Ludo Ergo Sum
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Health Insurance Rant
I've been generally pissed about the state of health care in the US, especially since I caught a news spot that talked about the fact that Health Insurance companies consider actually paying medical bills "Medical Loss" and so need to avoid doing so. If they actually pay medical bills, their "Medical Loss" goes up and investors abandon them in droves. So, in order to save their shareholders they tend to kick the people they actually get their profit from to the curb. They play the "if we deny their claim enough, maybe they'll die and it will be life insurance's problem, not ours" game.
Anyway, my current experience is that after I lost my job my wife has been trying to add me to her insurance, but can't because I need to prove that I'm not still insured. My guess is they're throwing paperwork at me in hopes that I go away. Lord knows it would just be terrible to have another customer. They might actually have to cover a prescription and what would that do to their "Medical Loss" numbers...
Health Insurance has become a parasitic industry. Its goal is to bleed its customers dry while providing as little benefit to those customers as humanly possible. Add to this the fact that there is no real competition. I've never really been able to choose my health insurance provider. Sometimes I get a choice of two providers whose coverage differs so much it's not really a choice. Let's see, you can save thirty bucks a month by going with the health insurance that doesn't cover anything (I'm sorry, but I don't actually consider $500 copays and 80% coinsurance coverage) or you can pay an extra thirty bucks a month for the company that's just going to try to bury you in paperwork, but will actually pay for something once in a while if you manage to jump through all their hoops.
And of course something like a public option that would actually make a difference turns into a HUGE windfall for the insurance companies. Instead of providing health care the government is going to make health insurance mandatory. So EVERYONE can have a health insurance company strapped to their back charging them $1800 a month to not cover medical bills. They make noises about making things more affordable but I'll believe that when I see it. Sure, they're making "pre-existing conditions" illegal, but the insurance companies will just figure out other ways to avoid actually paying for health care. These companies will still be entirely motivated not even by profit but instead by share value which involves courting corporations to actually inflict their horrible "health care" policies on hapless employees and then do everything that has even the most remote possibility of being legally justified to not pay a penny they don't have to towards health care.
The thing that really sucks is the last thing I want is more government. If health insurance worked like auto insurance has lately we'd be set. There is actual competition for auto insurance. People can look at different providers and compare prices and quality of service and choose the provider that's right for them. If an auto insurance company consistently gives people a hard time when they submit a claim, it will eventually come out and the auto insurance company will suffer for it. Another company can provide stellar service at a slight price premium and then if it's marketed well enough business will grow and with volume their prices will come down and consumers will get better service and competitive prices. This is the way capitalism is supposed to work.
This is *NOT* the way health insurance is working and these companies are doing their level best to keep it that way. The only people who are really benefiting from this situation are the politicians. A public option is the absolute worst nightmare possible to the current health insurance industry. This industry has responded by dumping millions of dollars into politicians and, once again, money won. Now we can look forward to requiring people to get health insurance from health care megacorps who will then bleed them dry and not actually provide any benefits...
Cat and Dog Food
OK, so I work at a local pet supply store, MadCat Pet Supplies (http://www.felineunderground.com/ if anyone is interested.) Back in 2005 I set up a forum (phpBB) we can use internally to discuss stuff. Today when I was catching up on that forum I came across a post talking about vegan cat and dog diets. The consensus is pretty much that this is one of the most colossally misguided ideas ever hatched. My contribution to this discussion was as follows:
I've used this analogy with some of the more "academic" customers:
Nutrition is a lot like light: If you break sunlight up into a spectrum you see a complete rainbow with a few dark lines. If you break up florescent light into a spectrum you see a few bright lines in the darkness. Whole food diets that get their nutrition from natural sources are like the sunlight: there may be one or two things they are missing, but they have a bunch of nutritional substance we may not even know they have. (We just figured out cats need taurine fairly recently, what else is out there like that?) The grocery store "corn with vitamins" food is like a cheap florescent light: yeah, it looks like nutrition just like cheap florescent light looks kinda white but both are missing a lot of stuff that can really make a difference over time. The one place this analogy falls down is that nutrition is much more complex than a straight spectrum. You can't just find nutrition at a specific wavelength to fill things out. There are dimensions to nutrition we will probably never discover.
Now, with vegetarian cat/dog foods you are trying to make do with huge chunks of the spectrum missing. There is no way to get the same high-quality, complete protein from vegetable sources that you can from meat sources. Period. Add this to the fact that while we can measure quantities of a substance in food we have no way to conveniently measure bio-availability that I know of. That's how Total cereal gets away with claiming it contains 100% of the recommended daily allowance of iron because it contains iron filings. Literally. The fact that iron filings have no actual nutritional value whatsoever seems to have escaped them somehow...
Another point:
Dawn (my wife) works as a compounding technician at Walgreen's. When they compound medications every recipe needs to be gone over by a pharmacist and even then in some cases they sometimes need to do some study. Now, a lot of these "recipes" are simply grinding up a medication and putting it into a liquid solution. Sometimes things that are chemically identical can behave very differently in a pill than ground up in a liquid. One recipe they had to add a bunch of vitamin C (if I remember correctly) because while the pills worked fine, when they made a liquid out of it the medicine leeched vitamin C out of the patient and they ended up with scurvy. Medication in a liquid solution is much more similar to the original pill than a supplement is to a natural source of nutrition...
Disclaimer:
Of course, as always, "Your Mileage May Vary", "No guarantee inferred or implied", "yadda yadda yadda", "ob-la-di ob-la-da" and all that jive... I've thought about all this a lot, but I am neither a nutritionist nor a vet. I am very willing to modify any position stated above should any of these statements be shown to be further evidence I'm a loony.
Nutrition is a lot like light: If you break sunlight up into a spectrum you see a complete rainbow with a few dark lines. If you break up florescent light into a spectrum you see a few bright lines in the darkness. Whole food diets that get their nutrition from natural sources are like the sunlight: there may be one or two things they are missing, but they have a bunch of nutritional substance we may not even know they have. (We just figured out cats need taurine fairly recently, what else is out there like that?) The grocery store "corn with vitamins" food is like a cheap florescent light: yeah, it looks like nutrition just like cheap florescent light looks kinda white but both are missing a lot of stuff that can really make a difference over time. The one place this analogy falls down is that nutrition is much more complex than a straight spectrum. You can't just find nutrition at a specific wavelength to fill things out. There are dimensions to nutrition we will probably never discover.
Now, with vegetarian cat/dog foods you are trying to make do with huge chunks of the spectrum missing. There is no way to get the same high-quality, complete protein from vegetable sources that you can from meat sources. Period. Add this to the fact that while we can measure quantities of a substance in food we have no way to conveniently measure bio-availability that I know of. That's how Total cereal gets away with claiming it contains 100% of the recommended daily allowance of iron because it contains iron filings. Literally. The fact that iron filings have no actual nutritional value whatsoever seems to have escaped them somehow...
Another point:
Dawn (my wife) works as a compounding technician at Walgreen's. When they compound medications every recipe needs to be gone over by a pharmacist and even then in some cases they sometimes need to do some study. Now, a lot of these "recipes" are simply grinding up a medication and putting it into a liquid solution. Sometimes things that are chemically identical can behave very differently in a pill than ground up in a liquid. One recipe they had to add a bunch of vitamin C (if I remember correctly) because while the pills worked fine, when they made a liquid out of it the medicine leeched vitamin C out of the patient and they ended up with scurvy. Medication in a liquid solution is much more similar to the original pill than a supplement is to a natural source of nutrition...
Disclaimer:
Of course, as always, "Your Mileage May Vary", "No guarantee inferred or implied", "yadda yadda yadda", "ob-la-di ob-la-da" and all that jive... I've thought about all this a lot, but I am neither a nutritionist nor a vet. I am very willing to modify any position stated above should any of these statements be shown to be further evidence I'm a loony.
Wow...
As I expected, my attempt at blogging lasted less than a day. Almost six years later I decide I'd try blogging again. I was feeling particularly depressed and thought I'd find somewhere to spew all the depression out there so my future self can look back on it and see what a pathetic loser I am now...
I was going to talk about how I was laid off from my job in the middle of December (failed as a programmer), my wife separated from me last year (failed as a husband), my kids are having emotional breakdowns (failed as a father), I offered programming help to a friend of mine but have made almost no progress on anything (failed as a friend, programmer and general human being all at the same time).
When I logged in I saw a bunch of posts from a blog I used to follow (http://crabbydad.blogspot.com/) and decided to catch up. I read a post, then decided to find where I left off and catch up. When I got to the January archive I completely lost it. I was laughing so hard it hurt. My face is still sore.
Suddenly I just don't have it in me to be pathetic. Ah well, maybe next time...
