Health Care Questions

I went through most of the July health care bill. The most interesting thing to me was how our government intends to irresponsibly pay for the new health care system.

In all, the bill will set up at least 8 trust funds to pay for the program totaling $2,352,000,000. However, I don't think that amount is the irresponsible part. There are successful companies in the world that have outgoing numbers in that range (of course, they have more than that coming in, too). The thing that says, "What kind of 9 year old mentality is spending our tax dollars?!!!" is this phrase which follows the establishment of each trust fund: "There are hereby appropriated out of any moneys in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated..."

What?!

Anyone try that with your budget?

"Honey, want to buy a new car?" "Oh, yeah! Will it fit into our budget?" "Oh, I'll bet so. We'll just take whatever we have left over at the end of the payday and put that toward the car payment."
I think wisdom here says that if we have to do unwise things to accomplish something, it's probably not a wise goal to reach for. Basically, these are the things debt is made of - I've already given my thoughts on that here.

Mole hill out of a Mountain

Last year I put this post up about some work I was doing on our bathroom. My wife knows me very well - we have been married for over 10 years now. She told me she didn't want it to take too long, she didn't want me to go too overboard, and she didn't want to be stuck with one bathroom for a long time. Well, honestly, we only went with one bathroom for a short week or so.

However, November 19th will be one year and I'm trying hard to beat that date! I'm really close now thanks to the help of a plethora of friends. Standby for pictures...

Hold on. The suspense is killing me, too!

Somethings wrong with the counter!

I just noticed I've had over 11,000 hits on my blog since August. Either that thing is broken, or the big brother is watching me for bad-mouthing the president. I know it's not because my thoughts are that interesting to read.

It wasn't really a lie... really.

I read an article on Fox News.com today that shed more light on something President Obama used in the post-break, Health care-reform, motivational speech. At one point, he was giving examples of the atrocities of our current health care and health insurance systems. He ran a list of several people that had their insurance removed at a critical time or that were denied coverage for something important; all the examples truly seemed like atrocities.

However, because of my presuppositions about President Obama I told myself that while his points and examples were extremely convincing I should just wait and see how things unfold.

Here's the unfolding:

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama, seeking to make a case for health-insurance regulation, told a poignant story to a joint session of Congress last week. An Illinois man getting chemotherapy was dropped from his insurance plan when his insurer discovered an unreported gallstone the patient hadn't known about.

"They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it," the president said in the nationally televised address.

In fact, the man, Otto S. Raddatz, didn't die because the insurance company rescinded his coverage once he became ill, an act known as recission. The efforts of his sister and the office of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan got Raddatz's policy reinstated within three weeks of his April 2005 rescission and secured a life-extending stem-cell transplant for him. Raddatz died this year, nearly four years after the insurance showdown.

I know that all politicians spin in their favor, which is exactly why I'm a Republican. The less politicians are in control of, the better. I think we are all much better at running and dealing with our lives ourselves.

What can we learn from this?
1. The government can take some steps to ensure people aren't wronged. In this case, the government did their appropriate part.
2. Clearly, "taking steps" should mean creating reasonable boundaries to ensure righteous business practices. Again, that was done is the above case. If the gov wants to do a little more, that could be a good thing, possibly. Bring that to the congress and the American people will probably support it.
2. "Taking steps" should not mean mandating insurance, forcing insurance on people, or providing it for free.

Coming out in the wash

Here are some things that went wrong during our vacation to the land of 10,000 lakes:
1. woke up an hour and a half later than we should have to make our plane to Minnesota
2. there weren't any Harley's available to rent for anniversary ride
3. we lost Nori's DS
4. we lost Candi's wallet
5. we lost Dale's sunglasses and sweatshirt
6. the pool was in bad shape the Friday before the Sunday Wing-a-Ding

But...we made our plane, two bikes became available and the ride was awesome, we found the DS and the wallet, and the pool was great the day of the party (I wish I had pics of the three performing amigos!)

I ended up finding my sun glasses in the Target "glasses" section and I have plenty of other sweatshirts. All in all, it was a great experience for our kids to see that patience, peace and faith are much better than stressing and striving (not to mention that it was good for God to teach Candi and I that, too).

By the way, the list of things that were great about our vacation is too large to write here. I miss and love you, my family.