Healthcare, insurance, and the prospect of poverty

 

I normally sleep pretty well, but I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking about Ben Sasse. If you don’t recall, Sasse is a former Nebraska senator who announced a few months ago that he has pancreatic cancer. There’s really no kind of cancer that anyone should want to get, but pancreatic cancer is one of the ones that most of us emphatically hope that we never end up with. Because it is hard to diagnose and there are few treatment options for the advanced disease, the lifespan of pancreatic cancer patients tends to be pretty short. 

At least, it did. There are now a growing number of experimental treatments for the dread cancer, and one of them reportedly shrank Sasse’s tumor. I don’t know if Sasse will survive the disease, but at least he has some hope for a positive outcome.

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Many people think I never say anything good about Donald Trump, but I applaud him for signing the Right to Try Act in 2018. This law allows terminally ill patients to try experimental treatments, and I suspect that Sasse’s good news may be related to the law. 

From there, I started thinking about my own experience with prostate cancer. After almost three and a half years, my PSA levels are still very low, which is much better than I had hoped for at the time. 

My nighttime reverie continued as I pondered the US healthcare system. Sasse is a former senator and university president with a lot of money and connections. I had few connections, but I did have savings and good insurance. It was a good thing too. 

If you’ve never had a serious illness, you may not know much about the process. As most of you are aware, health insurance in the US is tied to the employer for the vast majority of us. Whether you have good insurance or not depends not only on your choices, but those of your employer. You may have the choice of a few different plans, such as high or low deductible options, but they’re probably all with the same insurer unless you forgo the company contribution and strike out on your own. 

The same goes for disability insurance. Your company may not offer it. You might not have elected to buy the coverage if it does. 

If you have an illness severe enough to be out of work for a long time, the company will typically use your vacation or PTO (Paid Time Off) days first. Then there is short-term disability and long-term disability with separate time limits if you’re still sick. If you aren’t aware, long-term disability insurance does not pay your full salary; about 50 to 60 percent is typical. 

So, in the case of a long-term illness or injury, you have more bills than normal coming in, especially if you chose the high-deductible plan, and at the same time, your earnings have just been cut by about half. On top of that, if you stay out long enough, you may have to start paying your full health insurance premium out of pocket.

On top of all that, if the condition lasts long enough, you might lose your job when benefits run out. That doesn’t mean the illness goes away, but it does mean that you might lose your insurance. 

That quick walk-through illustrates the insanity of the American health insurance system. Our current system is only marginally more market-based than the national health insurance systems in those “socialized medicine” countries. The consumer doesn’t have much choice under either model. 

In both cases, the health care access is set up to serve people who aren’t very sick. It’s easy to get preventive care or antibiotics, but in the national health care model, you might go on a waiting list for a vital surgery. In the US, you can probably get the surgery scheduled quickly, but you may not be able to pay for it, and the odds are good that you won’t have any idea how much it costs until it’s over. 

For most of my life, the conservative line was about personal responsibility, but under our current system, you can do everything right and still be bankrupted by a medical emergency. If you have a serious, long-term illness, you’d better hope that you can get added to your spouse’s insurance. If you aren’t married, start looking. It also helps with auto insurance. 

In my prostate cancer experience, I was out of work for three months. I had bought the disability insurance and was covered on that for two months. The rub is that after my doctor cleared me to go back to work, I had to wait on the FAA to renew my flight physical. Because this was a paperwork issue, rather than a medical problem, the disability payments stopped. That was an oversight (since corrected) by my employer, and I can thank Senator Raphael Warnock’s office for helping to speed my paperwork along. (I contacted my local Republican congressman first and never got a response.)

I don’t know what the best solution is. I’m not a fan of government-run healthcare any more than I’m a fan of employer-run healthcare. Having said that, putting governments in charge at least makes more sense than tying medical insurance to a job, which makes none at all. 

The healthcare problem also impacts the retirement problem. If people spend their retirement savings on medical issues or drain their IRAs to survive while out on medical leave, they are likely to run out of money later in life, just when they need it most. 

There has to be a better way, and I think it will take both sides working together to find it. We owe it to ourselves to create a system that can supply timely, effective care without destroying our finances. 

Cancer is already a nightmare. The healthcare system shouldn’t make it worse.

From the Racket News

The war on expertise

 

You may be wondering why we didn’t cover Trump’s crazy speech last week. I didn’t watch it, and it seems like mainstream sources have done well at debunking Trump’s claims. The speech seems to have even dropped off the Republican radar quickly, but what else should we expect from a Republican presidential address that boiled down to the Democrats can run free and fair elections (2016 and 2024), but Trump can’t (2020). I think Republicans often want to forget that Trump, not Biden, was president in 2020.

Instead, I want to spend a little time on two instances that underscore how the Trump Administration is undermining public safety. Both problems arose within the past few days, but the basis for the problems were laid months ago.

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The first example was the Blue Angel low pass in Florida. Over the weekend, videoemerged of the Blue Angels flying extremely low and fast over Pensacola Beach, near the home base of the team. 

My immediate reaction was that, while this made for cool video, it was extremely dangerous to the crowd. Federal Aviation Regulations prohibit low “buzz jobs” and aerobatics over crowds. Military regulations mirror the civil rules. 

Saying this online was like kicking over an anthill. Commenters came out of the woodwork to deny any danger and claim that the team knew exactly what it was doing. These attitudes persisted even after the team leader called the pass “unsafe,” and the pilot of the aircraft in question told a congresswoman that he miscalculated the turn. 

The Navy handled this well. The team leader said the team would debrief and correct the problem. Initially, the Navy said it would conduct a safety review of the incident. 

It takes courage to admit a mistake, especially one as well-documented as the Pensacola pass. The pilot, the Blue Angels, and the Navy should be commended for handling the problem head-on and honestly.

The Navy’s civilian leadership did not perform as well. Defense Secretary Hegseth and Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao rushed to quash the review before it started, Hegseth tweeting, “The flyovers will continue until morale improves.”

The big problem is Hegseth is creating a climate that encourages risky behavior and dismissiveness of safety regulations. This is especially true since the underwhelming concern about the Blue Angels incident follows closely on the heels of other low flying incidents involving Army AH-64 Apache helicopters in Tennessee and South Carolina. It seems the only regulations that concern Hegseth involve PT and shaving.

This sort of attitude gets people killed, and both the Blue Angels and the Air Force Thunderbirds have had fatal crashes in the past, despite the faith of those who believe they can do no wrong. In fact, invulnerability is one of the five hazardous attitudes pilots are trained to avoid. (The others are anti-authority, impulsivity, macho, and resignation. Of these, four easily apply to Hegseth and the Administration.) Crashes at airshows are not unheard of, which is why aircraft aerobatics are kept a safe distance from the crowd.

The second example of a safety problem is the nationwide cyclospora outbreak of parasitic diarrhea. Under RFK’s leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC decreased monitoring of parasitic foodborne infections and the FDA suspended the Foodnet infection tracking program. Further, there is widespread agreement that the Trump Administration’s cuts left the CDC and FDA unable to manage the crisis effectively.

So far, the government has given mixed messaging on the outbreak. The source of the outbreak was originally traced to lettuce imported from Mexico by Taylor Farms and used at Taco Bell, but now the government says that, even though the test that it performed on the lettuce yielded a false positive, Taylor Farms is still the prime suspect. 

Americans are learning the hard way what some of those federal workers in the bloated bureaucracies do. Or did. Prior to DOGE, we may have had a government that was microscopically larger than the one we have today, but it was a government that effectively protected us all but the normal variety of Taco Bell diarrhea. 

DOGE enacted massive cuts to the federal workforce, but the government is still spending more than ever. The minuscule savings were squandered on the Iran war and massive explosion of the anti-immigration police state (which has been involved in more bad shootings recently as well as arresting a legal Chinese immigrant who sought asylum after working as a human rights lawyer in the PRC). 

Right-wingers thought the government was malevolent before, but under the Trump Administration, we’ve seen the altruistic segments of government eviscerated while the unaccountable (and poorly vetted and trained) police state has grown. The anti-government right has created their worst nightmare, and they don’t realize it.

The common thread between these two incidents is an antipathy to expertise, whether it be the aviation safety experts who make it possible for multimillion dollar fighter jets to fly within inches of either or the medical experts who made sure that our food supplies were not tainted. If you listen to the MAGAs, they’re all a bunch of nerds.

Part of the problem is that our safety protocols are so good that people have forgotten what it’s like to have frequent, devastating crashes or disease outbreaks. The one big recent problem that affected the American people, the COVID-19 pandemic, is not perceived as real by a large number of MAGA supporters. 

This line of thinking has taken us to a point where experts doing their jobs are either forced out or ignored. These aren’t the last crises that we will see under the Trump Administration, and all we can do is hope that career military commanders can enforce discipline, the remnants of the scientific corps at HHS can hold the line against microscopic invaders, and that career experts in other agencies can hunker down and be there when we need them. 

It will take years to complete the rebuilding of the government agencies that Trump has gutted. The rebuilding can’t even start for another two years, but voters can slow the destruction by electing politicians in November who will hold the Trump Administration accountable.

From the Racket News

Let your heart match your words

 Not long ago, I was ordained as a deacon in my church. One of the duties of deacons here is to periodically deliver a short meditation during the communion portion of the service. Today is my first time delivering this meditation. This is what I plan to say. 

I grew up about an hour from Athens, and for part of my young adulthood, I attended the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!) and worked in Athens while I commuted back and forth over an hour of country roads.

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One of my memories of that drive is being behind an old car with a lot of environmentalist bumper stickers that said things like “the Earth is your mother” and “give a hoot, don’t pollute.”

What made this encounter memorable is that, as I drove behind this car, I was nearly hit by a steady stream of cup, bags, food wrappers, and other assorted garbage that was being tossed out both sides of the car.

If you know me, you know one of my pet peeves is people throwing garbage on the side of the road, especially my road, but what struck me at the time was that it was pretty funny that a car with all those environmentalist stickers was throwing such a high volume of garbage on the road.

They obviously didn’t believe what their stickers said.

About the same time, I heard a DC Talk song called “What If I Stumble.” The song started with this introduction:

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today

Is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips

Then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.

That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.

How many of us are like the people in that car, not acting out the teachings that we claim to believe in?

This might not be a salvation matter for us. We know that all have sinned, and we know that we will go on sinning because we are human, but God’s grace and our repentance cover our sin.

But the flip side is that I’ve had people who I know tell me that they don’t want to be a Christian because they see so many Christians who obviously don’t believe what they say. Personally, I don’t want my actions to be the reason someone turns away from Christ. We need to remember that Paul wrote that we are Christ’s ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20), and ambassadors are typically on their best behavior because they want their actions to reflect well on their home country.

So that leads us to the question of how Christians should act. There are lots of Bible passages that give us guidance on how to act, as well as how not to act. I’m not going to try to hit all these because they said I need to keep this to about three or four minutes, and the pastor might get mad if I cut into his time. Besides, Christianity really is not a religion of rigid rules. It took me a few decades to realize that.

What I will do is direct you to one particular verse. It’s a verse that you find in three of the gospels (Matthew 22:34–40; Mark 12:28–34; Luke 10:25–28), but I’ll cite Matthew 22:36-40.

When Jesus was asked which commandment was the greatest, he answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

So straight from Jesus, if you aren’t being loving, you’re doing it wrong. A lot of the behavioral guidelines that we find in the Bible are really just ways to help us be more loving to others. In fact, Jesus said this when he said, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Sometimes that’s easier said than done. People can be annoying and hard to love, and it’s the ones who are difficult to love that we really need to try harder with.

There’s a meme that says following Jesus’s example might include flipping tables, but if we closely at what got Jesus angry, it was religious hypocrites and people who profited from worship at the temple. He sat down talked with the sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors and Romans. The dregs of society.

For us, the list of people we should love includes the people who bug you, the people who bully you, the people who cut you off in traffic and just don’t know how to drive, people who persecute you, your enemies (Matthew 5:44), atheists, trans people, other ethnic groups, foreigners (Leviticus 19:33-34), gays, immigrants (Deuteronomy 10:19), people of other religions, people of different political parties, and anyone else you can think of. 

Love God and love people.

And if there is anyone here who is being pushed away from Christ because of the actions of some of his followers, I’d like to close with another observation from the internet: 

“To be honest, if I was a Christian because of Christians, I’d likely be an atheist by now. But I’m a Christian because of Jesus, and Jesus is pretty freaking awesome.”

Prayer

Lord Jesus, we thank you for your love and mercy. We know that we all fall short of the ideal. Help us to be better ambassadors for you. Help us to live out what we believe.

We pray that you would give us guidance as we relate to others. Help us to see them as you see them. Help us to love them as you love them. Make us instruments of your love.

In Jesus name, Amen.

From the Racket News

Are Democrats blowing it?

 I’ve said for quite a while that 2026 is an election year that is the Democrats’ election to lose. Lately, they seem quite capable of doing exactly that. 

The most recent crisis involves the totally predictable implosion of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine. As I wrote several weeks ago, the red flags were there, including but not limited to an SS tattoo. 

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On Monday, the story broke that Platner was being accused of sexual assault by a former girlfriend. Let’s not sugarcoat it. If the allegations are true, Platner is a rapist. And given his history of sexual misconduct, the allegations are credible. 

The good news for Democrats is two-fold. First, party officials are doing what they should have done months ago and calling on him to step down. With that move, the party can maintain some shred of moral integrity, unlike Republicans who seem to accept pretty much anything from their nominees these days. 

The second piece of good news is that the Maine Democratic Party has a little time. If Platner withdraws by July 13, he can be replaced on the ballot. Democrats have untilJuly 27 to replace him with another nominee, picked by a nominating committee. Even after that deadline, if Platner withdraws by August 25, he must be removed from the ballot. In that case, Democrats could run a write-in candidate.

The bad news is that Platner has to withdraw. Candidates often are the last to understand that their campaign is toast. (See Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign as exhibit A.) And someone as apparently unstable as Platner might even continue to run out of spite, taking down the Maine Democrats hopes to unseat Susan Collins as revenge for abandoning him. 

Time will tell, but at this point, Platner should definitely be abandoned. 

In the final analysis, Platner’s latest scandal may prove to be a boon to Democrats. Getting Platner out while there is still time to replace him could salvage Democratic chances in Maine as well as remove a liability to Democrats elsewhere.

But wait, there’s more! 

At least 11 Democratic candidates for various offices are self-described socialists. Candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have won congressional primaries in Colorado and New York, where the seats are reliably blue, and are competing in Michigan and Wisconsin, where they are not. 

About 39 percent of voters have a positive view of socialism, so socialist candidates start at a general election disadvantage. Only about 21 percent of Americans view the DSA favorably. Worse, most voters who approve of socialism are young, the cohort least likely to vote.

Nominating socialists also makes Democratic candidates nationwide vulnerable to Republican attacks that they are socialist and/or communist (similar to tying the party to a Nazi-tattooed sex predator). The two are not the same, but few understand the distinction, and Republicans are happy to paint with a broad brush. 

In fact, the Republican tactic of dumbing down socialism may have contributed to its newfound popularity. For decades now, Republicans have decried everything they don’t like as socialism.

Universal healthcare? Socialized medicine!

Free college? Socialized education!

Higher taxes on the wealthy? Socialized redistribution of income!

As someone pointed out a while back, by painting popular ideas as socialist, Republicans have made socialism sound pretty good to a lot of people. 

And that was before Republicans started adopting socialist ideas. Trump has ramped up federal equity stakes in private businesses under the guise of national security, often with a “golden share” or executive, if not controlling, interest. By definition, socialism is “governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” 

I guess if you can’t beat them, join them. File it under “How Republicans learned to stop worrying and love government seizing the means of production as long as it’s Trump.”

Democratic primary voters are not playing it safe, when that’s what they really should be doing if they want to ensure that Trump is blocked from implementing his authoritarian agenda. Especially when it comes to swing states, the safe picks are moderates who have been vetted in other campaigns. Now is not the time to gamble on radicals or newcomers with no electoral experience. 

Going further, I’d like to see both parties take a more moderate stance on the issues and a more strident position on morality and decency. I want to see Trump and MAGA defeated, but I don’t want socialist radicals or trumpy Democrats to take their place. Democrats shouldn’t adopt Trump’s depravity any more than they should take up his socialist and authoritarian policies.

Speaking for independents, we want moderation and sanity. We want candidates who are decent people, candidates who we don’t have to dread seeing in the news every day. That shouldn’t be difficult, but partisan voters are making it so.

The crowning irony of all this is that Democrats are likely to win, even with bad candidates (but not Platner). Trump is just that unpopular. In the end, the Republican Trump mania may be what ushers in a socialist boom in the United States. 

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FOURTH POLL We ran a quick Independence Day poll on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Eighty-seven percent of respondents prefer to watch firework displays rather than shooting their own.

From the Racket News