Butler on Business, November 6, 2013, Executive Order on Climate Change

Ten minute discussion on Executive Order from November 1, 2013, Preparing the United States for the Impact of Climate Change. I come on at the 43 minute mark.
http://host1.cyberears.com//22566.mp3

Toll-Free Call to Enroll in Obamacare SATIRE

Since the Obamacare exchange phone number has crashed once or twice last week and the website is experiencing tiny code “glitches” that have momentarily crippled your ability to enroll in this administration’s signature legislation, Bud S. suggests to have fun with the toll-free call if you are lucky enough to get through. He also recommends blocking the call (star 67) although phone companies have sure ways of finding out who you are, where you live, and where you were standing when you made the call.

Tell them you want to get pencil and paper and walk slowly away from the phone. Take your time while they are on hold. Your call is important to them and they are not going to hang up. When you return, ask the operator some very good and important questions:

-          How much do my deductibles cost?

-          Is my doctor so and so on the list of approved doctors?

-          Is my hospital on the list?

-          How much are my deductibles for office visits, drugs, physical therapy, and hospital stays?

-          Do I get a single room or a ward?

-          I thought Obamacare was free?

-          Do I have to stop smoking right away?

-          Can I still party and get drunk every weekend?

-          Can I ingest as much salt, fatty foods, and Big Gulp sodas as I want?

-          Does Obamacare pay for eyeglasses, contact lenses, dental care, braces, and dentures?

-          Will my teeth be as yellow and crooked as the Europeans’?

-          Do Obamacare personnel drive me to doctors’ appointments? Can I call a cab and get reimbursed?

-          Can I have as many shrink sessions as I want?

-          Does IRS send me a bill?

-          If I don’t pay, do IRS agents put me in jail, take my house, car, money in the bank, retirement savings, furniture, and bling?

-          Does Obamacare insurance pay for massages, mud and sulphur bath treatments for two weeks like they do in Europe while I eat and sleep in a four star hotel?

-          Do I get breast enlargement and plastic surgery for free like they do in South America?

-          How much are my office visits? Can I go see my doctor as many times as I want and stay as long as I want until he hears all my whining and real and imagined medical problems?

-          Do I get expensive tests for free and with no waiting period?

-          If you don’t pay for my treatment, can I go outside of the country for treatment to, let’s say, Cuba? The MSM and Hollywood told us Cuba and Venezuela have stellar first class care and it’s free!

-          Is there malpractice insurance and can I sue the government if they remove my healthy appendix or operate on the wrong foot?

-          What if I change my mind, is there a lemon law to cancel my policy after three days if I don’t like it?

-          Can I read the entire policy that covers me before I sign up?

-          Can I have a copy of the policy in all 150 languages?

-          If I don’t like your doctors, can I keep mine if they are still in business?

Dial the number several times, maybe you get lucky and someone from Bangladesh will pick up after you press 2 for Spanish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.”

 

 

The American Dream, Just an Illusion

As a teenager, I used to day dream about escaping the oppressive communist society where we lived. I did not have a passport and a snowball chance in hell of getting one, I did not have any money, and our travel was restricted to a 20 mile radius, as far as our feet could carry us, as far as the rickety government-run buses would transport us, and as far as our pocketbooks allowed. We were so poor though, the wind whistled through our pockets most of the time.

I hid in Grandpa’s tall corn fields or in the woods by my favorite creek to do my deep thinking and planning. I could not afford to day dream in school. I was afraid the security agents, teachers, and the community organizers in the neighborhood that kept us in check around the clock would be able to read my thoughts or I would blurt something out that would give my thoughts away and get me and my family in trouble. Under communism, parents were responsible and guilty for their children’s deeds and anti-communist thoughts, statements, or unapproved behavior. Many careless comments by children with loose tongues sent their parents to Jilava or Siberia.

My dream to come to the United States, the land of freedom, seemed so impossible at the time. I could not swim, therefore I could not attempt to take the plunge across the Danube like some of my compatriots did; they were shot or drowned trying to flee. The currents were pretty strong and swift. I knew I would be shot at the border – many Romanians tried that as well and were executed on the spot. Those who succeeded ran the chance of being discovered and returned to the motherland, followed by torture and worse.

I made it even though I looked over my shoulder in fear and trepidation up to the moment the airplane took off. I just knew an agent would open the door and yank me off the plane, sending me back to the hell hole of communism. I could see and smell freedom once the plane took off. I could breathe and be free to speak my mind! I thank God for allowing me to enjoy relative freedom for 35 years. Will it be a long time before I complete the full circle, living again under communism, this time in “the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

People from around the world still dream to come to the United States. For most, it remains just a pipe dream. But even those who hate Americans wish they could be on American soil, somehow magically transported across the oceans, to have the opportunity to succeed and attain the American dream. And then there are those who come here with the dream and intent to change America into a caliphate.

The lucky Latin Americans can trek to our southern border and cross it freely now – few agents are allowed to apprehend them anymore and liberals make sure that they are never deported to their own countries. Crossing the border illegally into the U.S. is a lucrative business for Latinos, their progressive lobby in Washington, and the small and large businesses that wish to hire cheap labor. The proximity to our borders gives illegals carte blanche to break the law, take advantage of our lawless government, and become permanent wards of the American taxpayers. We should at least get a picture of the illegal aliens whose financial welfare and wellbeing we are sponsoring with our taxes. Their illegal children have become the “Dreamers” who demand everything American children get; it is their “right” and “entitlement.”

American teenagers here still dream to go to college, to have a career, to have a family, a solid job, and to grow old in freedom and prosperity. Unfortunately their dreams are fast turning into illusions, a frightening reality of joblessness, financial and health insecurity, welfare dependency, drug culture, immigration nightmare, socialist government control, and the diminishing chance of ever owning a home while holding a worthless college degree without the prospect of employment.

I fulfilled my dream of becoming an American citizen by choice. I cherished my freedom and never took for granted the chance at a better life, the education and prosperity it offered me if I was willing to work hard.  Americans should thank God every day for being born in this exceptional country.

Overseas dreamers have been waiting patiently for years the resolution of their cases. Four millions of them are still hoping to come to the United States. They are not so lucky – oceans separate them from the “shining city on the hill,” the land of opportunity that lately looks more and more like the land of OZ.

Butler on Business, 10-30-13 Sebelius Testifying on Exchange Website, Food Rationing

Sebelius testifying on 10-30-13 on exchanges website, food rationing. I come on at the 43 minute mark.
http://host1.cyberears.com//22393.mp3

Rationed Food and Purposeful Starvation

I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them.

The interminable lines looked like this bread line pictured here. We never knew what was sold at the end of a line we happened to come upon, but we knew we needed whatever people lined up to buy, so we joined the line.

If we wanted to eat, we learned at a very young age that we had to stand in long lines every day, often in bitter cold at 4 a.m. in hopes that the store would not run out of bread or milk by the time we made it to the front counter.

People carried cash and a shopping bag just in case they discovered hard to find items: toilet paper, aspirin, cotton balls, soap, potatoes, oranges, apples, flour, sugar, or cooking oil. From time to time, the shortage was so bad, we were issued rationing coupons. Once you ran out of rationing coupons for the month, you could not buy anything unless you were lucky enough to have extra cash to shop from the burgeoning black market of hoarders with communist party connections.

The ruling elite, of course, was fat and happy, shopping at their own grocery stores, usually located underground the local Communist Party headquarters.

It wasn’t that the country did not produce enough food in spite of its disastrous centralized communist party planning. The mad dictator Ceausescu was determined to industrialize the country at the expense of people’s food – he exported so much to the West in exchange for technology and hard currency that the Romanians had to make do with the leftover food not fit for export.

The agricultural five year plan was developed by communist bureaucrats who were community organizers with very little experience at producing anything and very little formal education. They were schooled in the fine art of radical agitation.

Around Christmas time and Easter, there would be more food sent to stores, the lines were shorter for a few days and the stores better stocked. But that did not last very long. People would wipe out the supply in no time and the store shelves would be empty again, with one very expensive salami hanging behind the counter or in the window, buzzed by flies.

But that was nothing compared to the Soviet plan to starve the Romanian population of Bessarabia in 1946-1947 in order to achieve collectivization. According to the 1897 census, almost 48% of the population was Moldovan and thus spoke Romanian. Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina were Romanian-held prior to the military occupation by the Soviet Red Army during June 28-July 4, 1940. To avoid a military conflict, Romania withdrew from the area following a Soviet ultimatum delivered on June 26. The Romanian province was recaptured by Ion Antonescu from 1941-1944 and then reoccupied by the Soviets in 1944. The regions were subsequently incorporated into the USSR.

I recently came across an eye-witness 25 minute documentary by Bogdan Parlea, “Marturii Despre Suferintele Romanilor din Basarabia” (“Witness to the Suffering of the Romanians in Bessarabia”), produced by the Fundatia Sfintii Inchisorilor and Fundatia Parintele Arsenie Boca. Hundreds of thousands of Moldovans died at the hands of their Soviet Socialist tormentors who confiscated their crops by force and shipped the food to USSR. Wheat and corn was left to rot and mold in uncovered wagons at train stations; it was done to leave farmers as poor and desperate as possible in order to better manipulate and control them. http://www.identitatea.it/foametea-din-basarabia-1946-1947/

According to Alexandru Moraru, the gazette “Moldova Socialista” (“Socialist Moldova”) reported on January 28, 1947 that the food industry in the region had exceeded butter production by 33.2 percent, meat production by 32.5 percent, and canned food by 101.9 percent. This was the food confiscated from the starving Moldovans who were too weak to bury their own dead. http://www.historia.ro/exclusiv_web/general/articol/canibalismul-provocat-sovietici-basarabia

It was a Soviet state secret - nobody was allowed to write or speak about the horrors that took place in Chisinau, Orhei, Balti, Cahul, and other villages, how collectivization agents took the last drop of food and grain from the farmer’s barns, and how the children of Moldova were kidnapped, brought into homes, murdered, cooked, and eaten.

Survivors were interviewed as eye witnesses to the communist power which forced peasants to pay confiscatory taxes as well as huge quantities of their crops to the Soviet state, leaving them with little to eat. The small crop yields resulting from a very dry growing season coupled with the forced confiscation in the name of collectivization caused mass famine. Ten percent of the 1.5 million population died of starvation and a large percentage that survived were severely malnourished, looking like Holocaust victims.

Anatolie Iov Spinei described how the crop yield in 1946-1947 was only 500-600 kg per hectare due to the draught that year and the forced quota to the Soviet state was also 500-600 kg.

Eugenia Ciuntu described how her family dug a large barrel in the ground and hid grain inside but the Soviet community organizers came with sticks and tapped the ground, finding the barrel in the soft dirt. They were tapping everywhere, even hay stacks, in an attempt to find every last drop of grain.

Petre Buburuz, Orthodox Priest, explained that the end game was to starve and kill as many peasants as possible, take their land, and establish the Soviet collectives, the “colhoz.” He described how people kidnapped other people and sold them for meat.

Margareta Spanu Cemartan talked about the “communist ideology to scare people, to bring them to desperation,” to make them acquiesce to become part of the collectivization when faced with the prospect of dying. Farmers will turn in their pre-determined quota of grain to the waiting trains, receive a receipt, and then the communist agents would come back for a second round of quotas, forcing them to sweep the last kernels of wheat and corn from their barns and give up their last chicken, cow, or pig. They were left with 8 children and nothing to feed them.

What did they eat? How did they survive? Parents fed their children first and chose to die the swelling and painful death of starvation. Nadejda Botea told how some men ground tree bark to feed their families. Valentina Sturza said that those found hiding food, were sent to Siberia 10-15 years in labor camps. Some survived by boiling non-poisonous weeds.

Ion Moraru said that every family had to turn in a certain quantity of everything that was produced on a farm, eggs, meat, grain, milk, cheese, wool, but not all peasants had all of these, so they had to pay extra taxes to make up for the shortage of food quota. Many were taken to the police precinct and beaten.

Those in charge of the collective farms were afraid to tell Stalin and his henchmen that the crop had been poor because of the draught. Consequently, the quotas were not adjusted to reflect the low crop yield.

People were so desperate to eat, they sold everything of value, icons, gold items, carpets, windows, doors, silverware, candlesticks, rosaries, including the clothes off their backs. According to Anatolie Iov Spinei, “Bread had become the currency.  A carpet was worth a loaf of bread.”

Teodosia Cosmin talked about eating weeds. Her mom sold every piece of clothing in her daughters’ dowry trunks in order to survive.

Anastasia Ursachi talked about farmers keeping cows and goats in the house with them otherwise they were stolen and eaten. “Women carried babies to term, killed them, and fed them to the other children,” she said.

They ate all dogs and cats. Nadejda Botea described how a woman’s husband passed away; she put the body in the attic and fed him daily to her children. The weak were robbed of their food and possessions, so deep was the desperation.

Those who did not engage in cannibalism, were so weak, they were unable to bury their dead. They dragged them into mass graves and abandoned them. Some died when the new crop came in and families ate too much.

After watching this shocking eyewitness documentary with film footage of that time period, I will never again look at food in the same way. The inhumanity of a desperate human being in the quest for survival at all costs is glaring and devastating evidence why communists should never be allowed to take power again.