Category Archives: Political Rants

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.
Political Rants

The expendables.

Sounds like a Bruce Willis movie from 1987, right? Well, it might as well be. The president appears to be okay with the notion of thousands upon thousands of us impaling ourselves on the altar of a boom economy; this after he left the door wide open to COVID-19, taking cues from the likes of Mick Mulvaney and John Bolton and other reactionary conservatives bent on shrinking the administrative state to a size that can be easily drowned in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist was fond of saying back when he was relevant-ish. Congratulations, America! Guess what? You’re all warriors now! Time to take a bullet for President Little Lord Fauntleroy, whose idea of sacrifice is taking uncomfortable questions from a relatively supine White House Press Corps.

Seriously, does anyone want to die for Donald Trump? Does anyone want to sacrifice a parent, a sibling, a child, a grandchild, an aunt or uncle, a neighbor … anyone for the betterment of Trump’s political fortunes? Because make no mistake about it – COVID-19 kills, and there’s no telling who it will kill next. You might be spared … or you might not. We simply do not know this virus very well yet. If we listen to the President and some of these red state governors and force people back to work (on pain of losing their unemployment benefits), more and more people will get seriously ill, the hospitals will be quickly overwhelmed (particularly in more rural states, where there is even less excess capacity in terms of ICU beds), and thousands more will die. Judging by the degree to which people are avoiding those establishments that have reopened, I would say that most people understand this dynamic fairly well.

Of course, we all know who is particularly expendable in the minds of our leaders. Elderly people in nursing homes? They’re expected to die at regular intervals – this much I know from experience. But the true expendables are the folks who take the crappy jobs – the meat packers, the farm workers, the restaurant workers, etc. People of color, mostly, and a lot of women. They are being compelled to return to work because the establishments they work for are being told to start up again, or because their bosses are getting impatient, and practically none of these companies are inclined to invest in protection gear or protocols that would keep their workers safe and well. Wealthier, whiter knowledge workers can work from home, no problem. Meat packers, not so much. There’s a greenhouse in a neighboring county to where I live – they tested their employees for COVID and more than 100 of them were carrying it. That’s an enormous number in a rural area like this. Multiply that by thousands and you’ll get some idea of what we’re looking at.

Trump wants to keep the cheeseburgers rolling. Trouble is, when you force meatpackers back to work, it’s likely that they’ll get sick. And when they get sick, they can’t work, so you’re right back to where you started from. We can either address the public health problem, or we can expect a massive level of disruption from here on out. Up to us.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Child’s play.

Experiencing the miracle of America’s largely employer-based health care system, so revered by the likes of Joe Biden and others. The bills from my visit to the hospital two weeks ago have started rolling in. The price tag on an ambulance ride provided by our taxpayer-supported fire department? Close to $800. (First time I’ve ever used the service, by the way.) Based on the billing, this service appears to be at least partially outsourced – the bill was accompanied by a form that I had seven days to return if I wanted them to bill my insurance company. Glad I’m fully recovered and able to respond to my mail!

Meanwhile, I’m watching in horror as our child-president noodles around with this pandemic as if it were an H.O. scale train set. His recent advocacy for ingesting disinfectants is illustrative of almost everything that is wrong with this particular chief executive. Despite his lame gaslighting attempt at claiming that his comments were meant sarcastically, Trump was obviously proud of his idea, looking for validation from his medical specialists, and basically pathetically showboating like a five year old. He is owlishly grasping for imaginary miracle cures that will extract him from the tremendous mess he and his administration have created through a breathtaking combination of incompetence and an ideological commitment to the deconstruction of the administrative state.

I want to be clear about Trump – he is all of our worst tendencies, rolled up into a big, fat, greasy ball of slime. He is Little Lord Fauntleroy, born into privilege and yet always feeling slighted and resentful. And all you workers who voted for this shit bag, be advised: he’s never worked an honest day in his life. All that said, he’s just the hood ornament on the Cadillac of destruction that is the Republican party and the neoliberal tendency in American politics more generally. As the Majority Report’s Sam Seder recently pointed out, Trump didn’t just wake up in the middle of the night and insist that we have to disband the pandemic response team in the National Security Council. That idea was served up to him by John Bolton and others, the intellectual architects of the current crisis. Recall Mick Mulvaney’s critique of Meals on Wheels – the program is a failure because there are still hungry old people out there. Destruction of the pandemic response (really, anticipation) infrastructure is part of that same logic. Who wants a bunch of scientists hanging around waiting for something to do?

We need to get rid of Trump. But we also need to get rid of the party that created him. And we need to defeat the neoliberal governance movement that will survive Trump when he’s finally gone. As bad as our child clown fascist president may be, they are worse than him … and they, my friends, have got to go.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.