If anything, years of spiritual practice make you recognize injustice when you see it. They also promote equanimity. Equanimity, when put into daily life, tempers and hopefully overrides the instinct to go out and throttle people. This is a good thing.
Those who have been following my personal life know that I go off on rants every now and again. Writing is one of the ways I stay sane. As my fingers need to be near the keyboard, the rest of my body can’t be elsewhere. The end result is that the world and its inhabitants are safe, for the time being.
When I worked for the University, I had a great medical insurance plan. I rarely used it. If I had been smart, I would have had every non-essential organ removed, lined them up on a buffet table, and crawled on top of it to let them follow up with a lobotomy for dessert. There would have been family photos of me looking gloriously happy in my pre-corpse stupor. I know, it’s not the same image as that sexy naked woman laid out with sushi artistically placed on her perfect breasts and other inviting parts, but it’s an image nonetheless. Somewhere, probably in childhood, I got the notion that I should keep my bodily parts intact, save the one kidney that went by the wayside in 1974.
When I left my job to move near my mother who was dying of ovarian cancer, I left an entire life, including my job and its accompanying benefits. Little did I know that getting health insurance on my own would be prohibitively expensive for anything approximating what I had. I also quickly learned that the name of the health insurance game is exclusion. Question # 591: Have you ever had a nosebleed? If you see that question, lie. This could be used against you. Your prothombin levels could be low, or you might have a platelet problem. It could be serious and more importantly expensive. You will be turned down and shunned. I know this for a fact. Just lie.
There are certain things that I believe in. Health screening is one of them. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona (BCBS) claims to be a non-profit organization. I made it through underwriting after single-handedly lowering my total cholesterol 150 points. The plan looked adequate. Preventive services were covered without touching the deductible. It's what they don't tell you that matters.
Hooray! I get to have a screening colonoscopy! The bad news is that I find out it will cost me somewhere between 3,000-4,500 dollars. BCBS will pay 80% of the physician charges, which happen to be $860.00 for the privilege of sticking a tube up my rear orifice. That's it. I checked. Still can’t get a figure on the anesthesiology charges, as apparently no one can determine what they might be. Just to walk in the hospital and get naked is 2,500 dollars. If one or two polyps get squashed under a microscope ...... who knows? The health insurance worker bees are pretty much silent on the issue and have varying degrees of information over and above their brainwashing. At the high end of the spectrum, they are very good at telepathic communication. At least I can appreciate that. Even if they could, they are not allowed to think on their own. So here I am. The physician won’t administer the procedure without anesthesia, nor will he perform it along side a well-lit taco stand. No, they want to stick it to me on their terms. I will be rendered unconscious or consciously incognito. A cloak of invisibility will be cast upon me. Who then will tell them they’ve got it ass-backwards?
The good news is that the medical model, for the most part, is anti-health and some of us are out of the loop! Just look at the industry. (Hint: We call it an industry). How many people go in fine and come out compromised? Hospital acquired infections (HAI’s) are on the rise. Infection Control Today (9/2/09) states that "Healthcare-acquired infection rates are about 5 percent of all admissions at the moment and with bed days valued at $1,005 each, the total economic burden is close to $1 billion per annum." And this is just in Australia. The federal Centers for Disease Control estimated that in any given year 1.7 million patients will get a hospital-acquired infection during their hospital stay. Out of those 1.7 million, 99,000 people, or about 270 per day, will die. These were the findings in 2002. More recently, the CDC estimated the annual medical costs of healthcare-associated infections in U.S. hospitals to be between $28 and $45 billion. Maybe that’s why my premiums are so high. Or maybe it’s because all those people who never paid into the system are now drawing from my investment (not to mention yours) to the tune of gazillions of dollars. Clearly, the factors are complex, maybe too complex for any of us to understand. It’s also just not right. Why is it the honest people who play by societal rules get penalized? This is the Era of Entitlement. Wake up America!
My fatality fantasy is being run over by a kosher meat truck, but that is unlikely in Arizona. I may need to modify it. In the unlikely case I'm not killed instantly, I hope to cost my insurance company so much money, they disappear from the face of the earth.
