Sunday, November 17, 2013

Part 7 Avarice 60 to 64: The Meme



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The Meme will become myopic on shorter-term, month and quarter based analysis on dividends and returns to owners.  One month’s net loss may be part of an annual or decade strategy that results in a net profit.  If the economy of the Meme focuses so intently on extracting profit to stockholders and upper management then the true macroeconomic stimulator of the large number of employed worker-bees getting a paycheck which is predominately spent is overlooked. 

A net-loss in a 10K report for a company which paid its employees a living-wage is punished by the Meme even though it is benefiting the greater human economy.  The Meme plays the prisoner’s dilemma on a firm-basis in such ways.  Corporations merge to gain size to avoid being the last prisoner without a deal.  The Meme sheds jobs, crafts dependency in the masses, and consolidates resources.  Victory becomes confined to and derived by piling up bricks of gold into locked vaults. 

The economy suffers even more mightily when the market is hijacked by sentiment over math.  Accountancy becomes a form of synthetic fraud-insurance for the trade-pits that someone, somewhere looked over the numbers.  Brokers make quick-decisions based on the name of the horse and how it looks, not its record.  The Meme wants us to see ourselves as able to become a get-rich-quick lot, by betting on long-shots that flash rather than sustainable practices.

One can argue firms have an Adam Smith/Milton Freedman free-market absolute obligation to maximize profit.  However firms are humans in a coordinated society who get caught up in and manipulated by hype.  Firms break and sidestep regulations in win at any cost mentalities that can externalize errors.  This becomes the rule and humans become nationless beholden to the Meme rather than each other.  

Rules of taxation rates, finance policies, and labor laws etc. provide mutual assurance to adapt global markets so that the majority of money keeps circulating rather than buried in a bank or investment-fund.  The Meme fights these assurances in our legislative and political systems and demands profit the same way an animal will eat his pride-mate if it believes this equates to his survival. 

Investment markets have shifted from a preponderance of long-term to a majority of short-term speculation-based instruments.  So much wealth is held by a small number of humans.  The change in use and the total dollars in trillions are higher and further towards non-trade (non-circulating) uses than ever.  This creates deflation to craft global markets of low-growth and low-wages.  When governments try to stimulate the economy like in 2008, the effect is severely hampered by this deflationary censure. 

Around 2025 the global stock markets risk a secondary major collapse as the housing markets caused in 2008, as a preponderance of American and Euro post WWII Baby Boomers are required to liquidate a greater portion of their equities in retirement vehicles to pay for healthcare and basic living expenditures.  This will liquidate a lot of the uncirculated cash in investment portfolios, but if that health system is dominated by international corporations rather than taxpayers, the freed money will reconsolidate instead of recirculate.  The act of healthcare is a dissipating service which does not for the most part produce a tangible good with a long supply chain.  The need for the U.S. economy to grab this cash could finally bring about single-payer healthcare in the United States, which is a threat to the Meme. 

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If single-payer healthcare is done correctly with a digital universal web-based interface allowing patients to sort themselves and communicate with doctors with fluctuating Internal Revenue Service (IRS) adjusted gross income-linked deductibles and copays including a factor for historical earnings under a modified health care tax in-place of traditional insurance premiums, America might stem the tide from economic collapse as the national debt swells.  The IRS could offer health tax-credits for attending an annual physical and additional credits based on the lack of additional health costs.  This combines preventative common sense with emphasizing health.  If a person is over the cost threshold they receive no health credit.

Doctors could advertise under a central web-hub to schedule appointments and communicate the number of procedures they have performed, training accomplished, accreditations, memberships compared to national standards in field with personal videos of the doctor speaking in a two minute clip.  Since the cost to the patient fluctuates based on availability, this would be a truer free-market way of facilitating medicine, because it links patient choice and patient cost. 

Lesser experienced doctors demanding lower salaries should cost the public less.  More experienced doctors would have to curb their salary demands to remain competitive through lower pricing-equations inside such an open system.  This would create leveled compensation structures in medicine more similar to Europe where a doctor could make an excellent living, but not an exorbitant one.

Doctors and medical facilities could have dynamic prices posted on the web to categories of American citizens based on an annually determined semi-generic classification for that human based on historical adjusted gross income and age.  Therefore if you knew, “I averaged $45,000 on my prior three federal tax returns and I am 42 years old,” then you are in class E.”  Class E for this service is $30 today.  If the doctor is less full the price might be $20 like the pricing systems for the perishable product of a hotel room.  A website can communicate the market and book the appointment.  Prices of drugs are determined somehow by the hospital Charge-master lists.  These would be required to be upfront on the website.

Procedures offered, medical devices, and prescription drug prices could be negotiated on a national level.  This is the mega-profitable pharmaceutical and medical device industries worst fear.  The pharmaceutical companies’ profit-equations have to come out of the shadows.  Patients would get web-displayed prices for procedures based on time estimates of actual procedures given complication possibilities, medical devices, laboratory services, therapies, and prescription options.  Patients could compare in an exchange, but depending on one’s historical income reported through the IRS the prices would differ within ranges.

Currently many Americans focus myopically on copays rather than the full employer plus employee premium, the lower salary employers pay because of it, the taxes to support the Poor, retired, and governmental employees healthcare, and the profit margins of the industry exploiting the purchase-decision disconnect between patient and service. 

Patients have little idea what we are being charged or sometimes even what we were charged after health insurers get involved.  Thus there is little motivation by patients to lower healthcare costs.  Behind these numbers doctors often trade what does a patient need for what will the insurance fund.  The Meme would like us to avoid the math and focus on the idea that under some fiscally healthier scenarios these copays may increase, but the total debt-burden of the nation to support the current system may decline. 

The Meme wants Americans to be ignorant of the Charge-master pricing lists in hospitals with forty dollar boxes of band aids and hundred dollar blood-pressure checks.  If doctors and hospitals had a predictable interface under a single-payer system, such mirage pricing schemes would not be necessary.  The Meme wants us to feel like we got a deal when a drug company charges four-hundred for a twenty dollar bottle of pills and our health insurance got it for one-hundred on top of our nine-hundred dollar monthly premium of which we only see a third on the employee share.  We pay more, but are happy about it like a thirty-percent off coupon on a good marked up two-hundred percent.

Most medical procedures are not matters of life and death and can be pre-evaluated in such ways.  Even under major care decisions, a human should be able to choose to spend or not spend one’s life savings to potentially sacrifice an offspring’s inheritance on two months of life.  Digital cards could be read in seconds to communicate medical and IRS data classification for pricing to doctors.  Billions are wasted on the hedge-maze of archipelago medical billing administrations drowning doctors and patients.

America’s current health system is motivated to promote sickness to cultivate profit; Canadian and European public systems farm preventative planning to reduce costs.  The collective nation of taxpayers negotiates as one.  If there is only one bidder on a stock, the price goes down.  This is the crucial crux of the U.S. cost anomaly in the industrialized world.  Flipping this disparity would devastate the Meme.

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One should be able to elect economical, painless, non-terrifying helium inhalation euthanasia if one so wishes after the age of eighteen.  Require a sixty or ninety day waiting period outside of other emergency medical conditions or a legal will with a Do Not Resuscitate order.  Those with long-term illness or those over sixty-five or some senior-type age should qualify for a shorter waiting period as little as immediately.  This balances a rough-day with rational life-planning for sick and older humans.

Much of the problem with euthanasia is the necessary Hippocratic Oath.  The most logical place for the near-dying to elect or carry out the act is in a medical facility, if the decision is dependent on a car accident and avoiding a $100,000 last week of life.  Non-profit death with dignity services could be organized to provide the self-administered equipment to the individual or a friend or family member so the nurse, doctor, or aid could be exempted from any direct participation.  There is a line of legalities and ethics, but this can be overcome with rational priority of the volition of the human seeking relief of life through death.  This may be done at home.  It happens all the time with barbiturates and firearms etc.

For everybody else over eighteen, offer counseling information at the suicide-clinic and links to alternative services for walk-ins.  Do not require the counseling.  Suicide is a selfish act, but humans own their life.  Death can rip the fabric of despair and ripple into other humans who love the deceased.  However the elected suicide is owned by that person alone. 

The Meme denounces even discussing such options.  The Meme wants to spread the illusion of an absolute respect for life.  Such hypocrisy hangs a judgment day over every moment as an absolute to not perform every medical procedure the Meme purports to offer so kindly.  This is a subtle tool to keep the Poor from transferring generational wealth and an assertion of authority that one must pay a toll to die. 

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The current healthcare system of bill boards and television spots markets based on rhetoric and stock-price.  The anti-Meme applies the empirical to create a choice that integrates supply and demand in instances where the choice in the current system is an illusion veiled behind health insurers offered by one’s employer.

If healthcare is confined to employer-linkage, the corporate-section of the Meme can control healthcare and partition winners and losers.  Healthcare then becomes like a lottery ticket.  The price of the ticket and ability and options to purchase health are part of the submission Labor must pay Owners.  One will take a lower wage and more hours to keep health for one’s self and offspring and spouse.  The lottery commission always profits.

The ticket must also be purchased in advance.  One can only purchase insurance at special enrollment times during the year, not the day after an accident.  No new tire after the blowout on the interstate.  You have to wait six months and pay $10,000 for this tire and then next January you can get on a tire plan and get a subsidized tire for $400.  Sound good taxpayer-laborer with a body, no?  Well we’re your only option.  If you don’t buy a ticket you risk bankruptcy and losing the meager wealth from every hour of labor if you or any spouse or offspring spends a few days in the hospital.  The Middle Class is forced to buy blocks of monthly-tickets only on special purchase-windows.  The Meme blames the purchaser or non-purchaser in this situation, not the Meme’s healthcare system.

Larger corporate entities benefit to become even bigger.  The more mammoth the risk-pool inside a corporate-group the better the health-expense rate is.  (The logical extension is that it is best for the collective to be in one large group.)  Small business and the self-employed are ostracized.  Each governmental entity is sectioned off causing taxpayers to pay more.  This is designed for the Meme to tear away volition and the options for humans to assert volition in health. 

On the under darker side of this theft of volition is the idea the Meme wants the Poor to suffer.  The Poor should stay subservient and the Meme knows that less healthy people are more dependent, easier to control, and will die off like disposable tools.  This breeds fear.  This keeps the general population away from science.  A health system based on prevention, patients asserting more volition in choice of care, choice in cost incurred to get that care, and lifestyle choices to not have to aid the profit of the corporate health system to achieve better health are all anti-Meme.

Inside the health insurance policies one is limited to few choices and a similar legal “you will take this and if you complain you get nothing” in context to what is covered.  No mental health, “Oh well that stay in the emergency room is not covered.  You paid your premium, but it does not cover that test; so you might have a tumor, but that is not cost effective for us.  Use our lab services with our hospital and we will profit inside the inside of the giant incomprehensible Charge-master bill.” 

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The Meme tries to redirect taxpayers to focus on the massive funding of Social Security and Medicare as being the problem rather than the question why does healthcare in the most privileged nation on the planet cost the most.  Why would taxpayers want the profits created from the differential of their younger years not subsidizing the same system all taxpayers support to cover all taxpayers in their senior years (Medicare?)  The positive variance of younger typically healthier humans should ideally flow into the same pool their inevitable older less-healthy negative-cost-variance will be paid.  In America it doesn’t. 

The positive variance goes to private health insurers who subsidize the pharmaceutical, medical device, and hospital administration industries.  This is extracted from taxpayers forever, who in turn pay for the most costly humans excluded from the private system.  Humans with significant health issues are cast out as spoiled raw materials for a Meme whenever possible by health-insurers.  This can be through pre-existing conditions or simply by the grand banishment of the Poor and the old.  The Meme divides and conquers pitting humans against each other where survival must be paid for like one-hundred-thousand dollar life rafts. 

Universal healthcare in several European countries and Canada is possible because Labor fought for the systems through a national political-party process.  The American system’s greatest battles came in segregated labor-unions inside industries and corporations.  This limits the availability and permission for access to be determined by corporate-authority.  Those outside corporate discretion are health-pariahs.  

America bans the importation of Canadian, European, and Indian pharmaceuticals etc. purportedly for weaker foreign Department of Health inspection standards.  If such drugs from universal healthcare countries were available via the internet the U.S. would experience a free trade problem, which would threaten Big Pharma’s profits on Wall Street in an area the Meme is exploiting.  

Corporations can run the healthcare sector.  The profits harvested by the healthcare industry combined with the disparate tax-benefits afforded to the employer-side of expenditures in non-healthcare industry business equates to a positive-differential for the business and the Meme as a whole.  In doing so, the Poor and the Middle Class pay more than they would compared to a universal system.  Business is therefore allowed to pay a lower total percentage of total healthcare costs. 

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