Ignorance knows no bounds: Evolution, health care reform et al

I was sitting here - still in bed, with coffee, Mr. Maven, laptop and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade - guffawing over the Las Vegas Gleaners hysterically funny rant about Repub Senatorial wannbe, Sue Lowden and a recent Facebook entry about Harry Reid and his diabolical plan to take America down by giving the little people access to affordable health insurance.

The evil brilliance of this plan causes me to marvel at Reid’s subtle genius. Lex Luther has nothing on Harry Reid.

Back to the Gleaners point, though. He makes a dandy case that these same people are probably the same blockheads that believe the earth is 6,000 years old and Sarah Palin shot trophy dinosaurs.

According to a pretty damning graph, the United States and Turkey (now ain’t that a neat association … and so timely. Gobble, gobble) both have similar ignorace levels when it comes to a belief in hard scientific facts and a lack of state sponsored, affordable health care.

This resonates with me, as a Nevadan (and thanks Gleaner- filthy, snooty, intellectual, socialist and atheist).

Every time you see Nevada appearing in any sort of ranking, our fine state is on the wrong - or unflattering - end of the rankings.

Suicide rates: we’re up there.

High school graduates: Whoops, near the bottom.

Foreclosures: Whoa, at the damn top.

Healthcare: The Commonwealth Fund finds Nevada right down in the bottom five.

There is a discouraging trend here.

My family doc and I were chatting yesterday, about his take on health care reform and we both could only come to one conclusion: Americans are dumber than dirt. He told me that I was being too kind.

Some of our conversation revolved around Medicare reimbursement rates. He told me flat out that if it gets cut much more, he will quit accepting new Medicare patients.

This is rationing.

Take a look at this interactive map of the United States, according to Medicare reimbursement rates from the acclaimed Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare.

Why so much variation?

And, when you start looking at different yet nearby locations and their ridiculous differences in reimbursements you can see a lot of the problem. Like Doc sez, the pie is only so big and when places like Miami (Yikes, my home town) are so rife with fraud and getting more than their share, guys like him are going to take it in the financial shorts.

Unfortunately, this is the type of sad information that teabaggers would use to convince one and all that ‘Guvmint ain’t no damn good’ and can’t run anything right.

I said to Doc, “but would you have UnitedHealthcare take it over and run it better?”

“Hell no!”

That’s when he started getting, well, ‘animated’.

Our consensus is that Americans must get off their ignorant, ideologically driven rumps and INSIST that those things best done by government, be done right.

But as long as they can’t even buy into evolution, the moon landing, global warming and practically anything else that is fact and evidence based, they’ll never be there to stand up and insist that democracy work.

Maybe they don’t deserve democracy.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.

Sigh. I can tell you this, Harry Reid is going to need the super powers of Lex Luther to do anything worthwhile.