“Have you taken a good look at some of these big, fat motherfuckers walking around? Big, fat motherfuckers. Oh, my God. Huge piles of redundant protoplasm lumbering through the malls like a fleet of interstate buses. The people in this country are immense. Massive bellies. Monstrous thighs and big, fat fucking asses. And if you stand there for a minute and you look at one of them, you’ll look at one of them and you begin to wonder: how does this woman take a shit? How does she shit? And even more frightening: how does she wipe her ass? Can she even locate her asshole? She must require assistance. Are paramedics trained in this field? And standing right next to her, of course, with a plate full of nachos and a mouthful of pie is her clueless fucking husband Joe Six Pack. With his monstrous swollen beer belly hanging dangerously out over his belt buckle, this guy ain’t seen his dick since the Nixon administration. And if you stand there and you look at the two of them. You begin to wonder to yourself: do these people fuck? Is this man actually capable of fucking this woman? It doesn’t seem structurally possible that these two people could achieve penetration. Maybe they’re in that ‘Cirque du Soleil’ or something.” -George Carlin
At the risk of stating the obvious, American healthcare is a sham.
And an abject failure at achieving its stated objective of, you know, improving health — if not its true unspoken goal of generating lifelong customers (patients) by keeping them sick and sad.
There’s a little ditty I like to tell foreigners when the medical system comes up in casual conversation one way or another.
Back in 2012, I was recklessly riding my bicycle at night on the Silver Comet Trail (a former rail bed turned into a bike/running trail) in Smyrna, Georgia. This was in my heavy drinking days, and I had just done a beer run to the Phillips 66 for a couple of bottles of Olde English malt liquor.
In the nighttime blackness, I didn’t see one of those poles they put on the track to keep cars off, which is I guess one of the safety reasons the trail’s technically closed at night. But I was a rebel, and it was a way more direct route to and from my house to the gas station than taking the streets (the roads in the Atlanta area being drawn in cursive).
Anyway, I wrecked and broke my wrist, which I immediately knew to be the case, having broken bones in the past. I pushed my twisted bicycle home with the good hand and stopped several times to drink some Olde English on the way to kill the pain.
When I went to the emergency room to confirm that I had indeed broken my wrist, the doctor looked at it for about ten seconds, ordered a single x-ray, sent the nurse in to tell me I broke it, gave me two painkillers, and told me to go see somebody on Monday, this being the weekend.
The whole trip took about thirty minutes.
A week later, I got a bill for $10,000 (I didn’t have insurance).
One x-ray, two pills, thirty minutes: $10,000.
Somewhere, that medical debt is still out there.
No one who’s not American believes me when I tell them this story.
I assure them it’s true.
But you probably believe me, as I’m sure you have your own tales of American medical scamming.
“The U.S. healthcare system ranks last among 10 advanced economies, according to a report released today by the Commonwealth Fund.
One of the report’s key findings is that the U.S. lags behind its international peers considerably in terms of health system performance — yet the U.S. is also “an outlier on health care spending.”
In 1980, U.S. health expenditures were “comparable to outlays in Sweden and Germany (8.2% of GDP).” However, since then, “the U.S. has far outpaced other nations, spending more than 16 percent of its GDP on health care in 2022” — a figure “predicted to exceed 20 percent by 2035.”
According to the report, this finding reflects the “enduring U.S. dilemma of spending vast amounts for generally poor results — the very definition of a low-value health system.””
“We compare the health systems of 10 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States…
In the aggregate, the nine nations we examined are more alike than different with respect to their higher and lower performance in various domains. But there is one glaring exception — the U.S… Especially concerning is the U.S. record on health outcomes, particularly in relation to how much the U.S. spends on health care.”
$4.5 trillion per year — 16.5% of the entire GDP — to live sicker and die faster than any modern nation.
RFK Jr. has been on the warpath for years, and now he has MAGA on the team. So at least there’s a modicum of non-delusional hope there.
On the other hand, how often do Mamala Harris or Tim Walz talk about it?
Indeed, the only time they ever seem to mention health or healthcare at all is to promote drive-thru abortions on demand, in the same way that the only context in which they ever talk about the environment is carbon offsets. These are small, narrow-minded puppets who don’t know or care about anything their donors haven’t instructed them to.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
