Small Town Life

The old Crazy Club meeting hall has gone out of business. Informal meetings have taken place at the Shiner's house in the kitchen, but this ain't as good as the old days.  Mike Krause is trying to revive the old club house. It does belong to him.  Yesterday Kadizzle visited him there.  In the old meeting room he has placed a table.  It looks like somewhere people might play poker now.  Kadizzle went to the library the other day and suggested the Brooks house be used for book club meetings. The Brooks House is the official name of the old meeting hall.  Krause kind of likes the idea, so we may be able to revive the place.

Kadizzle has to run to Bismarck today to the dentist.  As luck would have it both the Mr. and Mrs. cracked a tooth.  The bill will come close to three thousand dollars.  Dental work in this country has become as insane as all other health care.  Just to peek in the mouth and see what work need to be done cost over $100.  Dentist are creating a line of traffic heading over the border to Mexico to get dental work done.  What if the guy at the gas station came out and looked at your car for ten seconds and said " You got a flat tire, that will be $20 for looking".   When you do the math, it took the dentist less than 15 minutes to tell me I had a problem.  She did not do a damn thing.  That means her dental office was making about $400 an hour.  Lets be generous and cut that back to $300.  So that comes to about $2,400 a day.  Cut that back even farther to $2,100 per day.  That works out to about $550,000 per year.  That is not the entire picture.  There are one maybe two people cleaning teeth at $100 an hour.  That puts the figure back up there. Now the total intake comes close to $1,000,000 per year.  Of course it cost something to run the office, and the receptionist and accountant have to make something. The Googles says the dentist is netting $72 an hour.  So maybe it isn't all that bad. 

Now what if our country had better dental care? What if our country had something like Denmark? In Denmark there is a school dentist.  If that were the case the mess in the Kadizzle mouth would be far less. The total cost would be far less.  Preventive medicine saves lives and dollars, but that means we have to be smart and it might impact the tax cuts that are so important for the rich.  Oh, what the hell we will just pay the 3k and be happy.