Standard Mischief

You likely never noticed me missing, i’ll bet. Anyway, it was one day at the beach with another day flounder fishing.

I got skunked fishing, I caught five rays (Southern stingray, Dasyatis americana), three of them by snagging. If this keeps up, I’m going to have to learn how to cook them. I was using both minnows and squid for bait. The squid already came cut up and packaged in a zip lock bag, and smelt pretty good. Unfortunately there wasn’t any wasabi or soy sauce included (I asked). You would think I would do a bit better with the rod and reel than that considering that ?Standard Mischief? is an anagram for ?Fisherman Addicts?. After discovering that no one on the boat remembered sunblock, I found that my GI Poncho worked well as a dandy sunscreen and spray screen from the bow of the boat. When we went in at noon to drop off my niece and nephew, I got some SPF 45 out of the car. I didn’t burn.

The beach for me consists of one long swim. I like the waves, and the fact that I don’t have to irrigate my sinus with saline that day, but I’m less than happy about all that sand they put between the main attraction and the car. And all those people lying in the way, what the heck? I can sleep at home. After three hours of swimming and boogie boarding I was having a little problem standing back up and starting to exhibit the classic symptoms of hypothermia, so I had to come in. The water was pretty chilly this year.

Minimalistic beach gear for someone without kids and the associated support baggage: GI Poncho, towel, shoes, socks, sunblock, sunglasses, water bottle, and hat, all in plain sight, and a zip-lock bag with money, a credit card, key, and my Leatherman, which gets buried stealthily in the sand. Extra bonus is having friends/family willing to lie out and manufacture vitamin D, while watching your stuff. I guess they’re good for something.

The only bad part of driving home off-peak is that you miss the Bay Bridge during the daylight. I just love the view.

It’s always nicer to come home to a cat that desperately misses you rather than is totally pissed off that you left for a few days. Although he was left ample food and water, he barely touched it until I got home. This time I tried to pack in secret and I never make a a big deal when I slip out and leave, but the neurotic hairball always makes a huge deal of it whenever I return home after more than 24 hours.

Being hopelessly addicted to TV, regular viewing and productivity don’t work for me. So I haven’t seen that Burger Fling “Manthem” commercial that Kerry pointed out to me too today. I’ve probably watched the damn thing a dozen time in a row. It itself, and the moral indignation some people have over the silly thing is pretty amusing. Yea, I’m a tool for promoting buzz by blogging about this, but I’m in good company here. Kerry is a crowebar.

Having an extra Monday to lay around and unwind is very relaxing. It’s also good to reflect what Memorial Day is really all about. Check out what Xavier and Tam have to say.

Excerpt from the screed at feministe.us :

Raincitygirl Says: Standard Mischief, do you understand fucking ANYTHING about the Canadian medical system? Because I live here, and the stuff you’re saying bears no relation to the system I’ve been getting my health care from since 1978.

Seems like I do, but hey, thanks for your input!

.. You can only get 13 packs (at 28 days per pack) paid for in one year. However, when I wanted to skip my period because I was going on vacation, and thus went through my 13 pack prescription in slightly less than a year, my doctor came up with a very logical solution?

Damn, looks like I was spot on here, zuzu. Thankfully, it’s no more restricted than your average HMO here in the states. I figured it was like this the same way most people figure out which way to flick the light switch when you walk into a dark room. You don’t even think about it, most of the time just from past experience, you flick it up.

Prescriptions are handled by pharmacies, not by the government. If you have an extended health plan, often times you can get the co-payment taken off when you get your meds, [snip rest of interesting paragraph]

So you are saying the all encompassing Canadian healthcare has not yet reached prescription plans? That’s interesting. I do know, however that the Canadian government has instituted price controls on pharmaceuticals, nationwide.

I have a fair bit of choice in terms of which doctor I see, certainly much more than an American whose HMO will only allow him to see certain doctors. Possibly because universal healthcare is like one big HMO, but where NOBODY doesn’t have coverage. Yes, there are problems with the damn system, yes there are waiting lists for non-emergency care and non-life threatening surgeries, but if your doctor pisses you off you can go to another one without being restricted to the doctors of whom the HMO approves.

For this very reason, I’ve had a PPO for years. I could got to any doctor I wanted, but if I stayed on a pre-approved list, I only had to pay the copay. I never needed a referral, I could just go to a specialist if I wanted. I even had a decent prescription program. However, even though I had the very best coverage available short of visiting heads of state from corrupt third-world countries who have near unlimited funds and pay for the very best care by the hour, I still got shafted. See below.

And if you are diagnosed with cancer or another serious illness when you go to a doctor, you will always get care. In the US, if you’re unlucky enough to be diagnosed with a serious illness at your first trip to the doctor when you sign onto a health plan, that’s a pre-existing condition, and they don’t have to pay. Which means you’re probably mortgaging your house to get treatment. I have many complaints about Canada’s health care system, but I’d take living in a country where getting seriously ill doesn’t also mean you may end up bankrupt over living in the US any day. Mainly BECAUSE I am appalled that the richest country int he world, which put a man on the moon and spends billions on fighter jets, doesn’t have a public health care system.

Look, I’ve already freely admitted that the way we tend to do healthcare here in the USA has serious problems. And I haven’t even touched on what happens when you don’t have coverage.
In my case, I had just about the best coverage plan one could buy.

My GP could not figure out my problem, so he sent me to a bunch of specialist. I saw a dozen specialist on my plan’s dime, but not a single one of them spent more than fifteen minutes on me. Frequently they ordered diagnostic tests, frequently the very same tests. Two of the doctors ordered a battery of blood tests before I even saw them. I don’t “know anything” about blood test “kickbacks”, but many of the doctors employed people who’s sole job was to take blood. I think that they received payment back from the lab for every vial they drew because as soon as I instituted a strict policy of only having my blood drawn at a lab, to prevent the doctors from receiving kickbacks, the blood test batteries stopped. They were pumping my excellent coverage for cash, which drives up costs for everyone else on my system. Also, in an effort to control costs, my plan would try to disallow coverage for shit, after-the-fact of course. Oh, and I already mentioned the “drug roulette” game
.
In the end, I went around to the dozen doctors, got all my records (got in to a few nasties here. a few asserted that they weren’t my records) and hit the books. I had to cross index my results, [ed: I indexed about a 1 inch stack of lab results, including all the redundent Lymes disease tests] make lists of all the possible nasties I might have, and then I cornered my GP at my next visit. I got his full attention for about 40 minutes, and he sat down with me and we reviewed my records, and crossed out, one-by-one, the various things that I didn’t have.

In the end I made the diagnosis, he merely confirmed it. Treatment was surprisingly inexpensive, the actual diagnosis saga spanned over two years and cost thousands of dollars, most of which was redundant and was paid by my PPO. The not-so-funny thing is if they had sprung for perhaps an hour of real doctoring and a small battery of focused tests, they could have saved thousands.

If poor women in the US could afford the regular “well woman” check-ups which are a huge part of preventive medicine, and catch medical problems before they become very serious,and maybe if uninsured pregnant American women could go to the OB/GYN on a regular basis over the course of their pregnancy, the US might not have a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba. Fucking Cuba, which, may I remind you, is considered by many to be Third World country. You know which developed country on that list had the highest infant mortality rates: Latvia. That’s the only industrialized country in the entire fucking world where more babies die in infancy than in the US. And I had a roommate from Latvia. Trust me, being able to say you’re better at something than Latvia is pretty pathetic. Like an American bobsled team saying they’re better than the team from Jamaica.

I?m with you 100% on the preventive care, but the rest of this may be cooking-the-books. See this (including the comments):

www.saysuncle.com/archives/2006/05/10/the_feminine_mistake/

Raincitygirl, thank you for commenting, you have added a bunch to the discourse here. [same link as yesterday, now with bonus comments]

No real entry for today, but I’ve been commenting over on Feministe again. It’s fascinating how these women can effortlessly double-clutch between Libertarianism and Socialism, depending on which philosophy suits for the moment.

Anyway here is what’s up:

What I’m concerned about is that the guidelines will provide more cover for doctors who already do things like withhold effective treatments from their non-pregnant patients on the grounds that the treatments are harmful to a hypothetical fetus, even when the alternative, fetus-safe treatment does not adequately control the condition or has more severe side effects for the patient than the fetus-harming treatment. To wit:…

So I’m over there saying that if you want healthcare choices, and you support medical privacy, you really ought to drop your support for socialized medicine. It seems logical that the people who hold abortion as being (among other things) a privacy issue would not want to create a bureaucratic system that manages people’s health records and issues edicts that might limit the types of treatments that your doctor may be able to provide to you.

But it seems a tough sell. Part of my comment:

Regardless and back on topic, can you see how perhaps a Canadian style (universal, single-payer, socialized, take your pick) healthcare or a HMO plan might limit one?s choices compared to perhaps something like Health Savings Account (HSA) with a medical high deductible health insurance plan?

Increased government regulation is gonna ooze it’s creeping crud between a doctor and his practice and take away any discretion of the course of treatment, no getting around it. That’s just what bureaucrats do.

The other benefit is this. Medical records used to be between a doctor and the patient. Nowadays it?s between a doctor, the patient, and the HMO (still understandable, they have to pay out the expenses, of course they’ll want to see the records). Now the trend is a computerized standard defined by the government. How is that going to enhance your privacy? (You all are still big on medical privacy, right? I mean that was a cornerstone in Roe, right?)

If you honestly think that politically well-connected congress-critters and their maggot minions won?t improperly traipse through other people?s medical record when it suites their purposes, you ought to take a look at the aids of Charles Schumer did to get ahold of Michal Steele’s credit report (I have to say though, Chucky did the right thing and promptly fired their asses, but he goes on and picked up their lawyer bills) http://tinyurl.com/qj38e (WaPo)

Yup, I’m a big advocate of Health Savings Accounts (that are nothing like the use-it-or-lose-it Flexible Spending Accounts you may be used to):

I did mention the “medical high deductible health insurance plan” right? That’s the group insurance that kicks in when your expenses go over the “high deductible”. Except odds are, most people will never hit that ceiling. That’s why the rates are cheap, but if you ever have a medical catastrophe , your risks are spread out over others. It’s a safety net that does not get used as a hammock.

Anyway, go over and check it out.

That’s 6,000 unarmed, presumably only observing, National Guard troops to watch our southern border. Assuming that they are all 100% on duty, and never sleep or take breaks, or go on vacation, each member of the Guard will have their own one third of a mile to observe and report on, leaving all the Border Patrol people to do the pickups and arrests. Yea, right.

George Bush seems to want to appear to be doing something about our open borders, but it’s a charade. He’ll tie this do-nothing mobilization with his temporary worker program and hope he can get both through congress. If he succeeds, companies like Mall-Wart will no longer have to use subcontractors as tools to get their cheap labor, They’ll be able to hire above the board.

CNN.com:

Wal-Mart officials told the newspaper those arrested were employees of a subcontractor and that the nation’s largest retailer has contracts with subcontractors requiring that they follow all federal, state and local laws.

“It is our understanding that the individuals taken into custody at the Pottsville distribution center construction site were employees of subcontractors and not Wal-Mart associates,” Wal-Mart said in a statement emailed to CNNMoney.com.

I’ve been ranting over at Pawpaw’s place, in the comments. I see he’s got a new tagline too.

I found this word when I went and googled “all your * belong to us”.

From Wikipedia:

Snowclone is a neologism used to describe a type of formula-based clich? which uses an old idiom in a new context. The term emphasizes the use of a familiar (and often particular) formula and previous cultural knowledge of the reader to express information about an idea. The idea being discussed is usually contextually different in meaning from the original use of that formula, but can be understood using the same trope as the original formula was used. “Snowclone” has been described as an internet meme due to its frequent use on blogs which are critical of journalism.

…

And just in case I threw a reader when I blogged “All Your Telephone Record Are Belong To Us”, please read this.

I, for one, welcome our new black-budget Total Information Awareness Overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted blogger of the interwebs, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in the underground data mines.

For great justice.