Why, as Christians, do we suddenly feel compelled to help a people during a disaster, that we couldn’t have given a damn about a week earlier?

There’s a literal epidemic of people, well-meaning and completely sincere people, who suddenly feel led by God to go to an island nation which they had nothing at all to do with before that moment, to try and help people that have nothing, literally nothing, save for what they can pull out of the rubble around them.

But why? Why would God wait until now to put these people into your heart? Why would he wait until AFTER they have been devastated to send help? Is it a prerequisite of salvation that we be days from death, or that every last possession in our home, and our home itself, be laid waste? Certainly I can see the theological debates running on that one, but now ask yourself, has God dictated that we are to be destitute? Has He said that you can have no happiness or earthly goods while we wait for his coming?

Why go to Haiti? What will you do there? Are you a doctor? They need doctors. Are you a trained aid worker? Do you know the local language, or are you going to need someone to interpret every last thing, from the dire pleading of a woman to help dig her dead child out of the remains of her house, to the directions to the temporary latrine.

Why go to Haiti? Are you a construction worker? They might need those… in six months. No one is rebuilding anything yet. No one has any money. No one has much of anything.

Why go to Haiti? Are you going to join the crowd of other reporters chronicling the pain and suffering of the destitute? Is it your “mission” to show the world how horrible total destruction is, shoving a camera into the face of a grieving mother or a wide angle shot of the bodies piled by the road? Will you write about God’s awesome love and grace amid the wailing and screaming at night? Will you share stories of hope to those like you, safe back at home, or will you write for the people of Port-au-Prince?

Why go to Haiti? Are you going to minister to the people, tell them about God?… The God that just leveled their entire life and killed most of their friends and family. Will they understand you, or will your alien words and clean clothes simply mock their situation?

Why go to Haiti? Are you planning on helping needy children? Will you offer to watch the crying child of a mother who needs to go stand in line for food and water? What will you do if she doesn’t come back?

Do you think you can offer people hope? Hope of what? That perhaps they can leave their home and come to yours, you rich and prosperous rescuer. Can you offer them safety? Are you better prepared to defend them than the legions of trained and armed military who now walk the streets?

Has God really called you? Has he whispered to you quietly, urging you to go blindly to a nation you have never before seen? Is it sudden? Did He ask you to get round trip tickets, or did he say, “GO THERE. I’ll let you know when you come back, if ever.”

He certainly didn’t use a still, small voice when he flattened Port-au-Prince.

If it’s not God speaking clearly to us to give up EVERYTHING, pack up our tent, and MOVE to Haiti, I have to wonder if it’s God we hear, or someone else. Perhaps even our own guilt, at having so much when so many who had so little are the ones God chooses to bring His wrath down upon.

There were over three million people in Port-au-Prince. There are significantly less now. But, it’s estimated that during any given year there are 3.5 million people homeless right here in the United States; 842,000 in any given week. Most have little or no property. Are they any less deserving of our attention? Is their need any less important than the people of Haiti before or after the quake? Does God care less about them because they happen to live under the bridge near your home? Is their “disaster” any less significant?

There ARE people called to Haiti, by God, or because it’s their job. The people of Port-au-Prince need help to be sure. But so do millions of people right in our backyard. You don’t have to wait for God to destroy a city in order to help people.

• elegance and beauty of movement or expression
• seemliness: a sense of propriety and consideration for others
• (Christian theology) the free and unmerited favor or beneficence of God

For most of my life I have had a fascination with grace. Like chapters of a book, it has manifested itself to me in different ways at different times in my life. When I was still in middle school I learned to juggle. I’m not sure what got it started, but I would sit in my room and practice for hours while I listened to music. There was just something magic about the way the balls would complete each complex pattern, dancing seemingly on their own. My hands performed the motions that were too fast and subtle to think about without flubbing a catch. They were able to create a thing of beauty that always surprised me in it’s intricacy and simple impossibility. Objects just never did those things in nature. It was grace; grace of motion and mind that allowed that relaxing rhythm. It was the letting go of conscious control so that the unconscious could create and perform the dance that made me laugh aloud for the sheer joy in celebrating gravity.

As a young adult, I was presented the Christian faith, and shown the spiritual aspects of grace. Unmerited favor. All of God’s work can be summed up in those two words, the power and implications of which can not be fully explored in a hundred lifetimes.

In college, I learned yet another state of grace from readings in philosophy, logic, astronomy, and my own reading for personal enjoyment. I learned about culture, and what it meant to be civilized. For perhaps the first time in my life I really started to look at the world from a much larger perspective. I studied biology and saw the grace of all living things and the complex dance of the various ecosystems that sustain our world. I realized that civilization did not simply apply to humans.

Today, I find that it is that first state of grace that intrigues me the most.  I have accepted my favor with God in faith, and although I am still mystified and continuously surprised by the complexity of our world, I have had to let go of some of my youthful ideals for the reality of mature life. But in everything I do, every motion, there is still that rhythmic dance against gravity. I see it in the way I balance when having to pull myself up off the floor after playing with my daughter, and I feel it in the flip of a pancake on the griddle.

Although I have never spoken of it with my family, I constantly try to find that love of motion in everyday life. There is a flow like water when I rise from the toys on the floor, and an unconscious release as I toss a plastic cup spinning through the air to be caught impossibly just before I fill it with milk for my daughter. Balance and counter balance. Awareness of position and place. The weight and hardness of the world around me.

Recently, my wife has taken to doing studies in mindfulness as a part of her therapy. She is learning to be aware of herself and what she feels… and why she feels it. It’s all very zen, but maybe that’s the point. Grace gives us something that is beyond ourselves. It lends to us a connection to the world that we otherwise have neither the skill nor the merit to acquire. It lets us dance with God, with nature, gravity, and each other. It gifts to us the impossible.

As we got older, my sister and I cared a little bit less about the plastic goodies, and started enjoying the time with family more. Christmas had become a time when we did a great big breakfast and sat around and actually talked to friends and relatives we might not have seen in a while. Instead of a lot of little toys, there were usually a few larger ones, and because our interests had changed (carefully shaped and molded by modern-day marketing) the presents were more expensive.

As an adult, Christmas has a completely different meaning and feeling for me. This is obviously to be expected, but I’m actually a bit surprised by what Christmas isn’t. For starters, I have my own wife and child to share gifts with, so it’s not about ME. It’s not about what I get because frankly, I really don’t want anything.

“Impossible,” you scoff. Everyone wants something. Sure. But the things that I want today are no longer molded from plastic or capable of being packaged in a box. Today, I live in a small apartment that is already terribly overcrowded with Stuff, and anything that comes in only makes it more so. Our situation financially is tenuous at best, which means that no matter how you slice it, I am not going to be able to give to my own child the kind of Christmas that I had growing up. That hurts a bit. We all want to give our kids a better life than we had and frankly, looking back on it, my sister and I had it pretty good. We were raised in a middle-income family during a period of minimal world war, in perhaps the most advanced and prosperous country in the world. We never lacked for anything. Today, it’s a little different. Today, the economy is not doing very well, unemployment is high, times are insanely tight, and our prospects for the immediate future are a little bleak. But we’re making it, and that’s something, because a lot of people aren’t.

Sometime in the last decade or so, the whole gift-giving aspect of Christmas has started to seem a little trite. And it’s not just me. Everyone I talk to seems to feel at least a little, that Christmas gifts are more of a chore now than a joy. It stopped being something we looked forward to, and became a task that we needed to do to keep the status quo. We go through the motions of giving almost out of obligation. But for what?… Santa? Christ? The memory of Christmas past?

For my wife, the Christmas season brings with it a whole bunch of really bad memories. She never had the care-free childhood that I did, and for her, a great deal of Christmas is a horrible nightmare that comes with stress and anxiety (beyond the normal frenetic orgy of greed that takes place at malls all over the country). She has to work extremely hard to separate the happy aspects of the season from the bad of her past.

My daughter, on the other hand, is perpetually trapped in the mindset of that excited five year-old. Even though her body is entering into puberty, she lives forever in the self-centered stage of psychological development where everything, and I mean everything, is about her. She is egotistic to the point of cruelty (as any five year-old can be) but backed by the angst (and weight) of a pre-teen adolescent. We have worked hard to try and instill in her the religious aspects of Christmas, and some of it she understands at least at a rudimentary level, but ultimately, it’s the toys. And why not? It was for me when I was mentally five. What right do I have to deny her that?

This year in particular, we really don’t have the financial stability to do the rounds of gifts to our friends and family that we have done in the past. It’s going to be hard enough for my wife and I to have presents appear under the tree for our daughter on Christmas morning, let alone each other. We fall back to gifts of “creativity”, such as pictures and food for family and friends, but even that brings it’s own set of stresses. I look more and more toward just being with my larger family and sharing a tale or two over a cup of apple cider than I do the rest of “it”. I find myself almost repulsed at the overbearing commercials on television for Black Friday sales, and the mere mention of Cyber Monday makes me cringe. The whole idea of “Christmas gifts” has become a negative. Perhaps it’s because people ask me, “What do you want for Christmas?” To which, my honest answer is – A job. Peace for my wife. An end to the medical bills. A future for my daughter. — But no one can realistically give me any of those gifts, and so I am forced to reply with something sickeningly materialistic — “Gift cards are good… Maybe WalMart?” Because I know there will be things I need from there, even if it’s just groceries. Deep down, I really really miss the days when I could have answered truthfully with something as simple as “Battleship”, or “a new bike!”

But lately, I have begun to feel a little overwhelmed mentally when it comes to my passwords. Like most people, I have a set of passwords that I use, because having just ONE password is pretty dangerous should that single password be compromised somehow. And some are more “secure” than others, for example the ones I use for my bank, are NOT going to be the same ones that I use to log into World of Warcraft or my Gmail account. But as I age, I find that my memory just isn’t what it used to be. And to make matters worse, more and more of my life is either digital, or literally on the net. I do everything there, whether it’s paying bills, or just staying on top of the latest news headlines, everything requires a login and password. And that wouldn’t be so bad, accept that I have to remember them all, and they are almost all different.

“That’s good!” you say.  ”It’s secure!” Well, yes and no. You see, at some point, your brain (or at least MY brain) just can’t keep that much exact information at the ready.  I have a hard enough time remembering a few phone numbers any more, let alone the login name and password for three dozen different websites.  And to make matters worse, companies, who are increasingly getting sued over breaches in security, are implementing more and more strict rules regarding what exactly you can use as a login name or password. In some cases it’s getting downright ridiculous.

Take Gmail for example. This is my “not so secure” email address. Sure, I want it to be private, but it’s the one I give out to those sites that “require” a valid email address, but aren’t trustworthy enough to get my more private one linked to my private domain. No way. And in the past, I have used one of my generic passwords and it’s been fine.  But suddenly, gmail decided that I wasn’t secure enough and basically made it a requirement that I change my password. My old one was six characters long, which was actually more than some of my passwords which were only five. Google wanted at least eight.

Frak. This is like another whole phone number to remember. But, it’s made with letters, so I can find a way to remember it easier, right… NO, you can’t use anything from a list of known words. Okay… NO, it has to have at least 2 numbers as well. Okay then… NO, you can’t have any running strings of numbers or letters (1234… ABCD). Well how about… NO, it can’t contain any portion of your previous password. “Would you like us to generate one for you?”…. Yes…

Q7g6H3k#D7*21H

Ah, yes.  Much easier to remember.

I exaggerate, but not by much. On most sites, the new “minimum length” is six characters, and most of the rules mentioned above are real. It gets so bad that we start considering writing them down somewhere… which any security guy will tell you in a deep and stern voice that you must NEVER EVER DO. And they would be right of course. But what choice do we have? The rules to make passwords more secure are purposely designed to make them hard to guess. Unfortunately, those same rules make them equally hard to remember. And here’s the thing, having a secure password no more safeguards your personal information than a weak one if your computer is already compromised. Yup, all those viruses you’ve been fighting… Many of them are there to do nothing more than harvest your password, even if it’s, “Q7g6H3k#D7*21H”. And frankly, if someone is seriously out to hack your bank account or hijack your identity, there are far far easier methods than brute-force cracking your password. It’s a lot more likely they would just start by rifling through your trash. Then it’s just a matter of doing a little social engineering to take over your life.

And it’s happened to all of us… you forget one. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to log on to a certain account and you finally relent and hit the “I forgot my password” link. And you go through the process of either an email reset (provided it’s not your email password you have forgotten) or you answer the dreaded “personal question”.  These are those special questions that only you are supposed to know. Things like, “what is your favorite sports team?”… the answer to which is probably plastered all over the back of your car, or known by a mere 50 of your closest friends. I really hate these questions because, for whatever twisted reason, I just don’t hold on to the kind of information that most people do I guess. For example, as one of your question choices, they might have, “What is your favorite rock band?” Would that be now, at this very moment, or two years ago when I set up my account? Or how about, “What was the name of your first pet?” Okay… “Mac” I enter. “Sorry, your answer must be five characters in length or more.”  GAH!! Pet names are short! “Sid, Spot, Rex”, etc… What dunderhead is writing these filters?! And is it any more secure for a potential thief to guess my pet’s name (which could very easily be found in five minutes on Google) than to hack my actual password?

It’s maddening, and frankly only going to get worse as more and more of our lives are done online. Someone needs to seriously come up with a better way of securing our data… like maybe an individualized global number that every person has invisibly tattooed on their right hand or forehead… I’M KIDDING!… kinda…

So what do you do? Keeping them in jail is not an option. Our jails are already overcrowded. Simply letting them go isn’t working, and merely dropping them off just inside the Mexican border is like saying, “thank you for playing, care to try again?”

So here’s an idea. If we’re going to spend the money to process them anyway, why not put them on a nice boat and ship them someplace else in Mexico… like maybe Salina Cruz, which is all the way down by Guatemala. This way, there will at least be a delay in them coming back into the U.S., and they might be a little more hesitant to make the jump if they know getting caught means a lengthy and possibly expensive trip up from the South.

The scientists in the article talk about sexual frustration as a possible reason for this behavior.  Uh huh. Well, I don’t have a doctorate in marine biology, but remembering that this is an animal with a brain capacity that has been compared to that of man, this sounds just a little too much like a bunch of thugs saying, “See this? Stop crapping up our home or the next one will be human…”

With the release of the Droid on Verizon’s network, there have been a new batch of rants on all the tech boards about whether or not this is the legendary “iPhone killer” that everyone seems to want… well, everyone who doesn’t own an iPhone that is.

The fanboys will rage on both sides, comparing every minute detail of the hardware and the network speeds, lies will be spoken, debunked, and denied. Marketing will silently slip in the raving reviews that are about as useful as secondhand toilet paper, and those loyal to their respective operating systems will finally smirk at their counterparts, knowing that they have put the other in their place at last.

And the rest of us mere mortals are no better informed than when we began wasting our time reading the reviews.

I don’t own an iPhone. I wish I could afford an iPhone, but the reality is that until Apple and AT&T allow people to separate the expensive data plan from simply being able to to make phone calls, many many people like myself, are just not going to be able to afford it.  Sure the hardware has come way down in price, and it’s very competitive with the rest of the smart phone market. But the initial cost of a device that I use on a nearly daily basis has never really concerned me. However, paying a thousand dollars a year or more just to have the option to check my email while I’m out of wi-fi range, is just plain out of my league.

The interesting thing is that I do have an iPod Touch. I picked one up when my Palm finally died, and simply put, I LOVE IT.  Do I miss the fact that it can’t make calls? Absolutely. Is it a real bummer that it doesn’t have a camera or a microphone built in? Yup.  And all those things could be solved if I could only step up and afford the full monty, the iPhone itself. But then, my handy LG enV makes nice phone calls, and has a pretty decent camera and even does reasonably good video, with audio. I picked up a cheap mini-sd card at CostCo and I can literally put HOURS of video on that sucker. The catch is that I have to carry around two devices, neither of which does everything I want them to. Meh. I’m a geek, I’ve been doing that for decades.

But it got me thinking about what it is that I would really like in a phone, because let’s face it, we use our phones for more than simply making calls while were driving (did I just say that out loud?). Obviously, people are going to have radically different needs, but for the sake of arguement, here’s mine:

1. I would like to be able to make a phone call. It IS a phone after all, and at first glance, this seems simple enough. But it’s not. I have a lousy memory, so, for me at a least, it needs to play well with a “contacts” list.  That means being able to set speed dial, maybe voice calling (where you simply say the name of the person you want to call), and if it’s really on the ball, a way to sync that contact list with my computer. Nice sound quality would be great too, but we all sort of gave that up years ago when cell phones went digital. Forget what marketing would like you to think. Cell phone sound quality sucks. Between delays, breakup, and outright loosing connection, anyone who says their cell phone’s voice quality is as good as a land line is either completely deceiving themselves, or outright lying. But we put up with it because… well, because what else are we going to do, find a pay phone?

2. It needs a camera. I have had to face the fact that no matter how much I love my Canon Digital Rebel, carrying around a bulky 35mm SLR just isn’t practical. Sure, I could get a smaller camera which might fit in my pocket, but I’m a guy… You can only put so much in your pants before you start to look like a squirrel.  I mean, I’m already lugging around my phone, my iPod Touch, my overstuffed wallet, a half pound of steel in the form of various keys (don’t forget the essential mini Leatherman) and a car key (because you can’t put that bulky key remote on your normal ring or the weight will damage your car’s ignition switch).  And that’s if I’m not already carrying my checkbook, change in coins, or anything else in my pockets. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I have a weird (and highly disturbing) nerve condition in my right thigh that prevents me from putting anything in my front pocket on that side. If butt-bags weren’t so gay, or if men were socially allowed to carry a purse, I’d be fine. But we are forced to stay “macho”, which means we constantly look like we meant to wear our much more practical SWAT pants with the multitude of pockets, but only our tight, butt-hugging jeans were clean. So, yes, I need a camera. A 5 mega-pixel monster that could shoot HD video would be great, but frankly If I know I’m going to be taking pictures, I’ll bring a real camera. This is for those times when I DON’T expect to need to record something, and for that, 640 x 480 does just fine. I’m sure in ten years I’ll be asking myself how I ever lived with such a paltry resolution, but such is the life of a geek.

3. Text messages are cool. Yes, you heard me. Text. NOT video messages, not audio messages… plain old ASCII. I can even live with 160 characters. I can twitter, receive news alerts, or even send a quick covert love note to my wife. The best part is that it has a fantastically minimal effect on the overall bandwidth that the cellular network uses… Now if we could just convince the carriers to acknowledge this fact so that they stop charging us .25 cents a pop (without a messaging package, not available on all phones, some restrictions apply). Of course, that means that my “phone” needs a keyboard of some kind.  Sorry, but using 0-9 and multi-tapping just doesn’t do it for me, but frankly, I’m not that picky. It’s not like I’m going to be writing a novel on the thing.

4. Well… there is no 4.  Anything else I can do on my iPod Touch when I’m in wi-fi range. And here is the reason that the Droid is going to fail and fail hard when compared to the iPhone. Whether or not you like like Apple, the sheer momentum of the App Store makes it by FAR the most incredible resource for meeting every and any function a user could possibly need.  And in most cases, you can find that perfect app for free. Talk about how Android and Google are going to change the game all you want, but if your average user can’t find an app to solve their need, it’s just a lot of talk.  A perfect example of this was shown to me recently when I needed a way to keep track of the large number of medications my wife was currently taking.  I went to the App Store, and in five minutes I had located, downloaded and installed the perfect app to do just that. And it was FREE. Do that on a Droid. Forget hardware specs or network coverage. The ONLY thing that matters to the end user is – does it perform the functions that I need it to without having to jump through hoops or pay extra monthly fees? And it seems that Apple is still the only company to have figured this out, because in almost all cases, service providers such as Verizon are clinging for dear life to their desire not to sell you a phone, but a subscription. They are willing to take a loss on the hardware, the one-time payoff, so that they can gouge you each and every month for “specialty” services. But nothing makes a customer feel more ripped off than buying a cell phone and then being told two weeks later that they need to add another $20-a-month charge to their bill so that they can send “unlimited” text messages like all their friends, and then another $20-a-month for the ability to download music. They tell their customer service rep that they want to be able to write email, and are then directed to the “get-it-now” application store, which they boastfully claim is every bit as good as Apple’s. There you CAN get an email application to suit your needs… for another $20-a-month. And God forbid you should EVER upgrade your phone (which they almost guarantee you are going to do at least once every two years) because you will lose all your “apps”, ring tones, and unless you jump through some of those hoops I mentioned earlier-  your contacts, photos, and past text messages that happen to be stored on the phone.

Nope. The Droid has the hype, but Apple still rules when it comes to giving people the functions they want. And just to rub it in the faces of the other manufacturers, they do it in a sleek, well-designed package that’s intuitively easy to use.

The Droid? R2D2 has classier lines, and he had his debut in the 70′s.

At the end of September, my wife, who is having ongoing therapy for depression, is told that she needs ECT treatments again.  For those of you not in the know, that’s Electro-Convulsive-Therapy, or “shock therapy”.  I won’t go into the more sordid details of this procedure, but basically, it involves a number of sessions where they put you out and invoke a grand-mal seizure in order to treat extreme cases of major depression. Rough stuff in any book.  So here’s how things went down:

September 28 –  Therapist recommends ECT treatments as an inpatient, but we can’t afford a normal mental hospital because they don’t take Medi-Cal.  Oh, and Medi-Cal no longer covers psychiatric services… for anyone.  No one is going insane anymore it seems.  The solution as recommended by her therapist, is to admit her to the hospital through the emergency room, and as such, the treatments can be deemed “medically necessary” which ARE then covered.  Don’t ask me why it wasn’t medically necessary walking in the front door to the behavior health ward, but this is how it works.

September 30 – We’re off to the ER. We pre-arranged things with the psych doctor in the behavioral health ward so that he, and the people in the ER could usher us through quickly. At least, that was the plan. I had reservations about doing anything before the first of the month since Medi-Cal resets our “share of cost” on the first of the month. At the time, our share of cost was still set at $1,300 PER MONTH. But we couldn’t wait, as things had reached a tipping point with the depression.  It’s about 3 pm on a FRIDAY when we walk into the ER and check in.

Arrival +1.5 hours – they call us and take stats… triage/blood draw.  Back to the waiting room.

Arrival +2.5 hours – she talks to some psych guy at the hospital. We have no idea who he is, but he is NOT the guy from behavioral health. Back to the waiting room.

Arrival +4 hours – wife takes a bathroom break.  Mind you, we have already told the ER people that she is a suicide risk, so they place me in charge of staying with her at all times to keep her safe.  But I can’t go into the bathroom with her, so we have to get an escort just so she can take a leak. It’s now almost 7 pm.

Arrival +5 hours –  they finally call her in again. They give us a line about how they called us and WE didn’t answer.  Not a chance.  Aside from the fact that we were actually really really listening, the waiting room PA system sucks incredibly and we saw at least two groups that DID miss their call, so we were especially aware.  All this in the shiny new emergency room at the $$brand new high-tech$$ hospital wing. They have been open for months, so it was obviously more important that they have the extra cool facade rather than shelling out $20 for another PA speaker and some wire. In the ER observation room, they take more stats and we sit there for another hour.  My diabetic wife has had nothing to eat for almost eight hours now.  We met two other diabetics while outside in the waiting room, one of whom actually started to pass out because her blood sugar levels crashed.  They had to take her out in a chair. At this point I am asked to leave.

11:30 pm – FINALLY admitted to the behavioral health ward. It only took 8 1/2 hours to put her on a gurney and wheel her about a hundred yards to the other building. Once there, she has her stats taken yet again, and is told that she can’t see the doctor that night.  No doubt, the man has gone home for the evening.

To this point, the people that have seen her are:

-The receptionist at the ER front desk.  This is the Check-In gal.

-A triage nurse, for stats.

-Another triage nurse for a blood draw.

-An escort nurse to the bathroom.

-ER Psyche guy.

-ER Nurse for more stats.

-ER Doc for… who the hell knows.  It’s an “emergency” right?

-Psych nurse for more stats.

… And a partridge in a pear treeeee.

My wife stays in the psych ward through the weekend, because apparently the doctor doesn’t work on the weekend, during which time they try to put her on injected insulin, even though her blood sugar levels are completely under control with medication, and have been for years.  It’s now a new month, and so a new “share of cost”.  Yes, she is safely tucked away in a locked ward, but beyond some group therapy, she is basically just hanging around to see the doctor so we can get on with the ECT treatments.

MONDAY Afternoon October 2 – My wife finally sees the psyche doc who tells her that she will have ECT on WEDNESDAY because… drum roll please… they only do ECT treatments in the morning on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

SO, just so that my wife could start ECT treatments that cost about $1,500 apiece if you pay out of pocket, she needs to stay at the hospital for SIX DAYS at a cost to the tax payers (as well as our share of cost) of about $2,500 PER DAY, or $15,000.  And that’s just the price of admission. It doesn’t include the next two weeks in the hospital, or the three ECT treatments per week that she receives there.

You do the math.

All this, just so that she could have a non-elective procedure (well, she could stay radically suicidal I suppose, and since nothing else, including 11 different medications, was doing the trick…) without literally putting us on the street.  And although I would certainly call her condition “life threatening”, it’s not like she was having open-heart surgery, which can cost in the HUNDREDS of thousands.

Something’s broke here, but you certainly won’t hear the hospital complaining about it.

You see, there’s just something about the whole idea of health insurance that is really really wrong.  In essence, we, the buyers are gambling that we will get sick or injured and that the cost of that care will be more than the amount we put into our insurance, thus saving us money in the long run.  The insurance company, on the other hand, is betting that we won’t get sick or injured, and that the money we put in will be higher than our medical costs, and, that the profit they make while investing our money will be high.

There are several things wrong with this model.  The first, obvious one is that we are gambling against ourselves.  Never a good idea.  We only benefit if we get sick.  It’s not like we get to invest the money we have given to the insurance company, in fact, we are saying, “here, you take it and invest it, keeping all the profits.”  It’s gone.  And if we stay healthy, we get nothing in return.  You might as well have burned it.  On the other hand, if we do get sick, much of that cost will be taken up by the insurance company…  But here’s where things break down.  You see, insurance only works in our favor if we are seriously injured or sick.  Why?  Because most insurance plans have both a deductible and a co-pay. That means that if you are only a little sick, then you may very well still end up footing the entire bill, and if you only need a single cheap medication to fix your ills, then it’s very likely that you will pay for it with your co-pay.

The other problem with this system is that there is absolutely no incentive for the medical industry to keep it’s costs down, in fact, there is every incentive NOT to. They get more money from the insurance companies if they can charge more for services and supplies, and in most cases, the consumer NEVER sees what those costs are.  More and more we don’t even get a line item on our bill, just a grand total.  The really scary thing is that if you ask most doctors and hospitals, they have different rates for insurance companies compared to those who self pay.  Over time, what we have is astronomical medical costs, with everyone saying that they are just barely making a profit, when in reality, it’s only the end user that ultimately gets reamed (sometimes literally).  The person receiving services gets the worst possible return for their money no matter how you slice it. Unless they have a catastrophic injury, the benefit they receive will never be more than they ultimately put into the system, and it’s designed so that costs will only go up over time.  It’s a lose lose system.

Here are some rather sobering facts from a Vanity Fair article I googled:

With median annual compensation of more than $12.4 million, C.E.O.’s at the big health-care companies make two-thirds more than their counterparts in finance and are the highest paid of any industry. The health-care industry’s total annual profit has grown to an estimated $200 billion, and it doled out nearly $170 million in campaign contributions in 2007 and 2008. It now spends more than any other industry lobbying the federal government—$3.5 billion over the past decade and a record $263 million in the first six months of this year. That’s six lobbyists and nearly half a million dollars for each member of Congress. It’s been a good year on K Street, too.

It should come as no surprise, then, that we spend 17 percent of our G.D.P. and more than $7,500 per American per year on health care. That’s 50% more than any other industrialized nation. Meanwhile, the quality of care we get in return has fallen to embarrassing lows. According to the World Health Organization, our health-care system ranks 37th in overall quality and fairness, placing us between Costa Rica and Slovenia. We rank 41st in infant-mortality rates, alongside Slovakia and Serbia, and dead last among 19 leading industrialized countries in preventable deaths. Nearly two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are caused by illness, yet more than three-quarters of those people actually had health insurance when they fell ill. In other words, we’re all getting ripped off.

And now our government is trying to make it a law that you must have health insurance, or face a penalty.  I can understand their intentions, which are to make it mandatory so that those without insurance (who are still getting sick and receiving care at somebodies expense) don’t bring the system down for those that do.  But let me put it another way…  The government is trying to make it a law that you must gamble. In fact, they might as well have said that you need to gamble at least $7,500 a year, minimum, per person. Got a family of three? Your contribution to this broken system each year will be $22,500, that’s more than many people’s ANNUAL total income, and is regardless of your financial or social status. And guess what?  You’re chances of a payoff are probably going to be better had you taken that money to an actual casino and played slots.

The problem with all of this is that we have stopped looking at insurance as a gamble, and accepted it as a discount system. We only see the end bill, which says that you must pay $20,000 for something that would have been $300 if you had only had the magic “insurance” coupon.  If we really wanted to fix our healthcare system, we should be taking insurance right out of the picture. But instead, we are only adding MORE insurance.  We talk about a “public option”, the government’s casino. Step right in, our blackjack tables aren’t nearly as rigged to the house as the rest of the industry, and the buy-in is low low low!

Remove insurance, and healthcare is no longer a gamble.  Costs would have an incentive to go back down in the form of competition, and we, the people footing the bill, would only have to pay when we were actually sick.  Want to hedge your bets and gamble against getting cancer?  Fine, put your $7,500 a year into a Treasury bill or a 401k, or almost ANY other investment.  If you don’t get sick, then at least your money is well spent and not simply thrown away.

And what happens to those that don’t or won’t put away funds for a rainy day?  Nothing.  Literally.  If they need a new liver… sorry.  I’m sure this seems cruel, and I might feel completely differently if it was my own daughter that needed that liver, but life simply isn’t fair, and those with money get to have more toys. Less than two generations ago, if you didn’t have the money for an expensive procedure, then you died.  But today, we view top-notch healthcare as a right, not a privilege.  If we discovered a fantastic miracle drug that would cure ANYTHING short of old age, but it cost a million dollars a dose, should it be a right that ANYONE could have it anyway, at the government’s expense?  What about half a million?  $250,000?  Where do you draw the line?

]]> http://lunchpail.com/panic/?feed=rss2&p=525 2 http://lunchpail.com/panic/?p=522 http://lunchpail.com/panic/?p=522#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:25:29 +0000 Administrator http://lunchpail.com/panic/?p=522 In a recent CNN.com/Technology article, they talk about why it is that Verizon has boring phones compared to the other networks.  They chalk it up to Verizon’s choice not to go with things like the Apple iPhone, or the Palm Pre.  And sure, those are probably really astute observations.  But I think CNN has missed what is perhaps the greatest point of all…  That Verizon is fixated on being greedy, penny pinching bastards.

Yes, those are hard words, but the simple fact remains that nearly all of their higher end phones are crippled in some way.  Why, you ask?  Why would they intentionally hobble the Bluetooth, WiFi and messaging systems on their phones, even though the features were included by the manufacturers?  Simple, they want you to use, and pay for, their expensive “solutions.”

Take Bluetooth for example.  On the last three Verizon phones I have had, the Bluetooth was crippled in such a way that you could use a headset, but NOT transfer files or data to or from the phone without some serious hacking.  If I wanted to do something as simple as send a few music files to play over the phone, I was out of luck.  I was forced to sign-up for and pay to use Verizon’s crappy service.  Same with pictures, video and ringtones.  It was only with my current phone, which has a slot for a memory card, that I was able to get things onto or off of my phone with any kind of ease or without using both airtime and yet another paid for service.

This stinks.

Same thing with their Blackberry lineup.  I was ready to purchase one of those suckers… until I read that the of the specific versions they chose to offer, NONE had WiFi ability.  ARE THEY COMPLETELY STUPID??!  No, just greedy.  They WANT you to use their network and their VCAST video service, even if you happen to be sitting in your living room with no reception.  And they tout vigorously how cheap it is, while at the same time shafting people for .25 each just to receive 160 characters of text!  Oh sure, you CAN get an unlimited texting package… for another $10 a month on your bill.

Cellular giants like Verizon claim to be giving people what they want.  I say, BULL.  Apple gives people what they want, as proven by the fact that 25% of all iPhone customers were switchers from a network OTHER than AT&T.  Verizon may have the best coverage, but in an increasingly tech-savy market, bells and whistles DO matter.  If Verizon offered the iPhone, I’d ditch my LG enV and be in line tomorrow morning.  As it is… I’m not even going to upgrade my current phone, even though I could.  I’d rather wait and see what Apple does than tie myself to a looser for another two years.

Can you hear that?