The GirlAlive Blog

About My Book

Okay, so I’ve referenced the book that I’m working on a few times here now, and now that I have nearly 20,000 words on the page I’m willing to go public with what I’m writing about.

Actually, I’m working on 3 different books, but the one I’m furthest along on, and the one I’m enjoying the most is a book written for Americans to explain the things they will find in Great Britain that will annoy, confuse or surprise them. I’m covering basic things like words that are different (like pavement instead of sidewalk), to how the government is structured, to which celebrities the British talk about that the Americans have never heard of. I’m trying to make most of it funny and light, a bit like my British Food web site.

I’m also planning to intersperse my text with famous quotes about Britain, and maybe some original illustrations. I don’t have a publisher. If there are any interested, let me know. If need be, I will self-publish. (The actual publication could still be a few years off, realistically.)

Also, I don’t have a title. If you come up with a title for me and I use it, I’ll make sure you get a free copy and a mention in the “thank you” section. If you can think of anything about the British that annoyed, surprised, delighted, or confused you, feel free to post it in the comments, or hit me up on Twitter or Tumblr. I’ve already done about 160 topics, but there’s always a chance I’ve missed something.

So that’s what I’ve been working on that has kept me from posting here and on my book review tumblr as much as I should. With the help of a netbook I can use while I’m still in bed, and my patron saint of writing, Neil Gaiman, I’m actually properly determined to finish this book and see it in print.

The Core Reason We’re Angry at Banks

This morning I was researching some quotes about Great Britain for a book I’m working on, and I came across one that is of no use to me for my book, but it is perfect to demonstrate why people have occupied Wall Street and why people all over the world are closing their bank accounts in protest.

“There is another way we’re getting behind business – by sorting out the banks. Taxpayers bailed you out. Now it’s time for you to repay the favour and start lending to Britain’s small businesses.” – David Cameron (Prime Minister and leader of the British conservative party)

This is the core of why we’re angry at banks. We, as taxpayers, bailed them out and kept them from collapsing. In return, the government and the people expected that the banks would be grateful and invest back in the people who helped them.

Instead of investing in the people, the banks took the money and ran with it. They raised interest rates, and started denying more loans and mortgages, using their new favorite phrase “credit crunch”. Instead of using the bail-out money to rebuild the economy from the base, which was the intention of the bail-out in the first place, they used the bail-out money to pay huge bonuses to their executives. Then they started adding more fees to people’s accounts, claiming that they “had a right to make a profit.”

But do they really have a right to make a profit, when they have done nothing to pay back the huge pile of taxpayer money that they eagerly gobbled up?

Basically, what the American people are saying is, “We want our bail-out money back.” Whether it is in the form of the banks actually paying the money back to the government from their now multiplying profits, or in the form of making banking more affordable to the people who paid that tax money — one way or another, we want our money back.

Who will pick up the slack when the church fails?

I was raised a Republican and a Christian, as are many Americans. When I would ask questions like, “Why don’t the Republicans support social services for the poor, when Jesus spent so much time helping the poor?” I was given answers that, at the time, made sense to me. I was told that Republicans did not want the government serving the poor because that was the church’s job. You get a better society when people have to give to charity voluntarily to help others rather than just taxing them.

In theory, this sounds great. But let me tell you a story. In 2001 I lost my job. I was living alone in Seattle and my closest family was 1600 miles away. After I had been unemployed for about 6 months, I was diagnosed with a huge ovarian tumor which may or may not be malignant – they couldn’t tell until they took it out. I was scheduled for surgery in the first week of August.

A few weeks before my surgery I got a letter from my health insurance company saying that I owed them about $600 in back payments on my COBRA coverage and if I didn’t pay it immediately, my insurance would end July 31. So if I didn’t find $600 ASAP I would have a choice between cancelling the surgery or ending up in about $35,000 of medical debt.

I mentioned this financial problem at my usual Thursday night Bible study. They prayed for me and, unbeknownst to me, one of the leaders of the group went to the pastor and told him about my need, which he then referred to his “benevolence committee.”

The next Sunday I was pulled aside after the service and brought into a dark back room with 3 members of this committee. (Keep in mind that I didn’t ask for their help – someone else had asked on my behalf.) They interrogated me for about half an hour. They demanded to know how many jobs I had applied for and where, and if I was applying for low-level jobs and if I was registered with any temp agencies, and how many and which ones. I was in tears by the time they were done making me feel like a failure as a human being. I lived all alone 1600 miles from everyone who cared about me. OF COURSE I WAS LOOKING FOR A JOB. I HAD NO ONE.

At the end of the meeting they reluctantly agreed to pay my COBRA bill (and absolutely not a cent more) if I brought the bill to the church office and they would write a check directly to the insurance company.

This kind of cold and stingy treatment would be understandable if I was a stranger wandering in off the street asking for help. I had attended this church for three years. I had been on mission trips with them. I was a member of a small group. Even when I was earning near minimum wage and barely getting by, I still tithed 10%. And this is how they treated me, when I hadn’t even asked them for money. Someone else did.

This is how churches treat their members: like con artists who are trying to rip them off. Imagine if you are poor and hungry and not a member of a church. Who will help you then? If churches won’t even help the people that they supposedly trust, why would they ever help the poor that they don’t know?

I believe that this is what has happened to churches because they associate themselves with the Republican party. They have allowed the money-worshipping capitalist doctrine of their chosen political party to infect the church, completely ignoring the actions and teachings of Christ. They have been told over and over that people are poor because they are not working hard enough or not trying hard enough. That’s how they treat people. If they really lived by the Bible, they would know that people are often poor by no fault of their own, because we live in a broken and fallen world.

As I’ve grown older and had some time away from the US to really examine what both sides are saying, I cannot support the Republican party. (I’m not really a Democrat either – I think both parties are beyond corrupt.) They have adopted Christian rhetoric only when it suits them, and they have attached themselves to anti-abortion causes only to lure believers into a party that, at its core, represents greed and violence. The Bible says that you cannot serve both God and money. More and more I believe that you really cannot serve both God and pure capitalism.

So I guess this is me, formally renouncing the Republican party.

I’ll throw a few links here at the bottom. Most of them will be from my Tumblr.

Financial Sector Profits Roar Back
A History of Bank Mergers in America
Abortion Tactics and Conflicted Moral Ambivalence
Everything summed up in three graphs
Corporate Tax Dodgers

Why Health Care in America is So Expensive

To start with, let me give you an idea of my credientials in this area. I worked for a PPO network in the state of Washington for about three years. Then I spent a year working for a midwestern health insurance company. Then I moved to Scotland and worked for the NHS for a few years. I have gathered enough information at these jobs to understand why an aspirin from the drug store costs about 3 cents, while the same aspirin in a hospital costs $35.

When a doctor opens a general medicine practice, they go around to all of the major health insurance companies and apply to be a Preferred Provider. In some cases, if they’re part of a big clinic, that clinic makes them automatically signed on as a Preferred Provider. The Preferred Provider agreement that they sign with the health insurance company means that they promise to be generally a pretty good doctor, and in exchange, the health insurance company guarantees to pay them for their services according to a set fee schedule.

Let’s make up a doctor. Dr. Smith just joined up with SuperClinic, and so he is on a bunch of Preferred Provider lists. This means that he gets a ton of new patients and he is guaranteed to get paid by all of them. He decides that he wants to charge $50 for every 15 minute consultation. The fee schedule from the health insurance company will only allow him to be paid $40 per appointment, but that’s ok. He just writes off that extra $10 as a business loss, because as part of the Preferred Provider network, he can’t bill the patient for it. If a patient comes in without insurance, he charges them the full $50 and gets it.

A year goes by and the health insurance company revises their fee schedule. The fee schedule is set based on the average that doctors are billing and the health insurance company finds that doctors are charging more than $40, so they raise their rate for a consultation to $50.

Now Dr. Smith is getting a full $50 for every insured patient and $50 for every uninsured patient. He decides that’s great, but he could be making more. If he raises his prices, he gets to write off some loss from the insured patients, and get more cash from the uninsured. So he starts charging $60 per appointment. If you are his patient, and you have insurance, you never even notice that he raised his prices because your insurance company handles all that.

This occurs every year. Health insurance companies do not pay doctors based on the actual cost of providing services, but based on the average that doctors decide to charge. Doctors have figured this out, so most of them continually charge just slightly higher than the insurance company will pay, in order to ensure that they get themselves a raise every so often.

This same thing happens with hospital services. They started out billing insurance for the actual cost of an aspirin, but then found that they could get more just by telling the insurance company that it cost more, even if it didn’t. Whether they charge $0.30 or $30, the health insurance company pays it.

Because the health insurance company is throwing money around to doctors and hospitals, they have to charge their customers more. And refuse coverage to anyone who is likely to need to go to one of these expensive doctors or hospitals. It is a free market, so the doctors have the right to charge whatever they want, and the health insurance companies are powerless to say, “That aspirin didn’t really cost that much.”

This growing number of people who can’t get insurance end up having to pay the full price for a doctor (which is more than the doctor makes from his insured patients). Those people end up bankrupt from major medical expenses, or they end up chronically ill because they can’t afford a doctor. People who are sick can’t work. So those people end up on welfare rather than just getting the health treatment that they need in order to get healthy and get back to work. This effects the entire economy of the US. Fixing healthcare in America is part of fixing the economy in America.

In a government-managed health care system like in the UK or Canada, everything is cheaper. The doctors are paid a generous yearly salary, based on experience and education. The government pays all of the expenses based on the actual cost of care rather than based on what the doctor feels like charging. So it costs a fraction of what it costs in a free market system for medical care, and it is available to everyone, regardless of pre-existing health conditions.

The American health care system also has higher base costs due to the fact that in order to deal with all of the health insurance companies, clinics have to hire billing specialists, who are trained in filling out insurance forms in order to get maximum money. There is no need for a billing specialist or any kind of insurance specialist in a government-run system. It all runs together as one large government-funded corporation.

I’m not saying that government health care is perfect. No system is perfect. But government-run healthcare can provide decent health services to the most people for the lowest price.

UPDATE:
In light of the Occupy movements, there have been a lot of articles analysing who is in the top 1% of incomes in the US. People in the medical field make up about 15% of the “one percenters”. Not only are regular people being denied healthcare, but it is primarily because a portion of medical practitioners are grossly overpaid. So again, the answer to wealth inequality and the poor economy in America should start with complete reform of the health care system.

I think I just caught tuberculosis on the bus.

Okay, so it has always been my understanding that when you get on a crowded bus and you have to sit on an aisle seat next to a stranger, the polite thing to do is to move to a free seat when the bus empties a bit. The guy next to me on the bus today apparently did not get that memo.

He got on early in my ride (I think near the center of Edinburgh). The bus was empty to the point where I could see empty seats in front of me by the time we got to Cameron Toll. And still the guy sat there next to me. Coughing and hacking like he might have tuberculosis. Coughing into his hand, and then resting it on the back of the seat in front of him. By Straiton, my back was starting to seize up from being stuck in the same position for, by then, about an hour. I was actually tempted to turn to the guy and tell him that there are plenty of free seats for him to spread his diseases to. But I’m way too introverted to do that. Instead, I’ll just whine on the internet about how rude and disgusting he was. He didn’t get off until a few stops before me. I dread to think what kind of foul diseases he has generously shared with me.

And yes, I washed my hands a lot when I got home. A lot.

“You look like you could be from Proctor”

In 2000 I went to Russia on a missionary trip with my church at the time, City Calvary Chapel (from Seattle). I was sick through most of the trip because of undiagnosed chronic stomach problems. Because of that, I was left in Moscow for several days while the rest of my group went on to Ryazan.

A few days later I joined the group in Ryazan and a man walked up to me and said, “You look like you could be from Proctor.” That man was Loren Harrison. He was from Duluth and had been told that a girl from Proctor (a suburb of Duluth) was part of our group from Seattle. He was kind and generous and in every way an example of a great Christian man. I found out that he went to the same church in Duluth as my parents, but didn’t really know them (it was a large church).

When I went back to Duluth for Christmas later that year I was able to introduce my parents to Loren, and also meet Loren’s wife and kids. My parents became fast friends with Loren and his family. In the intervening years, he has done missionary work all over Africa.

Loren suffered from a ruptured brain aneurysm earlier this week. He was airlifted to a hospital with skilled neurosurgeons in Minneapolis, but in spite of their best efforts, he never regained consciousness and passed away yesterday. He was 50 years old.

Loren loved helping people and did missionary work all over the world. He never saw an “us” and “them”, but understood that there are only different faces of “us”. Please pray for his family and friends as we are all struggling with losing someone so suddenly and so young. The world is a worse place with Loren no longer in it.