Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Healthcare and Grand Unification






My friend Mike Murdock asked why the DMV is in charge of organ donors. That gave me an idea what they should do to socialize medicine in the United States.
First, nationalize all state Department of Motor Vehicles. This will ease the difficulty of a national ID, which will double as your medical insurance card. Then, fuse the national DMV with Healthcare and the Postal Service. Hear me out on this.
There is already a post office in every zip code. Think of the impact on Man Made Global Warming you'd have by reducing both driving distance and numbers of stops. You'd save money in hiring, too..... The standards of the AMA for physicians and nurses will have to drop a lot as they are identified as the main cause of spiraling healthcare costs, wages are dictated by the government, and those professions no longer attract our best and brightest.
An already identified pitfall of socialized medicine is, once it's free demand will skyrocket. Now that hospitals and DMV are the same entity, you could instantly apply the confidential morbidity rules that take away driver's licenses of those deemed medically unfit to operate a motor vehicle. The threat of losing one's license, and fear of the bureaucracy involved in getting it back, will discourage hospital visits. (You're going to have to walk home. We've conveniently provided you with a mailbag---please deliver this mail on your way)
Think of the savings for all the shipping costs. The papertrail for healthcare under a socialized system will skyrocket, and labwork will be farmed out to a deserving third world nation, so there will be a huge need for delivery services.

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All recovery and physical therapy will involve the sorting and delivery of mail. Illness and injury go up around the Holidays, exactly coinciding with the need for more mail services. We'll get Al Gore to do a movie on the health benefits of sorting, and even delivering, the mail; (few of you realize Al Gore has as much experience with the postal system as he does with Global Environmental issues)
Best of all--your voting records can be tracked. You might come in to mail a package; your voting record will be compared to the government's needs, and an assessment matrix will show if your vital organs should be re-distributed to others that vote with more sensitivity. You signed your organ donor card, after all. DMV said so. People often say their health is their greatest asset and health is often unfairly distributed among the well to do. The only way to make things fair again is to not only redistribute wealth, but redistribute health also.

1 comment:

Tina said...

I probably mentioned it before, but I'm not sure. I read a mystery short story years ago about a guy who'd escaped from prison because in the future, prisoners sentenced to death would have their organs sold to help offset the cost of prisons.

The whole story went on to relate that rich people figured out that they could kill off criminals to get their organs themselves, so they changed the laws. More & more crminals got sentenced to death so more organs were available.

The protagonist's crime?

Speeding.