We’ve seen multiple incidents of Taser use in Vermont in the last few years.  We’ve been told that they’re a less lethal weapon that can be used as a substitute for guns.  

But, in reality, I think what we’re seeing is that they’re becoming the sort of thing that the police will use whenever they want to use force, but non-lethal force.  Take, for example, the case of Steven Burke:

in the midst of being searched, Burke allegedly shouted that he wasn’t going back to jail and tried to run around the parked cruiser, Sheldon said.

At that point, Sheldon, who said he had his Taser out and pointed at Burke while he was being searched, discharged the device, designed to subdue suspects by delivering an electric jolt.

But Sheldon said the Taser prong caught in Burke’s winter coat and the shock it delivered didn’t have the desired effect.

“He said to me afterward that he thought he felt something hit him in the back but he didn’t know what it was,” Sheldon said.

Sheldon said police and Probation and Parole officials caught up with Burke moments later and took him into custody without further incident.

Note the details here: the man was no danger to anybody.  The man was fleeing on foot from a group of police who had a vehicle at their disposal.

I’m just wondering: is this the sort of situation where the police would have fired a gun had a Taser not been available?  I’m having trouble understanding this.

I’ve talked before about the difference between price and cost: it’s easy to look at the ticket price of something: you can find a cheaper food source, but the health benefits of that cheaper food source may be more poor, so the actual value of the food is not as good, and its overall cost may end up being higher due to poorer health resulting.

So I’m going to make another push here for local business and local purchasing.

Before I begin, let me note that I can be a hypocrite about this: I purchase books from amazon.com and the few books I’ve self-published have gone through a service in another state.  The CDs I’ve produced have been printed out of state and the new CD I’m working on will be a digital-only release, so locality is meaningless in that case.  There are a lot of reasons for these choices, primarily tied in with simplicity and convenience.  I rarely step in a physical bookstore any longer, even though when I do, I am often rewarded.  It’s a hobby of mine to do arrangements of old (17th – 19th century) tunes that are in public domain and I often find old books of sheet music at these bookstores.  I just rarely make the time to go looking for them.  I include this to explain that this post is not about chiding or cajoling, but about thinking through what we pay for and how.

But when it comes to produce, to foodstuff, we do our best to stay local, for multiple reasons:

1. local food tends to be fresher and, therefore, healthier;


2. food shipped locally does not require as many preservatives;


3. food supplied locally does not require nearly the shipping cost and, therefore…


4. …local food has a significantly lower carbon footprint.

So here’s what I find interesting.  If you visit this page, a part of the Vermont Department of Agriculture’s web site, you’ll see this logo:

But when you look at some of the specifics, you find the following:

The food supplier for the Waterbury state office building, the Waterbury correctional facility and the Pittsford Police Academy is Fitz Vogt and Associates.  

Though Fitz Vogt does have a Rutland location, their corporate HQ is in Walpole, NH.  

The Department of Corrections also has a contract to provide consulting for menu support and facility inspections.  Aside from the question of why that job couldn’t be done in-house, that contract appears to be with Around the Corner Catering (I’m not certain of this, but it looks likely, as they’re listed as “Corner Catering”).  Around the Corner is located in Pulteney, NY.

So I’m just making a simple proposal here: when we do business with an outside company to provide services for the State of Vermont, we should make it a priority to see to it that, whenever possible, those providing those services will be paying taxes on the profits they make on those transactions that go back into the state of Vermont’s coffers.   This isn’t about the services provided by these companies.  It’s about where are money is going and what the cost to those services are.

This isn’t a complicated concept, but I have a simple question: when our state government does business with private entities, is it cost effective to go with the cheapest provider of services we can find if their profits will not be used to pay Vermont state taxes?

Or, to put it another way, what’s the profit to getting our services from out of state when we could, instead, pay Vermont businesses?

I keep hearing about how we’re pushing businesses out of the state due to regulations and taxes, without any cogent argument to support this claim.  What I’m suggesting is that there are ways we can seriously support our local businesses that don’t involve lowering taxes and lowering support for services.

At this particular moment, the state has some very big ticket projects, the profits of which are going to the coffers of states some distance from Vermont.  Take, for example, the primary textbook vendor for Community College of Vermont.  This is a company called EdMap.  

Let me be clear: this post has nothing to do with the quality of service provided by EdMap.  It’s about the location of the company and whether or not it’s a good idea to have a company which is located in Nelsonville, OH

A repost from a year ago.  Enjoy 🙂

As you all know, the secular-hedonism forces in the country are doing everything they can to attack the valuable cultural icon of the Solstice.  To wit:

• People are refraining from saying “joyful Solstice,” replacing it with such heathen phrases as “happy holidays,” “happy New Year,” “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Chaunakah;”


• Our traditional solstice symbols, such as the star and wreath, have been co-opted by the forces of Christmas;


• Stores across the country have abandoned their stock of solstice-specific merchandise.  You can find Dradles, mangers and other merchandise, but nowhere can you find solstice-specific items;

Want to help end this anti-Solstice scourge?  We at the Department of Pagan Enthusiasm (DOPE) have prepared a short list of tasks you can incorporate into your everyday life.  See below the fold for this list.

Great.  So you’re on board with our pro-solstice campaign and ready to fight the scourges of the anti-Solstice agenda.  There’s a lot you can do to help:

1. organize letter writing campaigns: see a store that ignores our great and glorious Solstice?  Write them a letter.  Get your friends to do it, too.  Use phrases like “merchants of the forces of hedonism” and “supporting the powers of darkness;”


2. picket people who refuse to say “joyful solstice.”  Be sure not to just picket their places of business, but their homes as well.  If they object, leave sheaths of wheat on their doorstep.  They’ll get the message and shape up in no time;


3. see a tv program that doesn’t sponsor any pro-Solstice activities? write them letters, too, but also focus on their advertisers.  Ask the people who advertise on their show if they’ve ever had a bunch of angry pagans outside their offices.  If that doesn’t scare them, nothing will;


4. sabotage events supporting other holidays that exclude the Solstice: get a job as a mall Santa and eat lots of cabbage and beans before your shift.  If anyone asks, blame it on the elves;


5. bumper sticker your car: there are some great bumper stickers available form our shop: “Remember the Solstice!” and “12-21: not just a palindrome” are two of our best sellers.  But be sure to not stick to just bumper stickering your own vehicles.  Be sure to bumper other peoples’ cars as well.  Best to do this late at night so they drive around with our message of hope and peace for hours before they find out;


6. there is no number six;


7. see a manger scene? Get a bunch of “it’s a girl!” balloons and tie them to the hands of the wise men.  Tie them to the crib as well and make sure to put a pink bow on the baby’s head;


8. fight the snowmen: snowmen have been transformed from their traditional pagan status so as to no longer have their connection to traditional pagan rituals and rites.  They are no longer our allies and must now be seen as our enemies.  When you encounter a snowman, you may fight it through a variety of means.   Hair dryers are effective, but it’s difficult to find an easy to use outlet near many, so we recommend carrying a carafe of hot coffee.  Its effect is similar to that of “holy” water on vampires.  (vampires are neutral in this fight, so please don’t make your coffee with holy water.  It will be perceived as a threat by them, and the last thing we need is for them to ally with Christians);

We hope this update on the War on Solstice has been helpful.  With your help, we can defeat the forces of anti-paganism and bring society into conformity with our pantheistic tree-hugging dirt worship, which everyone knows, is the One True Religion.  And remember, if anyone challenges you, you’re doing this for their own good.  Just tell them that and everything should be fine.

I will end this message from the front lines in the culture wars with a traditional pagan litany:

Never give up.  

Never surrender.

May day can be summarized quite well by this photo:

Our forecast for tonight reads:

Moderate to heavy snow will continue to fall across… southern Vermont…before tapering off from west to east between 7 and 8 PM. Snowfall rates of one inch per hour will be likely…with additional snow accumulation up to two inches in some spots through 8 PM. The snow will also reduce the visibility to less than one quarter mile at times.

I went out briefly this afternoon to take photos of birds.  All our Pine Siskins apparently decided to come back today, as there were once again huge numbers at the feeders.  Here’s one that was waiting as part of the queue:

I had to drive home in Friday’s snow storm (at least it was still light out) and my car hasn’t left the garage since.

What’s up with everyone else on this cold, quiet, day?

So yesterday’s Rutland Herald had two headlines under state news, right next to one another:

Legislators to weigh variety of budget cuts

Council focuses on reducing child poverty by half

Now, noting that many of those budget cuts involve major cuts to programs that help eliminate poverty, there’s a certain irony at work here.

In the meantime, I’m getting a real sense of the administration’s approach:

• reduce funding for social programs because the tax base has gone down;


• cut funding to programs that will help people out of poverty;


• this causes a lowering of the tax base, and…


• repeat as necessary.

Take, for example, the testimony the other night from Todd Washburne, a high school student who needs a computer to speak:

“I am within sight of my high school diploma and planning on pursuing a college degree next year… I am concerned about cuts at a time when I need more resources, not less.”

Without the help of Washington County Mental Health, “I will be doomed to life as an underachiever,” he said.

And I’ll note something here: many of you know that I lost a major contract this year and my income has been slashed dramatically.  Things aren’t easy right now, but they’re not awful either.  Even being seriously underemployed, if I had to set aside an extra $50/month to pay an additional $600/year in taxes to cover these crucial programs, I’d have no problem with that.  I’m not the only one who thinks that way.  Again, from the Herald:

Marjorie Power of Montpelier, urged lawmakers to consider raising taxes to cover the shortfall in revenues, rather than cutting services… “I am not wealthy, but if they moved the income tax up I would not fuss.”

The desire to cut, rather than raise taxes, is “simply ideological,” Power said.

She’s absolutely right.  Raising taxes or not– the agenda coming from the administration has nothing to do with competent fiscal policy.  It’s simply about enforcing an anti-tax ideology that favors the wealthy over the poor and the middle class.

You know… I remember seeing how the wingnuts had taken over the Republican party and joking how much I missed the days when they were primarily just the party to screw the poor.

I was wrong.  I didn’t miss that either.

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.

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.

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.