LOSS OF LOCAL

A friend toils on the workman’s compensation side of medicine. He’s been doing it for nearly three decades.

For the unfamiliar WC is all about work-related injuries. When people are injured on the job their employer usually pays for work-related medical care. And a claim gets filed with the state and insurers.

Each state has its own regulations and each state is different. But it’s big business that involves essentially the public trough, a place where many sup, perhaps not the least of whom are PI or personal injury attorneys.

You might remember the name of John Edwards, the former Democrat candidate for president a few elections back. That's what he did, personal injury, where he made his millions. 

You might also recall he was the guy who got his paramour pregnant, cheating on his wife while she was dying of cancer, the sort of guy you want to find yourself sitting next to in your pew next time you venture to church. Excellent presidential timber.

Drive into or out of just about any airport in America and you’ll see the billboards. On the rare chance you miss them there, check out late night infomercials and talk radio. Vultures can smell decay. 

My friend though he owns three clinics is a mom-and-popper in a declining mon-and-popper industry that’s being swallowed whole by big conglomerates. Just like Costco and Walmart in retail to farming and pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens to you name it, the genie is out of the neighborhood bottle.

And if you're an animal lover it's happening in the veterinarian world also. Like most things in life there's good and bad here. Loss of choice or some might say freedom is one bad aspect.

Price monopoly is another. The good part? Maybe you spend a few minutes less than you would waiting in an emergency room. These conglomerates are profit driven, run by bean counters.

This is not to suggest that profit is a nasty word, just to point out despite much of Hollywood's misguided themes, greed is alive and well in more places than Wall Street.

It’s a big, cold, indifferent business despite the marketing. Vultures can also smell money. But we’ll leave that for another time.

There's another point here, about the loss of local. Local, whether you realized it or not, is about sovereignty, choice and globalization. Local and globalization are antonyms. Remember that the next time you head to the polls.  

Besides worker-related injuries most of these clinics do other tasks like pre-employment physical exams and drug screens and even urgent care to a degree. In some ways they are far more sensitive to changes in the economic landscape than all the economists with all their econometric minutiae together.

Pre-employment physicals have to do with jobs. And the number fluctuates not only with the seasons but the times. Even drugs screens are a decent economic indicator. A positive test usually results in a non-hire, especially in harder times like the low point of the recession.

But before the recession when the economy was percolating things were so tight employers were hiring applicants with positive tests. They needed bodies. In short, it’s a cycle. 

The other neat feature is one gets to talk to lots of business owners, large and small. It’s an informal survey, a snapshot, but it’s much closer to where the surf and the sand unite than econometric models.

During good times work-related injuries usually increase. And foot traffic, not unlike, say, retail, tends to decrease during slower periods. It probably makes too much common sense for the cognoscenti.

And besides it’s much more difficult for them and MSM to manipulate.