All posts by Joseph

Political Rants

Sickness as strategy.

Some may consider what I’m writing about today as controversial, but frankly, I don’t care at this point. If you don’t see this as a real possibility, you’re not looking very hard. The Trump administration and its allies in the GOP-led states are pursuing a very cavalier policy regarding COVID-19 and their plans to reboot the economy. They have minimized the impact of the current crisis, essentially hiding the ball on fundamental questions of who has been infected, who has been exposed, and even who has died as a result of this awful virus. They have openly denigrated the idea of expansive testing, Trump first among those calling testing “overrated” and complaining that more testing means more cases. They have characterized the risks of ending the shutdown as risks worth taking, and have encouraged Americans to think of themselves as “warriors” worthy of sacrifice.

Now, we know that Trump wants things to magically return to normal so that he can have a better shot at re-election. But why would any president seeking a second term advocate policies that would result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead Americans? I think a fairly convincing answer lies in the demographics of those most severely affected by this virus. According to current research (see this APM report), the COVID-19 death rate among Black Americans is almost 2-1/2 times that of White Americans. Nationwide, Blacks make up 22.7% of COVID deaths, significantly over-representing their numbers; they make up a much larger percentage of losses in states like Georgia, Mississippi, Michigan, South Carolina, etc. It’s no secret, either, that this disease hits people harder when they have fewer resources, less access to quality health care, more exposure to conditions associated with poverty, and so on.

In other words, this disease hits hardest those people who tend not to vote for Donald Trump in particular and Republicans in general. When Trump and GOP governors push for workers to go back to the mill, the restaurant, the fields, etc., they know that those people are not their core supporters. If they drop dead, it’s no skin off of Trump’s nose – in fact, it may in some small way contribute to his victory. A cynical suggestion? Not at all. Trump bends every effort towards giving himself an advantage in the November general election. He has railed against vote-by-mail, particularly in states like Michigan, whose leaders he has threatened with federal funding cuts – this in the odd belief that vote-by-mail favors Democrats. (Based on his own comments, he certainly thinks that more people voting is bad news for Republicans.) He is a self-dealing bullshit artist, and not a particularly convincing one, either. How he garnered as many votes as he did in 2016 I’ll never know. (PT Barnum had a theory about that.)

Dark people, poor people, undocumented laborers … they’re all expendable, worthy of sacrifice for the sake of decent economic numbers going into the Fall. How long are we going to stand for this crap?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Hands out.

2000 Years to Christmas

Huh. Still promoting the Christmas album, eh? Think that’s wise? I mean, it’s freaking May, man. What’s that? Okay. I’ll just stand over here, then, and not say anything.

Oh, hi. I was just talking to our advertising manager, a Mr. Antimatter Abraham Lincoln, esq., who spent some time as a railroad lawyer, I hear, and has since moved into marketing and PR. Perhaps a bit less mentally challenging for him, I suspect. Anyway, Anti-Lincoln has some very passionate opinions about what works and what doesn’t work. Interestingly, they don’t appear to have anything to do with standard measures of success, like sales, cash flow, etc. I’m not sure what he’s measuring, frankly. In as much as he is an anti-matter being, it’s possible that the less successful something is, the more of a success he considers it to be. If that’s the case, then Big Green is on top of the world in his book.

Yeah, trouble is … we’re on the bottom of the world in everyone else’s. I know, I know – the top and the bottom of the world are both cold, cold places, and nobody stays there long without a key to the ice station. Then there’s the radiation pouring through that ozone hole, and … um … I’ve lost the thread of this metaphor. Anyway, like every other band in America, we’re freaking dead in the water, hijacked by COVID-19, our gigs canceled, our audiences loathe to gather (and with good reason), our technicians fighting the cat for scraps. Many musicians have taken to the internets with virtual performances, either passing the virtual hat or running shows behind a pay wall. And many are discovering how little money there is in the internets. Shake it upside-down, and all you get is some gum wrappers and pocket lint.

Lincoln ... seriously. Give it up, man.

Some of you are aware that we of Big Green are old hands at the internet. Sure, we started life as an old-school, thrown-together, play-in-the-park-gazebo type of band. (That was in the Before Time, before the Awful Things.) We limped along in that mode for a number of years, then had a re-birth in the late 1990s as a virtual band, launching our first web presence in 1999, along with a page on the now-defunct mp3.com site (a domain that has been replaced by some exploitation pop culture news aggregator). This blog is just the most recent iteration of the garbage we’ve been posting since then. Trust me, no one knows better than us how little money there is to make on the internet. The thing will NEVER fly. But still … Anti-Lincoln will try. Unlike his posi-matter doppelganger, he really only cares about personal gain, not the fate of mankind … and some personal gain. He’s a gold-digger, old dishonest Abe.

Hey, everyone needs a hobby. Hobbies we got. Work? Not so much.

Political Rants

Cashectomy.

By rights, this should be an open letter to former Vice President Joseph Biden, a man who has nothing but good to say about employer-based health insurance. It actually dovetails fairly nicely with the first episode of my political podcast, Strange Sound, which was dedicated to that topic. As I mentioned therein, I am a subscriber to such a health plan – one of perhaps 170 million subscribers in the U.S., though that number has gone down by millions in recent weeks due to massive layoffs, furloughs, etc. I had cause to make considerable use of my coverage over the last month or so, and I am now experiencing the second wave of trauma that typically accompanies major illness in the United States: medical billing.

I’ll preface this with a brief “explanation of benefits”, as they say in the insurance game. I have what is known as a high deductible plan: health coverage that carries a $3,600 annual deductible, which means that I pay for the first $3,600 in medical charges, with some small exceptions, via a Health Savings Account. My employer kicks in about two-thirds of that. (They also cover about 80 to 85% of my premium costs, so as I said on Strange Sound, they are what makes the plan remotely affordable.) If I meet the deductible (i.e. incur $3,600 worth of medical charges), the insurance company starts picking up 90% of my medical costs; I pay a 10% co-pay until I reach another $3,600 hurdle, which is my “out of pocket maximum” of $7,200 per calendar year. After that, the insurance company is supposed to pay for everything.

Now there are various caveats having to do with out-of-network providers and the like, which I won’t get into here. Suffice to say that if I am fortunate enough to have a serious illness that doesn’t straddle two calendar years, the most my illnesses should cost me is about $4,400, allowing for my employer’s contribution. That may not seem like a lot of money to Joe Biden or Donald Trump, but in MY world, it’s close to a fortune. In fact, for most people, it’s a near-impossible hill to climb. If treatment for my illness started in December of one year and ended in, say, February of the next, I would be on the hook for at least twice that amount.

Part of the problem here has to do with how providers have structured costs around the private health insurance market. I’ve received a number of bills related to my hospitalization. The ambulance (a municipal ambulance, by the way) bill was $7,400. The hospitalization bill (minus charges from all of the medical personnel) came to $49,360. My portion of that last one is in excess of $5K, and I have yet to see a bill from my surgeon. Why does a four-day stay in a hospital (sans Doctors) plus some tests come to such a princely sum? It’s what the traffic will bear. You can see why rich people are fine with this system. It just doesn’t work for anyone else.

So, Joe Biden, what the fuck are you going to do about this broken system? And more broadly, Democratic party leadership, why are we patching this disaster with massive infusions of cash into COBRA plans when we could just be expanding Medicare/Medicaid to cover people who’ve lost their crappy employer coverage (and those who had none to begin with)?

You are going to need to be able to answer those questions if you want to win this year’s election … or at least minimally serve your constituents.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.