How did they know the coon was rabid?

I put the head in the freezer and a guy from the state health department picked it up the next day for testing.

How do you get the head off a coon?

I used a guillotine. OK, I didn't. I probably chopped it off with an ax, but how would I know? It happened before yesterday, which is farther than my memory goes.

I had a run in with a coon. Damn things were stealing my outside cats food. They ran up a tree when I went outside to try to clip them with my .22 and I managed to take one out. It went straight in the trashcan.

But my brother in law the doctor says that if they come around your house, the medical community (and people) should assume they're rabid. They're naturally shy animals. So that explains the rabies shots.

Although down in South Carolina, a freshly shot coon goes for $5.00 in the country areas. Lots of people still eat them down there.

Yeah, if you can file papers showing that your fortune is not greater than $250 million, as Romney did, you can give other candidates shit about their haircuts — I mean, ignore the issues of health care costs to real people.

The Massachusetts plan appears to me to be a giveaway to insurance companies. We need the real deal, government-run single-payer. Cheaper and more effective, as Jerry says. I don't want insurance, I want health care. What's so tricky about that?

Back in the Clinton health-care debate, you heard the question, "But do you want government running your health care?" Damn right I do, because the only alternative I can see is insurance companies.

Worst Companies in the World:

1. Weapons manufacturers
2. Drug companies
3. Insurance companies
4. Banks

IMHO…

The thing about it all that never ceases to amaze me is that business in this country not only tolerates our broken health care system, but seems to actively go out of it's way to perpetuate it. But I'm constantly amazed by American business. Their are waves of companies caught up in the current lending scandals - someone with even a modicum of education in economics had to be a blind hog not to have realized that when the prime rate went to 1% and the mortgages were being sold like crack cocaine, all these adjustable rate mortgages set on "prime plus" were going to blow up eventually. And yet every day I read about another group of CEO's, hedge funds, or another public company or bank caught up in the mess. And of course we have General Motors and Ford as examples of companies which seemed to have executives who literally drove their companies into the ground with wrong headed business decisions lasting decades.

I do understand why business leaders can't seem to get it; as Jerry describes it, the religion of capitalism does blind a lot of these guys to reality. But I got the same indoctrination they did in business schools and never bought buy into all of the myths that are floated out there. Although I'll admit that certain books, like Thurman Arnold's "the folklore of capitalism" allowed me to rethink quite a number of my fundamentalist views on the the religion of capitalism.

Business leaders in America, and particularly small business guys, usually do want to provide their employees with health care. I'm just amazed that there aren't enough business people with smarts enough to start their own strong lobbying groups to change the current system and take down the mob guys shaking them down with their drug and insurance scams.

I do understand that a legitimate argument can be made that we can't change the current system overnight. If we adopted single payer universal health care in one fell swoop, millions of people would not have a job tomorrow. Which no one wants. But then which is worse, millions not having a job or millions not having health care?

On the other hand, my theory of how whole swaths of our economy should be modeled, particularly health care, is based on a model that we once had in this country. And this system could be created within our health care system. A socialist modeled system competing with a capitalist modeled system. And we've done if before. Example: The utility industry. In the south where I grew up, we had some public utilities run on a capitalist model. Others set up during the Roosevelt Administration based on a socialist model. And they operated right next door to each other. There, the Rural Electrification systems that Roosevelt set up might be operating in an area in several counties right next door to a capitalist public utility. This "dual system" created a competitive environment in which the capitalist utility couldn't get too inefficient and vice versa - the utility run on the socialist model was right next door and if the rates went up too much, the managers of either system would have been confronted directly with their lousy management by voters. The system seemed to prevent either system from contracting either of the diseases that each system is often criticized for. The capitalist utilities had gotten an injection that prevented the disease of greed from take over. And the socialist system had gotten an injection that prevented slothfullness and the tendency of big bureaucracies to grow into large, wasteful and inefficient entities.

No one here in America argues for such a system, but I've studied the European systems and none of them seem to be pure socialist style systems-they are all hybrids of some kind.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Care

(which also has some good statistical information).

I do think that we do have to remember that we can't change the current system overnight. Othersise we'd have a huge number of unemployed people who currently work in the insurance industry and other business involved in our rotten health care system who would suddenly find themselves without "work". (not that the fundamentalist religious guys who go to the Church of Capitalism have ever cared about that one iota). Alright, I'll admit it. I do attend the church of capitalism. It's just that I go to the liberal Presbyterian church of capitalism and am not a Holy Roller guy at all, unlike the fellows in charge of the country right now.

Buck wrote, "If we adopted single payer universal health care in one fell swoop, millions of people would not have a job tomorrow."

Which people are you talking about? Medicare outsources claims work, mainly to local Blues AFAIK, and in a single-payer universal system, a lot of the clerks and some management types would be good catches for the expanding claims contractors.

A supplemental health insurance system would no doubt flourish under a universal plan, a la Medicare supplements, and employ the health insurers' sales and marketing people.

I foresee a lot of unemployment among billing clerks for hospitals and medical practices, but not millions of jobless, and the unemployment would be evenly spread across the country and, I hope, readily absorbed by an expanding economy.

Decent big employers would pare their employee benefits departments because they wouldn't be shopping insurance companies for the best deals or arguing claims on behalf of employees, but that's not a whole lot of unemployed, even if they weren't assigned new jobs within the same business.

So what likely unemployed workers am I missing?

Joyful, I'm not arguing that the long term benefits wouldn't be positive. I just believe that there are thousands of people currently working in the inefficient system we currently have who would no longer be needed. Presumably most of those folks could move on to doing something that actually contributes to society. But it's like the process of closing military bases after the cold war ended has been. That's been extremely disruptive in the short term for many communities. It's going to be a painful process for those workers whose services will no longer be needed. So we're on the same page, I just thing that we differ on how many people in the current system are running up the cost of medical care. I think that it's a pretty high number. I just don't think our medical care system costs twice as other industrialized nations solely because of profits. The process of denying claims requires a lot of people.

Although I paid ten dollars a pill this week for some medicine that used to cost me $25.00 for a whole bottle of about 30 pills. That does makes me wonder who's getting fat on all that extra dough.

Buck, I just don't think single-payer would put all that many people out of jobs, as I outlined above.

Jerry, wasn't Romney's legislation to require everyone in Massachusetts to buy private health insurance, yet the majority of the uninsured couldn't possibly afford the prices of even the skimpiest private plan offered? Wonder how that's working out, now that he's left town without actually implementing it.

Well Joyful, I guess that's where we both need experts. Because I'm guessing and I suspect you are too. I "feel" like I'm right but then somebody needs to run the numbers on this kind of question. I do know that quite often when I go in the doctors office, the drug reps waiting to see the doctor outnumber the patients or something close to it. Now I suspect these drug reps are pulling down at least 100 grand a year, maybe a lot more.

Let me step back and get slightly fictional here. Let's say I'm talking about some of my cousins in a state other than the one I'm from. One of my cousin's husbands is a children's doctor in a town of maybe 3500 people. And this guy is told he's an "expert" on ADD. So he prescribes that ADD medicine for kids, lots of it. And the drug companies tell him he's an expert on ADD, and since his ego is bigger than his common sense, he figures that in the town where he lives, which of course is the center of the universe, it's certainly quite possible to become an expert on ADD, even though statistically the sample in a town that size is so small that he can't possibly be an expert. (at least I don't think so) But the drug companies send him all over the country on junkets to speak to other doctors and have a lot of people on the payroll to reinforce the notion to him that he's an expert. So he prescribes more medicine. If you've got 150 kids in one county paying $150-$300 a month for ADD medicine, how much is this guy making for the drug companies? And how many kids really need that medicine?

Well, it probably takes a lot of people working for the drug companies to reinforce the notion in this guy's head that he's an expert on ADD. So the kids get their medicine. Maybe they all need it. What the hell do I know? I'm just an outside observer. But I'm never going to know much more and we aren't going to get our question answered unless the politicians start funding some research on this subject. The newspapers occasionally do some research on this subject, but usally their examination is only cursory. So we the people stay in the dark because all we can do is base our opinions on our own personal observations.

...but I think that it's a lot of regular people working for those Mobs - particularly the drug and insurance mobs. But I don't really know. I just know what I see.