OUR VIEW: Government gibberish

You want the federal government to do what?
Handle your health care? Bail out the auto/insurance/banking/airline/Chia Pet industry? Pay your credit card bill? Handle your retirement account? Mow your lawn?
What’s your reasoning? Your life will be easier? You won’t have to think? Congress knows best? You won’t have to fill out those complicated forms? Your weed trimmer is out of gas?
Before you cede all of your freedom to a centralized inefficient monolith in Washington, consider this run-of-the-mill, everyday press release that will likely appear today somewhere else in this newspaper.
It has something – we think – to do with farming and one of those countless federal subsidies that apparently keeps the world food supply from disappearing and farmers from abandoning their tractors in the corn patch.
While the program mentioned in the release may be the next best thing since the cotton gin, to the average reader and nuclear physicist it’s a bunch of federally subsidized jargon.
Here are a few snippets:
“The Pasture, Rangeland, Forage/Vegetation Index is a pilot program developed by the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation and is available in all counties in Virginia for the 2009 crop year.
“…This PRF/VI program is based on the use of Normalized Difference Vegetative Index data that has been derived from scanners on satellites observing the changes in greenness of vegetation of the earth since 1989.”
OK.
While this information may make perfect sense to an Agriculturally Astute Digger in the Dirt, we use it as an example of a federal bureaucracy gone amok.
Let’s set aside the question for a moment about whether the government should be using tax dollars for this program, and, instead, consider how the same undecipherable gibberish would appear on your universal health care application should the initiative ever become a reality.
Patient/Test Subject, please answer the following inquiries:
1) Have you ever experienced a descending mucous-related nasal event that required the utilization of an after-market descending mucous-related device used to suppress said event? (Translation: Have you ever had cold and used a tissue?)
2) How long would you be willing to delay medical treatment should you develop/contract/uncover beneath a rock a Frighteningly Loathsome Medical Condition (FLMC) that will likely result in the gradual cessation of your vital organs? (Translation: You’re going to die.)
3) Would you be willing to engage in a treatment experience with a Medically Awkward Doctor (MAD) that the Federal Department of Health Care and Janitorial Oversight will assign you? (Translation: The guy who took a correspondence course in taxidermy will be performing your heart bypass.)
Anyone know a good witchdoctor?