 
Privatization-Nationalization Pendulum. 
whitehouse photo
Medicare and Social Security Bait and Switch.
"With our rubberstamp congress it's as easy as taking candy from a baby."
Tony Blair likes Bushie methods. Blair is doing the same Bushie things to the British health care system, the British court system and the British Parliament itself. Promise them anything but, give them Bait and Switch, right Tony?
A perfect example of PNP, British style:
Has anybody ridden the train to work in Britain in the last decade? How about recently? The BBC says it won't get better any time soon. What about ten years from now? Only one in ten trains will be late by that time, it is hoped. So much for punctuality. The PNP had swung at least four times. Each time truckloads of cash had been given away, either to relinquish control or to take control of the railways. The explicit objective each time had been to make the darn thing work right. Each time some folks pocketed truckloads of cash. Each time promises of improvement remained unfulfilled.
Free Market propagandists always substitute the word let for make. They have said that if John and Jane Q. Public or educational institutions, etc., wish to have what should already be theirs by rights as birthrights, let them pay for them. What they have always meant was, of course, make them pay for it. Everyone has known for years that Bushies have wanted to bilk Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid completely by "privatizing" them. The first phase was a continual shrinkage of the budget, the Defunding Phase. Then the Crisis Phase. Now after the preventable tragedy, they have their chance. Oh goodness! What to do now? Privatize it. Make them pay. Bush's same old relentless pattern; break it, then stomp on it, and then pretend to fix it.  
The Lord giveth? Maybe, but the Shmokhead also taketh away.
The Privatization-Nationalization Pendulum, or PNP, is an interesting sociopolitical phenomenon. The PNP doesn't swing with a natural rythm or periodicity. As you can see from the representative animation above, the pendulum is manipulated from a centralized source. Services which are needed by all citizens are privatized and nationalized and privatized and nationalized with an apparently haphazard periodicity which seems to defy logic. Unless of course one is paying attention. If one were paying attention one would notice some obvious and well-publicized constants. The swings of the pendulum, either toward nationalization or toward privatization, are always preceded by a crisis. Such a crisis is financial in nature. Such a crisis is always a crisis which could have been prevented. There are entities which recieve enormous financial benefits of each pendulum swing. The rats on the treadmills always find themselves running a bit harder after a pendulum swing to pay for those enormous financial benefits which accrue to special entities. Sometimes silly plebes vote for a pendulum swing. They probably wouldn't vote in favor of letting someone hit them on their heads with a hammer; that would be too obvious. But most of the time pendulum swings are imposed without a plebiscite. Wouldn't it be nice if people of different nationalities compared notes on the PNP?
People in South American countries and European countries could tell Americans a lot about their immense dissatisfaction with the PNP. Wouldn't it be nice if people lived longer? Possibly.
If people lived to be 150 years old they would be able to stay on the treadmill longer. They could provide much more wealth for the richest 1,000 families in America. Especially for the newest of the nouveau-super-riche Bushes. Warren Buffet said it quite right, "The rich are different." The Bush diaspora are in fact, Born to Bilk Bushies.
On the other hand maybe 150 years would give the babes from whom the candy has so easily been taken enough time to wake up and smell the coffee. It's possible that within a lifetime of 150 years even the dumbest rats on the treadmill would come to understand the pattern of PNP periodicity. The PNP has swung marking the disappearance of more of the American birthrights without so much as a whimper from the rats on the treadmills. The Loyalty Enforcer wants the Social Security jackpot. That's why he has virtually bankrupted the government for the rest of your lifetime. That way he can say we can't afford not to privatize Social Security. He hasn't made it official yet, you say? Everybody knows Bush wants it. His rubberstamp congress is waiting to give it to him. There are no moderate Republicans. And what Democrats there are are actually fawningly servile sycophants.
As you should be before too much longer...
Because it's too late now to do anything.
Except to say...
We told you so, we told you so, we told you so. Free Medicine, Ho, Ho, Ho, William F. Buckley, June 24, 2003
"If there were a drug that required politicians to divulge the true reason for
their legislation, that drug should be free, and compulsory."
Who could disagree?
Buckley writes about how rules and regulations which determine how health care may be paid for are inherently confusing if not inherently corrupt. If you agree with the basic theme, that the preponderant problem is how to pay, the whole article makes great sense. The government is in the process of finalizing the hand over of responsibility for providing American citizens with health security to corporations. Are corporations bad? Not necessarily, were they utilized as originally conceived and intended. Corporations are a pillar of American society. Corporations are well suited for many purposes. Health care security is not one of them. Ask anybody from Norway, Finland and other northern European countries, Japan, etc., whether they would like to trade in the real thing for the ersatz American version of health care security. They read the papers. They know the score. They know preposterous when they see it. They'd laugh out loud. They have true universal access to the best medical technologies known. The individual patient is always the primary responsibility. Always. Health security corporation is an oxymoron which virtual morons fail to percieve and which American legislators fail to admit. Corporations can be here today, gone tomorrow. If not gone tomorrow, corporations have to be forced to accept responsibilities they do not wish to accept. Corporations are constantly raising prices and wiggling out of responsibilities. True, there are cases, all too rare in which responsibilities can be pinned down after lengthy, costly litigation. But the chance to make headlines does not equate to health care security. Primary corporate health care responsibility is never you, the individual patient. Never. Corporations are an ingenious device for obtaining profit while avoiding responsibility. Corporations introduce much more of the variable element of chance into health care security equation than they provide in the form of security. They make health care a gamble. Will you be able to pay and pay enough? Will you get the right company? Will you get the drug? Will you get the coverage? Will you get the procedure? Will you ever get health care security? Now the answers to these questions involve more unnecessary risk than ever before. Get used to it because it's going to get far more risky. 
A metaphor for action based upon misplaced faith.
A description of Health Care Bait and Switch.
Click for longer animated logo
Is the problem how much or who is paid? Or is the problem health care security? Mr. Buckley falls in line with everybody else and paints the problem as the former. Scandinavians and Japanese know it is the latter.
Bush's health care security bait-and-switch does away with security and makes health care a gamble.
What is gambling?
It's a way of getting nothing for something. Who paid for the hundreds of billions looted from the US Treasury? That's how this whole preventable crisis was created. Latest Developments
Many Doctors Withhold Info From Patients
(AP) -
"Nearly one in three doctors reports withholding information from patients about useful medical services that aren't covered by their health insurance companies, and the number may be on the rise..."
Silent Doctors... 
The conditions are different now than they were in Rome in 743 BC. Still, Cicero's words provide food for thought viz. the state of affairs in the government of America:
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious, but it
cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less
formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But
the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly
whispers rustling through all the alley, heard in the very halls of
government itself.
For the traitor appears no traitor he speaks in the accents
familiar to his victims and he wears their face and their garments
and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all
men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in
the night to undermine the pillars of a city. He infects the body
politic so that it can no longer resist."
Marcus Tullius Cicero, 743 BC  
Can you argue with success?
Bush's frogs-in-the-pot strategy is right on track. The semantic legerdemain of the consent manufacturing machine continues to be blatantly and unabashedly successful. Argue with the Loyalty Enforcer? Why bother. But as Horace asked rhetorically, "Could you help laughing, my friends?"
"Bush hailed the votes, and said he
would 'continue working closely' with lawmakers on a final compromise."
Story...
Continue working closely? Or continue threatening the unloyal?
"'We are one step closer to providing real health care security to seniors all
across the nation,' said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee."
Story...
What would be closer to the truth? "We are closer to providing real health care bait and switch."
In a democracy the word all sounds good. But look where he puts the word. Not all seniors. Rather all across the nation. All across the nation there are those who can purchase a Mercedes but not all can do so. If this guy were your physician what amusing circumlocutions might you be subjected to? Would you want him to perform surgery on any part of your body if you were a partner in a gay couple? An interracial couple? How far will the good senator Frist go in using his powerful positions to impose his party's weell publicized religious dogma on America? Hint: There are no moderate Republicans.
"'Competition, choice, the marketplace, these are the concepts that will save
Medicare for the coming decades,' said Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.
'Seniors will long remember if you vote for them today, but they will never
forget if you vote against them.'"
Story...
Can this fat cat be for real? This bill strips seniors of health care security by substituting corporate competition, corporate choice, and a corporate marketplace instead. What is a corporation? The famous Ambrose Bierce definition is that a corporation is "an ingenious device for obtaining individual
profit without individual responsibility."
"The Senate bill was centrist enough for Frist and Democratic Leader Tom
Daschle to support it.
'We simply can't allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good,' said
Daschle, although he warned Republicans not to include unacceptable
provisions in the final compromise bill."
Story...
Centrist? Good? Unacceptable?
Bush is so crooked, he could hide in the shadow of a corkscrew.
And darn proud of it.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson is the nation's leading advocate for the health and welfare of all Americans. He is the 19th individual to serve as Secretary of the department, which employs more than 60,000 personnel and has a fiscal year 2003 budget of nearly $503 billion.
$503,000,000,000
$503,000,000,000
$503,000,000,000
$503,000,000,000
That's $8,383,333 per employee!
That's $1796 per American citizen!
For that kind of money Universal Free Health Care could be provided to all. So where's it going?
hhs.gov/about/bios/dhhssec.html
Mirror mirror on the wall. Who's the dumbest of them all?
Good thing Americans aren't looking in the mirror on this one.
Study Shows Monkeys Resent Unfairness
by Alex Dominguez, September 17, 2003, AP
"Humans aren't the only ones who hate a bum deal, it turns out. In a recent study, capuchin monkeys trained to exchange a granite token for a cucumber treat often refused the swap if they saw another monkey get a better payoff, a grape. Instead, they often threw the token, refused to eat the piece of cucumber, or even gave it to the other capuchin after viewing the lopsided deal, said Emory University researcher Sarah Brosnan."
More...
When it comes to NeoCon Bait-and-Switch Americans, it would seem, aren't as smart as monkeys. So brainwashed are they by bogus NeoCon BS that whatever slop Bush throws in their trough, they just slurp it up. | 
