So, I don’t often do photo backgrounds, especially ones that are realistic, but actually, that’s my for-real hospital room from my recent health crisis. Actually it’s the last of FOUR rooms I had during my nearly month-long stay in the hospital, and this photo was taken the day I was discharged. Wild, huh?

Fortunately, I had good insurance, as just the hospital bill alone ran to around a quarter of a million dollars. And yeah, this business cost us plenty, but we still have our house and most of our retirement savings. Without insurance, we would have either A: Lost everything we’ve saved over the years, or B: I would be taking a big dirt nap right now.

I only rarely get political with the comic, but I don’t really feel that pointing out that our health care system in this country is the disgrace of the developed world is or should be a political statement. A health crisis can happen to anyone at any time, and it shouldn’t be randomly bankrupting families. We can do better than that. We HAD (still have as of this writing, but probably not for long) an imperfect attempt at making things better. It had big problems, but with it, we maybe could have bought our own insurance to bridge until I was old enough for Medicare, so my wife could retire as she planned. But now she’ll probably have to keep working just for the insurance, and we’ll just have to HOPE that Medicare isn’t screwed by the time I get there. Because instead of fixing the imperfect system, we’re going to hit the reset button for purely political reasons and replace it with a cobbled together mess that serves nobody but special interests.

We can do better than this. Pretty much every developed country already does. I don’t think it’s political to demand we do better. Whatever party you belong to, no matter what candidate you backed in the election, you should DEMAND of your representatives that we do better. Because if we don’t, we’re going to kill more people than Al Qaeda ever dreamed of. Heck, you just missed killing ME!

Okay, end of rant. The blog post got pretty serious, but I still think the cartoon is fun and a bit silly, if everybody can take the political chip off their shoulders for just a minute. Don’t worry. Next week we’ll be back to the usual silliness!

Your still-alive Minion Master,

Steve