Pulling the plug on Granny

-
...or maybe just letting her decide if there should be a plug or not. Terrific NY Times piece by Timothy Egan discussing the notion that hey, maybe we can talk about reducing the country's end-of-life care expenses without veering immediately into OMG-plug-pulling-Kevorkian-death-panels-black-helicopters paranoia and political cynicism. As Egan says, "how do we reform a system that lavishes most of its benefits on a cure for the 'disease' of aging" when many studies as well as common sense show that most people want to die at home, yet Medicare will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests but won't pay for non-hospice home caregivers.

And then I read about a guy who was basically lynched by a bunch of hillbillies in Kentucky. Not because he was black (he wasn't), but because he was... brace yourself... a FED! (a census worker, to be specific). And we know this was an issue in motivation for the murder because they painted his body with that three-letter word, just so the world would know what special brand of evil this guy was. What the fuck is wrong with these ignorant Americans that they HATE HATE HATE the meddling Big Brother federal government except when it's handing out Social Security/Medicare/food stamps? The ultimate absurdity, of course, was the frothing-at-the-mouth guy at one of the health care town meetings screaming "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" What am I missing here?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Entertainments II

-
1. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, which I'd never even heard of until a couple of years ago. Because of the title similarity, I guess I assumed it would be something like Cold Mountain, but actually it's more like Oscar Wilde meets Wuthering Heights. A phrase that sticks with me is the characterization of one of the characters as a "trying female." Such a useful description. 2. Jagged Little Pill , the Alanis Morissette album from several years ago that I recently rediscovered thanks to my iPod, which I've been listening to on my commute, since there's only so much NPR you can take at rush hour without getting bored and/or depressed. Lots of cool songs in addition to the familiar singles. That woman has a way with words. I can't help but wonder how many different men she's trashing, how people manage to careen from love to hate, and about the success of her future relationships given her apparently poor track record (and the potential intimidati
Read more

Beaky and spiny

-
Image
Yes, it's been a while. But today... today I have found something so inspirational that I can't help but share it with the world: long-beaked echidnas , beautifully described in The New York Times as "plump, terrier-size creatures abristle with so many competing notes of crane, mole , pig, turtle, tribble, Babar and boot scrubber that if they didn’t exist, nobody would think to Photoshop them." AND! Did you know the males have a four-headed penis? Oo la la. *** Though it's been a while since her death, I must still mark the passing of Bea Arthur, who created the unforgettable character of Maude, a rather underappreciated sitcom, lost in the 70s shuffle of "All in the Family," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "M*A*S*H" et al. One reason the show was so good was the writing, tackling fraught social topics and taboos just as AITF had before it. Here's a tour de force one-woman episode where Maude sees her analyst . *** One of the funnies
Read more

The rogue wave is coming

-
Ben and I saw " Poseidon " on Wednesday. To absolutely no one's surprise, I have lots of Deep Thoughts about the remake as well as comparisons to the original ("that's heavy, Robin"). I know it's retarded, but I took a pass on the scifi-fantasy Hobbit / Dungeons and Dragons nerdliness earlier in life, and I'm not a computer programmer, so I have the right to geek out about SOMETHING. Too bad I don't put this much effort into something else, like say learning an instrument, in which case I'd be appearing nightly at Carnegie Hall or at least Great Woods. But this is gonna take a while, so brace yourself for a future sea o' type. Elsewhere in the news, work has turned into a deluge as I crank out actual web pages, among other side projects that have suddenly cropped up. This three-day weekend will be a wonderful thing. And no 9:15 a.m. soccer tomorrow -- woo hoo! Ben personally accompanied the surveyor and held the sticks this morning at our
Read more