“Medicare (Mis)management”

Via email from Hugh H., this lil morality play in one act…


The phone rings and the lady of the house
answers, “Hello”?

“Mrs. Walker, please.”

“Speaking.”

“Mrs. Walker, this is Doctor Jones at the
Medical Testing Laboratory. When your
doctor sent your husband’s biopsy to the
lab yesterday, a biopsy from another Mr.
Walker arrived as well, and we are now
uncertain which one is your husband’s.
Frankly the results are either bad or terrible.”

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Walker asks
nervously.

“Well, one of the specimens tested positive
for Alzheimer’s and the other one tested
positive for AIDS. We can’t tell which is
your husband’s.”

“That’s dreadful! Can’t you do the test again?”
questioned Mrs. Walker.

“Normally we can, but Medicare will only pay
for these expensive tests one time.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do now?”
asked Mrs. Walker.

“The people at Medicare recommend that
you drop your husband off somewhere in
the middle of town. If he finds his way
home, don’t sleep with him!”


You know, this sort of humor just doesn’t work without a real world meme to support it, in this case, Medicare itself, in all its bureaucratic “glory”, conflated with AIDS and Alzheimers… The sad truth that so many government programs, like Medicare, are fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed without cures that are worse than the diseases makes this classic humor: we laugh simply because it’s better than crying or attempting to storm the Bastille, as it were.

Checking my deductible and Medicare co-pay at Conservative Cat, Outside the Beltway, and at TMH’s Bacon Bits, where The Mary Hunter is taking the high road this Palm Sunday weekend.

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