And I quote:

The longer we wait to make reductions, the more difficult these decisions become, and the deeper we have to cut to find the savings.

What does this mean?  He clarifies:

In human service programs alone, we estimate that for every month of delay, we will need either to find an extra $3M in new cuts or take substantially deeper program reductions in order to achieve the same savings.

And I’m sure their estimate is based on sound, economic principles, as opposed to ideological hackery.

But basically, this is political gaming of the system: if you don’t do what we want you to do now, we’ll just insist you do something worse.

Gotta run this morning but – –

Isn’t it time for a really big demonstration in Montpelier to let our legislators know that it is not OK to balance the books on those least fortunate in our society?

Doug Hoffer laid out plenty of options for dealing with the current crisis without resorting to slashing programs for those that need it now more that ever.

If there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans, now is the time to prove it.

PJ

This week, I had the rare privilege of seeing two profoundly magical moments in two days.

The first was Sunday night, after I turned out the lights and climbed into bed. I lay down, with my face toward the window, and saw two brilliant stars through the trees. I leaned forward to get a better look and realized that instead of stars, I was seeing the moon reflected in the ice on the branches of a tree. Then I noticed that every branch of every tree within my view had dozens of tiny moons tracing its curves. It was a starkly beautiful display that made all those human attempts at tree-lighting seem as awkward and graceless as a day-old colt in the mud.

Then at 10 am yesterday, in a small gathering in Room 11 of the State House, Vermont’s Electors officially cast their ballots for President and Vice President of the United States.

Vermont may be a little state, but even with only 3 electors, we provided one of the more diverse electoral college contingents in the country: 33.3% male, 66% female, 33.3% African American, 33.3% lesbian, and 33.3% State Senator all in one tidy little bundle!

The crowd was small (Orange County was seriously over-represented: fielding 7 people out of roughly 20), but the energy was large – you could feel the excitement as the proceedings began with the swearing in of the electors.

(Electors, Standing: Claire Ayer, Euan Bear, Kevin Christie)

More photographic goodness below the fold…

They had to take 2 oaths of office, and elect members for 3 different positions (which was pretty amusing to watch, since there were exactly as many people as positions).

Once the formalities were out of the way, the electors got down to business. There were two slips of blue paper for each elector. One had the name of the Presidential candidate and a check box; the other had the name of the Vice Presidential candidate and a check box. They didn’t seem to need a whole lot of time to figure out which candidate to choose!

Then came the most time-consuming part of the event. Each elector had to sign 6 copies of the State of Vermont Certificate of Vote form. I never needed to know whether or not the word “sextuplicate” existed before this. (It does.)

Now the forms will be sent to separate places to ensure that if one copy is lost, there are others from which the data can be recovered.

The most notable recipient will be the President of the US Senate, VP Dick Cheney, who will officially count the Electoral College vote on January 6. Let’s hope he’s a whole lot better at counting than he is at hunting birds whose wings have been clipped. At the very least, he doesn’t need a firearm for counting, so all faces in the room should be safe, unless he has a trick abacus or something…

So there you have it. Vermont quietly participated in the historic victory of the first African-American President of the United States: a brilliant spot of sunlight on a gray December morning. We were the first state to be declared for Obama, and now we’ve sealed the deal.

Congratulations to the Electors on their role in making history!

update:

Now available in Orange

The opponents of so-called “clean coal” have been amping up their efforts (and if you watch TV, you’ve probably seen the ads and know what I’m talking about). There is a real sense of urgency infusing the environmental community on this, above and beyond the obvious urgency over the whole climate change and destroying the environment thing (cuz obviously, potentially rendering the Earth uninhabitable only gets people so excited, but I digress…). With Barack Obama looking serious about engaging with climate change and energy issues (the likely and unfortunate elevation of Ken Salazar to Interior Secretary notwithstanding), environmentalists are at once excited about the potential for positive movement, while at the same time deeply concerned that “Clean Coal” technology will be part of the energy mix, potentially offsetting much of the good that could be accomplished.

Obama has been touting Clean (cough) Coal since well before the election season. He introduced the “Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007” while the Sierra Club was calling liquefied coal “the dirtiest, most expensive energy gamble we could take.”

During Monday’s announcement of the nomination of Nobel Prize winning scientist Steven Chu to lead the Department of Energy, Obama commented that “My administration will value science… We will make decisions based on facts.”

And now, activists of all stripes are preparing to work to guarantee Obama keeps that promise.

Among those efforts is a planned demonstration and civil disobedience action in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 at a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill. Wendell Berry and Vermont’s Bill McKibben sent out an email today promoting the effort and encouraging the word to be spread.

Now I’m one of those who believes that the value of such demonstrations has diminished dramatically over the years, but this one has the potential to be meaningful, mainly due to its timing, contextualized as it will be against the brand new administration and its stated priorities. It also doesn’t hurt that its being pushed by prominent individuals such as Berry and McKibben.

The email includes an appeal to forward its content far and wide. Copy it in its entirety into an email if you’re so inclined, or just send a link (but make sure you link to the extended diary and not just the front page, as it’ll scroll off into the archives in about a week).

Complete email below the fold…

There are moments in a nation’s-and a planet’s-history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

       We will be there to make several points:

           #Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level-below 350 parts per million co2-lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.

            # Even if climate change were not the urgent crisis that it is, we would still be burning our fossil fuels too fast, wasting too much energy and releasing too much poison into the air and water. We would still need to slow down, and to restore thrift to its old place as an economic virtue.

           #Coal is filthy at its source. Much of the coal used in this country comes from West Virginia and Kentucky, where companies engage in “mountaintop removal” to get at the stuff; they leave behind a leveled wasteland, and impoverished human communities. No technology better exemplifies the out-of-control relationship between humans and the rest of creation.

           #Coal smoke makes children sick. Asthma rates in urban areas near coal-fired power plants are high. Air pollution from burning coal is harmful to the health of grown-ups too, and to the health of everything that breathes, including forests.

       The industry claim that there is something called “clean coal” is, put simply, a lie. But it’s a lie told with tens of millions of dollars, which we do not have. We have our bodies, and we are willing to use them to make our point. We don’t come to such a step lightly. We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, and while in recent months there has been real progress against new coal-fired power plants, the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated. It’s time to make clear that we can’t safely run this planet on coal at all. So we feel the time has come to do more–we hear President Barack Obama’s call for a movement for change that continues past election day, and we hear Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s call for creative non-violence outside coal plants. As part of the international negotiations now underway on global warming, our nation will be asking China, India, and others to limit their use of coal in the future to help save the planet’s atmosphere. This is a hard thing to ask, because it’s their cheapest fuel. Part of our witness in March will be to say that we’re willing to make some sacrifices ourselves, even if it’s only a trip to the jail.

       With any luck, this will be the largest such protest yet, large enough that it may provide a real spark. If you want to participate with us, you need to go through a short course of non-violence training. This will be, to the extent it depends on us, an entirely peaceful demonstration, carried out in a spirit of hope and not rancor. We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you. There will be young people, people from faith communities, people from the coal fields of Appalachia, and from the neighborhoods in Washington that get to breathe the smoke from the plant.

       We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested. After that we have no certainty what will happen, but lawyers and such will be on hand. Our goal is not to shut the plant down for the day-it is but  one of many, and anyway its operation for a day is not the point. The worldwide daily reliance on coal is the danger; this is one small step to raise awareness of that ruinous habit and hence help to break it.

       Needless to say, we’re not handling the logistics of this day. All the credit goes to a variety of groups, especially the Energy Action Coalition (which is bringing thousands of young people to Washington that weekend), Greenpeace, the Ruckus Society, and the Rainforest Action Network. A website at that latter organization is serving as a temporary organizing hub: http://ran.org/get_involved/po… If you go there, you will find a place to leave your name so that we’ll know you want to join us.

   Thank you,

Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben

P.S.-This is important: Please forward this letter to anyone and everyone you think might be interested.

The headline at HuffPo says it all: Leahy Buckles, Will Push Back Holder Hearings. Well, he must have a good reason, right? Try this one on for size:

Nonetheless, in order to accommodate the Republicans members, I am rescheduling the hearing on Mr. Holder for twice that long, until more than six weeks after his official designation. It is disappointing to me that they are insisting that we delay at a time when the nation needs its top law enforcement officer and national security team in place and working.”

Really? Well, it's disappointing to me that you're giving into their insistence, Senator. It's good to know who's really calling the shots here, even with the expanded Dem majority. I could almost envision a Senate with 80 Democrats and they'd still bend over to accomodate the wingnut brigade. As far as setting the tone, here's really what's at stake here:

By moving the hearings back to the 15th, Leahy is taking one Republican argument off the table — the idea that this nomination was somehow being considered in haste. Moreover, if all goes to plan, Holder will be confirmed by the time Obama takes office. But the Vermont Democrat is also signaling that GOP protests, even those driven by the most hyper of partisans (see: Rove), will be considered. He is also offering Republican critics of Holder more time to build their case against the nominee.

Basically, he's telling Republicans that as long as they piss and moan, they will always get what they want. Give them nothing.  You know what to do, folks.

Only about 30 days left .

Mail a shoe to the White house

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

Okay, now that we’ve cleared up the… “problem” of not having any of the proposed cuts made available to the public, I’m going to to discuss a few that flagged as I was scanning the letter:

Sec. 2.228. Department for children and families – reach up

Reach Up Grants and Support Services – Phase I

Reduction of $400,000 in Support Services – Each Reach Up case manager has available a  pool of dollars to assist people in addressing specific barriers to employment.  In Vermont,

transportation is the largest barrier and consumes much of the Support Services line  item. This reduction would reduce the amount of support services per client on average to  $175 from $200.

The use of “on average” is fairly meaningless.  Some clients need a great deal more support than others and those, of course, are the ones who will get screwed.

Reductions in Reach Up Support Services – Phase II – $300,000

While the TANF caseload is up as a whole, the post secondary population is trending  downward; therefore less funding is needed.

Sec. 2.230. Department for children and families – office of  economic opportunity

Individual Development Accounts and Micro Business Grants – The Department is

suspending any additional commitments to these programs; the uncommitted funds

available for rescission are estimated to be $150,000.  

I’m not certain about this, but I think that some of this funding is funding that was promised but without some specific detail of the paperwork being completed or some other such thing.  I.e., people who were told the money was coming as soon as one detail is taken care of.

Sec. 2.216. Health –  public health

Immunization Program for Adults

This $4 million program is in its second year and was instituted as part of the Health Care  Reform Act of 2007. A reduction of $1,000,000 will be absorbed by eliminating HPV vaccine for women over 18. This will preserve access to HPV vaccines for children under  18, and to adult vaccines of greatest importance to the public’s health, PPV 23, TDaP, and  Hep A and B.

Right.  Because we want to roll dice with the public health of adults.

Yikes.

Many of you probably know this symbol…

Could we finally have a new one?

Now, I know there’s some mixed feelings about the “shoe incident”. Iraqis are already calling for the release of the reporter, hailing him as a national hero.

Kestrel has the vid in the sidebar if you haven’t seen it yet. So what is it, people, bold action? Horrible? Best thing since sliced bread or descent into madness? All of the above? Discuss.  

Hopefully, this will be fixed soon enough, but… as of 10:30am, if you go to http://www.leg.state.vt.us/JFO/ you will see this item on the upper left:

(I highlighted the relevant section).

I’ve been wanting to check this out all weekend, so I’ve been waiting to see what the recommendations are.  What do I get when I click on them?

This:

Perhaps an early budget cut was competent web developers.

This is a complicated story, and even some of it sounds fairly dramatic, I’m including those elements not to be dramatic, but to explain the situation fully.

I will start a small amount of history.  I had been purchasing insurance through my domestic partner for a couple years, paying a fairly significant sum.  When her office changed insurance providers and the price went up, I realized I could do better buying my own directly as a sole proprietor.  So I found a plan which costs a little under $5,300/year.  

At that point, I was working as a consulting with the state of Vermont, providing training and technical support.  It was a lucrative contract that got killed when we had a budget shortfall.  Therefore, in May I was informed that my contract was not going to be renewed.

Fortunately, I had seen this coming and was prescient enough to have started saving money.  When my contract ended at the end of June, I had enough money in my savings to pay both my health insurance and rent through the end of the year.

This is a very good thing, because my health took a fairly bad turn this Fall and I had to curtail my work search significantly.  This story isn’t about the loss of employment, but I include it to provide a full perspective on what’s going on.

Health insurance is something I was willing to pay for, and pay significantly for, for one primary reason: even though I am mostly healthy, I do happen to be diabetic.  This means that I am on several medications (one of which is quite expensive) but with my insurance, I rarely have to pay more than $30 for a prescription.   This insurance also covers doctor’s visits with a $20 copay for visits to my primary care physician and a $30 copay for all other providers.  

But if I, as a small business owner, had to hire anyone else, I never would have been able to cover the cost of it.  It’s just ridiculously expensive.  Furthermore, the rules of the plan require that I be hiring someone at 30+ hours/week in order to cover them (this includes me, and we’ll get to that part of the story later).  

So even if I wanted to cover an employee who only worked 15 hours/week, I would not have been allowed to do so.  You heard me right.  Under this model, I can buy insurance as a business owner, but I can only cover some of my employees, even if I’m willing to foot the bill myself.

This is all a small part of the story, and just about the economics and the ridiculousness of the nature of those economics.

This fall, three things were going on at once:

• I got very sick;


• I had to apply to get into Vermont’s Catamount Care program because I couldn’t afford to buy insurance any longer;


• I had to find work to support myself while the other two things were going on

I’m going to start with the Catamount story just to emphasize the absurdity of it.  I will note that I still work part-time as a teacher, which places my income at the level where I don’t qualify for Vermont Medicaid, which is the state-sponsored medical available to anyone who qualifies in terms of their income, but still at the point where I can’t afford to purchase my own insurance.

Catamount Care is Vermont’s private health care plan system with state support.  If you qualify for the plan, you can either pay the full monthly fee or, if you qualify for assistance, you can pay part of it (that’s means-tested based on income).  

The Catamount story starts with me trying to figure out (a) whether or not I qualify and (b) whether or not my pre-existing conditions are covered.  

I do qualify, but the process of understanding how and why I qualify was maddening.  I had to talk to five different people before I got a good answer.  One person I talked to clearly didn’t understand the program and was actively rude about it.  Another understood the program quite well, but didn’t understand my situation well enough (that was partially my fault, because I didn’t understand some of the specifics).  

But what I had to do was figure out how to make sure they had all the information I needed and present things so that it was clear that I qualified.  

It turns out the difference between being qualified or not hinged entirely on that factor I referenced earlier of how many hours I worked.  When I had a lucrative contract with the state and was working 30+ hours on my own business, I qualified to purchase my own medical insurance through a group plan.  When that contract dried up and I no longer had it, I wasn’t qualified to renew my plan.  

That was the sole reason I qualified for Catamount.  If I had merely been unable to keep up with the payments for the group plan, I would not have qualified.  It was because my insurance company was going to drop me that I qualified, which only was the case because I reduced my hours.  

Just so we’re clear: if I had continued to do 30 hours of work/week for my own business, even though I wouldn’t have been getting paid for it, I would not have been able to apply for Catamount.

Now: I am a very well educated person.  I have a master’s degree.  I am not, as they say, a moron.  And yet, I had a lot of trouble figuring all this out.

I have trouble imagining that everyone applying for health care in Vermont can follow this bizarre logical process and I strongly suspect that some people who qualify don’t bother applying because they think they don’t.  In fact, I can verify that this is the case because it turns out I would have qualified last year.  That’s right: if I had understood the program better, I could have gotten into it a year ago, and not had to pay the full cost of my insurance plan this entire year.  It would have saved me thousands of dollars to have enrolled in Catamount a year ago, and even though I very much had looked into it, I didn’t apply because I didn’t see in the documentation how I qualified.  But, so it goes.

So I applied in early November.  I got a call from them fairly soon, asking for more info about my current insurance plan.  They needed to know which plan I was on and my group number, etc. so they could verify that the plan was coming to an end, but I was told that once they had that, I’d qualify.

Except that wasn’t the end of it.  I didn’t hear anything until two weeks later, but the day before Thanksgiving I got notice that I had to prove myself to be a citizen.  Thank you so much, anti-immigration nutcases: it turns out that in order to receive any services that include any federal funding, I have to provide a copy of my passport (I don’t have a passport) or my birth certificate.  The note explained that I had four days to do this or my application would be canceled.

So, not having a birth certificate, and having legally changed my name in the meantime, produced a bit of a problem.  I called them in a panic, and was able to get an extension, but once again: more stress than I needed an an extra complication.  So I finally got in touch with probate court and in touch with the department of vital records from the town I was born in, and found out I could get everything taken care of relatively easily and quickly, but it did cost me about $40 all said and done to get things done fast.  So, okay, I now have proof of who I am and I can bring it into one of their offices so they can verify who I am and that I was, in fact, born in this country.

In the meantime, they send me a note saying I qualify for the program which helps employees pay for their own insurance when the employer doesn’t cover it all.  This, of course, is not what I applied for.  So I called them again and asked what to do, and it turns out because I’m employed part time by the college, I have to get them a copy of a form and get it sent back to the state.  This form basically tells the state “we don’t offer insurance to our faculty, so she doesn’t qualify.”  I dropped the payroll office an e-mail about it, never heard back and then on a Friday called and got the info for the one person who handles this sort of thing who was gone for the week.

Fortunately, when she did come in on Monday, she was great.  I’m qualified and everything, have a decent deductible to pay in the meantime, but after all this… I’m thinking… wow.  That was a lot of work to do and it took much longer than necessary.

The employee form that I just referenced, for example: if they’d told me it was a possibility that I’d need to have that done, I could have done it a month ago.  

The birth certificate?  If they’d just said up front “these are the things we may ask you for in the process of your application…” well, I would have had that all resolved in early November, rather than dealing with them during the weeks that covered preparation for and recovery from surgery.

But I’m also just really lucky that I was able to get this all taken care of, because while I was doing this, I was a mess.

And that is the second part of my story:

The medical issue is fairly straightforward: I got really sick in early September.  I mean, sick to the point of barely eating and having significant gastric distress.  This included days where I could not keep anything down (and one day where I couldn’t even keep liquids down).  Out of the next six weeks, I had maybe seven days where I was fully functional on my own.  During a large chunk of this, I could not sleep for more than 45 minutes in a row, and during those six weeks, I never slept for more than 2 hours in a row.  

I had five visits during that time to my primary care physician, who was convinced that it was a problem with the intestines.  Those visits would have cost me over $700 without insurance.  My current bill for them stands at $100.  The lab work that was done there would have cost me another grand or so, but there is no fee for those tests at all.

After those weeks of visits, in late October they finally decided they needed to do some actual tests that looked inside my abdomen to see what was going on.  They scheduled a scan of my intestine which would have cost over $500 if I hadn’t had insurance, but didn’t cost me a dime.

Turns out the problem wasn’t gastric.  It was kidney related.

I got called my my primary physician’s office within a few minutes after the scan was completed and they’d arranged a visit with a urologist who specializes in this sort of thing.  Mind you, I was still in fairly constant pain at this point, and had been for weeks, but I trekked over to the urologist’s office across the street from the hospital and he explained the whole situation to me in great detail:

The scan had immediately showed the problem: a kidney stone on my left side which had actually created a complete blockage.  This created a large fluid sack around my kidney which had had two dangerous effects: it had (a) ended my left kidney function entirely and (b) served to block my intestines from functioning fully, therefore explaining the gastric problems.

This was serious enough that he wanted to schedule surgery as quickly as possible.  The scan was done on a Monday.  The surgery was scheduled for Thursday.

This, of course, was terrifying.  

My insurance plan covers surgery, but with a large co-pay: up to $1,000 for outpatient surgery and $2,000 for inpatient.  So I was basically crossing my fingers hoping that I wouldn’t have to stay overnight and cost myself an extra grand.  

This, by the way, wasn’t surgery to remove the stone.  This was surgery to insert a stent which would divert the fluid from the one kidney to the other, and serve as a temporary bypass in order to release the pressure on the left kidney and give it time to heal.  The stone removal was to come later.

The surgery went extremely well.  I didn’t need painkillers, but I did have to pick them up just in case, which placed me as part of the State of Vermont’s tracking system for anyone who gets any schedule C narcotic via prescription, which is just oh so peachy.

The difference was immediate: no further pressure on the kidney, but with some minor unpleasantries that lasted the next week or so but I was able to sleep better and after that first week, I was able to sleep through the night.  This brought us to early November.

The total cost of that surgery, I found out, was $4,935.58.  My portion of that bill was $929.34.  

My insurance had almost paid for itself entirely with that one surgery, and I still had a 2nd one ahead of me.

The 2nd surgery was ten days ago: it also went extremely well, though it was a longer surgery and I had a harder recovery time.  I got motion sickness heading home that day, and (I never have motion sickness), but after a day or two of recovery, I was doing okay, still not needing the painkillers.

I haven’t been billed for that surgery yet, and if I am, it won’t be for more than $71.66, which I’m good with.  

So I’m good now: the second surgery removed the kidney stone and left me in a lot of short-term pain, but I’m beyond all that now and doing well.  In the meantime, the function has started to return to the left kidney, but I won’t know until next month whether it returns to full function or whether it sort of lingers permanently at the half-function level it was at a couple weeks ago.

I’ve got a long recovery ahead of me: I have to get used to exercising again, and I have to get back in the hang of, well, everything.  This took a small chunk of my life from me for a time, and put me in the position of having been forced to place my life in the hands of strangers.

Don’t get me wrong: once diagnosed, I was treated with the utmost respect and dignity, but this was a horrible experience.  I’m not out of the woods yet; we don’t know how or why the stone developed, or whether or not I’ll develop any more in the future, which means that having health care is a fairly big deal for me in the future as well.

And even with health care, I was misdiagnosed by my primary care physician, and misdiagnosed to the point where things got really bad before they started to get better.  

But I’m writing this because we talk about health care and we talk about the need for it, but we don’t spend enough time saying exactly how important this is.  This isn’t an extreme case.  This is something that happens to lots of people all the time, and some of us have health care and some of us don’t.

I took a look at my records from my insurance.  They break everything down by what the provider charged, how much the insurance paid, and how much I’m expected to pay.

I summarized this for the year (this does not include the prescription plan), and found the following:

My health care providers charged $23,820.97 for care I’ve receiver this year.

My insurance company, which places limits on payment charges for certain procedures, paid out $10,052.62 of that.

I’m expected to cover an additional $1,699.34 on my own.

If I hadn’t had insurance, I’d have been royally screwed.  Even as things stand, I’m not sure how I can afford the surgery, but I’ll find some way to cover it.

But through this whole process, I was thinking about something that happened to me about 15 years ago, when I didn’t have insurance: I developed an ear infection one winter.

I never treated it.  I never went to a hospital.  I never went to a doctor.  I just hoped it would go away.  

After a month, it did.

I got lucky.

Ear infections can do really bad things to you.  They can even lead to brain damage.

I was lucky.

Can I imagine someone in kidney distress doing the same thing because they think it’s a virus or an illness that just needs to pass?

Yeah, because that’s what my own doctor thought: take some antibiotics, let the problem heal on its own, and everything should be okay.  I had to push to get approved for the abdominal scan.  And I have insurance.  How much motivation will there be for people to push when they know they can’t afford the cost of it?

I also think about something that happened back in 1992: I had a bicycle accident.  I lost my breaks going down a steep hill and had a choice between ramming into some bushes or heading into traffic.

I chose the bushes, not realizing there was a hard metal fence hidden inside them.  I rolled over onto a spike on top of the fence and it impaled my neck, leaving a hole the size of a quarter, but I was lucky enough that it missed all the major stuff.

When I went to the emergency room, however, they told me they were going to do surgery right away.

Then they found out I had no insurance.

They they had a little huddle where I couldn’t hear them.

Then they came back and told me that they thought surgery would be unnecessary.

The minute they found out I didn’t have insurance, I fell to the bottom of the queue.  I was ignored, left to sit for hours at a time.  My hands were all scraped up from the accident and it took seven hours before I could clean them.  I kept asking for something to use to clean my hands, and finally the doctor showed up and threw me a washcloth and a bottle of bacitracin and told me that they were for my hands and left.

Having insurance matters.  Having insurance can be the difference between being treated like a person and being treated like a burden.  Having insurance can be the difference between health and disability, between survival and death.

This is why it’s necessary.  This is why it’s relevant.

I just didn’t realize until recently just how necessary and relevant it was.

Now that that’s all done, I think I need to go find a job.