07:57 – Reuters is reporting that the Greek government has struck a tentative deal with the Troika to release the long overdue €31.5 billion tranche and allow Greece to avoid default a month from now.
As usual, the terms are a joke. No one, including Greece, knows exactly how many people are employed by the Greek government, but it must be more than a million. That’s 10% of the Greek population. Not the working-age population, you understand. The entire population. If Reuters has it right, Greece will announce that 2,000 of these people, about 0.2% of state employees, will be put on notice that their jobs are to be eliminated a year from now. That’s 2,000. Not 200,000, which would have been a more reasonable first step toward reducing the size of government. And the layoffs will be a year from not, not right now. Then, Greece will serve one-year notices on a further 6,250 state employees every three months through 2013. So, Greece is going to lay off, eventually, about 25,000 state employees, or something like 2%. Not 250,000 which would have been a reasonable start. Drop, meet bucket.
As usual, it’s really all about Angela Merkel. She’s running for re-election next autumn, and she wants to make sure she’ll be re-elected. She doesn’t want the euro to collapse until she’s safely re-elected. She’s trying to spend as little as possible to ensure that.
13:17 – Barbara is leaving tomorrow to drive down to the beach with her parents. They’ll be back Sunday. Instead of wild-women-and-parties, I think I’ll just continue the Heartland marathon. I’d made it part way through series five the last time Barbara was away, so the question now is whether I should finish series five and then start series one again, or should I finish series five and then watch the first four episodes of series six before starting the cycle again?
When I mentioned to Barbara that Amber Marshall had gotten engaged a couple of months ago, she asked if I was disappointed. Eh? Barbara knows that I adore Amber Marshall, but it never even occurred to me that anyone would believe that I wanted her for myself. She’s an extraordinarily attractive young woman, and not just physically, but she’s young enough to be my daughter. I told Barbara that, to the contrary, I was delighted for Amber and wished her well. Now, it’s true that if I ever found out that Shawn Turner wasn’t treating Amber well, I’d have at least a passing thought of driving up there and pounding him into the ground head-first until only the soles of his feet showed, but that’s as far as it goes. I am protective of young women, not covetous.
17:29 – One of Barbara’s friends picked her up a little while ago to go out to dinner. Before she left, Barbara made me an early dinner. So, I fired up Heartland S5E13 and sat there watching it while I was eating dinner, with Colin begging the whole time. After I finished eating, I lit my pipe, intending to smoke it for a few minutes before I fed Colin. He let me know verbally that he wanted his dinner. I ignored him. He asked again. I told him to give me just a couple minutes. He then walked over to the DVD player, snouted the eject button, turned around, and looked at me. People who haven’t lived with Border Collies would pass this off as a coincidence. Those who have lived with BCs would believe it might have been intentional. Colin has certainly watched me closely many times as I ejected and inserted discs. I’m not 100% convinced it was intentional. Only about 99%.
My aunt sent me this great pro-Romney custom bult yard sign in Glenview, Illinois:
http://www.urgentagenda.com/PERMALINKS%20VII/OCTOBER%202012/02.SIGN.HTML
I think with Obama having a second term, we, the USA, will have a civil war by the end of his second term very similar to what is going in Greece now. With Romney, we may have a fighting chance of not going through that disaster. I am not sure at all that anyone can fix our way out of this mess though.
I am beginning to think that regardless who is president, the tax increases in Jan 2013 will cause a rather immediate and hard recession. Probably the unemployment rate will double in the first quarter.
My brother just sent me this:
Subject: FW: Budget explained in understandable terms.
This cuts thru all the political doublespeak we get. It puts it into a much better perspective.
Lesson # 1:
* U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
* National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000
Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
* Total budget cuts so far: $3.85
Assuming a hard recession and rocketing unemployment in January, the country is facing some major shit in the dead of winter. That will certainly help to accelerate the coming situations, whatever they might be, probably all bad, regardless of if it’s Mittens or Barack.
I don’t have a real hard time imagining a general stepping in near the end of the next president’s term. “in complete and full charge,” as the late General Haig once stated.
BTW, the most fascinating part of the third presidential debate was Romney and Obama arguing over how to disperse 80 billion dollars foreign aid while making foreign countries do tricks for it. I was yelling at the tv, “we are broke and both of you bozos do not get it”.
BTW, the USA foreign aid is 80 billion dollars per YEAR. How did we get here?
Well, for starters we know that around three billion a year has been going to our wonderful friends in Israel, who spy on us relentlessly and continuously. Another couple of billion was going to our good pal Hosni Mubarak’s swell regime per year, dunno if that’s still the case, seeing as how the Brotherhood is now jointly ruling with the usual junta. The Brotherhood pols, by the way, dumped all over their “Arab Spring” colleagues and kissed up bigtime to the junta.
We also know that the bulk of that money each year goes into the pockets of the people who run all those regimes, primarily, and what does not goes for weapons systems and armaments, with which they can wipe out their enemies, domestic and foreign. “The Man Who Would Be King” does a little running schtick with this scenario, indicating that it was going on back then, of course.
And we know, finally, that 80 billion dollars is now just a drop in the bucket; some of our billionaires here and in other countries are MULTI-billionaires on their own.
A fun scenario for our future here is wheeling a cart down the street with a billion dollars of American currency in it to get a loaf of bread while we trade our last silver coins for a stick of butter and wedge of moldy green cheese. I bet a lot of us thought it was quite droll when we were told the stories of German hausfrauen doing that between the wars and wouldn’t have dreamed of it happening here in a zillion years. Well, sportsfans, as our host has mentioned, prices are rising. And incomes are dropping.
What do you mean, prices are rising? It’s a lie! It’s an infamous lie! I just bought a container of the same coffee I’ve been buying for years, and it was the same price as it was six months ago. Sure, the container held 11% less coffee, but the price has not risen at all.
“infamous.” Ya don’t hear that word used much anymore. Not in that sense, anyway. You must be some kind of writer or something.
Here is an infamous bit of rhetoric from one of our English cousins on what is to be done over there; I thought it was rather good:
http://takimag.com/article/in_defense_of_english_civilization_sean_gabb/print#disqus_thread
You know, the five second rule has been lengthened to ten seconds for the duration of the recession. If all this wailing and gnashing of teeth comes to pass, will the people in charge change the five second rule to twenty seconds?
By the time they’re through, we’ll be eating everything we find on the ground, not just five or ten seconds from now.
Well let’s hope y’all are right and we is just wailing into a hard wind and of no account whatsoever. I will be the first to step up and say how utterly wrong and stupid I was.
Yah, I’ll often make some dire prediction and then note that I will be delighted to be proven wrong. I’ll also note that my record of successful predictions is not very high because I worst-case everything, and as a tolerably intelligent, tolerably imaginative, and tolerably educated individual, the worst I can imagine is pretty bad. It comes of being an engineer: Plan for failure. Design for failure. Allow for failure.
(Which, incidentally, is also the root cause for my being driven up a wall by our current political system. What idiot designed this? It takes a special breed of moron to put positive feedback into a dynamic system. What?! No error-catching mechanism? When I find who did this, he’s not only fired, he’s going to be blacklisted!)
Well, I bought into all the ‘back to barbarism’ stuff back in the ’70’s and it never came to pass. Most of my mistaken view was due to prodding from my dad and his father, who believed as you guys do, that society will devolve into chaos. I read all the books, including those by all the Mormons who were telling everybody how to stockpile food and store the fuel for a moped to get around. (My recollection was that the Mormon requirement was for only 6 months of stockpiled food, though; not a year.) Bottom line is that most people can get by on far fewer calories than we imagine, as the Biosphere problems proved.
But, in trying to learn from my past mistakes, I cannot buy that we are in for utter chaos. Something more than an Argentinean economic collapse maybe, but not starving, deprivation, complete loss of the business sector, and back to the Dark Ages. I am not going to misjudge the future twice–unless what you predict comes true. And I admit that I believe that far, far more likely than a second coming of Jesus, which will never happen.
And this bit about anarchists being about no government is not a part of what I have been reading about early 20th century anarchists. Certainly an elimination of government was not what Emma Goldman was about. She advocated worker participation in business, both in decisions about running the business and in financial sharing of the profits—greater democracy in all aspects of life.
Libertarians wanting too much government? You got that from somebody who is not a Libertarian. Look at places where they have been elected and see what they did to the size and spending of government they were responsible for. You guys talk a line of wanting what neither Nobama nor Romney will ever accomplish. But the Libertarians will—if only you will elect them. A vote for either Romney OR Nobama is a vote for more of the same. I will be shocked if spending does not increase dramatically under a Romney administration—just as it did under Reagan and GW Bush. Spending increases under Republicans, it does not diminish. The tables have turned since FDR; have you not noticed?
And that sign for Romney is not impressive to me. It neglects to include SCM/Ampad, which Romney raided like Carl Icahn, closing down a perfectly profitable company and eliminating hundreds of jobs, while Romney himself took away multi-millions from its closure. Obviously, you do not remember what Staples was like when it began in Natick/Framingham, Mass. and spread throughout the country. It was a huge store with unrivaled inventory. Now its appearance resembles,—and it is stocked like,—a convenience store. You want America devalued, disassembled, and sold off? Vote for Romney. He’s just the guy to get that job done. And what a record he does have for that!
Meanwhile,—changing the subject—I want to know what has happened to the past tense of “to see” in America. I was in a room filled with highly educated people today (all of them Masters degrees or higher), and one of them said, and I quote, “I looked at the orders and seen what needed to be done.”
I wrote it down exactly as spoken. I am hearing “seen” used for “saw” everywhere, originating from all parts of the country (not just around the super low-educated Tiny Town)—on TV, radio, and even from Americans in Europe on BBC news. I cannot find anywhere that “seen” is the past tense, but it is so commonplace that it now might as well be. Geez, it drives me crazy. How can you get through 6 or more years of higher education and misuse the word?
Not an engineer, I am driven up the wall by the knowledge that we once had a decent republic and it’s been betrayed repeatedly and is now unrecognizable and forgotten. And also by seeing every generation of young people involved in yet another stupid, wasteful, tragic and usually unsuccessful war. Someone will pipe up here that the War Between the States ended slavery (at a cost of 600,000 troops and probably another half a million civilians) or that we won the Good War against Hitler and the Japs (after 100 million dead worldwide and then Stalin, Mao, Tito, Il Sung, Castro, Pol Pot, et. al. and the loss of half of Europe to the Soviet dictatorship) and so on.
In any case I believe the words of both Randolph Bourne: “War is the health of the State,” and the well-known diatribe by General Butler.
We should know in a couple of weeks which way the cookie is gonna crumble, to a point, and then after the holidays we’ll know even more, watching the various events in Greece and the Sandbox and what new horrors will be visited upon us here.
“How can you get through 6 or more years of higher education and misuse the word?”
I seen that same thing for years now; drives me nuts.
This ain’t the 70s and much bigger things are going on now. I doubt we’re sliding back to the Dark Ages (which were not that dark) and I agree that Mittens would be a disaster, as is the Incumbent. But we’ll have a libertarian president when elephants fly and pigs learn to whistle; maybe a rep or a senator or two, that’s about all this system will accept. This system needs to be taken apart and rebooted and its rulers taken out, one way or the other.
Tut-tut, Chuck. You’ve become a humorless old guy. Or maybe you’re just tired from overwork. OK, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
My crack about libertarians and big government was just a crack. I’m by nature an anarchist, so anyone who isn’t, is entirely too supportive of big government.
“I am protective of young women, not covetous.”
If anyone is inclined to believe this I have a bridge I’d like to sell them.
I know that not all anarchists wanna blow stuff up (but there are these self described anarchists http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/01/5-arrested-for-allegedly-trying-to-blow-up-ohio-bridge/) but anarchism still doesn’t make sense. Without laws, courts, taxation, eminent domain (properly and sparingly used) how could large scale infrastructure be built? What about dealing with people who commit murder, or torch someone’s house.
I think humans are social animals and government is a good thing, so long as it doesn’t get out of hand. OFD, SteveF and our host would throw the baby out with the bathwater. Libertarianism I get, anarchism is just cloud cuckoo stuff.
Lyn wrote:
“BTW, the USA foreign aid is 80 billion dollars per YEAR. How did we get here?”
Some of it is probably food aid produced by struggling US families and bloated US conglomerates. Sorta social welfare for US business and families. The recipients could probably buy food locally for a lot less, instead they get expensive food provided by the US for free that makes their local farmers uncompetitive. (It is hard to compete with free stuff.)
As to the US military. Scale it back to 5%, but keep some missiles for when enemies of civilization “don’t get it”. And stop supporting governments, stop supporting their insurgents. Just let them work it out themselves.
SteveF wrote:
“It comes of being an engineer: Plan for failure. Design for failure. Allow for failure.”
One woman said to another: “I hate dating engineers. You give ’em a centimetre and they’ll take a kilometre.”
Steve, I’m afraid that Chuck has a long history of not realising when his leg is being pulled.
Our host is probably partly responsible for this. He likes teasing people about what he does and doesn’t believe and want to do, a perfect example is his claim today that he doesn’t covet nubile, fertile, attractive/beautiful/pretty/cute young women. When he wrote that I knew immediately that, despite what he’s said in the past, he *doesn’t* believe in evolution, which is all about increasing the frequency of ones own genes in the population.
SteveF says:
Tut-tut, Chuck. You’ve become a humorless old guy. Or maybe you’re just tired from overwork. OK, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
My crack about libertarians and big government was just a crack. I’m by nature an anarchist, so anyone who isn’t, is entirely too supportive of big government.
Yeah, that flew right over my head; but I see it now. Overwork is right. Up at 04:30 this morning for a 2 hour drive north to an all-day video job, 2 hours back, and now working late on completing stuff for another afternoon with the-computer-that-will-not-share-root-drives tomorrow.
Boy, where do the Republicans get all these whackjobs from?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-25/romney-distances-himself-from-candidates-rape-remarks/4332540
Chuck: Bleargh. My sympathies. I can still do 20-hour days if I have to, but it’s harder than it was ten or even five years ago. And IIRC you’re five or ten years older than I. All I can suggest is caffeine, the gift of the gods.
Chuck: I’m helping a guy with his writing. He’s writing a Harry Potter fanfic, which your the-computer-that-will-not-share-root-drives reminded me of. Y’know, I think we all should go around with hyphenated names; they’re just that cool.
Miles_Teg: RBT usually writes precisely. He didn’t claim that he didn’t find attractive young women attractive but that he doesn’t covet them. That is very plausible. (And I agree. Teenage girls are the single most annoying thing on the face of the planet, but young women are generally not far behind.)
Miles_Teg: Your understanding is very limited. Not all anarchists want to bomb bridges, kill people, and otherwise cause chaos and destruction. I’m a creator, builder, and protector by nature. I’ve killed a number of men, but they were muggers and rapists, not random targets “just because I could”. If everyone had my attitude (and the population density were lower so that ordinary big-city jostling and queueing wouldn’t lead to irritated outbreaks of violence) I think that life without any imposed rules would work just fine. As to whether it would work with an arbitrary selection of people here-and-now, I’m not sure if RBT and I disagree or if we’re just quibbling over phrasing.
Miles_Teg: Very little of the US money spent on foreign food aid actually goes to food in the bellies of famine victims. OFD is correct, above. If “one million dollars” is spent on “food for starving Ethiopians”, the majority goes into the pockets of corporations, not-for-profits, and government agencies. Of the (I’m pulling a number out of the air) $100K worth of food purchased at wholesale prices, a third will end up sitting on the docks, where it rots because the national dictator won’t allow the trucks to come get it because it would be going to feed his traditional tribal enemies, a third is confiscated by police or soldiers, and a third actually makes it to the famine victims. As noted, I was just approximating the numbers, but the 3% efficiency they come to is about right.
Hmm. My comment, above, has no blockquotes. Presumably I bodged something and WordPress ate the tags. No problem; the referents should be clear enough from context.
Ah, Greg, I never said I didn’t find Amber and other attractive young women attractive sexually. Of course I do. As you say, it’s hardwired in my male DNA, not to mention every other man’s DNA.
What I said was that I don’t covet them, i.e. I don’t want them for myself. Amber is 24 years old. She needs a mate that’s closer to her own age, one with whom she has things in common, and one whose remaining lifespan is likely to be similar to her own. No guy my age would be truly happy with a woman Amber’s age. We simply don’t have enough in common. No shared experiences.
This was brought home to me a couple of months ago when I visited the dentist. I had a very nice young woman as a hygienist, also 24 years old. Barbara and I had just seen a TV episode where a young person didn’t recognize the name of a musician that we thought anyone should recognize. So I asked this girl if she knew who Mick Jagger was. No clue. The Rolling Stones? No clue. Bob Dylan? No clue. Bob Dylan! I almost asked her about The Beatles, but I was afraid to hear her answer. So I hummed the opening riff of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. That she recognized.
So, yeah, if an older guy is interested in women only to make babies, I can easily believe he’d be attracted to 20-something girls. But if he wants someone for companionship, he’s going to find that 20-something girl unsuitable, to say the least. I like them. I like them a lot. That’s why I’m protective rather than covetous.
From what I’ve seen over the decades, they’re airheads; their brains have just recently been formed into the adult versions and they are tabula rasa. This is also true of men at that age; which is one reason it’s always been so easy to grab them up for bullshit military adventures in their teens. That, and the burgeoning testosterone.
38 now and rising, a sunny day, with alleged record temps predicted for tomorrow in the 70s; and the talk is of this Hurricane Sandy and how we may get soaked pretty good around here all through next week.
I agree completely with Bob. My wife is ten years younger than I am, and while we certainly have a lot in common, occasionally we have things crop up like what Bob is talking about. I’m sure the phenomenon would be much more significant if the age difference were two or three decades instead of one.
I agree completely with Bob. My wife is ten years younger than I am
This will become more of a problem when retirement age comes around.
My wife does not work at a paid job but instead works at home being a housewife and helping to raise a relatively successful youngen’ (married, house, good job, no consumer debt). I can get Medicare in 4 years, retire in 5. But I would no longer have health benefits for my wife. I cannot risk her having 4 years with no health benefits.
So I am going to have to work until I am 69 and she is 65 and can receive Medicare. If I am going to work until 69 I might as well work one more year until I am 70 and draw 125% of the SSI I would have gotten at 66.
In our case that won’t be a problem in our case because my wife works, and has better benefits than I do.
Besides which, I’m already making sure my DNA is widely distributed. Every kit we ship has my DNA included, albeit not explicitly.
Actually, I’m considering creating a DNA bank of my own, soliciting friends whose IQs are 160 or higher (call it +4 sigmas) to provide specimens. I figure that in 50 years or so I or one of my clones may have use for them.
Ray, I can’t remember for sure if your employer is so small that COBRA doesn’t apply. But it’s my understanding that if your employer is larger than a certain size you can pay for 18 months of insurance at the same price they would. I have also heard that if COBRA applies, you should be able to insure just your wife for the 18 month period.
Oh, that doesn’t sound at all disturbing…
I take it this would be from licking envelopes or something similar?
RBT wrote: “No shared experiences.”
No vision of the future, Bob? I can think of some very specific experiences I would like to share with Amber. Otherwise, I completely agree, not enough common ground for a meaningful relationship. Of course, the real problem would be that she and my dog share a name, and that could get kind of strange.
We were watching some TV episode a couple weeks ago where they were talking about who they’d want to have with them if they were stranded on a desert island. Barbara turned to me and said she knew who I’d pick: Amber Marshall and Emily VanCamp. I said of course, and that I’d also like to have Diana Rigg, Emma Thompson, Alison Hannigan, and on and on, and added something about “age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety…”
Barbara started to smack me. Not being a rookie, I told her that I was only kidding, and that I’d want her with me on the desert island. So she got mad that I wanted her to be stranded on a desert island. All men are rookies.
All of that said, I can think of worse people to be stranded with than Amber and Emily. I’d die of exhaustion, of course, but at least I’d die happy. But with my luck I’d end up stranded with Gilligan.
I’m sure your point is correct, I’m just why it happened. While Mitt Romney may well have something to do with it, I think Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton bear a lot more of the responsibility.
The only reasons I would drive to Plainfield or Greenwood to buy something from Staples is if I needed something that I couldn’t wait for Amazon to deliver, or I wanted to look at one before I bought it and Walmart didn’t carry it.
If this guy’s blog is to be believed, an Argentine style economic collapse is still a very serious problem. He may just be blogging to get Americans to buy his book. But then why can’t a reasonably intelligent Argentine national who has good English skills find a better way to make money than by hoping Americans will buy his book?
Well, as I’ve said, I don’t expect a complete collapse of the nature that Dave suspects. What I expect is that we will be impoverished to an extent that most people would find unimaginable.
I do keep food and water on hand, although not to the extent that many “preppers” do. For example, on our next Costco run, I’ll probably pick up a couple of the triple jars of Jif peanut butter, or 18 pounds total. Last trip, we picked up 20 pounds of sugar, and I almost convinced Barbara to go for the 5o-pound bag. Also, I was eying the 50-pound bags of wheat flour, but Barbara convinced me that it was hard to store without getting buggy. And we always have canned chicken, tuna, and beef on hand.
I want enough on hand to get through short- to medium-term disruptions, both for Barbara and me and to help family and close friends and neighbors. As for firearms, we have plenty of those, but only a few thousand rounds of ammunition in various calibers. A couple thousand rounds of that is .22 rimfire, although we do keep reasonable amounts of the heavier duty stuff–.223, .308, .357, .45, 12 gauge buck and slugs, etc.–on hand. If things do get really bad, everyone forgets that the cops have their own families to worry about. But I suspect our neighborhood could deal with scavengers and looters without too much outside help.
Whole wheat flour gets bugs rapidly. Bleached white flour, on the other hand, can go for years in the cupboard with no critters. It kind of disturbs me to think about eating something so toxic, actually.
Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton’s progeny are having a cage match. One will leave whole and a larger organization. The other will leave a shambles. The two cannot co-exist at their current strength and organization.
At the moment, I’m betting on Bezos. Amazon’s website is so much better than Wal-Marts and Sams. And Amazon is moving to same day delivery in the larger cities.
And BTW, I saw an interesting statistic the other day to muddy the biggee superstore survival question. Over half of Wal*Marts sales are with cash or a cash portion. Cash does not go well at websites.
I recall that the trick to storing flour for a time bug-free is to transfer it to food-safe containers with tight seals leaving a quantity of air at the top. Toss in some dry ice to evacuate the oxygen and the bugs have nothing to breathe.
I prefer liquid nitrogen.
In our case that won’t be a problem in our case because my wife works, and has better benefits than I do.
I am trying to get her to take a job at the school as an administrative assistant. She has been subbing for 20+ years at the school. They have better benefits than I do. If she would do it I could quit work at 65, be unemployed for a year, then draw SSI at 100%.
But it’s my understanding that if your employer is larger than a certain size you can pay for 18 months of insurance at the same price they would.
COBRA is available. But it is $1,000 a month and not a very good insurance policy. Doesn’t pay anything until I have reached $4K out of pocket. Even then they argue about every little claim. Organization got the cheapest they could find.
I looked back at my Amazon order history, and I’m surprised at how much we have bought from them, and it is growing. My wife buys a lot of stuff from Wal Mart. There may come a point where we spend more at Amazon every year than we do at Wal Mart, but I think that’s not going to happen in this decade. Also generally the stuff we buy at Amazon is stuff that Wal Mart just doesn’t carry. The stuff we buy from Wal Mart is stuff that’s too bulky or heavy to ship, that we want to try on first or otherwise makes more sense to buy locally.
I’m sure Amazon has a much better keyboard selection than Wal Mart. But I only buy a new keyboard when the old one gets Diet Mountain Dew spilled on it.
I am totally amazed at the cost of healthcare and at the cost of health insurance. Something has to give here, the inflation in the USA healthcare arena is much too large to sustain.
In fact, the availability of good healthcare has become the norm here in the USA and is causing the social programs costs to grow out of sight also. It was never envisioned that most men would live to 85 and most women to 90 when social security and medicare were started. We are going to have to decide how to pay for these programs plus medicaid and the argument will not be peaceful.
I, of course, would pick my wife to be stranded with on a desert island. Just no pencil or paper for her to gin up Honey-Do lists there.
Teenage (well, 20 now, but not so’s you’d notice) daughter can find her own desert island.
Case in point on healthcare costs, I am going to have heart surgery next month. The cost of the surgery is the last thing on my mind, I could really care less as I know that my portion will be less than $5,000.
Somehow we have got to get the costs of the actual healthcare down to the individual. I suspect that I will still have no idea how much the surgery costs when I get the final bills six months after. For instance, I am going in for weekly blood draws right now and the cost is $8 per draw. I suspect that there is some money crossing under the table between the Lab and BCBS. Otherwise the Lab is no way making money on me.
When my wife had hip replacement surgery my maximum out of pocket for the year was $6,000 (that has since increased to $8,000). I was not concerned about the cost which actually turned out to be $50,000 vs the $75,000 that was billed to insurance. So insurance paid $44,000.
During that year I also had some expensive injections in my spine to stop some pain. I had held off on these until the year of my wife’s surgery. I wanted the insurance company to foot the bill. Each injection was $4,000 as it required a preparation room, an operating room, some sort of x-ray device, general anesthesia and recovery. I had three of those injections. There was also a couple of MRI’s involved at $800.00 each. Several doctor visits were required before the insurance company would approve the procedure. These doctors visits were on the insurance companies dime so I did not care.
Yes, I stuck it to the insurance company. I (well my organization) has been paying them about $1,000 a month for 10 years. That amounts to $120,000 over time. It was well past time that I got some of that money back. The insurance company still has made a handsome profit so I in no way feel any remorse or misgivings for what I did.
What gets me are labs. For one blood test the lab billed my insurance $550.00. Insurance adjusted price was $55.00 of which I had to pay 100%. If the lab is making money at $55.00 they are gouging people at $550.00. I suspect the lab is also writing off $495.00 for tax purposes.
Something has got to give in medical. I don’t know what. But it is certainly becoming expensive and is being run by the insurance companies rather than the doctors. Too many unnecessary tests just so the insurance might not have to pay and also to protect the doctors and insurance companies from liability.
That system is also destined for collapse along with much of the rest of this gigantic house of cards; it simply cannot be sustained much longer, and our rulers and their stooges don’t care; they can afford the best of medical treatment and fuck the rest of us, the 95% or so. I hear tell that the thing to do is buy airline tickets to Singapore and Thailand and get your stuff done there, no ID required, no messy and lengthy paperwork, no hassles, no fuss-no muss. In and out. CHEAP. Biggest cost is the airfare. Done by true med professionals, real doctors, real nurses. Who treat you like a human being.
And I still remember a bit of Thai….but nothing major needs to done….
…yet.
Here are my actual lab numbers from BCBS. LabCorp is charging $115 for my weekly blood test. BCBS allows $10.38 and pays $8.31. I am paying $2.07. Something is really wrong here. This is why I think that money is exchanged under the table that they are not telling us about.
Given the fact that the money is always at the end of the medical transaction, I see no hope of fixing this system. Even though the system works for the moment and is doing a great job a taking care of us and extending our lifespans here in the USA by about 30 years. At least 20 years in most cases.
A 53 year old friend of mine had a heart attack last Sunday afternoon. They double stented him that night and expelled him the next day. He was at church last night and doing fine. Simply amazing.
I would be careful of outside the USA care. My dentist told me that he recently had a patient who had four new tooth implants done in Singapore ? China ? India ? I forget. Anyway, she came in complaining of pain in the new implants. He found that the foreign dentist had drilled all four implants into her sinus cavity and the titanium shafts were sticking out of the jawbone. He had to remove all the implants to stop the pain.
Here in the USA, the implant dentist (a specialist – costs more!) does a sinus lift if your jawbone is not thick enough. My wife just had one done in preparation for the implant. The sinus lift alone cost $1,500 and takes 3 to 6 months to heal before he can drill it for the post.
OFD wrote:
“Teenage (well, 20 now, but not so’s you’d notice) daughter can find her own desert island.”
I have the perfect one in mind… 🙂
I am looking to get any dental work done here; but if I had a really major procedure that needed to be done and my insurance sucked, which it does right now, I’d seriously consider Thailand. I have the intel/info from expat ex-comrades who either stayed there or went back and stayed, and from a fairly wealthy investor who could afford to do it here for whatever. He went over just to test it out and sure as hell, that was the deal. In Bangkok, anyway. I wouldn’t test it in Nakhon Phanom or Ubon Ratchathoni, both old stomping grounds for me.
“I have the perfect one in mind… ”
Oh I just bet you do, you lecherous old Aussie; but you’d be cashing in your chips within minutes, tops….six feet and 220 pounds, mate, with years of x-c running/jogging/soccer/hockey.
I am neither old nor lecherous. And I don’t discriminate against short, skinny women.
Okey-dokey. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya, mate.
Ah, sometimes getting old is hell. I really do not feel any older than I was at 20, but that is all in my mind. Went to lunch with a friend at the grand re-opening of a newly rebuilt neighborhood restaurant near Broad Ripple/Indy, and afterwards we stopped in at the record store on the corner, which has been there for ages. At the counter was a young knockout, just graduated from the nearby uni that I started out at. Obviously, I cannot touch that, but geez my mind tells me (or is it my body telling my mind?) it would be great. One of my favorite people in the world is Grace Slick, who once said that she really could not blame her band mate, Paul Kantner, for throwing her over for a youngster half her age. “Men’s reproductive system is attracted to women who are ripe to get pregnant. He was just following that built-in leading. He really could not help himself.” But I really did wish hard that I were 40 years younger, all the while I was in that store today.
Diana Rigg has aged terrifically. Life-long smoker. Still. Google her images. You might change your mind about including her on that desert island.