A few weeks ago I started having unbearable back pain. I figured it was just stress or I pulled it somehow. I go and get a massage. No help. I take OTC pain relievers and wait for it to go away.
Only this time it doesn't, it gets worse. Pain is shooting down my leg, I can't stand or walk for more than a few minutes, Now it's radiating around my ribs and I am having trouble breathing. My right side hurts.
Finally after 4 weeks of this getting increasingly worse, not being able to get into the local clinic I can't take it any more so I go to the local ER. I hate going to them for anything especially this kind of thing but really can't take any more. At first they we all nice, friendly, concerned and working to find out the problem. Then comes the "DOCTOR" , the one person making buttloads of cash for rubber stamping the work others do for him. He tells me I should have gone to a clinic or a real Doctor. Then to my shock and amazement he says "you need to go to a clinic and not come back here again.".
But, but damn it! I TRIED to go to a goddamn clinic. They are so overworked they don't have appointments for MONTHS. For fuck's sake don't these people LISTEN to what you tell them?
He sends me to the PA, they give me 12 vicoden and kick me to the curb, washing their hands of my kind.
I go home, dutifully eat my pain pills, try once again to get into a clinic (to no avail) and wait. And suffer.
Fast forward 3 days... it's worse. The pain pills are useless. Nothing has changed. So I go to another ER. This one with a reputation of being good. I am more prepared this time. I have a written littany of symptoms, the discharge papers from my previous exercise in futility, all my meds (including the empty bottles I have no way to refill). It starts out well, they have a plan of action, they are going to run x, y and z tests. They have a theory. I think "YAY!" real honest to god medical personnel that know their jobs and care! Until shift change.
My test results are in... the new doctor -that never even looked at my chart - walks in and says " Good news! :) your tests are all negative... there is nothing wrong with you!"
... I am speechless. "What do you mean?" As though suddenly the pain is all supposed to just magically go away cause your 3 tests found nothing? He stutters... "well what are your symptoms?" I repeat a portion of the littany. He tells me well maybe you should go see your regular doctor. Oh! I see! I am supposed to go see the clinic doctor that is so overworked I can't get an appointment anytime in the next 3 months. Just so long as I don't inconvenience you again.
The new nurse comes in and is in such a hurry to remove my IV port she lets blood drip down my arm and all over the room. Here is your Rx for stomach meds (!??!) now GTFO.
So here I sit, still in pain, still sick, several thousand dollars in the hole and absolutely NOTHING to show for it but further proof that our health care system is irrevocably broken and the medical profession is so full of incompetent, greedy, fools that it may as well not exist.
Welcome to the Corporate States of America. It makes me want to cry, scream and yell. This is not the United States I grew up in. Where the hell did my country go?
More on the Lost Decade, Courtesy of Cheney-Bush 
by Meteor Blades
Fri Mar 05, 2010 at 09:56:03 AM PST
Just about any way you look at it, the country got smacked around from January 2001 to January 2009. Aside from its wretched foreign policy, violations of human rights and civil liberties, nowhere did the Bush administration pound us harder than on the economy. Despite this, the Republican Party's megaphones at Foxaganda and scattered throughout much of the rest of media are now eagerly telling Americans our future prosperity depends on another round of the clever governance that got us where we are.
To illustrate just how disastrous the GOP's last turn at the wheel was, The Economist recently highlighted figures from Christopher Wood, a strategist at the Hong Kong-based investment group CLSA:
Click for larger graphic.
Real GDP in America grew by an average of 1.9% a year during the 2000s. This may not sound all that terrible, especially for a decade that saw one short recession and another particularly deep and long one. But it is the economy’s worst performance for a long time. During the previous six decades, average growth was 3.9% a year. Only the 1930s—when growth was a mere 0.9% a year—were worse. And America’s population is growing smartly, so GDP per head has grown a good deal more sluggishly than GDP as a whole. The story is much the same when the growth in Americans’ personal consumption during the ten years to the end of 2009 is compared with previous decades. Again, only the 1930s were worse.
In terms of employment growth, the 2000s were also a lost decade. In the years between 1940 and 1999 the number of Americans employed outside farming grew by an average of 27% each decade. In the one just past it fell by 0.8%. In January this year, the number of people who had been jobless for more than six months reached 6.3m. And though the economy has grown for each of the past two quarters, the unemployment rate has only just begun to inch downwards. Though the recession is now supposedly at an end, the pain of the noughties’ miserable economic performance will be felt for a long time to come.
It's true that the deregulatory fever which got its first big boost from the Reagan administration culminated with some awful actions in the late '90s, stuff like the deep-sixing of the Glass-Steagall Act that Republicans pushed but which the White House might have vetoed had it not been for the likes of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers saying what a good idea repealing that New Deal era protection was. An overeager expansion of unfettered free trade and the dot.com bubble also took their toll. Nonetheless, that earlier decade ended with the federal budget in a modest surplus and a record 23 million jobs generated.
The Republicans have a solution for the economic mess we're in: Bring back the '00s. No better slogan than one ending in zeroes could be found for the Party of No.
