Back in my undergraduate days, one of my friends was over served one evening and tried unsuccessfully to take a shower. I say, "unsuccessfully," because at some point he lost his footing and landed on his chin. As any doctor can tell you, as well as most engineers, the human chin is not designed withstand that kind of point load. After several hours of emergency surgery, glen would up with a couple of hundred stitches inside his mouth and his shattered jaw wired shut.
For weeks, he was unable to consume anything that couldn't be sucked through a rather small diameter straw. The novelty of a milkshake diet quickly wore off, however, and he went to heroic lengths to puree solid food.
One evening the usual suspects were enjoying beer and pizza while Glen drooled visibly from the corners of his mouth. At our prompting he pulled out his ever-present blender and tossed in a can of Budweiser and a slice of Alex's peperoni. The resulting goop looked and smelled like a blender full of vomit. Glen took a sip, grimaced and announced that it didn't taste nearly as good as it looked. Hoo-boy.
The main moral of the story, of course, is to not get drunk and stupid or bad things can happen to you. The secondary moral is that a whole is not necessarily as good as the sum of its parts.
I was reminded of that story when I read that the House had passed their version of, "health care reform." The individual pieces of the legislation may appeal to this or that person, but the whole is, in essence, a blender full of vomit.
My advice to all Americans is that there has never been a better time to quit smoking, lose weight, exercise, start wearing your seat belt, change the batteries in your smoke detector and anything else you can think of to stay healthy. The Federal Government can't even distribute Pork Flu vaccine to children before Gitmo terrorists.
Even if I accept the premise that that the Government should take over our health care system-and I most certainly do not-there isn't going to be enough money to even begin to pay for it. We're broke, folks. On the current trajectory, it's only a matter of time until we crash and burn.