Diagnosis: Old
Just to complete the epic saga of my health woes, I had the CT scan and I neither have cancer nor the other thing I might have had that would have required surgery. And because the symptoms that sent me to the doctor in the first place have begun to subside of their own accord, it’s not looking as if we’re going to find out exactly what caused them. However, in the course of trying to figure it out, my third, unfired (YAY!) doctor ran a test that indicated that one of my internal organs is tired of working at 100% so it’s not going to anymore. I’m not in dire condition or anything, but at some point I will need to go on medication and stay on it for the rest of my life. My current insurance plan doesn’t cover it, so it’s likely I’ll also have to change insurance plans, assuming that will be an option.
The reason I don’t now and might not later have the option of changing plans is because I now have a pre-existing condition. See how that works? Even if you have insurance, you shouldn’t use it because if you use it, your doctor might find something, and if your doctor finds something, then you could become uninsurable. If Obama is reelected, the Affordable Care Act will take full effect in 15 months and once it does, all opposition to it will vanish because even people who hate Obama will find they actually like not going bankrupt due to medical bills and then dying anyway. So in that event, I’ll probably be okay, at least in terms of being able to maintain insurance coverage or obtain different coverage. If Romney is elected, then it gets more complicated. He says he’s going to repeal the ACA on day one of his presidency, but he also says he’s going to sit down with a bipartisan group of senators and house members and solve all our nation’s problems on day one. I am pretty sure he’s also going to spend a good portion of day one walking around the West Wing shouting, “I AM KING! ALL BOW TO THE KING!” so, you know. Busy day.
A couple of things: Romney can’t repeal the ACA by himself. I think he’s confused about the limits of executive power. It’s a little like 2008 when Sarah Palin said as Vice-President, she’d be in charge of the Senate and if she wanted to, she could “get in there and make a lot of good policy changes.” And then all the third-graders of the world replied, “uh, no you can’t.” What Romney can and will likely do is issue waivers to each state saying that they can ignore the ACA, and then chip away at the law over a period of time, leaving in place the portions of it that are good for insurance companies but bad for all the regular people who have a weird mole that needs to be looked at.
But hey, congratulations to Mitt on winning the first debate! Also, condolences to Mitt on losing his pants in a fire.
My fellow Democrats have been spinning for a couple of days as to why Obama did poorly in the debate. Some people say he wasn’t prepared for how blatantly Romney lied from start to finish. Others say he was playing Rope-a-Dope and forcing Romney to commit to claims that either contradicted earlier claims or that he would undoubtedly contradict later (all of which has happened, but it’s not as if this is new; this has been going on for months). A couple of morons even said he was feeling down and distracted because he had to spend his 20th anniversary looking at Mitt’s orange face. Comforting theories, I’m sure, but come on. Barack lost the debate. You can say it. It’s okay. He’s still a good person.
Immediately after the debate, I was depressed. Mainly because Obama tanked it, but also because I was promised zingers and the ensuing awkwardness thereof but they were few and far-between, not to mention lame. I think Romney saying that Obama believes in “trickle-down government” was supposed to be a zinger, but as a concept it doesn’t even make any sense. It’s like Michael Scott’s vision of doing improv with Robin Williams and responding to “nanu nanu” with “blibity bloo blah.” Likewise, “you’re entitled to your own house and your own plane, but not your own facts,” was dumb and forced, but worse, Obama let him off the hook by not saying, “well, how about food and health care, am I entitled to those? Or would that make me a victim?” Though I did enjoy when Mitt basically said his five sons were all liars. I like to think that later on the campaign plane, his sons were screaming at him, “from you, dad! We learned it from watching you!”
Anyway, I feel better now. Partly because I realized that while a majority of people who watched the debate believe Romney won, that doesn’t mean a lot in terms of the election itself. After all, I think Romney won the debate, but it’s not as if I’d ever vote for him. But mainly I feel better because in the ensuing days, Romney’s been popping the buttons on his shirt with pride, which cracks me up. You won the debate, Mitt. You still suck. You know who else won the first debate against an incumbent? John Kerry. Also? Walter Mondale. And yet I do not predict that their pictures will ever be on money.
Despite all his money and privilege, it can’t be easy being so awkward and out-of-touch and socially inept. I would probably feel sorry for him if he weren’t such a pandering obnoxious creep. Perhaps Tom Hanks can better illustrate the vagaries of being Mitt.
Mitt before the first debate:
Mitt after the first debate:
Mitt after the September jobs report showing unemployment has dropped below 8% was released:
The only thing more frustrating than the health care industry is health insurance. Our plan is changing next year. For me, my premium does not change (yay), but now I will have a big, fat deductible to meet before they will pay for anything other than “preventative” care (e.g. screenings and statins), and then my co-pay will be a percentage instead of a flat fee (which could be good or bad, depending on the amount charged). My goal is to never get sick, but we know how well that worked out this year.
I watched part of the debate, but all I heard was “blah, blah, blah”. I was taking stock of my personal finances at the same time, and discovered that my retirement investments have grown by 50-60% since the first quarter of 2009, after taking a nose dive during the GWB era. So, yes, the prospect of King Romney scares me.
Glad your new doctor found the source of your problem. And no surgery! That is always a good thing.
I have a big clonking deductible, but it doesn’t apply to everything so every time I need to go to the doctor or get a test done, I have to read my benefits book to see if it’s going to be covered. As a result, on top of whatever else might be going on, I get a headache.
It’s interesting that Romney/Ryan adopted the “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” line because by almost every objective measure, the answer is yes. It’s not as if anyone is saying, “man, I wish we could return to the prosperity and peace of Autumn 2008!”
Gonna be serious for a rare moment here. Obama’s presidency has shown me that our political system is so irretrievably corrupt that even a good man in office can’t make any substantive changes. I’m disgusted by the whole process, and while I’ll vote for Obama again, I won’t take any pleasure in it as I did last time.
Obama has accomplished a lot, but because much of it is groundwork and the effects aren’t immediately observed, he gets little credit for it. Early on, I felt that he was playing a long game, and this year Andrew Sullivan wrote about him in exactly those terms for Newsweek. Of course, if Obama doesn’t get a second term, then a lot of that work gets undone. I know what you mean about not feeling as enthusiastic this time though, but then you don’t see many presidential election years like the last one.
First of all, I found your blog and have just finished reading the whole thing and thank you! You are too funny for words! I eagerly await your next post. And secondly, since I quit my job to stay at home with my new baby I will lose my insurance and will have to start shopping..something that I’m not looking forward to. Also, my partner who is a day trader predicts that the stock market will go to hell if Romney gets elected.
Chicago! There you are. You know, this is a first of sorts. Every so often I see in the stats that someone has gone through and read the archives, but then they never come back. I assume they want to make extra sure they hate my blog before they leave forever, which I find admirable in its way.
Good luck with the insurance shopping. The last time I did it, it wasn’t too bad, but I was completely healthy and also there were only maybe three choices total. As it is now, I just cross my fingers every month that they don’t send my premium payment back with a note that says, “naaah, you’re done.”
One of the awful things about getting older is the extent to which you realize that politics DOES really have an impact upon your life, and it’s not just something you debate with the irritating conservative boy with rich parents in AP History class. I buy my insurance because I’m self-employed and when Obama was elected I breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t have a preexisting condition, but I have little faith that protects me against healthcare insurance shenanigans. In the movie “Sicko,” I still remember the woman who faithfully paid her premiums and had her insurance yanked when she got really sick because she failed (forgot) to disclose she had been treated for a yeast infection, which meant she failed to disclose a ‘preexisting condition.’
I like Obama very much and think that his accomplishments don’t get enough credit. Oh a personal level, however, he has one of my greatest faults–he thinks that using logic somehow gets you more points than ‘seeming intelligent’ and pushing people’s emotional buttons. When pressed, he can give a good speech, but his ‘default mode’ is professorial wonkiness.
But only in America are people seduced by the idea that is ‘bad’ to require people to have health insurance and widen the risk pool to keep insurance costs down. The audience claps when the Ron Pauls of the world espouse the ‘freedom’ people will have under Romney to ‘choose’ not to be insured so they have more money to buy cheap shit and Wal-Mart every month and then go under into bankruptcy when they do get sick and have to pay exorbitant costs for out-of-pocket healthcare.
I’m praying selfishly that Obama gets elected but also for your sake so all of this is a non-issue.
I lived in England for two years and people just didn’t get how America can be such a rich country, yet if someone gets sick they can die because they can’t afford to be treated (or will have to ‘die’ financially to afford to get treated). They complain about the NHS, of course (complaining is a national sport in Britain), but not even Margaret Thatcher would dare to talk about eliminating it.
It’s almost funny, the deceit and transparency of Romney–in his former incarnation as a moderate, his greatest legislative accomplishment was bipartisan healthcare reform. But I should laugh, because laughter may be the only medicine we can all afford, someday.
I buy my own insurance as well. I’m not technically self-employed, but I had to give up a few things to be able to work from home and being in the group plan was one of them. Aside from both the yearly and age group premium hikes, the other headache is that you have no bargaining power and some companies’ default mode is to deny every claim and only approve it after you’ve disputed the denial. My carrier was like that for a couple of years, and then suddenly became okay, so I have to wonder if the state insurance commission smacked them.
I believe the U.S. will eventually go to a single-payer Medicare-for-everyone plan because that’s the most effective way to both keep health care costs down and ensure the solvency of Medicare, but I don’t expect to see that happen in my lifetime, even if I live to a ripe old age and don’t die from a stress-induced stroke while talking to a claims specialist who keeps putting me on hold.
I agree with you about Obama. Like Bill Clinton, he can explain the hell out of something, but Clinton has a way of doing it that makes you feel like he has a personal stake in whatever the issue at hand is. With Obama, you get that he cares, but it’s more abstract. I think his temperature is just set a little lower than average; he could never pull off Clinton’s quivering, “I feel your pain,” without seeming false.
Glad you don’t have cancer nor require surgery. As for the rest, well… I’m Canadian :-\
Well you know, depending on how the election goes, there might be a lot more Canadians pretty soon!
I’m happy to see your medical issues are not as dire as WebMD originally told me they were.
WebMD tends to exaggerate, I think because the figures in their symptom checker don’t have faces or genitals. If you start out without a face or genitals, you’re going to have more medical problems than average.
I’m glad you’re ok! And still funny!
Not true! I have eggs in my neck!
I agree with Marius and Mary Pagones. In the past few years I’ve done a 180 politically. Now I realize it doesn’t matter one way or another. Corruption wins every time. Once a president gets in, they are quitely told how it’s REALLY gonna be. Sorry, good guy. You’re our puppet now.
I wouldn’t say our government is corrupt, but then I’m surprisingly optimistic for someone who is usually pretty crabby. My sense though is that there are too many politicians who feel like every policy matter is a zero sum game and instead of stopping to notice that they actually agree with the other side, they would rather just kill the other side.
I must add that I tried to watch the whole debate, but every time I saw Mitt’s smirky face I wanted to hurl. I read a book until Jeopardy finally came on. Maybe Alex Trebec should run for president. Oh, wait, maybe I should move to Canada…
I know, what was with that smirk? I’ll bet that’s how he looked at his dog before he strapped him to the roof of the car.
Flurrious for President!
That requires too much cooperation. I’d rather just be a dictator.
Glad that you’re okay(ish!). I totally had my mom cancel a neurologist appointment today until she calls her insurance agent and makes sure that every single t is crossed, i, dotted; and that if they got something back terrible that they wouldn’t be like, “Ah, all your long term care coverage is denied because you’ve only had it for five months and you needed it for a year!” Can’t mess around with that shit, man.
OR we could move to Sweden. It’s supposed to be nice there, and I like a nice smoked fish platter as much as anyone.
Also, you’re hilarious.
It’s probably not a bad idea to double-check your insurance before doing anything. I don’t know too much about long-term care coverage because when I tried to get a policy for my mom, she was denied on the grounds that they thought there was a likelihood she might use it someday. No kidding. That was actually in their denial letter. Their position was basically, “we want to be able to collect premiums and then not pay anything out for claims. Why can’t you people understand that?”
Well, because I have been living under a rock and not reading blogs, I had no idea you were experiencing age issues. I mean health issues. ;). I’m glad you’re okay.
Also, random: my therapist doesn’t take insurance, so I submit my claims myself. I never used to get reimbursed for anything, but now? (Presumably because of “Obamacare”), I get about 75% back. That’s a pretty sweet deal.
I enjoy that opponents to the ACA dubbed it “Obamacare” as a slur, but because eventually it will prove to be one of the most popular pieces of legislation ever (I’m basing this on the fact that in the mid-1960s people were like, OH NOES MEDICARE IS SOCIALISM, and now Romney/Ryan threatening it was a factor is their loss), they’ve pretty much just enhanced his reputation to future generations. Well, that was an awkward sentence.