Health Care Rant

Like a cold, it starts with a tickle in your throat. A twitch in your eye.

Before you know it, you're sending nasty emails to family members and blogging about how stupid the American public is, the vein in your forehead pulsing with fury.

I feel a rant coming on and I'm about to blog all over my keyboard.

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My insurance company recently sent me a form. They wanted me to explain, on three separate forms, exactly how I broke my clavicle. Please provide as much detail as possible, or it may delay the processing of your claim.

There is absolutely no medical reason why the insurance company needs this information. It will not speed up my recovery or enable them to provide better medical care. In fact, no doctor or nurse who cares for me will ever see this form. So why are they asking for it? Because they want to know if someone else might be responsible for my injury. They're looking to get out of paying for my medical care.

It shouldn't be this complicated. I have a broken clavicle. Who cares how it happened. It's real and it needs to be fixed. I pay health insurance (or my employer does) precisely for this kind of situation.

How much time, energy and money are wasted by insurance companies trying to get out of doing exactly what we pay them to do?

In other countries they have something called a single-payer system that bypasses all of this bullshit.

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Speaking of other countries, I don't understand why we're the only rich country in the world (and the richest of them all, at that) that doesn't consider health care a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT, along the lines of public education, clean water, a fair court system, free elections, etc. Why are people so afraid of this?

We're the richest country in the world, but we're #42 in life expectancy. We pay more for health care, with worse results, than 41 other countries. There's so much to admire about this country, so why can't we provide for our citizens like the rest of the civilized world does? Why is this not even a priority for us?

Okay, I'm being rhetorical, because I have lots of theories about why we're the outlier. And none of them are charitable toward Republicans, conservatives, and most "Christians." There is a disease among people on the right that makes them believe that the government is bad. It doesn't serve any worthwhile purpose. Forget about schools and roads and police and national defense and a hundred other services that girder the system we operate within, the government is not to be trusted.

One of the most hilarious and distressing things I've heard was hollered at one of these town hall meetings lately was, "Get the government out of my Medicare!"

I can't even think of an analogy that illustrates a total lack of rationality more than that. I could try: it's like saying, "Get God out of my church!" But that's still not as clearly ridiculous as the quote I'm trying to analogize.

Guess what, Medicare is the government!! It's a government-run social program that provides health care to Americans over 65. See, the government can run health care!! It was started in the 1960's by LBJ, a Democratic president, and was opposed by most Republicans, most notably Ronald Reagan. But it's been wildly popular, and some people theorize it was the passing of this popular social program by Democrats that kept the Republicans out of power for so long.

It was funny listening to Michael Steele, the Republican committee chairman, trying to do verbal gymnastics on NPR this morning to explain his attitude toward Medicare. He won't say whether he's for it or against it, just that he wants to improve it. Even though it's a government-run health care system, and he's against those. But he can't come right out and say that he's against Medicare, because it would be political suicide. But he can come right out and say he's against the government running health care. Except that Medicare does that. And except when it (the government) regulates insurance companies.

So, I ask, again rhetorically, what is wrong with all these old people who cling to Medicare like their life depends on it (because it does) and yet furiously decry any form of government-run health care? Jesus, people, pull your head out of your Glenn Beck!!

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There are two right-wing "compassionate Christians" who submit comments on my brother Dan's blog. During debates about the role of government and social programs, both of them have voiced a similar attitude that absolutely baffles me.

They've said that as Christians it is their duty to voluntarily help the poor. So if the government gets in the business of helping the poor, it takes away their choice. It takes away their ability to honor God. If they're forced to help the poor, they don't get credit for it.

Please forgive me if I've misunderstood. Perhaps they're just not very good at expressing what they mean. But what it sounds like to me is that they need poor people in order to be good Christians. Their goal is not to eradicate poverty, but to be good Christians. It's Christianity for robots. Jesus said care for the meek, so we better go find us some meek. Maybe even cultivate a group of meek that we can keep as pets. We'll be such good Christians when we care for them!

Obviously, I find this attitude incredibly nearsighted, selfish, and repugnant. Notice how this isn't at all about the people you claim to want to help (or volunteer to help), but about you. You want to be a good Christian. You want to volunteer to help. The people who don't have adequate health care? They're just a means for you to get into heaven.

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Who would Jesus deny health care to?

Addressing My Home

My new house needs a name.

Like my cats, my car, and my family members, I give names to things that are important in my life.

Right now the house is only known by its address. As addresses go, it's an awesome one: 1710 [FAKE STREET.] I love the house number 1710. It's simple and short. There's no letters or apartment numbers or dashes ("Apt. 5a-208".) Seventeen-Ten. Four syllables. And the number reminds me of a good football score. Or a good historical year, like for example, the year that Johann Kaspar (Jean-Gaspard) Reichsgraf Basselet von La Rosée was born.

The street name, [FAKE STREET], is simple, appropriate, and unpretentious. It's right across the street from a [FAKE URBAN FEATURE] and it's a [FAKE TOPOGRAPHICAL FEATURE] of middle class Americana. There's no cute spellings or pretentious words that have nothing to do with the geography of the area (i.e. Parke Harbour.) I don't have to spell it out when I give people my address.

Still, I'd like to have a name to go along with the awesome address.

The only other name I've used for a place of residence before is when I christened the first house I rented with my ex Timbecca Manor. (This was part of the larger Timbecca Empire, which, like the Roman empire, became too large and crumbled.)

So I'm taking suggestions on what to name my house. Some possibilities:

• Timland Ranch
• Timpire State Building
• Fortress of Timitude
• Furball Central
• The Brick Haven
  

I'll have to think some more on it.

Even a Broken Clavicle is Right Twice a Day

If my life were the Chinese Zodiac, this would be the Year of the Physician.


I've been to six different doctors this year, about a dozen different times. And the year is only half over.

But it wasn't until August that I'd made it to the emergency room.

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There were only about 10 minutes left in the two-hour tennis workout. We were playing doubles and the old man hit a shot that was short and wide. My first instinct was to just let it go, but then my competitive spirit kicked in. I can get to it! I thought. So I sprinted for the corner of the court. Going full-speed, I stretched out my racket. The ball hit the racket and bounced back from whence it came.

But I couldn't stop. About to lose my balance, heading face first into the pavement, I did what I thought you were supposed to do in this situation: I turned my shoulder and rolled.

I did a somersault on the hard concrete court. It must have looked graceful enough, because after the cursory "Are you okay" from my companions, they asked if I was ready to continue. I wasn't. I knew immediately that something was horribly wrong. I was dizzy and my shoulder felt out of whack. I put my left hand up to my right shoulder and felt a bone sticking out-- under the skin, but definitely not where it's supposed to be.

"You won the point" the old man told me. "Well, that's a consolation," I said, and sat down against the fence trying to get my bearings. I was convinced that I'd dislocated my shoulder. It felt all out of whack. Like literally, whatever whack is, my shoulder was way out of it.

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A tennis friend drove me to the emergency room.

They took x-rays and I waited for the diagnosis. While I was sitting on the bed a cute nurse came up to me and said, "What have you done to yourself, my dear?"

I told her, "I hurt my shoulder playing tennis...but I won the point!"

"Was it worth it?" she asked in a motherly voice.

"No."

"Well, I can't tell you what's wrong, but I've seen your x-rays and you really did a number on yourself...But we'll get you fixed up."

At this point I was still convinced that my shoulder was dislocated. I'd heard stories about dislocated shoulders, and how popping them back into place hurts like a motherfucker, but after a moment of agonizing pain you feel good as new. So I was bracing myself for someone to pop it back into place.

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The doctor came in. He was friendly but didn't waste a lot of time. "You broke your clavicle."

Well, fuck me! I thought. I guess you can't just snap the bone back into place like a Lego piece, can you? He must have read my mind, because he said, "You're looking at 4-6 weeks."

It turns out there's not much they can do for a broken clavicle. It's like a broken toe. It heals on its own and all they can do is make it more comfortable. The bone sticking up would eventually work itself back in place. In very rare cases, they need surgery. He offered me painkillers, told me to take Advil or Tylenol for the pain, and said they'd give me a sling to help support it while it heals. He even said I could play tennis if I wanted (with the heavy implication that I wouldn't want to play tennis for a while.)

But contact sports like football, MMA, and cage wrestling are definitely out.

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Although I had a pretty good idea before, I can definitely, unequivocally and with authority say that I do not recommend breaking your clavicle. Since it's my right shoulder, I'm learning to do a lot of things with my left hand. Drive. Brush my teeth. Carry groceries. Wash myself. Dress myself.

Thankfully, I can still type and operate a mouse with no trouble. Four to six weeks without tennis and without playing on the computer? I don't know if I could handle that. But any activity that requires me to raise my right elbow is painful. Getting dressed and showering are the worst. Fortunately I only do those about once or twice a day.

I also have this ugly-ass sling that I have to wear.

(Mine looks exactly like this, right down to the ugly sky blue padding sticking out that clashes with all of my clothes.) Not only is it a form of torture to get into the sling, but once I'm in it it shouts, "Dork! Dork! Dork!" And not just any dork, but clearly a dork looking for attention. Ask me about my injury! it shouts.

I was wearing the sling inside my shirt, but my brother and sister-in-law convinced me that I have to wear it on the outside, as a warning to other people to Handle Me With Care. (Otherwise the cops might rough me up or something.) They have a point, but I still hate wearing it in public. I mean, really, would you ever have sex with the guy in that picture?

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Although I don't recommend breaking your clavicle, I have to admit that there are some silver linings to this ugly, blue-padded cloud.

There's never really an optimum time to break your clavicle, but the timing for this break was not terrible. I just finished moving into my house and getting everything unpacked. The very day before I had hung the last of my things on the wall. There's no way I could pound nails into the wall with a broken clavicle.

All three of my summer tennis leagues ended last week. The fall ones don't start until September. Although I'll be missing a tournament next week, this is a pretty optimum time to be missing a month of tennis. Plus, the entry form for the tournament was sitting on my car seat when I got injured. I had planned to turn it in that afternoon. But getting injured when I did, I saved myself the $10 entry fee.

The end of the semester is this week. After Thursday, I'll get two weeks off to devote to my recovery.

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But perhaps the best thing about this injury is my obsession with the word clavicle. (Collar bone is the other word for it, but that's not nearly as funny.) As I was driving to the tennis courts the morning of the injury I was listening to NPR, and they had an interview with Harold Ramis about writing comedy. He talked about funny words and mentioned that the "k" sound is funny (Hoboken, kangaroo). Well, clavicle has two "k" sounds.

It's a funny word that I could say over and over again.

On Saturday night, as I was nursing my injury and watching TiVo, I saw the pilot to Parks and Recreation that had aired on Thursday. In it, Amy Poehler falls into a pit and is convinced she broke her clavicle. (The nurse who examines her tells her she's fine, but she still wears a neck brace.) The very same day I break my clavicle, I watch a joke about one? What are the odds? How often do you hear that word on NBC sitcoms?

I called my good friend and asked him, "Hey, how's your clavicle?!"

My dream is that one day Steven Colbert will start wearing a ClavicleStrong! shoulder strap.

I'll leave you with a song that's been in my head the past two days: O Tannenbaum with a few modifications:

O Clavicle, o Clavicle,
Wie treu sind deine Knochen!

(Oh clavicle, oh clavicle,
how loyal are your bones!)

Lunch

One of my favorite Onion Headlines:

Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day


I'm that way about lunch.

Why I [Heart] Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart isn't always the best debater, but he caught Bill Kristol in a mess of twisted logic the other day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNfamHulC6Y

Kristol was, as usual, trotting out some tired old conservative talking points, maintaining that the evil government will ruin health care. He made the following statements:

1. Government-run health care is expensive, inefficient, and ineffectual.
2. Our soldiers have a government-run health care system.
3. Our soldiers deserve, AND HAVE, the best health care system in the world.

   Stewart got a little distracted by Kristol's point that soldiers' deserve better health care than the general public, but he soon put all the pieces of Kristol's argument together to come up with the following conclusion:

4. The best health care system in the world is government-run.

Kristol tried to backpedal from this, but he'd already realized his mistake. Stewart then pinned him down that it's not so much that the government can't deliver good health care, but that it's just too expensive for the unwashed masses. A common conservative point of view, but one they don't like to admit in public.

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Why is it that whenever I hear a conservative pundit, they have to resort to such twisted logic to get their point across? Either that or they appear to be trying way too hard to hide their true agenda. When they do show glimpses of their true agenda, they come across as monsters, like when:

• Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's, or
  
• Glenn Beck, dispensing with an pretense that minorities watch his show, decried the fact that whites will be a minority in 50 years and encouraged whites to start making babies, or
• Bill O'Reilly told the son of 9/11 victim to shut up because he disagreed with his politics.
  

Not all conservatives are illogical monsters, but it does seem to me that the conservative point of view requires a lot more mental gymnastics to justify itself. When you have to really consider the nuances of every issue, and thoughtfully include alternative viewpoints, conservative ideals eventually lose out. It's no coincidence that intellectuals lean toward the left and there are more bullies on the right. After all, slavery, segregation, denial of voting rights-- these were all conservative ideals at one time.

Like Steven Colbert says, reality has a liberal bias.

The Box Collector

Here are most of the boxes I used to move into my new home recently. (This picture doesn't tell the whole story, since the bigger boxes have multiple smaller boxes inside them.) For the past two years, these boxes had been stored in my brother's crawlspace.

When I went into the crawlspace to collect my boxes in preparation for the move, I had to admit something about myself:

I'm a box collector.

I've done it for years now, probably because I move so often. Because every home is a temporary one, I want to hang on to the boxes that were so helpful to me during the last move. Meanwhile, I buy new stuff and keep the boxes it came in, in case I'll need them for my next move. (In my latest move I probably had at least a dozen shoe boxes, for example.)

Some boxes have been in my life a long time. I got the one above when I left my first public library job in 1994. It's a nice big, sturdy box, with handle-holes, made for transporting books. For 15 years, through 11 moves, I've filled it up with my oversize books-- atlases, coffee table novelties, and large comic books-- and lugged it to my new place. It's been with me longer than most of the people in my life.

My predilection for keeping boxes was really just a symptom of my transient nature. But now that I've bought a house, I'm putting down roots and don't anticipate another move. And so it's time to deal with my "problem." I need to let go of my boxes. The first step was letting my brother throw out a bunch of empty ones that were not even employed in this move. There was a pile of them left in my empty apartment and he wanted to throw them out. I grit my teeth and said, "I'm going to look the other way. You do what you need to do."

Then a friend of my brother's family was looking for boxes because she was moving. I reluctantly agreed to let her at my beautiful, beautiful box collection. It's time to let go. So I piled all my boxes in the corner of my spare bedroom and let her take what she wanted. I was a little offended when she rejected some of them. In other cases, she took the box but left the lid! How can you disrespect the sanctity of the box like that? Why, a moving box without the lid is like...like...like... well, I can't think of a better metaphor than a box without a lid!

I was secretly thankful that, before I let select her boxes, I had put a few special ones in the closet. Like the library box above. It's been in my life too long to be discarded like that.

Now let me tell you about my bag collection...

Language Stickler Buys a House

During the hectic final days before the closing on my new awesome house (which successfully happened last week-- woo-hoo!), I received an email from the assistant to my mortgage loan officer.

Before the mortgage holding company could process the loan, they needed some documentation to explain why my W2's show my annual income so much higher than my (so far) biweekly paychecks would indicate. (There's a clear, but long, explanation for this-- having to do with my summer contract-- but it did require another flurry of paperwork to sort out.)

But they didn't explain it quite that way. The mortgage company told my loan officer they needed following: "Satisfactory explanation from employer why borrowers YTD and W2 income is so much higher then his bi weekly pay [sic]."

This is a professional correspondence between a mortgage company and a loan officer, and they can't even exhibit a basic grasp of possessives and comparative phrases? Plus, who are they calling bi?

And these are the people who will be in charge of hundreds of thousands of dollars of my money?

Is this why the mortgage industry crashed?

...mortgagor owe's more then there income...