not improved by leaps and bounds. If you are 17 years old and injure your foot, even though you carry with you the expected envelope stuffed with cash for the inexperienced doctor, your toe will look like this after six weeks of “expert” care.

Doctors worked from 7 to 3 p.m. in the former “communist workers’ paradise” where I grew up. On weekends the hospital was pretty much empty of medical personnel, save for a few janitors and the guard at the gate. He had to make sure no dirty people compromised the sterility of the hospital. The janitors did not do much work, judging by the filth around, the stinky bathrooms, the respectable layer of dirt, and by the blood stains and other unidentifiable marks on the peeling walls and on the broken linoleum.

Doctors who were treated like gods interceding between life and certain death by neglect were paid lower than teachers but supplemented their meager income with monetary bribes brought in envelopes and with hard to find items such as soap, shampoo, meat, cigarettes, and other sundries. Such bribes bought a patient immediate attention, better care, a needed prescription, a blood test that took days instead of weeks and a chance at survival if the surgeon did not botch the operation. A doctor had a file with special clients in it, marked by alphabetized envelopes with the patient’s name and the amount of cash enclosed.

A few very good doctors were besieged by patients from a wide geographical region although it was against the law to treat them. They were to serve only the residents assigned to them by the communist party headquarters. Since quitting time was 3 p.m., some doctors continued their private practice illegally in their government assigned apartments. Everyone knew about it but the economic police did not stop it because their families often used the doctor’s services after hours as well. Even live chicken, eggs, butter, cheese, preserves, and wine were accepted as payment.

The poorly paid doctors were assigned to practice medicine in designated areas by the government, had thousands of patients, did not keep records, and their sparsely furnished waiting rooms were filled to capacity like sardines every day. Although medical care was “free” and people did not get much for free, after 3 p.m., nobody moved, everyone understood that now they had to pay to be seen.

As a child, I remember waiting with my Mom from 7 a.m. until late into the night to be seen by a doctor, holding a piece of cardboard with my assigned number on it, racked with fever, hoping to get the miracle pill that would bring my fever down.

The local pharmacy shelves were mostly empty even of that miracle drug (a bitter-tasting version of Tylenol called “piramidon”) but the doc had his own sources and we could buy it from him – the black market was thriving. Sometimes he even had antibiotics for sale. They were great because it cured the burning fire in my throat quickly. He would give me an excuse for school and I would go home and lay in bed for days, alternating between fever-induced bad dreams and reality.

Come to think of it, when we were in Italy recently, where medicine is socialized, Aspirin and Tylenol were regulated by government and could not be bought on the market without a prescription. I could not understand why since it was available on American posts and Italians were clamoring to buy it from them.

After only six years of medical school and no practical experience in hospitals or internships, all doctors were ill-prepared to care for their patients. Lucky people survived, those who were not so lucky succumbed to complications from simple procedures which the inexperienced doctors bungled. Hapless and innocent people who trusted doctors with incipient medical skills were laboratory rats.

Many family members died before their time from simple procedures such as appendicitis, tonsillectomies, hernias, thyroidectomies, and other surgeries that we take for granted here in the U.S. Raging infections would set in, some developed septicemia and gangrene from nicked organs and intestines, and patients died a painful and unnecessary death. None of the doctors were held accountable because families could not sue the government for malpractice.

The American Embassy evacuated their personnel for medical treatment to West Germany or other developed countries in the West, they were never sent to Romanian hospitals during Ceausescu’s communist era.

There are private clinics today in Romania that give stellar care and drugs are available for a fee. Capitalist free market care does work very well. But all the public hospitals and pharmacies that provide socialized medicine run out of their rationed drugs, supplies, surgeries, procedures, and tests early in the year. After that, they have no choice but to turn patients away and ration care based on age.

Dental medicine was very scary as well. Appointments for painful teeth that needed removing were made six months from the onset of an abscess or a painful cavity. Teeth were drilled, root canaled, and removed without any anesthetics in spite of the patient’s screams, pain or bloody discomfort, and the doctor used boiling, no autoclaving procedures for his instruments. He did not have an assistant or a nurse. Tooth cleaning or braces were not offered; the procedures were generally considered to damage teeth and not recommended in stomatology school.

Ambulances were a joke. Devoid of medical equipment then, they were more or less a way to transport patients from rural areas to urban areas hospitals. They did not arrive in a timely manner, offered no comfort to the patient during the very bumpy ride, and, aside from the driver who was more interested in picking up hitch-hikers to make an extra buck, there was no medical personnel on board. Things have improved under a more capitalist-based economy, ambulances have come a long way since then, but care is still sketchy and rationed. Hospitals run out of government allotted money for ambulance service relatively early in the year.  After that, severe rationing occurs.

Large hospital wards were depressing “wailing rooms” where elderly were stuck to die, screaming in pain, attended by family members who brought them food, sheets, morphine (if available) purchased outside the hospital, and without any nursing care much less around the clock as is the case in the U.S. If a patient did not have a family, he/she died a painful and neglected death.

Things have not changed that much in 24 years. Recently, my aunt cared for her husband round the clock in the hospital, administering his meds, giving him shots, in a more modern version of public hospitals in 2013 Romania.

I was horrified by the lack of medical personnel, cleanliness, and otherwise professional medical care. Nothing like the first rate care I had experienced in American hospitals. And this was one of the best public hospitals in Romania in which the skilled doctors actually saved my uncle’s life following brain surgery.

I was shocked when I tried to use the only restroom on the floor that both patients and visitors used. The tub and shower had not been used in a long time judging by the patina of thick grime everywhere. An elderly female patient dressed in street clothes was washing her dirty laundry by hand in the bathroom sink. The commode stall had huge open-wide windows, visible to the floors above. The stench reminded me of our high school latrines.

It is no surprise that many doctors have migrated from Romania to work in other EU countries where socialized medicine is a little less gruesome, remuneration is more generous, rationing is enforced by law, compliance rewarded, and euthanasia is practiced legally.

Can anyone try to imagine what our brand of socialized one-payer medical system will be like in the United States in the very near future?

The often repeated rhetorical phrases, “everyone knows it’s broken,” and the Pinocchio promise, “he will fix it,” mesmerized everyone as if by magic. One shudders to think what the “fixes” will be when the health care itself was not broken and everyone had universal healthcare anyway. All they had to do is show up at an emergency room sick and they were treated.

One reader named Gene surmised Obamacare as “A one word portent for the destruction of the world’s most enviable, most successful, and most sought-after and effective health care enterprise, through nationalization; accomplished tangentially, the crippling of the national economy, and an irreparable loss of personal liberty.”