Or Why Nursie is glad there are not family dinners sometimes

 

Thankfully a night off. The lab coat and stethoscope hung on my hook for the night, and I spent some time just visiting with friends and stuffing myself. Nurses are good at stuffing themselves, you know, simply because you never know when you can take another bite (get it? bite).

There are several things nurses can detect with their keen sense of smell in no particular order. The first is when someone on the unit poops themselves, someone with a GI bleed, Pseudomonas, and of course if someone brings food. Usually, on the food part, it is all of us that bring in a little potluck.  They roll out the buffet for day shift, and half the time it is served by the hospital administration who smiles at you and makes small talk and you get to take “a little break” from work to enjoy it. Nights, as always, you are lucky if food stays warm and you get a bite between call lights. In all this, I am not bitter. I like night shifts for this reason as well. Administrators are weirded out by us and want to sleep at night more than they want to drag their butts in, which in the end is good. They could send the buffet though…

Last night, someone pulled me away from dinner and attempted to engage me about the ACA. There are a lot of reasons I am for it, but everyone else only sees the tax penalty. The comment I paid over $4000 in penalties for my family. Wow, did you listen to your stupidness, or think about the fact that you can actually get carted off to jail for not having insurance on your car as a penalty? Yeah, the insurance exchanges aren’t cheap, and I know that. Insurance companies are way eviler that I am or Igor when his mouth gets going (Don’t mess with a Creative Writing major who’s also a drag queen). Trust me I tried working for one, I thought they’re evil and I’m evil, so it’s a match made in heaven.

My boss, Beelzebub, was a nice enough guy, just a little too evil, even for me. Back to the stupidity. So, you would rather pay the penalty than properly insure your family? Family values my ass. Let that sink in…a man with all the usual family values crap, on his Facebook page (as well as the usual anti-Obama stuff), tells me, he would sacrifice his family’s health and pay the penalty to the same government that he is against. Oh, the logic just escapes people. I will tell you, dude, that martyrdom sucks. I hate it when they try to put wooden stakes in my heart, that’s why I had the local forests removed. These are reasons that make me want to get out the good cape and terrorize villages. The mandate is there to keep the cost down by requiring the insurance, just like car, house, and other types of insurance (weird concept, I know). Yeah, ya know, so your selfishness doesn’t get to say, screw it, I am not going to play, but everyone else can shoulder the burden of my irresponsibility with my health (Sounds like the bs they say about entitlements/welfare and so on…). Ugh, my fangs grow when I get angry… The problem here is that everyone wants to win without playing the game. Paying out your hard-earned cash sucks, until you really have to pay it out for a catastrophic illness, surgery, major accident, or death (Yeah, I went there). Nursie told you about this before.

Ok, so how are we shouldering this burden? Well, higher hospital charges. If you are uninsured and cared for in a hospital, they will bill you of course, but who has 10k just laying around? If you do, you can send it to my pay-pal account, it would help. The chance that you will be able to pay that bill in any short order is minimal, so they charge it off, so bad debt to them and you. Enough people do that, and voila, the hospital says, “we have to charge those big insurance companies more because the unwashed masses aren’t paying their bills.” It’s a vicious cycle. I guess with all that coming to an end, good luck? I think my freedom is better served by some level of personal responsibility and as my mom used to say, “if you can’t do it yourself, I will have to help you do it.”

I will avoid much more politics here. Look, if you want to sacrifice your own health, it’s not ok. Whether you like it or not, you are getting older, I can hear your creaking joints from here. Your body is not going to stay in fabulous shape, and there is a good possibility that you are going to start spending money on healthcare or die. The burden is enormous without insurance. If you can’t pay it, they will come after your family to recoup their money. Insurance companies are like this, they really love their money, and they love making it and not spending it. The rest of the ACA that was “struck down” really is as beneficial and more. The pre-existing conditions alone make this law worth saving, but alas it is not meant for immortality like me…

Have a Merry day with family and friends from my hellhounds, Igor, and me.