Your Health Care Provider is Not Working for You

I was to the girly site Quillette this morning reading a piece complaining about the lack of Wu Flu testing, written by a "single mother, writer, and secondary school teacher" and MFA.

I have been thinking, rather than complaining, about this, and as I have a telephone appointment with my Kaiser Permanente "Care Team" today I plan to ask what "the protocol" is at Kaiser regarding:

• Wu Flu testing
• (Hydroxy)chloroquine cocktail treatment at Kaiser
• (Hydroxy)chloroquine as a prophylactic

I wonder what the answer will be. Because I am on Kaiser as a Medicare Advantage person, which means that Kaiser gets a fixed fee from the gubmint for my care. And because I am an unreformed racist-sexist-homophobe I understand what that means. Kaiser is not working for me, but for the gubmint.

That's the problem with all gubmint programs. The folks you deal with aren't working for you. They are working for some darn politician. And the politician isn't working for you; he is working for the special interests that contribute to his campaign.

So. Why do we do it? Why am I, an unreconstructed racist-sexist-homophobe, signed up with Kaiser for my health care when I know that Kaiser works for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and not for me.

Well, I'll tell you. For me, it's because getting the very best of care and living to age 110 is not that important to me. I have two daughters and six grandchildren and I think I am the luckiest man alive. I really don't want my health provider spending billions to keep me alive till next time. And I don't want the bother of the complicated billing that comes with regular Medicare with a Medicare Supplement.

I realize that for most people gubmint health care is good because, 1) it is free, or freeish, and 2) it means that you don't have to make morally agonizing life-and-death decisions. The protocol does it for you.

I keep reading Instapundit Glenn Reynolds boosting the latest research to extend human life, and I always think that he's missing the point. The whole point of life is that the old'uns die off. It is not a bug that old people have dry skins and dicky hearts and dementia. It is a feature! The longer the old'uns hang on the more the young'uns have to wait around drumming their fingers with impatience.

Hello Nancy Pelosi, aged 80, and Joe Biden, aged 77!

And Donald Trump, aged 73, for that matter.

Really, if you ask me, headline politicians should be in their 50s. Of course, at that age they might be a teeny bit too energetic and get us into unnecessary wars. Or not.

Of course, the whole question of the woman's Culture of Complaint and its basis in the fact that women expect to be protected is fascinating to me.

Because I think that if women are truly to become liberated, the liberation will come when they emerge from out of their Culture of Complaint and stop expecting anything.

But, as I have written again and again, women don't really want that. They want to complain about stuff, and they want to cause trouble at work, but they really don't want to march towards the sound of the guns. And they expect to be protected.

There is nothing right or wrong about this. It is just the way that women are programmed, and you can see why when you study chimpanzees where the males do nothing except protect the borders of the troop's territory. The females do everything else, bearing and raising the baby chimps. That's the line of Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.

And that is the really important work: bearing and raising the next generation. And then getting out of the way, Nance and Joe!

Of course, I'm not complaining. Oh no!

But if you want to complain about Trump and the gubmint's response to the Wu Flu epidemic, go right ahead.

Just don't forget that the only people working for you are the people you actually pay, directly. Those are the people that might, just might, bend the rules a bit for you.

And paying your taxes to the IRS doesn't count.