Sissy stuff to keep warm with during the "VORTEX"?

[Betty]

Oh Yes. Almost every far right candidate running for office openly claims they will tear down any & all affordable or free health care plans created by the current administration. Do they want to be elected? Yep, but look at who's funding the campaign - - big money, big corporations, big oil, big insurance, big medical, & big pharmaceutical.

Who are the ones being conned to vote for them? They're conning most of us older people by using our traditional or conservative values to win us over... and we're exactly the people who need affordable care the most.

Unless you're just running for a small town sheriff, or dog catcher, it takes millions of dollars to get nominated, campaign, & get elected to an office here. A few bucks from every interested citizen won't help much compared to the mega bucks a corporation can put up to have the politician do it their way.

There should be limits to how much a candidate can raise & spend on a campaign. That way elections would be decided by the people & the politician's merits, rather by who's funding them. And contributions to any politician, campaign, lobby, or lobbyist from any company or corporation should be outlawed. Contributions only from private citizens should be allowed.

Then they paint a phoney horror picture of affordable care in Canada & the UK, describing it like people are dropping like flies in the street because of inferior health care. They tell stories of people waiting in lines outside hospitals & medical centers for days in the cold waiting to get in. They say people in the UK & Canada are dieing at home because of waiting months for an appointment to see a physician.

Of course if you pick up the news from outside the USA, you don't see or hear that horror. Could it be the rest of the world is lieing, & only the far right conservatives in the USA are telling the truth?

Multimillion & billion dollar corporation heads are in control. They don't care what happens to us, because they have the money, resources, technology, & gold to survive it all. No matter how bad things get, they all stand to profit from it.

What if someday clean safe drinking water cost $10 a gallon? Do you think a well or lake owner will get that money? Nope it will be some corporation who has an almost unlimited supply stockpiled away. They'll tax the private well or lake owner $20 a gallon to make it impossible for him to sell it cheaper, or they'll require so many licenses & permits to sell or distribute it, that only big corporations with a team of corporate attorneys will be able to do it. They'd corner & take over the fresh water market making it almost impossible to afford or get the water from somewhere else.

Even water pollution is to the advantage of cooperations. Then they can charge a lot for what you could have normally get free or cheap. They don't care how many people, plants, or animals live or die as long as they still have plenty safe to eat & drink, & can turn a profit. To most of them we are nothing more than something they can  make money on, or something that's a drain on their resources & stock prices that needs to be eliminated quietly, quickly, & efficiently. Even a significant portion of the earth itself is disposable to them if they can't profit on it.

[Betty]

The conservative voter has been bullshitted by the politicians & companies about affordable care. They've been told it will eliminate their health care plan & insurance. Nope. You can still choose any insurance, doctor, or hospital you want as long as they will have you. You can pay whatever they want if you can too.

Affordable health care means stopping unbearable pain, misery, & saving lives should be affordable to all. Briefly relieving pain & misery a little while or extending their lives until the money runs out shouldn't cost a person, & their loved ones everything they got & worked hard for all their lives.

C'mon voters. This is worse than the inquisition torture of the dark ages, because more are being tortured, & it's all quietly swept under the rug. 

Medical corp policy: "Give me 1/4 million dollars from you or your insurance & we'll relieve a little bit of your pain & suffering for a little while, then we'll try to do some basic stuff to save your ass a few weeks until the money runs out or your insurance doesn't expect you to pay premiums for the next 20 years. After that, we will let you die painfully."

But your love ones will see it as a peaceful painless treatment & death. Pumped full of paralysis drugs the victim can't move much. It or conflicts with a cocktail of other drugs usually causes kidney, liver, or other organ failure, needlessly ending in death.

They shove a tube down your throat, even when you don't need it, so you can't scream in pain, complain, or talk, & strap your arms down so you can't struggle. This is why, except for the emergency room, hospitals in the USA are suspiciously & spookily as quiet as a funeral home.  The tube procedure, even when heavily medicated, is very painful, is carelessly done by nurses or trainees, causes damage & infection to the most crucial, sensitive & delicate parts of the body.

Medical staff & doctors don't want to see, hear, or witness pain, & suffering. It's too depressing & human for their workplace. they feel it should be quiet & run like a computer or automotive repair shop with the humanity removed. Better to just tie down & silence the sufferer for the peace of the facility, even if it kills them. Even if they survive, they won't remember half of it because it was so traumatic... but it doesn't mean it wasn't traumatically painful.

Remember how you stubbed your toe on that table leg years ago, that hurt so bad you almost cried in pain? Yep. You remember it hurt bad, but don't actually remember the real pain itself. So it seems a mild mistake than the severe ouch. That pain & other pain or mistakes are still there to haunt your mind, but your conscious brain blocks it so you don't remember the pain itself all the time & drive you nuts.

What affordable medical care does try to solve: A single pill of aspirin, tylenol, or ibuprofen shouldn't cost $50 each in a hospital. No life-saving pill should cost $750 each in the USA if you can buy it in a 60 pill bottle of it in the UK, or Canada, for $10-$20 from the same company.  It shouldn't cost $10,000-$100,000 a day for a basic bare-bones hospital room. It shouldn't take $450-$7,000 to fix a toothache or pull a tooth.

Stopping serious unbearable pain, & saving lives shouldn't cost 1/4 million dollars or more. Of course it never comes to that, unless they know for sure you can pony up lots of money for a long time. In modern times they just shove the tube down your throat to silence you, & let you die painfully of "unforeseen complications", infection, or organ failure.

Believe me. Although science has advanced, I've seen people survive more comfortably, & longer 30-40 years ago with the same stuff that people suffer terribly & die sooner since about 20 years ago. Since science has advanced, & I don't see this reversal in the UK & Canada, it must be a failure, corruption, & greed of the USA medical system.

I had a brother who had a spot that they thought was cancer on his lungs. He was totally healthy & fit. They decided they had to pull the spot out to inspect it to know for sure if it was cancer. He had the best medical insurance. With his own country home & machinist business, his assets totaled almost a million dollars.

After the operation, when he woke up, with the dreaded & unnecessary painful, infection prone tube down his throat he struggled. They knocked him out & added paralysis drugs. Strapped down, blindfolded, paralyzed for a month. he died of "complications", from a cancer checkup which proved to test NEGATIVE.

That means if he never went to the hospital to have the dot removed & checked, he'd still be alive & fine. That month in the hospital used up all the insurance & used up a lot of my family's & my money.

Mom with COPD went out a similar way at 70 y/o. The insurance wouldn't cover the best treatments, cheaply available in the UK & Canada. The family & I also used up what we had trying to cover what the insurance wouldn't. If she lived in the UK or Canada, she could have made it to 80, & it would have been a more comfy & pleasant life with COPD.

Now it was my turn. I'm not a greedy person. I lived a simple, frugal, but comfortable life. But I worked very hard for very little, including benifits, & causes for little or nothing. Often I worked 50-70 hour work weeks. What kept me going cheap is that I loved my work (remodeling, restoring antiques, tech, lights, DJ/VJ etc.) because I worked for the underdogs who lived & worked the same way (except for the last years of work).

After the fire, in my 50s I lost almost everything. I again, working 50-60 hour work weeks, tried to save up for a modest frugal but comfy retirement by 65.

Then I got the worst flu of my life. I drowned in my own lung fluids causing a heart attack. It caused permanent scar tissue on my lungs, & COPD in one day. Conflicting reports say I died for a little under a minute in the hospital, but also in the ambulance.

In 1 day they cleaned out almost all of my retirement fund. If I didn't offer it up to save my ass, I'm certain I would have been dead by 2012. In the few weeks that followed for medical, they cleaned out the rest, plus had to borrow a shitload of money. When it got too far, I had to stop all treatment & live with my condition like they did 100 years ago, except I had no money left, no way to work well anymore, & in debt up to my eyeballs.

[Betty]

We had a mild snow flurry yesterday, & got just a couple inches of snow. About half of it melted already, & it's currently 33F. It looks like it will hit into the 40s F Sunday so the rest will all melt away. By Tuesday night they're expecting it to stay between the teens & 20s the rest of the week, with some light snow flurries.

Remember snow flurries? The weather peeps who obsessively make up new names for stuff that we already had names for, now call a snow flurry, a snow shower. Excuse me, I know what a shower is. Almost all of us have one in our bathroom. It's a wet thing. There's no such thing as a snow shower. It's a flurry, not a shower dammit!

Ironically they don't call a wet snowfall (half melted snow or snow mixed with rain) a snow shower. They simply call that "wet snow". So goofy!

Now if only we can get the weather people to say the word "temperature". It's been over 20 years since I heard someone say "temperature" on the  weather. They all say "temp" or "temps" now. Are we all supposed to be really impressed & think the weather geeks must be real cool just because they know how to abbreviate? A "temp" is a temporary office worker, usually with secretarial or accounting skills used to help on a temporary project, or just temporarily fill in for someone.

Abbreviations are supposed to be typing & writing shortcuts, you're not actually supposed to speak in abbreviations. 

NFL's Superbowl Football is tomorrow. Trying to look cool by speaking in abbreviations has even infiltrated the American football geeks. I'm sure I'll be gritting my teeth by the time I hear someone say "Tee Dee" for the 100th time tomorrow because some sports geeks refuse to say "touch down" anymore. "Tee Dee" is something little girls sing while playing with dollies or dancing like a ballerina.

So now that I brought that up, it will stick in your head. Every time you hear "Tee Dee" tomorrow you'll want to giggle, thinking of Betty's, ballerinas, & girls playing with dolls.

I see another storm cycling into the eastern USA again. Stay warm, drive carefully, & try to enjoy your snow flurries.

[Betty]

So I have 2 brothers gone now, & 2 brothers still alive, the oldest & the second oldest. The second oldest, about 8 years older than me is also suffering from COPD, & had a couple battles with cancer, where they removed half a lung. He's fortunate in that at least his insurance hasn't run out, & they haven't cut him off yet. 8 years ago it wouldn't be the same story, the insurance would have pulled out long ago at the first sign of something serious, or refuse to cover anything except the most basic care.

He's been in & out of the hospital again recently. Last week he started coughing up blood, & is back in the hospital. They want to remove the rest of his half a lung. In his condition & age, they estimate the best chance of survival is only 25%.

For those who believe in such things & know how to, please say a prayer for him.

[Robyn Jodie]

Several years ago I read a book, "How to Stay Healthy in Spite of Your Doctor," I believe tha author's last name was Mendelson.  His point was that doctors like to doctor.  Why do something simple when you can intervene in a complex, expensive and beautiful way?  After all, the insurance companies are paying for it.  Employer-provided health insurance is, in my opinion, one reason for the skyrocketing cost of medical care (not health care, medical care -- they often don't care about the patient's health, just their opportunity to "practice" medicine).

One of the problems of getting older is being taken to the hospital for something minor but life-threatening and never coming back.  You can die in the hospital among unfamiliar beeps and "wake-up, it's time for your sleeping pill" routines, or you can die more comfortably at home, even if you die a week or so sooner....

Two things insurance companies hate about Obamacare are having to take people with "pre-existing conditions" and not being able to "cap" their losses -- to sell policies with, for example a $100,000 cap so they can simply dump you once your care exceeds the cap.

[Betty]

The kitties were extra cuddly & affectionate the past few days. It seems they know when I'm sad & try to cheer me up.

[Betty]

Brother goes into surgery 7:30am E. USA time Tue. morning. They say his chances of surviving is only 25%.

All prayers are welcome.

[Angela M...]

I will say several prayers for both of you. Hope his doctor is one of the best and his recovery time is speedy and comfortable.
My mother went into the hospital dazed and confused from banging her head after a fall. They said there were multiple things wrong with her but we just wanted to see if she had damaged her head at all. She never came back out again but there was no serious head injury.

[Angela M...]

Hey Betty,
my kitty always knew when I was ill and would cuddle next to me until I was well again. She started doing that again just before she passed away but I was not sick. Then I understood that she was.

[Angela M...]

I just read a very interesting email from a friend who told me that meds in both the U.S and Canada are marked up a thousand percent or more by manufacturers and the pharmacies. They said you can go into any Costco and by the same drugs at deep discounts and you don't need to be a member either. When you figure the cost of basic ingredients some Cancer drugs are inflated by 100,000 % or more.