Be Sure to Insure

 

Auto insurance is a fact of life in our country. Currently, only one state does not require some form or another of insurance for automobiles, New Hampshire, and they require insurance in cases of some past infractions. As well, a resident will have driving privileges revoked in the event of an accident that involves uncompensated costs. Wisconsin requires either insurance, a $60,000 deposit with the DOT, or a bond filed with the same department. California follows a similar procedure, with the deposit or bond amount at $30,000.

And why is insurance mandated? It’s pretty simple, really. It’s to eliminate unpaid costs that would eventually be passed on to the taxpayers, via state and federal funds supplied by taxes, as well as state and federal fees and surcharges.

Strangely, or not, the Teabaggers and other self-appointed conservative enforcers have little to say about this form of mandated insurance. Perhaps the fact that the insurance saves billions of dollars in uncompensated costs has something to do with the silence.

And yet, they can’t seem to follow the same sort of logic when it comes to mandated healthcare.

Uninsured medical costs topped $200 billion last year, and have been over $100 billion since 2000. Of those costs, fully a third are ultimately uncompensated. The primary source of funding for those uncompensated costs are the federal, state, and local governments, or more accurately, the taxpayers. This pays 85% of the payment shortfall, to the tune of over $56 billion dollars last year.

And of course what cannot be calculated monetarily is the insufficient or nonexistent care for those who carry no insurance and either get subpar treatment, or forego it altogether.

So maybe it’s not about the money. Maybe it’s about who proposes the healthcare plan. After all, Mitt Romney got it through in Massachusetts, and contrary to what many talking heads insist, the plan actually has worked quite well. But then, Romney looks like the average ultra-con, and our President does not.

The End is Nigh!

 

Are you ready for some rapture?

Yes, it is being predicted, and not just by the usual evangelical lunatic fringe, that the rapture will occur this Saturday, May 21. Of course, the rapture is that special time when “the dead in Christ” will rise up out of the earth and ascend to heaven to be with god and his son. Then, shortly after the corpses have gone, those who are alive and saved will follow upward. This will leave those of us who are heathens, pagans, heretics, or generally just non-Christian , here upon the earth to suffer five months of the end times. It will be a period of hellfire and brimstone and consummate suffering, culminating with the actual end of our existence on October 21, also of this year.

This cataclysmic event is not to be confused with the Mayan doomsday scheduled for December 21, 2012. But the number 21 does seem to be significant, doesn’t it? Wonder why…

Anyway, the speciousness of the prediction aside, something like this will  break us up into three basic groups.

First, we have the True Believers, the evangelicals and devout, as well as the paranoid and panicky who are getting serious now with this impending End. They’ve bought into the scenario, and are going to spend Saturday waiting to be swept up into the sky. Though, only after the billions who are already dead make their ethereal trip, of course. I don’t know how they’ll spend their days. Maybe there will be church gatherings and Bible readings and euphoric celebrations. But they will be chaste and orderly.

Second, we have those who believe but just don’t care. As well, there will be a few non-believers who use this as an excuse to act out. The bottom line is, this group will become disorderly, riotous, larcenous, violent, and generally felonious. They will see themselves as unsaved, unworthy, and as usual, untouched by earthly guidelines of good sense and good taste. And they figure if they’re going to hell, why not get their money’s worth before the journey? Thank fully, we can expect this segment to be a distinct minority.

Third, we have those who simply do not believe but are every bit as good and decent as the most devout believer, along with those who are Christians but don’t cotton to this apocalyptic nonsense. These people will go about their business on Saturday as they would during any other weekend, happy to be free of work, seeing to chores and kids and recreation. Maybe some of those who are teetering, or strongly curious, will identify a true believer and keep an eye on them, to see if they end up going POOF and leave a vapor trail heading into the sky. But overall, they will live their lives, obey the law, be honest and forthright, be loving and caring, and shake their heads at all the silliness they see around them.

Into which group do you fit?

Me?

Put it like this: I’ll see you all on Sunday

Games People Play

 

Over two decades ago, Osama bin Laden decided he was going to take down the Great Satan, aka, The United States. Despite what is in retrospect some pretty inept security, it took him and Al Qaeda until September 11, 2001 to make the big splash they’d been working toward. His goals were based on some central tenets: he needed to morally confuse and befuddle America, he had to bankrupt the American economy, and he wanted to diminish America in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Now that bin Laden has taken  a bullet to the eye courtesy of Navy Seal Team Six, it’s become popular to sit back and gloat about how America has won it’s personal battle with ObL. You just know he died scared, wishing for a few more moments before his brain was turned into a gray and red slurry, don’t you?  But things aren’t really as rosy as all that. And while bin Laden certainly cannot take credit for all our continuing ills, they’re no less real for that fact.

Consider the moral aspect.

While I am not judging, America greeted the demise of bin Laden as though Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck just exploded a world-killing meteor. We displayed a bloodlust, perhaps justifiably, but one that parallels that shown by many of the fanatics who oppose us so vehemently. Fat talking-heads gripe that Obama won’t show pictures of bin Laden postmortem, then complain that talking about his porn stash compromises national security. Senators decry a president’s adulterous inclinations just hours after getting oral sex in the back of their cars from mistresses. And even the most religiously zealous among us go blind to the WWJD billboards and cheer torture, revenge killings, and covert assassinations.

Now look at the economy.

We were already on a careening  crash-track before bin Laden ever signed off on the 9/11 attacks. Unfettered, and unregulated, greed on Wall Street led to exotic mortgage instruments and a runaway real estate bubble that doomed the economy the day the first NINJA loan was funded. We deemed many companies “too big to fail” and handed them billions of dollars to stay afloat. We sank over $3 trillion into a “war” in Iraq that was misguided, based as much on a son’s attempt to validate his daddy’s past aggressions as it was on a desire to strike back at an Axis of Evil. We continue to bankroll a similar debacle in Afghanistan, the mountainous Killer Of Empires. And we’ve forked over more than $11 billion to Pakistan alone in the name of fighting terrorism. Pakistan, of course, has done little toward that end, in fact harboring bin Laden for several years, and has instead used the billions to build hundreds of nuclear warheads to likely one day strike at India, bringing on a very real slice of Armageddon. Oh, and to keep things interesting, we continue to subsidize oil companies with billions as they record record revenue and profits perfectly well on their own.

And how do we look to the rest of the world?

This is certainly subjective. We will always have our fans, and our detractors. For every England, there’s a France (Ungrateful bastards, right?), and so on. More importantly, though, how do we compare with the rest of the world? Well, we hold our own in racism, but that could be considered subjective as well. So let’s consider metrics such as life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, and math comprehension. We crack the top ten in one of those, life expectancy, and fall woefully short in the others. Infant mortality comes as little real surprise, as we’ve never given much more than lip service to those not yet of voting age. But it still speaks pretty poorly of us. And the other two, based on our obscene failures in education, result from two fundamental miscalculations. First, we can’t seem to understand that it is possible to correlate one fewer $4o0 ball peen hammers bought by the Pentagon to ten additional textbooks given to our schools. Second, in the wake of leaving our economy in the hands of those who had the highest incentive to abuse it, we’ve decided to make public services, including education, the illogical scapegoats, gutting funding and guaranteeing that we won’t be reading or adding numbers any more effectively in the near future.

American companies hire almost 80% of their technical professionals from other countries because, in the words of one staffing chief, “they’re smarter.” Since 2001, we’ve increased the anti-terrorism bureaucracy to the tune of three whole Pentagons worth of new office space.  And we kill, abuse, marginalize, and hate people different than us, all while holding some holy book that, at least in some parts, tells us that’s exactly what we shouldn’t do. And as one final stake in the heart, Conan The Barbarian is divorcing his Kennedy squeeze.

So no question, there’s no way you could say bin Laden was a winner in the end. But pending further review, it’s not clear what we’re winning, either.