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I tried to play like I’d post on vacation, but gave up in favor of heavy drinking. Now that I’m back, you can enjoy some pictures taken on my vacation.

Cats are messed up animals. Pete, for example, has developed a somewhat fatherly relationship with Josephine. Occasionally, when she’s being fed or resting in her bouncy seat, Pete will come by and gently lick her head, or rub against her.

She, of course, loves him. When he saunters by she can’t keep her eyes off him. It’s rather amusing. I have been told that cats tend to bond with humans of the opposite gender, but my anecdotal experience hasn’t borne that out. The cats at my parents house always prefer my father. (I guess he smells like a boss cat. Who knows.) At our house, Pete usually likes to sleep with me (until I start tossing and turning), and Poly’s always been Mommy’s girl. (JD and The Cheat didn’t seem to care.)

The best part about Fatherly Pete is that if Josephine is upstairs, and is crying, and we don’t go up to get her right away, Pete will sit at the bottom of the steps and stare at us, as if to say, “What the hell! She’s crying! You gonna do something about it? Jerks.”

Poly, of course, has responded to the appearance of another child by being annoyingly ingratiating. There’s been a lot of dragging of slippers and little plush toys all over the house, and a lot of loud midnight meowing, as if to say “Hey! Look at me! I’m still here! Look, I brought you a present!” until finally we kick her out so she doesn’t wake the baby.

The Cheat is now an outdoor kitty, since I couldn’t teach her not to pee in the basement. Sometimes she seems to be handling it well, and sometimes I find her huddled behind the air conditioning unit with a wild look in her eyes. She does at least have a cute collar now.

Would you rather have government bureaucrats or big business bureaucrats making decisions about your healthcare insurance eligibility? I know which one Sophie’s Mom would prefer.

Just as our Blue Cross plan was set to start, we received a notice from them stating that they considered Sophie to have a pre-existing pulmonary problem (due to the amount of doctor’s visits for pneumonia), and that while they would cover her in general, they wouldn’t cover any pulmonary/respiratory issues until she had gone two years without needing medication or problems…

All of a sudden, Sophie was without coverage for pulmonary problems. This was absolutely terrifying. What if she got sick?! What if she needed to be hospitalized?! We spent the next couple of months researching every insurance company that we could, begging them to take Sophie. Nope, it wasn’t going to happen.

And then our biggest fear came true: Sophie got very, very sick. And I’m ashamed to say that although we knew that she was incredibly ill, we actually considered keeping her home from the doctor’s office, as we knew that this would be yet another strike against her getting insurance. Luckily we pulled our heads out of our asses and took her to the doctor anyway, and it’s good that we did, because Sophie was so critically ill that she was sent straight from the doctor’s office to ICU. She was so sick that we couldn’t even wait for an ambulance; they helped me throw our limp, blue daughter into our car, and I drove like hell to get her to the hospital next door.

Let me state that very clearly one more time: we almost didn’t take our baby girl, who was in severe respiratory distress, to the doctor because we knew that it would hurt her chances of getting insurance.

Even as we speak, a supremely competent fellow named Joe is installing Verizon FiOS in our new house. (Well, new to us. The house was built before my great-great-grandparents were born.) My excitement is ExxxxTRREEEEEEM. I’ve wanted to try FiOS for a while, since a package including basic TV, internet, and phone is the same price as my comcast package. So I’m basically going to save the equivalent of a phone bill every month, which is not insignificant. I’ll also not have to deal with Comcast, who do not offer ESPN Classic as part of their digital package, an oversight for which I’ve been waiting years to punish them.

Moving continues apace; we’ve been hauling boxes and bags of anything that fits into our cars, and I donated my motorcycle to a buddy who hauled a bunch of furniture up for us. Hopefully we’ll actually be able to start actually sleeping here in a few weeks, after we rent a massive truck to haul our beds and other furniture.

Like I said: excitement. EXXXXxxxXtreeee3AM excitement.

Here’s a nifty graph about support for gay marriage:

I’d love to see a few graphs like this over time to see how feelings have changed. Still, Ryan Sager points out:

Just how big is the gay marriage age gap? Between the under-30 crowd and the over-65 crowd: 35 percentage points.

Or, try this on for size, at the state level: If people over 65 in each state made the laws, 0 states would have gay marriage; if people under 30 made the laws, 38 states would have gay marriage.

In a few years, this battle is won.

Good ol’ Barney Frank:

My question is, why aren’t more politicians reacting this way? They keep trying to have civil conversations with people who are clearly there to disrupt debate, and they try to actually engage them. I used to think that the PR hit they’d take from having these people thrown out would be bad, but let’s face it the only people who would care are on Fox News, and they’re not going to support a “leftist” agenda anyway. In fact, a savvy politician like Barney Frank might make their heads explode.

I work for an insurance company, so perhaps my perspective is colored a bit by that, but here’s my question: why are private enterprises allowed to offer insurance? Shouldn’t this be a government function alone?

Stay with me. The problem with the current healthcare insurance situation translates to all types of insurance, if you think about it. Insurance companies make money in two ways:

1. By taking your premiums and investing them, such that even if they have to pay out more than you’ve paid in, they made a profit on the investment. (This is how most life insurance policies work.)


2. By simply taking in more than they pay out, which is a big problem.

It’s a big problem because, as anyone can see, it behooves the insurance company to deny all the claims it can. This results in companies putting all kinds of fine print in the contracts, so they can weasel out of paying you. The more egregious companies deny even legitimate claims, forcing you to fight them to receive your benefits, knowing that many customers won’t bother to question it.

In the case of a healthcare insurance organization, it achieves its greatest profit by letting people get sick and die without treatment. If you get sick, and are denied a claim, you could try and switch to a different insurance company; vote with your feet, as the saying goes. Except now that you’re already sick, the new insurance company says you have a pre-existing condition and denies you insurance, or worse yet accepts your premiums and denies your claim.

I’ll say it again: insurance companies achieve their greatest profits by letting people die.

In the case of a public plan, though, that wouldn’t be a problem. The government doesn’t care about turning a profit. Politicians will complain if the plan loses too much money, but in the end if a program is popular no politician will vote to remove it. (See also: Medicare, which is the sort of “socialized medicine” that right-wing politicians hate, but which they’ll never get rid of because seniors like to vote.) So there’s no incentive to deny your claim because you already had cancer when you signed up, or because you accidentally mispelt your PCP’s name on the paperwork. They may haggle with providers over rates, and you may have a deductible, but they’ll approve almost anything.

Oddly enough, I think it’s even more egregious that no one offers anything like this in the area of auto insurance. I can’t think of a state that doesn’t require you to have auto insurance in order to drive, but do any offer a public insurance option? (I honestly don’t know, and am too lazy to look it up. (I am not a very good journalist.) Delaware does not, to the best of my knowledge. Seems like the kind of thing California or Massachusetts would do, though.)

I guess putting all insurance in government hands would put insurance companies out of business, but, frankly, screw ’em.

Eek. I find this letter from the director of the Congressional Budget Office to be disappointing:

Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.

Read at least the first few pages for more detail. I’m frustrated because one my big arguing points on the subject of universal healthcare is that it would save money, long-term; it may not. Does that mean it’s not worth insuring the millions of un- and under-insured Americans? I don’t know.

Some good news, however, on the media front:

What just happened in three short days?

With one statement about the “public option” from Obama, the entire health care reform discussion shifted totally away from the right wing crazies and Palin’s “death panels” In just three days with one statement about the “public option”, liberal Democrats who stood on the sidelines and barely jumped in to the death panel discussions, have finely stirred off their duffs to get into the fray and argument.

In just three days, the media has shifted its coverage away from the crazies and the lies and finally, some meaningful media attention to the real issues on the health care reform effort. In just three days, the whole debate on health care reform has turned around and hopefully, now the debate and discussions can be about the real issues and real health care reform can happen. Meanwhile, the ultra conservative right wing has been stymied. Obama is brilliant!

Huh.

So I’m lifting in the gym earlier, doing my leg press so that I don’t look like this poor fellow, and another fellow comes in. He’s wearing regular street clothes, so I’m thinking he’s one of the “light workout” types, comes in for a few reps on the nautilus at low resistance, and then leaves. But no.

He strips his polo off, revealing the beater underneath, and drapes the polo on one of the weight benches, adjusting it to angle. Fine so far. He then leaves it like that and lays down on ANOTHER bench to do some pretty serious benchpressing. Huh? Was he just…reserving the first bench for something? After the bench pressing, he takes the shirt off the first bench and drapes it over the bench press bar, and then gets a paper towel and puts it on the first bench. He also retrieves two 35-pound dumbbells and sits them next to the bench. Having reserved his various pieces of exercise equipment for his personal use, he goes over to the nautilus and starts using one of those machines as well. What the hell?

What kind of self-centered prick do you have to be to reserve equipment you aren’t using, so that it’s free when you’re ready for it? If I’d known we could do that, I would have just pissed on everything to mark it ahead of time. What a dick.

Man, I’m in a mood today. I should stop doing steroids, probably.

No racism or anti-semitism at the town halls, huh? Sigh. Have they no shame? Don’t these folks understand that they are bad people for doing these things?