Karl Klockars

I’m no health care expert.  I’m barely capable of baking a pizza without burning the shit out of my forearm either, so I’m certainly no authority on my own health.  (Pretty sure I don’t have tuberculosis or anything like that, tho.  Paging Dr. Karl!)  And I’m not terribly brilliant on policy or anything like that, but I do know that some sort of health care reform has gotta come down the pike somehow.

I’m not worried that the government is going to ruin it totally.  For someone to take a system that’s already classified as “totally effed up” and move it either to “really, really effed up” or “slightly less effed up” isn’t much movement either way and that’s all  I really expect at the end of this debate.

What am I concerned about?  What would get me really cheesed off about this whole deal?  What would it take?  And what am I also absolutely positive is going to happen somewhere down the road?

The financial coverage of the hippy-dippy woo-woo alternative medicine doctor.

It’s nice to think that rocks and handwaving and crystals and chanting will make everything better.  Maybe it makes people feel happy for a little while.  And I know that we’re going to find ourselves paying for it down the road.  I haven’t searched through all 850-whatever-pages of the bill, but if I had a .pdf to poke through, I might take a look to see where “feng shui” and “vibrations” and “crystals” fall into it.

There was a time where I might have believed in alternative medicine.  I even got talked into doing a whole program on reiki healing back when I was doing my half-sober, never serious radio show.  It was pretty interesting stuff, all a bunch of bullshit, and after the interview I got to deal with a bunch of angry phone calls talking about how they thought the guest was dealing with demons and opening herself up to Satan and jazz like that.  Yeah, it was a fun show.

But now I’m not falling for any of it.  And the idea that we’d all be supporting a government plan financially, just to send Moon Beam over with a bag of rocks to lay on someone’s back and align their shakras, doesn’t sit well with me.  But it could happen.  It will happen.

Is there any guarantee that I’m not going to pay for someone’s acupuncture treatment?  What’s the likelihood that I’m going to be footing the bill for homeopathy treatments, and chiropractor’s adjustments, and aromatherapy?  I give it inside 2 years from the date of the bill’s signing from an expose story about some government clinic (likely in Northern California or Sedona, Arizona) doing goofy spiritual healing and taking tax money for it.  Guaran-damn-tee it.

I’m surprised it hasn’t come up in popular culture yet – why hasn’t Rush been ranting about the idea of the Government Bureaucrats using Our Tax Money to fund some terrifying voodoo witchdoctor shit to protect us from demonic possession or some Psychic Surgeon taking tax money to pull chicken livers from our torsos with a little slight of hand?  Cuz’ it’s coming.  Soon enough.

This is how a fundamentalist thinks, isn’t it?  Why people get so up in arms about tax money for abortions or illegal aliens?  See, I don’t have so much of a problem with spending money on things that have a result.  But the idea of spending money on things that are just pure bullshit?  Not a fan.  All the alternative medicine for me falls into the Bridge To Nowhere camp.

I’m looking forward to a country where we spend less on our defense budget than we do on taking care of ourselves and each other.  But since that’s never going to happen, I’m happy to at least push the bar a little bit closer.  Even if that opens up the door to rampant goofball spending on crap like herbal therapy and dog yoga.  It’s not the end of the world, I’m just preparing myself for it mentally.

Somewhere someone once said about Libertarianism, “Would you give up your favorite government program to get rid of the ones you don’t like?”  It’s a tough question, and everyone has their own picky little preferences – I wouldn’t ditch NASA for just about everything.  Nor the National Parks either.  It’s sort of a parallel of this – would you accept a plan you really think we need, knowing that it’s going to get bollocksed up with woo-woo idiocy?

Yeah, I would.

All of this is a long way of saying:  Everyone’s got concerns.  Everyone has worries.  Everyone on the right and the left are gonna get upset about this whole thing.  But I’m still glad we’re working on it.  I’m glad we’re doing it.  Even though there are parts that are going to make me mad.  Nothing is perfect.  It’s going to be okay.  Why?  Because all I need is a spinal adjustment, my back to be cupped with some hot jars, and some ground-up rhino horn and I’ll feel fine.