WAKE UP WOKE PEOPLE!

[jakelafortParticipant]

And Enco if you are not cool with selling humans, selling hard drugs and firearms to 6 year olds, selling atomic bombs to terrorists etc…then you are good with at least a modicum of regulation, of state interference with freedom to sell shit and freedom to buy shit.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Robert,

Citation aboubt douche bags, please, since it seems to be a personal area of expertise. 😁

Lo these past two years, you’ve droned on at length about what your Medical bedside manner would be. You gloat over people dying, while I gloat over people living. Here, take a lesson in how it’s done:

“Good Morning, Rev. Armageddon T. Thunderbird! Good news: Your kidney transplant took and you’ll be out by Thursday!

We got your kidney from a fine young Secular gentlman who gotcout of New Hindustan when Modi declared himself Dictator and went bonkers. The young man needed some financing for his A.I. software start-up so he sold one of his kidneys. Once the business runs itself, so to speak, and breaks above even, he said he’ll buy another for less. Very shrewd of him!

He’ll be working my hands hard, but I’m a trial patient for the new CRISPR-sync-ed Nanobots that heal damage as it is detected. A couple hours and my old bones are like new! When that hits the market, I’ll re-tool and get another specialty.

Lay off the Sun-Drops for yourckidneys and lay off Hellfire-and-Brimstone or you’ll need a new spleen. Take care! 👨‍🔬😁

[_Robert_Participant]

A+. Emojis are always the proper punctuation for douche bag posts.

[Belle RoseParticipant]

@unseen,

First 3 minutes..,,around 3:30 actually he says it’s going to be decided by Asia and Latin America? Um…..no…..the US, India and China are top 3 problems when it comes to CO2 emissions. He really doesn’t know what he’s talking about 😂

[UnseenParticipant]

Belle Rose wrote:

@unseen, First 3 minutes..,,around 3:30 actually he says it’s going to be decided by Asia and Latin America? Um…..no…..the US, India and China are top 3 problems when it comes to CO2 emissions. He really doesn’t know what he’s talking about

I just looked at a map. Yes, India and China are still in Asia. As he points out, had you listened all the way through, the problem isn’t geographical, however, it’s economic. To people who are starving and trying to live without indoor plumbing and electricity, climate change isn’t at the top of their mind. And probably won’t be until their lives get better.

Listen to the Bjorn Borg videos and you’ll see that the key to climate is to raise the poor up to a point where climate change becomes a motivating concern for them, and that what the Western countries (N. America and Western Europe) are doing tries to fix the problem on the back of the poor, which is not only dysfunctional but unethical.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Fellow Unbelievers,

Rest assured, I’m not ignoring you. I’m having a little emergency at the moment and I’ll have to catch you on the flip-flop of it.

(I’m pretty sure there’ll be a flip-flop at least, but it’s given me quite a start since last night. Take care and hopefully we’ll discuss it further.)

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen and Fellow Unbelievers,

Like the Prodigal Son, I’ve returned, but I brought the pig in case anybody needs aortic valves with their bacon. 😁 🐖

Saturday night, I got home from work, took off my work clothes, socks, and shoes, and noticed my index toe was dark red, swollen, and blistered. As I said earier, it gave me quite a start because I didn’t drop anything on it, didn’t knock it against anything, and never felt anything and still don’t now.

Having Type 2 Diabetes and Peripheral Neuropathy, I knew it was not a problem I could just tough out, so the next morning I went to the emergency room. The Doctor examined it, took bloodwork, wired me up to the diagnostic devices, splinted the toe with tape to the middle toe, gave me an IV of antibodies, and sent in the X-Ray Specialist.

After a few hours, the prognosis was that I had broken my toe and never knew it. I suspect it could have been my shoe’s tongue bunching up inside and causing pressure.

I was released with a boot to keep my foot still, plus a prescription of more antibodies, and I got supper and with medical approval, I went back to my workplace and worked for a half-shift.

Fortunately, I seen the signs of trouble, I knew I needed help, and my Physician made the right prognosis snd got me antibodies in time, for which I am eternally grateful. However, if this had not happened, things could have got necrotic and gangrenous, which means something would have to be amputated, from a toe to a foot to a leg to a whole life.

Here, folks, is where a free market in organs, tissues, and stem cells would come in handy, as well as personal cryonic “body shops” with spare parts ready at anytime. The life it could save may be yours someday.

• This reply was modified 2 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling with a tiny keyboard

[DavisModerator]

Yikes. Very glad to hear it isn’t as serious as it could be and that you are on the mend!!!

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Davis,

Thank you very much for your kind words!

My emergency room visit only took 7 hours, though I had provisions with me for a three-day stay if needed. The visit this time was better than when I visited just over a year ago. I got a podiatrist appointment tomorrow and an Internal Medicine appointment for Thursday.

Medicine here in the States can be a mixed bag and can always be improved, but there was no real long wait and the Doctor did the right thing. I hope my experience with billing is better than the last time and hopeful the insurance will pay a lot of it if not all. Sole practitioners are generally good at working with patients and spreading out payments, but the hospital not informing me of contracted-out testings threw me the last time.

So far, I’m walking good with the boot with no pain. Definitely watching my steps better.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Oh hey Enco,

Glad the grim reaper aint got ya yet.

Why antibodies for peripheral neuropathy and type 2 diabetes?

It would be so cool if we could get that free market running. Not only organs and assorted parts but slaves! There is a ready market. If the goddamn government will allow natural market forces to operate we can get back to the good old days of whuppin slaves and pickin cotton.

https://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11105552/trump-supporters-slavery

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake,

Thank you for the kind words.

The antibodies were for the injured toe, which resulted from an unknown cause which I couldn’t detect because of the Peripheral Neuropathy, which in turn, is a side-effect of Type 2 Diabetes blocking blood flow and nerve function.

Most likely, the cause of the broken toe was the tongue of my shoe and/or insole bunching up inside and building up pressure. I didn’t drop anything on it or hit it against anything.

The bones are still close after the break, so maybe the bones will seal together sooner. Meanwhile, I may need the boot for 6 to 8 weeks.

Meanwhile, I have thrown wire hanger after wire hanger into your straw baler until it’s mangled beyond all recognition and you’re still trying to make this Strawman of Free-Market Capitalist slavery? Please give this up.

And David Ricardo had some serious ‘splaining to do. Even if Ricardo was the author and not Ferdinand LaSalle, by Ricardo’s own admission, it would be better named The Bubble Gum Law of Wages. And it was based on Malthusian notions about population growth and poverty that have long since been refuted.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake, Robert, Unseen,

I have to give you guys a Goose Egg, “F,” #Fail on viewing comprehension, which isn’t even as hard as reading comprehension.

You all missed a point in Stossel’s video on organ and tissue sales that is very important to anyone concerned with Secularism, Freedom, and just maintaining coordinates on Earth.

Since the U.S. outlaws organ and tissue sales, people who want to do the sales have to go to the outlaw regime in Iran, just as alcohol and drug Prohibition puts monopoly control of control of supply in the hands of The Mob and The Cartels.

People who need organ sales have to transact it in Iran’s health care system, where the Mullahs and Ayatollahs get their cut of da mouse take–(mouse take is obviously Halal, but is mouse steak?)–and that take goes to fund the Islamic terrorism of Hamas in The Palestinian Authority and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as the Islamic regime’s nuclear ICBM fever dreams.

Banning organ and tissue sales threatens not only the lives needing them, but everyone else’s as well.

[UnseenParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Jake, Robert, Unseen, I have to give you guys a Goose Egg, “F,” #Fail on viewing comprehension, which isn’t even as hard as reading comprehension. You all missed a point in Stossel’s video on organ and tissue sales that is very important to anyone concerned with Secularism, Freedom, and just maintaining coordinates on Earth. Since the U.S. outlaws organ and tissue sales, people who want to do the sales have to go to the outlaw regime in Iran, just as alcohol and drug Prohibition puts monopoly control of control of supply in the hands of The Mob and The Cartels. People who need organ sales have to transact it in Iran’s health care system, where the Mullahs and Ayatollahs get their cut of da mouse take–(mouse take is obviously Halal, but is mouse steak?)–and that take goes to fund the Islamic terrorism of Hamas in The Palestinian Authority and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as the Islamic regime’s nuclear ICBM fever dreams. Banning organ and tissue sales threatens not only the lives needing them, but everyone else’s as well.

@Enco

Got any statistics on that, because I suspect that that almost never happens.

[UnseenParticipant]

@Enco

The problem with healthcare is that it is not and cannot be anything like a free market subject to simple supply and demand forces.

If I want to buy a car, I can at my leisure investigate the options available to me and I can put off my purchase until I’ve narrowed it down to what I feel is the best choice. The time I take helps to ensure that I make the best choice.

If in the course of pursuing a complaint a specialist discovers cancer, and it’s an aggressive sort, the time I take researching a specialist helps to increase my chances of dying.

From a recent Forbes article:

Health care is not a market. It lacks any of the vital features of a market. Treating health care like a market means living and dying without modern medicine. To advance a culture based on opportunity rather than government dependence, we need an alternative to state-owned health care that keeps key decisions in personal hands, preserves market triggers where appropriate, and rids us of the strangling influence of the massive federal bureaucracy. Republicans cannot do this without abandoning some cherished fantasies about the unquestionable, divinely-ordained righteousness of markets.

In a free market, goods and services are allocated through transactions based on mutual consent. No one is forced to buy from a particular supplier. No one is forced to engage in any transaction at all. In a free market, no transactions occur if a price cannot be agreed.

The medical industry exists almost entirely to serve people who have been rendered incapable of representing their own interests in an adversarial transaction. When I need health services I often need them in a way that is quite different from my desire for a good quality television or a fine automobile. As I lie unconscious under a bus, I am in no position to shop for the best provider of ambulance services at the most reasonable price. All personal volition is lost. Whatever happens next, it will not be a market transaction.

Insurance is the obvious solution. By agreeing to a transaction for insurance coverage at a time when I am healthy, I can in theory provide for my needs when I am ill. But an insurance-funded medical system means abandoning an unregulated free market for health care. The insurer-model creates a three-party managed market in which the patient has surrendered their buying power and much of their discretion to an entity whose interests are not aligned with their own. Insurance companies don’t bleed. Insurance companies don’t get pregnant. Insurance companies don’t get cancer. Insurance companies have certain needs and interests that will never line up squarely with their customers’. I cannot represent my own needs in a conflict with my insurance company when I am seriously ill. At the most critical moment I am at the mercy of an entity with interests at conflict with my own.

Despite the misaligned interests, an insurance-based health system can work quite well. Private insurance coverage is the method most of the world uses to deliver universal health care. But an insurance-driven system, even with private insurers and private health providers, cannot survive under unregulated, free market conditions.

We cannot maintain an insurance-based system of health care unless there is some force aligned with the consumer that has the superior authority and financial backing to hold the insurance providers to their end of the deal. As I lie under that bus in the road, what if my insurance company refuses to pay for my care? What if the insurer tried to intervene in my care to their own benefit instead of mine? What if the company with which I contracted for insurance services collapses and cannot pay for my medical care when I need it?

Absent a competent regulatory scheme, patients, at the moment in which they make their insurance purchase, have no way to be certain which provider will actually deliver on their promise. They will only discover the answer when their life, or the lives of their family members, depend on it. Under an insurance system without effective, powerful regulation, the market forces that would exist in a face to face transaction between consumer (patient) and supplier (doctor) disappear, replaced with a grim gamble in which the insurance company has every incentive to cheat.

Modern health care with all its fancy instruments, amazing methods, and success in extending life and happiness only exists because we started abandoning the free market in medicine a century ago. Go back to paying your doctor with chickens and your doctor will go back to being a part-timer who learned his craft from a book so he could augment his income from blacksmithing.

Does that mean we will eventually have to submit to a fully nationalized, single-payer health system controlled entirely by the federal government? No, the developed world includes a kaleidoscope of different approaches to health care from single-payer to almost exclusively private. They generally deliver better care at lower cost than ours. Alternatives to our broken system are proven, established, and readily available. So far, Republicans have refused to even look at them.

Less government does not necessarily mean more freedom. Lower taxes do not necessarily produce faster growth. It takes smart government to accomplish these goals. Sometimes it takes a government program, a new tax, and an intelligent regulatory scheme to free up the next wave of innovation and individual initiative.

One of the most frustrating obstacles to the growth of a broader entrepreneurship culture in the US is the structure of our health care system. It punishes innovators, chains employees to traditional work, and leaves millions of struggling Americans without access to care. We count on Republicans to deliver pragmatic, sensible solutions that foster a culture of business growth, but when it comes to health care Republicans are off their meds. Until the GOP is ready to move past their free market fundamentalist fantasies in health care and on other issues, our hopes of developing an ownership culture will remain stalled.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Wake up and smell the covid.

Oh hey Enco, i was looking into shrunken heads, old and rotted boots and assorted civil war memorabilia. But the market wasn’t free except for coffee. Don’t ya see?

Breaking a bone without knowledge is a little like you pontificating about libertarian concepts. I had a client back in da day who had osteogenesis imperfecta. That guy had broken over a hundred and fifty bones. Just a little impact and CRACK! So i let’m know that it would be unwise to pound his fist or kick the wall when i informed him of his legal matters. But that is neither here nor anywhere.

Unseen had some good ammunition to fire into the cauldron of free market everything that suggested we get health care the hell out of there. On the other hand there is nothing to stop free market slavery if only we could get the stinkin gov. to get its nose out of private citizenry bizzzness. Not only is the historical precedent for slavery indisputable and august in its longevity and prevalence but it is clear there is still a demand for it! Bring it on. Just let humans do what they do. What could go wrong with that plan?

[Author]

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