Lex's Health Care

Yeah Dan, I'm willing to call it a wash too.

As for a good reason for the AMA to support the bill, I'm sure there is a nice $$ trail attached to it like pretty much every thing the government and their lobbyists decide are "good for us". :) The AMA represents less than 1/3 of all doctors and half of those are retired. It's pretty silly how we think this historically conservative group speaks for all doctors. In the end, doctors are split as evenly as the population.

Here's my suggestion for healthcare reform...Just to temper: I don't parrot any one party. I vote people not party.

My suggestion for reform would be to first repair Medicare/Medicaid. Every year nearly $30billion is lost to fraud and abuse Let's get these two potentially great socialized healthcare programs working properly. Let's limit the abuse of the system and keep our poor and elderly healthy with good doctors...not just those doctors milking the system by billing patients for 24hrs of "care".

"According to a national CAHPS survey conducted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2007, 56 percent of enrollees in traditional fee-for-service Medicare give their "health plan" a rating of 9 or 10 on a 0-10 scale. Similarly, 60 percent of seniors enrolled in Medicare Managed Care rated their plans a 9 or 10. But according to the CAHPS surveys compiled by HHS, only 40 percent of Americans enrolled in private health insurance gave their plans a 9 or 10 rating." -Based on CAHPS scores 1997.

So, the public system is enjoyed by those on it...why not get some oversight in there to shore up the fraud? If the government would put forward a plan that would severely punish everyone that abused medicare/medicaid and that showed positive results in three years, I think we would one step closer to fixing the broken systems. At that point, I would suggest a 5% tax on all private insurance users to infuse more money in to the two systems. It would be easier to do, if people believed that these socialized systems worked efficiently. Most Americans, are not opposed to helping the poor and would gladly pay a little more to do it. If we focus solely on the people who are uninsured and truly can't afford it, we have 20million people uninsured that we could insure with a better operated program. Heck, we could even give illegal immigrants some type of balloon healthcare so when they show up at the Arizona hospital ER suffering from exposure due to illegally crossing, they will be covered by some general fund.

Sorry about the length. Hope you get a chance to click the links I added and take a gander.

A case of Science vs. Batshitinsane

Last night around 10pm, NASA launched a satellite named "Kepler" to seek out earth-sized planets around neighboring and semi-distant stars. If Kepler returns new "green" planets, what are we going to find? Are we really the only sentient beings in the universe? If we aren't, and the things we find aren't Christian or Muslim, do we holy war their asses? It would only make sense, right? We don't evolve and God must have installed other heathens on other planets to be fodder for intergalactic holy annihilation, right?

The Trouble With Creationism

I've had a tough time as a conservative understanding the blood lust that the Republican party has displayed with destroying science. I don't understand it. It's a hard thing for a science believer to grasp. It's been so hard that I have been actively trying to find reasons to disbelieve it using a Christian background. To this point, I have a hypothesis (not a theory like evolution). I will lay it out below.


So, according to the Bible, man came first and fucked around in the Garden for a period of time without a vessel to impregnate. This went on for years...

God came down out of whatever it was above Adam and told the guy that he would make a nice soft place to put his piece. To do this God knocked the hell out of Adam and removed a lower rib to make a female....as in, males are missing a lower rib which made girls.

They lived in harmony having sex and banging under all sorts of fruiting trees while all the other animals watched and learned....

Moving forward six thousand and nine years, I have to question that claim.

If God really removed a lower rib, why are we, as men, not able to suck our own dicks?

A fascinatingly odd surgery for certain types of men is the removal of a lower rib to achieve a frontal bend that will put even the smallest of penis in the mouth....so as Christians...why did we need to have it removed? Wasn't it taken out when we were but a dream in the mind of the first autofelletioing male? Shouldn't Adam have been the first guy to put his own penis in his mouth?

Going forward, how can we really trust folks who claim religious superiority over the population? Shouldn't they have to pass some test without surgery that shows that with their lack of that bottom "female" rib they can put their penis in their own mouth?

Can Pope Benedict suck his own dick? Doesn't that make him holy? It should. If he can suck his own dick, I will believe in Creationism. If he can't, it's possible that we just evolved to this. No offense to the religion...but seriously, if your own Pope can't reach his own dick without that tricky rib, why are we to believe that we lost a rib? Wouldn't the Holiest of Men in the Church be able to show God's work by putting his Pope dick in his Pope mouth?

Until I see Pope Benedict suck himself off, I can't believe in Creationism.

I love people who are turned in to internet puppets

Bwahahaha!

When All Else Fails...

...Chimpanzees make everything better:

Fag Hags: Why Quitting Smoking is So Hard for Women

Hello, boys and girls. Cartola is back in the building! Due to a long, extended abscence directly proportional to the fact that no one ever reads this shit and, surprisingly, the rise in my malpractice suits, it turns out removing molars because they are just plain dirty is not legitmate dental practice, I have been blogging less than usual (read: not at all). Yet Cartola, is back in business. And he has some cultural musings.

I see a lot of smokers come into my dental practice everyday. Their mouths are horrid and most of them are women that I have affectionately termed "buttermouths." (Go ahead and steal my term blogosphere!) I have found that these women are extremely hot, but have a mouth like a fifteen-year-old unclean sewer pipe that has to be snaked with a metal rod. Hence, a buttermouth defined, although often-times extremely hot and doable by Cartola standards, can be ruled out for various unclean and probing sexy times in the dental chair.

So what accounts for this confluence of smoking among women and why do they find it so hard to quit? I pondered this thought on this beautiful, slightly cloudy day off as I went for my daily smoking jog, my smog; that's right Cartola is nothing if not despicably hypocritical. According to Kristyn Kusek Lewis in her article "How four women quit smoking -- and you can too" in Health, "... women, it turns out, have an even harder time quitting than men: They seem to experience stronger withdrawal symptoms, perhaps because of hormones or the bigger nicotine dose delivered to smaller female bodies." I call bullshit on this because Lewis is a woman and I am always right, being a man with a larger male body.













Smoking, it turns out, is bad for both men and women. Deal with it. If you are going to make excuses for smoking, don't use the whole glass ceiling, gender argument. Hillary Clinton is a cunt by the way who should have left her husband and his cigar smoking to the oval office. Smoking is largely mental, if I wanted to quit I could quit. There would be three or four days of withdrawal symptoms and then I would be so fresh and so clean, clean. I just choose to be dirty and unhealthy like these women with oral fixations and too, too high standards. Boo-hoo I can't find a man. Maybe if you stopped phellating guys named "Top Gun" that hang out at the White Eagle on Green Street, you could land a decent, respectable man.

In conclusion, stop smoking if you want to or maybe just so your dentist doesn't have to scrape off years of yellow tar from your teeth with a sharp, scrapy metal instrument. What the hell is that thing called anyways, a pain stick? Ugh. Unsexy. Fucking buttermouths. Fucking fag hags. Fucking women.

Time for a smoke. Cartola out.

An Open Letter to Obama Haters (Especially Lex)

Second in the presidential race, but first in constipation.

Poor, poor Lex. It's ok, let it all out now. Barring a terrorist attack, assassination, or the Large Hadron Collider ending the world between now and January 20, Barack Obama is going to be the next president of the United States.

Artist's rendition. Seal subject to change.

There's very little doubt now. He's up big in all the polls, even the ones that usually lean to the right, and he's still gaining. There may be the usual cusp-of-Election-Night tightening, if it's not superceded by state budget difficulties leading to cutbacks of programs that people care about, something that conservatives have a long history of being unsympathetic to, or a weakened stock market. And the McCain campaign is only making things worse for themselves, ratcheting up the negative attacks that seem to turn voters off, which makes the attacks more negative, which turns more voters off, leading to more negative attacks... love those negative feedback loops!

So the nightmare scenario is upon you. You've spent the 10 months since the Iowa caucus cultivating the hate for Obama, and now he (to the ectasy of his slobbering devotees) is going to be front and center in American life for the next four-to-eight years.

Despite my obvious disagreement with your political philosophy, and our many run-ins on policy and philosophical issues, I feel your pain. You see, my fellow liberals and I have lived out the same nightmare. Actually, our nightmare is probably more horrific than anything you can experience in the next three weeks - you won't see an apparent McCain win stripped away by butterfly ballots, senile Florida snowbirds, a corrupt state government run by Obama's brother, and a highly politicized Supreme Court... only to watch four years of incompetence and fear-mongering be rewarded with another four-year contract, one that the majority of the population regretted almost immediately.

Still, we know where you're coming from. You'll undoubtedly have the same reactions to this election that we had:

• You'll threaten to move to another country. This was easy for us - we have an allegedly socialistic paradise right next door that even speaks the same language. Finding a country that loves the free market, hates minorities, and encourages caring only about "getting yours" is going to be a bit tougher. Better start shopping for prime real estate in Estonia now before the big rush. (Michael Phelps recommends Rosetta Stone for all your language-learning needs.)
• You'll blame third party candidates. This will probably be irrational; it's not like adding Bob Barr or Lyndon Larouche's supporters to your totals will really make the difference, even in the close states. (Though this has been know to happen before.) But it's not like anyone's going to come to the defense of those wackos. Fish, barrel, BANG.

Cheney says, We must waterboard LaRouche.

• You'll sue. Sue everyone! Challenge the registration system! Find the proverbial needle in the voting haystack (and it will help if he's black, for obvious reasons) and claim that this is representative behavior. They're stealing our election! (It helps if, seven years later after all those wounds heal, you make a ridiculously one-sided movie that rips off those scars all over again. There's two hours of needless anger I'll never get back.)

And that's why I now subscribe to Showtime.

• You'll throw off your flag pins and root for bad things to happen. Recessions! Stock market plunges! The collapse of the dollar! Threats to the sanctity of capitalism! (Wait, what? Already? But I thought we arranged that for after the elec.... Damn minorities, you can't even fail correctly!)
• You'll blame yourselves for not doing all the things that would have actually made things worse. We should have gone negative sooner and with more energy! We should have tried to connect to redneck dropouts and trust fund babes! We should have chosen a running mate from a more inconsequential state! (Note: this is already starting.)

(HT: Because I Said So.)

• With what little power you retain, you'll take out your anger on swing voter blocs. College-educated single women? No more birth control coverage! Latinos? Deported! (Even if you were born here.) Coastal men? Rising sea levels!
  
• Finally, when you get to acceptance, you'll start up depressing websites where you apologize to all the people around the world that were counting on you to make the right decision. Sorry Georgia! And... uh... Cuba?.... hmmm.... really, Israel said no?.... McCain was born in Panama.... no, I think that's pretty much it.

It's not all bad news. We're at the start of a pretty devastating recession, and research indicates pretty clearly that the party in power gets blamed for economic troubles regardless of their guiding philosophy. At some point there's going to be some military intervention that's required, and it's always fun to say you were right about whatever the result happens to be, even if you weren't. And nothing rallies a base like a humiliating defeat - just look at what happened to the Dems after Carter was defeated!


Hmm. Well, Mondale's blowout loss must have made things better!


Oh. Yikes.

Regardless, it's won't be long until America tires of the Democrats. It's like clockwork - every six years or so, the whole structure is overturned for no good reason, and it doesn't really matter because both sides believe in pretty much the same things. So wait patiently, keep up the bitching and the independent counsel investigations, and you'll get your power back.

Besides, he's black. It's not like America can deal with that forever.