Entry #637626, added on 02-27-09 @ 12:01 am EST
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Warning . . . I've been ruminating. My mind is has been moving at warp speed and that would be good except that it is only moving in circles. Truth is, I'm a bit agitated, and I'm going to tell you why, but I'm short on both time and patience at the moment so I'm just going to spew it out in a pseudo stream of consciousness.
*stream* Last night I watch the State of the Union address. I watched most of it anyway, and I've gotta say it irritated me some. Mostly it irritated me because there seems to be a disconnect in grasping what caused our current crisis. You can talk all you want about greed, speculation, and lack of regulation, but what I'm getting at is more along the lines of personal responsibility.
The cold hard truth of it is that our culture has shifted and we have become a bunch of rabid consumers who really don't know how to live within our means. And the government, and the media keep feeding the monster. They don't just feed it, because then it might just get fat and lazy, they poke at it with electric cattle prods to keep it in whipped up in a frenzy.
Because, if the monster isn't spending they call it "a lack of consumer confidence" and the market tanks and industry panics and the economy that was built on the back of that monster starts to crumble.
A local car dealer has decided to combat the recession by advertising that if you finance a new car through them, and you lose your income within one year, you can return the car with no penalty to your credit rating.
Anything to keep the monster moving. But the monster is slowing down because he's got this huge amount of consumer debt hanging around his neck, and things really aren't going so well for the monster.
Poor monster.
He would like to lay down somewhere quiet and hibernate . . . live off the fat of the land for a couple years until things turn around. Unfortunately, the bastards with the cattle prods won't leave him alone.
After all, we have an entire automotive industry to save. Because what the average family really needs in the midst of an economic crisis is yet another monthly car payment. BUY, BUY, BUY. We'll help! The checks are in the mail. The credit should be available soon. Buy a car, save a nation.
My thought though is that maybe instead of saving the auto industry, we should pour some money into mass transit infrastructure so that people would be less dependent on cars and the fossil fuels that keep them on the road. Building light rail systems would in fact create jobs.
Yeah, I could go on and on about that, but I'm seriously running out of time and I've got one more thing I need to spew. You see, medicaid needs to be reformed in a meaningful way too. This is what is griping me on a daily basis because I deal with medicaid and all the stupid initiatives that get pushed through in an effort to contain costs.
One of the recent initiatives involved spending millions of dollars to develop a tool and a process to assess the needs of individuals with developmental disabilities. The idea is that we'll arrive at a point where "X" amount of need translates into "Y" amount of services and delivery will follow a very standardized, cost effective, managed care way of doing business. 
In reviewing some of the assessments though, I've become very afraid for our system because the assessment reads something like this.
"Sue needs verbal and gestural prompts when using the bathroom more than once per day, but less than once per hour."
Now, there are a lot of things wrong with this picture, but allow me point out that Sue is both deaf and blind. It doesn't matter how much you wave your arms and holler "No Sue! Not there! That's the sink!" Sue's needs will not be met and Medicaid just wasted millions of your tax dollars. Worse yet, they are going to figure out they made a mistake and they are going to spend millions more trying to fix it. {e: /stream}
Time to go back to work and finish answering dumb ass survey questions.
Question: How will you use existing staff in order to implement the newly published guidelines?"
Answer: Abusively! |
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