GCN Satire

National Health Care is NOT Cradle to Grave! (Yet.)

By Otis Bucksnort      Filed 4/2/10

I am just sick and tired of gibbering drooling Wrong-Wingers caterwauling about the recently passed health care bill. If you listen to them, the Democrats are turning the country into some kind of Nazi-like cradle to grave nanny state!

This is just absurd. No one has made a call for government provided funerary services. However, having considered this lapse on Nancy Pelosi's part, I'd like to be the first to suggest it.

Have you ever had the misfortune of having to shop for end-of-life services? I don't mean nursing care, I mean DEAD end-of-life services? Well, I can tell you that trying to lay to rest a loved one can cost thousands of dollars.

This often unexpected expense can come at the very time a bereaved family is most vulnerable to the evils of free market capitalism- perhaps when a hapless widow is struggling to provide her children with food and shelter without her co-tax payer and or child support provider.

What we need is new legislation to literally provide American citizens and residents living here lawfully or not still another new entitlement.

Perhaps we'll be able to call it "Bennie Thompson Merciful Death Assistance Act of 2010." Surely he'd sponsor it. After all, Bennie has never seen a new government "bennie" that he didn't like.

A funerary benefit would fit hand in glove with our all new and far more efficient health care system.

If tax payers are not going to waste valuable medical resources on those irrationally clinging to life past their ability to give back to society- such as paying their fair share of taxes- then assisting their grieving families with a free funeral is the least the state can do.

You might say is it is a human application of the Kelo decision.

Of course, any new entitlement like this must turn a page on the outmoded policies of the past. Setting aside land for graves is not responsible stewardship of natural resources. So, requiring tax payers to fund the traditional bourgeois Christian body-in-casket burial would not only be inappropriate on environmental grounds, the separation of church and state absolutely precludes it.

Besides, it would cost a lot of money.

The obvious answer is cremation. Properly equipped, government run crematoriums, fitted with advanced environmentally sound catalytic converters and CO 2 scrubbers, would dispose of our loved one's body while keeping our air clean and free of global warming greenhouse gases.

Of course, baby boomers are the largest demographic approaching the window of imminent demise. With their numbers being so massive, we must consider the environmental impact of all those mercury fillings being released into the atmosphere by fire. Vaporized capped and filled teeth could spell an environmental disaster.

Human ingestion of mercury would certainly impact national health care costs, so loved ones would have to have their capped and filled teeth removed prior to incineration.

Such a laborious process could turn a national funerary plan into a job maker of considerable import. And the recycling opportunities don't stop with teeth! Think of implanted electronic devices, artificial hip and knee joints, surgical screws, skull plates, and other items.

Then there is the possibilities afforded by mandatory organ donation; eyes and hearts, livers and kidneys, hair and even skin.

The sheer magnitude of this harvesting and recycling would be daunting if it weren't for the looming abolition of all meat consumption. Thankfully, forced vegan-ism will provide plenty of shuttered meat processing plants suitable for this new use.

The crematoriums could be co-located with the funerary recycling and harvesting centers to further save money on transportation expenses. And by using rail to get our loved ones to these centers, we'd be saving our our departed loved ones the ignoble humiliation of being carried on their final journey by a fossil fuel burning hearse!

And because trains don't have to stop at rail crossings like cars and trucks do, any such rail based "funeral procession" would speed the dead to the hereafter without the drama and expense of a police escort.

Should anyone, such as the Religious Wrong, try to raid these trains for their own nefarious religious purposes, security could be provided by our president's new health care security force. The president has said such a force will be just as powerful and well funded as the US. Military.

The savings will surely be so great the entire plan will pay for itself!

Now, doesn't this plan just give you a warm fuzzy feeling?