It's a Hard Luck Life

Not mine. My life is not a hard luck life, but the overall deal these days outside of my bubble is peculiar.

I was listening to people discuss healthcare pros and cons regarding regulation and lack of it. I have to admit, I see the sense on both sides of that concern. What doesn't seem to be within the thought process is a great deal of knowledge about how things became as they are.

All the explanations tend to be missing a lot. I think there are factors which involve government, insurance companies, and health providers (including the world of pharmaceuticals). Then there is also the influence of lawyers and the courts. My belief is that the unholy interaction and partnership of all these entities has corrupted the process to the point where people actually believe more of a collusion of these interests, overseen by the IRS will somehow improve our world.

On one hand, people ask if it is right to deny someone care. On the other, I ask if it is right to force insurance on those who may not want it at this point in time, due to personal circumstances, yet do not expect others to pay the costs they may incur due to medical needs.

Here is where the philosophies diverge. Some believe "we must all sacrifice for the greater good of all". That would be the group who likes the new law controlling healthcare--although I've yet to find anyone who knows exactly what the thing entails, or who has actually tried to skim and look into any of the actual text.

Some believe it is anathema to a free society to force individual sacrifice for what others deem the greater good. I tend to fall into that group.

Still others fall somewhat in between. They don't so much mind the whole thing of forced sacrifice for what they consider the greater benefit, but they don't trust the mechanism for executing this if it means that federal bureaucracy has total administrative autonomy.

Seeing their points and feeling good about them are two different things. I believe that an honest picture of how things became odd even before this law is almost impossible to find. It is like looking through a window on a foggy morning after a hundred disgruntled kids unloaded a hundred eggs on all the transparent surfaces of your abode. How do I know that and on which end of the eggs' flight was I? Maybe neither. I'll never tell.

I've been considering the thoughts of those people who were in the discussion. I've concluded that the only reasonable approach is a very tedious one. All the regulations have to be filtered through and analyzed regarding right and wrong, not who will kick back to your campaign.

Throw out what doesn't belong. I suspect that would involve laws and regulations passed over the last 6 or more decades. Not all of them, but some. This may involve things like requiring a prescription for many medicines and drugs which ought not require it.

Sure people can kill themselves or others through misuse of some of these, but they can do the same thing with clorox and ammonia, for cryin' out loud. And that is but one tiny piece of it.

Why can't insurance be competitive nation-wide?

Anyway, it is not impossible to think of things which do not violate my idea of human rights, individual liberty, and which still allow for a system in which little johnny isn't required to rot away from gangrene because his parents are flat broke. I would turn away most illegals. And probably people I just don't like.

Do people do much checking to see how hard it is to legally move to other countries? Believe me, they do not welcome broke individuals who sneak in with open arms. They don't welcome just average, hand to mouth, willing to work, types with open arms. And they really don't want you if you are over 40. Unless of course you come bearing flowers and a pot of gold which you plan to park on their doorstep.

Regardless of people who sneak over hoping to do the work I now do, does it make sense to accept something that forces sacrifice, even though you don't even know all the sacrifices, and from whom, it requires? I guess if you trust people who make laws, then exempt themselves from its requirements.

Don't trust insurance companies but you are now required to do all your physical upkeep through them? I don't get it. I do get that many people need things they can't now afford. I'm all for ways that would facilitate some of that care. But anything reasonable can only be done by a real purge of the bad deals, corrupt rules and regs which produced this expense and confusion.

What do I know? Just thinking.

Maybe I'll go test my tent at the naked place. Cheapest and best facilities and no one knows me so what the heck. Test it, go to work to finish teak work bloc two, then purge my own house of what is nonsense, then off to the great Northwest.