Health Care Is Only A Dream Away

Health care is all the rage in the news these days. President Obama's health care plan is going to revitalize the entire country. Complacent doctors say it will destroy the very foundation of medicine in the country, causing all of us to become troglodytes who will have to turn to witch doctors to be cured if "socialized medicine" gets passed in this country. Love it. Hate it. Whatever. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and in reality, no one really cares.

What am I talking about? Well, it's one of those issues that people have a stake in because it's political. It defines your party identity, so people take sides based on what they believe in. Most people arguing, and most people who are being listened to, are people who already have health care, and they don't need it. It won't affect them; it will affect those who really have no voice, and to be honest, no one really wants to listen to them in the first place.

Last time we tried to have universal health care, or something like it, we ran into the personal story defense, which is one of those fake defenses that makes people think the sky is falling based on one or two examples. In other words, if ONE person is affected negatively, then they can throw all sorts of fear tactics around and the people will blindly turn out against it. That's what happened with the Harry and Louise defense. Basically, what happened was this fictitious husband and wife were played by two actors, and the Republican Party made them pretend that they were going to be completely destroyed by President Clinton's health care initiative. The plan failed and has been forever linked with the failure that is Hillary Clinton, even though she tried to put that behind her as she ran for president unsuccessfully.

Well, that same sort of thing is happening again, but it's turning into more noise than anything else. And what people don't realize is the true fear of universal health care this time around is that the new program may not actually do anything different than what we're already doing. In other words, we may spend billions of dollars, but in the end we'll have a little bit of the same of what we already have. Those in the middle, people like me, will still have no health care, and the only ones that qualify will be those with steady jobs or those who have figured out how to game the system, something most of us in the lower middle class have never been able to do.

So what about me? Why am I talking about this as if I'm in this strange category of people who have no health care? And why should someone like me really matter?

Well, if you watch the way events will unfold, people like me are unimportant, and no one really does care. I don't say that to seek sympathy, but to pass on that people do not care for those who shouldn't be in a bad situation; like a lot of our class arguments, people blame those who don't end up coming out on top, almost as if it is a failing in their own abilities that they are starving to death and dying from lack of proper medical care in the country that has been the shining beacon for so many others before in the past.

Yes, I'm one of those without health care. How did I get there? Well, I had health care when I was working full time for a hospital system. Then I went back to school to do graduate school, to be able to better myself and get a step up in the academic community. So I had health care while going to school. After school, I took a job in South Korea where I still had access to health care (universal health care in South Korea). Then things turned bad. The job I had stopped paying me, and my only recourse was to return to the United States without employment. Since then, I've been unable to find a job, so the little bit of money I had accumulated is slowly dwindling, and my lack of health care has started to make itself known by the fact that I take a number of medications for an ailment that is part of my medical history.

Not having health care is a very interesting dilemma to be in. It is like being one of those turtles that has overturned itself and cannot get back up on its feet again. You keep thrashing over and over again, hoping somehow that someone will notice you're there thrashing, but people just point and stare, sometimes commenting on how bad it is that the turtle has fallen on its shell and can't get up again. This continues until the turtle eventually dies of starvation because it can never make itself upright again.

That's how being without a job and health care is for someone that isn't comfortable being without a job and health care. I walked to BART today to catch a bus that leaves from there, and while I was there, I was accosted by no less than five beggars, asking me for money. That is something I told myself long ago that I would never do, and the activity disgusts me, but at the same time I'm starting to see these people as possibly smarter than I am. I mean, they're not pretending that they're going to turn things around; they realize they're screwed, and they just stand there at the BART station asking people for money. They gave up. And they're probably making more money per day than I stand a chance to anytime in the very near future. So who is really the foolish one here?

I went to Kaiser today because they used to be my old health care provider. It's amazing how unhelpful the system is when you're no longer one of the "members". All I really needed was a copy of my prescriptions so I could at least find out what medications I've been taking (unfortunately, the prescription information of mine was lost in transit, along with my military DD214 (proof I served) and tons of personal paperwork that might make this whole situation a bit easier). Member services at Kaiser is annoyingly rude to most of its members and people like me. They seem to see everyone that shows up as an antagonist, so the attitude is immediately one of hostility (you could sense it when the one woman at her desk kept lecturing people for not waiting until she said she was ready to see the next person...imagine being spoken to like a prisoner at a detention facility, and you get the impression of how it feels to be in need of information from that type of a gatekeeper).

This ended up putting me into the emergency room of Kaiser because that's the only place that will see you if you're not a member. And they're not like other emergency rooms. They want money, and lots of it. I'm not talking about small amounts of money. They wanted astronomical figures. An example is drugs. The drugs that I take cost about $600 for a month's supply from Kaiser Permanente. The same drugs for the same period of time, bought from Costco, would cost me $37.50. But that's where the fun begins, because just getting the prescription from Kaiser to Costco was one of the quests that would have made the computer game Myst proud (for those who do not know...as one of the first real puzzle games, that game confused the crap out of tons of computer players when it was first released, causing more than one computer screen to end up with a broken beer bottle sticking out of it by the end of the night).

Anyway, why am I talking about all of this? Well, the argument for universal health care is waging in Congress right now, and in the end the chances are pretty good that nothing is going to come of it. Oh, they'll probably pass something, but it will be what's called feel good legislation, where they can claim victory without actually doing anything. The taxpayers will spend many billions of dollars, a few people will get outrageously more wealthier than they already are, and nothing will change. Why is this? Well, because people in Congress already have the greatest health care you can possibly get. And they get it for life. They don't need it. So why should they care? Sure, it sounds good to seem like you care, but at the end of the day when they're arguing numbers, what they care about is getting re-elected and becoming more powerful. Those of us slipping through the cracks don't matter. We're irrelevant. We can't die fast enough.

So, here's where I say something that hopefully will get you to think (I am addressing this to the two stuffed animals of mine who make up the readership of my blog). There is massive dissatisfaction with the government today by more and more people are finding themselves out of work and losing some of the basics of everyday life, like health coverage. There is a tipping point to where the amount of people falling out of the system start to become opponents of the system. We're not there yet, but we're moving there. And the problem with that is, and the problem that has ALWAYS caused, is that when this antipathy starts to turn to anger, there's no warning. Nor is there any smart seer on a hill somewhere with his or her pulse on the attitude of these people. When they rise up, they sweep pretty much everything out of their way as a movement that takes a life of its own. We've seen it happen so many times in the proto-modern times, and we've started to see it happen a lot more since the post-communist world where groups of people have become important variables that cannot be tracked until they've already done their damage.

Part of the problem with Obama is that he was seen as some kind of messiah, a response to what was considered a horrific period for the liberal ideas of mainstream America. Well, he's starting to show himself to be as regular as any other person, and that momentum that brought him to power is starting to show lots of kinks in the armor. People said they wanted change, but that's not what they really wanted. They wanted prosperity as part of a desire for accountability. They're receiving neither, and nothing indicates that anything being done today is going to lead to just that. I wish I was wrong, but I'm not.

Stumble It!

The Election of Obama, the Healing of America, and the Future of Cooperation and Friendship with the Rest of the World

The election was a very long one, and a lot of people are exhausted, finally getting through this process that has managed to prove how divided a nation the United States really is. We knew we were divided some time ago, when each subsequent election showed that half of America wanted one party while the other half wanted the other. In a winner take all system like we have here, that meant a lot of people being completely misrepresented by a party not their choosing. This allowed the Republicans to run the White House, and so many others to continue to control the halls of government of this once great, shining country.

But when it came to the election, people became so divided that they stopped seeing clearly. Instead of seeing people who disagreed with them as the other side of the family that loves you but holds you in check, people saw anyone who disagreed with them as enemies, as people who not only had to be defeated, but had to be disgraced, dishonored and, if possible, destroyed. This has been politics in this country for some time now, and right now, things can get better, or we'll be turning over a cesspool of political disfunctionality to those who come behind us. It's our choice, even though we sometimes make it without thinking about exactly what we are doing when we finally do it.

The United States has suffered greatly because of the misguided intentions of a few who believed they had the best intentions at heart. And they probably did. But their thinking was archaic and outdated. Their thinking was confrontation leads to solution, but that's 19th century thinking that led to 20th century destruction. The future needs to be something different, and unfortunately, people have been swimming in the same muck for so long now that they are no longer capable of thinking about alternatives other than what someone may have tried before. Unfortunately, hitting the same nail into a board only goes so far before you're just breaking wood. The future needs something different than what we are capable of achieving with our think tanks of old ways and diplomats of ancient ideas. The world has been crying out for a future direction, and all we keep hearing is old ways that rarely worked in the past as if they will somehow work some day in the future.

What the world needs is directed cooperation, not mandated imperialism or negotiated compromise. In interpersonal communication literature, one of the final achievements of success in successful communication with another person is not the predicted compromise, but an understanding with the other person that together both of you can achieve a combined learning process that leads you both to a successful outcome that is not a compromise for either but achievement for both. People still don't think that way. Even counselors rarely think this way, telling people that one person must compromise so that two people can reach a commonality (although it is usually directed at both partners, so that both compromise).

The future can be one of successful cooperation, but only if the most powerful nation on the planet realizes such a future can be achieved. Right now, we live in an era where our diplomats play catch up games with international affairs. If someone treats us unfairly, we treat them unfairly in return. If someone does something nice for us, we produce easier trade routes into our borders. That may seem, on the surface, to be the answer to achieving successful economic stimulation, but it is really only temporary, and in most cases does not produce friendships that are long-lasting but develops trade relationships that last only as long as it is economically viable for both sides. In a game theoretic framework, this means that we continue to prosper as long as our "friends" prosper, but once one of us drops out of the game, the only path usually ends up being one that utilizes either the proverbial carrot or the stick. Our paradigm does not know any other functionality.

I suggest the future needs to look at this game theoretic and introduce the idea of cooperation and generational footprinting. What this means is that our targeted friends should not just be those who do right by us, but that when we do right by those who are in our economic and political spheres of influence, we must also do right by those who are overlapping our partners' economic and political spheres of influence as well. This isn't the old "my friends of my friends are my friends" but more a directed desire to work towards friendly relationships with those who border us, and recognize changes in our relationships to where we share certain, fundamental characteristics, such as the desire to wear plaid pants (dumb example, I know). The more functions we share with this neighbor where we wear plaid pants, the more likely we are to also begin sharing other characteristics, like wearing the same kind of hat. This expands out into the cultural realm as well, so that over time we become more like our neighbors, and our neighbors become more like us.

Then we focus on their neighbors, and we look for when those neighbors (who may have very few dealings with us as well), and if we see them wearing plaid pants, we reward them by opening up functionality spheres with them so that we share more venues where we can both show off our plaid pants, so that we, too, might begin to share other attributes and then become more and more like our friends.

This is a simplistic example of the model I'm proposing, but at the same time it also leads to the ability to create long-lasting friendships with potential friends and enemies. This isn't a new process by any stretch of the imagination, but a recognition of certain mathematical principles that do exist in raw social interactions. I use a matrix application to run the interation mathematics that drives the process, but what is important is that nations that are actively involved in attempting to build stronger friendships must be as willing to recognize the change in others as well as accept changes within themselves because self-reflective entity nations have a tendency to attempt to self-correct themselves when they see change as an error rather than a natural progression of cooperative behavior.

This is kind of an offshoot of the FOT (Friendship Over Time) Theory that I created with K. Bruce, and it is going to be presented at the NCA National Conference. We sent a shortened version of the process to the Obama campaign during the last month of the election, as I felt it was important to at least make an attempt at trying to find a better alternative to the rotten ways the US attempts to conduct international relations. My guess is that our letter was either ignored, passed on to some flunky who ignored it, or treated as fan mail. Unfortunately, there are really few avenues for an academic theorist to try to make one's ideas known, especially ideas of such magnitude that would require enlightened leaders to take notice. So I just thought I would say that I at least gave it a try before realizing that in most cases, no leader ever really vies for changing the way things are, even if one's campaign is run on the idea of change.

There is a better way. Making it known is a deeper struggle than finding the solution.

Stumble It!