Kindergartners and Handguns

Let's see, this time its a kindergartner who brings the handgun to school. It accidentally falls out of his bag and three kids are in the hospital. When will America get tired of this? Time to wake up and smell the 21st century. Link >>>

Either capitalism should be allowed to work or it shouldn’t

 Either capitalism should be allowed to work or it shouldn’t – For example, people should be able to afford the homes they purchase and if they buy one that is too expensive they should have to take a bath on it. All this fuss about the housing bubble is bewildering to me. People who didn’t have enough money to buy a thousand square foot home in Southern California for $800,000 but bought one anyways, got what they deserved and the bank that lent them the $760,000 got what they deserved too. And now our government wants to find ways to bail them out. Oh, the poor people who bought that expensive house are getting foreclosed on and they will be out on the streets. Well, I have one word for you: rent! People who can’t afford a house can rent a place, a lot of people do it and it is nothing to be embarrassed about. Foreclose on them, and since nobody will buy the house at the same price, lower the price. This is free market capitalism. Remember, supply and demand dictates the price? Instead we are throwing money at the banks to try to save them (tax money that we have yet to pay). Why? Banks came up with all these ways to entice people into borrowing money, now they should pay the price. If the government tries and succeeds in preventing any pain here and now, we are going to crawl through this recession for years and years. Or better yet, create another bubble, maybe an equity bubble this time. Actually we’re too late, this has already started and the new equity bubble is going to burst as well.

The government should run health insurance

 The government should run health insurance - The very nature of capitalism runs against health care and health insurance. The basic premise of capitalism is that the market decides what the price for goods or service should be right? So let me ask you, when is the last time you negotiated with your health insurance company how much you would pay for coverage? Could you negotiate the price of getting an operation? I'm not trying to say insurance companies and our doctors are stealing from us, but I don’t see any good reason why an illness should sometimes cost tens or worse, hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat.

Capitalism and health insurance have nothing to do with each other - Health Insurance companies make profit by not offering a service. Now if that isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be any private insurance companies, but a government run public one would be a better option simply because profit wouldn’t be an issue. In Japan there is private health insurance as well, but it is in addition to their public health insurance and used for things like paying the difference for a private room rather than a shared one during a hospital stay, or getting money to cover the fact that you aren’t working.

Americans are so scared of socialism in America they can’t imagine their government involved in health care. Well, I’m more scared for the fifty million people who can’t go to a doctor. Matter of fact I’m scared of getting sick and I have health insurance, my deductible is 5G and insurance companies give their employees bonuses for finding a way to cancel my policy. Getting sick is scary enough without having to be scared of what my insurance company is planning to do with me. If government (state or federal) run health care is such a problem, why isn’t the fire and police department? What about public schools? Er.. The Armed forces? CIA, FBI, FDA? Why don’t we trade them in for a capitalist version? Maybe it is because they work (for the most part)? How would you like a capitalist fire department? Sorry we will only put out your fire if you can pay us the amount we ask.

Health care should not be complicated and fast - I’ll give you an example based on my personal experience. I was looking for a specialist. I found a dozen of them in my general vicinity. The first three I called wouldn’t take my insurance. The next two all had waiting lists over a month. I live in the world’s wealthiest country, and even with insurance, I can’t find a doctor. Imagine if you were not insured, your only choice would be the ER when you are at the brink of death. And these are the reasons that health care is expensive for all of us; there are two many people who won’t get treated early and when they do, are way past the point of quick help. And on top of that, are not or under insured and can’t pay their bills. There are 45,000 deaths linked directly to lack of health coverage in the wealthiest nation in the world. Link >>>

The main points for health care reform should be:

• Everybody should be required to have health insurance
• Everybody should be able to get health insurance from any company, public or private that they want for 5% of their annual family income.
• Every health care provider, should be required to accept any insurance
• There should be price regulation for health procedures so that a Band-Aid doesn’t cost five dollars.
• Health care providers and insurance companies should put more emphasis on prevention.
• It should be made affordable to become a doctor. Grants should be offered so that more people would be willing to enter the profession. More doctors would allow more competition thus reducing costs to consumers.

Basically, a country with insured, healthy people who have access to health care anywhere, anytime. Oh that is impossible you might think. Take a look at Japan or Canada or most of the other developed nations n the world and tell me it can’t be done.

Universal health care is not socialism (even if it is, who cares?)

This is a no-brainer and makes me crazy. I lived in Japan for years and years, I went to the doctor when I wanted, without an appointment and could go to any doctor I wanted to. I turned in my pink insurance card after the doctor was through with me and on average paid about $10.00 per visit (including medicine). Comparing this to the $40 I pay for visits in Los Angeles plus what I have to pay for medicine, which could easily be in the hundreds. I also went for a yearly physical, at no cost to me because Japanese politicians, companies and doctors understand that preventing me from getting sick saves everybody money in the long run and I get a long healthy life in the bargain. So what did you pay annually for your health insurance you ask? I paid about five percent of my income. So if you make 10G a month, you pay about five hundred bucks. If you make a grand, you’re in for fifty dollars. My insurance in the states costs $649.00 a month with a five thousand dollar deductible and although I can afford it, a lot of people couldn’t (as you have probably heard, Anthem raised my rates about 20% in May). In Japan what you pay is based on your income so everybody can afford it. By the way, the government runs health insurance in Japan and Japanese people have longer life spans and have a better quality of health than Americans. If we compare our system to other developed countries we find that America is the most expensive ($7,290 per capita compared to $3,601 in France) with the most uninsured (13.5%), the highest infant mortality rate (6.7 out of 1,000 live births compared to 3.8 in France) and a shorter average life span. Link >>>

Here is another chart comparing life spans vs price of health care. Just so you know Japanese people live to 83, go to the doctor on average once a month and live to about 83 years old on average while paying an average of $2,581 for their healthcare annually. Link >>>

Day Two of the Same Bullshit

Yesterday I reported about a student bringing a gun to school and accidentally shooting two of his classmates. That was yesterday. Today another person, this time a police officer was shot in front of a school in Woodland Hills. Four hours later a 16 year old Bell High School was shot and wounded a half block away. When are Americans going to get tired of this and outlaw guns like the majority of developed countries? By the way, eight children are killed on average by handguns everyday in America, that's one every three hours.

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82 a Day

Right down the street from where I live in Gardena, a kid brought a gun to school with him, dropped his backpack on the ground and the gun he had in there misfired. The stray bullet went through one of his classmates head and another's neck. And people still think guns are a good idea in America. Gun rights activists love to say that if we just carried more guns, we could control crime better. But the truth is just the opposite, there is on average 82 shooting deaths a day in America. Maybe we should just change the name of our country to Tumbleweed.

Oh, by the way the top news in Japan is:"Monk on motorbike suspected of giving toll collectors the slip 80 times." Nobody got shot and killed today in Japan, or yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that, or.........(continue on 40 or 50 times..)

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Understanding The Constitution

People should be forced to understand and properly interpret the constitution or forfeit their voting rights – I don’t know, call me silly but as the constitution and its bill of rights are fundamental in our society, maybe we are best to figure out what our founding fathers were trying to say. Let’s take the second amendment for example. The second amendment is the “right to bear arms” one that conservatives just love. Unfortunately, they probably don’t understand it very well. Let’s see, it says this:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed

Most conservatives, usually only quote the second half so it sounds more like this: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Matter of fact, the national headquarters of the NRA only has the last half of the amendment plastered on their building. The common deletion of the first half pretty much changes the whole meaning. The point with the amendment has mostly to do with the “well regulated militia” part really. I don’t know about you but I can’t see much use for one of those anymore. You see America was founded as a breakaway state from England and in order to keep the British from coming over here and kicking our asses, a well regulated militia was important. Considering we didn’t have a real army so to speak, normal people like you and me, were expected to grab our guns and take shots at the invading British. If you don’t believe that this was the original motive, look up “bear arms” and “militia” in your dictionary and you will see.

Now that America has enough military weapons to kill just about every person in the world, you and me keeping a rifle in the closet seems pretty silly. Matter of fact it sounds rather dangerous, and statistics tell us so. The founding fathers, bless their souls, had no way of envisioning people using guns to, a let’s see, go to school and kill their classmates or go in to my house and shoot my ass for my sneakers. They obviously envisioned a better-behaved society than we have now. 


There are other possible reasons for the need for people to have guns two-hundred plus years ago. Hunting comes to mind as well as the possible need to balance military strength of the government and the people. You have to imagine, when this whole thing was thought up, young America was just getting over getting smacked around by England and was weary of the new or future American government doing the same thing. 


Or maybe, considering the lack of law in the western part of America, guns would be necessary in protecting one’s self from danger, this amendment would be important as well. But let’s face it, there are police and super markets everywhere and if you think we could beat the Army in a test of force, you’re dreaming. So maybe in the late 1700s something like this might have seemed like a good idea but now it seems pretty stupid. Matter of fact, I don’t even think the amendment has to be changed, it just has to be properly interpreted and the laws changed to adhere to its proper meaning. It basically says that the federal government has no right to interfere with how state militias arm themselves. As far as the assault rifle under my neighbor’s bed, a law making it illegal has nothing to do with civil rights and is simply a matter of common sense. If you doubt that being able to buy and keep guns is a bad idea, I’ll just leave you with some statistics:

The gun-related deaths per 100,000 people in 1994 by country were as follows (guess which ones have gun controls):

1. U.S.A. 14.24 
2. Brazil 12.95 
3. Mexico 12.69 
4. Estonia 12.26 
5. Argentina 8.93 
6. Northern Ireland 6.63 
7. Finland 6.46 
8. Switzerland 5.31 
9. France 5.15 
10. Canada 4.31
11. Norway 3.82
12. Austria 3.70 
13. Portugal 3.20 
14. Israel 2.91 
15. Belgium 2.90 
16. Australia 2.65 
17. Slovenia 2.60
18. Italy 2.44
19. New Zealand 2.38 
20. Denmark 2.09
21. Sweden 1.92 
22. Kuwait 1.84
23. Greece 1.29
24. Germany 1.24
25. Hungary 1.11
26. Ireland 0.97
27. Spain 0.78
28. Netherlands 0.70
29. Scotland 0.54
30. England and Wales 0.41
31. Taiwan 0.37
32. Singapore 0.21
33. Mauritius 0.19
34. Hong Kong 0.14
35. South Korea 0.12
36. Japan 0.05

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With the recent assassination attempt against Rep. Gabrielle Gifford, isn't it about time America takes a good look at gun control? Six people were killed and 14 others wounded in the shooting. Among the dead, a federal judge, a congressional aide and a 9-year-old girl.