Your Health Care, America's Health Care, Today and Tomorrow

Already, a New York Times/CBS poll reports  that the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) has resulted in decreased access and increased cost. How can you cope? What should America do? My PsychologyToday.com article today 
attempts to tackle those thorny questions.

Days of Our Work Lives: An unvarnished look at work today: Part I: David's Saga. The final episode: Episode 17: Third Time's the...

Days of Our Work Lives

Part I: David's Saga

Episode 17

Third Time's the...

In the previous episode, David proposed that the end of jobs might possibly be a net plus for society. His next day, however, would not be a net plus. 

It was an ordinary afternoon. Susan was giving a singing lesson on Skype. Adam was quietly doing his homework. (Their parenting-by-guilt was working remarkably well.) David was staring into his Big Data, trying to make more efficient the single-payer health care system his white paper helped get enacted. He was so proud that he helped pass the law that allowed 50 million more people, including 11 million formerly illegal immigrants, to get health care.

And then David felt that pressure in his chest again. But this time, taking deep breaths didn't help. As before his previous heart attacks, it kept getting worse. "Susan, call 911."

But this was Sage River not San Francisco, and five minutes, ten minutes, 15 minutes, and still no ambulance. Susan called again but 911 said, "I'm sorry. The system is overwhelmed. We just don't have enough ambulances. We can't keep up with the demand. It shouldn't be too long."

But when you're having a heart attack, you don't have long. David was getting dizzy and the pressure in his chest intolerable. His skin, normally pale, was now red and shading to purple, with Susan and especially Adam, looking on in horror.

Finally after 20 minutes, the ambulance arrived and a paramedic and EMT moved David onto the ambulance, with Susan and Adam by his side. Unless it's a real emergency, noise abatement rules require ambulances to use their siren as little as possible, but this was a real emergency. The driver turned on the siren and kept it on.

While starting an IV drip to reduce David's pain, the paramedic told the EMT to start CPR.  "No, slower! Harder!," the paramedic coached the EMT. The EMT pleaded, "This is only my second time. I'm new!"  

David got more purple. And then blue. Susan screamed, "He stopped breathing!"  The paramedic pushed the EMT aside and continued the CPR, far harder. But it was too late.

A month later, Susan received a copy of David's will. He had always lived modestly and invested rather than spent. Every time he had an extra thousand dollars, he'd invest it in  Vanguard Growth Index Fund, a widely touted smart place to put money. As a result, although he never had a huge salary, in the 20 years since he started saving, his nest egg had already grown to $500,000. He chose to leave half to Susan and Adam and the other half to the American Heart Association, specifically to fund research on sudden heart attack in men, which kills many more men, earlier, than other diseases, yet receives proportionately much less funding. 

Susan decided that the next plays she directs will be fundraisers for that cause. 

Although guilty for feeling this way, she felt relief that only now did she feel free to live the life she really wanted to live--if only she knew what that was.

 * * * * *

And that ends David's Saga, Part I of Days of Our Work Lives.

Next: Episode 1 of Part II: Susan's Saga.

Part III will be Adam's Saga.

Days of Our Work Lives: An unvarnished look at work today: Part I: David's Saga. Episode 10: Sometimes It Takes a Scare

Days of Our Work Lives

Part I: David's Saga

Episode 10

Sometimes It Takes a Scare

In the previous episode, under the pressure of a new, bad job he felt forced to take, David had his second heart attack.

Fortunately, it was another mild one and after a month at home, his doctor okayed him to return to work. But David knew that going back to that start-up, even if it had been a good one, was asking for trouble. Besides, cliche though it is, flirting with death made him rethink his priorities: Maybe he should, at least for starters, while he's still not 100 percent, do a little volunteer work.

But where? The obvious choice was health care reform. After all, his two coronary experiences with the health care system were battles. They weren't battles with the doctors and nurses. While not perfect, they were doing their best with the field of medicine still in just its adolescence and made especially difficult because of the Affordable Care Act forcing the system to try to care for tens of millions of newly insured people, most of whom pay little or nothing into the system. His battle was with the insurance companies."They truly are monsters: doing everything in their power to avoid paying. Damn, if they're even questioning medical care for a heart attack, what the hell will they pay for?"

So David chose the obvious: to volunteer for Physicians for a National Health Care Program. And here, for the first time in his life, he felt at ease at work. "I don't care whether a widget sells or not. I care about people getting the health care they need without going broke, without a fight, without worrying whether a doctor is going to do an invasive test on me to cover his ass or, instead of prescribing a medication, doing a "procedure" (shorthand for painful and expensive) to make an extra grand for an hour's work."

At PNHP, David spent his day using his marketing mind to come up with smarter ways to lobby Congress to pass single-payer health care and his data-miner mind to find ammunition to support that lobbying. Work, this work, put fear of a third heart attack way to the back of his brain's bus.

After just a month of volunteering, someone he didn't know, in a suit, came into his cubicle and offered him a job: lobbying support analyst, basically doing what he'd been doing but now getting paid for it. The problem? The pay would be $65,000 a year, half of what he was making at UnderSports. He was down with that, super down with that, but what would Susan say?

The next episode is posted HERE.

Where Are The Jobs? Nowhere

The somewhat declined unemployment rate masks the true situation. Ever more people have stopped searching and many people who are landing jobs are forced to accept lower-paying positions or work that is more odious. How many people do you know who say it's getting easier to land a good job?

This article supports what I've been sensing for a long time: that there are no significant areas of U.S. job growth. The usually cited growth areas--health care, computer science, engineering, and Green--have become saturated, the result of offshoring, automation, and structural problems in the U.S. economy.

I'm well aware that heretofore, new fields have always emerged to replace declining areas of employment, but I cannot think of one. I hope that merely reflects my lack of vision but if I'm right, I fear that in the coming decade or two, the U.S. will suffer a dramatic drop in standard of living to closer to the world average.

For the world, that actually may be, net, a good thing: True, most Americans will have to live on $20,000 a year plus taxpayer handouts but the billion people on Earth who live without basic food, water, housing, and health care would have lives improved far more than the decrement to Americans'.

Ironically, the U.S. government's growing impulse to be kinder to the poor is accelerating America's descent. It is redistributing additional resources from the wealthy and from corporations to the poor. For example, it does so with the employer-funded ObamaCare (which will pay for comprehensive health care for indigents) and with "comprehensive immigration reform." The poor will get more resources but redistributing resources from job creators to those less likely to create jobs will cause a decrease in U.S. employment and probably GDP.

What do you think?

Govt's Track Record Makes ObamaCare Scary

The following is circulating around the Net. Its analysis is simplistic but somehow does make me scared of ObamaCare, not to mention the even more government-centric proposals. What do you think?

To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature.

A. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 236 years to get it right and it is broke.

B. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 76 years to get it right and it is broke.

C. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 73 years to get it right and it is broke.

D. War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 47 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.

E. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 46 years to get it right and they are broke.

F. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 41 years to get it right and it is broke.

G. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 34 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.

You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars. AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM ??

A Good Question About ObamaCare

My wife forwarded this to me.

Let me get this straight . . . .

We're going to be "gifted" with a health care
plan we are forced to purchase and
fined if we don't,

which purportedly covers at least
ten million more people,
without adding a single new doctor,
but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents,

written by a committee whose chairman
says he doesn't understand it,

passed by a Congress that didn't read it but
exempted themselves from it,

and signed by a President who smokes,

with funding administered by a treasury chief who
didn't pay his taxes,

for which we'll be taxed for four years before any
benefits take effect,

by a government which has
already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare,

all to be overseen by a surgeon general
who is obese,

and financed by a country that's broke!

'What could
possibly go wrong?'

The ObamaCare Questions I'd Ask at a Town Hall Meeting

President Obama, you've said, again and again, that ObamaCare would not cover illegals. Yet ObamaCare has no money allocated to verifying that a patient is a legal resident of the U.S.

And to the extent illegals wouldn't be covered under ObamaCare, you have repeatedly said you plan to make all illegals legal: the so-called "path to citizenship." So won't all these 13 to 20 million illegals become legal and thus covered under ObamaCare?

And is that fair? Today, every year(!), medical errors result in more than 100,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of additional people who stay sicker or get sick because of those errors.

Indeed, two months ago, a dear friend, a healthy 54-year-old woman, went in for routine surgery and came out a near-vegetable--the surgeon nicked a critical blood vessel.

With the same number of doctors, nurses, MRI machines, and operating rooms, ObamaCare will attempt to provide health care for 47,000,000 additional people--a group with high health care needs and low ability to pay. Thus, many more medical errors will occur and so, many legal residents who took care of their health and paid into the system will die, get sicker, or stay sicker because you, Mr. President, are forcing us to share our health care with a cohort of 47,000,000 high-use people, whether they are legal or not, whether they pay or not.

I ask you, Mr. President, what would you say to those countless people who unnecessarily will get sick, or to the family members of those who die because you decided to provide health care without regard to people's legality or whether they paid their fair share?

Isn't it fairer to have a basic public plan for the poor and a much higher-quality plan for those who pay into the system? Isn't it unfair to make legal residents pay for illegals, thereby endangering those legal residents' lives?

And a final question: Do you really think that ultimately, we will have a more just country, a better life for our residents, when you force the responsible taxpayer to reward the lawbreakers (the illegals) the wild-risk-takers (people who borrowed beyond their means and the banks that lent to them) and the incompetent (the US car makers)?