Farmers get health care via a variety of means, depending upon their means and quite often their spouse's employment. Itinerant farmhands dreaming of rearranging the world have even fewer options.
I've felt pretty darned good these last few weeks, until I took a little tumble yesterday. Being inside has given me time to ponder the national shame that is our current health insurance system.
I knew the dock was in need of a rebuild; Chuck had said this several times. A big diesel pickup pulled up with fifty bales hay and off we went to unload – the delivery guys in the truck tossing it onto the dock, Chuck and I hauling it back and stacking, while Phil (lower right) was supervising. Phil takes his hay very seriously – especially the way this winter has gone; someone stole six hundred bales from a remote storage area. That is fifty days supply and $1,800 to $3,600 on the open market depending on where they sold it – a very, very painful loss.
I was fine until the last bale, which I picked up, then I and fifty pounds of hay went roughly straight down about three feet right through some rotted boards.
I landed hard on my oft abused left ankle, giving it a two hundred thirty pounds (me + hay) dropped from three feet twist, making a tennis ball sized upraised bruise on my right leg, and then catching myself with straight right arm, jamming my wrist and antagonizing my right rotator cuff, long ago weakened in a car crash. I limped off the playing field, Chuck came and applied his paramedic skills ensuring there wasn’t anything broken, gave me an ice pack, and went back to work; animals don’t care if you’re sick or hurt, they want to be fed and in some cases milked.
I’ll take it easy for a day or two then I should be back to work. I was very luckily wearing my well traveled pair of Asolo Fugitives when this happened and I had them laced nice and tight. Had I been out doing chores wearing the usual waterproof knee boots instead of these I’d be nursing a no walking sprain or perhaps a break. Chuck had a similar event a few days back – he is limping from catching the chain from his saw when it came off the sprocket.
Farm work is hard work. I am not at all surprised about the chainsaw bruise on the inside of my left leg, the shovel bruise on the inside of the left, and I’m sure logs and sheep are responsible for all of the other marks on my legs. Some of this sort of thing will pass as I get stronger and get used to handling the saw again, but most of it is just farm life – you get banged up on the regular.
Health care is a huge concern here. I’ve been nearly sucked under by a sneaky devil of a parathyroid tumor and Chuck has faced similar travails with Lyme disease. Both of us have been labeled drug addict/drug seeker rather than treated. I’ve had the junk insurance failure experience and the state Medicaid disaster, documented here. Chuck prefers to self treat and soldier on alone. Both of us would have dramatically benefited from easily available health care via a single payer system.
I can’t stress that enough: a single payer system. Socialized medicine sucks. Do you understand the difference? Single payer means I select the doctor I want to use and if they’re fuck ups, like what I saw with Iowa Care, I go somewhere else. Socialized medicine is what I experienced with the state of Iowa and what our veterans face every single day. They have one place to go and if the doctor can’t ... or won’t care for them, they’re screwed.
The medical insurance system in this country today is a tool for corporations to control their costs for workers. Once you get a job you’re trapped ... unless the corporation discards you, and then you’re screwed. The pre-existing condition game is all part of the scheme – if you actually need care the corporation you’d been conned into paying denies it and the one you work for ... well ... when they’re done with you good luck getting coverage elsewhere.
We face unprecedented troubles in energy, environment, and economy. Right now the way things are done people who could and would get off the corporate boat about to sink under the twin waves of energy costs and economy collapse are instead chained to deck chairs by health care concerns, unable to leap to the safety of some new career. Believe me, if I’d been making what I was making in 2001 I don’t know that I’d be out here on the road doing the things I am doing. I got pushed into the life I lead and I hated it for a long time, but thanks to various folks here and a lot of assistance from the crowd over at The Oil Drum I’ve gone from being a niche IP network engineer to (dare I say it?) a leadership position in the renewable energy field.
We, The People Of Progressive Tendencies, had ought to keep the flame tuned blue hot, and keep it on the lil’ feets of our collective representatives from right now until we’ve got a sensible health care system like the rest of the industrialized world. As the mortgage scam unwinds and the banking system deflates from all of the excess of the Bush years we’re all going to be making big changes – knowing you can try something new without cutting your own throat on the health care from is going to be absolutely key in freeing the creativity of the American people to deal with our changing world.