Pattern for the Lady Di dress

I don't think you can blame this on YouTube. These contests are widely publicized and filmed. The requirements for participation are published and understood in advance. The actual winner and runner-up for this contest were also asked questions and were able to field them with aplomb.

I am not a fan of beauty contests. I applaud the inclusion of some criteria other than appearance, but I still find the whole concept somewhat unsettling. Women as objects.

But a great deal of money and effort go into the preparation of a contestant, and generally there is a stage mother behind it somewhere. It behooves them to be ready for the required parts of the contest, whether it be swimsuit modeling or responding to judge's questions.

I like the response, "George W. Bush vs. Miss Teen South Carolina."

--Karen D.

I had not seen that. But I have now. G.W. Bush for Miss Teen U.S.A. I'd give him my vote for that.

Iris

Pogonip wrote: ...

That Alberto Gonzales really should go "spend more time with his family."

Senator from the Mpls airport restroom, ditto.

And selected others in the top of the "administration."

HTH

--Karen D.

Yes, that's another example.

Recently, my DH was in London for a few weeks, and got sick. The hotel sent him to the local hospital clinic, where he was seen by a doctor and given prescriptions. He was not charged anything at the hospital, though he did have to pay the apothecary for the prescriptions. Thank goodness the hotel staff sent him there, because he was so sick he wasn't thinking clearly. Thanks, too, to the National Health for looking after a foreigner so well. They fixed him right up and he was able to enjoy his visit.

Thomas Jefferson and the others who designed this system had in mind a country of farmers and small business owners who would take a couple of weeks to meet and pass any necessary laws before going home to continue the family business. They would be appalled at our system of professional politicians.

Politicians don't run anything. That's work. They pass laws once they get elected, then leave it to the workers to make it work. The VA and Medicare are both working a lot better than the thousands of private insurance companies, even though the government attempts to oversee insurance to protect the public.

We just have several unnecessary layers of management, that could be eliminated if we were to take the profit incentive out.

I had a friend who has since moved who was having gynecologic problems and her gatekeeper PCP insisted that there was only one solution, which was something that violated her conscience, and he would neither suggest a different option nor refer her to someone else who would.

I have Kaiser Permanente, and granted, I have learned how to work the system, but it works for me.

OTOH, when my husband was >

Some insurance companies are very rigid about who their customers can see. With single-payer systems, all the providers are in the system so changing PCP is a lot easier. For 30 years now, my PCP has not been on the list for my insurance, but I've seen him anyway. Just before I retired, he went on the list for that provider....just as I left that program to go on Medicare.

My doc is from Canada, left there 30 years ago because he didn't want to work under National Health. Now, the insurance companies make his life and his practice much more of a nightmare -- he went from the frying pan into the fire.

There was a time when malpractice suits were unheard of. No doctor would testify against another, no matter what. Patients were kept in the dark about their treatments. Prescriptions were not identified, and were sometimes sugar pills.

That wall of secrecy was knocked down as it should have been, and may have gone a little too far the other way, holding some responsible for outcomes beyond their control. I think intoxication (drug or alcohol), maliciousness, willful indifference, and stupidity should be cause for action. But a sober, intelligent doctor doing the best he/she can with what is available, should not be sued.

The military used to have a bad reputation for medical services, except for places like Walter Reed. Fortunately, they have much improved now. Kaiser apparently runs the gamut from outstanding to marginal, depending on which center one uses.

I've noticed that Kaiser folks here love or hate them. No middle ground. Hanging out with older quilt gals that have a lot of medical problems I hear a lot about kaiser. It seems if you are with Kaiser for years they are a tad more workable. Learning the system makes a big difference. Folks that are in poor health just don't have the fight it takes sometimes for their system. My favorite Kaiser story is the guy that went in with a bad foot and got a barium enema and never got his foot attended to. Now I can't figure that out but you gotta laugh!

Taria

Pog> The military used to have a bad reputation for medical services, except

Poor guy! He never saw that one coming, did he?

A former co-worker was very upset with Kaiser because her father kept asking them about his symptoms and was put off with being told it was nothing to worry about. She didn't like what she was hearing, and brought him to visit her family in Arizona and took him to the Kaiser there, where he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer that had already spread into his brain.

Universal health care (ie government run or subsidised) works well in many other countries of the world so the US should be able to manage it.

The latest Michael Moore movie called "Sicko" covers just this topic and compares the US system with those in other countries. He may be a very controversial film maker but this movie is apparently getting very good reviews because there is less of him and more about the subject.

I would take Michael Moore with a grain of salt, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. ;-)

Greed seems to be the universal motive these days, the insurance companies make no secret of it, they're profit-making organizations. The benefit to people would be eliminating several layers of management, and thus, expense. The government can't proclaim greed as a motive like a business can, so there is a much greater likelihood of reaching a break-even point.

Most people you talk to in the U.S. really have no idea what a single-payer system would mean to them. There has been so much propaganda and misinformation spread about by the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance industry, and right-wing politics. There is one branch of politics that holds a belief that government should do nothing beyond protect our borders. One man explained to me that government should not own anything, including the White House, but all governments' needs should be met by renting from private industry. This is an extreme point of view. The other extreme, of course, is that government should own everything - socialism in the extreme, if you will. Neither extreme would benefit the population.

There's no question that our current system is broken. Medical offices are staffed with clerks that do nothing but deal with all the insurance forms and telephone calls that have become required. Some may remember when a doctor had a back-office assistant, and one on the front desk to answer the phone and greet arrivals. This only happens now if all the paperwork goes to a central department, as is done in one hospital complex here. Costs have sky-rocketed with all these additional employees, office space, file-cabinets, copiers and fax machines, etc. Practice of medicine has taken the backseat to business management.

When I was on Guam, someone's son got a tick on his inner thigh near his groin and they took him to the med center. The unprintable adjective of a corpsman took a 4 x 4 gauze sponge, soaked it in some foul-smelling disinfectant, slapped it on the spot where the tick was, covered it and taped it up, and told them to come back in a week.

A week later, the poor boy's skin was so raw he could not wear underwear or go to school, and when the U.A. of a corpsman took off the 4 x 4 the skin was red, raw, and chemically burned, but the tick was still hanging on tightly.

(We always used alcohol. Other people use salad oil. A few brave souls use heat.)