As a small business owner, it’s time to weigh-in on the obscene cost of health care. But, if you please, the culprits aren’t the doctors, hospitals and other medical services. Once again, WE THE PEOPLE willingly have been sucked into mindless attitudes and misplaced priorities. Health Insurance as currently practiced is a bad idea that blows the cost of health care out the roof. Try on this premise: We should adopt health insurance only for catastrophic health care. For everything else, people should simply pay the bill as they would for any other purchase they make in life. You get a checkup, pay the bill. You get the flu, pay the bill. Break a leg, pay the bill. The pervading sickness across this land is the notion that health isn’t a cost of living like taking a vacation. Health isn’t as important as gorging, puffing, guzzling, scarfing Cialis or babbling on the cell, not to mention the mindless addiction to flat screen mania. Hell, getting sick isn’t fair. Some of us get sick more than others. So we need our friends and neighbors to pay for our health and we help pay for theirs. Isn’t that a sweet socialistic concept? Instead of looking our doctors or hospitals in the eye as we pay for their services, we send money to insurance companies who recycle the money to pay for thousands of paper pushers inhabiting a corporate monstrosity. So what do you think happens? Yes, you’re almost as smart as a fifth grader. The cost goes up and up and up. Health insurance makes sense for dread, degenerative and life-threatening disease. For everything else, we should pay direct. The cost should be much lower without the burden of regulation, litigation and overhead. Physicians would have relationships with customers and charge for services as they see fit. And, yes, this idea means people would be forced to be more accountable and responsible for their health. Horrors. They might have to think twice before charging the $2000 cruise to a credit card when they need a colonoscopy. That is, if the colonoscopy is more important than a week at Cozumel. Hmmmmmnn.

Isn’t it time that White, Anglo-Saxon, Heterosexual, Christian, Overbearing Males had an organization all their own? WASHCOM. Not bad. Don’t they need to band together and speak out when somebody says something insensitive or prejudicial about them? Women have NOW and the Lifetime Channel. Blacks have the NAACP. The LULAC signs up Latinos. Asian Americans unite under the UAAO. Gays and Lesbians march under the NGLTF. CAIR fights for the rights of Muslims. The AAI speaks for Arab Americans. Jews use the ADA to attack anti-Semitic bias. Special interest organizations number in the thousands for every conceivable nationality and cause. Most of them are fighting for “rights” and against discrimination. If that’s true, you have to guess they must think of themselves as minorities who are being denied their rights by somebody. Who persecutes these people, pray tell? Let’s see, if you exclude Women, Children, African Americans, Arabs, Jews, Gays and Lesbians, Atheists, Latin Americans, Asian Americans and a myriad other ___ (fill in the blank) Americans, who’s left? Evidently, all of these people are at war with WASHCOMs. G.W., Cheney, Gingrich and Limbaugh could be WASHCOM poster boys. Well, they should be ashamed, shouldn’t they? Truth be known, they and their ilk probably have many deep-seated prejudices, so typical of your average WASHCOM. In honor of our Founding Father WASHCOMs, Congress should amend the Constitution to outlaw prejudice. It should establish a new Federal agency — the Commission to Regulate All Prejudice (CRAP). Having the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of property worked pretty well to build the greatest nation on earth, but these rights are too ambiguous and no longer protect the feelings and welfare of millions who have special needs and interests. The ERA and EEOC are not strong enough. We need CRAP. It should blanket the land and pass into every home, school, church and business. By making prejudice a felony, CRAP would punish all bigots, especially those who carelessly vilify minority groups. Some idiot radicals might argue that WASHCOMs have the right to be prejudiced in a free society. Shouldn’t they have the right to be a Group? Perhaps, but they better put a lid on their opinions. Or they will have to deal with — you guessed it — CRAP.

Especially if you have bad habits. Like smoking. Or visiting doctors. Or ingesting smack, drinking booze, driving cars, eating fat, flying in airplanes, having sex in the workplace, committing homicide or defending your own life. But you needn’t be concerned with living a full life. You see, we long ago crossed the ultimate threshold into the Litigation Age. History will show that toward the end of the Second Millennium and into the Third, Americans exhibited a complete loss of anxiety, a state of near euphoria brought about by their total freedom to choose any behavior under the sun with no personal sense of responsibility whatsoever. In fact, it will be recorded that those who exhibited the least control over their lives stood the chance of profiting the most through ingeniously conceived lawsuits. Some moralists out there may lament this sorry state of affairs but they would be smart to get off the straight and narrow and pray for their own calamity. With any luck at all, they’ll show up in court and wind up in Aruba.