It’s always good when a loved one tells you they have nothing but faith in you, pursuing what you love.
I love my wife. Mel Hynes is the best thing that ever happened to me.
Now, back to what you care about: Ebola? Ebola! EBOLA EBOLA EBOLA!!!!
Ya skeered yet?
Good. Now let’s make it funny.
Yes, Mel is awesome-sauce! Love to you both!
=^..^=
Why do I have the feeling that something/someone else bad is about to happen to the new store?
Tom Lynne will walk in, spout some bigoted shit about gay Liberians with Ebola, then projectile vomit all over Mick. Meanwhile, Sparkledark will sneak in the stockroom and light up a joint. Just in time for Agent Keller to walk in. Meanwhile, Maria Villanuevos will file for divorce from Omar, and suddenly Omar will want the store back. Omar and Alex will meet for a duel at high noon, while Mick heads to Presby to not get treated for Ebola.
Jeez, you could’ve at least put a SPOILER ALERT header on that.
What, you didn’t see it coming?
Until I moved to Dallas, I had a lifelong plan of never coming to Dallas Texas! LOL
Where are the gas masks and biohazard suits….
Sure to be a great seller this time of year 🙂
The twisted part of me thinks Ebola would make a great name for a black drag queen. The rest of me is just waiting for Eric Idle to come by pulling a handcart.
I’m Getting Better!
Great drag queen name, right down there with Sharon Needles.
My personal all-time favorite, even though she was purely fictional, is still Miss Rachel Tensions from To Wong Foo. That sequined Rebel flag gown was brilliant.
I’m not dead yet!
Be quiet you, you’ll be stone dead in a moment.
3 overlapping scenarios: A guy walks into the ER and says he has the ebolas.
1. Someone diagnoses him as a nut, gives him some pills and sends him home.
2. There is nothing dangerous looking and if they pull the pandemic contagion disaster alarm, no one is going home for days.
3. The admissions group wasn’t sure who would get stuck with a $300,000+ intensive care isolation unit charge and hoped he would land somewhere else.
Which just goes to show how fucked our healthcare system is.
We’d rather risk a national epidemic than risk the profit margin.
I’m not entering your living room trying to start shit, but seriously, what unicorn fairy-land healthcare system are you envisioning where money won’t ever be an issue?
Even in the extreme of a completely nationalized system, this guy would represent a threat to the hospital’s budget (and the boss’s bonus at the end of the year, al la the VA).
As much as it sucks, money is always going to be a motivator, if not the KEY motivator, in any healthcare system. And money can only come from one source – profit and wealth generation. No matter how many middle-men you throw in there, the only folks that are gonna have the money to pay, are those making a profit on something.
I can’t honestly see a hospital administrator getting involved in this and saying “send him home with Ebola, we don’t want to spend the money.”
No, this was front-line folks making a bad call due to bad information management, and nothing more. Where I’m from, we call that a “mistake” and don’t ascribe shady and immoral motivations to it. Shit happens, and PROFIT had nothing to do with it.
1. Nobody in Texas thought it would be rational to ask “Have you been to western Africa and handling sick and dying ebola infected relatives?”
2. Right or wrong, you’ll have a target on your back for pulling the alarm. I was laid off for reporting dangerously unsafe equipment that hadn’t killed anybody, yet.
3. Putting him in isolation intensive care until they found an ebola test kit would cost at least $50,000. That is a lot for a probable drill.
I’m trying to remember the exact allusion, but when doctors diagnose shit, they’re typically looking for the most common ailment, not the least common. Looking for horses, not zebras. Ebola in the US is a zebra.
That being said, this is one of those fuckups akin to one I heard from 9-11:
“Hey, we have these 4 planes that just went missing off of radar. Should we scramble jets to find them?”
“…..eh, ….nah!”
Something like Occam’s Razor?
“When you hear hoof-beats, you think horses, not zebras.”
Also, re: 9-11; The planes didn’t drop off the radar. They just stopped reporting info about their ID, altitude, and heading (and civilian radars are not designed for tracking). Why don’t *you* try staring at a screen with a thousand dots on it for hours on end and notice that something unusual is happening with four of the dots? There’s no realistic way traffic control could have caught 9-11, because the system’s just not set up for it.
OTOH, the hospital workers are somewhat responsible for the events in Dallas, because the man said he had just gotten in from Liberia, which is kinda an important point, and this was simply not communicated to other people in the chain.
Except, they did scramble jets. The problem was they didn’t know where they were, and three reached their targets before fighters could reach them. Flight 93, hijacked after the others, was in the process of being intercepted by two F-16s. Unfortunately, because it was not SOP to keep armed fighters on the flightline, they were unarmed, but were prepared to ram the airliner to take it down if necessary.
Since the man lied about that on two other occasions during his return to the states, I’m not confident he would have answered truthfully to that question. On the other hand ‘third times a charm’.
But maybe the people at the airport could have asked?
Sad to say, even the NHS* makes decisions based at least partly on Cost/Benefit.
Mind you, Over Here people aren’t scared of getting stuffed with a huge bill if they get sick or injured
*One of the three largest employers in the world BTW, up there with India’s Railways and the Peoples Liberation Army
“what unicorn fairy-land healthcare system are you envisioning where money won’t ever be an issue?”
French?
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS
11.6% and 11.7% versus your 17.7% and 17.9% lately and 10.9% versus 16.5% a few years back.
http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=5.59290322580644;ti=2010$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=tXf6_OUYVmyEMZo0g4DQw6w;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj3XYThRy0yJMA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL_n5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=lin;dataMin=0.7011;dataMax=100$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=1.121;dataMax=23$map_s;sma=49;smi=2.65$cd;bd=0$inds=i76_t002010,,,,;i82_t002010,,,,;i125_t002010,,,,;i238_t002010,,,,;i239_t002010,,,,
Hell of a URL, son. Hell of a URL. USA spends much more of its GDP on healthcare than France, Germany, UK or Liberia. Out-of-pocket costs account for a slightly smaller percentage of that than in UK or Germany but higher percentage than in France. Liberia spends about the same amount of its GDP on healthcare as France and Germany, more than the UK and way less than the USA.
http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=5.59290322580644;ti=2010$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=tXf6_OUYVmyEMZo0g4DQw6w;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj2tPLxKvvnNPA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL_n5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=lin;dataMin=0.7011;dataMax=100$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=1;dataMax=83$map_s;sma=49;smi=2.65$cd;bd=0$inds=i76_t002010,,,,;i82_t002010,,,,;i125_t002010,,,,;i238_t002010,,,,;i239_t002010,,,,
Life expectancy’s highest in France, then UK and Germany, then the USA, with Liberia trailing way behind.
If you ignore Africa, there seems to be a bit of a negative correlation between out-of-pocket healthcare expense and life expectancy …
http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=5.59290322580644;ti=2010$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj3XYThRy0yJMA;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj2tPLxKvvnNPA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL_n5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=lin;dataMin=1.121;dataMax=23$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=1;dataMax=83$map_s;sma=49;smi=2.65$cd;bd=0$inds=i76_t002010,,,,;i82_t002010,,,,;i125_t002010,,,,;i238_t002010,,,,;i239_t002010,,,,
… and a positive one between total healthcare spending and life expectancy, although Afghanistan, Djibouti, Haiti, Kiribati, Moldova and Micronesia are way below the curve on that one … especially Haiti.
Eh. I’m not sure which figures are used to make these comparisons: The prices that doctors, hospitals, testing facilities and drug companies charge, or the ones insurance companies and Medicare ( or uninsured patients ) actually pay. The latter are fractions of the former. But the former are probably much easier to gather for statisticians and researchers, private and public. If the former, then the disparities are way overestimated.
And this is without even noting that it might be in certain parties’ interests to overestimate them.
Your response was self-defeating. I asked “what healthcare system can you imagine where money won’t ever be an issue” and you replied with a discussion of how much more cost-effective France’s healthcare system is than our current system.
By definition, then, money IS an issue, right? Because by definition, something that is not free, and is rather merely more “cost-effective” than something else, still has a cost. By that definition, money is still an issue. I promise you that hospitals in France have budgets, and administrators tasked with keeping those budgets, who will operate with the same motivations to that end as a profit-driven enterprise in a free-market system would. Add in administrator bonuses, as we have in the VA system, and you’ve got a system even more rife for abuse and misery than a for-profit system.
My statement was not meant to indicate the superiority of one system over another. My statement was meant to shed some rationality and logic to a debate that has become far too politcally and emotionally charged. No system is perfect. Few, if any, systems will be able to eliminate the tendency that J. Grant mentioned, which was to pinch pennies at the expense of all-encompassing, full-service healthcare. To do otherwise would be impossible, since, as I said before, the pool of wealth slated to fund such an enterprise, whether it is privately-funded, publicly funded, or for-profit, will be finite. This means that somewhere along the line, someone is going to get told “no”. Someone is going to get sent to the hospital across town for THEM to foot the bill. These claims of “perfection” in a healthcare system are bogus.
Follow me?
Maybe I’m being a little oversensitive before I’ve had my coffee, but was that clip supposed to be funny? Because I am now offended. I have been microaggressed against!
As a Texan, I thought it was a documentary.
Just a fyi, still getting the memory errors: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 29097940 bytes) in /home2/ftfcomic/public_html/wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/modules/free/backup/class-itsec-backup.php on line 148
My favorite part of ebola are the ignorant fools taking to twitter to ask, “Who is she?” Or, “Is Ebola the King of Africa?”
First case of Ebola in the US? Hardly. It’s just the first case dangerous to humans. A new strain of Ebola was discovered in Reston, VA back in 1989. It was deadly to monkeys. Four workers handling the monkeys showed signs of exposure, but did not become ill. There was another outbreak of the Reston strain in Texas in 1996.
“Calling Doctor House, Doctor House, please go to the CDC and kick some ass!”
It’s time for you take your sissy liberal crap off into the pink sunset. How about you do one more episode and then skulk off with your tail between your legs?
Love you too, snookums.
http://instagram.com/p/ulOla0TAt1/