Wake Me When Our Society Collapses

You’ve no doubt seen those annoying ads featuring smug, entitled Americans demanding in one lump sum the money owed to them for structured legal settlements because it’s theirs and they want it now! Apparently we have become such a nation of legal parasites that it requires an industry devoted to servicing them.   I guess this is what is left of American exceptionalism;  bunches of fat, lazy, entitled morons sucking money out of what remains of the productive class.

I see this every day and it is distressing, or used to be because like a particularly malignant cancer spread past the point of treatment, there’s nothing to do about it now but laugh.  You see enough fit, otherwise healthy drug addicts on disability for drug addiction or entire generations of families who have never had to so much as apply for a job and you realize there is no hope for our nation.   The sense of entitlement, the religious conviction people have in their absolute right to suck as much from the public treasury as they can is so stifling now that all we have left is humor and devout prayers for a zombie apocalypse to help focus people on the more meaningful things in life.

The entitlement mentality know no age or class distinction, by the way.  I find those smug Hoveround commercials equally degrading.  Look, grandma, you didn’t put that much into Medicare and a couple of messy hospitalization blew through that in short order.  Would it kill you to pay a little for your motorized wheelchair?  We’re not talking a lifesaving drug but only a little extra convenience in the kitchen and it’s sort of selfish to expect your grandchildren to foot the bill.

My inlaws don’t care, by the way, and have said as much to me.

In No Particular Order, Why American Medicine is Doomed

1. Legal depredation

2. Out-of-control, self-perpetuating, self-enriching bureaucracy.

3. The insane paperwork that would make a Babylonian scribe shake his head in disbelief.

4. Lack of Electronic Medical Records…the only thing worse being the current crop of electronic medical records; I’d rather and more quickly lithograph my notes after etching them on brass plates.

5. The heavy and ignorant hand of our politically-motivated Coulrocratic Government; they are all a bunch of clowns.

6. Fraud, sweet fraud…lovely fraud of which Medicaid is the ne plus ultra.

7. Younger and younger patients with more and more diseases of the kind we only used to see in the elderly…we are regressing to the dark ages except where ferocious Norsemen once marauded we now have early onset hypertension, diabetes, and childhood obesity.

8. All-you-can eat Chinese buffets; I stopped going after I saw a woman whose chair groaned in protest as she lowered her vast bulk before a plate that looked like a science fair volcano.

9. The insanity of futile care, the ICUs full of the living dead,

10. Cowardly physicians like me who let it happen; our various colleges and professional societies with even less fortitude.

Where the Money Is

As sports are our nation’s state-sponsored religion, the corruption in it is as inevitable as it is horrific and we have not heard the end of the Penn State pedophilia scandal.  Just like the Catholic church with its cadre of rogue priests, no doubt similar revelations are coming about coaches from other schools and other programs.

When asked why he robbed banks, the infamous bank robber Willie Sutton matter-of-factly replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”  Pedophiles are drawn to sports similarly because that’s where the little boys are.

Joe Paterno is not a hero.  He knew perfectly well that his assistant coach was a pedophile and chose to do nothing.  I understand that doing the right thing comes at a price but that’s why it is often so difficult…although the rape of young boys does not seem to be that thorny a moral issue.  Yet, when weighed in the balance against lucrative television contracts, prestige, adulation, and a place among our undeserving elites the fate of a couple dozen boys was nothing to him.  He is not a fallen hero but a squalid fraud and a warning against placing your faith in the corruptible.

It’s just a fucking game.