And I mean no offense to monkeys.
Yeah, some people might find this tack offensive.
But someone’s got to say something.
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Monkey balls: primate, dirty, probably haven’t been bathed in a while.
Not something you’d like to have your lips on for too long, if at all.
In the realm of basic sexuality, not necessarily the most gratifying place to suck, if you know what I mean.
The seat of maleness. Testes, dominance, aggression, competition.
Monkey balls: the U.S. health care system.
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Since both my parents both worked in the medical field, I was encouraged to pay into the fucked-as-monkey-balls U.S. system health insurance system right out of college.
I’ve been self-employed ever since, humbly shelling out $80 a month for shitty health insurance – in 1996 – and continuing to this day’s rate of $350 plus a month.
Just to secure the privilege of paying health insurance companies not to cover my medical bills.
That's around 20 years or so of sucking monkey balls. Big ones, too. But on a positive note, it's given me plenty of time to see how what we mistakenly refer to as a health "care" system – is actually a health "insurance business."
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Economics 101: the U.S. health insurance system is for-profit.
Translation: no matter how much you like (or don't like) President Obama, Obamacare sucks.
Why?
Because in order to be for-profit, U.S. companies must by law post profit growth each quarter to their stockholders.
That means it's against the law for for-profit companies to lose money.
In other words, Blue Cross, Humana, your basic "Health Insurance, Inc." – like all other publicly traded U.S. capitalist businesses (cars, wheat, fashion, makeup, hair cuts, grocery stores, etc.) – must continually GROW.
There's just one teeny fucking problem to this equation (not to mention the growth-only nature of capitalism itself): Humans wax and wane like the moon. We're young for a time, middle age for the rest, we grow old – if we're lucky – we get sick, we die. Biology 101.
Not ever, not at all, not once does a human ever "just keep growing."
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These irreconcilable differences between U.S. monopoly capitalism and human frailty expose the essential scam of the U.S. health insurance system. Health "insurance companies" – as for-profit businesses – are required by law to treat human beings (who don't grow forever) in for-profit (growth only) ways.
And there's only one way to do this:
Deny care.
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What other way could companies continually post profits in a no-growth “industry” (the sickness and aging of human beings)?
Health insurance companies deny care because it's not profitable to give you the "care" you "purchased."
It's only profitable to pocket your money, deny your claim, and make you foot the bill.
Beginning to see why giving $350 a month to Blue Cross is like sucking on monkey balls?
Noting a familiar business plan here?
Smelling Ponzi?
Or just plain monkey balls?
Yum.
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Known as "denying claims," the refusal to pay for customers’ medical care even when those customers have paid into the insurance system for the purpose of getting care is the only way health "insurance business" companies can post profits.
So Health Insurance, Inc. denies people medical care in several major ways:
1. Most people can’t afford monthly premiums.
If you can’t afford your premium, and your premium covers nothing (as we've shown), you’re legally bound to pay into a system that gets you nothing.
2. Even if you can afford your premium, you still pay out of pocket for your medical needs.
The only way for-profit health insurance companies continue to post profits is to pocket your money (monthly premiums), deny your claims (needed health care), and make you foot the bill (for what they said they'd cover).
3. Because customers end up paying out of pocket for medical costs, they don't even use the health services they’ve "supposedly" purchased – by buying insurance – because of the bills they’ll get afterward.
Let’s face it, if you’re 49, have a few kids and a wife, can barely afford the premiums as it is, and you're having chest pains, why the fuck would you go to the doctor?
How could you pay the bills that came in?
Do you know how ridiculously expensive EKGs are? MRIs? Blood tests?
Do you know how much it costs to see a specialist?
No. Think I’ll deny this chest pain and have a beer, take some aspirin, sweat in bed.
And what about those bad headaches and strange moods? Hmmm...must just be me. I mean, I can't afford to go to the doctor anyway, so it better be.
Short of breath? Let's see, the power of positive thinking. Okay, well, if I die my kids' college tuitions will be covered by my life insurance, which is more than I’m worth right now, anyway.
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We all know it, Europeans think we’re insane, and most of the informed members of this country admit it’s criminal.
The “richest country in the world's" citizens aren’t going to the doctor.
So they wind up in the hospitals for weeks at a time due to preventable illnesses.
They suffer massive strokes that could have been prevented with simple daily meds.
They weaken heart muscles by ignoring warning signs of mini-heart attacks and end up out of work and, worse, residing in institutional health care facilities that bill the government tons of cash because there’s no regulation, and they can.
In other words: human beings in America are, through brash institutional subterfuge, being denied basic health care – something which is considered a right in other countries.
And this is happening for a profit.
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Smell monkey balls?
Don't see them dangling there?
Let's start by noticing that U.S. health insurance system propaganda is extraordinarily embedded. Many brainwashed – and harebrained – citizens in this country even defend the scrotum system, justifying their right not to have adequate health care.
"Seeing doctors is for pussies," you might overhear an American idiot say as he sips his PBR.
Compare this with Japan, where an average citizen visits his/her doctor 17 times a year. That country has provided universal health care for its citizens since 1961.
Contrary to the lies forwarded by the well-oiled health insurance propaganda machine – and repeated by dumbfucks – Japanese citizens aren't seeing doctors because “they're pussies." Like most citizens of industrialized nations (including the nations of Europe, and Canada, etc.) they've grown up in a human-friendly culture. They learned that good health comes from taking advantage of preventative medicine and having an intimate relationship with your doctor.
To these citizens, doctors aren’t just the mechanic you call (at the emergency room) when you’ve totaled your car (body) on the highway (middle age).
Our motto in America? “If you’d have come in for new tires (heart scan) when you were due for a checkup (40 years old), your car (body) wouldn’t be beyond repair (fucked). Sorry, dude.”
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I know this sounds like “just how it is,” because we were raised on it, and being patriotic, want to defend the right of our country to be “different.” But like all Earthen systems, the U.S. health “insurance system" is actually very basic, very tenuous, and created and run by humans themselves.
Only a few humans, though. That's the key here. A handful, really, who’re making exorbitant sums, gaining enormous perks, and securing grand entitlements and advantages for doing things in this materialistic, monkey-balled, misanthropic way.
You see, letting us die of preventable illnesses while CEOs collect our money and give it to their children in the form of trust funds goes beyond “uncool.”
It’s criminal.
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Allow me to wax poetic for a moment.
It seems that if the timeworn Way of the Human ever returns, if we aren't subsumed by Robotic Fascism – which appears is happening at a rate faster than anyone thought possible – humankind will eventually view the late 20th century/early 21st century U.S. health insurance system as a form of genocide.
Why? First off, because the CEOs of Health Insurance, Inc. like Blue Cross and Humana are so rich, your money doesn’t even go to them.
It goes to their children’s trust funds.
Yes, Timothy and Tammy's Trust Fund. Ever met them?
Probably not. They’re members of the Super Class. They’re well-rounded, attractive, white, entitled, travel a lot, drive expensive cars, get facials, and have never had to work – ever. They also marry equally rich trust fund children of equally rich CEO fathers.
And their children, and children’s children, will be equally rich from inheriting trust funds.
So when you write your monthly check, you’re paying into someone’s kid’s trust fund.
Picture it: Tammy Trust Fund's college tuition, grandiose and ridiculously expensive wedding, fancy cars, and third home? And that of her children?
On you.
Timmy Trust Fund’s love of sports cars, expensive watches, and obscure art? And that of his children?
Yep, you’re popping.
When what you really wanted – or probably more accurately urgently needed – is a colonoscopy.
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That’s why the image of me holding a pair of dirty monkey balls in my mouth comes to mind every month when I watch $350 siphoned out of my account going to Humana, or whichever interchangeable scam/Super Class dynasty I’ve randomly selected to give money to.
It’s not going to my heath care.
It’s not going to doctors who actually provide care.
It’s not going to finance health care for poor people, the disabled, the elderly, or children.
It’s going to the stockholders of Humana, to post gains.
It’s going toward Tammy Trust Fund Kid’s month in Boca this year.
It's going to outfit expensive wooden boardrooms around which entitled CEOs discuss the “art projects” their multi-millionaire children are “into” and how to cut costs – meaning deny you and I medical care – so they can “post earnings.”
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Still, I'm not writing this is not to attack the injustices of the system.
We’re locked in pretty good right now. And that’s really not my problem. That’s the problem of the Trust Fund Fathers and Mothers who are running our government at the moment. Though it does make it easy to see why "Obamacare" went through – meaning now we’re all required by law to pay into this criminal system – and why they simply don't give a shit that we can’t afford heart scans (they’re profiting on us not getting them).
No, I’m writing this because when it was just me paying into the system to get my parents off my case after college, at least I was comforted by the notion that most Americans weren't sucking monkey balls like I was.
That others were, in some ways, smarter.
Risk-takers, maybe. Rolling the dice. But not...chumps.
Not bestial suckers.
Now, thanks to the "Affordable" “Care” Act, everyone has to pay into this corrupt system.
State-enforced lining of Tammy Trust Fund Kid’s pockets.
Not a good idea.
Not a free society.
Fascism.
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So we’re coming upon the point of my essay: the U.S. health care system is barbaric.
The jungle.
Every man for himself.
Inhumane.
Monkeys are brutal, savage, cannot be reasoned with.
They're animals. They're selfish, they follow their instincts. Pretty much, yeah. That’s what they do.
Entrusting two homes to your great-grandchild because a human wound up in a nursing home for the rest of his life because you wouldn’t pay for his heart check-up at age 52 is barbaric.
Forcing people to mortgage their homes to pay for basic cancer treatment in middle age – because you want to turn a profit – is barbaric.
Not caring that the entire mid-section of the populace (people between the ages of 40 and 65) are the ones who need preventable medicine the most, and denying them this, is barbaric.
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How can we sit around defecating, I mean defending, it?
Last week I was lectured that I should feel "grateful" that people with “preexisting conditions” can now “get health insurance.”
Grateful?
The term “preexisting condition” doesn’t even exist in Europe or Canada.
Every other industrialized country in the world offers its citizens basic health care as a right of existence.
And it’s not because they’re altruists.
They’re not somehow more “loving” and “kind” than we are, nor are they more stupid or, gasp, "communistic."
They simply followed what their economic models told them after World War II when so many of their cities had been destroyed.
Which was: providing all citizens with basic health care is more economically efficient for nations than not doing so.
All of Europe, Canada and Japan are not dumbasses.
They simply accept that for-profit health care is an inefficient economic system.
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So. Question. What will we do when the mid-section, the middle aged start dying off?
Who the fuck is going to take care of the children and the elderly when 50-year-olds start dropping in droves from preventable diseases because they can't afford to manage the illnesses of aging – even though they have "insurance"?
How is this system still in place?
How can we all be required to pay into it?
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It seems we need to seriously reconsider how much catastrophic health insurance is worth.
And not for what health insurance companies promise, but for what it actually is: infinitely recurring revenue to a bunch of super rich people.
How much are Tammy and Tommy Trust Fund Kids’ second homes in Aspen, third homes in Tampa, worth to you?
How much is it worth to send Tam and Tom to the Superbowl, wherever it is, every year, for the rest of their lives?
Enough for you and I to open wide and have a good suck?
So how...does it taste?