Even worse, but less worse that it could have been

We discovered that an ambulance ride costs more than rent now.  In Millennial terms, around 400 Starbucks coffees and 150 avocado toasts.  I need to start making friends with drug dealers.

By the gymnastic grace of God, there was same-day treatment and no permanent damage.

ICE has been in our area, but I haven't seen any personally--that I know of.

One thing in my home that I've been appreciating lately is a tall narrow garden trellis that we picked up for free from a neighbor who was moving.  Similar to these curved ones, but with four top spikes that each end in a small ball.

It fits very well in an awkward gap next to an awkward corner in the bathroom, we can hang towels off the spikes, and the trellis keeps them away from the wall.

The Goodwill doesn't really take garden furniture, so it is often given away.  I switched to a metal flower pot stand for my nightstand, and set a wrought-iron-style napkin weight? for picnics? upside-down in it to keep small items from falling through so easily, while still allowing most of the dust through.  I don't put water glasses there because the mattress is frequently used as a trampoline; small house, long winters.

I managed to paint a large picture frame and an office stand that we had picked up at other times, using old toothbrushes as brushes.  Uneven paint coverage, but I think that could be an advantage when trying to simulate marble.  A clear varnish of similar reflectance to polished stone would make it more convincing.

Storms it is

The snow somehow held off until we had finally gotten the yard stuff taken care of.  Since then there has been a whole series of domestic disruptions.  I've only just now gotten the house more or less in order, aside from the washer being broken.  

I happened to have picked up a short RV water hose from someone's curbside a few weeks ago, and so I  experimented with siphoning water out of the washer.  It sort of works if I get all the air out of the hose and bring the lower end down to a basin on the floor; it needs the difference in height to create enough suction for that size of hose, and it only worked for the top half of the water.  

After that, I experimented with using a short hose from the dehumidifier as a flexible water container:  lower entirely into the water, and then lift by both ends.  This worked, but the amount of water it can carry is very small.

I did wash a load of laundry in the bathtub using my antique Rapid Washer-style metal laundry plunger, and experimented with setting wire shelving over the laundry room sink as a place for draining water out of the laundry.  However, really, a stronger force than gravity is needed.

Future loads are waiting until the landlord deals with the washer in one way or another, or until I finish recovering from this cold.

I am appreciative now of two projects I did a while back, which was to take some free-from-a-neighbor bathroom tiles, and two wooden panels from a deconstructed TV armoire, and make two tiled panels:  one for the kitchen behind the wastebasket, and one for the bathroom between the toilet and the side wall; both protecting the walls against family members with bad aim.  Both panels are just leaning against the wall, not attached.  One I finished with grout in the tile joints, and the other with white caulk and a band of paint along the top edge.  Both are much easier to scrub clean than the wall paint, and being speckled white instead of weary beige, they help to brighten the rooms.

The painted wooden frame in the living room now has large red Christmas bells hanging from it.

The apples are for the most part keeping far better than I expected, given their condition when we picked them.  I haven't done much more than sort through them every week or so to pick out the ones that are going bad, and cook up the ones that are partly salvageable.

I realized a year or two ago that the purpose of food is not to be eaten, but to be available to be eaten.

Merry Christmas!

The table leaf worked out very well, although we had to turn the living room into a dining room with two tables to seat everyone.  A little too much work to set all that up again for Christmas, when it is just our own family.

Christmas is also going merrily.  The family sculptor improved on a gingerbread house's chimney by adding two Santa legs sticking out of it.

The oldest child has improved rapidly, and is scheduled for surgery in a few weeks to prevent a recurrence.

Set

I found several Georgette Heyer books at the thrift store, and remembering Practical Conservative's love of the author bought them.  Not my usual genre, so we'll see.

My life this fall has been apples, election, and hospital.  An acquaintance with a backyard orchard had a bumper crop this year, and we easily picked thirty bags' worth.  I learned how to make apple butter, and that is what I'm doing with most of them now.  It turns out to not be so easy to dispose of quantities of apple scraps in the city when you are stubbornly refusing to order and use the organics bin that you are being forced to pay for.

The hospital was for my oldest child, who is doing well despite taking a Grand Tour of the medical system across seven different sites this month, for a congenital issue that suddenly became a problem.  There is some lingering non-obvious aftermath, but she is chugging through most of the functional tests faster than I would. 

A neighbor gave me an old table leaf that is more or less the right size for our round living room table, and I put two coats of polyurethane on it.  I plan to have Thanksgiving dinner in the living room again; the house has no dining room and it is much more memorable than crowding into the kitchen as usual.  The next challenge is the table base:  it is a pedestal base--for an oak top that can be six feet long.  Someone in the past tried to reinforce the weak point by pounding in a lot of nails.  I think I can repurpose the frame of my old homemade dinner table, if I shorten the legs.  The hard part will be getting it into place around the pedestal and up under the table top's rails, but it shouldn't be too bad because the frame's legs are attached with removable pegs.

What we stock up for...

...is the next round of unpleasant unplanned major expenses and impediments.  Which has now begun.

The child in the hospital is doing much better, although still not out of the woods.  I don't know when he will be able to come home.  People from church brought us a lot of food, and are willing to bring more as soon as we need it, and on top of that some of them are real prayer warriors.

It has been also been good to have the new musical instruments around the house, to pick up and blow some air through now and then.  My littlest children very quickly learned how to get the trumpet to toot.  I looked up the manufacturer online, and the trumpet could be a century old.  Transitioning to an open-hole flute has been much easier than I thought it would be.

I had decided a while back to get going with the hand weights and some simple exercises again, despite being somewhat wiped out from anemia.  That has been helpful with the added workload of a sick child.

Biden fixes Affordable Care Act "family glitch" by fiat

This month the Biden Administration finalized an administrative workaround to somehow override the law and counteract the "family glitch" that left many families without access to health insurance subsidies.

"Four out of five Americans can find quality coverage for under $10 a month" the administration said in April, speaking of those receiving subsidies.

That's not what we've been paying all these years. 

There is conservative commentary here.

This move will create pressure for families to drop employer-based health insurance and switch over to the exchanges...particularly since inflation is high and prices are outrunning incomes.  Probably some employers will drop health insurance benefits entirely.  The "family glitch" was not accidental, and these consequences are not accidental either.

Too little, too late

By far, the most-viewed post on this blog is my Health Insurance post.  Mostly viewed by bots, I presume, but still.

Biden and Obama just had their little Obamacare celebration at the White House, which I saw variously described beforehand as "promoting" and "pushing" the Affordable Care Act, which is an odd way to talk about an epic piece of legislation that was passed en masse twelve years ago, and that supposedly is very popular, and that is also supposedly politically impossible to repeal.

There have been a number of articles recently about finally doing something about the "family glitch" that I described--where health insurance is deemed affordable if the cost of employer-based coverage for a single worker is within 9.5% of their income, and never mind if they are buying family coverage also--because they are not eligible to purchase coverage on the exchanges at all, on account of the coverage available through the employer.

Apparently Biden is about to solve this problem by executive order [Edit: here], and there may be legislative action later on. 

From what I've seen so far, the executive order would allow family members affected by the glitch to buy subsidized insurance on the exchanges, beginning with January 2023 coverage.  They anticipate that about one million of the several million glitched families would do so, along with maybe 200,000 people who are presently uninsured.

I'm sure that the administration will manage to mess up the implementation of this somehow.  This is especially likely when calculating subsidy amounts, since the exact amount ought to depend on how much the breadwinner is paying through their employer in premiums--which can change mid-year as the employee hits a birthday and moves up a price bracket. 

One feature of our present coverage is that after we pay the premiums for the first three children, the rest are included at no additional cost.  This has been the case across various plans from various insurance companies, but I don't know where it came from and I don't believe that it will necessarily be the case with the plans on the exchanges.

I'm not very happy about the idea of having different health insurance for different family members, and having to learn to deal with the exchange, and then perhaps actually having to do so.  It is complex enough when everyone is on the same plan, and when the employer's HR drone is handling the annual health plan shopping and application process.

People have been complaining a lot about the recent inflation, but the truth is that there is still a lot of slack in most people's finances that goes to things beyond the austere basics.  The Biden administration has to deal with the family glitch soon, though, because many of these families have had much less slack for almost seven years now.  The increases in the standard deduction and in child tax credits have only partially offset the premium costs in absolute terms, and the uneven distribution of subsidies created a substantial relative differential in disposable income.

Finally, this fix to the family glitch would only return our out-of-pocket premium costs to roughly the pre-Affordable Care Act level.  Obama promised that premiums would be lower by $2500 per year, remember?

Well???

There are ways that could be accomplished, but you can be sure that that is how it will not be done.

My turn, part 1

My turn to haul out the sob stories, I mean.  Aren't we all a bit tired of hearing them from the left for the past four years, and also the eight years before that, and the eight before that as well....

There was something in the newspaper from a week ago Sunday that set me off a bit.  A Hmong woman was telling about how when her mother was admitted to the hospital for COVID, for her first meal the nurses ordered a special meal for her that is the first meal that they serve to Hmong women after they give birth.  After that. her family brought in "culturally-appropriate" meals for her every day.

When I transferred to the hospital with my first baby, after giving birth at home, it was in the wee hours of the morning.  The baby needed some medical observation, nothing too worrisome, and I had lost somewhat more than the usual blood loss--but not so seriously as to need to go to the hospital by myself.

I may or may not have been given a breakfast that morning in the obstetric ward, after being up all night, but at lunch time I was given a tray, and I also had a bunch of doctors coming in and out, and I didn't feel comfortable eating in front of them.  When the tray-collector came around, I told her I wasn't finished with it.  Which you can take as meaning that I had had practically no free time for eating at all, because I'm not a slow eater.

When time was coming on for supper, I remember remarking to the nurses about 6:30 pm that I was looking forward to dinner, because by then I was quite hungry.  Two or three hours later, a nurse came in, found me slumped down (with baby safely tucked in at my side) and despondent, and asked, "What's wrong?"

"Starving," I murmured.  Supper had never arrived, and my blood sugar was falling.  My husband had been away dealing with home and things, so I had been alone in the hospital for several hours at least, and not wanting to bother the nurses.

She went away, and came back with a skimpy little sandwich, and an apple.  There may have been a little juice as well.  But that was it--no tray, and no dinner.

I called my husband after I had perked up a little, and told him to BRING REAL FOOD.  He eventually showed up, bringing me a meal from Wendy's--Wendy's, after being up all night and all day giving birth and then being in the hospital.

It may be of interest to some readers to know that my hemoglobin level was 7, and all they did for it was give me some iron pills.

I think we were able to go home the next day, but before that they did a jaundice test on the baby, which led to us returning to the hospital the following day for an even bigger s***show.

This time, the baby was an official patient, as I was not, but they gave me a room to sleep in, and the baby went to the nursery.  We got there in the evening, having had to drive very slowly through crowds from a sporting event who were unsportingly blocking the streets to the hospital, and who may have received some unsporting hand gestures in return. I sat up the whole first night with the baby; apparently one of the effects of higher blood loss while giving birth is that the post-birthing hormones are concentrated within a smaller blood volume, so I felt that this was within my capability, and I wanted to stay with my baby, and bond.  At 6:30 am, however, I was very tired, and went to bed.  At 7 am, while I was still awake, a very loud noise started up outside the window, my boarded-up window.  On a Saturday.  The hospital was building an addition, and just had to have the Giant Jackhammer going right outside what should have been my window, for several hours.  I don't even know when I was able to go to sleep.  I hadn't slept much the night before, either.

As a non-patient, the hospital was not even pretending to feed me, but my husband brought me little meals from the cafeteria, mostly hard-boiled eggs and hot dogs, and at some point my mother-in-law brought in two or three meals' worth of chicken stew, which I was able to refrigerate and microwave.

The baby's medical treatment was an additional s***show, and so was dealing with the rest of the dozen obstacles to breastfeeding that I haven't yet described, but we were able to go home again toward the very end of the third day.

So maybe you can understand now why I am triggered by that newspaper article.  It's no use complaining to the hospital I was at; it closed a couple of years ago.

A correction...

...has been made to this post (2nd post before this one). 

And I have to say, some of the links that I saw when I was trying to find an answer were rather confusing:  Nitrates in preserved meats are carcinogens, but nitrates in beans and in vegetables of the Brassica family are considered very beneficial, and you should eat them every day, because they have a "vasodilatory" effect?

These are the exact same nitrates chemically, as far as I know.  Or at least, I think they are in terms of what gets released from them into the body.  I could be wrong!

But I think the answer might lie in how these foods are eaten.  Traditionally, a high-nitrate plant food is eaten with a very moderate amount of meat, which was probably preserved by salting, drying, smoking, and/or some other traditional method.  In modern times, the meats have been increasingly preserved using nitrates--even the "low-nitrate" products typically use extracts from high-nitrate plants for preservation.

So if you eat a meal of say, regular bacon, beans, and collard greens, then you're getting a "triple dose" of nitrates.  That must be a shock to the body's systems, although perhaps the bacon fat slows down the nitrate uptake.  If you replace the bacon with something like a bean-based "meat substitute", then you still are in the same place...unless it is low fat!--in that case, you get the full nitrate load all at once.  This may explain much of the physical weakness and ill-health among some of the country's most careful eaters, as well as some of the country's most careless.

This merits further investigation, but before you go off and experiment on yourself, consider the tragic example of Seth Roberts, who I would call one of the greats of self-experimentation; I used to read his blog daily.  He died suddenly of something that was more or less a heart attack, while out hiking (in several ways it was very similar to the death of George Floyd, now that I think of it:  clogged arteries plus enlarged heart plus significant exertion), in the middle of a self-experiment that involved eating a diet that was very high in butter.

The way to do this more safely is to make a small change--such as taking a few small bites of a food--then wait for it to take effect, observe the results, and only then decide whether to take another small step in that direction, or to back off.  We are far too ungentle with our bodies in this culture.

Kevin Roche for Governor!

He puts in another round of slapping Governor Walz and the Department of "Health" around.   And they deserve it, saying things like this (via Power Line) about the youth sports mask requirement:

While some youth may experience shortness of breath, dizziness, or headaches until they acclimate to wearing a mask, these symptoms are not considered harmful. Masks can be safely worn, with the proper coaching and training, by young athletes.

Dizziness isn't harmful?  While they're playing sports??

Just as an experiment, I tried playing my flute while wearing a mask.  The air went everywhere except where I wanted it to go, and I couldn't get a sound out of it at all.  Wearing a mask while under physical exertion likely sends more air around the mask than through it, and at a considerable velocity...which makes this mask requirement a total charade.

Thanksgiving turkey

After the election, Governor Walz decided to play with the lockdown dials again, and did things like forcing the bars and restaurants to close at 10 pm, and restricting Thanksgiving gatherings to ten people.

Now he has new orders out, beginning tomorrow:  no informal social gatherings, indoors or outdoors; bars and restaurants take-out only; youth and adult sport activities shut down; gyms closed.  Retail and schools and child care and churches may stay open, although many are choosing to close.

I'm not a native Minnesotan, but I think it may be a bad idea to shut down both Thanksgiving gatherings and youth hockey leagues at the same time.

In his announcement Walz was making sad faces in the direction of the federal government, hoping that they will print more money and bail the state out.

The funny thing is, if you take the state's number of positive cases, and multiply by the state's estimate of undetected cases (a factor of ten), then it can be estimated that roughly half the state has had it already, and so the present daily increase in cases is very likely unsustainable, and would soon be falling even if the state did nothing.

But this way, Walz and his administration will get all the credit.

Paper towel outlook: poor

After the Affordable Care Act was passed, I quit buying paper towels as a protest.  

That protest will be continuing into 2021, as our health insurance is about to increase by 16%, after increasing by 15% last time.  

There are also some changes to the provider network; the base network remains the same, but the insurance company has created an additional, extra-restricted network, and an incentive for people to use it:  a lower deductible.

This annual ratcheting-down of services just to keep the costs on the painful side of "affordable" is not sustainable, especially when health insurance is required by law to provide coverage for a number of services.

Morning in Minnesota

Currently Biden is up by about 230,000 votes.  Apparently there were 1.8 million early votes; compare that to 2.6 million votes total in 2016.

Ilhan Omar won in her district, but with only about 65% of the vote this time, compared to 78% in 2018.

Our precinct was busy at the beginning of the day, but by the time I got there, there was no line and I had my pick of the voting booths.

Minneapolis had a few arrests, but no large groups of protestors as far as I know. 

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Some numbers on Minnesota hospital capacity finally appear:  908 COVID cases in hospitals; 203 of those in ICUs, and they are beginning to sound alarms about a lack of ICU staff.  If you remember in the spring, the state scrambled to get ICU capacity up to well over 2,000 beds.  The lack of staffing seems to be related to quarantines.  Many nurses are being asked to return to work before their 14 days are up.  Only about a third of those quarantined because of heavy exposure became sick.

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A quote I found interesting, about peasant life in 16th century Russia around the time of Ivan the Terrible:

In order to make their estates profitable and to fulfill their obligations to Moscow, both the boyars and the service gentry needed a constant supply of peasant labor.  This was assured only when the peasants were immobilized, attached firmly to the land.  The traditional means of binding them in this way was through debt; a landlord would advance money to a peasant and the peasant would remain on the land until his debt had been paid.  Legally, peasants could pay their debts after the fall harvest and move, taking service with another landlord who offered better terms or better land.  But in fact, peasants almost never earned enough to do that; most found themselves barely able to meet the interest payments on their debts, and they thus remained, year after year, in a condition little different from bondage.  -- Robert Wallace, Rise of Russia

Blame game

Kevin Roche:

Not only is masking not working, but the battle plan for the long-term care sector has failed and the defenses completely collapsed.  But never fear, it isn’t the administration’s fault, no, not at all, they had a great strategy and associated tactical plan, but, as we heard several times in the briefing, Minnesotans aren’t following the rules; we aren’t complying with the mitigation measures, so it is all our fault that cases are rising.  Aside from the complete subversion of democratic norms, this is most deplorable of the IB’s tactics–blaming the population for his completely incompetent handling of the epidemic.  But I expect we will hear a lot more along those lines over the next few days.  None of it is true; Minnesotans have been all too compliant with the terrorization campaign.

I also want to observe that our IB Governor is strangely mostly silent these days and is doing less threatening, notwithstanding the “alarming” rise in cases.  I strongly suspect that is due to Minnesota partaking in the rural uprising present throughout most of the country, an uprising which threatens his party’s hold on politics in the state.  And I also very strongly suspect, without being too paranoid, that if his party remains in some legislative control, he has some very nasty actions in store, probably to be unleashed as early as next week.  He has too much to lose by not continuing to pretend that this was and is a massively devastating epidemic that required and requires his thoughtless and irrational responses to protect the people.  His actions and the actions of like-minded petty dictators throughout the country are the source of the vast bulk of the economic, educational, health, and social damage perpetrated on the citizenry.

 

 IB is short for "Incompetent Blowhard", Governor Walz.

It's almost time...

 ...to find out how much next year's health insurance is going to cost.  Last year, the cost went up 15% while the services covered went down a bit.

Biden still has that bit that made steam come out of my ears last year on his campaign website, where he promises to increase Affordable Care Act subsidies for the families that already receive subsidies.

Trump's campaign site lists his administration's accomplishments in health care, but not his plans.

 

Putting things together again

No curfew in Minneapolis or St. Paul last night, only continuing violent crimes.

Coronavirus numbers in tests, hospitalizations, and deaths in Minnesota have held quite steady since mid-June. I suppose an uptick should be expected in early fall, once school and other fall activities get going a bit. Summer is very much the off season for most organized social activities around here, because the people who do the organizing go out of town to their families' cabins.

I made progress on many things last week.  I mended more clothing, and some knitted dishcloths, and a mitten. I aligned the reel mower. I moved two bags of toys out of the living room, back down to the basement where they belong. I established a better workflow for a refinishing project that I am working on, and am finally making progress on it. I found my what-to-do-next cards, which I had completely forgotten about, and am getting back into a routine. I am also easing into exercising with hand weights again.

I've been gradually moving some pieces of decor around, trying things in different places.

So, well, and Sowell

Minnesota's mask mandate began Saturday, by governor's fiat, but is being challenged by Republicans with a lawsuit. Also, it appears to directly contradict Minnesota law which bans masks and other disguises--unless the "medical treatment" exemption in the law is read as including infection prevention.

Cases and deaths are embarrassingly far below model predictions; deaths have not yet reached the level predicted for the end of May.

One of the Republican legislators remarked that the mandate should be at least be paired with further opening up the state.

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We've been getting cucumbers. tomatoes, peppers, and a few peas out of the garden.

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A few Thomas Sowell quotes, from Race and Culture:
 

Throughout history, one of the great sources of cultural achievement, both for groups and for nations and even civilizations, has been a borrowing of cultural features from others who happened to be more advanced in given fields at a given time....Exaggerated group "identity" makes copying others akin to treason.

If all differences between the earnings, occupations, and employment rates of different groups are simply defined as "discrimination," then it is circular reasoning to say that discrimination causes these differences, and compounded meaninglessness to quantify these "effects" of discrimination.

Government may use its power to forbid, coerce, confiscate, punish, or expel.  Goals achievable by these means are well within the effective control of government.  Goals which depend upon the creativity, skills, thrift, work habits, organizational abilities, and technological knowledge in the population at large are much less within the power of incumbent officials to achieve within a politically relevant time period.

How the Democrats will lose in 2020

Or at least, how they richly deserve to lose:  through the continuing slow-motion failure of the Affordable Care Act.  Democrats keep talking about health care and how it needs to be reformed, hoping that no one will remember that they were the ones who shoved that 1000+ page law through in 2009.  People who especially are being screwed by it:  young adults (subsidizing costs of older adults), parents of younger adults (having children staying on their plans until age 26), people getting health insurance through their employers (being ineligible for subsidies), single-income families (paying way more than Obama’s “affordable” 9.5% of income), and lower-income people nearing retirement age (paying far more than they can afford).

Out of curiosity, I looked into health insurance options in the high-unemployment coronavirus economy.  COBRA still exists, and now sucks worse than ever, because the ACA requirements generally raised premiums.  Thanks to Trump, there are now short-term plans available, but they may not count as having had “minimum essential coverage” when you try to get on a better plan later. Christian cost-sharing plans have not yet developed adequate fraud protections, I believe—without any evidence, just based on intuition. Going on Medicaid leaves the possibility open that the program could seek to recover the money it spent on you from your estate after you die, although at present they usually don’t bother to.

That leaves buying insurance yourself, either on or off the exchanges, or self-insuring.  My question was how a change in income would be reflected in a change in premium subsidy, for an exchange plan. It appears from this article that most of the time, an income change earns you a 60-day Special Enrollment Period, with subsidy re-calculation, aside from perhaps being required to report changes in income anyway. But with exceptions and changing rules and state-to-state variations, it just looks like a giant headache...one that could continue into next year with tax return preparation for tax year 2020, since the amounts of subsidies received versus subsidies qualified for have to be reconciled and squared up.

I’m tempted to think that the options presented there would be more understandable if they were presented in flowchart form, but there are too many unknowns. As I have said before, this system was designed to fail. It is simply too complex.

One minor point from near the end of the piece:  changing insurance plans will usually reset your out-of-pocket costs counter to zero. That’s a cost to factor in.

Pondering

Remembering all the sewing machine needles that have broken while in use, right in front of my face, I am thinking that I should be wearing better eye protection while I’m running it.

Usually a needle will break into two pieces:  one end still held in the clamp, and the other still held by the thread running through the eye, but there have been times when pieces went flying.

Looking back at coronavirus, and how it ties in

It’s now long enough since the state started opening back up that the predicted eruption of cases toward a late June or early July peak should have begun. I’m not seeing it yet in the graphs; new positive tests per day, hospital beds, and ICU beds are all basically flat.

I think that the protests may not have much of a net effect on the spread of the virus locally.  Thousands of people were out protesting and rioting, but hundreds of thousands were sitting at home under curfew. Less shopping went on overall because of stores being closed or destroyed, but there was possibly a higher concentration of people in the fewer open grocery stores; some stores were having whole shelves emptied out as people bought food to donate.

Floyd’s April 3 positive test was interesting, because at that time tests were scarce, and commoners were only tested if symptoms were present. From my post from just before Minnesota shut down, I’m reminded that he may have needed to have been exhibiting “severe symptoms“ to have been tested.

I was also sick around that time, but not tested, and my breathing isn’t great even now, although in my case mild seasonal allergies and extreme pregnancy are factors.

I just watched the New York Times’ compilation of videos around the arrest and restraint, until it froze up on me. What the video shows well is the sequence of main events from multiple perspectives. What it shows poorly are the real-time length of each event, and the flow from one thing to the next. The video is about half as long as the whole thing actually took to play out.