Kauli Flower

Have Wells Fargo as your lender.

Now the state is investigating them.

Good. Because I tired of putting for the effort about 8 months ago.

www.avaaz.org. Go read and become enlightened.

Tonight we will take little grr and have her put down. She’s very weak, not suffering that we know of, but she’s always been in survival mode.

While we are going about our daily lives pretending that everything is just swimmingly fine, as that is what our jobs require, our hearts are breaking knowing that we will be saying goodbye to our friend and trusting companion.

Job well done, Tigger. We will love you always.

Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush. Read the rest of this entry »

“Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won’t take anything on faith?” Bill Maher, 7/31/09

From a Canadian’s p-o-v.

Debunking Canandian Health Care Myths

After you read this, go read the entire article. For some folks, no amount of myth-busting will satisfy them. But, give this a try.

Myth: There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care.There are no waits for urgent or primary care in Canada. There are reasonable waits for most specialists’ care, and much longer waits for elective surgery. Yes, there are those instances where a patient can wait up to a month for radiation therapy for breast cancer or prostate cancer, for example. However, the wait has nothing to do with money per se, but everything to do with the lack of radiation therapists. Despite such waits, however, it is noteworthy that Canada boasts lower incident and mortality rates than the U.S. for all cancers combined, according to the U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group and the Canadian Cancer Society. Moreover, fewer Canadians (11.3 percent) than Americans (14.4 percent) admit unmet health care needs.

I love speaking with others on just about anything. The conversation stops for me when there is a bullying, denigrating tone.  I’ve just spent quite a bit of time over at the Friendly Atheist. Love it! Try it.

More aggravation than anything, but another example of what’s wrong with the insurance industry. (Yes, I was very satisfied with how the c-scope went, the clinic, and very happy everything was okay. That’s not what this is about.)

My employer recently changed insurance providers, much to my doctor’s happiness. CIGNA was who it was at the time of my colonoscopy. I received an additional bill for $40.00 from the clinic that did the procedure.

Here was the process:

1. Initial visit $40
2. Day of procedure: $120

That was supposed to take care of everything on my part. However, on the day that I received the additional bill from the clinic, I received an “Explanation of Medical Benefits” from Cigna. The total charge for the procedure was around $1,400. There was nothing unusual about the procedure, no added medication, surgery, etc. Everything had been cleared through the referral process (and this was a test that CIGNA was encouraging me to have because of my age). So a month after the fact, I’m told that my plan liability was a little more than $200, and I’m responsible for another $40.

Now this might not seem like much to you, but to me that’s like going to buy a pair of jeans and they’re marked $40, which you pay; then after you’ve left the store, you get a call saying that you owe an additional $20 for.

Shouldn’t the cost be the cost? The patient liability be all settled ahead of time? I’m going to pay it, of course.I can appeal, but if it goes anything like appealing my traffic ticket did, it would wind up costing me more.

Oh, and you saw where there were an additional 5 million who lost their insurance; which brings the number of Americans without insurance to over 50 million. I hope you aren’t one of them.

I was 19 when I had my first child. Normal pregnancy, great OB/GYN, great hospital, no insurance. At the time, the hospital charged a flat $1,00. I think the dr. was $600. We made payments to both and were paid in full by delivery. It wasn’t easy, but my mom helped out.

Almost 4 years later, a different state, a small town doctor and hospital, we still had no insurance. As in the first case, too much money to be on Medicaid, and there was no maternity rider on the insurance. Doctor out of town when I went into labor, hospital couldn’t find him, so someone else wasl called in. He had no idea about the type of block I was having and instead shot me up with Demerol and attempted to put a gas mask on . All the time, I’m thinking how barbaric this situation is, and how I should have gone to a nearby city. You don’t know how many times I’ve relived that.

My son was purple and when I asked the doctor, he just said that it was cold in the delivery room and that’s why he was purple. Less than an hour later, they were rusing him by ambulance to the hospital I should have gone to, because he had underdeveloped lungs and was struggling to breathe. They knew he was 3 weeks early, how could they have so cavalierly stated he was just cold? I went to the smaller hospital, the small town doctor, because I had no insurance and because everyone has healthy babies, right?

Fortunately, my son was stubborn, and after 13 days in NICU, was released to go home. A hospital bill of $14,000+ which was 30 years ago. That was almost equal to what his dad made in a year.

Why should a parent have to sacrifice care because of lack of insurance? Why should a child be denied excellent care because their parents make too much to qualify for assistance, but too little to afford insurance?

Pre-existing conditions? State Farm would not cover any repiratory illness for my youngest son for, I believe, the first year of the policy. This was well after he had started school, and had pneumonia three times, and bronchitis twice.

This health care reform is one of the most important policies that will be faced in our lifetimes. When an opposing party is claiming this will be Obama’s Waterloo, I wonder how out of touch he is? What would he do without his government benefits? Without the money he gets from lobbyists. What a pompous ass to make such a proud proclamation.

Say that it’s Obama’s Waterloo to a mother or father as they have to decide which medicine to purchase for their child because they can’t afford both. Tell that to the elderly person who decides to take only a half of their dosage because they can’t afford to purchase it as regularly as their doctor recommends. Tell that to the woman who doesn’t get a mammogram because she can’t afford to take off work and can’t afford to be sick if anything does show up.

You can take my two stories and multiply them by 47,000,000 – much more bleak than mine, and maybe you have a similar story. Please feel free to share. We are faceless victims to policymakers, and that needs to stop. Our stories need to be told. The time for real health care reform is now.

We can, but people have to buck up and stop being afraid of the bs that’s being dangled in front of them.

Dana Milbank referred to Nico Pitney as a “dick”. It must piss the hell out of all the over-inflated egos of certain journalists to be shown how to do their jobs in the 21st century.

Face it guys (& gals), he’s provided the best real-time coverage of Iran. Tech savvy and he asks the ?s that you haven’t since the blue dress.

Grow the fuck up. He deserves a Pulitzer for his coverage and your jealousy sounds like junior high pettiness.

Bunch of little wahwahs can’t even get your facts right on this.