dazzleberry

It's like that at my aunt's house, except that their TV is always on Fox. My blood pressure creeps up just driving across the border into Oklahoma, because I can hear O'Reilly when I cross the Red River.

Actually, I prefer print (including electronic print) media to broadcast. It's easier to skim the sensationalism, which is what the majority of broadcast media is. I avoid the washington scandals and hype about the war-- I know where I stand on both and I don't need senate hearings or grim statistics to sway me. Blame-fests don't interest me (as in whether or not cops were justified in their 5-minute delay at Virginia Tech).

I'm a social scientist at the core of my being, and my pets are immediate social issues-- healthcare, education and the environment topping my list. I usually haunt the NY Times and Washington Post, and when I find an issue that sparks my interest, I generally hunt around for other opinions.

I'm probably more likely to read a right-wing rag than a left-wing one, even though my own political leanings tend towards the liberal. I go looking for what the other side has to say and decide whether I think their protests have any weight. Sometimes it sends me looking for a different nuance. Sometimes it makes me settle something into my principles. It's been recently that I've decided that I don't think there is a solution to the healthcare crisis that doesn't involve federal government intervention. I've looked for the benefits of Bush's proposal, and if anyone could draw blinking arrows around them, I'd expect conservative media to do it. And I havent' seen anything compelling even from them.

I guess I'm a rare person who actually enjoys politics. Policies piss me off royally sometimes, and ignorance gets deep under my skin. I have my pet issues, though, and I watch them like a hawk.

For example, healthcare is one of my pet issues.

Whoever comes up with a viable plan to get every single American insured is very likely to have my vote.

That quite aside, though, I miss sitting in coffee shops and calmly debating international policy with my friends. Used to do that, but we all went our separate ways and now I don't know anyone who cares to do that.

I don't understand our health care system; I don't understand our defense system; I don't understand so many of the issues I'm supposed to be considering

I think that's probably why I'm so passionate about my pet issues. Working in the healthcare industry, I see daily the burden of the astronomical costs. Ours is a mid-sized hospital, and we bill something like $6 million in charges every day. In a town of 100,000 people. I see the cycles we get into-- even when we want to lower our charges, we can't because our contracts with insurance companies are negotiated based off our charging scheme, which, in turn, is based off how Medicare pays us. If we lower our charges closer to cost, we suddenly find ourselves unable to recoup expenses because we've negotiated rates with healthcare giants. As a concrete example, we have a new implant device that has a hard cost (our cost-- what the hospital pays for the little metal thing) of $25,000. In order for Medicare to pay us that $25,000, we have to mark the damn thing up to $55,000. The director keeps looking for any way to avoid attaching a $55K price tag to anything, and there's no way around it that doesn't involve us losing $15,000 a pop. And since Medicare is the whale in the swimming pool, we have to play by their rules. And if we charge Medicare $55,000 for it, we have to charge Aetna $55,000 for it. Only Aetna is going to pass 25% of our charge to the patient, so the patient's coinsurance is $14,000 for this thing (which is a pacemaker type of thing). And God forbid anyone without insurance needs one. It's like, to stay afloat, we have to mark our already-high costs up to exhorbitant charges so that when insurance pays their percentage, we'll recoup our costs.

And, the more we charge, the greater the risk to insurance companies, and the greater the risk to insurance companies, the more they charge in premiums, and the more they charge in premiums, the fewer people who can afford it, and the fewer who have insurance, the more who are on government plans that pay the worst, and the smaller the number of people on private insurance, the bigger the burden on that segment of the population to support everyone else.

/soapbox

I have a similar one in storage for education issues, and another for environmental ones.

Books?

Still on my regency kick.

I've been reading Gaelen Foley's Knights Miscellany. It's...

Individually, all the books (seven of them) are very good. They lack cohesiveness as a series, though, and after seven of them, I got awfully tired of weepy heroes. The first two were heartbreaking, but I think I got immune to the emotion.

Also been reading Eloisa James's four sisters series. Enjoying that one immensely. No complaints at all. Individually, the books are wonderful, and the over-reaching story arc of the series is spectacular.

Also read Jillian Hunter's Boscastle series. I don't know why I keep buying those books. They're terrible. But I buy the damn things and read them. I think it's the series story that has me hooked there, because individually the books are fairly forgettable.

Katie MacAlister has a pair-- Noble Intentions and Noble Destiny (can you tell I like series?) that kept me rolling. Her heroines were so refreshing.

And I just finished one by Jacquie d'Alessandro-- Love and the Single Heiress. It was really, really good. All romance novels' storylines are fairly interchangeable of course, so it's all about writing style and characters. The heroine in that one was a widow with a disabled child, and the hero was simply perfect (perhaps a little too perfect even).

So yeah. Why do I spend so little time in front of the TV and online? Because I spend it all reading trashy romance novels :)

And I am still writing. I've got the original simmering while I work on another for a while. Mostly running clean-up duty on the original, and I get immune to my errors after a while.

What have you been up to?

I wish it hadn't happened, but I prefer to know about these things when they do

This is very true. I just really miss being around people who are willing to discuss topics more far-reaching than Grey's Anatomy. It never really bothered me when I had my coffee-house collection of friends who bounced around between literature and history and politics and religion. Used to spend hours and pots of coffee hashing out election issues.

My gripe about the voting ignorant is that they don't seem any more knowledgeable about issues in October of election years than they do in July of off-years. It just annoys me.