Pharmakeia, Part I: Grift

[kimberlysteele]

 

 

 According to the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS):

 

U.S. health care spending grew 9.7 percent in 2020, reaching $4.1 trillion or $12,530 per person.  As a share of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 19.7 percent.

 

When my commercial lease expired earlier this year, I was hoping to make the jump into another commercial space where I could start a library and education center.  I may have had the creative urge and the mojo to make the center happen, but I certainly lacked the funds.  Commercial space is expensive.  When I looked around, I found the usual array of places that had stood vacant for years.  The average going price for a modestly sized, 2000 square foot, one bathroom portion of a building was $3500 a month.  As a private music teacher, I don't charge my students enough to cover that price nor do I want to do that.  For 25 years, I have sought to keep my prices affordable so my "product", which I believe is exceptionally good, can benefit people who are in the middle class and not just a set of upper middle class elites who can afford it.  

The cheapest place I found was a storefront on a minor thoroughfare in a strip mall complex.  They didn't return my calls or emails after I proposed a $1500 a month offer -- they wanted $2500 or bust.  The space is still vacant.  Guess what's there?  A physical therapist and a pharmacy/medical equipment dealer.  Keep in mind the building is within walking distance of a CVS pharmacy.  One block down the street, there is a building with several doctors offices in it.  Less than a mile away, there is a gargantuan hospital campus the size of a small town.

The medical industry has our civilization by the balls.  Hospitals have metastasized into brutalist empires of constantly expanding blobs of steel, concrete, and fifteen thousand dollar machines.  Dentists proliferate in strip malls and office buildings; they are more common than hairdressers.  Despite the onslaught of the Pfizer documents (Pfizer wanted to hide them for the next three quarters of a century but failed in that cover-up) and the hard, cold fact that no test animals survived the MRNA vaccine trials, there are vaccination centers in every chain drugstore.  if one cannot achieve becoming a human test subject at Walgreen's, there is always some brand of the experimental bioweapon available in the mall or at the doctor's office.  

Nobody is exempt from needing medical care, though I am trying my darnedest.  None of us can truly opt out.  The last time I had regular health insurance coverage was the year 2012, which was right around the time my husband was booted out of the salary class when the company he worked for went the way of the Hindenburg.  I had health insurance for a couple of brief stints of a year or so tied to my husband's employment, but unfortunately it was Obamacare one of those stints, which ended up being financially punishing in the extreme.  I have not had health insurance at all since 2017 and I have no plans ever to have it again, come what may.  Luckily for me I have no congenital defects or chronic conditions.  I also have the basic understanding that my health is not someone else's responsibility and if I squander it, it's on me.  The trouble arises if I sprain an ankle or need a root canal.   Some things cannot be helped.  I'd rather take my chances though because the health insurance "product" and its accompanying medications is simply not a luxury a lower-middle class person like me can afford.  

To my horror, I realized that almost everyone I know in the upper middle class either works for the government or Big Medicine in some capacity.  The kids I grew up with in upper middle class suburban Chicagoland whose dads were not architects had dads and moms who worked for the local laboratories (government) or at the hospital as nurses (medicine).  A girl I was friends with had a mom who worked with insurance companies and a dad who was a big wig at a utility company.  Many had parents working at the local prisons (government) or as teachers or school administrators (government) and of course there was no shortage of hospital administrators (medicine). Very few lacked connection to a government or medical job, and the ones who did were often of far more modest means than the Big Medicine or Big Government beneficiaries.

There are three legs to the iron triangle of the grift economy that now collapses all around us.  The first leg is Big Government.  The second is Big Medicine, which I believe accounts for far more than 19.5 percent of the real economy as cited by the CMS.  The third is Everybody Else, the motley collection of independents increasingly crowded out or coerced into joining the grifts of the other two triangle legs.  

Where Have the Vegans Gone?

Vegans are a collective group that have never failed to surprise me in their capacity for hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance.  I am vegan and I fully plan to stay that way for the rest of my life, but I often wonder how I got here because vegans are some of the absolute worst people this planet has to offer.  My distrust of Big Pharma and Big Medicine are shared by other vegans -- or at least that's what I used to think. 

For instance, I will pick two prominent vegans out of my hat at random: popular Youtuber Mic the Vegan and Kip Andersen, creator of Cowspiracy and Seaspiracy.  It's especially interesting that two prominent vegans continue their quest to save animals by promoting the health and environmental benefits of veganism yet have nothing to say about forced MRNA vaccines.  Kip Andersen has done a heroic job exposing the hidden malfeasance of Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Media, Big Government, and Big Insurance when it comes to the promotion of eating animals and animal secretions.  Yet when it concerns a vaccine from Anthony Fauci, a person who forced foster children to suffer through AIDS so he could profit from their suffering, Kip is nowhere.  Fauci funded NAIAD, a group whose "scientists" literally tortured beagles to death by putting their heads in containers where they could be eaten down to the skull by sandflies.  Once again, Kip is radio silence, along with other ostensibly left-leaning vegans.  Vaxpiracy is not in the works anytime soon.

Mic the Vegan has a photograph of himself on Instagram where he sports a homemade mask and says something about it being comparable to an N85.  Mic the Vegan comes from a place of well-researched health expertise, yet even he has failed to understand the mask as a brainwashing tool.  Masks have no utilitarian purpose, they do not prevent the spread of any respiratory disease, including Covid-19, and they reduce the flow of oxygen to the brain.  We are left to wonder whether or not Mic the Vegan got vaccinated or boostered.  I hope he skipped it.