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Category Archives: Politics & News
How Much Will the Government Give You?
Blue Cross blew an advertising flier into the Herald yesterday to remind us that the open enrollment deadline is just 28 days away.
Want to know why Obamacare can’t flourish over the long run? Click through to see the slightly crumpled flier. I’ll wait.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury…”
This quote probably originated in Elmer T. Peterson’s 1951 op-ed piece in The Daily Oklahoman. Mr. Peterson had probably read Democracy in America.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville was a French political historian best known for the two-volume Democracy in America and for The Old Regime and the Revolution.
In 2000, the health policy journal Health Affairs found that the United States spends “substantially more on health care” than any other country. The use of health care services in the U.S. is below the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development median by most measures. The study also concluded that the 19 next most wealthy countries by GDP each pay less than half what the U.S. does for health care.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that in 2012 U.S. health care spending increased 3.7% to $2.8 trillion, or $8,915 per person. 3.7% is “slowest growth rate on record.” That sounds like welcome news until you look at the real numbers:
1. The official Cost of Living increase is less than half that.
2. Total annual health care spending at this “slow growth rate” will double in less than 20 years, to $17,830 per person.
HOW MUCH $ WILL THE GOVERNMENT
PAY FOR YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE?
And where does “the government” get the money?
The Congressional Budget office estimates that Federal spending on major health care programs will rise from $2.8 trillion in 2012 to $23.8 trillion in 2038. “A trillion here a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
And where does “the government” get the money?
We can’t blame Blue Cross for this; in fact, we ought to thank them for the reminder.
And where does “the government” get the money?
See, the final vote tally for the Obamacare “reform legislation” was 60 Senators plus 219 Representatives. 34 Demorats in the House joined all Regublicans in both houses in opposition. Want to see who would bribe the public with the public’s money? Here’s the blacklist.
Mr. Peterson concluded:
“After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.“
Horse thievery used to was a hanging offense.
Steven Brill wrote in Time Magazine, “Put simply, with Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay.”
Used Car Dealers
Join me now for wondrous a ride in the Way-Back machine as we visit that time in the distant past when I built boats. Boat building is a wonderful business, full of some of the nicest people you’d ever want to go broke with.
Selling boats, not so much.
Like most folks in the business, I subscribed to several of the trade mags including Boat and Motor Dealer. It’s a good rag, full of how-to articles as well as profiles of the successful traders who would sell my wares to the unsuspecting public.
The advice? Emulate a car dealer.
Have you bought a car recently? After arm wrestling the salesman to a draw, you’ll be presented with a contract that is for a wee bit more than you might have thought the F&I manager promised.
Oh, the price of the car won’t have changed but that ain’t the amount on the check they want you to write.
Car dealers have mastered the hidden fee and the mysterious charge in the sales process: Some are inevitable, some are questionable, and many are just plain bogus.
Sales tax: There is no escape from death or taxes.
Title fee: It’s a tax. You’re stuck.
Vehicle registration (the license plate): Ditto.
Vehicle registration, part II: Florida residents adding a vehicle are assessed an additional $225 fee. Just because we can. Bogus but it’s a tax so you’re stuck.
Doc fee/conveyance fee: This so-called “documentation fee” pays for the paperwork every other business calls the overhead to record a sale. Dealers have just figured out that you should pay their overhead. Bogus.
Prep fee: The dealer preparation fee is assessed to cover the cost of preparing the car to hand over. The factory covers the prep fee. Really bogus.
Delivery charge: The factory already adds a “destination charge” to the invoice. You’ll notice that if you buy a model car from Wally or a kumquat from the grocery, there is no “destination charge” to cover freight. Other businesses eat that cost. Many car and boat dealers tack on an additional delivery charge of their own. Doubly bogus.
Advertising fee: This one’s extra tough because you’ll notice again that if you buy that model car or kumquat, there is no “advertising fee” to cover the cost of enticing you to the store. What, are they nuts?
Facility fee: This is a really, really good one. You get to rent the chair you sit in the waiting room. B-O-G-U-S.
The Airlines definitely read the playbook. They charge you for your ticket. Fine. They charge you for your meal. Ehh. They charge you to check your bag. Not so fine. And now they charge you for your “better” seat on top of charging for your flight.
Hospitals apparently read Boat & Motor Dealer, too. Here’s what the Miami Herald had to say yesterday on page one, above the fold:
Like baggage fees for air travel, healthcare may come with hidden costs called facility fees, and not all insurers pay them.
The Herald story details the unpleasant surprise a Miami woman had with the University of Miami’s network of clinics and hospitals. She had some testing done at one of their outpatient clinics. Her insurance paid for the tests but not the $210 bill from UHealth for “hospital services.” The hospital labeled it “Room and Board – All Inclusive.” She never set foot in any UHealth hospital or spent the night at the clinic.
She probably did sit in a chair in the waiting room, though.
Not all insurers pay them? Why should an insurer pay a new, extra facility fee? Why should the patient pay a new, extra facility fee?
Our South Puffin hospital owns several physician practices and has an urgent care center. Our North Puffin hospital has also bought or started physician practices, built a rural health center network, and a new urgent care center. I don’t know if either charges a facility fee. I’m afraid to ask.
I do know that SWMBO had to visit the North Puffin urgent care center over the weekend. She tangled with a piece of sheet metal in the barn and needed four stitches.
They did a great job.
They didn’t give her a bill.
Doctors have no idea how much a “procedure” costs. Hospitals can never tell you what it will cost to visit them. I do not understand how any business can get away with that.
“We’ll just bill your insurance,” they said.
Not giving her the bill may have been wise. See, I won’t pay a “facility fee” and do typically argue a bill line by line because the overreach of government and the malfeasance of the insurance companies aren’t the only reasons U.S. health care needs to be burned down and rebuilt from scratch.
If they had given me the bill, her insurer would have never even seen the bogus charges.
Chuggita Chuggata
Floating objects we call “chugs” wash up from time to time on the beaches here in the Keys. Cuban boatbuilders work with materials scavenged from junked cars, crates, roofs, packing.
These almost-boats are small enough to build in the sheds and garages of Cuba where craftsmen keep ’53 Chevvies running and can make a Vermont farmer cry with their ingenuity to recycle and repurpose and reuse 60-year old iron.
Then 20 or 30 desperate people crowd aboard for a journey of days or weeks across open ocean, dodging Cuban and American patrol boats, huge, blind cargo ships, go-fast drug boats, and other sharks.
The salvaged engines have only one direction: north. The engines run at a chuggita chuggata low speed slowly propelling people who hope for the best when they leave everything behind.
In spite of our political malfugalties, those 20 or 30 people are desperate to get one foot on American soil.
Many chugs look like boats for obvious reasons. Humans arrived on Borneo by “boat” at least 120,000 years ago. Egyptians knew how to sew wooden planks into a ship hull as early as 3000 BC. Boats have evolved since then but most still have a pointy end to go through the water first and a hull shape that is easy to push. Most chugs are like that.
A different chug arrived on Coco Plum last Fall. It is unique in construction with a welded rebar space frame, metal roof panels hammered into shape, and styrofoam blocks as flotation and deck combined.
The boatbuilder impressed me for inventiveness and resourcefulness. Many of these unseaworthy boats sink; the Styrofoam blocks might have been awash under the load, but they would support it. The lightweight roofing protected the flotation from abrasion. The rebar frame kept the people aboard and kept the boat together.
I’ve wandered over to Coco Plum to photograph the chug several times, including yesterday, and ended up with a pleasingly good batch of images. I had pre-planned, so I knew what I wanted to compose. And I checked that the tide would be out at the time the light was right. The vessel was a little higher on the beach than I remembered so the background was within the Depth of Field zone but I stood in the water and shot with the 100mm lens. The detail is so fine that you can count the threads on the rod used to secure the hull to the top frame.
I like these images; this album will continue to grow.
I’m thinking we want anybody that resourceful to live and grow here, too.
The “wet foot, dry foot policy” is the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that permits that anyone who flees Cuba and makes it onto United States shores can to pursue U.S. residency a year later. Any Cuban caught on the waters of the Florida Straits (hence the “wet feet”) are sent home or to a third country. Any Cuban who makes it to shore (“dry feet”) can stay. The law provides for expedited legal permanent resident status and, eventually, citizenship.
News:
A Key Largo man tired of “illegal immigrants” was jailed for threatening a man with a knife after asking a group of people for “their papers.” (The 50-year-old construction worker he pulled the knife on is from Miami and was born in the United States.)At least 18 Haitian migrants died on Christmas day as their boat carrying 50 people capsized off the Turks and Caicos islands. Eleven Haitians died in 2012 when a boat carrying 28 people from the Bahamas to Florida sank.
Forty residents of Perico, a town about 100 miles southeast of Havana, drowned at sea on a failed attempt to cross the Straits in 2007. The group included between nine and 12 children and expected to make landfall in the Keys.
We have an interesting way of enforcing national immigration policy here in South Puffin. The Key Largo man was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, battery, and criminal mischief. His bond was set at $114,000 but we give the few illegal immigrants we catch free room and board before sending them back.
Over on another border, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio offered to detain illegal immigrants his Tent City because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials announced they would release a number of illegal immigrants held in immigration jails. See, the Feds needed to cut costs.
Can you spell Immigration Reform?
The muttonheads we sent to Washington to fix laws like this are too stupid to fix the problem but men and women and children from every country in the world will risk their lives to get here anyway. Just think how much we could accomplish if people like this chug builder could build real boats here.
On the other hand, I don’t have much use for pictures of cruise ships but I’ll have plenty to photograph as long as people are willing to come here on boats like these.
Preventive Testing
Blue Cross sent me my new Obamacare card and “Outline of Coverage” on Saturday, more than a month after I finally got signed up and 18 days after the new policy period started. I’m glad I didn’t get sick.
The accompanying letter advised, “Please carefully review the enclosed outline of coverage…”
I did. After the shock of seeing my deductible, I went online to view the more detailed explanation. That’s where I found this:
Women have unique health care needs that change over the course of their lifetime. The Affordable Care Act has expanded women’s preventive services to be covered with no member cost share for plans with ACA-defined preventive benefits beginning August 1, 2012 and upon renewal.
I understand why ACA would mandate free Rh(D) Incompatibility and other Screenings for Pregnant Females.
I understand why ACA would mandate free Cervical Cancer Screening for females only just as I understand why ACA would mandate free Prostate Cancer Screening for males only.
I simply do not understand why ACA would limit breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, glucose screening, Hepatitis B virus infection screening, HPV DNA testing, to females only.
It’s not as if the government doesn’t know men develop breast cancer. NIH reports that, although breast cancer is much more common in women, men can get it too. It happens most often to men between the ages of 60 and 70. But there is no preventive male Breast Cancer Screening in the ACA list.
NIH reports that Chlamydial urethritis affects men. But there is no preventive male Chlamydia Screening in the ACA list.
An NIH report recommends the glucose challenge test screening for prediabetes and undiagnosed diabetes because diabetes prevention and care are limited by lack of screening. But there is no preventive male Glucose Screening in the ACA list.
CDC reports that gay and bisexual men are at increased risk for Hepatitis A, B and C. But there is no preventive male Hepatitis B virus infection screening in the ACA list.
CDC reports that most men who get HPV (of any type) never develop any symptoms or health problems but they can still transmit it to their partners. But there is no preventive male HPV DNA testing in the ACA list.
“If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance.”
I did like my health insurance. It did offer free breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, glucose screening, Hepatitis B virus infection screening, and HPV testing. To everyone covered. It covered my cataract surgery with no waiting period for the cataracts to “mature.” And so on.
Now I have sticker shock: The new policies cover less and cost more.
Once upon a time, that wasn’t a joke.