Done yesterday (20110720 We)

[mdlbear]

0720 We
  * up 6:35; W=199.2; drugs, nose, teeth, hair, laundry, dishes
  @ Ravan's Rants - The Real Cost of the Health Insurance Racket
  @ Rhubarb Song - Torn World lyrics by ysabetwordsmith), music by catsittingstill
  * Colleen: humira
  * 3-mile walk.  Hot.  Calm.
    mostly thinking about disk upgrades at the Starport.
  @ The Decline and Fall of Facebook - Cringely on technology
  & conversations with Scott and Jilara
  & some noodling:  When I Go and The Rose
  * 15min: email under 5000 in mail.misc (about 2000 msgs expired)

Hmm. Not a very productive day, I guess, but I took a 3-mile walk, and had two good conversations in the evening. So good on the whole.

I spent some time noodling, and some time marking a couple of thousand messages in my mail.misc folder as expirable. Only 4000 more to go. (The misc. folder is the dumping ground for stuff not caught by my sorting rules, so it's about equal parts mailing lists I haven't added to the rules, and spam not caught by SpamAssassin. Once it's manageable, I'll start building my rule base again.

Link of the day is definitely "Rhubarb Song" on Torn World, with lyrics by ysabetwordsmith) and music by catsittingstill. A couple more up in the notes.

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I have no health insurance - I'm not employed, and my husband's employer offers a package that we can't afford, and which doesn't have useful benefits anyway. I'm not old enough for Medicare, and not poor enough for state Medicaid, but nowhere near able to pay for medical attention. I only saw a gynecologist when the bleeding became too heavy to brush off as "menopause from hell" - and that's how I found out I had cancer.

I was lucky that the doctor I went to - chosen out of an online guide to "Monmouth County's best doctors" - knew what to recommend to a person in my financial situation. He sent me to the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, which is part of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, which is involved with the NJ State University of Medicine and Dentistry. I explained my financial problems, then applied for, and got, "charity care" from the hospital. I don't quite know how they calculate the reductions in my bill (I think they just pull numbers out of their ass), but I'm paying about a quarter of the "official" total cost of examinations, ER admission, diagnostic tests, surgery, hospital stay, and radiation oncology treatments. We can just about manage this, although we're going to be stretched pretty thin for a year or two of monthly payments. And I get the impression that, should we be unable to pay even that reduced sum, they'd be willing to either write it off, or postpone it indefinitely, as long as we've paid them something.

I've been given to understand that this isn't nearly as uncommon as one might think, and becoming more common as the economy continues to flounder. Of course, Robert Wood Johnson is named after one of the founders of Johnson & Johnson, the enormous medical/pharmaceutical company, and undoubtedly gets a bunch of funding from the company. And it's also affiliated with Rutgers, the state university of NJ, which must also be a source of funding. And I know that there are other hospitals in the area that don't have such lenient financial policies... and yet they also don't provide the level of care I've gotten (which is somewhere between "outstanding" and "unbelievable").

It's not proper universal health care, not by a long shot... but it'll do until the real thing comes along.

(And without it, I'd either be quietly dying of cancer now, or already dead from sudden massive internal hemorrhage.)