OT: Health insurance

[Robert Green]

Not me when I had my first back problem. I was in my 20's and never fitter but I was under extreme stress and that tenses all your muscles. You must know the phrase "God protects drunks" when applied to car accidents. If you tense up before the collision, your injuries are likely to be more severe than a drunk's because they don't anticipate, tense up and then absorb the energy of the crash as a "stiffened" system.

At least that's what the EMT's explained to me when they hauled out drunks from crushed cars with no injuries but pulled sober people from uncrushed cars with serious musculoskeletal injury. I'm certainly willing to be disabused of that belief except for the fact that my "degenerate" disks act up when I am over-extending myself with too much to do or worry about. I start to break out in small muscle spasms my wife calls "egg yolks" because that's there size and shape. She can massage them away - sometimes - but they often presage that horrible feeling that I just took an arrow in my lower back.

(Oddly enough thinking about that brought back memories of the first multiple fatality accident I covered as a rookie police reporter and the drunken, unscathed driver of the "murder car" coming up to me, reeking of alcohol, begging me (not sure why) to forgive him. I have never felt more contempt for a fellow human being in my entire life. Only one infant survived because she had been thrown into the area behind the driver's seat, one of the last places to crumple in a catastrophic accident.

Even the state trooper who responded (a rookie too) was overwhelmed by the carnage and retched after ascertaining there were no life signs among the victims. He had to look in the car. I didn't. For which I am eternally thankful. It took the EMTs to find the little girl who never made a peep, oddly enough. Thank God they were so thorough in removing the victim's bodies and searching the car. That memory of how disgusted I was with that drunk driver is causing my back to tense up. Darn you Norminn! )

Lack of a good night's sleep from stress is all it takes for some people with previous back problems to have a recurrence, IMHO. At least, BTDT! (-:

[trader4]

. If it is, why are

Tell us what your property tax bill is. Then tell us about how a senior citizen living on social security might feel about that bill. I'm sure a lot of folks here will get a good laugh at that, because their's is probably less than half that for a similar house.

First you have the feds taking 25 to 35% of what we make. Then the state comes along and takes another 5 to 9%. Then you have a property tax bill of $10K. Buy a car or just about anything else and they take 7%. And then when you buy something, it costs more in NJ because, among other things, the businesses are taxed and regulated to death. Buy or sell a house, there is a transfer tax on the sale. Happen to be luck enough to make a profit, well the state wants a cut of that too. But then guys like you just think it's all peachy keen and that's how the politicians keep getting away with it. Oh, and the state is $50bil in debt, because even with the high taxes, they're still pissing away more than they take in.

Some good examples of that are our fine public servants. They have a career of 20 years or so, retire at a fat, full pension we pay for. The week after they retire, they show up at another govt agency in another $100K a year job. That is what is crushing us.

[Robert Green]

)-: My condolences. We can learn a lot from the quiet dignity of animals. Maybe that's why God gave them a lifespan so much shorter than ours. I just said to my wife yesterday, this the more love than might ever expect for $5.56 in Purina dog chow a week. You never realize how much a part of everything they were until they are gone.

On my second date with my then-to-be wife we had to take her dog to the emergency vet and then discovered he was very badly hurt and would not survive (old spinal injury from a long-ago mauling by a much larger dog). I think she was just a captain, still a long way from her retirement rank of colonel, but watching her sit with her dog of 15 years as the euthanasia drugs took effect made me realize that beneath that stern officer's demeanor there was a person with a great capacity for love.

I don't think anything but a massive cultural shift will change the way we approach death. Until we can extend life with quality and not zombification we'll have some serious soul-searching to do as a nation.

Sorry for your loss, Vic. Post a picture somewhere so we can celebrate the life of a good, good dog.

[Robert Green]

In most cases, you buy insurance because there are events that would cause severe financial hardship like the totaling of a car, the death of your family's bread winner, or the destruction of your house. Because of the bipartisan tax subsidy granted health insurance employers provide essentially all healthcare from basic health maintenance and symptom relief to the most expensive life-saving procedures, and they do it because the government massively subsidizes this approach.

You don't expect your auto insurer to fill up your car with gas or pay for an oil change, or your homeowner's insurance company to change a furnace filter. Why do you go to your health insurance company for everyday medical services? Because it's not really what we consider insurance, it is tax-subsidized provision of all your healthcare needs that causes two big problems: Health coverage is tied to your employer and consumers are insulated from the cost of basic healthcare because they don't pay directly for services.

So of course when a doctor recommends an expensive procedure for a dying parent, you're much more likely to accede to the operation if it's not coming out of your pocket. Don't quite know how we can fix that, though.

[Robert Green]

Tuesday is Soylent Green day! Mass privation from some natural disaster could change the entire world overnight. I'm betting on the Yellowstone supervolcano being the next big game-changer. The entire population of the US could end up living in a "Logan's Run" environmental dome. "Fish and sea greens, plankton and protein from the sea!" (-:

[Malcom "Mal" Reynolds]

you haven't heard of it, or you haven't done it?

in any event, exactly what has that got to do with my point?

[Malcom "Mal" Reynolds]

well it was those same loons that protected people from rapidly rising property taxes, but in any event, CA is not going broke

[Wes Groleau]

"If she were dying, they would pay thousands to make her comfortable. But not a penny to prevent it from happening."

That's what the social worker said regarding our request for Medicaid assistance with my wife's anti-cancer drug. His intonation suggested he didn't like it any more than we did.

[Wes Groleau]

This is an extreme exaggeration.

There are indeed many entities that benefit from illness, and not all of them are ethical.

And doctors have different levels of resistance to the unethical incentives.

But there ARE incentives developing that promise to improve wellness. We in healthcare are actively trying to learn how to qualify for those incentives. But even without them, it has LONG been the primary aim of many non-profit healthcare providers to help people be healthy.

[Wes Groleau]

Some do

Most ARE saying that. Some for good reasons, others to increase the insurance company's profits.

Maybe if insurance companies weren't so greedy, greedy docs wouldn't be compensating by sticking it to the uninsured.

[Wes Groleau]

Getting it from a non-celibate Catholic priest may be worse. :-)

[Wes Groleau]

The 2000+ page bill did not pass. The one that did pass was WAY too thick but it was much smaller than 2000 pages.

[Wes Groleau]

I've found that neither extreme places any great value on rational thinking.

[Ashton Crusher]

that's because it's a third party (the insurance company) that is paying the medical bill, and because for a lot of people, it's a second "third party", the employer, who is paying the insurance policy bill.

So if I"m the sick person in a decent company, I don't pay but a small part of my insurance premium, so I really don't care how much the premium is, and I only pay a small co-pay for whatever treatment I get so I really don't care what the cost of the treatment is. It's like getting it all for FREE!!! so I just don't care what the insurance costs or what the insurance has to pay. Until I lose my job that is, and then suddenly I want to know "Why is insurance so expensive and why is health care so expensive???"

I don't agree that health care in the US is bad or poor if you are an informed consumer of it. You could, and many people do, say your car care is bad or poor because you don't understand how your car works and you don't understand how it's supposed to be fixed and you don't take the time to find a good mechanic but just take it to Billy-Bobs Rx Car Doctor and Car Wash.

[trader4]

.

A classic non sequitur. I've yet to work for an employer where my health insurance coverage included paying for dying parents. They are usually covered by ummmm, let' see, that govt program called Medicare.

And apparently you can't make everyone happy, even among you libs. Some of you here are arguing strongly that we need more routine medical care, more early treatment, more preventative intervention. Yet here you are complaining because companies that provide it for their employees get a tax break. I suppose when the govt does it directly, then it would be peachy keen.

[trader4]

It's beyond extreme, it's just plain nuts. Yeah, that's why all for profit healthcare providers refuse to provide vaccinations for all those diseases like measles, polio, tetanus, etc, right? Why they all don't tell fat people they need to lose weight, instead they tell them to chow down on ice cream. Those that are drinking too much alcohol, they never warn them it's damaging to their health and they should stop. They just want them all to get sicker so they can treat them more. That's how it works, right? Good grief!

[Ashton Crusher]

damn that is so sad. But good in it's own way.

[trader4]

Classic lib denial.

"First Vallejo, then Stockton, then Mammoth Lakes, and now San Bernardino a nd soon possibly Compton. As Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach told Bl oomberg News, the bankruptcy dominoes are starting to fall. One California city after another?following a decade-long spree of ramping up public-emp loyee pay and pension benefits, as well as redevelopment debt?are becomin g insolvent.

rticle/1159341

California slipping toward bankruptcy, again

California is going broke. Again. The state controller has estimated that t he state will run out of money sometime this month. California will need to find $3 billion in cuts or revenues to keep the state in the black through the rest of this fiscal year.

And next year looks even worse. California's Legislative Analyst Office pr ojects that, even with billions in one-time revenues from Facebook's impend ing IPO, Gov. Jerry Brown's budget will run a $6.5 billion deficit.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- One of the nation's top credit rating agencies said F riday that it expects more municipal bankruptcies and defaults in Californi a, the nation's largest issuer of municipal bonds.

Moody's Investors Service said in a report that the growing fiscal distress in many California cities was putting bondholders at risk.

The service announced that it will undertake a wide-ranging review of munic ipal finances in the nation's most populous state because of what it sees a s a growing threat of insolvency.

The report has both investors and government leaders worried.

[Ashton Crusher]

I've had a wide variety of procedures and I've never found any doctors who pushed me to have them beyond what I would consider normal tendencies to want to help people. The only medical practitioner I've run across that seemed to be in it for the bucks was a dentist who was taking over the practice of my retiring dentist. Somehow, even though I'd been getting regular dental care from the old dentist, this new guy found close to $5000 of recommended dental work on me and about $4000 on my wife.

[Ashton Crusher]

The police and fire people work??? That's a laugh. They are the most overpaid and under worked "labor class" in the country. A study some years back showed that the vast majority of "on the job injuries" for fireman were injuries they got at the fire house playing volleyball and such between calls. Some of them spend half their PAID shift sleeping. Cops spend a huge chunk of their time driving cars around accomplishing nothing. And state troupers spend almost all their time burning up gas harassing motorists. When we had a big budget crunch in the past several years the highway patrol had to stop doing so much wasteful driving - no one noticed the change in service. One of the local PDs that had to reduce staff for the past several years studied the result and could find zero evidence of any actual reduction in service that resulted in anything, no change whatsoever in crime rates, just an increase of a minute or so in responding to calls. The police and fire in cities of any size are all unionized which means all they care about is doing as little as possible for the most amount of money and protection from being fired no matter how much they screw up.