I will lay out the indictment here in brief form.  It's aimed at the American public at large because this is what is tolerated on a daily basis and what it costs us.  I'll leave this open for comment for a couple of days, after which I'm locking the topic.

Let's see if anyone can make the case for what they intend to do both personally and collectively about any of this -- and I'll keep this one short.  Trust me, there may be more where this came from if I decide it's worth my while.  After all it's not like I don't have 11,000 articles written over the last decade to draw from..... oh wait....

Let's start with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  There is now incontrovertible evidence that several years before the Uranium One deal was signed off on by both Hillary and Obama, a deal that sold 20% of American uranium assets to Russia (and we all know what uranium is used for, right?), the FBI had an ongoing investigation into the Russian principals of that transaction for bribery and extortion.  There are only two possibilities, of course: Either the FBI (all of it) intentionally concealed the existence of the investigation from the administration or the administration knew damn well that the deal was coerced and went along with it despite having full knowledge of same.

Do I particularly care which it is?  No, because the FBI is the government.

What I do very much care about is that the Russian Government actively practiced extortion and bribery within our borders for years and exactly zero was done about it to this very day more than a decade later.  The FBI knew about it and did exactly nothing.  Not one person has been indicted, the acts themselves were covered up despite being known to the government and the "deal" that appears to have been procured through felony unlawful acts has not been forcibly unwound.  In other words the Russians have been allowed to keep what they stole; this is equally egregious to the FBI watching a mobster rob a bank, knowing who it is that robbed the bank and then not only refusing to prosecute them letting them keep the money.

I remind you that if the government merely suspects you have $10,001 in your briefcase due to selling a substance they don't like they will steal it from you at gunpoint even if they are unable to prove that you did anything illegal.  At the same time the millions of dollars that these people funneled to the Clinton Foundation remains there, it has not been seized and the deal has not been unwound, nor has one single indictment been leveled.

I further remind you that before you scream "Democrats!" that Donald J Trump has been President now for nearly 10 months and he and his attorney general Jeff Sessions have done exactly nothing about any of this.  Trump and his administration along with both sides of the aisle in Congress are therefore explicitly confirming on a literal daily basis that this is "acceptable behavior" and not worthy of criminal punishment.  Let me remind you that Trump, during the campaign, repeatedly cheered on the premise "Lock Her Up."  Well?  Whether you're a "MAGA" supporter, an "establishment" Republican or a Democrat of any stripe go fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw because you are all explicitly supporting an administration that has intentionally refused to act on the "buying" of 20% of our nation's nuclear energy and weapons raw material by Russia through acts of bribery and extortion.

Considering that having our energy infrastructure strangled by a hostile government is arguably one of the greatest threats that we could face this activity is especially outrageous.  However, I can understand why you might stick you head in the sand on this; after all, the lights haven't so much as flickered in your house, right?

Ok, so maybe I'll let you slide on that one.

I won't let you slide on the $15,000 a year that is stolen from every family in this nation on an annual basis by the medical scam in the United States.

The means by which it happens are so varied and outrageous that they are almost beyond belief.  I have heard many people scoff at me when I point out that we overpay by five times in this country for medical care.  That is, if we stopped the scams I assert that your cost for medical care (and health insurance) would come down by 80% in a day.  I'm utterly confident in this number, however, and I would like to give you just a few reasons why.

One, for instance, is the fact that virtually every eye-drop medication is intentionally designed to waste half of the drug prescribed.  If that crap was to be stopped and the companies were prevented from simply doubling the price per-vial by competition the cost of said drops on a per-month basis would instantly fall by half.  Remember, this is without any other competitive pressures of any sort being brought to bear -- it would simply result from putting a stop to the intentional practice by the drug companies of designing a dispensing device that intentionally and unavoidably causes you to waste half the medication by having it run down your face.

Never mind the fact that such a practice also likely causes some percentage of users to suffer side effects that are harmful when the medicine goes in places it isn't intended (like your sinuses and throat), which you then must pay more money to counteract or treat.

The second I've written on several times: Drugs (such as antivenoms for scorpion stings and snakebites) that are sold in Mexico OVER THE COUNTER for $100 or so, yet in the United States a few dozen miles north the exact same drug, made in the exact same factory by the exact same company is available only from a hospital under prescription and costs tens of thousands of dollars.  This crap is true for almost every drug with varying differences by nation, with the United States paying the most in essentially every case.  While the really crazy ripoff percentages come for drugs that are relatively rarely used (like snakebite antivenom) they often amount to 500% or more for "mainstream" pharmaceuticals, whether they be for Hepatitis-C, diabetes (insulin), high blood pressure or hundreds of other conditions including various forms of cancer. The only reason this situation persists is that it is a federal offense for you to cross the Mexican (or any other) border, fill a suitcase with said drug for cash and then bring it back to the US and sell it for whatever you can fetch.

The third is "CON" laws in many states that require before you open or close a medical facility you receive a "Certificate Of Need."  The board evaluating your application?  It's made up of the owners of the existing medical facilities in the area.  This, along with other aspects of price fixing, is largely why you can literally fly to Narita, Japan, have an MRI done (for cash) and then fly home while spending less than the local imaging center charges you for the exact same scan and reading of same.  You are literally bilked out of anywhere from 5-10 times the cost in that first-world, first-class nation for the exact same thing.

Then there's The Surgery Center of Oklahoma, which I've written on several times.  They're a cash-based surgery center that will give you a price, soup-to-nuts, for a procedure just like the corner grocer does.  Hospitals and doctors for years have said you "can't" do that with medicine; this organization has proved that's a lie.  They not only do it their business is thriving.  Because they have quoted you a price and that's what you pay they also have every incentive not to screw up and give you an infection while there.  A traditional hospital gets to and does bill you to treat an infection they gave you while you were in surgery.  That incentive for them to not screw up is reflected in outcomes: The Surgery Center posts their infection rate and on a typical year it's twenty-five times lower than the national average.

Most of this is "hidden" from you through employer-provided insurance, but the scam continues nonetheless. The average Florida family pays over $18,700 a year for "health insurance" irrespective of who writes the check and if it was a more-appropriate $4,000 you'd get the nearly $15,000 a year difference in your salary.

Cut the crap, America.  Not only does the medical scam in this country, all of which I remind you is illegal and has been for 100 years, which medical and insurance firms twice tried to claim exemptions from when sued, the cases went to the US Supreme Court and the medical and insurance firms lost both times, cost every single family in this nation $15,000 each and every year, or enough to make the mortgage payment on a middle class house it also results, if you wind up in the hospital, a risk of infection twenty five times greater than what a market system brings you.

If the robbery isn't enough is a twenty-five times greater risk of a bankruptcy due to infection caused by the hospital, or, in the extreme cases, your death enough to get you off your ass?  May I remind you that roughly 200,000 people die in this country every single year due to preventable medical screwups, and that's only counting the ones that aren't successfully hidden.  In fact this is the third leading cause of death in the United States!

That isn't enough to get you off your ass?  Go fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw.

Think there are no answers to this rampant scam and the death it brings?  The hell there aren't.  There are remedies available at both state and federal levels.  I remind you that virtually every state (if not every) has an anti-trust law roughly parallel to the US Federal law (15 USC Chap 1.)  This means state prosecutors can bring these cases too, and state legislatures and executives could demand they do so.  Either the States or the Federal Government could start right here with a one-sentence law and follow it up here.

County and local governments could condition the issuance of business licenses (without which no medical facility or drug store can operate at all) on the posting of prices and non-discriminatory billing.  They could do that right now via city or county ordnance and if they did it would resolve their budget problems as well as fixing health care for you, their constituent.  Instead they rape you on property taxes and engage in financial shenanigans that ultimately will bankrupt both them and you.

They don't fix the problem instead of screwing you because you refuse to make this issue, which robs you of a fucking house every single year, the political point that they must face and resolve or be ejected from office and shunned to the point that they can't even walking the family dog without facing birds flown in their face by everyone they meet, with your treatment of such bastards extending from the lowliest cop on the beat to the Governor of every single state of the Union -- and every government employee in between.

Let me know when you stop consenting to being financially raped, along with accepting a twenty-five times greater risk than necessary of being severely injured or killed as a direct result of virtually every hospital in the United States having every reason to not give a damn if they give you an infection because they profit from it when it happens.

You don't want to do it?  You don't care that you're robbed out of a house every year?

Fine.

I don't want to hear your complaints when the economy collapses as this scam exceeds the ability to extract any more money from the people, or at least as bad or maybe worse forced rationing comes into play, you need medical care of some kind and you're simply told "Nope", leaving you die in agony after bankrupting you.

Fuck you Mr. President and your "Executive Order."

Double-fuck you Rand Paul.

There is no "reform" in your Executive Order; selling insurance across state lines and allowing "skinny" plans does nothing to address cost.

You could, via Executive Order, direct the FTC to go after medical providers of all stripes for refusing to publish prices, declaring such an action to be a deceptive practice and thus in violation of Federal Law and Regulation.  Every single business we deal with daily, with the exception of health care, posts prices and thus allows us to shop before we buy.  It is only health care that lacks this essential element of a market and in any other line of work such would have long-ago led to enforcement actions and even indictments.

You could, via Executive Order, direct Jeff Sessions to enforce 15 USC Chapter 1 against all medical firms as regard disparate pricing based on one's insurance status, a clearly-extortionate and illegal act under 100+ year old law which forbids any collusive act intended to limit competition and/or fix prices.  Said law has been challenged twice by the insurance industry all the way up to the United States Supreme Court with the first such challenge in 1979 (Group Life & Health .v. Royal Drug, 440 US 205) claiming an exemption for health insurance providers under McCarran-Ferguson.  THEY LOST.  I have repeatedly heard from myriad "lawmakers" that health insurance and medical providers are exempt from anti-trust; this is a bald lie given that there are two cases which went to the United States Supreme Court and were lost after attempting to assert exactly this claim.  What's even more outrageous is that after the second loss the State of California wrote a section into their BPR code (similar to the federal CFRs) that explicitly exempts health providers from the effects of that US Supreme Court decision yet it is a fact that no state regulator or legislature can exempt someone from a federal law.  That such a claim continues to be made by lawmakers, including Matt Gaetz just recently here in a Town Hall meeting in Florida, is an outrage and a deliberate fraud upon the public in which you are not only complicit you are the chief fraud enabler and promoter.

You, Mr. President, had not one but two items in your platform when running for President that addressed these issues, with one of them requiring the publication of prices.  As soon as you were elected that provision disappeared and has never been seen or heard since.

You're a damned liar Mr. President, and watching you at the dias this morning I want to fucking puke at the crap you are running on the American people with the full support of Rand Paul, who likewise wants to screw Americans by extending anti-trust protection to all medical providers.  He has in fact repeatedly tried to pass such a provision which would make legal that which currently is not, and which has been ruled illegal twice at the US Supreme Court but which your Administration, just like the previous ones, refuse to enforce.

The actions of this industry are illegal and between them medical firms steal over $3 trillion a year from Americans, enough for each and every American family to afford the payment on a middle-class house.

Fuck you Mr. President, fuck you Rand Paul, and fuck you Congress.  

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

The Okaloosa County Commission is by definition dysfunctional, corrupt or both.  Any governmental unit that believes a 47% budget increase over the space of a mere five years is defensible has rocks in their head.  That the Commission managed to paint over this by drawing down reserves when the cause was not a one-year hit from an event like a hurricane (which is what reserves are for) ought to be treated as criminal corruption and result in the incarceration of everyone involved.

The "escalating" expenses in the budget this year alone are primarily (1) reserve restoration (that is, paying back what the commission took through gross mismanagement), (2) adding to said reserves (possibly arguably ok), (3) more law enforcement (big shock) and (4) insane health care cost escalations.

If Okaloosa County wishes to improve its economic attractiveness it must address these issues along with the outrageous actions and inactions by the Commission not only over previous years, but on a forward basis.

Like many if not most counties Okaloosa County's ad-valorem tax revenue almost exclusively goes to the Sheriff's Office (and related expenditures, such as the county jail.)  This is not unusual; there are in fact counties where more than 100% of ad-valorem revenue goes to law enforcement.  If you're wondering why county sheriffs like to write tickets, well, you just figured it out since traffic fines of course offset some of their ad-valorem tax demand.

But in this county, as in other tourist areas, there's a problem: The majority of services provided by the Sheriff's Office, most of which are quite-mundane (e.g. traffic accidents, etc) involve and are provided to tourists.  The issue is that tourists pay almost zero ad-valorem tax; while if they rent someone's condo that person does pay the tax they only occupy the building for a tiny part of the year and thus on a pro-rata basis, that is, on a per-capita/year basis, they pay almost nothing.

Yet on a per-capita/year basis tourists form the majority of the Sheriff Department's load.

The county could have avoided a very large percentage of the millage increase in this particular case had it developed a taxation system that placed upon the users of these services the burden of paying for them. In fact, if the Commission had done so years ago there would be no need for millage increases at all; instead we'd be running a material surplus from ad-valorem revenue and would also have long ago reached the desired level of reserves!

Instead the county has a "bed tax" that is locked up for tourism "development" (read: advertising and promotion.) That "lockbox" currently has a large surplus and yet not one dollar of it can be used to fund the operating cashflow deficiency in the Sheriff's department caused by tourism.  Since our condos and hotels are in fact currently at capacity during the season there is also no point to spending money on additional promotion since there's nowhere to put additional tourists -- never mind that if we did the deficiency in the Sheriff's department would simply grow larger.

In response what the Commission has done is demand of residents that we pay more property tax.

This imbalance is a direct consequence of a poorly-designed taxing system that has shifted the cost of law enforcement brought to the area by tourism onto the backs of those who live here year-round.  Rather than change the taxation regime so as to shift those costs onto those who consume the services the Commission instead decided to screw the residents and continue to subsidize the tourists with resident tax money, an effective act of theft-by-conversion through the operation of law and ordinance!

If the Commission wishes the residents of the county to embrace and approve of tourism in our area they need to stop screwing the residents and landowners whom they need to provide goods and services to said tourists.

The current situation is exactly as if said tourists directly broke into resident homes and stole money from them with the Sheriff's Department providing "muscle" for the thieves.

The Sheriff, for his part, is well aware of this and in fact he's actively involved in that cost-shifting through the way he practices law enforcement.  Sheriff Larry Ashley does this intentionally and he knows damn well exactly what he's doing -- and why.

To take just one example on "heavy tourist weekends" (e.g. Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc) the Sheriff's Office typically sets up a "safety" checkpoint somewhere intended to snare DUIs (and other offenses, of course.)  This may be defensible since DUIs spike on said weekends but the Sheriff's Office always places that checkpoint at locations where few to zero tourists ever travel, such as on Mountain Drive instead of right in the exit path from popular tourist drinking locations like AJs on 98 and the complex of tourist-focused nightclubs and bars at the fishing pier on Okaloosa Island.  The most-recent example was a checkpoint on Beal Parkway that is not on the path to or from any frequented tourist accommodation from any drinking establishment but is on the path home for many local residents from local-frequented bars and nightspots.  As such while they do catch people driving drunk with these checkpoints a ridiculously-overrepresented percentage are locals since the tourists happily drive drunk down the roads the Sheriff intentionally does not concentrate on and the checkpoint consumes resources that could otherwise be used to patrol such areas WHERE THERE ARE LOTS OF DRUNK TOURISTS.  While DUI is a problem for everyone and I applaud getting any dangerously-intoxicated person off the road to place such "checkpoints" where nearly zero tourists will encounter them but locals will leaves the largest component of risk for DUI accidents and death on those weekends intentionally under-policed.

This practice has been undertaken for my entire 17 years of living here and yet not a single mention of it has ever been made by the County Commission that I am aware of.  The local media has also ignored it, of course.  In my years here I cannot recall one time that I've seen a checkpoint at either the Harbor area or near the fishing pier -- both routinely full of drunk tourists on a holiday weekend.

As a strong and positive signal to the Sheriff's Department the Commission could make clear that the department will have all funding increases denied and in fact will have its budget cut by 10% a year until it starts behaving in a fashion in its policing that matches the load imposed on the department by the various groups demanding services.

This is just one of many examples but it's one of the most-glaring, obvious and easily corrected without spending a single additional nickel.  Further, for each tourist caught DUI as opposed to a local resident the local economic impact is actually positive on balance since (1) they won't wreck someone else's property (and maybe someone else's life) thereby imposing costs on residents, (2) the court system collects a large fine and costs (including quite-possibly enough to cover whatever incarceration term is imposed, if any) which goes back into the county coffers and (3) the consequential unemployment (and thus lower or zero future spending for some period of time) of said person, if it occurs, harms some other economy instead of ours.

The Commission can also work to redesign the portion of the county and local tax structure they control with the express intent (and if necessary votes of the citizens) so as to place the burden that tourism puts on the Sheriff's Office entirely on said tourists at the same time.  But, I caution residents, half-steps that are not linked in an indivisible way are not acceptable.

If the commission will not place the costs tourists impose on the Sheriff's Office on them and insist that the Sheriff direct his enforcement activities toward those causing the service volume increases we who live here ought to contemplate being rude as hell to said tourists and try to get them to leave as that will both improve our quality of life and decrease our taxes!

There are plenty of other issues in the Sheriff's Department, mostly revolving around effectiveness in policing.  The county jail is currently 200 people over nominal capacity yet the question not asked is why do we keep seeing increasing incarceration rates? We're obviously doing it wrong both in terms of real economic progress (employed, happy people rarely commit jailable offenses.) When it comes to law enforcement tactics instead of demanding that Sheriff and his deputies change their tactics so as to reduce crime that leads to incarceration (and thus decrease both the number of people in jail and the need to hire more deputies) the Commission instead votes to throw money at the problem, hire more cops, buy more law-enforcement hardware and contemplate building a bigger jail while taxing the productive members of society, in some cases probably to the point that they no longer deem their effort worth it and thus turn to crime!

In other words the Commission's actions, on the margin, actually create criminals who then not only need to be locked up they victimize the productive members of our society as well.

On the revenue side the Commission wishes to pass a sales surtax, and plans to put such before the public later this year or early next year.  Such a surtax, if we are to approve it, must come with permanent and enforceable rollbacks that are of exactly equal budgetary impact in millage that occur before the sales tax is imposed.  The point of such must be to shift burden to the user of services to the extent we can, not simply add revenue.  I remind you that a tax is a tax is a tax; whether I pay it in a property tax levy or at the local store makes zero difference at the end of the month when it comes to the impact on my wallet.  Further, the anticipated sales tax revenue is grossly more than the property tax levy increase -- that is, there was no reason to pass the property tax increase EXCEPT to screw the residents given this sales tax proposal.

The second and probably most-important issue both retrospectively and on a forward basis, however, is one that's much easier than redesigning the county's taxation structure or even pressuring the Sheriff to do the right thing.

It revolves around the same issue everyone else in the country -- not just Okaloosa County -- has today.

That, of course, is the insane escalation of health care costs over the previous three decades which has no indication that it will slow down or reverse. Indeed, the Commission's presentation featured no less than three line items comprising a large part of the increase in the millage that resulted from the insane expansion of health-care cost, including a 15% year-over-year increase in county employee health insurance premiums.  The Commission, ever-mindful of its employees at the expense of everyone else in the county who are also being slammed by the very same costs included a bonus to be paid to county employees for the explicit purpose of assisting with their health expenses.  Another line item was for two incidents at the jail in which the county was obligated to provide care, and which totaled nearly a half million dollars!

Out of six million and change to be raised via the millage that's no small potatoes.

So why doesn't Okaloosa County act to fix the health care issue?  Why, for example, did the Commission years ago support and get passed via referendum the "ALS" system in our county -- an upgrade to the county ambulance service that is both quite expensive and, on the merits by one study actually produces worse outcomes by delaying transport to hospitals in order to "intervene on-site" instead.

Needless to say the medical "community" doesn't like studies such as this and relentlessly attacks them whenever and wherever they appear.  The problem is that an actual out-of-hospital cardiac arrest has a crappy survival rate in the first place so any "analysis" of same is probably specious at best.  Facts are facts and it's simply this: You have about 4 minutes after a cardiac arrest before the odds are that you're either dead or severely and permanently impaired; if someone does not provide CPR, use an AED (if it works for the disordered rhythm you have) or get you into an actual hospital OR in that amount of time you're almost-certain to die.  Since simple response times (remember, it's from the arrest, not from the time of the 911 call!) are typically more than 4 minutes simply to figure out exactly where you are, what's happened, get the word to the EMS folks and get the truck moving, well.... you do the math.

Here is the ugly reality nobody wants to deal with honestly: If you arrest in the hospital you have an approximate 20% chance of survival long enough to be discharged -- that is, to leave the hospital in something other than a hearse.  That's if you arrest in the hospital folks.  If you arrest outside of a hospital your odds are roughly six percent.  With such dismal base figures it's easy to scream "20% improvement!" while the actual change is just over one percent in survival rate, which makes any such claim when used to support multi-million dollar expenditures on salaries and equipment an outrageous and public fraud.

The more-damning evidence in that same study on ALS .vs. BLS services, however, is found in severe trauma situations (e.g. severe car accidents, etc.)  There BLS also outperformed -- in other words, all that "intervention" is for crap compared to getting the victim to a hospital now in that it actually harms and even kills people.  But all that "intervention" sure as hell is expensive, it was sold as a "great thing" here that would save Granny and now we're stuck with it -- and with the crazy costs, even though the "upgrade" in service is a net negative when it comes to survival rates.

Who on the Commission has brought this up in the budget hearings?  I note that the ALS EMS system was one of the cited issues this year.  I'll answer that for you: Nobody.  Why not?  I raised hell at the time the referendum was being debated in the county, pointing out that the simple math on out-of-hospital cardiac events were rarely survived irrespective of assistance and as such the proposal was a massive fraud upon the public and was called all sorts of names, including by the current paramedics who were electioneering 1 foot beyond the minimum legal distance at every fucking polling place in the county.  Why?

Big salary increases coming their way for full time 24x7 coverage, that's why.  They didn't like being called on the fact that they were -- and still are -- robbing the public.

The Commission should put facts before the public and place a referendum out there to get rid of ALS in the County.  It's worthless on a comparative basis and expensive.  It was sold to the public via an outrageous and false campaign of misinformation promulgated by the very employees who benefited from it and nobody in the Commission took them on.  The Commission can fix this right now and it damn well should.

But this is not the only place the Commission could act when it comes to Health spending.  The Commission could put a stop to nearly all of the financial shenanigans that make health care so expensive in Okaloosa County.

The Commission can act to do it tomorrow.

Okaloosa County, like most counties, issues business licenses.  You must have one to conduct business of any sort.  I have a business license because I do contract computer work from time to time, among other business interests I have and may wish to engage in.  The law says I must pay a license fee and have a nice certificate from the county displayed where I "primarily" do said business (it's in my bedroom, right near my computer.)

The county, of course, places conditions on said license.  So long as those conditions are non-discriminatory that's perfectly legal.  Among others I had to get a sign-off from the planning commission documenting that, for example, I understood that it was illegal to post any sort of signage or have customers come to my house.  That's reasonable; I live in an area that is zoned for homes, not storefronts.  Some occupations have further requirements including state-operated licensing (e.g. cosmetologists, etc.)

The County could largely solve the health care mess in this county by conditioning business licenses, which every doctor's office, dentist, hospital, clinic and pharmacy must have just like every other business, on the following three simple points:

1. You must post prices for all goods and services you sell so customers can see them before agreeing to goods or services being delivered.

2. You must charge everyone the same price for like kind and quantity, with allowance made only for reasonable differentials in the actual cost of delivery of same, difference in classification of customer or collection costs associated with payment.  A differential of 10% from the posted cash price shall be conclusively deemed reasonable.

3. Upon presentation of proof that a business has violated (1) or (2) to the County Commission the business license in question is revoked and may not be reapplied for by the same principals and/or at the same location until a period of one year passes.

The 10% differential allows for, as an example, giving a 10% discount to Seniors.  Or to the Military.  Or, for that matter, to charge a 10% fee for open invoicing or third-party (e.g. insurance) billing as opposed to cash on the table.  All of this is reasonable.  But what this requirement would instantly put to a stop is the extremely common practice of charging someone two, three, five or ten times as much money for the exact same good or service simply because they have one particular insurance coverage over another, or worse, no insurance at all.

The very day that this requirement is put in place every single medical center, doctor's office and hospital has to start competing for business because they must post prices and may not screw one person for 10x the charge they bill out to someone else.

You can see the difference in price that merely posting prices and charging everyone the same price has at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma which posts all of its prices and charges everyone the same price.

The prices posted there are typically roughly one fifth of those charged by hospitals -- including the hospitals in Okaloosa County.

If the County Commission adopts such an ordinance then in order to operate a medical clinic, dental office, pharmacy or other business that provides medical care (or anything else for that matter) there must be a posted set of prices and everyone must pay the same price.  To operate a business in this county you must have a business license.

If the county adopts such an ordinance medical costs will drop like a stone -- to about 20% of what they are now.

How do I know this will happen?  Because it's being done right now at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma and that's the result -- prices that are roughly one fifth that charged in conventional hospitals.

The result will be a permanent resolution of health-cost escalation for all persons in the county.  That includes but certainly is not limited to those who work for the county government.

Not only will the budget problem be solved for the county it will also be solved for the residents of the county, including most-especially those who have been allegedly screwed blind by North Okaloosa Medical Center, which, I remind you, is in Commissioner Boyles' district.  I further note that particular medical center is currently being sued as a class-action for this exact issue -- differential pricing that wildly screws some people compared to others.

I wonder if the jail's medical cost issue arises at least in part from the same medical center?  The jail is awfully close to that hospital; if they provided the care to said inmates has the county joined and sought to expand the suit?  Did the County get hammered with a $400,000 medical bill due to differential pricing that they could have prevented from occurring and which screwed them -- that they now expect us as county residents to pay for?  If so why haven't they already adopted an ordinance to permanently put a stop to that crap and gone after the providers in question?

I have no problem with posting a price for my time as a consultant or bidding out work with a per-hour rate. Every attorney in town does exactly that.  Tapworks posts their beer prices on a chalkboard, easily visible to everyone who comes in.  The car repair center posts their prices; they have a shop rate per-hour, and a flat-rate book for everything they do.  AMC Movies in the Destin Commons posts their prices for a ticket, for popcorn, and for a glass of wine.  Every store in the area posts prices on the shelf or on the item, from Walmart to Whole Foods to Best Buy to Kilwins.  The gas station has a big sign out front telling you exactly how much per-gallon their gasoline costs so you can choose whether to stop there or go across the street.  Your Gulf Power or Chelco bill has a per-kWH price on it as does your Okaloosa Gas bill per therm.  Every local restaurant has a menu with prices on it.  The local hotels and inns all have posted prices, most are on the Internet and all will tell you exactly what a room will cost when you call them or walk through the front door before you are obligated to pay.  Every one of those firms charges everyone exactly the same price for the same thing bought at the same time, other than the few instances in which you get 10% off for being an active-duty military member, a Senior Citizen, or if you get a small discount for cash commensurate with the decreased cost of taking it as opposed to credit cards.

There's nothing about such an ordinance that prohibits someone from charging a different price at a different time or changing prices as a merchant so chooses.  I booked my hotel for the recent eclipse a year in advance and got a decent price.  Everyone else who booked that same day paid the same price.  If you booked a room a week before the eclipse, if you could find one, I bet it cost more, and probably a lot more.  That's perfectly fine and legal.  What wouldn't be legal -- and is simply not acceptable -- is charging one person $500 for a hotel room because they drove a Porsche up to the front door while someone in a Chevy gets charged $100.

Condition all business licenses on this requirement and the medical problem goes away in an afternoon and so does the county budget problem.  It goes away not just for the County but for every one of our residents. 

At the same time Okaloosa County becomes the place to start and run a business -- not just in Florida either, but nationally.

In short this is the "small action" answer that applies the very same solution I've advocated for on a national basis -- and it will work, because we already know it does via the example found in Oklahoma.

The County Commission has a solution to both its budget issues and a means to radically boost economic growth within the grasp of the commission and the citizens who live here.  There is no need for a millage increase; indeed, millage could be radically cut were this ordinance to be put in place as the additional economic activity would boost tax receipts to an enormous degree.

Pass this ordinance at your next meeting if you have any desire to actually solve the problem -- not just for the County budget but for those who you allegedly serve as well.

If you don't, or won't do the above then expect trouble with retaining your office in the next election.  I'm tired of government officials that refuse to address problems and simply throw the people's money around they extract by force especially when they personally profit from market bubbles and churn they foster and promote.

Would you consider it perfectly ok if Mack Busbee, the Okaloosa Property Appraiser, owned a title company and thus made money on real estate transactions in the county while responsible for setting their valuations?

Think about that while reading the following.

Okaloosa County's Commission just voted to raise its millage by 11% next year.  For having the temerity to speak against such an increase I was personally attacked by Commissioner Boyles who read into the record the details of my property ownership, implying that I was a "fat cat" who should not complain.

Yes, Mr. Boyles, I can afford it.  I can also attend a 5:01 PM meeting 30 miles from where working people and our military had just gotten off work 1 minute prior -- and thus couldn't protest personally.

A bit of investigation leads me to believe there may be more motivating Commissioner Boyles than being called out by a voter for promoting a tax increase -- and a 47% budget increase over the last five years.

Commissioner Boyles owns a title company and personally profits from increased real estate churn.  Ad-valorem tax increases hurt renters more than homeowners as rental property does not enjoy either homeowner's exemption or valuation escalator caps.

Millage and valuation increases thus fall disproportionately on service industry employees who earn lower average wages and our military who are subject to involuntary reassignment on a rolling 2-year basis, a fact that makes buying real estate risky for them but very profitable for title companies.

That would be bad enough as an indirect conflict of interest.  But it gets worse because Commissioner Boyles is also listed as the County Commission's liason to the Appraiser's Office and Valuation Adjustment Board.

The property appraiser sets values of the real estate in the county, while the Valuation Adjustment Board is who you appeal to if you think the appraiser screwed you.

So Commissioner Boyles, who owns a title company in Crestview not only has influence over setting the millage (rate of tax charged) he also has influence over both determining value against which that rate of tax is charged and, arguably worse, adjudicating disputes should you have the temerity to argue you were unfairly appraised!

That's not a "thumb on the scale" of justice it's both thumbs and a big toe.

Florida Statutes say the following:

(5) It is hereby declared to be the policy of the state that no officer or employee of a state agency or of a county, city, or other political subdivision of the state, and no member of the Legislature or legislative employee, shall have any interest, financial or otherwise, direct or indirect; engage in any business transaction or professional activity; or incur any obligation of any nature which is in substantial conflict with the proper discharge of his or her duties in the public interest.

Please remember that beyond legal requirements in the Florida Statutes there is an overarching issue: The key principle of sound government ethics policy is that government employees and officials must refrain at all times from even the appearance of impropriety.

Irrespective of whether the letter of law was shaved or flagrantly broken in my opinion Mr. Boyles' participation in the setting of millage and real estate value assessment smells like week-old dead fish.  That Commissioner Boyles is also involved in the dispute resolution process should people believe they got screwed adds crawling maggots all over said week-old dead fish.

Absent Mr. Boyles' "Yea" vote, since the commission passed the millage increase 3-2, the motion to jack the millage up by 11% on all Okaloosa County residents would have failed. The Commission still has a final vote on said millage coming up and can choose to reject it at that time.

Given all of the above the Commission must void said vote, void all contaminated actions taken since Mr. Boyle's ascension to office and act decisively to bar future conflicts.

But whether the Commission acts or not effective means of redress remain with the voters of this county aimed not just at Mr. Boyles but at the entire Commission in the next election and, one hopes, via investigation by the State Attorney General's office.

There's been some attention paid to all the "screen time" that our kids get these days -- and that this "screen time" makes us less, rather than more, happy.

Ever think about it folks?

You should.

And then you should remove Facepig, Messenger and all the other social apps from your phone.

Why?

Think about it folks.  Look at Facepig and beyond all the ads, sponsored clickbait garbage (which I've written on repeatedly) and such what's on there?

Someone doing something fantastic, right?  Someone you know on a cruise.  Another person winning a race. A third person having a beer. A fourth on top of a mountain somewhere.  A fifth, sixth and seventh posting 500 pictures of their cute baby or child (who by the way most-certainly could not have consented to their visage being permanently stolen by Zuckerfucker).

Think about the image this presents to you as what life is supposed to be.

It's all smiles.

Now I want you to contemplate something: Have you ever seen someone take a shit on Star Trek - or any other TV show?  You've got eight Star Wars movies, and yet I don't recall one person having to stop and take a crap.  The only time you do see that is when it's a joke as part of the plotline -- like in Jurassic Park with the lawyer.

Now let's expand that a bit.

You've never seen anyone actually do laundry.  Nor have you seen someone do the dishes, or even unload the dishwasher.  You've never seen them sit in traffic for an hour commuting to or from work.

Why not? Because if you actually put someone's daily life on television you'd never watch it; 95% of it is the normal daily grind -- we get up, we make a coffee, we shit, shower and shave, we get in the car to go to work and listen to music while stuck in traffic, we buy groceries, etc.

What do you see on Facepig, Snapass and similar?  The 1%, all the time, which inexorably leads you believe that your life should be that 1%, all the time.

But it can't be.

Nobody lives like that.

Even a billionaire who has no care in the world for making another nickel, ever, and has a building full of paid servants still has to shit, shower and shave.  The kid in High School has to sit in class and then do his or her homework.  Even the retiree doesn't get to live like that; he's gotta go to the doctor and get poked here and there, cook dinner, etc.

So what are you doing when you are continually looking at Facepig or Snapping away?  You're engaged in someone else's -- and your own -- fantasy.  A fantasy that is guaranteed to make you miserable because nobody can live a life that consists of even five percent of the projected thing you are viewing.

The fact is that nobody takes a crap on Star Trek because nobody would watch the show -- or the movie -- if they did.  Yet if we ever do master faster-than-light space travel the people on board that ship are still going to spend 90% of their time doing things that amount to "shit, shower and shave."

They do it now on the ISS, they did it on Apollo, in Gemini and Mercury and they will in the future just like you do now.

Zuckerfucker likes to talk about bringing people together and other similar tripe. It's crap.  In fact it's worse than crap, it's a knowing lie.  Zuckerpig knows that even if there was no clickbait, fake deals and other garbage on the site that you'd still be made miserable simply by being there because the "face" you see is one you cannot possibly live.  It therefore cannot bring you joy -- it can only bring you tears to some degree.

Don't tell me about how it helps you "keep up" with your 457 "friends".  You don't have 457 friends.  In fact, I'm willing to bet that you can count the number of people who you can legitimately call "friend" on your fingers.

If you assert that's not true then I will make a declaratory statement in reply: None of those people are actually your friends -- they're all acquaintances, every single one of them.

I recently heard that a record number of kids committed suicide last year in our local High School.  I'm willing to wager 100% of them spent a huge amount of time with their faces buried in a hand-held fantasy machine that made them miserable while stealing a record of everything they did to try to make a profit off that same misery.

Those kids are dead; their misery has ended but the profit still went in Zuckerpig's pocket.

Folks, there's no value here for you in any of these "systems."  It's all net negative and it gets even worse when the data is mined off and sold as I've pointed out repeatedly.  We put these little spying machines in our pockets but how many people will stick them on silent or ignore them when they ring say much less toss 'em in "Airplane" mode?

It wasn't that long ago that if someone wanted to talk with you they called your house and if you were home you could talk to them.  But only one person at a time could do so in said house because there was only one phone line.  If there were five people in your family and one of them was on the phone, the other four could not make or receive a call.  If you were out getting groceries or even just mowing the lawn there were no voicemails either; the phone just rang and nobody answered it.  There were no text messages, Facepig posts or anything else of the sort.  If you were separated by more than a few tens of miles of distance the long-distance charges made sitting on the phone for an hour at a time punitively expensive and nobody could afford it.  Your only reasonable answer to a desire to say more than a few sentences for a birthday or other major life event was to sit down and write an actual letter and stick a stamp on it, then wait days for delivery and a reply.  You only did it on any sort of regular basis if the person you were corresponding with was an actual true friend or more; acquaintances, even those you call "family", you spoke with for 5 minutes on the phone on a birthday or anniversary, and perhaps you saw them over the holidays for dinner when one or the other of you traveled.  Most people had two or three such correspondents and no more simply because you had to invest a material amount of time to write said letters and there were only a few people who were worth it.

The number of people worth it in your life has not changed folks; instead interaction has been cheapened to the point of worthlessness.

How many posts do you think I've made on my Facepig timeline this year?

Three.

One talking about Facepig's spammy ads and two more being single-sentence replies to someone else's post.

Let me count that again for you folks: THREE.

Yeah, I've made a handful of other comments, but in terms of timeline posts -- it's three and only one of substance.  The other two were the prototypical 2 minute pre-cellular phone call.

I'm not trying to expand my reach on the Internet for monetary gain.  If I was then yes, it would make some sense for me to post things on Internet sites; that's called advertising.  But I'm not.

I have zero interest in posting my "personal triumphs" and gloating about them on social media.  My ego is simply not that large.  If you're interested in knowing what I'm doing and whether I happen to take satisfaction in some accomplishment then you probably know how to get ahold of me personally and we can share that.  It might actually mean something to both of us in that case.

More to the point if you wish to call me friend then you won't expect me to find your events, triumphs or whatever on Facepig.  You'll think enough of me to call, recognizing that if I don't answer immediately it's not because I don't like you but because I might be having dinner, mowing the lawn or in the middle of one of the three Ss of life -- and if you choose to leave a message I'll call you back when I can devote some time to us.  Ditto with a text; I might reply right away, but if not it's as likely to be because I'm under my car changing the oil or cleaning the gutters on the house as anything else.  You know, part of that daily shit, shower and shave routine.

Do I look here and there at Facepig? Yes.  But what I see is what I talk about above.  Is it worth my "engagement" in the general sense?  No; I recognize that not one bit of that will ever translate into changing the necessity of my life which, just like yours no matter how rich or poor you are revolves around shit, shower and shave.

But what said "engagement" will do, if I embrace it, is make me less-happy and more-miserable.

It must, because by its nature it portrays a fantasy that nobody can actually live.  Zuckerfucker knew this originally and in fact had "girl rating" pages on his Haaaarrrrrvvvaaarrrddd site which were exactly as "nice" as you might expect they'd be.  You don't really think he forgot that, do you, nor their popularity with his "friends" -- right?  (BTW what's his wife think about that?  I bet a few billion dollars makes her not care and that tells me everything I need to know about her.)

No, what Zuckerfucker did was turn your increased misery and reduced happiness into billions of dollars for him.  The founders of Snap and all the other so-called "social media" have done likewise.  They don't even give a shit if the misery their "engagement" contributes to causes nine teens to kill themselves in one semester at a given local school.  What's even worse is that they've done all of that in concert with people like John Legere, the brash CEO of T-Mobile who, along with Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, charge you in both money and slower performance, never mine crappier battery life, to deliver ads for the sole purpose of capitalizing on your decreased happiness.  Any of those carriers could put a stop to a large part of it in an afternoon by putting in place a switch you can turn on in your account that blocks all common advertising domains.

This would not be a "net neutrality" violation since you would choose to turn it on, not them.

But none have, and none will.

They won't because misery is profitable.

People who are truly happy don't need to spend on "aspirational" things.  They certainly don't need $1,000 iFrauds to make them feel good.  Miserable people are another matter; that smiling face with a nice big fat $1,000 iFraudy phone is a "message" they can try to get you to bite on, with the hope that it might make you smile -- at least until you see someone on a cruise, at which point you're back to being unhappy because you need to shit, shower and shave while Jane is on Facepig with a $5,000 vacation smile and a fat Mai Tai in her hand.

None of these apps are on my phone folks.  If I want to look at Facepig I'll do it on a browser, which I can close when done so it can't root around in my device and steal information on whatever else I'm doing.  I don't do "messenger", Snap or any of those others for the same reason.

You shouldn't either, and if you stop doing all of them I predict you will smile more.

Oh, and you'll also pay less -- in both misery and money.