I've been reminded that the so-called "health care" industry in the United States is run by people who really don't care about anyone's health. They're not allowed to. It's a mis-managed bureaucy that's gone so far down the rabbit hole that its rules don't even make sense from a money-focused perspective.

Case in point: I go to my primary care physician (or PCP, coincidentally the abbreviation for a pneumonia responsible for killing countless AIDS patients, and for a lethal recreational drug) and tell him about some knee pain I've been having. So he refers me to the specialist who did surgery on it a couple years ago. Everything's good so far, and my insurance covers everything except some affordable office-visit co-pays. Then the specialist refers me to get physical therapy, and they start helping me get my knee in shape so it won't hurt. Then things go haywire. Two weeks into PT, I get a call from the PCP telling me that the specialists referral to the physical therapist is no good. That means I have to pay for it myself. Instead, the PCP wants me to go to a different physical therapist.

Understand: the issue isn't that my insurance isn't accepted by the PT place; they do billing with (let's call them) Indigo Cross all the time. And it's not that my insurance policy doesn't cover PT; it does, without even a co-pay. It isn't that this is some (in the opinion of the insurance company) quack pseudo-medical facility; like I said, Indigo Cross deals with them routinely. It isn't even about money; if the place I was going charged more than the insurance company was willing to pay, they could demand that I make up the difference, but that's not what happened.

The issue is that my PCP is part of a "network" that serves to channel patients to each other rather than to non-members. And they'll screw over a patient (making me cough up money I can't afford to part with, and then start over with a different therapist) to enforce that.

This is insane. Or at the least, it's unethical. But it's how the American medical-services industry works. I might point out that nothing like this would happen with a single-payer health insurance system. If the physical therapist is certified, and the treatment is properly judged by medical experts to be necessary, it'd be covered.

The people who defend this system (mostly Republicans, but the blame is shared by the other party in power as well) claim it's a free-market system, and that's the only acceptable solution. But it's not... free-market or acceptable. It's more like a RICO ("Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization") case or perhaps less stridently, a good old-fashioned trade-restraining "trust". I admit I'm not the biggest fan of the economic darwinism of the market system. But it's fairly benign as long as it's a true market, in which providers work to supply consumers' demand for something. But this isn't that kind of market. The customers aren't the patients; the customers are the insurance companies. The insurance companies have customers too, of course, but those still aren't the patients... for the most part, they're employers. And it's only in the most reality-distorting sense of the word that employees are "customers" of their employers. (Even when someone - like me - resorts to buying insurance for themselves, they pretty much have to settle for the worst policies the industry knows how to write, which are themselves just cut-back versions of the ones that employer's sign up for, because they can't afford anything better. The notion that I can "shot around" for a better insurance policy is laughable.)

The system might work fine as long as the best interests of the patient and of the customer coincide. But when they disagree, "the customer is always right", so the patient loses.

I'm not looking for a job... really, I'm not. But a friend of mine who is just called me to tell me about one that... sure sounds tempting. The following image is an actual unretouched advert from the June 12, 2005 edition of The Grand Rapids Press.

Now, I know that the Christian Reformed Church is more open-minded about sex than, say, the Roman Catholic Church, and they don't have any theological problem with oral sex, per se. But I'm rather surprised that they would offer it like this as an employment benefit, outside of the bounds of holy matrimony. And in the Sunday paper, no less.

Plus, I had no idea that job recruitment had become so competitive that employers were finally offering this. This is definitely going to come up in my next conversation with my boss.

The Dove Foundation, a non-profit group that was founded to promote family-friendly (and consistent with mainstream Christian values) movies, has released a study "proving" that G-rated films are more 11 times as profitable as R-rated films, and PG and PG-13 films fall in between. They say their stats show that "what the people want" are the more openly-rated films.

Except that's not true.

I'm not questioning their statistics. Just the way they're trying to misinterpret them. The thing is, Hollywood makes way more R and PG-13 files than either PG or G. Compared to 1,533 R-rated films put out from 1989-2003 that were included in Dove's study, there were only 123 G-rated films. And those dozens of G-rated films included some megablockbusters, including the entire output of Pixar, a bunch of heavily-promoted Disney animations, and so on. All this tells us is that the percentage of G-rated movies that get huge promotion and attract a big audience is bigger than for R-rated movies. If the number of R-rated movies released was restricted to just the best (or most commercial) 123 of them, their average profit would be a lot better, because fans of sex, violence, and "adult language" would all have to go to the same 1 or 2 films playing at any given time. On the other hand, there are a lot of "experimental" and "artsy" movies - stuff no one expects to make any money on - in the R-rated bucket, which the public just doesn't go to see in any number.

Plus, there's the fact that once upon at time... such as the Dark Age before 1989... G-rated films had a tendency to bomb at the box office. Star Trek fans cringed when they saw that ST: The Motion Picture had gotten slapped with a "G" because they were afraid no one would go see it, and the franchise would be doomed. Fortunately (yes, I mean that), the trekkies turned out by the thousands, and the film got good enough reviews to overcome the stigma - yes, stigma - of a G rating. When Disney returned to feature animation in the late 1980s, there were similar fears. And they, too, beat them with quality.

That's what it really comes down to. Quality (which I have to admit probably means "quality of the special effects, marketing, and star power") makes money. The Dove Foundation is trying to dispel the myth that G-Rated films don't make money. But in doing so - by convincing the movie studios to take more chances and green-light more of these kid-friendly films that are being shopped around Tinseltown - they're helping to reduce the average quality of G-Rated films that get made. That in turn will reduce their average profitability... maybe even to the levels that nearly killed off the "G" in the late 1970s.

A few days ago the Center for Public Integrity published a report that said that Dick and Betsy DeVos (the son and daughter-in-law of Amway co-founder Rich DeVos) were (as a couple) the largest individual contributors to political campaigns last year. Turns out the CPI was wrong, and they've now published a correction: nearly a million of that was actually contributed by Rich himself. Rich and Dick have the same legal name except for "Sr." and "Jr." and both CPI and the GOP itself attributed donations without a suffix to Junior, instead of Senior.

But this is really just a technicality, because Dick is little more than a clone of his father. They even use the same return address on their donations, which is part of how their checks got misattributed. And what's interesting is looking at the whole top five. Rich and wife Helen were #3, with over $1.5 million donated. Dick and Betsy actually rank at #5 with just shy of $1 million. And up at #2 is Rich's lifelong buddy and fellow Amway founder Jay VanAndel, who managed to donate $2 million before dying last year. Add up the donations of the Amway klan and you get a cool $4.5 million, doubling the supposed #1 donor (Arizona Democrat Jim Pederson). That's a lot of races - and representatives - paid for by a handful of obscenely rich white fundies.

For earlier articles on this topic, see God's ex-Boyfriend, volume one.