The health insurance post

For years, I avoided comparing our current health insurance premiums with those from the years before the Affordable Care Act went into effect.  I knew I wasn't going to be happy with what I found.

Finally, I dug out some numbers, and indeed I am not very happy with them.  Our premiums in 2018 were double those of 2012.  Our income rose during that time, but it certainly did not double.

Remember, the ACA was passed in early 2010, with most of it not going into effect until 2014--after the 2012 election.  Plus, my husband's employer did what they could with the renewal dates to delay adoption of ACA-compliant plans for their employees until very late in 2014.

This doubling of premiums was not for the same plan or coverage.  In 2012, we had a high-deductible plan (HDHP), which had the nice feature of a very high level of coverage once the high deductible was met, up to the lifetime limit.  There was a health savings account (HSA) offered, which we signed on for and used, and it worked out well for us to have that money saved, because we did meet the deductible that year.

Our plan in 2018 had somewhat lower deductibles, much higher premiums (doubled), along with much higher co-pays and co-insurance.  We had the option of a moderate reduction in premiums by going with a much smaller network of providers, but we ended up not doing that; snafu story omitted. We were a few years older, which added a bit to the cost.  Because of the ACA, there is no lifetime limit, but that requires that at least one of us can stay healthy enough to work and keep paying the premiums through an expensive and possibly medical scenario.

That has left us with theoretically "better" health insurance, but in a much worse position financially for actually using it and getting health care. Let alone all the other things that our very frugal family could be doing with an additional several thousand dollars a year; the ACA carries an enormous opportunity cost for our family.

Of the current crop of presidential candidates, Senators Warren and Gillibrand were in office when the ACA was up for vote, and both of them voted for it.  Neither of them is saying anything about the affordability of health insurance on their campaign website now. I find this a disappointment in the case of Warren, who co-authored The Two-Income Trap, and who knows a bit about the strained finances of American families.  She has chosen to focus her presidential campaign more toward other demographics.

As I have written before, my response to the passage of the ACA was to stop buying paper towels.  I figured that the passage of the ACA had cut ten years from my expected lifespan.  A couple of years ago, from a newspaper article I learned that the number of people buying insurance on the exchanges was about half the number of people who were going without insurance and paying the penalty instead.  (The individual mandate penalty has since been reduced to zero.) With a bit of mental extrapolating, I guessed that you could extend this 1:2 ratio to a 1:2:10 ratio:  for every person benefitted by buying health insurance on an exchange, there were about ten people who wanted to see Obamacare nuked from orbit.

That the Republicans, once they regained Congress, failed to repeal Obamacare was quite stunning to me, and is probably the primary reason for their losses of House seats in 2018.

In my research for this post, I learned that there is a phrase for our situation:  the "family glitch".  My husband's premiums with his employer-based coverage are "affordable" by ACA definitions, therefore we as a family are not eligible for subsidies in the exchange, even though our total cost is well above the "affordable" threshold.  Supposedly there are 2-6 million families in the same situation. That number looks a bit low to me, and probably there are millions of couples also affected.

I no longer bother complaining about these sorts of things, because I'm fairly sure that They are Doing Them On Purpose. If you remember, the ACA was shoved through to President Obama's signature quite rapidly, leaving little time for public comment or in-depth analysis. A law that long and complex is almost certainly bad somehow. It has been my opinion all along that the Democrats' intention with the Affordable Care Act was for it to pave the way for universal government-based health care. Their plan seemed to be that people with unaffordable health insurance would beg their employers to discontinue coverage, so they could then get affordable subsidized insurance on the exchanges. Edited to add:  Another piece of the plan was that the ACA mandated that people applying to buy insurance through an exchange would be funneled into a government health program if they qualified. Also, under the ACA, some hospitals can determine likely eligibility for government health programs, and sign uninsured patients up on the spot. From there, it would be a short step to universal health care.

What actually happened is that many people just tightened their belts elsewhere and made do, and then went out and voted Republican. Democrats have since proposed fixing the family glitch, but the fact is, that they have lost too many elections and no longer have the ability to do so. The Republicans in Congress certainly aren't going to help them; the ACA gave them back control of Congress...gift-wrapped.

I see in my analysis here further reason to doubt the long strings of stories in the media from 2016 to 2019 about how the election of Donald Trump to President definitely, for sure, had to be because of "Russian interference!".  After the Mueller report was released, the preferred explanation became "Racism!", now pivoting into "White Supremacy!". The idea that making millions of voters' health insurance even more unaffordable was a large factor in the Democrats losing the presidency is completely verboten.

Our other options for health insurance coverage are also unattractive. Buying insurance on the exchange without subsidies would cost more than we are paying with the employer's plan.  Medical sharing ministries are another possibility, but I have always felt hindered in my spirit from them; I don't know why, but possibly cheats and scammers are working their way into that field. We have avoided government insurance programs, for reasons that people who support the Right to Privacy and Right to Choose should understand. Also, in some cases some of these programs (Medicare, notably) can claim a share of a person's estate after they die, so they are not necessarily free money, but function more as an extended, no-interest loan for life.

I don't want government health care. I don't even want government subsidies for health insurance. What I want is to be able to buy the level of insurance that we can afford, and that best meets our family's needs. The government's job is to make sure that the insurance companies and health care providers play fair.

Garden update

This has been a rough year for the vegetable garden, as my husband was unable to work in his plot for much of the summer. Some fellow gardeners pitched in and helped with watering and weeding, though, and we are getting some things out of it now: cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, basil, peppers, and beans.  He had enough cucumbers and tomatoes to give some away, and in turn others have given us kale, summer squash, zucchini, and eggplant.

What I've been doing instead of exercising

August is not my favorite month. But since it is miserably hot, it is a good time for taking on a miserable project or two.

We had a small upholstered chair with worn-out fabric, sagging webbing, and, as I found when I started tearing into it, foam padding that was turning into powder.  Over the course of a week or two, I stripped it all the way down to the frame, and then dismantled the frame.

It was messy work, what with the dust and powdered foam. Also, de-upholstering involves dealing with large numbers of pointy little staples and nails and screws, most of which are difficult to remove.

In the end, what I am keeping from the chair is a small pile of fabric, a small pile of rough-sawn hardwood from the frame, and a few screws.  Also, I am keeping the legs. I try to bring things into my house that are made of good materials, ones that I can re-use later.

Direction

I've been thinking about the runner some more, and looking at the materials that we have.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I could pray and ask for one.

The answer that came back immediately was that I already had everything I needed to make it.

I take that as meaning that I should go with the best option that I have on hand, the repurposed jute, and for coloring it use acrylic paints that I have.

As I mentioned previously, knitting it will use the quantity of jute that I have most economically.  This knit rug will be going over the existing bits of carpet.

Earlier I researched possible knitting patterns, and did a test swatch. I think I can get away with using multiple knitting needles across the width, so I won't have to make longer needles.

The reason I was hesitating to use the jute is that it is not really a very strong or durable fiber.  But if I color it with diluted acrylic paint, that will help it a bit.

In a previous attempt to use paint as dye, I had problems with it not dissolving evenly, so this time I am going to thin it down more gradually, and it will probably help that I have better-quality paint than I did then.

Coming together

I am a bit amazed at how the bench and the table fit so well up against each other.

I've been brainstorming a list of runner possibilities. I have studied making homemade rugs for quite a few years, so I have plenty of ideas.  Here are some of them:

Use the jute from my crocheted bedroom rug to make a rug that goes over the carpet remnants. I've already unraveled it. To make it cover the area that I want probably requires knitting or weaving; crochet uses much more fiber to cover a given area. Then I would dye it to the color I want.

Overdye the carpet remnants.  Did you know that dyeing your old wall-to-wall carpet was possible? The internet says that it only works for nylon or wool, though. The way to tell if it's nylon is to take a little bit of the fiber off, and burn it (under controlled conditions, of course).  Supposedly burning nylon should melt and form a small, clear bead on the burnt end. The other way is to immerse it in a little chlorine bleach overnight; if it is nylon, the bleach will eat it away entirely within 12 hours. So the internet says. Wool will smell like burning hair when it is burnt.

When I tried the burn test, however, it didn't look like nylon to me--I think it is probably acrylic--and in any case, it is dirty and probably wouldn't take dye very well.

Make a braided rug, probably from wool yarns. This would be somewhat time-consuming, and definitely expensive. The advantage of using yarns over fabrics is that you don't need to fold the raw edges in, so it goes much faster.

Weave a rug.  That requires finishing my current weaving project, which is currently stalled at 25% complete.

Flip the carpet remnants over and paint the backing, which is woven plastic. I'm not sure how well the paint will adhere, though, and I would consider this a temporary solution at best. The painted texture is not going to sit well with some family members.

Find a used runner and overdye it.

Use my drawer full of shrunken wool clothing, which could be cut up and applied to a backing and dyed. I did a bit of searching for local sources of industrial felt, and haven't really found any.

Buy enough yarn to get started, and knit a rug in a loop stitch.

Buy a length of canvas, and make a floorcloth.

An art

I made "an art" to put on the wall in our school room.  Because the room is full of varnished wood furniture, I decided it would be a painted piece.  The chair below it set the scale for the size. The rest of the room is very organized and regimented and visually weighty, so I wanted to do something in a looser sort of style, and much lighter, in a textured sort of way.

These considerations led me to playing around with string and paint left over from my wall doily project.

I got out rubber gloves and a piece of giant graph paper, turned the ball of string into a looser ball of string, and kneaded paint into it. It would have been better to make a looser coil of the string, tying it in a couple of places, and to make the end more findable; it ended up rather tangled, and untangling gooey string was a challenge, although I was able to get it mostly straightened out.

Then I started laying the string out on the paper in a big oval shape, in a loopy sort of way, around and around. At this point the toddler woke up, so I pushed through the rest quickly, ending by patting the string down hard onto the paper to make it all cohere.

When it was dry, I tore the paper away from the outside edges, but not from the center, which shows some interesting marks from being touched by the painted string.

I hung it up in its place, and it does all right there as a prototype--it has given me some additional and better ideas.

Nearly there

A few things remain to be done in our school room, but it is almost done.  My to-do list:

1.  Find or make a runner to replace the carpet remnants. I've found fabrics around the house with approximately the color I want, and have spread them out there to test it, and it does work well there. The challenge is that our budget is still basically zero. I have some materials that I could use to make a rug, but it would take a lot of dye to get the color I want.

2.  One of the lamps is a bit puny for the place it is in.  Also, its shade is beginning to fall apart.

3.  Make "an art" to go in that last empty piece of wall.

While I've been thinking about or waiting on these things, I've been getting back into some other projects, mostly sewing; the point of having the room "done" is so that the business of living can go on without having to think about it too much. I sewed some summer toddler clothes from my mother-in-law's leftover quilt fabrics, and turned an old knit skirt into a T-shirt for me.

Surfaces and accessories

The next step in the process of cozy-minimalization was to deal with the surfaces in the room. Some surfaces I am intentionally keeping empty, as places to put things down, or just to leave clear for breathing room. Most of the remaining surfaces are either for holding stacks of books, or various people's projects. So there was very little accessorizing that needed to be done, and I only used things that we already had.

Plants fall under the category of accessories, but I had mine in place already. I did repot one of them into a larger and nicer planter.

There were several leftover items that found homes in other parts of the house.

I found a mirror at the thrift store, to replace the one I took from my bedroom closet. It happened to be on sale, so the cost was just over $5. It is faux vintage, but still endearing in its inauthenticity, and I like it.

Walls almost done, and thinking about a runner

I filled the empty space on the wall with my elf house (which has acquired a few more elvish furnishings over the years). That puts it in a much more visible place than it was before. I also put the rope that I was hanging kid's artworks on back up. 

With those done, the walls are just about done.  There is one more area that seems to need filling.

I also backed up a step or two in the process and thought about what to do with the entry runner. We've had the landlord's carpet remnants there continuously, and I would like to do something different and better, in a very dark green color.

I remembered that we had some fake grass (aka Astroturf) in the garage. I never used it before because I didn't like the plastic texture, and because it sheds little bits around the edges.

But I pulled it out, and found that we have two pieces of it, one of which is almost exactly the size I want.  In color, it was quite a bit brighter than I wanted, although not as bright as I remembered it being.

Family opinion was deeply divided on the texture. Several of the children thought it was a perfect place for a picnic, and for scattering toy "flowers".  Another one joined me in hating the feel of the plastic.

One problem was discovered:  spills go straight down through it.  Since the runner is the place where most of the snowy boots get parked, it needs to have absorbency.  A second problem is that the bright color makes the rest of the room look faded and worn.

So I decided to put the fake grass in the bedroom of the children who love it--the carpet in there is a hideous greige--and keep using the carpet remnants until I find something better.

Minimizing the smoke detector

This is the one that is smack in the middle of a wall that is one of the room's main focal points.  The smoke detector is still there, I haven't moved it, but what I have done is to bring in strongly-colored and more attractive objects at a lower elevation, to draw the eye downward, and to let the white smoke detector visually fade into the upper wall.

This approach I would say is partially successful.  There's some empty wall space at a middle height that seems to want to be filled.

Mirror up

I decided to move the mirror from my bedroom closet to our school room. The mirror is just what I've wanted for the school room for a long time, while almost any old thrift store mirror would be fine for the closet.

I did some testing before I hung it, though, to see what would be reflected in it! This is something that Cozy Minimalism emphasizes.

As it turns out, the place beside the door where I wanted the mirror to be has good reflections from almost any angle, showing the bookshelves and lamp at the other end of the room, or the windows in the adjoining wall. It is also good to have something larger and shiny in the room; all of the other shiny things are small.