Health Care: Time to Facebook Reality

Facebook recently surpassed Google as the most visited website in the world.

Accordingly, I am now using Facebook to gather all my information.

For instance, check out this nugget of wisdom about health care reform, which originated from God-knows-where:

"This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

"I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

"After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by NASA.

"I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to drop my kids off at the public school, and to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

"After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to various law enforcement agencies.

"And then I log on to the Internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how Socialism in medicine is bad because the government can't do anything right."

I could not have said it better myself.

Of course, conservatives reading the above are likely to miss the point, which is that we rely on the government all the time to protect our rights.

"Rights," in our society, are defined as that which we've decided all people should have, regardless of personal income. Things like roads, safety, and education fall into this category.

A hundred years ago, no one would have dreamed that access to doctors and hospitals would be a "right." You expected half your kids to die of typhoid, smallpox, or massive goiters induced by witchcraft, and you more or less accepted that, even if you were lucky enough to find a doctor, there was not a damn thing he could do about it, anyway.

Nowadays, if a man shows up at the emergency room with third degree burns, they treat him, even if he's broke. We've already decided that health care is a right.

Yet there are plenty of people who are not "broke," and still can't afford to hire their own oncologists. How do we pay for them?

The same way we should pay for all our other rights: by taxing the hell out of Google and Facebook.

Needles to Say....

People don't take me seriously when I say this, but I have experienced both a wisdom tooth extraction and a vasectomy, and trust me, the vasectomy is much more enjoyable.

What the two procedures have in common is they require being stuck in a sensitive location with a needle. And they can't make it an innocent-looking needle, either, with pastel-colored flower designs on it or something. No, it has to look like the Giant Sinister Mephistophelian Needle of Doom, all cold, metallic, and sterile, like some twisted experimental device developed by NASA during the Nixon administration.

But we must love the needle, because it contains the magic anesthesia that makes it possible for those who practice medicine to First, Do No Harm, and Second, purchase a spare Jeep Grand Cherokee. So, yes, the needle is on my Christmas Card list.

After the needle, the procedures are very different. The vasectomy involves a mild tugging sensation, accompanied by the brief smell of burning flesh. For 20 minutes, the surgeon will try to keep your mind (or perhaps his mind) off the fact that he is slicing and smoldering your extremely personal organs by chatting about the Red Sox or the weather or whatever else comes up.

Afterward, the doctor orders you to store a bag of frozen peas in your underwear and to have people wait on you for a few days. Every guy’s dream weekend!

The tooth extraction, conversely, involves violent jarring pressure and unpleasant crackling and other peculiar noises within your mouth. It takes less time, but because you have to hang your jaw open for longer than it takes to read the latest Harry Potter novel, the whole thing seems to last forever.

You will still be required to chat about the Red Sox, and you might even find yourself compelled to agree that Manny Ramirez is definitely, “Ghonghhha eeyyy oooouuuah.”

When I went to have a wisdom tooth out last week, there were complications. Let’s just say -- for the sake of avoiding a terribly graphic description -- the tooth in question was unusually well-attached to my skull, resulting in large portions of bone being ripped out through the roof of my mouth.

Observing this, my oral surgeon said, “Hm, we do see this from time to time.”

This is a dentist’s way of expressing animated surprise and alarm. When a dentist pounds his thumb with a hammer, as he jumps around, wincing and violently shaking his hand, he says, “Hm, we do see this from time to time.”

Anyway, as the surgeon was sewing me up (Another needle! Hooray!), he temporarily stowed some of the excess thread between two of my front teeth. Even as my nerves shook me and I felt myself wanting to pass out, I had to observe the irony, since I probably could have avoided the whole predicament with more consistent and vigorous flossing.

Instead, I’m now on Vicodin, which gradually turns me into a dizzy, drowsy drug addict, and antibiotics, which kill everything in my body smaller than my kidneys.

So, given the choice between repeating the vasectomy or repeating a tooth extraction, I would opt for the vasectomy, hands down.

So to speak.