Healthcare Hijinx

There's nothing quite like watching sensible shoe wearing, sexless haircut having, post babyboomer AARPers foam at the mouth and scream and fight like drug addled anarchists over the proposed new healthcare plans from congress. Middle aged moms with names like Trudie and Pat have thrown all decorum out the door to lambast their representatives about "freedom" and the "socialism". It's high comedy to say the least, especially when you consider the ludicrous propaganda fueling their ire. That anyone believes for a minute that we will have "death panels", or euthanasia for the elderly just demonstrates how ignorant a decent chunk of Americans have become. That said, I don't support the healthcare plan either. I voted for Obama, but if this passes, it just may be the nail in his political coffin. Here's why: it screws the moderate middle class that helped cinch this election for him. The benefits in no way outweigh the gargantuan costs. It's more of the same backscratching drivel, leftie style this time. Any legislation that doesn't address the staggering costs of malpractice insurance due to lawsuit abuse isn't worth the paper it's written on. Torte (lawsuit) reform would prevent the ridiculous practice of defensive medicine, where doctors order numerous expensive unecessary tests to prevent liability in the event of a lawsuit. Yet no one in Washington is talking seriously about any real lawsuit reform. Do you know why? Because we continue to elect a bunch of lawyers on both the left and right to represent our interests. Obama's plan is going to drive up costs for folks who pay for their own insurance and small businesses that provide it to employees in two ways: 1) by potentially taxing employer based benefits as income, and 2) by requiring insurers to provide coverage regardless of preexisting conditions, to which insurers will respond by dramtically raising their rates. Rich people can shoulder this extra burden without much distress, but a working family like mine will have our backs broken by it. The way the momsta sees it, there are only two ways to fix our healthcare problem. The first is to bite the bullet and switch to a governement sponsored single payer system, as healthcare for profit is an intrisically BAD IDEA. Given our population size and ideology as a country, however, this option is damn near impossible. The next option is to take 4 crucial steps. The first step is to dramatically restrict malpractice lawsuits, thereby making malpractice insurance all but unnecessary. The second step is two provide significant tax incentives to insurers for providing low cost coverage to those with preexisting conditions, costs that would be regulated by a government body. The third step is to require insurers to provide insurance on an income based sliding scale, which would be subsidized by the government. The cost for this would be offset by taxing the hell out of unhealthy crap like soda, junk food, and cigarettes. The cost benefit of that is twofold. Lastly, we need to create incentive for healthy preventative lifestyle choices. Insurance discounts for being gym members, for having a low BMI, for being a nonsmoker etc. How, you ask, does this provide coverage to the millions of uninsured who claim not to be able to afford it? On the sliding scale system, those iwth no income at all would be exempt from paying. Others would pay according to what they could afford based on income. This is far more cost efficient the our current medicare or medicaid system. It doesn't make sense that seniors with hefty pensions and IRA's get the same benefits as those living off of social security. It still allows for healthcare to remain a free market industry, just with far more extensive goverment regulation and involvement. Let's call it a compromise. And p.s.-if there were going to be a death panel, it would be based on severity of hairstyle, not age : )

Popping my blog cherry, a.k.a. the roach wars

So, in my usual fashion, I catch on to technology years after everyone else, only now finally taking the blogospere plunge. I didn't even get a cell phone until 2004, so it's no surprise that I'm only now exploring the totally narcisisstic, self indulgent medium that is blogging. And what, you may ask, finally compelled me to divulge my innermost rants and raves to the masses? Was it the premature birth of my third child? The trauma of almost bleeding to death at 27? The psychologically and emotionally draining rollercoaster ride of having my son in the NICU for 6 weeks? The latest ignorant bile to pour from Sarah Palin's mouth? No, my friends, it's cockroaches. Yes, the dirty, invasive, nervous breakdown inspiring scourge from the depths of hell has set up shop in our condo after four years of bug free living. Just in time for our move to a new, larger place. Nothing quite adds to the stress of a move like the specter of possibly having one of these little bastards hitchhiking a ride to our new place. The question of what brought this pestilence upon us looms large in my mind. We're clean folks, despite the presence of a toddler and a 32 year old man. We lived here without seeing so much as an ant for four years, with the exception of the occasional lost cricket. And then, at the peak of the most stressful summer of my life, they appeared. Just one or two at first, but I knew what it meant. When you see one or two of the little f@*kers, you know there are at least 30,000 more hiding in your walls. I'd been down the german cockroach path before. Fearing for my kids and pets, I called some hippy-dippy green exterminator to come spray. We had this guy come out 3 times, and thought we had nipped the problem in the bud. Then right when I began packing for the new place, they returned with a vengence. They popped up in my kid's art box, under my bathroom scale, even on my daughters chest of drawers. We were clearly under siege. When I sounded the alarm to my husband, he laughed at my "melodrama". Laughed until one of the vile invaders accosted him while he was taking a leak. Sufficiently creeped out, he agreed to catch my back on launching a full scale war against the plague, lest they should follow us to our pretty new abode. We started by unpacking anything we had packed in cardboard, and blowing a cool $200 bucks of my maternity leave savings on plastic tubs to repack everything in. Cockroaches LOVE the cardboard, so that shite had to go. We then called the non-hippy cockroach slayers at Terminix to come unleash a holocaust at our place the week before we move. Debit another $130 bucks from my savings. War is not cheap. The holocaust took place yesterday, and so far, no sightings, though I still creep around my own home in fear of spotting a racing, scuttling brown spot from the corner of my eye. Sometimes they move so fast and covertly, you question yourself and suspect the delirium and fear is causing you to hallucinate, only to find that, alas, there is a roach perilously perched at the edge of your toaster oven. As a result of the infestation, I have decided to discard both my microwave and toaster oven, as appparently they like to set up shop in appliances. I fear this will severly limit our ability to sell this place when we put it on the market at the end of the month, but I would rather spend the next seven years with a foreclosure on my credit report than another week of living in fear here.