Treating military members as health care expenses

Posted: February 17, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in News/opinion
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Not a week goes by without someone remarking that I must be lucky to have military medical insurance. A few years ago I would agree that military health care, despite the ups and downs, was actually not too bad. I’ve had surgery, preventative and acute care, and almost all the time it was decent.

The Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) makes her way through the Panama Canal to cross into the Pacific Ocean on June 3, 2009. The Comfort is participating in Continuing Promise 2009, a four-month humanitarian and civic assistance mission providing medical and other services in seven countries throughout Latin America. DoD photo by the U.S. Navy. (Released)

That’s not true anymore. It’s now taking months to schedule an appointment. I called in January and was given first availability in April. The visits I have had recently are rushed, and I notice more doctors being borrowed between facilities to make appointments happen. Increasingly, I have to seek care at facilities more than an hour’s drive from my home.

What happened? Well, to put it bluntly, the military decided that health care is an expense, not an investment. Last year the services combined all military health records and scheduling into one system called MHS Genesis. This in itself is a good thing, since it means if I seek care at an Air Force hospital, they can get my records electronically without me having to bring physical records along from a Navy hospital

But someone used the merger to lay off thousands of employees. From the perspective of a twidget sitting behind a desk, heath care is an expense. You do everything in your power to minimize expenses, including firing people, shuttering facilities and offering less services in the pursuit of “finding efficiencies.” I’m sure it padded someone’s pockets, but it’s now resulting in less and less health care.

I’ll use myself as an example. I need a routine surgery. Normally it takes 2-4 weeks to schedule. Right now I’m looking at summer time at the earliest, because the USNS COMFORT is deploying, and when she deploys, they empty the nearby Naval hospitals of doctors to go underway. Great for Central America, terrible for our own military members.

Gee, the US government caring more about foreign citizens than their own people? Where have I seen that before?

If you need mental health appointments, better schedule a month out. While there are lots of suicide resources available on the spot, they are almost all over the phone and haven’t made a dent in suicide rates:

“Active Component suicide rates have gradually increased since 2011.  While the 2022 Active Component rate is slightly higher (3%) than 2021, both years remain lower than 2020.” -Department of Defense Releases Annual Report on Suicide in the Military: Calendar Year 2022

Surprising no one, the military’s solution to lack of care is…bring more dependents into military health care?

Seriously, I’m not joking, read about it here.

Hicks laid out a plan to grow the number of patients who receive care in a military treatment facility by 7% by the end of 2026, compared to the number of beneficiaries in December 2022. That would mean 3.3 million people would be using the MTFs in three years, according to Military Times calculations.

So let me get this straight. You can’t see patients in a timely fashion now. You “right sized” health care so that it barely gets by. You prioritized treating foreign citizens over your own. You did one thing right, which was move dependents out into civilian care so they can get treated and not suffer. And instead of hiring more people, or changing how you man the USNS COMFORT, or any number of ways to address the inability to provide health care, you want to bring on MORE patients into an already stressed system?

This makes no sense except in one case: financial. In the FY2024 request for funding, there is this section:

Controlling Health Care Costs
DOD’s budget request noted that private sector care accounted for 65% of the total care delivered to
beneficiaries and that it “will continue to represent an important part of the overall health system in [FY2024] and beyond.” DOD did not state a long-term strategy to control these health care costs while sustaining military medical readiness requirements and other health-related program investments.

So well over half of military health care is delivered by the private sector. Literally, the military couldn’t make it work if it tried. But that’s expensive, and in typical fashion, the military thinks it can do it cheaper, despite not having a great track record in doing so.

Treating health care as an expense, rather than a mission enabler, means we’ll never get the surge capacity needed to deal with wartime injuries and never get appointment scheduling to a reasonable level. This limits the use of Tricare as a recruiting and retention tool, and will exacerbate an already difficult recruiting problem. It’ll force more people, including myself, to pay out of pocket for care we were promised when we first signed up. And for some reason, the military wants to shoot itself in the foot over this.

I don’t recommend it…I heard gunshot wounds take 4-6 weeks to schedule an initial appointment.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

The Smell of Pot in Fitchburg and Days of Yore

Posted: February 17, 2024 by datechguy in culture

As some of you might know my wife because of a back/hip issue has to sleep on a recliner in the den as we don’t have a hospital bed which is why I sleep on the couch in the den because I didn’t get married to sleep apart from my wife.

Today I woke up to the overwhelming smell of pot in the house. This is a very strange thing because nobody who lives here or has lived here uses and all the doors and windows are closed with it being 30 degrees outside.

It is the nature of things to change and also the nature of people who are 60+ to note how much better the “old days” were.

I’m sure if it was 150 years ago Fitchburg would have smelt of horses and if it was 100 years ago Fitchburg would have smelt of factory smoke and burning coal and 40 years ago depending on which way the wind blew Fitchburg smelt of the waste water treatment plant.

But right now there are parts of Fitchburg that smell like pot and this morning anyways the smell was so bad it got into my house.

I plan to die here in the city I was born in and that my parents were born and died in. This is my home. I understand that in hundreds of ways my life is much easier than it was for my folks and even than the me of 30 years ago.

But at the risk of sounding like a sixty year old man, let me say this: I miss normal, normal was good, I miss sanity, sanity was good and I miss the post world war 2 years of my youth when America was great and was not shy about it’s greatness.

And the only reason why some of you reading this do not is because you didn’t have the joy of living through those years made possible by folks like my dad.

And it’s not because my parents generation who fought world war two were the greatest generation, they would point to their own folks as better than them. It’s just that the generations that have followed have sucked royally.

Decline is a choice and we’ve chosen it, and the more fool us.

The Best MD Has in the Barn For Now

Posted: February 16, 2024 by datechguy in election 2024
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John Cleese: It was from such an unlikely beginning as an unwanted fungus accidentally growing on a sterile plate that Sir Alexander Fleming gave the world penicillin. James Watt watched an ordinary household kettle boiling and conceived the potentiality of steam power. Would Albert Einstein ever have hit upon the theory of relativity if he hadn’t been clever? All these tremendous leaps forward have been taken in the dark. Would Rutherford ever have split the atom if he hadn’t tried? Could Marconi have invented the radio if he hadn’t by pure chance spent years working at the problem? Are these amazing breakthroughs ever achieved except by years and years of unremitting study? Of course not. What I said earlier about accidental discoveries must have been wrong. 

Monty Python’s Flying Circus A Book at Bedtime 1973

For a very long time there was basically one book on the Falklands War that existed. It was The Battle for the Falklands by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins. It came out in 1984 only two years after the war and has sat on a bookshelf in my home for around 25 or 30 years.

One of the things that struck me from the book was a bit was something that one of the British special services officers mentioned concerning training. It seemed that various nations just wouldn’t believe that it was training and hard work that make them what they were. To paraphrase what he said the various nations militaries all think there is some kind pill they can take if only you would tell them what it is.

I thought of that when I saw the negative reaction to the former Maryland Gov Larry Hogan running for the Senate in the state and when I saw these pols indicating that he may have an easy time of it in that deep blue state:

Note the numbers. He is +7 in a state where Biden is +23 and this makes an important point that needs to be remembered.

If you want to have a strong conservative running in a state, you have to have a state where people understand that conservatism means a better life for them and their families. There will be more responsibility but not only is the potential greater but as a state becomes more successful there will actually be more actual money to build a safety net for those who can’t climb.

Maryland is not such a state, but IT CAN BE.

The problem is you don’t turn a state via a National election or even a Statewide election. In fact even a state legislature race doesn’t do the job, at least not at first.

What you have to do is get strong conservative at the school committee and city/town/ward council levels. Someone local and known who national and state parties will have trouble demonizing. Have them apply conservative solutions to local problems, from the basics in education to the broken windows theory in law enforcement.

As these solutions work such people can seek higher office with a record of success while folks inspired by said success replace them at that bottom rung.

That’s the real work of building a party and convincing people that they will have a better life.

It’s not easy, there will be pushback and of course it takes time but when you do that the end result is model schools, model neighborhoods and successful towns and cities and that is how you turn a country and then a state.

In a state like this. You would not have to settle for a Larry Hogan to carry the GOP banner. There would be a solid bench of conservatives who the public trusts who could run and win given the GOP the ability to prevent leftist judges from reaching the bench and having a reliable conservative vote when you need it.

Alas that day is not yet here. So until we have a party ready and willing to do the heavy lifting to change hearts and minds my suggestion.

Let’s get Behind Mr. Hogan, get the senate majority and be happy to get a 70-30 guy in a state where the GOP has no business having a senator and work for the day when Mr. Hogan can be upgraded to a stronger conservative.

And if we aren’t willing to do the work then let’s be grateful that we can manage even him.

Hey Progressives Nudge This

Posted: February 15, 2024 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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A small percentage of Leftists, which includes Progressives, Socialists, Communists, and Fascists, see themselves as elite shepherds to the remainder of the population. These self appointed masters of the universe believe they have the right to rule over the masses who they believe to be unwashed and brainless.  These privileged leftists believe they are Pavlov and the common folk are the dog.

It is obvious that the Democratic Party is infested with this class of elitist Marxists   The paternalistic nature of the laws and edicts crammed down the throats of Americans by Democrats is a dead giveaway. 

Democrats found that most Americans were more resistant to outright rule by leftist masters than those that had never lived in the land of the free.  The Democrats learned they had to be more subtle in their attempts to impose their rule on Americans.  Bludgeoning Americans into submission did not work.  They found that nudging us in the direction they chose for us was more effective.  Barack Obama implemented the philosophy of nudge on the federal level.  He used the federal bureaucracy to infect the rest of the nation with this vile crap. When Trump took office this nudge nonsense faded into the background.  When I saw this article, The Obama ‘Nudge Unit’ Rides Again – American Thinker, I knew that we would soon be up to our eyeballs in this Marxist crap again.

The American Thinker article was good, however, I found that the original source material cited in the article was far more informative.  I used those sources as the backbone of the rest of this article. 

As you can see from this official White House document, 09-2022-Policy-Development-in-the-Social-and-Behavioral-Sciences-Subcommittee.pdf (whitehouse.gov), the Biden Regime is using nudge to force woke crap down our throats with subtlety.

The Biden-Harris Administration formally rechartered the Social and Behavioral Sciences Subcommittee (SBS) of the Committee on Science of the National Science and Technology Council in April 2022. The SBS coordinates policy action to address pressing social issues and Biden-Harris Administration priorities using the tools and insights of the social and behavioral sciences.

The social and behavioral sciences offer unique tools for describing, understanding, and addressing societal challenges, and assessing and evaluating initiatives, programs, and policies. As described in its Charter, the SBS leverages these tools to advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s agenda, to carry out short-term, high-priority tasks, and to lay the groundwork for longer-term coordination of agency efforts related to the social and behavioral sciences. The first short-term task of the SBS is to deliver a whole-of-government framework or “blueprint” for the use of social and behavioral science research to advance evidence-based policymaking by April 30, 2023.

The SBS is co-chaired by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, and comprises membership from a diverse range of Agencies, Departments, and Executive Offices. It provides a forum for collaborative, interagency work towards advancing equity through the activation of social and behavioral science evidence

This article, Obama’s effort to ‘nudge’ America (politico.com), contains a wealth of background information from the Obama era. It was not surprising to me that the author of this Politico article practically purred with delight as he describes this Marxist brainwashing because of how far to the left Politico leans.

For the past year, the Obama administration has been running an experiment: Is it possible to make policy more effective by using psychology on citizens?

The nickname is “nudging”—the idea that policymakers can change people’s behavior just by presenting choices or information differently. The classic example is requiring people to opt out of being an organ donor, instead of opting in, when they sign up for a driver’s license. Without any change in rules, the small tweak has boosted the number of registered organ donors in many states.

Nudging has gained a lot of high-profile advocates, including behavioral-law guru Cass Sunstein and former budget czar Peter Orszag. Not everyone likes the idea—“the behaviorists are saying that you, consumer, are stupid,” said Bill Shughart, a professor of public choice at Utah State University—but President Obama was intrigued enough that he actually hired Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard who co-wrote the best-known book about the topic, “Nudge.”

The president officially adopted the idea last year when he launched the White House’s Social and Behavioral Science Team (SBST), a cross-agency effort to bring behavioral science research into the policymaking process

OK, but is this really nudging?

The team’s projects were definitely a form of prodding—giving people little pokes to improve their behavior in some way. But the more muscular form of “nudge” involves what experts call changing the “choice architecture”—automatically enrolling employees in an optional 401(k), for instance, or making organ donors opt out.

This article contains a great definition: The Best—and Worst—Nudges, According to CHIBE Affiliates    – Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE) (upenn.edu)

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”

This Nudge business is absolutely repugnant to the text and spirit of the Constitution. It reeks of collectivism whereas the Constitution was written to protect the liberty of each and every individual living in the United States.

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