09:50 – The countdown begins. Only four days left to ship science kits this year.
I’m still working on the prepping book. At the moment, I’m writing about those rack-based food storage rotation systems. Geez. Almost $500 for a storage rack that holds 112 #10 cans (a bit less than 19 cases) and takes almost twice the space it would take just to stack the boxes. What a deal. We’d need three of these units to store our current inventory, which would then take almost twice the space it does now. And for almost $1,500 versus less than a tenth that that we’ve spent on steel shelving, a short length of 2X4, and some 1×6 boards.
The only reasons to buy something like that would be:
– not handy with tools.
– want something overbuilt that can be secured against earthquakes.
Well, it’s a steel shelving system that’s 3′ wide by 2′ deep by 6′ tall. I can buy the same or a better shelf at Home Depot for something like $79. It assembles without tools (other than a hammer or mallet or rock to pound down the slip-fit clamps that hold the vertical supports together), and I suspect it’d be pretty secure in an earthquake, particularly loaded down with literally a ton of canned goods. If we lived in earthquake country, I’d probably clamp it to a wall and run chicken wire around the sides to keep things from coming off the shelves.
Wow, more than 1/5th of the USA population is now covered by Medicaid (Medicare covers 17% of the population):
http://kff.org/medicaid/fact-sheet/the-medicaid-program-at-a-glance-update/
“Altogether, Medicaid finances 16% of total personal health spending in the U.S.”
And the Medicaid doctor payment rates are being dropped by 43% on Jan 1. No wonder many doctors do not accept Medicaid patients anymore.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/us/obamacare-medicaid-fee-increases-expiring.html?_r=0
And our Obolacare BCBS Silver plan sucks. One of my employees had cataract surgery last week and had to pay $4,000 out of pocket. That is way too much but I am between a rock and a hard place. I am paying over $500/month for his healthcare plan already.
Mrs. OFD may well have to get eye surgery soon, probably cataract, and that was the amount they wanted up-front, cash on the barrel-head. She currently has zero insurance but we fail to see how that would help us now, between premium costs, med costs, etc.
No choice, though, we can’t have her losing an eye.
OFD, you and Da Missus should look on the bright side: an eye patch and a parrot would be a lot cheaper than the eye surgery.
For the broader point, both yours and Lynn’s, I’ve been wondering about this modern, Obola-era health insurance thing. If you’re mid-level or higher in a large corporation, if you’re a government employee, and definitely if you’re a politician, you have good health insurance at an affordable cost to you. Otherwise, you get health insurance which is essentially indistinguishable from not having health insurance except that you have to pay hundreds per month per covered person for it. Am I missing something here, or is the era of Obolacare worse in every way than the pre-Obola era?
From what we can see, and bear in mind Mrs. OFD has been a public health professional for over thirty years, we’re expected to pay many hundreds per month in premiums just for her and then pay thousands ANYWAY for surgery and other med procedures. So how bad would it be if we didn’t pay the premiums, one wonders? Millions? I don’t think so. We think it’s a miserable fucking racket and the cui bono question has to be answered. It ain’t us.
So yeah, the ObolaCARE era is significantly worse than the pre-ObolaCARE era, and one can put this down to either colossal incompetence and/or malice aforethought.
Basically, health insurance is becoming catastrophic insurance. Just about the only time that it will participate is in drug copays and doctor copays. If you need a procedure done then you are in deep you know what. Unless you are broke and willing to take any doctor that they shove your way on Medicare.
You must have catastrophic insurance if you are below the age of 65 if you have any assets. Otherwise a small hospital stay will bankrupt you if you have a heart attack, cancer, get run over by a hit and run driver, etc.
If you have Medicare then you have to have all kinds of extra insurance which are $300 to $500 per month. Unless you are broke and are eligible for Medicaid.
This is a total mess and designed to be that way. We will end up putting everyone on Medicare in a year or two to solve this nightmare.
BTW, cataract surgery is reputedly $7,000 here for private insurance and $700 for Medicare insurance. Something is really wrong with this picture.
The reason restaurants use the can rack systems is to ensure proper rotation of inventory. You assume that the employee will do the maximally lazy thing and pick the first can, although you are still supposed to mark the can with the date received.
Re: [snip] cataract surgery is reputedly $7,000 here for private insurance and $700 for Medicare insurance. [snip]
Just because the doctor presents a bill to the insurance company for $7,000 or $700 doesn’t mean that that’s what gets paid. My older sister died in July 2013, after a 2.5 day stay in the hospital. The itemized bill came to $82,112, but the total paid was $9,804, of which BCBS/FL paid 90% and the estate was responsible for the rest. But had she not had insurance, they sure would have filed a claim for the full amount. The ER physician collected $267.33 out of a billed $1,407; the radiologist $236.25 against $500 billed, et cetera et cetera et cetera. And yes, I understand about contracted discounts, pre-payments, but the whole system is based on fraud.
Meanwhile, the Obamacare web site still doesn’t work for me. It gets as far as the electronic signature, then says ” We’ll give you your eligibility results after verify your identity.” (sic) Then nothing else happens. If I come back later I have to start from the beginning, clicking repeatedly to confirm everything I’ve already entered, and then it still hangs up. Sigh.
OFD, your points are good, but you missed addressing my main point: can your wife pull off an “Arrgh, avast there, ye scurvy dogs!” with any sincerity?
Lynn, yah. Catastrophe insurance except that the premiums are up where they used to be for normal insurance. As you say, something seems wrong. So wrong that it must have been designed that way.
Now, far be it for me to suggest that every politician, every bureaucrat, and every insurance company employee be dragged out and strung up from trees and telephone poles… No, wait. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.
“We will end up putting everyone on Medicare in a year or two to solve this nightmare.”
As Dr. Bob and I have been predicting, with slightly different details, their “plan” is probably to smush all the retirement, pension, medical insurance and social security funds into one gigantic pile and then loot the dickens out of it until it’s gone, undoubtedly for pressing “national security” reasons or some other such malarkey if anyone cottons onto it out here before it’s completely plundered.
The One Percent are currently all set and just continuing to amass loot beyond any human’s ability to even spend it in several lifetimes and the percentages just below that, their factotums, minions, and others who keep the whole criminal racket going, are in-progress getting as much of the country’s treasure to themselves while the getting is good. It’s a massive and overwhelming criminal enterprise, sitting on top of a gigantic and permanent Leviathan bureaucracy.
Wait, someone said we can vote these rascals out and stop all this? I just saw a study from Princeton (I’ll try to find the link) that after allowing for the politically connected and special interest lobbying, the average voting Murkan has such a small chance of ever affecting anything through their votes as to be statistically insignificant. What may work in Canada, with one-tenth our population, and then only sometimes, or in Switzerland or Norway or someplace, ain’t gonna fly here.
We are basically screwed until the whole rotten edifice implodes and collapses and our kids and grandkids will have to rebuild something from the ruins. Given that they can barely speak and write their own language, most of them, this is problematic. But by Jiminy they’ll have lotsa self-esteem and be solid bonafide worshipers of the goddesses Diversity, Democracy, and Egalitarianism. I’d guess the only hopeful signs at all are as Dr. Bob says and others, that there will be enough techies, engineers, scientists and tinkerers to make things work again. I’d also guess that depends on the level of societal breakdown and prevalence of violence and disorder.
“…but you missed addressing my main point: can your wife pull off an “Arrgh, avast there, ye scurvy dogs!” with any sincerity?”
She may have to, and we may then venture out upon the Highway and become pirates and highwaypersons ourselves…
…and cut a colorful Figure at our Exit.
“…every politician, every bureaucrat, and every insurance company employee be dragged out and strung up from trees and telephone poles… No, wait. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
If we add in lawyers, financial speculators, war criminals, most MSM people, the university humanities and social “science” faculties, and probably some others that could be mentioned here, we’ll run outta trees and poles. I still say the guillotine is the way to go.
Regarding today’s “health” insurance basically being catastrophic insurance, no it is just plain catastrophic no matter what.
The ObolaNoCare system is designed to decrease the population.
If a person has a major illness, most people will use up all of their savings and assets within a year or two. They will then be dumped into Medicaid which, in reality, is now charity care. The Government is soon only going to be paying pennies on the dollar and the only way that there will be any doctors is the Government will require that in order to practice medicine a doctor must see a certain number of Medicaid. The infrastructure is already in place.
There will be private hospitals and doctors, but that will only be for the ruling class and bureaucrats. It will also be illegal for you to leave the country for medical care.
If the Supremes allows ObolaNoCare’s latest challenges to be over-ruled we are doomed. Mark my word. There must be total collapse before there can be any recovery.
” There must be total collapse before there can be any recovery.”
Agreed. This mess is too far gone. It is unsustainable. To put it mildly, our Lords Temporal do not have our best interests at heart.
Periodic phony jumps in the economy or falling energy prices are not indicative of any sort of permanence and are likely designed with malice aforethought to render us more or less comatose and easily pliable. Our rulers have taken the old Soviet playbook and kicked it up several notches with new technology and reptilian deviousness.
They must laugh their asses off when they watch us vote in elections and get all worked up over the talking head cretins at the Fox network. Just as the libtards all wet their diapers when they’re tuned in to NPR and MSNBC. “Lean Forward” so we can swing this scimitar across your pencil necks.
Basically, health insurance is becoming catastrophic insurance.
And it is sold like that. I get the pitches, and they all start with the ‘what would you do if this catastrophic thing happened to you and you did not have insurance?’
As far as Medicare — I am on it. Even with my supplemental insurance, I pay $90 to $100 for each doctor visit. Cardiologist wants to see me twice a year, and family doc wants me in twice more. That is $400/yr if they do not do anything to me! More if I have to have blood tests, X-rays, or other ancillary testing. By no means does Medicare pay for all of my healthcare.
My docs are all with the Catholics, who own the medical system in Tiny Town. Those folks are not going to stop taking Medicare patients, but they just billed me for visits 2 years and more ago, on dates when I was never in their offices. I suspect that will be a nightmare to straighten out, because it appears they already got money from Uncle Sam for those supposed visits.
BTW, cataract surgery is reputedly $7,000 here for private insurance and $700 for Medicare insurance. Something is really wrong with this picture.
Here is the deal. Actually, it is Medicare that is holding rates down. As we very well know, doctor fees are positively astronomical compared to any other Western country (I have mentioned before that doctors and tenured teachers in Germany make the same wage), and at least our government is only willing to pay what the international market charges. Insurance companies are much more gullible. In the case of my Uncle’s unexpected hip replacement, they paid what they were billed, but his insurance premiums are paid as part of his retirement package. What they pay is between his pension provider and the insurance company; he has no influence over that.
Getting doctor wages down to internationally competitive rates is going to be an unpleasant ordeal. In Germany, if you are accepted into medical school, it is free. Likely we are going to have to cut the cost of medical school and probably pay off student loans for younger doctors in the transition. The US doctors in my family have student debt that is more than the mortgages on their big houses.
It cannot go on that we continue to pay doctors many times over what the rest of the world pays for the same knowledge and skills. One way or the other that will eventually stop.
It will also be illegal for you to leave the country for medical care.
I am surprised that is not already the case. But it does present an opportunity for Americans to get much cheaper care abroad. My cousin set up one of the nation’s first medical tourism businesses out East more than a decade ago for joint replacements performed in India at one-third the cost of getting it done in the US. Cataract removal is probably available abroad, too.
As far as quality of the foreign care, I did not respond to the comment some days ago that people come here from around the world for our ace medical care. That all changed more than a decade ago. Just off the top of my head, Peyton Manning formerly of the Indy Colts, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, Kobe Bryant, Alex Rodriguez and a couple Hollywood stars (whose names escape me at the moment) got treatment abroad in the recent past. As far as people coming here for medical treatment, last person I heard doing that was King Hussein of Jordan seeking treatment at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnie-SO-tuh well more than a decade ago. Of course, his reputed favorite wife was from the US, and it is well known that she encouraged him to seek help in the US. But Mayo’s sent him home, telling him they could do nothing for him.
And I don’t find ANY surveys or studies that show the US excels in healthcare. None. Just a quick google shows The Commonwealth Fund Report, WHO, Bloomberg, New England Journal of Medicine, a Harvard Study, study financed by The Lancet, EU Comparative Report — all place the US way down the list in both citizen longevity and medical outcomes. Ja, there are plenty of Americans complaining about the studies, to be sure, but nothing — even from US funded and conducted studies, shows the US anywhere near the best medical care available internationally. And one thing for sure: it is going to be astronomically more expensive here than what is available just about everywhere abroad. I suspect Manning paid more for exploratory measures in the US than he did to actually fix his neck abroad.
Warmenists have a new advocate. Makes sense to me.
Anthropogenic Global WarmingClimate disruption was a religion from the get-go. (To the extent that it wasn’t just a scam for money and power.)Many of us traditionalist/conservative Roman Catholics do not take every utterance of the Holy Father as certified gospel, esp. his comments off the cuff about various social matters and scientific stuff like this; note the comments from Cardinal Pell accordingly, who runs the Vatican budget.
Egalitarianism is also a religion now, along with its deities, Diversity and Affirmative Action.
And let it be said, some atheists have made of their unbelief their own faith, and they defend it with (un)holy zeal, too.
The wind has picked up tremendously here in the past couple of hours, it is howling out there. The various odd cross-currents on this end of Lake Champlain are also mentioned in colonial/Revolutionary-era historical writings, esp. by soldiers plying their way along the shores.
As Dr. Bob and I have been predicting, with slightly different details, their “plan” is probably to smush all the retirement, pension, medical insurance and social security funds into one gigantic pile and then loot the dickens out of it until it’s gone, undoubtedly for pressing “national security” reasons or some other such malarkey if anyone cottons onto it out here before it’s completely plundered.
Those funds are already gone. Have you seen the national debt?
Yup, somebody left the door open to the polar vortex again. We were 75 F this afternoon and then the temperature suddenly dropped to 50 F. We are now 47 F and still dropping with a vicious north wind.
Effective cataract surgery costs $25.00 per patient.
Check out the Fred Hollows Foundation. Fred was an Australian ophthalmic surgeon who started doing cataract surgery in Asia, and on Australian natives in Australia, on a charity basis. After a while he started a foundation to fund this work which, after his death, became known by his name. A $25.00 donation makes the difference between a charity case, blind for life; and a productive citizen for life. Nothing fussy – Fred did ops in the open air, patient on a chair, back to the sun, him bending over them with an ophthalmoscope. About the most cost-effective charitable work there’s ever been.
The difference between $25 and $7,000 is substantial.
I can’t help thinking that, if I lived in a country like the USA with fourth-world unaffordable medicine, and I couldn’t afford to migrate to a civilised nation, I’d at least let some of my money migrate, so I could build up a fund to finance medical care overseas. It would have to be a lot cheaper than financing the charges levied in the USA.
“Those funds are already gone. Have you seen the national debt?”
Technically speaking, yes. But we live inside the looking-glass and everything is topsy-turvy, you see. There are still golden eggs to gather and sheep to be fleeced.
“Yup, somebody left the door open to the polar vortex again.”
Probably Mr. Chuck down there in Tiny Town. He likes messing with the weather. When he’s not tweaking Linux machines.
It’s 44 here right now but wicked windy, with a light rain falling. Possible rain or snow showers tomorrow.
Well, actually, health insurance as “catastrophic insurance” is exactly the way it should be. The inexplicable thing is why Obamacare-era prices are so high, when procedures costing up to a few thousand are no longer covered.
The answer is found, I expect, in all of the people who cannot, will not or just do not pay for their own small treatments. I used to read a couple of emergency room blogs, that described the vast majority of their patients either as people coming in for trivial things, or else coming in hoping to trick the hospital into handing them free narcotics. While the hospitals apparently have the right to charge $50 cash up front for non-emergency treatments, none of them do – for fear of discrimination suits, etc.. Stupid, because having to pay cash up front when you come in with a case of the sniffles would pretty much eliminate the problem…
Well, there’s also the regulation – both over-regulation and regulatory capture – that serves to drive up prices. Get the government out of health care and see what happens. Won’t happen, of course…
Another aspect: liability. I’ve had some health adventures the past few weeks, including two emergency room visits. At least one of the emergency room visits, as well as a great deal of general misery, was the result of my GP missing the initial diagnosis. In the US, I expect many people would have called their lawyer about the mistake. Here, not so much.
Here in the Great State of Texas, you can now only sue for actual damages plus $250,000 pain and suffering. I am not that it has cut the cost of malpractice insurance very much, if at all.
The reason healthcare in the US is so expensive is the same as why legal fees are so high: our government lets doctors and lawyers regulate themselves, and the first thing they did was limit the number of doctors and lawyers to shortage proportions, which allows both professions to charge many, MANY multiples of what their work is worth anywhere in the world outside of the US. Very effective, and breaking that protective fence around the US is going to be very unlikely, IMO. Worst effect of that is that doctors in the US are clearly overworked; no professional with that much responsibility over life/death matters should be working more than an 8 hour day, but all those I know work 12 or more in hospital settings, and at least 10 hours in office settings. Same for the nurses who also have responsibilities to others’ welfare.
But not only that, so-called “free-trade” measures now being pursued by Nobama and his people are NOT free trade, but are agreements which will remove our legal system in resolving disputes and put it in the hands of worldwide tribunals to which our laws will be subservient.
Quoting a recent Dean Baker post on the issue:
“The terms of the pacts will supersede laws put in place by both national and sub-national governments, creating an investor-state dispute settlement mechanism. Foreign corporations would be able to contest laws at every level of government at these tribunals. Their rulings could not be over-turned by domestic courts.”
As if that were not enough, these ‘free-trade’ agreements will tighten copyrights, royalties, and trademarks, making them actual barriers to trade, at a time when R&D has been on a massive decline and those roadblocks will further erode innovation. Amazing how our political and economic setup is pushing for more of what is contributing to failures for the masses. But the one thing it is very effectively doing, is lining the pockets of the 1% with transfers from the wallets of those of us in the middle class, who actually work at something to earn our living, instead of dismantling companies by remote control and taking other people’s work away. What a country!