Being a right wing celebrity de jour sure is expensive as declining health care subsidies and then reconstructive rhinoplasty eats up a lot of cash:
Grace Brewer….wanted to keep the catastrophic health insurance plan she once had, which she says fit her needs. But under the Affordable Care Act, the government’s health care reform law, the plan was discontinued because it did not comply with the law’s requirements, and her bills doubled to more than $400 a month….Though Brewer could pay less for a plan if she were to accept a subsidy from the federal government, she refuses. “I want to pay my own way,” she says. “I will not take a handout.”
I am taking a guess, but a $200 per month policy for a 60 year old woman that is medically underwritten probably has a $20,000 deductible, no mental health, no pre-exisiting conditions, low life time caps, minimal rehabilitation and recovery care. It is insurance for the lucky that won’t help too much on the Congrats You’ve Got Cancer conversation.
Klemencic, the sole proprietor of Ellenboro Floors in Ritchie County, West Virginia, says he sees the federal subsidy program as welfare, which he does not believe in. He also does not think the government has the constitutional authority to offer the subsidies…
Klemencic, who is a plaintiff in another Supreme Court case challenging the subsidies, says he has prepared for possible emergencies by adding medical coverage to his car insurance and setting aside funds….
Well the Supreme Court disagrees with your Constitutional interpretation as Congress can spend pretty much as it sees fit to spend. As far as self-insuring through savings… good luck with that. Paying cash for a even a medium size John Cole klutz incident will wipe most people out, and a cancer diagnosis will destroy the future of anyone outside of the top 2% or 3 %.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
To me, this is the base of the problem we’re dealing with:
There seems to be a stubborn contingent of people in this country who think that health insurance is a “handout” and they should be able to pay everything out of pocket. I don’t know if they genuinely don’t understand the numerous “handouts” they get every day thanks to oil subsidies, farm subsidies, highway bills, etc. or if they’re just upset that the “handout” is coming from That One.
Mudge
The federal subsidy program as welfare, a handout. Interesting. Your mortgage deduction is welfare. Child care and education credits are welfare. Your personal deductions are welfare.
They are so true to their ideology. Not too smart, but true.
Eric U.
a couple of years ago, one of the grad students had an ER visit that ended up costing over $30k out of pocket. I’m going to guess that would bankrupt at least half the households in the country. The whole notion of saving for medical costs is simply ridiculous for most of us.
Edmund Dantes
The best part? The guy throwing bad money at the problem by adding medical coverage to his car insurance.
Ummm… What does he think that is going to accomplish if he falls off a ladder? Is he going to run to his car anytime he gets hurt, and crash it into the nearest tree with the hope the car insurance will cover his medical bills?
CONGRATULATIONS!
These people are fucking insane. My appendectomy would have just shy of fifty thousand dollars if I’d had to pay out of pocket.
Times in my life when I’ve had fifty thousand loose cash in the bank – zero. And I’m in the top 20% of income earners in this country.
rikyrah
I have no sympathy for stupid muthaphuckas like this. Because their dumb azzes want to pay, why should they force others to pay. The level of unbelieveable selfishness is what galls me about people like this.
elmo
People with limited imaginations and no experience of complex healthcare have no concept – none – of the costs involved and how rapidly they escalate. That’s where the lament about the lost days of the “family doctor” and pay-as-you-go healthcare are coming from. “I’m self-reliant, I plan ahead, I have savings, and I pay my own way” will evaporate in less than a week’s worth of critical care. Or six months of chemotherapy. Or the first two hours of a 14-hour organ transplant surgery.
And the same people who say “Everyone has healthcare, go to the emergency room!” are (1) also the people who bemoan deadbeats and free riders on Obamacare, and (2) completely lacking in imagination or understanding that chemo, orthopedic surgery, and any kind of ongoing treatment whatsoever does not take place in the fucking emergency room.
OzarkHillbilly
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): Don’t worry, that problem won’t last long as they will all die soon due to an inability to pay.
sparrow
That article made me depressed. People are so f-ing stupid.
Mineshaft Gap
FSM my brain is fried from reading the comments section of that US News article. We truly are a nation of idiots.
SatanicPanic
@Edmund Dantes: I suspect that actually is his plan.
Snarki, child of Loki
Unfortunately, as good as modern medical care is, it has no cure for self-inflicted ignorance and stupidity.
mai naem mobile
@Eric U.: i have a friend who went to the ‘charity’ hospital for a relatively simple urinary tract infection. I saw his EOB bill. It was $9990.00. No admission. Just the ER.
dedc79
Presumably Ms. Brewer also doesn’t use the national highway system, but instead clears her own path for her car every time she wants to drive somewhere.
Hildebrand
I look forward to this person returning her monthly Social Security check when she becomes eligible.
elmo
@dedc79: Oh, VERY good.
Iowa Old Lady
A friend is taking a cancer drug that costs $40K per month. Save up for that, fool.
OzarkHillbilly
Some years back my son got a MRSA in the upper thigh bone, there was talk of amputation if the antibiotic of last resort did not start working in 12-24 hrs. (it worked) I don’t remember what the week long stay in ICU cost, but the antibiotic cost $30,000…. Per week. He was on it for 6 weeks, after he got out.
Thank Dog for Carpenters insurance. My out of pocket costs were limited to the ER copay.
different-church-lady
Maybe we should start figuring out why that is…
Iowa Old Lady
@rikyrah: And yes, as you say, aside from the stupidity, the most maddening part of this is that the rest of us wind up paying higher bills because people with no insurance can’t pay theirs.
RSA
Part of the problem is idiots with megaphones:
japa21
I think we may be reading about these folks down the road winning the annual Darwin Awards.
Slightly off-track. Yesterday, one of the largest health insurance companies announced that it was raising its corporate minimum wage to $16/hour. The head of the company made the announcement and said he was going to try to convince other CEO’s to do the same. One of the people in the room where he made the announcement was literally in tears when he expressed his gratitude.
Elizabelle
People like Grace Brewer and Dave Klemencic are selfish, unmitigated assholes. They are welcome to die for their stupidity. They are not welcome to take others with them.
Per the article, Grace Brewer has “no dependents.”
Klemencic’s medical spending last year was $200. Says nothing about spending for any other person.
I wonder if they’d be so boldly anti-handout were it their child or partner facing an expensive condition or incident.
Elizabelle
These people are bottom feeders. They make bad examples and would be bad law.
SatanicPanic
Most of the people angry about Obamacare are deeply foolish people. It’s not much more complicated than that.
KG
Not entirely clear on the concept of “insurance” is she?
Elizabelle
@KG:
Do you think she’s either not approved for insurance reimbursement, or only takes cash and chickens and motor oil?
Laertes
I always want to ask these nutters if they think the mortgage interest deduction is welfare, and if not, why not.
KG
@Elizabelle: oh sweet baby buddha, she is (more or less) a doctor? I give up, I got nothing.
shelley
Yeah, I had to laugh at the ‘setting aside funds’ comment. Maybe he got it confused with his Christmas Club.
KG
@Laertes: the answer is simple… it’s not welfare because it is a tax deduction (and it helps the economy by REASONS!). I’ve had this discussion before, tax deductions are different, and totally not a penalty for those who can’t claim them.
JPL
@Laertes: Ted Cruz never took health care subsidies either. He doesn’t understand the taxes saved by not having to account the twenty thousand his wife’s company pays for their health
insurance.
Kylroy
@different-church-lady: We can improve the costs, but I do not think we can more than halve them without cratering quality of care. 15K will tank most people as effectively as 30K; the fact that 99% of the populace will never be able to bootstrap themselves through significant medical expenses is an inescapable fact.
The Ancient Randonneur
Good thing these rocket surgeons aren’t atheists. How would they handle US currency with “In God We Trust” stamped on it?
gratuitous
As dead set (npi) against “welfare” and “handouts” as these horrible examples of humanity are, I suppose they’re also far too proud to deduct any of their business expenses, preferring to pay the full tax on every penny of income from their businesses, right? Because, you know, any deductions for business expenses are just welfare, reducing their tax burden while the rest of us have to pick it up. Right?
The sooner these dopes go Galt, the better off so many of the rest of us will be.
Woodrowfan
I hear the same nonsense about paying for college. “Why can’t they just work part time to pay for it?” Because working a minimum wage job doesn’t pay enough to pay for college unless you plan to take one class a year and graduate when you are in your 90s!!!!
Joel
There’s your answer right there. Doesn’t believe in medicine.
esc
When my mother had cancer, her bills before insurance were over a million dollars. Nothing like having to stay in the hospital for weeks at a time because your fever won’t go down to ramp those bills right up on top of the actual treatment. As it was, with good insurance, my parents were almost wiped out between her loss of income and the medical bills they did have to pay. I suppose these idiots think they should have invested in longer bootstraps or something.
SatanicPanic
@Joel: hehe, maybe she’s seen her business drop off since people became able to afford real doctors
different-church-lady
@Kylroy: I think you’re right, but I also think it goes deeper.
a) People have been having medium sized Cole klutz incidents for the entirety of humanity, yet somehow lives continued without desolation. Something changed here.
b) Nobody ever wants to talk about how insurance severs the connection to what a market will bear. Everyone cares about how much their insurance costs, but nobody cares about what the actual treatment costs. Of course these things are connected, but the simple act of making them indirectly connected combined with human psychology makes the entire thing gooficated.
c) Everyone acts like insurance is some magic wand that creates money out of nothing. Everyone here is so smug about saying “we” are paying for the care of someone who refuses to insure themselves. Yet somehow nobody here expresses any guilt about having a healthy young person pay thousands of dollars every year for medical care they don’t use, in order to enable a system that makes their own care cheaper.
different-church-lady
@Woodrowfan: And yet people used to do just that. What changed? Think…
Don
Does these same jeanyuses refuse to use the standard federal deduction when they pay their taxes? Reject coupons? NO DAMN YOU, MACYS SALES CLERK, I WILL PAY FULL PRICE! I AM NOT A CHARITY CASE WHO NEEDS YOUR SALE NONSENSE!
NCSteve
Darwin. That is all.
Belafon
@esc: She should have planned her cancer for when she could have covered it.
// sarcasm
Cacti
Showing once again that while ignorance can be cured with education, there’s no cure for stupid.
Mary G
I always say people who talk like this are incredibly lucky to be healthy. They must be because there is no way to pay medical bills from savings unless you are Mitt Romney or something. Would that they should also have empathy and imagination.
I have been going through my EOB’s from my little bathroom fall – $58K plus for three days in the hospital, $12K plus for the stay in the rehab facility, plus about a hundred “little” bills from everyone who even passed my room in the hall of those places. Thank God for Medicare with disability. I am one of those charity cases and very thankful and grateful so to be.
Bubblegum Tate
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
And it will be All Obama’s Fault when she can’t afford to pay. Party of Personal Responsibility!
Villago Delenda Est
The stupid.
IT BURNS!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@KG: More “less” than “more,” I’d say. Clearly lacking cognitive ability, however.
SatanicPanic
@different-church-lady: people care what the treatments costs, but bringing the market into it is a waste of time. The market can’t bear most of these things, it’s just not possible.
eric
@different-church-lady: There is nothing to be guilty about. It is a system of collective action for the betterment of the whole of the community. might it be better if the mega rich paid for all health care through taxes? it might, but that is not the current model adopted by our democratic republic. Thus, we all pay in to the kitty for the eventuality that we may need the system someday. Thus, we can act without the fear of the catastrophic of personal or business financial lives. Optimal in my view? No. But I am not feeling guilty either.
Belafon
@eric: If that 20 year old wipes out on his motorcycle, he’ll be using part of the money I put in to cover his medical costs.
Punchy
WTF you talking about? This has yet to be adjudicated, and will likely be ruled in the GOP’s favor when SCOTUS hands it down.
Villago Delenda Est
@SatanicPanic: The system is gloriously rigged to prevent the sort of thing you do on a Saturday afternoon shopping for a big screen TV. What you (and your insurance company) pay isn’t known when you purchase the product (some health care procedure) and no one can tell you what it will cost.
It is pretty much the antithesis of Econ 101 ivory tower ideal market.
Benw
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): in this case “that one” could also mean “a democrat” because I bet she happily cashed her $300 check from GWB. But yeah it’s hard to untangle the stupidity from the hatred and fear in guessing the motivation for some on the right.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): I think I’ll send this stupid woman a bill for my years of military service protecting her worthless asshole ass from the Red Menace.
scav
different-church-lady also ignores time, it’s not as though all those poor trodden upon young healthy people paid for their entire education on the yearly personally-earned cash on the barrelhead program. Spending as a collective, be it a family or society is smooshed and fuzzy, and doesn’t neccessarily balence to a dime per individual (per economic catagory of spending per unit time blah blah).
Benw
@Iowa Old Lady: this made me LOL. I’m on the cheap end: my chemo is around $90k for a 3 month supply!
SatanicPanic
@Villago Delenda Est: that and the fact that I know well enough what a TV does and can tell if it isn’t working. And I can not buy one if I don’t feel like it.
catclub
@Mudge:
I wonder what his thoughts are on gravity.
srv
If Obamacare results in millions of conservatives refusing welfare/healthcare and being bankrupted or dying, isn’t that a holocaust?
How can people sleep at night.
Cacti
O/T, but here’s today’s Galtian superman that we can all laugh at:
In 2014, libertarian millionaire Roger Ver renounced his US citizenship and moved to St. Kitts to avoid paying taxes.
Now he cries like a toddler that the mean old US State Department has denied his visa application to come back for paid speaking gigs.
Geeno
@different-church-lady: In the case of colleges, they added several layers of “administration” at 6-digits a person, and tuitions sky-rocketed while real wages stagnated making it impossible to pay for college with a low wage job.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@different-church-lady:
Assuming all goes well, one day that healthy young person will be middle-aged or old and will need their share of care. Paying a little more than their exact share now ensures that the money will be there to pay for their care in the future. That’s what makes Social Security an insurance program, not a retirement savings program.
And that’s leaving out that certain percentage of healthy young people who get into accidents, are diagnosed with cancer, etc. We’re all healthy until we discover otherwise.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cacti: Boo hoo hoo. My heart pumps buttermilk for the sack of barnyard waste that is Roger Ver.
Calouste
@SatanicPanic: That last bit is IMO the crux. It isn’t a free market if you can’t choose not to take part in it.
raven
Here’s my front yard right now.
Mike in NC
All of these rugged individualists like Gracie deserve to live in cardboard boxes in back alleys where they can Dumpster dive to their heart’s content.
srv
@raven: Wait til they find the indian burial site.
raven
@srv: No granite yet and they only have 20 of the 100 yards to go!
Seanly
Yeah, you’d literally need a boatload of chickens & goats to barter for my wife’s leukemia treatments, blood stem cell transplant, ICU care after a pulmonary issue and now ongoing acute care. Last I checked we were up around $800,000 in medical bills for 2014. You can bet your sweet ass that I met my co-pays & deductible last year. Probably meet it this year in a few weeks.
For those who’ve seen me post about her earlier (and/or give a damn), she is doing well. Especially considering that I was told they had exhausted all options for treating her lungs 5 weeks ago. She turned around and has a long road to physical recovery. We hope that she can transition to a rehabilitation hospital in a couple of weeks and get back home in a couple of months.
The enormity of potential spending on health care exceeds what most people can comprehend.
Plus I don’t see the subsidies as a handout. One pays taxes in all sorts of different ways. I get a reduction in my taxes because my employer health insurance, 401(k) and HSA payments all come out pre-tax. Those aren’t handouts – just a weigh to reduce my taxable income.
Elizabelle
@raven: Yup. That’s some Georgia red clay.
raven
@Seanly: Good to hear she’s progressing.
burnspbesq
@Cacti:
In 2014, libertarian millionaire Roger Ver renounced his US citizenship and moved to St. Kitts to avoid paying taxes.
He may be avoiding U.S. tax on his future income, but he paid (or will pay when he files his 2014 return) a whopper of a toll charge when he expatriated.
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Expatriation-Tax
pseudonymous in nc
So I assume they don’t take any tax deductions on their Schedule Cs as well, right, because that’s just fucking welfare.
Actually, for fuck’s sake, shouldn’t they be taking the cost of their premiums and out-of-pocket costs as deductions unless their partners have insurance from their employers?
I smell ever so much bullshit.
burnspbesq
@pseudonymous in nc:
You’re assuming that scum like this actually file.
pseudonymous in nc
@different-church-lady:
Maybe because I have no fucking guilt about believing in a healthcare system where we’re all in it together, not acting like a set of atomic individuals.
Turgidson
@Punchy:
That’s not the question before the Supreme Court this time. Between Roberts earlier decision calling the mandate a “tax” and the voluminous previous commerce clause case law (which Thomas, Alito and the ever-grumpier Scalia would overrule if they could, but haven’t yet), Congress can indeed spend how it damn well pleases in most cases.
The King/Halbig embarrassment is about how to interpret ambiguous or contradictory statutory language. And while I agree that I think the GOP ideologues on the court are going to go for it this time and nuke the federal exchanges and subsidies, they’ll be overruling extremely well-settled SCOTUS case law when they do. It’ll be an abomination.
Woodrowfan
@different-church-lady: I know, it’s because profs like me get paid too much! oh wait, no, that’s not it….
burnspbesq
@Turgidson:
Apparently, the Supremes haven’t forgotten how to read statutes, and when a statute is sufficiently clear they will vote unanimously to apply it in a way that fucks their supposed constituency (in this case, a major mortgage lender).
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-684_ba7d.pdf
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@burnspbesq:
I think what people fear is that the SC will try to do another Bush v Gore style decision where they claim that the decision only applies to this one case and not any others.
cckids
@pseudonymous in nc:
There are limitations & lots of rules about how much you can deduct (re: health care costs) when you are self-employed. For all the blathering about supporting small business from every Congress, the tax laws are not always very fair.
andy
Did these clowns pass on claiming a deduction for their kids, or any of the other goodies you can get running a business?
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I get that. There’s a big disconnect between how lawyers and non-lawyers think about Halbig and King. Lawyers are like “those arguments are so fucking stupid, there’s no way,” and non-lawyers are like “yeah, that’s what you said last time, and look how close we came to losing the entire statute.”
Turgidson
@burnspbesq:
I don’t question their capacity to interpret statutes – only their ability to do so in good faith in this case.
I just don’t get why they took the King case if they weren’t itching to kill the federal subsidies. They could have just let the full DC Circuit overturn the shitty Halbig decision and kept their paws off the issue if they weren’t considering blowing it up, or am I missing something? You have to either be head-injury-stupid or a shameless ideological activist to think the agency’s construction of the statute isn’t reasonable or permissible. I think the rightwingers on the Court are itching to be the latter.
Turgidson
@Turgidson:
to add – I’m a lawyer, and I’m in the “that’s so fucking stupid” camp AND the “but it might not matter because the conservatives on the Court are fucking assholes” camp. I don’t know how else to look at it in light of recent SCOTUS jurisprudence.
burnspbesq
@Turgidson:
There are only two ways for plaintiffs to win. Either the Court blows up everything everybody thinks they know about statutory construction, with unimaginably bad consequences for every area of human activity where law matters, or they blow up the entire Chevron doctrine and create unimaginable chaos in every area of law where regulations matter.
I just don’t think Roberts or Kennedy have the stomach for either of those consequences.
Kylroy
@different-church-lady: In order:
A) Yeah, and they mostly took care of it at home and had lingering effects from the injury for the rest of their lives. Medical options have exploded in the past few decades. If we were willing to restrict ourselves to interventions available before 1955, we could save a lot of money, but I don’t think people are up for that.
B) It does sever the connection…because the market does not function if people have to pay out of pocket. The original Blue Cross Blue Shield plans were created by hospitals during the Great Depression because *nobody could afford to pay for a doctor’s visit*, so they weren’t going.
C) Everyone else has already jumped all over this one, but I’ll just repeat: we don’t feel guilty asking people to pay for their own security when their failure to do so can result in massive costs that are spread to the rest of us (if their uninsured ass gets injured and ends up in the emergency room).
Kylroy
@burnspbesq: Or they wave the same wand they did in Bush vs. Gore and declare that this is a special ruling that applies only in these circumstances because reasons.
Turgidson
@burnspbesq:
I’d like to agree, but wouldn’t put it past those weasels to figure out some bullshit rationalization for why Chevron isn’t being disturbed by their ruling, but still killing the subsidies, or as Mnem said, appending a “this case is not to be used as precedent” dodge to the end of the opinion.
Four justices had to want to take the case. So presumably one of Roberts and Kennedy wanted this. Unless it was the liberal justices who wanted to take the case and the intent is to issue a “knock this shit the fuck off” opinion, I don’t see why they’re even hearing the case unless they’re seriously considering blowing it up.
This is stressing me out. Grateful to live in Covered California land.
Iowa Old Lady
@burnspbesq: From your mouth to the FSM’s ear.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
And, TBH, it’s hard to argue too hard with the State Department’s reason for denying his application. Given that he still owns a company based in the US, I too would be suspicious about whether he’s going to go home to his adopted company after his visit is over. In any case, it’s about fucking time the rules that are used to keep poor people out of the company were actually applied to rich people, too.
Monala
@different-church-lady:
a) People have been having medium sized Cole klutz incidents for the entirety of humanity, yet somehow lives continued without desolation. Something changed here.
What changed is that we can now treat those things. Those medium sized incidents often killed people throughout humanity’s existence.
c) Everyone acts like insurance is some magic wand that creates money out of nothing. Everyone here is so smug about saying “we” are paying for the care of someone who refuses to insure themselves. Yet somehow nobody here expresses any guilt about having a healthy young person pay thousands of dollars every year for medical care they don’t use, in order to enable a system that makes their own care cheaper.
That’s because that young healthy person won’t always be young and healthy. And when s/he does get sick, other people will be the ones paying thousands to support his/her care.
Monala
@different-church-lady: The rising costs of higher education and health care may have some overlap, but as I understand it, higher eds increases have been driven by two things: a) the “no tax increase” movement of Republicans, which has reduced state coffers and made low-cost or free state-run higher ed almost non-existent; and b) “frills” (such as fancy dorms and gyms on campus) to attract wealthy students, and admin overhead.
pseudonymous in nc
@cckids:
Indeed there are. My broader point was that both of the exemplars in that piece were self-employed / sole proprietors, so presumably Sched C or similar, and either they’re extremely dumb, or they’re very familiar with the process of accumulating business expenses, calculating home office deductions, logging travel mileage and every other tax writeoff available to them, all of which constitute “government welfare” no less than the ACA premium subsidies.
delk
A little over a year and a half ago, I spent 13 days in a drug induced coma. People who have never been seriously sick think you just get a bill:You Owe This! In reality you get dozens of bills. Everybody gets a piece. I got billed for stuff I obviously do not remember (I was in a coma, lol) and stuff I do remember.
Every day for a couple of weeks the bills all start rolling in. Five figures here, four figures there, OMG! one only for $32.67!!!! $19,000? Well that’s better than the $32,000 one that came yesterday.
I have excellent insurance, and it paid for most of it, but still, the 10 dollars here and the 20 there, the $32.67 all add up. In my case to just over $6,000.
People that think that they have ‘good enough’ insurance are clueless.
Another Holocene Human
@Iowa Old Lady: There were some stories two years ago about how a big anti-ACA activist in Florida was exactly that, a big old deadbeat.
Richard Mayhew
@Punchy: As a constitutional principle, Congress can spend money fairly freely. The question is if you ignore a plain reading, if you ignore a contextual reading, if you ignore legislative intent, if you ignore your own 2012 understanding of the law, can you isolate 10 words to fuck the law over…. that is a legal principal, not a constitutional principal…
sm*t cl*de
@KG:
oh sweet baby buddha, she is (more or less) a doctor? I give up, I got nothing.
No, chiropractice /= medicine. She’s a snake-oil charlatan who doesn’t want to be insured against snakebite.
sdhays
@sm*t cl*de: While I wouldn’t recommend visiting this lady, I’d just like to say that chiropractic care can work. My father used to call them “chiroquacktors” (in fact, to this day, I still think “chiroquacktor” whenever I see the term “chiropractor”). He used to suffer terrible, splitting headaches. After decades of suffering and shrugs from the medical professionals, he happened to find out that his mother used to suffer the same, but had found relief by visiting a chiropractor. Not regularly, but only once in a while after the initial treatment. My dad was willing to try just about anything, so he went to her chiropractor and after a few sessions, his headaches just about disappeared. The chiropractor said to come back if they start to reoccur, but so far, they haven’t. My dad sure doesn’t call them “chiroquacktors” anymore (and my parents are now even more keen to share with me information on their aches and pains in case I develop the same so that I don’t muddle along for decades with something they know how to fix).
I’m sure some chiropractors are frauds (frankly, some doctors are pretty much frauds, despite all their medical training), but there’s something to the practice itself. It’s fair to refrain from calling them doctors since they don’t have the same training, but they’re not automatically “snake-oil charlatans”.
Brutusettu
@sm*t cl*de:
Is she a mixed or straight chiropractor? If she’s straight, she’s a quack.
If she’s mixed, she still might be a quack, but could just be an under trained physical therapist.
Brutusettu
@sdhays: Placebo, not just a band.
sdhays
@Brutusettu: Don’t patronize me with that “placebo” bullshit. You believe what you want to believe; my dad’s headaches weren’t psychological.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Brutusettu:
Per the National Institutes of Health, scientific studies show that chiropractic treatment can be useful for lower back and neck pain:
https://nccih.nih.gov/health/pain/spinemanipulation.htm#science
It may be mostly BS, but it’s not 100 percent BS. It’s not unusual for a headache to be referred pain from a problem in the neck, so I find sdhays’ story to be quite plausible and in line with current science.
sdhays
Just to clarify for anyone who doesn’t get it, I’m not calling on anyone to run out and visit their local chiropractor. Maybe they are indeed little more than “under trained physical therapists”. My only point is that some of them know something about what they’re doing and do actually help real people, so it’s unfair to just sneer at someone because they’re a chiropractor (and I say this as someone who used to do just that). This lady is clearly an idiot, and I have no doubt that any relief she may bring her clients she takes back by forcing them to listen to her right-wing bullshit during their sessions (I actually doubt she’s competent because she seems to be the type of person more concerned about politics than whatever is going on with her client; I once went to a dentist who was like that and very proud of how competent he thought he was because no one had ever sued him, but I found him to just be unfocused and going through the motions). But we have no information to judge her practice, so calling her names just for being a chiropractor is being dickish.
My dad got treatment from his doctor, an ear nose and throat specialist, and a neurologist, and NONE of them had the idea that his terrible headaches (debilitating like a migraine, but not a migraine) might be structural, but were willing to do a lot more expensive tests and treatments. This chiropractor examined him once and said “I know what the problem is, I’ve seen it before, I can help you” and he did and it wasn’t some scam to keep him coming in every month. Maybe he’s the only chiropractor in the world who’s not a fraud, but I know at least one of them exists.
And that’s the end of my public service announcement.