| Monday, August 13, 2007 |
| Weekend update |
On Saturday, we went to see the Shotgun Players' production of "The Three Musketeers." Their summer play is always presented outdoors, in a North Berkeley park. While the rest of the country sweats through a heat wave, anyone going to see outdoor theater here risks freezing to death unless they take a sweatshirt along. Outdoor plays are ubiquitous in the Bay Area at this time of year as local companies take advantage of our rainless summer months, but personally, I don't quite get the appeal; give me a comfy theater seat and climate-controlled environment any day. After the show, an older gentleman tripped going down the rough stone stairway (the amphitheater is built into the side of a steep, rocky cliff); as Joe and I were walking back to our car, a fire truck and EMT unit were racing toward the park, sirens blaring.
The bulk of my weekend was spent reading William Kent Krueger's Thunder Bay. Kent is a client of mine and a really nice guy, but he's also an amazingly talented writer, as evidenced by the number of awards he's won for his novels. His books are about a sheriff (now an ex-sheriff-turned-P.I.) in rural, northern Minnesota named Cork O'Connor. Cork has an accomplished and beautiful wife and three lovely children, and the most horrible things always happen to them in Kent's series, which makes some members of my book club apoplectic. Thunder Bay is no exception, although at least everything is calm and relatively happy for them at the end of this book. I'm sure that Kent is busy cooking up nightmarish things to put them through in future volumes. Personally, I try to keep in mind that as real as they seem, they are fictional characters, and Kent's just doing his best to ratchet up the suspense and keep raising the stakes. Considering how glued I was to Thunder Bay, whatever he's doing obviously works.
On Sunday night, we tried to go see "Sicko" at the Cerrito. For all the Michael Moore haters reading this (and I know you're out there), at least we waited until it went second run. But there are obviously a lot of cheapskate Moore fans in town, as it was already sold out.
My main beef about our health care system is the way it has historically (since WWII, anyway) tied health insurance to full time employment, which I feel discourages entrepreneurship. As a self-employed person, I'm very, very lucky that I'm able to get health coverage through Joe. I know from people who don't have a spouse's insurance to rely on that it's extremely dicey to get individual coverage, especially if you have any kind of pre-existing condition, and even if you find something reasonably affordable, the insurer can drop you at any moment for any reason. Why make it so hard on folks who, for whatever reason, don't want to work for a large company (small businesses with only a handful of employees have it just as tough)? This country's policies should encourage entrepreneurship, which is one of the things that makes America great.
As for that old guy who tripped and fell in the park? At least he appeared to be old enough for Medicare, so presumably he didn't have to worry about picking up the tab for the emergency services. If it had been a self-employed, uninsured 35-year-old who had been injured, it could have driven him into debt. When Joe broke his ankle, the ambulance alone cost over $1,000. Thank goodness for that full time job. |
posted by 125records @ 12:41 PM  |
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| 1 Comments: |
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There was an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (I think) in the New Yorker some months ago that told the story of how the current situation (with health insurance tied to employment) came to be. Basically, in the late 1940s, as most of the democracies of Western Europe were beginning to set up their socialized medical systems, the Truman Administration began planning to do the same in the United States. This sent the major American auto manufacturers and other companies, who saw it as the first step towards socialism or at least some nationalization of industry, into a panic, and a delegation of representatives of big business made an offer to Truman: if he would pull back from his plan, they would make sure that their employees would have health insurance, both while working and after retirement. At the time, it was blue-collar workers, the overwhelming majority of which were working for large firms, who were considered to be the major potential beneficiaries of socialized medicine.
The rest, as they say, is history. We're stuck with a system in which access to health care is determined in large part by the sort of employer one can wrangle; the auto companies, who proposed this bargain in the first place, are complaining that their health care costs, especially to retirees, are untenable and leave them unable to compete against German and Japanese companies, whose employees benefit from state-run universal health care; and more and more retirees, who based their retirement savings plans on the assumption that their former employers would pay for their health care for life, are discovering that those employers can declare bankrupcy and get out of those obligations.
Josh
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There was an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (I think) in the New Yorker some months ago that told the story of how the current situation (with health insurance tied to employment) came to be. Basically, in the late 1940s, as most of the democracies of Western Europe were beginning to set up their socialized medical systems, the Truman Administration began planning to do the same in the United States. This sent the major American auto manufacturers and other companies, who saw it as the first step towards socialism or at least some nationalization of industry, into a panic, and a delegation of representatives of big business made an offer to Truman: if he would pull back from his plan, they would make sure that their employees would have health insurance, both while working and after retirement. At the time, it was blue-collar workers, the overwhelming majority of which were working for large firms, who were considered to be the major potential beneficiaries of socialized medicine.
The rest, as they say, is history. We're stuck with a system in which access to health care is determined in large part by the sort of employer one can wrangle; the auto companies, who proposed this bargain in the first place, are complaining that their health care costs, especially to retirees, are untenable and leave them unable to compete against German and Japanese companies, whose employees benefit from state-run universal health care; and more and more retirees, who based their retirement savings plans on the assumption that their former employers would pay for their health care for life, are discovering that those employers can declare bankrupcy and get out of those obligations.
Josh