Happy birthday to Dylan and Piper’s favorite beast of burden!
Archive for October, 2013
Mandatory Insurance Coverage
I’ve only been covered by “health” insurance a few times in my life, most recently when I worked for the school system. If I needed a doctor, I paid for it myself. It wasn’t a problem. Insurance policies were mostly for catastrophic coverage and, being young and healthy, I didn’t really need any. What could happen? I figured that if I got in a car wreck, my car insurance would cover me. If I got hurt at work, I’d be covered by workmen’s comp.
Heck, even things that were covered like cracked/broken ribs from a vehicle accident didn’t stop me. I went home to get a non-totaled vehicle, then drove to work on my construction job and spent the next eight weeks sleeping upright in a chair because I couldn’t breathe laying down.
When I was pregnant with SwampDaughter, we sold my mule to pay the cost of the doctor. The hospital bill was a couple hundred bucks. (SwampDaughter, that was a good mule. You owe me.) The kids and SwampMan got their share of lumps and bumps (uninsured) and we paid for the stitches and xrays. It wasn’t a huge cost.
The point is that health care used to be affordable, not something that costs tens of thousands of dollars for a simple ailment and hundreds of thousands of dollars for something more complicated.
“But Swampie!” you may whine. “Technology is more expensive!”
Really? Unless you live under a rock, surely you have noticed that EVERYTHING having to do with technology has gone down in price. CNC machines are affordable to the average householder. They used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and only be available to well-capitalized businesses. Computers used to take up entire rooms and cost millions. Now pocket-sized smart phones are more powerful computers than our first (and expensive!) home computer that we had to program ourselves. Most people have copying machines in their homes that are incorporated into their printer, something else that was prohibitively expensive. A Selectric typewriter cost more then than a computer costs now.
But wait, there’s MORE. My grandkids play with tablets that are so affordable, they’re treated as TOYS. They’ve got more computing power at their fingertips than the first moon mission. An even more recent example is that the first flat screen tvs were an order of magnitude more expensive than those today that last longer and give a better picture.
Yes, technology has reduced the price of just about everything. But not health care. And not education. What do these things have in common? Government regulation.
You Aren’t Being Cancelled, You’re Being TRANSITIONED
Insurance companies aren’t sending out cancellation letters, they’re helping people “transition” into Obamacare, according to a top Democrat.
“If [the companies] changed [the insurance plans] then they have to notify the people who have to have the opportunity to have another policy,” said House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Sander Levin, D-Mich.
In fact, according to Levin, the “so-called cancellation notices” merely “help people transition to a new policy.”
Isn’t it convenient the way he forgets to mention that the insurance companies are being forced by government to put things in policies that many people do not want? I dunno ’bout you and yours, but my husband doesn’t need maternity benefits. Neither do I. I resent being forced into buying things that I neither want nor need. Force is not “transition”. Force is robbery.
The death panels aren’t going to deny us lifesaving treatments. No. They’re merely going to transition us to the afterlife.
H/T to Rayra at GCP
Happy Halloween!
Oh, dang, I went outside to feed Puppy and forgot which videos I posted! Guess I’ll have to post it to see what’s in it.
Just Say No
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. I’m astounded at the people that think there is, and that they won’t have to pay for it.
I Want Obama Car Care!
I drive an F150 truck because I need to haul feed, lumber, fencing, and livestock. I drive a ’95 model because I like the way it looks, it works well, and it gets the job done.
Unfortunately, the maintenance costs are fairly high. I have to buy a new battery every few years. Truck tires are pretty dang expensive. Gas and oil costs are high. I spend $100 per week just in gas! That’s totally not FAIR!
My automobile insurance only covers my truck when I get in a crash or break down (if I pay the towing insurance). It should cover routine maintenance costs like gasoline, tires, batteries, windshield wipers, and oil changes. I should not have to pay an additional surcharge for towing insurance. I should not have to pay an additional surcharge for uninsured motorists. The government needs to administer this so that there are no uninsured motorists. If my truck breaks down, I want the services of a mechanic to be paid for.
What, this would be unfair for drivers of, say, hybrids that get really good gas mileage and have tiny little bicycle tires? Why should they get a free ride? It’s not FAIR. I deserve to pay the same amount for my vehicle maintenance as they do.
Of course, there is the teensiest tiny little problem in that your insurance may not be valid outside your county and definitely not outside your state.
Homemade Dog Food
I used to make Puppy’s food because he couldn’t seem to tolerate dog food. I somehow forgot the reason that I was making his dog food, though, and had been feeding him bagged dog food mixed with canned because it was easier. He lost a LOT of condition over the summer and was scratching himself raw despite my using Advantage on him. D’OH! Then I remembered that the same thing had happened when he was on dog food before!
I use several recipes that are similar to this one. The one that Puppy is eating tonight had 3 lbs. mixed hearts and gizzards, 2 cups of white rice, 4 cups water, and a tsp. of garlic powder. I brought the water to a boil, added the rice, garlic powder, some salt, and 3 lbs. chicken gizzards and hearts, brought it back to a boil, then turned the heat down to very low until the rice was nice and soft.
Then SwampMan came into the kitchen, checked the pot of dog food, got a bowl, and helped himself to the gizzards, hearts, and rice. *sigh* He pronounced them very good. AFTER SwampMan raided the dog food, I added leftover sauteed fresh spinach to the pot.
If this were all the food Puppy got, it wouldn’t cover his nutritional needs. However, Puppy also gets raw bones (turkey necks, chicken backs, pigs feet), raw meat such as raw leg quarters, beef hearts and kidneys, etc., a 15-oz. can of jack mackeral once or twice per week and, of course, eggs and miscellaneous table scraps.
Just Came In and Obama Was Lying (Again)
I came in to hear a tiny little portion of Obama’s speech about health care on the radio, about how it was soooooo affordable and high quality. Snort. Really? REALLY? Then why is it significantly higher in cost than the plans that were offered pre-Obamacare, and why are the deductibles really, REALLY high? That isn’t affordable health care. That’s robbery courtesy of the Federal government. Apparently he thinks that the people listening to his speech do not know how the difference between $400 per month and $800 per month. I guess it doesn’t matter if somebody else is paying. As the somebody else, it pisses me the hell off.
Obama appears to be some sort of pervert Robin-Hood wannabe that robs from the middle class to give a few crumbs to the poor but the majority to the rich. Oh, yeah, we have to pay HIS healthcare, which won’t be Obamacare. Well, of course. He’s a Democrat.
Florida Blue Wanted To Do A Survey…
Florida Blue called. They wanted to do a survey with SwampMan, who still has insurance, and not the 300,000 people that they suddenly decided to drop from their insurance coverage. Go figure. I suspect that SwampMan, who still has insurance, might be more inclined to rate them highly than those people that were suddenly dropped with no warning. SUCKERS!
SwampMan did not want to talk on the phone. I told the lady that he didn’t want to talk to her. “Do you know the answers to the questions?” she asked.
“Well, I might have an inkling on one or two,” I told her.
“Fine, I’ll ask you.”
Most of the questions were about his satisfaction with his doctors, his care, his policy. So, I relayed the questions to SwampMan when I didn’t know, who told me his answers, and I relayed them to the lady doing the survey who was really earning her money on this one. Questions like “How would the policy holder rate his mental outlook and status? Excellent, Above Average, Good, Fair, or Poor?” I think there may have been another choice in there somewhere, but I forget what it was.
“SwampMan! They want to know your mental status and outlook, and raving lunatic isn’t a choice, so he’p me out here!” I yelled across to SwampMan.
“Is it on a scale of 1 to 5?” he yelled back.
“No, it’s more on the scale of ‘hand me the big knife’ to ‘zippity doo dah, zippity ay, my oh my what a wonderful day…'”.
“Hunh?” says SwampMan.
“The choices are something like Piss Poor to Excellent.”
“Piss poor is a choice?”
“Well, maybe not in those exact words, but that’s what they meant.”
“Well, I’m excellent then, of course.”
“You are NOT.”
He would only settle for above average. I told the lady that he SAID that he was above average on his mental status and outlook.
“Okay!” she said with relief. “Now we come to the demographic portion. Is he white?”
“Not really. He’s more tannish.”
“No, his race. Is he WHITE?”
“Is white a race? I think you mean is he Caucasoid.”
“That’s not a choice.”
“He’s never been DNA tested so we can’t be sure about the percentage of Neanderthal, but I can say with certainty that he’s a Heinz 57. In appearance, he’s mostly Neanderthal-Caucasian.”
The lady sighed at the other end. “Okay, let’s try this again. He can choose more than one category. I’ve checked white. Is he Hispanic?”
Since when did Hispanic become a race? Who designed these questionnaires? “Can you shake any Hispanics outta that family tree, baby?”
“What? NO!”
“He said no.”
“Asian?”
I looked carefully at SwampMan. I could not see any discernible Asiatic features. “Not that I can see.”
“Pacific Islander?”
“Any of your relatives from Samoa or Tahiti?”
“What kind of dumbass question is that? NO.”
“He denies any Pacific Islander ancestry.”
“Black?”
“Well, yeah, his family HAS lived in the south since the 1700s.”
“What was that?” queried SwampMan.
“She wanted to know if you were part black.”
“Well, great grandma on my momma’s side….”
“Well, that’s what I told her.” Everybody’s pretty mixed that’s been here for awhile, although they pretend not, regardless of race. Besides, George Zimmerman had a black grandparent and was darker than many prominent “black” leaders, but he was counted as white. “This whole racial thing confuses me.”
“American Indian?” she inserted, interrupting our conversation.
“Oh, definitely!” I assured her. Crap. I think Amerindian is a subset of Asian. See how little I remembered about race from my anthropology classes? *sigh* Come to think of it, most of what I learned in anthropology class has since been changed because it was incorrect, and it may still be incorrect.
After we got off the phone, SwampMan said “Maybe we should get some DNA testing done, because how do we really know what the heck we are?”
“I dunno!” I told him. “My maternal grandpa was a Cajun, and he definitely had a ‘fro, but I think his momma was a Hungarian. Then there’s Germans, Jews, Scots, maybe some Indians, and who knows who else? I identify as a Caucasian because it’s easier than telling people that I don’t really know my background beyond a generation or two, and I am for sure Casper white. But I do know one thing for sure….”
“And what’s that?” asked SwampMan.
“If either one of us shows significant amounts of Neanderthal DNA, we’re going to claim minority status as Neanderthal-Americans.”
A1A South 