Unfunny email joke

Another one making the rounds. Har dee har har.

The other day, I needed to go to the emergency room.

Not wanting to sit there for 4 hours, I put on my old Army fatigues and stuck a patch onto the front of my shirt that I had downloaded off the Internet.

When I went into the E.R., I noticed that 3/4 of the people got up and left. I guess they decided that they weren’t that sick after all. It cut at least 3 hours off my waiting time.

Here’s the patch. Feel free to use it the next time you’re in need of quicker emergency service.

It also works at DMV and the Laundromat.

If you really want to clear a room, you can just walk in and tell that joke. All the psychologically healthy people with a sense of empathy will leave, horrified. Sort of like my joke about sex:

Q: What’s the worst thing about sex?
A: Getting the blood out of the clown suit.

This joke also works at the laundromat.

Conservatives like the Border Patrol joke, though, because it speaks to their condition. I’m not sure if the condition has a name, but the symptoms are seething indignation, bitter resentment, and a monstrous sense of entitlement. It also links in their belief that illegal immigrants are clogging emergency rooms with their trivial injuries, taking up space that belongs to the rest of us.

A belief that turns out to be wrong. In fact, illegal immigrants are probably underrepresented in emergency rooms.

Latinos’ use of health services studied

Illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency rooms in California, according to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
…
By federal law, hospitals must treat every emergency, regardless of a person’s insurance – or immigration – status. Illegal immigrants, who often work at jobs that don’t offer health insurance, are commonly seen as driving both the closures and the crowding.

But the study found that while illegal immigrants are indeed less likely to be insured, they are also less likely to visit a doctor, clinic or emergency room.

“The current policy discourse that undocumented immigrants are a burden on the public because they overuse public resources is not borne out with data, for either primary care or emergency department care,” said Alexander N. Ortega, an associate professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health and the study’s lead author. “In fact, they seem to be underutilizing the system, given their health needs.”

I’d like to do a study. I’d like to get a bunch of conservatives and a bunch of liberals, and tell both groups things that they already believe. Of course, everyone likes to have their ideas affirmed, but I’d predict a moderate result for the liberals, while the conservative group would get such a flow of dopamine that it would paralyse them in an epiphany of wonderfulness that would prevent them from challenging any of their beliefs ever.