Another Day, Another Dollar

I got my end-of-the-fiscal-year raise a couple of weeks ago. It was the standard 3% that we apparently get every year, which comes to slightly under $1, or $80 extra in my paycheck. That's not bad...I'm always happy to have more money.

But yesterday I signed up for my 2008 health insurance package, and lo and behold, the same coverage as this year is going to cost me $67 more per paycheck! And for my extra $67, I'll also be getting higher co-pays on prescriptions and doctor visits. That pretty much negates my raise, and THAT pisses me off.

Maybe the only thing that pisses me off more than that, though, is that I got a letter from my employer telling me how lucky I was to be paying back my raise in insurance premiums and co-pays. How the average worker in Illinois is getting gouged WAY worse than we are, and we ought to be thankful that it's only that bad.

Do you think there's ever a point when they're composing those propaganda letters that management is ashamed? Or that insurance executives are ashamed? Is there ever a moment when anyone is ashamed of this mess??

Lori and I have 2 prescriptions apiece. All together between the four of them, we pay $100 a month in co-pays. That's a lot better than full price, but it doesn't console me that much. The seizure med I take costs about $500 a month without insurance, so my crappy ass insurance defrays a lot of that...but I don't feel much better. I think pharmaceutical companies are as evil as insurance companies, and I don't want either of them to have my paycheck. If I could go scrape bark off trees and boil it into seizure meds, I'd be out in the woods doing it. Oh, and I'd scrape some blood pressure meds for Lori while I was there.

I feel bad for the millions of uninsured people in the U.S. I was one of them for about 15 years and I know how scary it is when you have to choose between taking your kid to the doctor or putting gas in your car so you can go to work so you can PAY the doctor.

But the point is not which workers are being screwed worse by the insurance industry, the point is that the system is so fucked up that we're ALL getting screwed while Republicans crow about the advantages of a free market system, and insurance companies pay 3 million people in America just to deny claims of insured people.

Every month I go to the neurologist, and every month my health insurance claim is denied. And every month I have to get on the phone and fight the company that collects almost $400 a month from my paycheck to actually provide the coverage that I'm paying them for.

I think the U.S. insurance industry ought to be abolished today and replaced by a Canadian-style system. And I think every one of those people who's life work is to collect money for a service they don't intend to provide should be told to immediately get a job in which they actually do something to productive for a living, or they'll be denied health insurance under the new system.

Oh...and I think Congess ought to lose their cushy insurance packages and be forced to juggle their health care like the rest of us. Or lined up against a wall and shot. I'm still deciding which.

Happy Tax Day, America

Today is April 15th, and you know what that means: Taxes.

Since I'm the kind of person who has to pay, I'm also the kind of person who files on April 15th. However, this year we actually get until the 17th to get it done, so I'm feeling positively virtuous by having it done on the 15th.

Part of my procrastination is because...well...I'm a procrastinator. But the other part is that I can't quite reconcile the domestic problems that are untended in this country with the massive outlay of dollars...tax dollars...my tax dollars...that is being spent to destroy Iraq and it's citizenry.

C'mon, George! We've already plunged them into civil war and destabilized the region. Now can we address the massive national budget shortfalls for a while?

I bitterly resent my tax dollars being spent on this war, about as much as I resent being forced to provide "homeland security" for Wyoming because it's Dick Cheney's home state.

I know if I were a terrorist, Wyoming would be my first target.

For some reason, more homeland security dollars are spent in places like Wyoming and Montana per capita than in places like New York and Los Angeles.

Even though I love Southern Illinois, it seems insane to me that my hospital got a multi-million dollar windfall from the homeland security budget. My lab alone received a super-duper quarter million dollar blood banking instrument with ongoing software issues. But hey...it'll protect us when Al Quaeda comes pouring into Southern Illinois and we need to crossmatch 20 people at a time.

So since I'm a pinko commie liberal, I'd like my share of the annual tax windfall to be spent on protecting Americans in a more tangible, meaningful way. Maybe on universal healthcare or development of alternative energy sources or a treatment for antibiotic resistant bacteria or something. Or hell, just patch I-57 once in a while; I'm not picky.

It just pisses me off that I work 2000 hours every year and pay into the system so that the army can have one more missile to blow up one more Iraqi wedding party.