Health Care: Fixed!

How many people who have Medicare are willing to give it up? I don’t know the answer for sure, but my bet is not many, if any.

People on the "Right" like to argue that Medicare is going broke. It will be defunct in just a few years.

So here is my health care plan.

Reduce the age of eligibility for Medicare to 0. Or minus 9 months, if we are too stupid to figure that one out without it being in writing. The only requirement would now be that you are an American citizen.

Instead of paying thousands of dollars a year to private, for-profit insurance companies, everyone will now pay 1500 dollars a year into Medicare. This works out to about 35 dollars a week, less than half what I pay to my insurance company.

Sadly, insurance company executives will no longer be able to rake in multimillion-dollar salaries. Life sucks, find another way to make money. If the business I work for all of a sudden becomes unnecessary to society, no one is going to cry for me, I don't see any reason to cry for them.

My insurance company can cover me, pay their CEO 18 million dollars a year, pay several lower level executives multimillion-dollar salaries, and pay enough dividends to keep shareholders interested, based on the premiums of the people they "cover".

I have to assume that Medicare should be able to cover me on $1.5k a year, without having to pay out all those wasteful salaries and dividends. Once this is done, we can concentrate on weeding out the waste and fraud in the Medicare system.

My $1500 dollar per person price tag is just off the top of my head, and probably way high. I am sure there are folks that can figure out what the exact number needs to be. I would be happy with the 1.5k.

Bam, health care fixed and paid for.

Ticket for not speaking English?

The Dallas Police Department seems to be in a heap of trouble. Not for Tazing someone unnecessarily, nor even for beating someone. No, the men in blue find themselves under fire for a ticket one of their rookies wrote to a woman for not being able to speak English. Keep in mind that the City of Dallas has an ordinance that requires taxi drivers to speak passable English. Note also that Federal law requires commercial truck drivers to do so as well. The onboard computer on his cruiser provided that this was a legitimate offense.

Apparently this woman made an illegal u-turn in front of the officer. When he pulled her over, she not only was unable to communicate with him; she also was unable to provide a drivers license. Apparently she didn’t feel compelled to keep it with her.

The city and the police chief have apologized, but that doesn’t seem to be sufficient. You see, it seems that she was so distressed over getting a ticket that she had to spend several days in the hospital, and now she wants Dallas to pay for her stay.

That stay originally was reported to be "nearly $5,000" but has since been inflated to "over $8,000". You decide why that may have changed. My guess is that high-powered lawyers aren't cheap. But that is seriously just a guess.

I have a message for that woman. Be glad, be VERY glad that I am not a cop, and was not the one that pulled you over. Once it became apparent to me that you couldn’t converse in English, and that you also did not have a license to operate a motor vehicle, I would have washed my hands of you. I would have called I.C.E. and let "la migra" take care of you. With any luck, they would have noticed that you supposedly are legal to be here before they dropped you off south of the border.

Distressed by a ticket? Seriously, anyone who has ever got a ticket they didn’t feel they deserved has been distressed. How many of us took ourselves to the hospital?

I very rarely get pulled over, but I got pulled over not long ago. I got a ticket, in essence, for buying a car on a Saturday. Yes, I said I got a ticket for buying a car on Saturday.

Back in September, my doctor told me that, due to some unfortunate problems in my groin area, I would be unable to ride my motorcycle until late December at the earliest. Well, at that time, my bike and my wife’s car were my family’s only transportation. Since our work schedules are so different, it is not possible for us to carpool. So, I had to go out and buy a car. That has got to be the most expensive doctor visit I have ever suffered that didn’t involve surgery.

Did I mention that I bought the car on a Saturday? August 29th, to be precise. Around 2 p.m. we concluded the beating, I mean negotiations, with the dealer. I didn’t buy a new car, but it is new to me and it came from a new car dealer, so there was no front plate and no registration sticker. Actually, there was no rear plate either, unless you count the paper one they issue you at the car lot.

Anyway, at 2 on a Saturday afternoon, my insurance company is inaccessible except for emergencies. No biggie, I thought, I have the insurance card from my wife’s car to cover me, and I can call Monday and have them send a card for the new one.

Monday, August 31, I woke up went out to run some errands. One of my chores took me to Arlington, and when I was headed back into Fort Worth I got pulled over. The road I was on (Pioneer for those from the area) has a 55mph speed limit. As it enters Fort Worth it changes name to Rosedale, and drops speed limit to 40mph. Now, for those who have never driven it (or those who have and haven’t noticed) the city limits sign is just over the top of a hill, and the new, lower speed limit sign is so close behind it as to be obscured until you are right on top of it.

As soon as I saw the sign, I braked to slow down. Apparently not quickly enough, because the motorcycle cop at the bottom of the hill stepped out into the road and waved me to the side. I rolled the window down as he came up, and the first thing he said to me was "where is your front plate".

We have front and back license plates in Texas.

Those who know me will be unsurprised by my answer of "probably the same place as my rear plate and registration sticker. In the mail. I just bought this car Saturday".

He told me that the reason he pulled me over was my speed, and when I pointed out to him that the other side of the hill is 55 and I was braking when he clocked me at 48, he decided to drop the idea of a speeding ticket in favor of a no insurance ticket.

Never mind the fact that you can’t get insurance (from a reputable agency, anyway) on a Saturday. Never mind that you have several days grace to add a new car onto your policy. Apparently, it being the last day of the month, he hadn’t made that quota they don’t have.

So, eleven days later, I had to take off work early, go downtown and waste a couple of hours of my time to get the ticket dismissed.

Do I want compensation? Heck yeah. Do I think I deserve it? Well, yeah. I doubt that I really do deserve it, but I at least think I do. Maybe I should call that Mexican lady’s lawyer.

Health care, some more.

There seems to be a lot of talk about insurance coverage portability. This talk comes from the same folks who are adamantly against any kind of single-payer coverage, let alone the so-called public option. I have to say, the idea of portability WITHOUT a single-payer plan is just smoke. If you work for a company that provides you with coverage from Humana, and you leave that job to work for a company that uses Humana, then should be able to reasonably expect to get some kind of portability. You don’t have it now. If the company you work for has 2000 employees and the company you move to only has 50, you will pay more for the same coverage, even though it is from the same company. They have some kind of convoluted explanation for why this is, but you have to live in a fantasy world to begin to believe it. If you, however, move to a company that uses Aetna for coverage, you cannot expect to be able to carry your same coverage with you. The two different insurance providers are not going to offer the same plans or the same prices. The only possible way we can remove the ties between our insurance coverage and our jobs is to go with a single-payer plan, like most of the rest of the industrialized world has.
Consider, also, that the only real way to provide health care fairly, as a right, is to do away with the for-profit health insurance companies. I know, that would put a lot of people out of business. But, I don't remember anyone crying when Texas Instruments invented the calculator and put numerous abacus companies out of business. How do we pay for it? I'm glad you asked. My family pays just over 5 thousand dollars a year to my health insurance provider. It then pays out dividends to its shareholders, 18 million dollars a year to its CEO, and who knows how much more to the rest of its executives. Far far more than any government worker makes, you can be sure. Then, to ensure that their bottom line is nice and healthy, they deny me services like the (apparently) recreational colonoscopy my doctor wanted me to have.
If we take that 5 grand a year and instead pay it to the federal health care plan, we can probably push a lot of that 5k back into my bank account. There are no government employees pulling down an 18 mil a year salary. Nor are there any making anywhere near what probably the top 20 execs at just my insurance company make.
If my insurance provider can make the kind of profit required to justify the salary of its top executives by charging me 5000 a year, then I have to assume that the government can provide me with coverage for far less. Of course, it would also require that they hire honest people to administer. Maybe I am living a fantasy, too.
Some will say that this reeks of socialism. Yes, it does. So do public schools and hospitals, police forces, fire departments, military, and any number of other benefits we have that most of us pay for and all of us use.

Presidential Intelligence

So I just had a chat argument with a guy over him calling President Obama "retarted". His spelling, not mine. So we started off on a good foot, because those who know me know that I didn’t let that one pass. I also pointed out to him that calling arguably our most intelligent president in years retarded, especially in light of the mental acuity of our previous president, was moronic. He argued that Bush got blamed for a lot that wasn’t really his fault. Of course he did, that’s what happens to presidents. Like Barack Obama being blamed for the record debt America holds right now. Never mind that George W. came into office with cash surpluses that Clinton left him and quickly turned them into record deficits that made even Reagan’s look mild. Never mind that G.W. got us embroiled in a war we never should have even considered.
He argued that we HAD to attack Iraq, due to 9-11. Again with the "retarted". Apparently he forgot that even Bush eventually admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. He was also unaware, until I pointed it out to him, that no one from Iraq was involved in the attacks. A whole bunch of Saudis were, but hey, they are our buddies, our pals, our friends.
But wait, he argued. Iraq had nukes; we had to stop them. What? By this time my head is spinning like I just finished drinking a case of beer alone. Nukes? Iraq didn’t even have the wmd’s we accused them of having at the time, let alone nukes.
I once saw a quote, I can’t remember who it was credited to. "While it would not be true to say that all conservatives are stupid, it would be true to say that most stupid people are conservative."
What kind of uneducated, uninformed people do we really have in this country? And these folks vote. Usually straight Republican ticket.

Get your own Health Insurance

It seems awful strange to me that the same people in the media who are gung-ho about spending billions of US tax dollars to obtain the freedom of the Iraqi people (people, by the way, who have never paid a dime in US tax) are the same people who are viciously against spending our tax dollars to ensure the health of every American. These same people are the ones who told all of us, back in 2002, that if we were not on board with the invasion of Iraq that we were un-American. That if we disagreed with President Dick Cheney’s plan to depose Saddam Hussein we were terrorist sympathizers, and possibly terrorists and traitors ourselves. I would like to remind everyone that on 9-11-2001, Iraq did not attack us.

I would also like to remind everyone that there are a lot of Americans with inadequate or zero health coverage. Either due to the fact that their employer does not offer it, or because they cannot afford what their employer offers. On top of that, there are uncounted people slogging through every day in a job they hate just so they can have health insurance. THAT’s gotta be good for your health.

Of course, one can go out on an individual basis and get insurance, but it is pricey. What I found was $644.00 a month for a family of three. The deductible is $2500.00 per person. That is the middle of the road one. You can get it for about fifty bucks a month cheaper if you want to jump that deductible up past ten grand. You can drop the deductible too, but the monthly payment begins to rival Bernard Madoff’s monthly rent.

I have also heard people say that you can go to the emergency room if you don’t have insurance. You certainly can. Let us look at my case. I had epididymitis. Don’t ask me what it is, I haven’t really a clue. It is definitely painful, in an area you do NOT want painful. At least if you are a guy. Which I am.

What it is not is life threatening. Or so they said, anyway. Seemed pretty threatening to me, considering where it was painful. Since that is the case, I could have gone to an ER and sat for three days while they got around to looking at me. Once they discovered that I had no insurance and was unable to pay, they would have sent me on my way. The only way an ER is bound to treat an uninsured person is if that person’s life is in imminent danger. And even at that, all they really HAVE to do is stabilize.

Funnier (strange, not ha-ha), I work with a guy who, in the last year, had a pacemaker installed, paid for by Medicare. He is staunchly against the government being involved in health care. It seems that there is not a lot of thinking going on there.

I have noticed that a lot of the folks against any kind of reform have what they believe to be good insurance. I say they believe to be because that may just be the case. A lot of people believe they have good coverage right up until the point they have to use it. Then that coverage becomes either stunted or nonexistent, depending on the provider’s policy of dumping undesirable patients.

By the way, I do have insurance, the previous example was just for example purposes. My doctor wanted me to have a couple of tests run to be certain of what was wrong with me. My insurance company refused, so my doctor went to plan b: throw various pharmaceuticals at it and hope one takes. Nice.

This for six thousand bucks a year.

At least it wasn't some government flunkie telling me no.

Tell Your Kids To Drop Out, part 2

Too too funny. the Arlington, Texas school district refused to allow the children in that district to watch the Obama "stay in school" speech. The district has since had to call off a school paid trip to the new Cowboys stadium to listen to George W. Bush (Bush 43) speak. I am certain they would have preferred that this speech had stayed as under-the-radar as the Bush 41 speech did, at least until it was a fait accompli. Ah well...

Tell your kids to drop out

In 1988, Ronald Reagan, a white Republican president, addressed the students of America in a televised speech. He spoke about how tax cuts increase revenue, gun control, and a few other partisan subjects. I, for one, do not remember anyone having an aneurysm over that speech. Now, 21 years later, Barack Obama, a black Democrat president, wants to give a speech on the importance of staying in school, getting good grades, and taking responsibility for one’s own education. People are apoplectic, claiming a fear that he will deliver a speech laden with partisan politics. Folks are promising to keep their kids out of school that day. Excuse me? Are these people stupid? The White House and the US Department of Education have both averred that this speech will be over nothing but the importance of getting a good education. There will be no political agenda attached, unless you can consider keeping kids in school an agenda. The president of the United States of America wants to tell your child how important it is for him or her to be a good student and you don’t want your child to participate? There is no way anyone is going to convince me that this isn’t, at best, partisan in the extreme, or, at worst, racist. I do not claim to know the motives of parents on this issue, but I do claim to know that they are idiots. Keeping your child out of school for this occasion not only sends them a message that it is perfectly all right to disrespect the office of the President, but also that it is all right to skip school because you do not agree with the content of the day’s activities. I wish this had been an option when I was in school; I can’t think of many days I would have attended. Reagan preached the necessity of cutting taxes for the richest amongst us, apparently believing that rich folks will voluntarily pass on those riches that we, the peons, pay extra for them to keep. This didn’t raise an eyebrow. Apparently the right has no problem with a president delivering a speech, even if it is partisan, to schoolchildren, as long as he is a Republican.