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December
14
2017

Get The Rope, Pitchforks And Torches
Karl Denninger

This is the sort of article that ought to get you digging around in the garage for what the American people seem to forget they have: Pitchforks, torches and rope.

There is one simple and easily actionable approach that each of us could take to try to wrest control over health policy decisions away from the lobbyists who now control it with little effective counterbalance and put it back in the hands of our patients, who should be powerful shapers of such decision making.

This is a short excerpt from an article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) on a conversation they urge doctors to have with you.  The gist of it?  Obamacare and forced cost-shifting in general is something you should demand more of from politicians.

Now let me note something for the record:  The AMA, which of course is the last three words of the title of that journal, has just 15% of practicing physicians as members today.  This was 75% in the 1950s.  Yet the "association" has never had it better when it comes to its finances.

How is this possible?

The AMA makes most of its money today on the forced subscription to the ICD and CPT codebook sales that both change every year and become more complex.  The association has created for itself a monopoly with the force of law in that government-funded health care providers must use it, and yet they're a private organization.

This sort of racket should lead to them being charged for violating 15 USC Chapter 1, which I note does not have an immunity for "non-profit associations" -- including the AMA.  Indeed there is a pretty-clean argument to be made that the AMA's forced subscription model is to a material degree responsible for the ramping cost of health care and the 10:1 or greater (in many cases as high as 30:1 if some statistics are to be believed!) administrator hiring rate .vs. nurses and doctors.  I note that said administrators never provide one second of care to an actual person during their entire career.

There is not one word in that JAMA article about health care cost. The fact of the matter is that we overpay by at least 80% in this country for health care and it is directly due to these scams and outrageous actions, all of which ought to be investigated and prosecuted that are responsible for it.

Yet the army of lobbyists deployed by the likes of the AMA and pharmaceutical industries continue to argue for more and more to be taken from you and given not to actually provide care but to prop up pricing and fund overhead that is utterly unnecessary and does not give one second of actual medical help to one person.

It's not just them either.  Now we've got two Catholic "non-profits" that want to merge hospital management and create the largest US hospital chain in the country.  This too is clearly a matter for 15 USC Chapter 1 but again you can bet there will be zero attention from Jeff Sessions or Donald Trump to it just as there was not from Obama's administration either.  These so-called "Catholic" organizations are Satan on earth and perfectly happy to asset-strip you to your underwear while waving religion around as a shield.

Never mind Congress which is all set to play along.  Rather than demand that Jeff Sessions find his balls (and handcuffs) Ryan is claimed to be looking to screw retirees.  I remind you that were we to fix the medical monopolies nobody but the abject poor would require Medicare at all since with an 80% reduction in cost the 20% you pay now would cover the whole thing!  Instead we get this sort of screed and screech fest from the media -- this time from Faux Snooz.

Finally, if you're a Trump supporter you've been had.  I told you that was going to happen, it did happen and thus you are the worst of the lot, especially those of you who are literally on your knees performing fellatio on Twitter and elsewhere.  This President promised to put a stop to all of this crap in the medical industry during the entire Presidential campaign and yet literally the day after the election that promise disappeared.  Instead of holding him to that promise under threat of impeachment or worse, which in the case of a threat to the nation's economy that will trash same is clearly called for, you are instead pleasuring that President daily.  Those of you in this camp either need to get off your damn knees and hold Trump accountable now for his satanic lie or you deserve the worst of what is to come and I fully expect that you will get it long, hard and dry.  As I've pointed out a one sentence bill would instantly stop a huge percentage of the abuses and meet Trump's campaign promise.  Why are you blowing the President instead of shoving a pitchfork in his face and demanding that he take the position that Congress either pass this one-sentence fix now -- which I remind you he promised to do if you elected him President -- or he's going to veto everything that comes across his desk until it does? 

In short the question is will Americans find their pitchforks, torches and rope or will they go along with this latest scamfest and be rendered not only broke but dead besides?

Time's up on thinking about it; you now need to act or suffer the consequences.

 

Mr. Denninger, recent author of the book Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World, is the former CEO of MCSNet, a regional Chicago area networking and Internet company that operated from 1987 to 1998. MCSNet was proud to offer several "firsts" in the Internet Service space, including integral customer-specified spam filtering for all customers and the first virtual web server available to the general public. Mr. Denninger's other accomplishments include the design and construction of regional and national IP-based networks and development of electronic conferencing software reaching back to the 1980s.

He has been a full-time trader since 1998, author of The Market Ticker, a daily market commentary, and operator of TickerForum, an online trading community, both since 2007.

Mr. Denninger received the 2008 Reed Irvine Accuracy In Media Award for Grassroots Journalism for his coverage of the 2008 market meltdown.

 

 

 

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