The Left Side of the Moon

The Great Health Debate

I don't understand how people can be opposed to having universal health care. I do understand people being resistant to change. I understand people having a fear of the government controlling decisions about their health. I get that. I do.

Still, how can anyone oppose health care reform? How can anyone look at the health care system we have now and think, I'm going to scream and throw fits at public hearings to oppose those dumb, tree-hugging Democrats from changing the great health care system we have in this country!

Health care in this country is a disaster. The only people making out are the drug companies and insurance companies. They're driving more people into bankruptcy every day.

And when exactly was it decided that we're modeling our health care system after Canada's and so we should take every Canadian dissatisfied with their health care and have them scare the daylights out of us with their horror stories to convince us to oppose universal health care?

We're not Canada. We're not trying to be Canada. We're trying not to be 37th ranked country in health care out of 191. And if the life expectancy and infant mortality rates have any bearing, well, sounds like Canada's health care system may just be better than ours. And they spend less money on it.

I'm just saying.

If you read or listen about the costs of Medicare, in the next few decades those costs are not only going to exceed the budgeted amount for the program, it's going to exceed the entire federal budget. Our current health care system is not sustainable. Status quo will cease to be an option. For those of us with an ounce of logic, it already has.

And Medicare and Medicaid are only one part of the problem. I pay over $500/month for health care. That's with my company paying half and a $4,000 deductible. This is not unusual. I also don't see it as acceptable. And then of course, there's all the co-pays. Last time I checked on how much the insurance company actually covered of my son's allergy medication, it was $5. My co-pay was $35. They may consider Claritin an alternative for Singulair, but my son's allergies don't. Exactly what the hell am I paying them for? Honestly, I'd prefer not to pay them at all, and just put money in my own account for medical expenses. But you can't take that chance, can you? Because what if you're in a car crash or get cancer? There's no budgeting for that. And not having health insurance when going into a hospital, well you might as well go in with a sign that says you're a dead beat, loser and they should just let you die.

It's not fair.

Health care should not be a for-profit business. It should not be smart business for drug companies and doctors to treat us but not cure us. Not that there is a cure for terminal illnesses like AIDS or cancer, but there certainly isn't any incentive for them to give us one either. I mean, I'd like to believe these company's have my family's best interests at heart, but somehow I'm just not feeling it.

So does this make me a communist? I have no interest in moving to Russia or Canada, at least not yet. I believe Obama's on the right track, just like the Clintons were 16 years ago. Sixteen years and we've only been letting it get worse. People are actually fighting to keep it from getting better. I mean, unless you're the drug or insurance companies, I really don't see what you have to lose.

Universal health care. Health care for everyone who needs it. With the option to keep the insurance you have now if you want it, and the assurance that you don't have to change doctors.

Really makes you want to scream, doesn't it?

So here goes.

RATIONAL, INTELLIGENT PEOPLE DO NOT SCREAM THEIR FOOL HEADS OFF DISRUPTING TOWN MEETINGS AND MAKING THREATENING PHONE CALLS TO SENATORS IN THE MIDDLE OF NIGHT!!!

And why is anyone still listening to Sarah Palin? Has it not been made clear to everyone that the woman couldn't even describe what the job of VP in this country actually entails. I wish that woman would find that so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" and walk her way-too-expensively-with-taxpayer-money-clad-ass over it and disappear.

The Truth

Time to blog has been issue for me lately. An issue I can contribute to many things: the job change last year, my kids, my husband's crazy work schedule, Weeds, True Blood. One does need the time to screw off now and then. Honestly, after an eight hour day, karate, baseball or what-have-you, dinner, homework, maybe baths, story time (each boy separately), I can barely string a coherent thought together, let alone a blog post.

But there's another reason, too. My mind is consumed with too many problems I'd rather not write about. Well, the programming database stuff for one, which I'm sure you'd all rather I just left out altogether. But often it's those problems I'm working on at work that are consuming any brain resources that are left. It's always a struggle to get my hours in and when I do, I'm always trying to get a little over time. Though there is the possibility I may be getting salaried, which I have mixed feelings about. I'm nervous about the rest of this year and next. What it will mean for my husband's business and our incomes. I want the professionalism and consistency of the salary, but I'm nervous about losing the OT. Which leads into what is mostly clogging my brain, and that's worry over money.

If I could only rest assured that the companies and individuals that owe my husband money would pay their bills, then maybe I could relax a little bit. But when you see formerly solid and solvent companies laying off their staff and not paying their bills, it makes it difficult to think about anything else. We've made it halfway through 2009, and so far so good. On the one hand I'm counting my lucky stars, on the other I'm noticing there are fewer stars than I'm comfortable with. All the financial forecasts seem to be pointing towards a start in the upswing of the economy starting at some point next year. All we have to do is get through another six months or so, and we'll have managed to weather the storm, right? Except I don't necessarily believe them. What else are they going to say? Even if it's true that we still haven't seen the bottom of the hole yet, you can't tell the general public that. It will cause panic and make everything even worse.

I think a lot of it hinges on health care and whether they can get a bill passed. Health care is bankrupting us. I've never had to put my medical bills on payment plans before this year. But a sinus ultrasound and endoscopy that hit our $4,000 deductible kind of threw me for a loop. Again, I'm lucky. My company picked up half of it. It was still $2,000 I wasn't prepared to pay right after switching jobs and thus health insurance. And changing the job wasn't really an option. Not that there hasn't been some good come of it. The new job is good. My old company was bought out a month ago. Another small business gone under in 2009. It had survived the tech burst years back, but unfortunately not this recession. The recession that I'm sure they'll tell us next year was actually a depression.

Once we get through the summer, though, our child care costs will decrease, so that will be a relief. Thank goodness for full day kindergarten finally being made official for next year. Not early enough for me to send the kids to camp for the summer, but better than not happening at all. I can't lay the nanny off for the summer and expect her to come back in September.

These are the thoughts that are so frequently clogging my brain lately. Thoughts that don't keep me up at night yet, because I'm much too exhausted to worry at that point. But thoughts that are none too productive for my writing and creativity. Somehow I find the stress stifling lately.

It Sort of Feels Like I Clicked My Heels Three Times and Landed in Oz

Except I didn't really land in Oz. No, it's more like Oz became mixed into America. The wizard is now President (the real wizard, not the one behind the curtain), and surely they're painting the path to the White House yellow. Do you think if someone doused Cheney with a bucket of water, he'd melt? Maybe I exaggerate, except it's rather impossible to exaggerate what I'm feeling. It is as if someone has given me back my heart, provided a huge dose of courage, and brought me home to a place where the President has a brain.

I know many of you have been waiting to hear from me about our President-Elect-Obama. I am so relieved, so happy, so overwhelmed with emotion, it's difficult to put it into words. In this one decision, America has finally decided to change the course we've been on the past eight years. We voted to end the war in Iraq, to end the unregulated gluttony of Wall Street, to improve public education, fix our health care system, find alternative energy sources, decrease the unemployment rate, and generally begin digging ourselves out the abyss we find ourselves in.

Now some would argue that while Obama talks a good game, he doesn't have experience to actually pull all of this off. I disagree. President Obama (doesn't that have the nicest ring to it) has quite a challenge in front of him. And it's not just one challenge, it's two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), an economic recession, a housing crisis, the highest national unemployment rate in decades, banks going bankrupt, our faltering position internationally. Not to mention the issues we've been trying to correct for over a decade and the current administration has just exacerbated: education, health care, social security. I certainly don't expect him to be able to fix it overnight, but I sleep better at night knowing the country's future will be placed in the hands of a man that I honestly believe has the best interest of the people of America at heart.

Electing Obama is also a tremendously emotional moment in history for so many of us. Our generation finally has a huge moment in American history to be proud, which is just amazing. Now I have something to balance out the memories of where I was on September 11, of my abject horror over the administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina, my disgust over President Clinton's impeachment and the lack of impeachment for George W. Bush. Clinton may have been getting off with his aides, but Bush has a great deal of blood on his hands. And honestly, I hate to blame Bush. Cheney has a lot of blood on his hands. The GOP has a lot of blood on their hands. It took way too long for enough people in our country to recognize that fact, but they finally have. I wish the horror of Hurricane Katrina had never happened, but I know that if it had happened before Bush's re-election, there wouldn't have been a re-election. And we wouldn't be where we are now - at the bottom of very deep financial hole.

I am ecstatic to know that my children are growing up in a different America than the one I grew up in. An America that is finally in a position to start turning itself around. Our generation hasn't even had any leaps in our quest to achieve equality until now. When our teachers and parents taught us of freedom and equality, they spoke of Martin Luther King Jr and Harriet Tubman. There has not been such a huge leap for equality in fifty years. But while our children will learn of Martin Luther King, they will also have President Obama leading the country like it's the most natural thing in world. He is living proof that anything can and does happen in America. It is one thing to tell your children that all people are equal, but it's so much better to have that exemplified in real life. Children, after all, learn much better by doing as we do, than doing as we tell them.

I have on more than one occasion in past week, broken into tears speaking of our new President. People all over the country, all over the world, have been in tears over this election. Even my kids have been caught up in the excitement. Trouble was quite confused to see Bush on the television the next day speaking of, "approaching the finish line." "Isn't it over?" he wanted to know. "Didn't we win?"

Yes we did, my little man. Yes, we did.

More Political Ignorance

I've mentioned before about how it's not exactly enjoyable for me to keep myself abreast of political happenings in the world. I want to be informed, I just don't like investing the time it takes to always be informed. And if my political knowledge now is only moderately embarrassing, when I was younger it was abysmal. It took until Bush ran for President the first time for me to pay any attention to politics at all. I was one of those teenagers and young adults who felt that one politician was as bad as the next, and it really didn't matter who was in office. I felt not only that my vote didn't count, but that it didn't matter if it counted or not. Even though I was self-proclaimed ignorant of all things political and really happy to stay in the dark, I knew immediately how bad it was that W was running for office. It didn't take any political knowledge to recognize the bumbling idiot running as the bobble head of the Republican party, who would be nothing more than an easily controlled pawn by the richest of Americans who were helping finance his campaign.

So it's not surprising that reading books and watching movies that focus on the political happenings of the eighties and early nineties can be a bit eye opening for me. Our book club read A Thousand Splendid Suns this past month. In the several years we've been a book club, it's easily one of our favorites. To get a perspective on what it has been like to live in Afghanistan, especially for women, for the past couple of decades, it's very moving. I mean, you know what's going on over there. You see it in the news and read it in the paper, but sometimes that can just be desensitizing. To really have an author bring you in and make you feel what it's like to be a woman in Afghanistan, it's something much more real.

I also recently watched Charlie Wilson's War, and Blackstone was horrified to realize I didn't know we'd supplied the Taliban with weaponry to fight the Cold War against Russia. Again, I force myself to pay attention to politics now, in my teens and early twenties, I wasn't even trying. I admit my ignorance. I'm trying to rectify that one news article at a time. Honestly, politically savvy or not, great movie. You don't have to love the History channel to enjoy it, but even if you do, I bet you still love it. The idea of rich Texans pulling the political strings behind a war, somehow I think that's all too close to the truth of how much of this stuff goes down.

I'm thrilled to say I went and voted today. I won't be able to sleep until they call the election tonight. I may never sleep again if McCain wins. Well, I probably will, but I'll need to be heavilymedicated and it will be riddled with nightmares. Thankfully, for the first time in eight years it looks like my prayers may actually be answered.

Getting Away with It

I have learned about myself in the past three decades, that I have one hell of a moral compass. Oh, I may like to drink, I may like to party, I may keep some questionable company at times, I may even be good at lying to my parents, but beyond that, I have trouble jay-walking. I am honest to a fault. I mean, we all learn to lie to some extent, those little white lies, life would be a whole lot less pleasant without them. And job interviews, not like I'd ever go in one and lie, but it's the same philosophy as being on a first date, right? You sort of omit any details that may not show you in the greatest light. If you have any sense, you're not heading in in your favorite pair of old jeans with the hole in the ass, spouting how trashed you were this weekend. It's that whole dance of not lying, but not telling the whole truth either. Because if you were stupid enough to tell the whole truth, you might as well have stayed home and called the unemployment office. And good luck with that these days. As with everything else, the funds are running dry.

My new job is at a warehouse. I don't actually work in the warehouse, but there is a big warehouse, and walking into the smell of oil and metal in the morning is something entirely new. Everyone there punches a time clock. Oh, I suppose the owners don't. But the people in sales, IT, supervisors - we all punch a clock. Curls, who works in HR, informed me that this is rather atypical. Usually, it would be just the blue collar workers punching a clock. It's gotten me thinking about how people will get away with whatever they can. I do get that, but it still kind of shocks me deep down to know that most people are not as honest as myself. My supervisor has to sign off on the hours I work at home, and it's just not in me to claim hours I haven't worked, though honestly it wouldn't be difficult to fudge. Our blue collar guys are not unionized. I tend to be rather for unions, but having friends who work in HR and growing up with a dad who was a plant manager, I know all too well why so many people are opposed. Because once your in a union, you can get away with just about anything and it's pretty much impossible to get fired. It's frustrating to me. Those unions are there for a reason, because without them, historically the owners have taken advantage of the workers, paying cheap wages and providing substandard work environments. But now with the unions, the scales have tipped the other direction and the workers often use the union to take advantage of the company they work for.

It can be very disheartening, but it seems most people are going to get away with whatever they can. You need to look no further than Wall Street to see the absolute disgusting truth of that these days. Without regulation, CEO's, mortgage lenders, and those playing high and loose in the world of finance, have raped our economy, and our government has let them do it, we have let them do it. I have heard many people asserting on the news that our current financial turmoil is due to misunderstanding of the underlying risks in buying these high risk mortgages, that it's due to incompetence. Bullshit. These are not stupid people with their MBA's on Wall Street. These are the people who are walking away from all of this with a bundle of cash. It does not take any financial genius to know that buying substandard mortgages is a risky business, regardless of insurance or whatever the hell they were calling it. And then, of course, I've heard politicians and lenders blaming the irresponsible people who took out these mortgages they could not afford. Honestly, talk about the pot calling the kettle. But unlike the lenders, who I sincerely feel were smart enough to know what they were doing, who knew that this could only eventually come to giant financial implosion (if I could see it coming, seriously, come on now), some of these people were talked into believing they could afford these mortgages. Others probably knew they couldn't. I really don't understand what they gained, though. They may have gotten to live in a nice house for a few months before they were foreclosed on, but I'm missing where they had much incentive to destroy their credit. Of course, maybe their credit was already in the toilet, which is why we need the damn regulations. It's absolute irresponsibility, to invest so much in people with a proven track record of unreliability. They may be wrong and stupid, but Wall Street is wrong and absolutely vile.

Hysterical

It's Good to be Chinese

I was reading an article in Newsweek about why the government is bailing out certain large financial institutions, while letting others, like Lehman, fail. This quote certainly states it in a way that truly puts it into perspective for us laymen who don't speak the stock broker lingo. "Fannie Mae wasn't too big to fail, one Wall Street wag told me this week. It was too Chinese to fail."

Also, very typical of our current administration, those companies who participated in the most reckless financial behavior, putting not only their own company's future at risk, but many others - those are the companies getting the bailouts. Nice isn't it? It's way better off to have been a huge screw up than to have done your best to take calculated risks and be responsible.

I hope those damn Evangelicals are getting this. How much is it going to matter whether abortion is legal when our entire economy collapses?

Hope Abounds

It only took me a week, but I finally got around to watching Obama's speech. My favorite line is when he says, "Change doesn't come from Washington, change comes to Washington." And I have to say, contrived thought is certainly was, him delivering his speech on the anniversary of the "I have a Dream" speech was moving. When Obama referenced it at the end, it gave me chills.

What Schism?

After listening to Hillary Clinton's speech last night, it truly seems this great controversy within the Democratic party is entirely media-hype. I'm very relieved to see that. It's also great to see Hillary back in her true form. Her campaign showed her in the worst possible light, but her speech at the Convention was moving, uplifting and everything it needed to be. She spoke emphatically and passionately of her support for Obama and her contempt for the possibility of McCain in the White House and four more years of Republican leadership. She was all that and more.

The Democratic Convention

I only watched a few minutes of the coverage last night, didn't manage to catch anything meaningful. However, just because you didn't see the speeches live, doesn't mean you can't watch them. They're definitely worth your time.

Michelle Obama Part 1

Michelle Obama Part 2

Ted Kennedy