A Nation of No Losers
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Your mistakes will be rewarded handsomely.
When you bought clunkers that you should not have, we give you $4,000.
When you had mortgage that you cannot afford, we’re going to bail you out.
When you lose your job, we extend your benefit.
When you do not have saving, we give you free health care.
When you have saving or a job, we punish you by taking your health care away.
Teenagers, the more babies you have, the more benefits you have.
Drunk drivers, no one will prosecute you as the entire jury are drunk.
All athletes are rewarded with millions for taking drugs.
However, we will strongly oppose to any foreign athletes doing same.
It is an America invention!
No other country lets their citizens owning guns to kill other citizens.
NRA and his puppet politicians will give you millions of funny ‘reasons’.
When any company fails, we bail it out.
The executives are rewarded with bailout bonuses for bringing down a company
We need you to vote and re-elect us in 4 years.
The children of today cannot vote, so let’s pass our debts to them.
—————–
The country above is US. However, I can write one on China. China and US are just two extremes. Hope each will choose middle ground.
Health care on China: If you do not pay, you die. Just one of the many examples I can think of. Depending on whether you’re a China basher or a China apologist (see another Letter), you will poke some fun on them.
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August 4th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
“Health care on China: If you do not pay, you die.” – um, have you heard of “wallet biopsy”? In US if you don’t have money, you die:
http://news.aol.com/article/hospital-deports-patient/586554
August 4th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Hi Charles, in US if you do not have money, you do not die as it is free for everyone with a low or no income.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:56 am
Tony, why are you posts invisible? this is strange, they don’t appear on the front page, are they secret posts? And the most surprising of all: if they don’t appear on the blog then how do we all end up here to do comments? The unsolved mysteries of FM.
Anyway, regarding the Health care system, both US and China totally suck. In this field only Europe rules, I say.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:02 am
Ahh, hold on a sec. I got it. I jusy realized your posts are on the “letters” section of the blog. The thing is I hadnt opened that page for months and I had forgotten its existence. I was entering your posts through the “recent comments” widget on the sidebar, and then I was puzzled when I couldn’t find the posts on the main page. nevermind…:)
August 5th, 2009 at 3:37 am
@ Uln: Been there, done that. 😛
August 5th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Hi Uln, it is just an invisible post from an invisible man (or a low-key person), haha.
The US’s health care system has 2 bad features:
1. high legal fees due to high reward in malpractices (10% to 25% depending on which report you read). The lawyers here will gladly assist you with all the info., haha.
2. taking care of illegals and the poor that could bankrupt the hospitals (Steve can expand this in his tribe in Calif. and see whether the hospitals will be reimbursed with IOUs – that’s why CA is a primitive tribe where no money has been invented, haha).
A lot of folks including some famous die waiting for treatments in Canada. EU handles it better but varies from country to country. German’s bill is about half that of US and then the government pay for most of it (so is Mass. if you meet the low income guideline.)
From my blog on health care: http://tonyp4joke.blogspot.com/2009/03/universal-health-care.html
I can help the US hospitals by outsourcing their services in Thailand (take a vacation at the same time), China…Everybody wins!
August 5th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
@ TonyP4: Last year my wife’s cousin’s son who is an M.D. paid 50% ($350,000) of his earnings in insurance coverage. That’s ridiculous. Most of what he’s doing is kidney stone removal which is not exactly life threatening.
One of the couples we know here are now living in Shenzhen and the wife had gone to the hospital in Pudong for some treatment while visiting Shanghai. She said it was as modern a hospital as she has ever seen, the doctors were all trained in the States and she paid very little as compared to the States. Of course she paid in cash.
Sorry Tony, we can’t outsource services to Thailand; can’t seem to leave the country when the airports shut down because people are trying to overthrow the government. We could outsource to China but the passengers would be quarantined if someone on the plane had a slight fever for fear of the swine flu so the really sick ones would die. Maybe we can send them all to Canada??? Oh, but then they’d all have to wait six months for treatment. How about Tijuana? Drugs are cheap but it’s hard to avoid being kidnapped. Seems like there’s no easy solution. 🙁
August 5th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Is that a poem? It doesn’t seem to rhyme. My guess is that Obama won’t ‘solve’ the heath care crisis either.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
How China checks incoming passengers for Swine Flu…
“Swine Flu Screening of United Flight 857: San Francisco to Shanghai”:
August 5th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Hi Pub_Ster, it is not a poem. I use one sentence for each idea, so even Obama can follow.
Hi Steve, of course there are solutions and that’s why Obama got the big buck.
– Thailand is still a solution. We just have to pay the protesters to let our plane in. Money talks. The biggest benefit is even if you die, you still go to heaven with Thai massage. You can also ask for two beautiful ladies, one for traditional and one for bodyly for the price of peanuts.
– China and Canada solution. In either case, you die so your disease is cured automatically.
– I like Mexico (it’s a rock throw for you). It really depends which one is more life threatening, the disease or the kidnapping.
With the communication, the most effective way is to use remote doctors. It will not help the airline industry but I can have a ton of jokes for lost translation like politically incorrectly cutting the right foot of a leftist…
August 5th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Steve, according to WHO here are the swine flu hotspots:
“The community-based transmission of the infection has been established so far only in Mexico and the USA.”
I don’t blame them for suiting up and taking temperature. If they let people off and quarantien them later, the news will be people are detained against their will, right violated, etc.
August 6th, 2009 at 12:34 am
@ Charles: I don’t blame them either. I posted this video because I thought it was a good idea. Because they can take the temperature from a distance, it’s not invasive and because they do it on the plane, it’s only a short delay.
August 6th, 2009 at 1:21 am
@Charles and Steve: I had a nice experience with the flu checking, which I’d like to recount. I came back from San Francisco last month (I live in Beijing) and first I filled out a form at the plane. Most of it is the typical legalese that a lot of people wouldn’t say even though it was true (Have you had fever for the last week?) but other parts were things like your contact information. I filled it out and handed it in at the airport. The temperature was checked with infrared cameras but I never saw them.
Then, for every day during the week, a doctor would call me at home and ask if I felt bad or had any symptoms. I would happily say there was no problem and hang up.
Later I met a Chinese friend who’d been in SF during the same period and he had been getting these phone calls too! I was (and am) impressed by the effort they put into this.
August 6th, 2009 at 5:08 am
@ Wukailong: It makes a lot of sense to me. Because there are so many people living in such close proximity to each other, an infectious disease can be very hard to control once you’ve let the proverbial cat out of the bag.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:03 am
“Maybe we can send them all to Canada??? Oh, but then they’d all have to wait six months for treatment. How about Tijuana? Drugs are cheap but it’s hard to avoid being kidnapped. Seems like there’s no easy solution.”
What about Cuba?
My guess is Obama will ’solve’ the US heath care crisis when he “traded 50 years of anger towards Cuba for an olive branch,” by annuling the Cuba sanction.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:14 am
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDate=2000-03-31
Excerpt from “A Letter of Apology to Elian Gonzalez from Michael Moore:”
“History is filled with many people who risked their lives escaping to another country because, had they stayed, they would have been imprisoned or killed.
That’s not what happened in the case of your mother. Her life was not in jeopardy. Her son — you — was in no danger. The worst that could be said is that, in Cuba, you were in jeopardy of receiving free health care whenever you needed it, an excellent education in one of the few countries that has 100% literacy, and a better chance of your baby brother being born and making it to his first birthday than if he had been born in Washington, DC.
August 6th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Hi HKer, there is some truth to it. However, it shows part of the picture only.
There are many Cuban refugees (99% of them are financial, not political), and Miami is pretty much a Cuba Town. 99% if not all do not want to return to Cuba. The reason is quite obvious.
Wash. DC is not a typical US city. Where ever there are high % of black, there are more violent crimes. Statistics do not lie, but I like to avoid the racial topic that I understand but am not politically correct for me to discuss here.
Cuban suffers a lot from US embargo besides the yearly hurricanes from nature. Hope it will be lifted and the country can benefit a lot from US tourists to start – I like to see Cuba myself. Staying side with China at a time China was not rich is part of their problem. There are some Chinese immigrants to Cuba and most are not doing well financially (compared to the migrants to other S. American countries).
August 6th, 2009 at 10:42 am
@#10
Another joke on remote doctor.
The English patient pleaded painfully, “Would you get me some one who can speak English?”
The “English interpreter” says, “If I not speaking English, what language I speaking?”
August 7th, 2009 at 12:19 am
# 18“If I not speaking English, what language I speaking?”
LOL 🙂 The current criteria for issuing ESL teaching work permit in South East Asia favors the citizens of – and preferably Caucasians of the G5s, i.e. UK-US-Can-Kiwi & Ozland. Tony, Your quoted line above applies to many “foreign” teachers who are descendants of these passe empires, now spreading their user-most-unfriendly variant gab worldwide. Cest Le Vive.
August 16th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
TonyP4:
I would be remiss not to mention Today is the 40th anniversary of “WOODSTOCK”
The movie, “Woodstock” will do more universally to explain America to China and the world than all the media information and missionaries on earth could ever do.
This is who we were in 1969, and whom we aspire our children will become in 2069. Woodstock epitomozes everything that is America in one concise simple 4 hour soundtrack, about a million kids smoking pot and hoping for life on earth to continue in spite of the news papers insistents that it might not. LOL!
I know I talk a lot and say very little. But if there is one thing I would say that is this simple statement.
imho: “Woodstock is America being reborn in the modern world after WWII.”
I am no longer young and trusting, those childish notions have given away to sad resignations. But even as our generations waning reflection of what we were fades into celuloid mist, our new generation of children continues to raise the banner of youthful folly and celebration of hope and life in spite of our adult admonitions to cease and desist.
Doubtlees they will grow old also and realize how foolisah they were to believe in such niaive thoughts as world peace and happy ever after. It is thsi absurd youthful profession of faith in tomorrow that silences the world and all the mighty voices which decry “NO!” loud enough to deafen.
Still echoing forth forever those silly hippies singing and dancing while Rome Burns speak mountains to the ocean of doubt, singing. “Yes we did!”
Did we know what we were doing? NO. But we did it anyway. The result was today it is China’s turn to provide the world with Woodstock 2010!
What are you waiting for?:)
August 16th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
1968 was my first year in US. I worked too hard in the summer (busboying and washing the slot machines) and I only remembered the Moon Landing. The good old 60s when US was the strongest country in the world and full of spirits. I came to US to study for these two reasons and hoping to escape from the communists before they took over Hong Kong.
US still can be the strongest country in the world but at a lesser scale. We cannot afford to fight 2 wars for example, we need to encourage the young to study the right skills and face reality… We need to solve the internal problems before we leave our home land.
Our leaders should look for the benefits of the country beyond 4 years. We should not been pushed to unwinnable and continuous wars by the Israels (we did not learn from Vietnam).
You did not talk too much and I enjoyed your free ideas – not too surprised if you told me you’re an old hippie 🙂
August 17th, 2009 at 2:52 am
@TonyP4: “US still can be the strongest country in the world but at a lesser scale. We cannot afford to fight 2 wars for example, we need to encourage the young to study the right skills and face reality… We need to solve the internal problems before we leave our home land.”
Have you read Fareed Zakaria’s “The Post-American World”? I’ve only read one chapter, but it seems interesting. He’s basically making that point – the US will still be the strongest country for decades to come, but it will no longer be the dominant country. I’m happy for that, but I sometimes also worry – wasn’t this the situation before WWI? The difference today is that the strong countries are much larger.
@jonkoot: Look out for Woodstock in China in 2020. That’s when it’s taking over the world! 🙂
August 17th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Hi Wukailong, My reading list besides on stock market and recently some Chinese books is pretty nil. I just use common sense. It is quite coincident that my friend told me that what I wrote on India (a reply post in FM) is the same summary of a book (Elephant and … from my memory).
Hopefully the leader will not rule by missiles but by good behavior that will get the ultimate respect from other nations.
August 17th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Does opium bring the powerful country down?
China about 250 years ago down? US today to some extend? Yesterday we blame British empire as the opium pusher, and now the rich, permissive country of US.
August 18th, 2009 at 2:50 am
Reading the comments it does make me wonder if the posters here have regularly seen doctors in the US or in China.
The US system is terrible for multiple reasons. The poor abuses emergency rooms because it’s the only place where patients cannot be rejected if they cannot pay. For those of us who do have insurance, we have to deal with the fact that at any given time we have NO IDEA if the set of tests recommended by our doctors will be reimbursed by the insurance companies or not. When my wife was sick last year, we end up getting paying close to $1,000 even after insurance because the insurance company (BCBS) ruled that they did not want to pay for one of the tests for reasons just because.
Finally, there is not a single centralized place to store personal health information. This means that if you move and switch to a new doctor/dentist you would need to run the tests over again. Doctors trying to get patient information from other doctors can be difficult. This produces tons of inefficiencies in the system.
The China system is not so bad, if you have money. If not you are screwed. You get the same problem with record keeping, however at least in China if I want to see a good doctor for a quick check up I can get one immediately provided that I am willing to pay a few hundred RMB. In the US I have to wait for about 2 months for an appointment because doctors want to go on summer vacations.
I don’t get the whole for-profit healthcare concept in the US. To maximize profit the insurance company would need to deny healthcare to as many people as possible. That to me is opposite of what a good healthcare system should be about. Also, currently the insurance companies dictate how much each doctor will be getting paid and how much premiums patients must pay. It’s acting like a bad middleman who wants to screw both its clients (patients) and suppliers (doctors). Due to the fact that companies select the insurance to most people, we don’t have a choice on insurance companies really. I don’t mind if we have a true free market/capitalist system where competition decides the rates for insurance and doctors, but right now that is not the case in the US.
August 18th, 2009 at 4:22 am
Here’s a laid-back discussion making fun of claims about Canadians dying waiting for healthcare:
http://geniusofinsanityworld.blogspot.com/2009/07/typical-republican-scare-tactic-youll.html
To me it sounds like an urban legend, or a bit like the Birther movement.
August 18th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Hi Hzzz, the health care system has been discussed and several countries have been compared several times. I have a summary in my blog http://tonyp4joke.blogspot.com/2009/03/universal-health-care.html
$1,000 is a small change than the thousands of dollars that the insurance companies do not want to reimburse and they can drop you altogether when they do not see profit on you. There are some merits in the public option that most likely will not be implemented this time.
There should be some way to limit seeing patients in emergency for non-emergency problems. It costs many times than regular visit. Different state has different rules to help the poor in health care. In MA, it is pretty much free (not dental) for low-income folks.
Recently, CA has free clinic for days. It was flooded with thousands of eager patients. When we cannot fix our basic internal problems, why we send army to fight wars overseas or explore to Mars?
Health care cost can screw up our economy by forcing us to ship jobs to countries where health care expense is minimal.
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