You know you are getting old when:

Lean'n'mean · Aug 1, 2018

LizzieMaine said:
Indeed. The entire goal of modern psychological marketing is to turn the individual into an unthinking mass consumer.

As we all know, humans have, since 2016, been living on enviromental credit i.e. using more ressources than the earth can regenerate. Usually the accounts are examined & fingers wagged in december but this year, the accountants have noted that we are already seriously in the red, a first for humanity this early in the year.
Frenzied consumption may be good for short term employment stats & the much hailed economic growth reassuring for re-election but are catastrophic for the enviroment & so in the long term, for us.
Mass consumers are by nature, unthinking & are unable to realize that the continued mass manufacture of unneeded material goods & obsessive customer spending, on which our economies are dependant, cannot be sustainable even in the medium term. How many consumers ever give a thought about how a product was made or it's effect on the enviroment or indeed on other less fortunate peoples in the world who are obliged to suffer the consequences of our over consumption ?
With the US on fire from Alaska to Texas, it might be timely to question our lifestyle & contemplate a less excessive future before we run out of options.

MisterCairo · Aug 1, 2018

Touchofevil said:
our insurance company ( I give them $1100 plus a mo.)

$1,100 USD per MONTH?!

Bloody hell...

tonyb · Aug 1, 2018

MisterCairo said:
$1,100 USD per MONTH?!

Bloody hell...

That’s typical. I couldn’t afford self-employment if not for the health insurance provided through my wife’s employment, and the additional $700 per month deducted from her pay to have me on the plan.

Over the past couple of months I’ve shelled out an additional $2K in copays and deductibles—for a colonoscopy and a nuclear stress test. (Insurance declined my cardiologist’s suggestion I get a PET scan because in its view the procedure wasn’t medically necessary.) I’m scheduled for another diagnostic procedure in a month or so. I have yet to hear how much that will set me back.

My prescription copays exceed a hundred bucks a month. Every time I walk into a doctor’s office I’m out another $50.

It isn’t that I get the red carpet treatment. Nope. The next available appointment with a specialist might be a couple months out. Or more.

The providers themselves aren’t fans of our health care delivery model. Specialists spend 15 or 20 minutes with a patient before they have to move on to the next. They order procedures for their patients only to have the insurance companies determine they aren’t necessary.

I admire and appreciate the providers. It’s hard work with long hours and tremendous responsibility. I wouldn’t want the job.

But the insurance companies? I’d gladly march their high-level executives to the walls.

LizzieMaine · Aug 1, 2018

Yep. I've refused diagnostic procedures because my deductible is so high -- over $7000 this year, at a time when I've still got five large left to pay on that g-d appendectomy three years ago. I had to fight like hell to get my mammogram covered last year -- as if I'd put myself thru that for a frivolous reason.

Meanwhile, every year our insurance gets moved from one carrier to another in the interest of "affordablity." Affordability in employer-benefit health insurance is an illusion. It's "affordable" only to the company you're working for, not to you as the end user. You will always end up paying more out of your paycheck, only to be told that "this isn't covered" when you actually go and try to use it.

There might be a difference between the American health industry and a filthy, immoral shakedown racket, but it's purely a matter of semantics.

tonyb · Aug 1, 2018

^^^^
A little tip, which may or may not be helpful ...

Perhaps offering a lump sum payment of something less than the outstanding balance to clear the debt?

I had an inguinal hernia repair a few years back. My piece of it was something pushing 5 G’s, if memory serves. I called the billing people (in a city thousands of miles away) to discuss payment options when the woman I was talking with offered to accept something a bit over half the balance if I got it to them in, like, 10 days. You bet, I said.

LizzieMaine · Aug 1, 2018

And, really, doesn't that just go to show what it's really all about here in the Land of the Fee and the Home of the Knave? It's not about "we have to charge high prices to ensure best quality of care to the most people" blah blah blah. It's about gouging all comers for the most possible to the point when they can seem like they're beneficient friends to all humanity by settling for half.

Our local hospital is like a Daily Worker editorial cartoon come to life -- staff worked to the bone while the administration goes to extreme lengths to break their union to ensure that the CEO can enjoy a comfy six-figure salary in a town where the average worker scrabbles along for less than thirty. Every nickel they squeeze out of me is blood money.

Tiki Tom · Aug 1, 2018

It’s all about “what the market will bear”, but I can’t help but think that we are all generally over charged for just about everything. My wife was recently helping my daughter buy a car in a distant state of the union. A price had been settled on when my wife recognized a woman in the dealership to be an old classmate of hers (this was in my wife’s home state) It turned out this woman was up in the hierarchy and she told the young sales person “be sure to give Mrs Tiki a good deal.” A thousand dollars magically disappeared from the price. Hearing the story, I couldn’t help but wonder what their normal profit margin was! Of course this is what drives inflation: everyone regularly raising their own prices in a mad and hopeless effort to keep up with the Jones.

ChiTownScion · Aug 1, 2018

We're definitely probing the perimeters of the social contract here-- but I'd like to know how any serious discussion of aging, anywhere in the world, can avoid that.

tonyb · Aug 1, 2018

LizzieMaine said:
And, really, doesn't that just go to show what it's really all about here in the Land of the Fee and the Home of the Knave? It's not about "we have to charge high prices to ensure best quality of care to the most people" blah blah blah. It's about gouging all comers for the most possible to the point when they can seem like they're beneficient friends to all humanity by settling for half.

Our local hospital is like a Daily Worker editorial cartoon come to life -- staff worked to the bone while the administration goes to extreme lengths to break their union to ensure that the CEO can enjoy a comfy six-figure salary in a town where the average worker scrabbles along for less than thirty. Every nickel they squeeze out of me is blood money.

The nuclear stress test I alluded to above was billed three thousand and some bucks, of which twelve hundred came out of my hide. This is the rate the insurance company and the providers negotiated. It’s what they charge and what gets paid.

But the poor uninsured schmuck paying out of pocket? The same procedure would be more than $10K. Seriously.

It’s little wonder we have so many personal bankruptcies in this country. And we all pay for it, one way or another.

LizzieMaine · Aug 1, 2018

That's the thing. An industry that plays with life and death for human beings is essentially being run on the same basis as a sleazy car dealership. And we all have to go for the undercoating.

Touchofevil · Aug 1, 2018

MisterCairo said:
$1,100 USD per MONTH?!

Bloody hell...

$1,100.00 a month and climbing for what isn’t even the most expensive plan. Go figure that I take medication for blood pressure. They screw me over on that as well.

Touchofevil · Aug 1, 2018

LizzieMaine said:
That's the thing. An industry that plays with life and death for human beings is essentially being run on the same basis as a sleazy car dealership. And we all have to go for the undercoating.

My mother fought an ongoing battle with them for 20 plus years. Diagnosed with an illness in her forties and given six months to live, she fought with her insurance for twenty plus years. By the time she was diagnosed with cancer in her sixties and given six months to live, she knew the insurance game. She lived another five plus years after that diagnosis. Insurance companies are Evil. My Mom was a Bada$$.

LizzieMaine · Aug 2, 2018

I happened to listen last night to a 1938 broadcast of "America's Town Meeting Of THe Air" dealing with exactly these questions -- and exactly the same arguments. We talk a lot about the progress that's been made since the Era on many points, but to listen to this and realize how little real, meaningful progress has been made in dealing with this one in eighty years is a bit sobering. If anything, the situation has gotten vastly worse.

tonyb · Aug 2, 2018

My objection isn’t to people profiting handsomely for developing medicines and procedures that improve and prolong human life. And I don’t know how any reasonable person could.

What I (and any reasonable person) finds objectionable is the abject profiteering on human suffering simply because the profiteer can. Billions are funneled into private pockets thanks to research conducted on the public’s dime. Adaptive equipment costs ten times what it should because few users of that equipment (power wheelchairs, for instance) pay for it directly.

But we all pay for it, in our insurance premiums, in the debts that don’t get paid on account of personal bankruptcies, in our taxes that finance Medicare and VA benefits and the like.

Edward · Aug 3, 2018

MisterCairo said:
Your favourite 80s New Wave singers now look like the angry guy at the end of the bar at the Legion:

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If you liked the Smiths, your favourite New Wave singer isn't so much the angry guy at the end of the bar in the legion, but the wino screaming abuse outside.

LizzieMaine said:
With every year that passes, Sir Paul looks more and more like a short-tempered middle-class old white woman about to complain to me in a shrill voice that the person sitting in front of her is blocking her view of the subtitles. And she's also too cold, so could I turn off the AC.

Jagger, on the other hand, is a dead ringer for the kind of skeevy grandpa who is always trying to convince one of my seventeen-year-old concession kids to come down after the show to see his boat. I can smell the odious drugstore cologne from here.

Accurately skewered them both.

TimeWarpWife said:
IMO, Sirs Paul and Mick needed to retire from the stage long ago. For the love of humanity, there needs to be an age limit for old rock 'n rollers getting on stage and shaking what they no longer have or now have too much of (the latter comes to mind after seeing K.C. - of K.C. and the Sunshine Band - doing a promo for a disco cruise ). After all, no one wants to watch their favorite guitar god break a hip on stage.

I'm not a one for an age limit, but I agree that both Jagger and Macca wore out their credibility long ago. Jagger's biggest sin is that he takes himself so terribly seriously (something noone else has been able to do since that Dancing in the Streets duet for Band Aid...).

If we're going to start putting old pop stars down when the embarrass themselves, though, both of these will be a long way back in the queue behind the likes of Van Morrison and Cliff Richard.

HanauMan said:
Yeah, guess the 80s revival is coming to an end. Actually noticed that recently as my favorite current TV show, Young Sheldon, is set in 1989!

Same year as Heathers - which still hold

LizzieMaine said:
What gets me is when all those round-robin email Boomer nostalgia things "remember when kids played free in the streets" blah blah start coming around with "You must've been a 90s kid if..." at the top. Nostalgia eats itself.

GHT said:
For those unaware of how NHS funding works, a percentage of earnings is deducted from wages, or for the self employed, billed to be paid upfront. The employer also contributes, the current employer rate is a shade over one eighth of the person's salary.

That was the original plan; in reality, the link between NHS funding and National Insurance was broken long ago, and 80% of NHS funding now comes from general taxation. There are current proposals to fund it through a ring fenced NHS tax replacing National Insurance, though it would have to be set much higher than NI to cover the costs and be structure differently (as I understand it, rate of NI actually goes down once you earn over a certain level, not up).

Trenchfriend · Aug 3, 2018

Edward said:
(as I understand it, rate of NI actually goes down once you earn over a certain level, not up).

"Contribution assessment ceiling", like in Germany?

TimeWarpWife · Aug 3, 2018

ChiTownScion said:
I've heard the anecdotes and Cousin Mary stories before, but the data shows that more Canadians and Britons are satisfied with the availability of affordable health care than Americans.

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Source:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/8056/healthcare-system-ratings-us-great-britain-canada.aspx

I assure you that these were not "anecdotes" or stories, they are from real life people I happen to know. And they are NOT satisfied with the so-called availability and affordability of health care in Canada and Britain.

LizzieMaine · Aug 3, 2018

I think anecdotes are fine -- you'll find plenty of people here deeply dissatisfied with the so-called American Health Care Industry whose experiences are just as valid and just as deeply felt as those of anyone else anywhere. But I think the sheer number of Americans who are and have been forced to put off essential procedures because they simply can't afford them, or have run up crippling debt to pay for them, is a sign of a system that is, itself, deeply diseased. (And "well, work harder and you'll be able to afford it" doesn't cut it when you're already working three jobs and the first thing your doctor says when you do see him is "you've got to slow down or it's going to kill you.") That's not an anecdote of someone I know -- that's me, right here, along with millions of other people. And it's millions of anecdotes that tell the story, from either perspective, and get boiled down into hard statistical analysis. And those analyses say more people in the UK and Canada are satisified with their health care system than Americans are satisified with theirs.

The idea that the American Health System Is The Greatest In The World has been promoted heavily for the past eighty years by a certain faction that has a profound financial interest in keeping things just as they are, and which has used various well-paid spokesmen down thru the decades to put that point across. Working as a paid shill for the AMA launched the political career of a certain former president of the US, in fact.

The history of the "Greatest Health Care System In The World" meme is itself something worth investigating, as journalist George Seldes did in his "In Fact" newsletter the 1940s -- and his documentation of the fact that this meme was manufactured and promulgated, not on the basis of any hard statistical analysis but as part of an elaborate publicity and propaganda campaign by the insurance industry and the AMA in opposition to the Truman Administration's proposed health-care reforms remains just as relevant today.

tonyb · Aug 3, 2018

It appears it’s not just our health care system that’s in need of an overhaul.

ChiTownScion · Aug 4, 2018

LizzieMaine said:
I think anecdotes are fine -- you'll find plenty of people here deeply dissatisfied with the so-called American Health Care Industry whose experiences are just as valid and just as deeply felt as those of anyone else anywhere. But I think the sheer number of Americans who are and have been forced to put off essential procedures because they simply can't afford them, or have run up crippling debt to pay for them, is a sign of a system that is, itself, deeply diseased. (And "well, work harder and you'll be able to afford it" doesn't cut it when you're already working three jobs and the first thing your doctor says when you do see him is "you've got to slow down or it's going to kill you.") That's not an anecdote of someone I know -- that's me, right here, along with millions of other people. And it's millions of anecdotes that tell the story, from either perspective, and get boiled down into hard statistical analysis. And those analyses say more people in the UK and Canada are satisified with their health care system than Americans are satisified with theirs.

The idea that the American Health System Is The Greatest In The World has been promoted heavily for the past eighty years by a certain faction that has a profound financial interest in keeping things just as they are, and which has used various well-paid spokesmen down thru the decades to put that point across. Working as a paid shill for the AMA launched the political career of a certain former president of the US, in fact.

The history of the "Greatest Health Care System In The World" meme is itself something worth investigating, as journalist George Seldes did in his "In Fact" newsletter the 1940s -- and his documentation of the fact that this meme was manufactured and promulgated, not on the basis of any hard statistical analysis but as part of an elaborate publicity and propaganda campaign by the insurance industry and the AMA in opposition to the Truman Administration's proposed health-care reforms remains just as relevant today.

As so frequently they do, your comments regarding George Seldes spurred me to further research about the man. It sounds like he was quite an interesting character. Anyone who manages to piss off William Jennings Bryan, Lenin's Bolsheviks, Benito Mussolini, J. Edgar Hoover AND Joseph McCarthy (and a whole legion of others) is likely someone who is going to follow the evidence no matter where it may take him. Good trait for a journalist.

You know you are getting old when:

Lean'n'mean

I'll Lock Up

MisterCairo

I'll Lock Up

tonyb

LizzieMaine

tonyb

LizzieMaine

Tiki Tom

My Mail is Forwarded Here

ChiTownScion

Call Me a Cab

tonyb

LizzieMaine

Touchofevil

Touchofevil

LizzieMaine

tonyb

Edward

Trenchfriend

TimeWarpWife

One of the Regulars

LizzieMaine

tonyb

ChiTownScion

Call Me a Cab

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