Divinest Sense

I hope BriVT is right about this - that this new Medicare debacle will affect so many millions of ordinary Americans that it will be impossible to ignore. This is truly a far-reaching crisis with staggering implications for our healthcare “system”. From a column in Newsday:

But Gottlich doubts this Congress or President George W. Bush will deal with the fundamental reason for these problems. As correspondent Margaret Warner said recently on PBS’ “NewsHour,” “There’s no standard government-designed plan” administered by Medicare. “Instead, enrollees have to choose from dozens of plans offered by private insurance, with different deductibles, co-pays and lists of authorized drugs.”
Some Democrats want to modify the privatization aspects of the law by having at least one standard plan run by Medicare. But that would mean competition for private companies from the more efficient Medicare system, which could use its purchasing power to drive prices down. The Republicans and the drug companies who bought them won’t hear of it.

Did anyone *really* think that Part D was going to improve anything? The congresscritters who voted for this piece of garbage must have just closed their eyes, gritted their teeth, put cotton in their ears, and mumbled to themselves, “well, it’s all for the sake of privatization and competition, which are theoretically good things…”

Despite whatever “big picture” rationale they made up to make themselves feel better, our legislators knew in their hearts that they were screwing the real, live, human individuals who depend on the government to get the medication they need. And they will hear about it. They won’t listen to young and healthy me, but they will be forced to listen to the millions of grandmas and grandpas whose lives are now in jeopardy, and the angry state officials who are emptying their coffers in order to keep the government’s pledge to the elderly poor.

Another hapless denizen of bizarro-world unmasked, tarred, and feathered by the relentless guardians of Wikipedia. Oh, why must we insist on the facts when the fiction is so much more entertaining? - Andy Carvin has the story.

A young man identifying himself as Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, 5th Duke of Cleveland, visited Stillwater Area High School in Minnesota three times trying to enroll as a transfer student. He had a “spot on” English accent and insisted on being called “your grace.” Students at the school had their doubts, so they began researching him on the Internet…student research exposed Gardner to be their so-called Duke of Cleveland; he also happened to be a 22-year-old registered sex offender.

All right, so it’s definitely for the best that the erstwhile 5th Duke of Cleveland was discovered in his lie, as he could have endangered the lives of high schoolers with his sexual predation. But think about it - with our pasts and personal histories becoming increasingly transparent, does anyone really have a chance to retire with dignity by becoming a harmless fringe-dwelling eccentric, without some plodding fact-checker pointing out to everyone that you are really just a former stock manager for Safeway, and not a terribly good one? I guess my life plan of moving to the backwoods of Kentucky, changing my name to Costanza, Duchess of Umbria, and collecting dried-out deer droppings in various-sized velvet-lined boxes and breathlessly showing them off to visitors as the “family jewels” will have to be modified a bit.