A story about people being impoverished by "healthcare costs" flared up in a major newspaper today, but why bother saying which one? It's not like it's their story or anything. It was done in "collaboration" with Kaiser Health News, a new nonprofit media foundation. The vogue thing to say nowadays is that nonprofit foundations will take over as mainstream media (newspapers) die (without health insurance for the people who lose their jobs). So I hope you like your news being brought to you directly by corporations whose mission statements proclaim they have a stake in "shaping" certain issues. Just because they're nonprofit doesn't make them holy.
At the same time, without this foundation, there would be no story at all.
I just don't like a single part of it.
The story attempts a helpful sidebar on keeping down Your Healthcare Costs, but I don't think it helps much, so I wrote my own:
1. Even though the only food you can afford is subsidized corn syrup pressed into traditional dinner-shape servings and we want you to work 18 hours a day, don't get fat.
2. Don't get diabetes, either.
3. Don't get cancer or asbestos poisoning or injured from lifting my garbage cans, day after day after day past the age of 50.
4. Fight my wars, but don't get wounded.
5. And a special note for the ladies: Don't have children, don't have sex, don't use birth control, and don't get abortions. If you do have children, don't let there be anything, you know, "wrong" with them, mmmK?
6. Never, ever skip paying a health insurance premium--how else am I going to afford my boob job, bitch?
Simple, reasonable measures lead to reasonable savings for all!
The other supposed savior of the fourth estate is online discourse, a paradise of trolls and mental dwarves laboring in the darkness. Today, they filled the comments field on this story, telling people with cancer and heart disease that they should stop being fat illegal immigrants and just get over it. (Even though no immigrants of any kind were harmed in the production of Kaiser's story, the trolls just had to bring that issue to the party anyhow.) I'm like, Jesus, there are so many comments here about a couple of white guys' appearance! So two of the guys featured weigh a few pounds, maybe that's because they haven't been healthy enough or had the cash to hit the gym lately! Is the penalty for being big death, now?
Putting it all in perspective is an escaped troll now "working" at the American Enterprise Institute, who actually gets quoted in the story. He says these people just expect too damn much (like staying alive!) and that their expensive benefits could "preempt the use of resources for other services, such as buying Viagra for the rich fucks at MY foundation, which will soon be placing a story all about the tragic epidemic of limp dicks among right-wing policy analysts in what used to be your city and your nation's newspaper. Pay to play, baby!"
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4 comments:
Amen, sister. This is towering.
oops. that's from
-- J.S.
Thanks. Here's the punchline--first thing this morning, I got a call from the lab saying they saw a spot on my mammogram. I'm like, oh, please, health care system, I didn't mean it, I was only joking!!! Seriously, NO WORRIES--I checked and it's a pretty common type of anomaly and 99 percent of the time means nothing--but they still demand a second set of boob prints, mostly to cover their asses. So there's another grand to the Man. This system has gone past absurd.
please be well . . .
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