Aquarian Weekly 12/3/03 REALITY CHECK
HARBINGER OF THE FLOWER PEOPLE
It’s official; the Boomers will doom us all.
The Medicare Bill has sealed the deal.
This latest atrocity funneled by your congress and peddled by this pitifully mediocre president has handed the blank check to the majority of Americans careening towards retirement, and by the time these haughty fuckers are done with Social Security and Medicare and every other ounce of bureaucratic fat, we’ll be left scraping sticky change from the curb.
It’s over.
There have always been fears and debates about the terrible bushwhack the hippies will eventually wreak on the fumes of The New Deal. It has now become a sickening reality.
There have always been fears and debates about the terrible bushwhack the hippies will eventually wreak on the fumes of The New Deal. It has now become a sickening reality.
Benefits for everyone! Yay! Let’s coddle the Flower People until they suck us completely dry and we’re scrambling for provisions alongside Mad Max in the desert. I thought these people wanted to live in communes and fiddle with anarchy and drop homemade chemicals until the Grateful Dead sounded good. Are we to perpetually hold their hands until we end up in the shitter?
The federal budget deficit is at a whopping $374 billion and counting. We’re basically a nation at war teetering on recession with a bevy of tax cuts kicking in. And now we learn that over the foreseeable future we will fund every penny of these fantastic new benefits from our coffers?
It’s important to note that wanting everything, but paying for none of it, has put California on the brink of economic collapse and prompted the ushering in of a barely articulate pop icon into governance.
Look, I’m not going after the 40 million elderly and disabled who use Medicare currently. These people actually vote. Politicians are only interested in appeasing voters, and a preponderance of youth in this country could not give half a fart about voting, so they lose out.
But what of the rest of us who are staring down two decades of a financially bruised federal government that has been fueled on these benefits for three-quarters of a century and will have its hand out when its our turn.
Just the thought of it makes me want to exhume Timothy Leary right now and kick him in the balls on principle.
The Bush people needed a victory somewhere, somehow. This is it. Give the store to the elderly, call it a win and forget the Iraqi mess. And, best of all, it doesn’t matter until 2006, and by then it’s already second term, baby!
Meanwhile it’s party time over at the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies and the plethora of doctors who frequent the same money pile, sipping Champaign Coolies on the back nine and making secret deals on what drugs to peddle to a nation hopped up on so much legal narcotics we’re ready to salute anything.
This isn’t about helping the elderly or making good on campaign promises. This is about feeding the machine. Those elderly who care have been getting breaks with Canadian prescription drugs for years. The power of pharmaceuticals rivals tobacco, oil and beer right now. What they say goes. And they can’t have cheap drugs being purchased on the Internet when there are locals to be prized.
This bill has effectively taken the onus on ceilings for prescription drug prices out of the hands of the government. This is good. But now private insurance companies and drug middlemen, known as Pharmacy Benefit Management Companies, will merrily continue to hike the world’s highest drug prices into spheres best understood by honest South American drug runners, who have to actually work for a living.
This is not good.
Did anyone notice the spike in pharmaceutical stock prices on 11/24?
I don’t have the space to get into the imminent dangers of this bill to existing HMO’s or how the AARP lobbies have manipulated benefit packages for years or what this could mean politically to Bush or any other useless pustule running around the capital. Read the Wall Street Journal for that noise. But make no mistake, this is about who is eventually going to pay for these bones being tossed to the elderly in exchange for votes.
Let that read you and your children.
And what are we paying for?
Someone else’s overpriced medicine.
Hope there’s some left for the rest of us.
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