Doctors and the lack of healthcare advancement and quality of service.

Kevorkian may have been stopped, but what is worse could be the many passive Kevorkians in the system. 80 years old and head injury with bleeding? Odds are no recovery so, why try because the failure rate is so extremely high. Simply maintain and watch the decline to eventual death.

I'm saying that because Doctor's are so high up in the system both socially and professionally they can get complacent as just about anyone does. Or, it all becomes too much to bear or whatever the cause; any doctor has a heck of a lot of learning and as they are revered in our society we should be able to expect more from them. Just as any athelete or movie star or giant of music or other person choosing to make their life a display for all and gets a special place in society we should be able to expect their best behavior. From Doctor's we should get the highest of quality, concern and innovation. It's like Dentists, I mean can you believe it is just about the same technique-wise as it was 1000 years ago, they just have novacaine and nitrous oxide and lasers to make it easier for them to do their jobs. What I mean is, if they really cared to fix you, really, by now they would have found out how to stop cavities altogether and you wouldn't get tooth decay at all. I mean 1000 years, come on. And, the cigarette companies if they had taken the money and years they spent trying to make it seem that cigs don't hurt you and spent it on cancer research we would probably already have a cures for throat, lung and mouth cancers. Oops, back on track>
So, I was putting a customer's patient monitor into a box to ship to the company that has to fix it as it requires proprietary manufacturer's software only available at the factory to calibrate it, when it occurred to me that I wouldn't really in all good conscience be able to charge for the time I spent fixing it as I hadn't really fixed it-even though I got it working again it was out of calibration. This made me think that it would really make Doctors work really hard to come up with new innovations and techniques and would also make the quality of health care overall get a lot better if we as a society make it a rule that when a Doctor or hospital doesn't fix you:
you don't have to pay.

Insurance premiums would also most likely go way down as the quality and innovation in medicine sky-rocketed. As this would no doubt also save society huge amounts of money as so many more people would be cured, and cured faster and returned to a greater degree of health upon recovery society could even afford to pay Doctors even more money than they get now when they also get paid for the failures to heal. I suppose for a while we would have to still pay them a fractional payment for the really, really old folks who expire, but we could feel better as a society knowing that everything that could be done was really getting done as they would save a lot of their time and make a lot more money if they also fixed them and this would keep them from complacency with the status-quo.

As long as I'm ranting what about if we had spent the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Iraq 'War' and bought solar collectors, how many watts would have been produced that would also have the wonderful benefit of not producing greenhouse gases and heat as a by-product of their use? A whole lot, and probably no one would have had to die doing it. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Fix for the Afghan preference for growing poppies

I say the US or International Community as a group simply buy the opium produced. After all in the US we pay rich people that are absentee owners of farms that don't grow anything 'free' (translated: your tax dollars) federal government money in the form of farm subsides. So what if it is opium? Just buy it. When the opium is bought then it's known who is growing it, and it keeps the drug and drug money out of the hands of potential terrorists, and the Taliban. Then burn it or sell it to legit drug and chemical companies to recoup some of the money spent on it. This way the farmers don't turn to the Taliban and terrorists for their survival which makes any man a another man's friend. Then we become their friends instead of potential targets.

If this is done the Afghan farmers can then be introduced to other crops that will support their families and they can freely and proudly sell in the open marketplace.

Buying the opium produced also prevents the regulating agency from having to traveling with armed squads of soldiers and they don't have to kill or arrest people simply trying to make a living in a harsh environment.

One other plus is no spraying of plant poisons and defoliants that will stress their already marginal growing environment and may pose long-term health threats to man, animals and local plant species.

I can only assume that no armed squads, no herbicide campaigns, no deaths on both sides will be cheaper than buying the opium and providing teaching and new crops.