I watched MSNBC Chris Matthews’ The Rise of the New Right yesterday. I learned almost nothing new about the Tea Party and the conservative movement, but Alex Jones’ quote, “We’re in deep tyranny. Deep, deep, deep…” keeps ringing through my head. This man is afraid and wants to make everyone else around him fearful. I guess fear sells as his website is chock full of ads. (By the way, everyone advocates for hoarding gold, water, guns and ammo, but nobody thinks a loyal dog would help. Except Hollywood. If this country collapses, I’m sticking with my pack.)

Then I got to thinking about who the real tyrants are in America. Alex Jones, his network and FOX News came to mind right away, but so did a lot of others. I’ve prepared a very short list below to get you thinking about how much non-government tyranny is wielded over us with little oversight and almost no recourse.

FICO Scores and Credit Agencies (TransUnion, Experian and Equifax)
Every American has now been reduced to a non-disputable, three-digit FICO Score between 450-850. A FICO Score is determined by a semi-secret algorithm that is held by a private corporation. Your FICO Score determines if you will get a loan, a job, insurance and an apartment. It determines where you can live, where you can work and how much in interest you will pay on a loan if you are deemed worthy enough to get one. It even determines whether or not you can serve your country in the military and to what capacity. If your FICO Score is too low, you can be denied a security clearance.

If you become unemployed and begin shopping at WalMart to save money, your FICO Score will be adjusted accordingly, thereby affecting your credit limits. If your identity is stolen, your FICO Score will be decimated with little recourse. If the credit bureaus make a mistake reporting your payment history, they do so with impunity and can erode your FICO Score with one typo on an account number, name, amount, etc.

Personal Debt
Nothing in this country paralyzes economic or personal mobility more than personal debt. Yet we embrace it every time we buy something on credit, lease something we can’t possibly afford, charge a new gadget that we have to have or buy something on late night TV for three easy payments. The credit card has become the new handcuff. Try renting a car without a credit card or staying in a hotel by paying cash. Try buying an airline ticket without a credit card (well, now anyway, not before the NYC car bomb thing.)

Homeowner’s Associations
If you think you own your own home, go ahead and try painting it lime green with chocolate shutters. Try putting up a large flagpole and fly an eight-foot American flag in the front yard. Try digging up your back yard and planting a vegetable garden. Try building a chicken coop and raise chickens. Try drilling for oil on your property. Try putting up a radio tower. Try putting up a wind turbine generator. Try doing something as Earth-friendly as hanging your laundry out to dry. You will find out very quickly how much power your homeowner’s association has and how forcefully they will wield it.

Health Insurance Companies
Regardless of how you feel about your health insurance, they are the only “death panels” in this country. Doctors want you to live as long as possible. So do hospitals, health care clinics and drug companies. Dead people don’t generate recurring income. The only ones that want you to die quickly when you are sick are health insurance companies. It is in their best interest to rush you to your end. Healthy people pay premiums; sick people rack up expenses. You do the math.

Parent Associations at Schools
If you think your child will succeed by getting good grades or get a place on the team by working hard and honing skills, you have never had an interaction with a parent association. Their members consist of self-appointed despots who have gone to the school and their parents went there and their parents went there. Getting “in” a parent association requires more humiliation than the worse sorority/fraternity hazing you can imagine. Staying in requires all the vicious deft of a hockey mom and the morals of a soccer mom.

These are just a few “unelected, non-government” groups that wield tremendous power over our day-to-day lives and have far more influence on where we can go, what we can do and to whom we can speak. They control what opportunities our children have, what homes we can buy, where we can live and what jobs we can have.

I could think of a few more like churches, energy corporations, your own employer, etc but I’ll leave those to you and the comments below.

Ironically enough, it is government that is most likely to protect us from these unelected tyrants. Or at least try to. Or want to try to. Or say they want to try to.

Our “free society” is at once our greatest asset and our greatest enemy. It enables us to plunder and pillage resources that belong to all of us for the purpose of personal enrichment. It is the hoarding of power with a select few — be that elected senators like McCarthy or fear-mongering activists like Jones — that is the real tyranny.

We should be vigilant and suspicious of both.

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On the first of April, my health insurance company will start taking a 21.8% increase in premiums out of my butt. They have not increased services nor do I feel more comfortable that my coverage is any more secure. I know that I am one heart attack away from being dropped and two heart attacks away from bankruptcy. But, that appears to be life in America, so as sure as I walk the sidewalks flanking the roads with half-crazed nuts driving around texting like mad, I guess I can breeze along with health insurance as least half as good as those odds.

Then I got to thinking about what that 21.8% increase really means.

Let’s say the average salary is about $48,000 and an increase of 21.8% represents about $1,000 of POST TAX income that I have to spend on health insurance. That is about 2% of an average salary if you don’t count in taxes or anything like that. If you calculate just on take-home pay, it is more. But, let’s leave it at 2%. (If you make less, that percentage goes way up but even if you make twice as much, the tax is still 1%)

That is a 2% tax increase. Whatever else you may want to call it, it is 2% of your wages that is no longer discretionary. You can’t buy a flat-screen TV with that or an iPad (cause you know you’ll want the big one) or even a good German Shepherd. That is 2% of your income that is a private tax to your insurance company who may or may not cover you when you need it. So, I guess it is more like a 2% of your salary bet on red in Las Vegas.

My Australian friends tell me that for a flat 1.5% of their gross income, they get full health care. And they are happy and healthy, despite their lifestyle (if you’re Aussie, you’re grinning, high-fiving your mates and saying stuff like “no worries” cause you know what I mean.)

2% is a tax increase any way you look at it only we can’t vote those bums out.

Can we keep talking about why universal coverage is too expensive? Seems like we’re already conditioned to pay.

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In November, the Democrats were on the ropes. The GOP had just elected themselves a golden child with Scott Brown and tilted the scales back below sixty votes in the Senate. They had won two gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. The media was calling the Health Care Reform bill dead. Time between now and the next election cycle was getting shorter and the drums of defeat were beating loudly.

But then the bill got the biggest shot in the arm from the insurance companies. They increased their rates 39% in California, cut off cancer-survivors in Youngstown, Ohio, jacked up rates all over the country and even sent this poor puppy a letter that increased his health insurance costs by 21.8% over last year.

That was the second wind.

Had the health insurance companies instituted a premium freeze for 2010, not cut off existing customers regardless of circumstances and sent letters out with the message, “We’re all in this recession together, so we’re not going to increase your premiums,” they could have taken the wind right out of the sails of the Reformers. They would have convinced the average American they were not greedy, money-grubbig heartless bastards, but caring, warm folks who only had your health in their hearts.

They would have gained the entire GOP and most independents as free PR agents for their industry. “They get it, we can make a difference!” would have been the rally cry and the Obama Administration and progressive Democrats would have been left fighting an enemy that simply no longer existed. By August, the country and Congress would have been embroiled in a mid-term election with Democrats fighting to explain why they spent so much wasted time fighting the benevolent insurance companies. Most likely they would have lost a few seats and the balance of power would have tipped a bit. President Obama would have then had two years of accomplishing nothing and the insurance industry would have been healthy for the next several decades, free to plunder and pillage recklessly while Obama’s successor’s successor worked up enough public passion to start another health care reform movement.

But they didn’t. They rushed hard toward the profit line, cutting off aunt Sallie who had cancer and facing a home foreclosure. They dropped health insurance for residents in Flint, Michigan where unemployment is 27%. They continued to increase premiums an average of 22% across the country, claiming it was necessary because of rising health costs. They tightened their grip on the wallets of those lucky enough to remain employed and even tighter on the small businesses and entrepreneurs trying to weather the economic downturn and tight credit markets. And yet, they continue to post record profits.

Sometimes you have to retreat back a few steps to advance forward.

But they didn’t.

Bad business, bad public relations. On that account alone, the health insurance industry deserves to go the way of the horse buggy, passenger train and telegraph industries.

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If you haven’t already seen the “one more moment” video between Lieberman and Franken, here it is.

At first, I just laughed. Funny people, Senators. “Let him talk, he wasn’t saying anything anyway.”

But then I got to thinking. If Joe Lieberman had to deal with real life the way we all out here in Realitytown have to, the following things would also be denied.

“No, Joe, you can’t have another moment to score a touchdown. The buzzer has already buzzed.”

“I’m sorry, Joe, but we stopped serving breakfast at McDonalds at 10:30. I know it is 10:31, but sorry.”

“No, Joe, you can’t have a few more minutes to finish your SAT test.”

“Sorry, Joe, but that parking meter expired a minute ago. You can’t have a few more minutes to shop.”

“Ooooo, Joe, yeah, but that insurance premium check arrived in our offices 1 day late. Sorry”

Perhaps if Privileged Joe Lieberman had a few more Plain Joe life experiences, he would not be so quick to deny health care to folks who have trouble getting affordable insurance between the ages of 55 – 64.

And maybe the public option may not be such a bad idea for the rest of us.

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I bolted straight up in bed last night and asked myself the most obvious question most folks in the media should be asking themselves about the health care reform debate. “Where is the bell-shaped curve in the GOP dissent?”

Think about this. When was the last time you had forty supposedly independent-minded people agree on anything?

The average family Thanksgiving dinner has 8-12 people. On a rather banal issue, say the ideal turkey, the majority of people will agree in the middle and go with roasted. A few will say deep-fried and a few will say tofurky. But to get 12 people all in the same family and all having a shared desire to have a successful Thanksgiving dinner to agree to all say the same thing is just not ever going to happen. Ever.

So, why are forty US Senators all holding fast to the same opinion on health care reform? Is the bill so bad that not one of them would ever consider supporting even a small part of it? (before you answer, I give you tofurky. On Thanksgiving.) Given our smaller sampling of a family which has more inherent homogeneity, I’m leaning towards the actual content of the bill not being the reason all forty are holding fast to the same opinion. There must be another reason.

A reasonable, smart person would examine an argument and concede certain points to the opposition, agree with some arguments being offered by the defense and then offer some arguments of his own. While membership in a particular group says we will have similar experiences, we each have our own experience which entitles — nay, obligates — us to have an individual point of view. So, why are a group of forty holding fast to the same opinion without guilt or any feeling that they are abdicating their obligation to country?

Some would say it is easier to say “no,” to do nothing and hang onto the status quo. But these are pretty smart folks who got themselves elected to the US Congress. They know that the fastest route to irrelevance is to deny change. They know new life is born, old life dies and to fight change is to deny death and taxes, which they all believe in. So, why are all GOP senators right in the middle?

The question here might be more accurately phrased, “Why are US Senators not empowered to think independently on both sides of the aisle?” Why do we have an aisle? Are we so afraid that nothing will ever get done due to one-hundred people all thinking for themselves without a party dictating the path? Would we still have a bell-shaped curve if we had one-hundred different opinions on one issue. Human experience says we would.

The two-party system is broken. The US Congress is playing games in which they appear silly, stupid and petty to everyone outside Washington and the press. But, unlike a game, the choices these guys make affect our lives out here.

I say we should lower the age of eligibility from thirty-five to six and then we could elect the average Kindergartner to be a US Senator. We’d get the same result, only CSPAN would be a heck of a lot more fun to watch!

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Yesterday, the US Senate tabled the Nelson amendment which would have limited access to abortions for people who had insurance subsidized by the US government. As part of the compromise, Medicare will be opened up to people 55-64 who have trouble being covered by their employer.

In addition, nobody is challenging the “right” of anyone under 26 to be kept on their parent’s policy. Here lies the unintended consequence which insurance companies are skillfully guiding through.

When this bill passes, eventually you will not be able to purchase health care insurance for anyone under 26 years-old or over 55 years-old. Because options will exist from them vis-à-vis the US government plans, the insurance companies will have successfully divested themselves of these messy groups, settling now to only directly insure people 27-54.

Sounds exactly like the maneuver that the insurance companies pulled off in 1965 when they got rid of anyone over 65 years-old. Eventually, the hole in the middle will close and the US government will be providing health insurance to everyone, placing the health insurance companies in the very lucrative business of providing supplemental insurance, not basic health care, to people who have the means to pay for high-value stuff.

Am I wrong?

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The photo above in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye this morning and sent me into a tizzy. For the record, I am a bit upset at the direction the health care reform bill is taking. It favors the preservation of the insurance company system by forcing us to buy the same crap that got us into this mess and rewards job-holders (folks who choose security) over entrepreneurs. In short, it is re-establishing a job-based, status-quo economy instead of an entrepreneurial one where innovation and risk produces growth. I am very disappointed at the turn of events.

But the point that is sending me over the edge is the fifth “right” that says you have a right to stay on your parents’ health insurance policy until you are 27 26. I say it here now and when MSNBC starts saying it, you know you heard it here first.

The unintended consequence of this provision is insurance companies will not provide health insurance to anyone under twenty-six who have living parents. But an even worse consequence is the expansion of a parent-sponsored nanny state in our culture as a whole.

A quick conversation with my 24-year old son reveals that most of his friends with freshly-minted college degrees expect to be able to move back with their parents and live there rent-free and guilt-free indefinitely.

The FAFSA will not allow anyone under twenty-four to get financial aid without parents disclosing their financial resources. Despite almost no benefit to the parents, they are expected to pay a large chunk of an inflated tuition bill by leveraging the equity in their homes.

Almost all landlords in college towns will not rent/lease to a student without parents co-signing, even though the students are over eighteen and legally able to enter into a contract AND be sued in a court of law.

And now insurance companies and the Federal Government want to strap parents even more by obligating them to provide for health insurance for their kids until they are 27, nine years after they have legally become an adult.

What they should do is obligate kids to accepting and embracing their adulthood at eighteen. When parents have no legal right to their children, they should also have no corresponding legal responsibility. Either these kids are adults or they are not.

If they are, start treating them like adults. They should have a right to their own health insurance when they turn eighteen, not the obligation to be parasitic for the next nine years. And parents need to start expecting they act like the adults they are, regardless of how painful self-reliance is.

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Villager photo by Bonnie Rosenstock

While the politicians in Washington argue about how many uninsured people there really are, call each other liars and debate over eleventh-hour amendments, real people with real lives are not waiting around for some edict to determine their destiny. They get fed up, roll up their sleeves and get the job done themselves. And that is exactly with Dr. Dave Ores is doing.

Dr. Dave (as he in known locally) formalized his care for workers in the restaurant industry by founding the Restaurant Workers’ Health Care Cooperative. The healthcare cooperative is “an informal handshake” between the doctor and the participating restaurants. It is a not for profit health care delivery system that enables restaurant owners to provide health care to their employees, many of whom can not afford traditional insurance.

[What I'm doing] “should not be special, it should not be great. It should be the way things work,” Ores says in his CNN interview aired yesterday morning.

We agree. Health care should be not for-profit. When the profit is removed from health care, the measurement becomes “how well did we treat someone” verses “how much money did we make per patient.”

Dr. Dave is proving you don’t need to be rich or famous to change the world. You just need to care enough to get off your butt and do something for another human being, without expectation of reward. No big change ever happened without first being one small act, followed by another and another and another by someone who refused to give up.

Here is what CNN ran yesterday.

We found this photo published on the New York Daily News and had to include it. Apparently, Dr. Dave also founded the Eastminster Kennel Club Show, a spoof on the Westminster Dog Show. We knew there was another really cool reason we liked Dr. Dave! He is a dog person. (I wonder if he has a photo of Abe Lincoln in his office. That would complete the trifecta of a cool sit-com.)

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The argument for pulling the plug on someone who is brain dead and on life support is very easy and can be made in two sentences. For now, though, humor me with a short theory on some health insurance stuff.

I think ultimately people buy health insurance in hopes of preventing their own death. Regardless of what kind of plan you have or how much money you throw at your health care, you will die and no insurance policy will prevent that. So let’s change the argument slightly and say that you may not have the right to unlimited health care to prevent your death, but you do have the right to receive health care with dignity, regardless of your economic clout.

Instead of shooting for plans that cover everything, let’s shoot for something in this country that enables the poorest among us to receive health care without shame and without begging for it as if it were a gift bestowed by the rich. Let’s not punish the worker who labored his entire life to build a future for his kids by bankrupting him in the golden years of his life. Let’s live up to the pledge we all made to each other when our founders wrote “all men are created equal” and each of us has an inalienable right to life.

A right to die in dignity does not include begging for simple health care.

Now, the argument for pulling the plug. If you love me, you will not allow me to live in a vegetative state where the only thing keeping me alive is a machine and an insurance policy that has not yet been maxed out. If you hate me or don’t care about me, pulling the plug should be really rather easy.

Easy argument.

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There was just so much stuff today that made this puppy’s head spin. Amazing how the news media can be given all the facts and come to the wrong conclusion simply by assuming the story HAS to be more complicated than the simplest explanation.

Banking bonuses getting paid to incompetent employees
Jim Cramer came on Morning Joe this morning with an opinion on why banking employees should get their bonuses. Revenue is up, stock prices are up, etc, etc. — everything that indicates that these are stellar performers and deserve the compensation. But, here is the kicker: in the dip, when the lack of liquidity would have sunk you, me and any other small business, these guys reached out for the duct tape called the Federal Government and took the money to bridge. Had the TARP money not been there, they would have crashed and burned, like lots of other small business and families do when they run out of cash. They only deserve bonuses if they had been able to pull their banks out of the nosedive without TARP. By accepting TARP, they failed. Who cares if they are able to pay it back, without TARP they would not be alive to be successful.

Spanking and cognitive development
The WSJ wrote an article about spanking. Perhaps the years of spanking I got as a puppy destroyed my cognitive abilities, but it is hard to figure out what conclusions they are drawing and overall, what they are actually saying in the article. It was be a more interesting study to show the generational spanking trends and the results of what kind of people they grow up to be. Spanking has been on a rapid decline the past 40 or so years in favor of “explaining and reasoning” with kids and in that time, we have produced 1 1/2 generations of the most spoiled, entitled adults ever. I’m not saying there is a connection, but worth exploring. Also worth noting that the generations that were spanked went on to invent the Internet and other cool stuff.

Just compensation in Eminent Domain
The WSJ ran an article on a Brooklyn neighborhood being torn down to build a stadium. The usual suspects emerged and the argument that Kelo “settled” between “public good” and “public use” is still being stretched. Why is nobody examining “just compensation” beyond “fair market value?” Being paid $50,000 for a piece of run-down, blighted property in Brooklyn is not “just compensation” whereas getting a share of the tickets sales on a new NBA stadium or a portion of the sales receipts of the local Walmart that was erected on your former “blighted” home is. “Fair market value” does not equal “just compensation.”

If private developers are going to benefit financially as well for property acquired through eminent domain, fair compensation should include a portion of the profits from the development.

The military is meeting its recruitment goals in spite of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
True headline read by Robin Meade on CNN’s HLN this morning. WTH? It is the ECONOMY, stupid! The economy and job market is so bad that the people for whom the military is an option, the risk of deployment is miniscule compared to the risk of starvation and homelessness.

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One of the arguments that always comes back about the number of uninsured is that 64% or so of Americans have insurance and like it. (WaPo)

But, what nobody is doing is actually looking at what the insurance really is. Here is a metaphor that I think might clear up what the insurance problem in this country really is.

Let’s say your insurance policy is a pile of money, or if you are in Congress reading this, a bag of money stuck in a freezer. The only hitch here is that some of these bills are counterfeit, but you don’t know which ones. When you pay for medical procedures, you can only pay for them using bills at the top going down. Obviously, when the medical provider gets paid, he is going to reject the counterfeit bills and want you to swap out real ones for them.

When you run out of a stack of money, you can no longer buy any more medical things. And, the money stack must stay on the table it is on (your job!) so if that gets taken away, the stack of money goes with it.

The 10-47 million uninsured folks are not really a problem. They will either die early or get treated minimally until they do. The real problem this country faces are the 260-197 million or so who have a stack of health insurance money, but have no idea which bills are real and which aren’t until they need to spend them.

Switch out enough bills for counterfeit ones and they will start buying pitchforks instead of CAT scans.

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Yesterday, Keith Olbermann had a one-hour special comment about health insurance and health care in America. He has recently had a first-hand experience with his father.

I don’t know how much it cost to produce one hour of Countdown nor do I know what the lost opportunity costs are from insurance ad revenue MSNBC will probably never get because of this and having Wendall Potter as a frequent guest, but I do know how much influence this hour will have on moving the health care debate.

Zip. Nadda. Nothing.

If Keith Olbermann’s celebrity and MSNBC’s money and reach can’t even blow a little breeze into the health care debate in this country, what chance do any of us have of being heard? Exactly.

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Hi Mr. Boehner,

I saw you on MSNBC’c Countdown saying you have not yet spoken to an American who wants the public option on health care. If you are free at any time tomorrow, you can call me and we can have a conversation about how I want the public option. You can even record the conversation for recollection later.

I live in District 3, but Mr. Turner can’t get airtime and he has not yet said anything stupid enough to loop tape on the cable news, but we’re all still out here hoping.

I called your DC office and your Voicemail is full, so you may want to check that. Also, your office in Butler Cty was not taking calls either. I’m not really sure how government works, but my office takes calls 24/7. Let me know if you need more tax money to run a call center that takes calls 24/7 and I’ll see what I can do.

My number is 937-836-XXXX. My cell is 937-239-XXXX and I carry that everywhere so you can always get in touch with me. I do hope we can talk because you being from Ohio, I am interested in your representing our state in the best light possible, even though we may disagree politically.

I hope to hear from you tomorrow. It is Friday, so nobody will notice if you knock off early. Perhaps you can call me during your commute back home.

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A water main starting leaking in front of my house. Last week, the City of Englewood sent a man out in a pickup truck who marked up the pavement with green and orange paint.

This morning, the Socialist Englewood Water Department sent an entire crew of water department surgeons out with spare parts, heavy equipment and trucks to repair the water main. They put up signs, tore open a neat (very neat!) square hole in the road, cut the old valve out, put the new valve in, flushed it all out, filled up the hole and left without much evidence that they were there. I have water which they assure me is safe. They even publish a water scorecard every year to prove it.

And nobody knocked on my door and nobody asked for a co-pay or a water insurance card.

Damn socialists. Next thing you know, they will want to be running health care.

—
Photo: One of the workers was drying his boots on top of his pickup. I had to grab that photo!

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A few days ago, I saw a video of you saying that Americans most fear the US Federal Government is spending beyond it’s means and that we are leaving a mountain of debt to our kids and grandkids. (I can’t find it right now, but when I do, I’ll post it.)

I think you are wrong.

Here is a short list of things that I fear more than the Federal Government spending getting out of control.

- I fear that my health insurance company, Blue Cross/Blue Shield will send me a letter in March, 2010 stating they no longer want me as a customer because I am getting too old to be in the “sweet spot” of profitability for them. My insurance renews on April 1st of each year which gives me thirty days or less to find an insurance company to take me.

- I fear that I will have a heart attack during the next four years, causing me to spiral into bankruptcy during a time when my daughter most needs me to be able to help her with college tuition.

- I fear that the City of Englewood will assess me an outrageous fee to arbitrarily replace the curbs and water supply infrastructure in front of my house, oblivious to the recession going on around us.

- I fear that I will be diagnosed with a medical condition that my insurance company will not pay to treat.

- I fear that I will get a letter from some tax department in Ohio (county, city, state) claiming I owe a bucket of money to them and they will hang on like a rabid dog because they are running a deficit themselves.

- I fear that some of my right-wing, gun-happy, God-fearing neighbors will become irrationally scared of losing their country to “those who are not like us” that they will do something stupid that will endanger me, my family and my home.

- I fear US Representatives who can afford to live in West Chester, OH and stay tan all year losing touch with their constituency* and start erroneously claiming to know what Americans are most fearful of. I also fear these same Congressmen categorically dismiss and oppose ideas simply because they came from the “other party” with no thought or analysis.

- I fear the loss of rational thought and civil discourse.

- I fear the decline of the quality and breadth of education available to our younger generations that will further doom them to become less competitive in an increasingly global marketplace.

- I fear the increasing selfishness and short-sightedness of parents who teach their kids that the President of the United States of America is not worthy of their attention or respect.

- I fear a society that believes it to be permissible behavior that a Congressman disrespect a sitting US President in public. On TV.

There are many more things, but this list is probably long enough.

Mr. Boehner, I fear a lot of things more than I fear the US Federal Government putting us in debt. If you had to live in the day-to-day world that your actions in Congress create, you may possibly also share these fears.

Please, Mr. Boehner, please think before you talk in hyperbolic terms. Please think about what consequences your words have. Please think that possibly things like fear, hatred, distrust and violence may be a worse legacy to leave to our kids and grandkids than debt.

——

*I know, Mike Turner is my rep, but he never gets the microphone and doesn’t ever read my blog nor return phone calls.

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Barack Obama compared having health insurance to having car insurance in his speech last week. Today, I read an article in the WSJ that did the same thing. Over the course of a week, I have heard this being repeated again and again. The two are not at all analogous to each other.

Driving is a privilege. Living is a right.

If I can’t afford insurance or gas for my car, I can decide simply not to drive it. I can’t decide not to drive my body because I can’t afford the insurance.

Comparing the two is silly and stupid. Please quit doing it.

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The title of this post is taken from the lyrics of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and explains what the right is doing with the so-called public option of health care reform. Love or hate him, Robert Reich explains the public option clearly, at least to us who laugh at the notion of “competition” with insurance plans. In Ohio, there really is none and opening up competition across state lines would do little to change that.

We don’t like what we don’t understand and in fact it scares us, and this monster is mysterious at least.
Bring your guns, bring your knives, save children and and your wives, so save our village and our lives!
LET’S KILL THE BEAST!

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Forget Death Panels. The event of the evening will be the Presidential Death Match.

“In this corner we have B. Hussein Obama, lightweight, barely weighing 170 pounds. He has never won a title fight in his entire anemic political career. And in this corner, the entire GOP fat cats and most of America, salivating at the smell of his blood, aching for him to fall so they can pounce on his near-lifeless corpse.”

Oh, brother. And where does health care reform fit into all this?

Health care reform? Who’s that?

Dunno, but he damn well better have a ticket or we’re tossing his butt right outa here.

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I was listening to Gary Vaynerchuk* yesterday deliver a talk to publishers and indie bookstore owners. At some point in the talk, he encourages everyone to have some sort of freemium pricing model. That got parked in the furrows of my brain.

What if we had a freemium pricing model for health care? When you move into a new area, you need to choose a doctor but that doctor may not be compatible with you. Once you got there, though, you usually become “stuck” with the doctor as the new one will require endless reams of forms, medical history photocopying charges, blah, blah. Many of us stick with a doctor because the pain of finding a new one is overwhelming.

Under the freemium model, your first visit is free with no obligation to provide stacks and stacks of forms. S/he would then have to put his/her best foot forward, maybe give you a few extra minutes of time instead of processing you like a sack of potatoes, maybe even have a full conversation with you. The doctor and the practice would have to sell you they are the best option for you.

Maybe the doctor would give you one free checkup a year. They could work the model like auto repair. If you bring your car in every three months for an oil change, they usually find something else wrong with it and end up charging you for replacing this or that, even though you may have waited until this or that fell off. (Come to think of it, oil changes should be free and … that’s another post.)

Vision and hearing checks could be available through the schools to our children free of charge. At the end, the doctor could send home a brightly printed piece of paper that has eyewear package option listed. The model works for class photos and we all know how many of those we buy that we don’t need!

If wellness programs really did save costs overall, they should be free as the “public option” because it makes good business sense. Then, insurance would only be used for major repairs, like heart attacks disease, broken bones, hernias and life-saving operations. Why don’t medical practices compete against each other for customers? What if only the free parts of the medical service was subsidized by a government-run “public option.”

The time to start thinking a little bit outside of the normal ways of doing things is now. The current system of health care is unsustainable and a full public option is perceptibly unaffordable. Every other business is expected to adopt some sort of freemium model in the near future; why not health care?

—
*I don’t know what Gary’s views are on health care. His video was merely inspiration for this blog post. The views expressed above are entirely my own.

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Watch the entire video. Please. Then think.

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VIDEO: Rep. Jenkins Laughs at Uninsured Single Mother, Son

Grow up and buy insurance that is not available and not affordable if it was. Grow up and buy insurance that will increase your premiums 30%+ a year, not cover your basic needs without a high deductible and drop you when you dip into it.

Rep. Jenkins, who buys YOUR health insurance? Oh, that right. We do. We the people. We the grown up tax-paying people.

You’re welcome. Even though your stupidity and insensitivity appear to be a pre-existing condition.

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Regardless of what health reform laws pass in the next several months, health insurance companies will still be ok. They will find ways of continuing to extract premiums from business and individuals all the while maintaining their profit margins and paying fewer claims.

How do I know this? I’m watching the credit card companies.

Last week, new laws went into effect, with more coming in 2010. The credit card industry responded with a flurry of last-minute letters alerting their worst customers* of reductions in their credit limits, higher interest rates, card cancellation for non-use; the usual fare. Chase may be the worst out there, but that is only my opinion based on the letters I received from them.

Congress means well, but they don’t really think all this through because they live in a bubble. After years of building up a really awesome FICO Score, it is now in the process of being adjusted downward based on several cards being cancelled for non-use and credit limit reductions. This affects my available credit to credit used ratio. A reduced FICO Score means I will no longer have access to the best interest rates. It means an employer may not offer me that job because of a dramatic shift downward. It means my car and home insurance will go up because I am no longer in their best class of service.

But, since Congress did not foresee how the credit card companies would screw over their worst customers* and raced to protect only the irresponsible folks who were being “taken advantage of,” we responsible mutts out here who have no debt, live within our means and use credit responsibly have to live with the unintended (one assumes) side-effects. When we write contracts, we start by asking ourselves “How can the client screw us out of not paying?” and go from there. Laws need to be written from the same approach. The credit card rules also have to protect the responsible citizens.

Regardless of what the health reform laws look like, you can be guaranteed the insurance companies will resort to all sorts of shenanigans. With the open enrollment seasons of 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 before any changes go into effect, they will have ample opportunity to restructure your insurance plan so that it skirts the new laws and still preserves the profit margins they now enjoy. The financing will be different but the end result will be the same. Already, they are in the process of raising premiums dramatically as they are gambling there will be no “you must reduce your rates back to 2009 levels” provision in any of the legislation. Even a dog can do the math on how much cash you can milk out of defenseless small business and individuals with unregulated, annual increases of 30%+ over four years before new laws go into effect.

You lose. You’re on your own. Again and still.

*Worst customers to credit card companies are those who pay their balance off in full each month, never take a cash advance and never go over their limit. They make no money off us other than charging merchant fees for what we purchase with the card.

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I’m having a tough time trying to figure out what is so bad about socialist medicine. Health care only 9.8% of GDP, more doctors per capita, Danes are not dying in the streets (very healthy people, I have a few relatives there!)

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Chris Matthews had John Velleco from the Gun Owners of America on Hardball yesterday. The interview was all about people bringing loaded weapons to presidential events, but he did something probably ad lib at the end of the interview (10:50 or so) that was brilliant. He asked an off the cuff question about whether or not Mr. Velleco was a “birther,” expecting a simple yes or no.

Watch.

What if Matthews did the same thing with health care reform? Every one of his guests should be asked, “Who is your insurance company?” “How much did you pay in premiums last year?” I’ll bet most of them would stumble around, revealing to the average American how little these pundits know about the real issues surrounding the health care debate.

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How will you pay for your marriage? Yet, you still go out and have a wedding. How will you pay for kids? Yet, you still get pregnant. How will you pay for {insert life event here}

Yet, we still do all these things. Most of the time, we do without a plan to pay for them. Because they are what life is about.

Yet, we are willing to forego health care reform because we are worried about how to pay for it?

People will get sick. People will need health care. The real question should be:

How will you pay when you get sick?

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