The Rusted Musket

The title isn’t an original thought, the original belongs to Jill Carattini who writes for the Ravi Zacharias “Slice of Infinity” newsletter.  I’ve been mulling over the nucleous of her September 25th posting since last week and have come to the conclusion that this is the kind of stuff you should share with others.

What I’ve been turning over and under is that mercy, basically is a beautiful thing to see in action; it’s virtuous, noble, pure, it’s great to be a part of.  There are other times though when the act of mercy is abhorrent, dastardly, ugly in our eyes.  A situation like this can be seen in the “compassionate release” of Lockerbei (Pan Am 103) Bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Magrahi to Libya; I’ll be honest, this is ugly mercy to me.  I feel like him escaping a murderers lonely demise in a Scottish cell for a hero’s welcome in Libya, even if only for a few days, makes for ugly justice.  But it is mercy none the less and this is what troubles me.  Jill Carattini writes, “Mercy is far less beautiful when its recipients mar the pictures.”  Often my infrequent acts of mercy are only during phases of controlled benignment, never when the benefactor is, in my eyes, marred; consistency zero, the virtue evades me.

I think of my Lord’s mercy towards me, a murderer in my own right, and the voice that says “judge not lest ye be judged”. I’m silenced, what to think…

I like it when cynical people write reviews, they tend to be blunt and honest.  If I buy this game early, like tomorrow’s release date, I’ll add some of my own cynical thoughts…

This story of a medical student using a sword to defend himself against an intruder kinda gives new meaning to the bumper sticker I once saw that said “If they outlaw guns, can we use swords?”

If you’ve worked for any amount of time in youth ministry you’ll smile at this snarky satirical video a friend of mine helped put together for a free youth minister event called Refuge.

Obama isn’t trying to fix health care, he is trying to give health care away on tax payer’s dime. Read this article by Bloomberg…. You see, the real problem with health care isn’t that some people don’t have it, the real issue is rising costs in health care and the lack of proper legislation. We don’t need a “public” option, what we need is for a cap on malpractice lawsuits, we need better consumer education about health care options. We need doctors to be paid not based on how many patients they see, but on the level of service they provide. Last time I was at the doctors office I was charged $150 and I only saw a doctor for 10 minutes and a nurse for about the same. They ran some basic tests and that was it. A visit like that shouldn’t cost so much.

Don’t get me wrong though. Doctors should be paid well. They had to go to school for 11ish years and they can have a high stress, risky environment. They ought to be paid well, but $150 for 10 minutes of a doctor’s time is absurd.

There are of course 2 parts to any conversation, speaking and listening: but I find that most conversing people, myself included, seem to like speaking the most and not so much the part where we have to listen.  Maybe this is because listening is a virtue and speaking a talent.  Let me explain…  Talents come naturally therefor if speaking is your talent you’ll naturally like to chat whereas listening, as a virtue, is unnatural to Sir Speaksalot because it is earned by training through, not along with, his impulse.   In closing, listening  is a very alien artifact to most of us with the gift of gab therefor the acquisition of an attentive ear should rank among the highest of priorities for the budding conversationalist…

When hosting a dinner party it is generally understood that you’ll be the one providing the food.  In the same vein the host should not neglect, atleast initially, to provide the evenings other pivotal feature, the conversation.  With this in mind it is surprising how many people are actually very poor hosts!  While the host might put forth a lot of effort to make some food (that’s in and out of the system with in a few hours) they give little or no effort to themes or topics that guests might for the next week or two be enriched, intrigued, humored, or delighted by.  Never, under any circumstance should the evenings conversation depend upon banal conversational cop outs such as, “How are you?” or “Whats going on?”.  Those brain dead trivial questions should be avoided like the plague because in essence they transmit the vibe of, “I’ve got nothing to say, I’m boring, please you talk”.  There might be occasion to use those phrases casually, but never ever when you’ve gone through the trouble to invite someone over.  Instead start out with a funny story that stands out from last week and then gradually get into deeper matters as the evening progresses…

Just thought everyone should read some of the highlights of the bill…
You can get it here: http://docs.house.gov/edlabor/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf

I found a list of points about the bill but some of it was inaccurate, so I’ve written or reworded each point and checked the actual bill to make sure that it was accurate.

Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure.

Page 29 Lines 3-16: There will be a annual dollar limit on health care cost-sharing, meaning that YOU will have to pay what the government won’t cover

Page 30: A government committee will “recommend” (mandate?) what treatments and benefits people will get

Page 42: The “Health Choices Commissioner” will decide health benefits (similar to the committee)

Page 50 Sec 152: Is interesting because it is vague enough that it provides health care for everyone, including illegal immigrants… Unless there is some other provision I’m missing that counters that.

Page 58 Lines 5-13: The Government will have real-time access too all of your finances and every person will be issued a National ID Healthcard.

Page 59: The federal government will ‘‘(C) enable electronic funds transfers, in order to allow automated reconciliation with the related health care payment and remittance ad-vice” so basically they can transfer money from your account. It doesn’t specify whether they have to notify you or not.

Page 102 point 3: Those eligible for Medicaid will be automatically enrolled, apparently whether you want to or not. Which would probably mean that the current health care you have you wouldn’t be able to use.

Page 124: No company can sue the government for price-fixing. No “judicial review” is permitted against the government. Put simply, private insurers will be crushed.

Page 127: The government sets Doctor’s wages.

Page 145: An employer MUST auto-enroll employees into the government-run public plan. However, the employee may explicitly state that they wish to use different insurance.

Page 146: Employers MUST pay at least 72.5% of full-time employee’s medical premiums, no if ands or buts. Employers MUST also pay a portion of health care costs for part-time employees as well.

Page 149: Any employer with a payroll of $400K (about 8 employees, we are talking small businesses) or more, who does not offer a health care plan, pays an 8% tax on payroll

Page 150: Any employer with a payroll of $250K-400K, who does not offer a health care plan, pays a 2 to 6% tax on payroll

Page 167: Any individual who doesnt’ have acceptable health care (according to the government) will be taxed 2.5% of their income. What is acceptable isn’t spelled out very well.

Page 170: Any NON-RESIDENT alien is exempt from the above tax

Page 195: Officers and employees of Government Healthcare Bureaucracy will have access to ALL American financial and personal records.

Page 203 line 13-14: “The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax.” Verbatim quote…

Page 241 lines 6-8: “Service categories established under this paragraph shall apply without regard to the specialty of the physician furnishing the service.’’ So from the sounds of it a pediatrician will get paid the same as a brain surgeon (no offense to pediatricians).

Page 253: Government sets value of doctors’ time based on “time, mental effort and professional judgment, technical skill and physical effort, and stress due to risk”.

Page 265: Government mandates and controls productivity for all healthcare industries. On the surface this may not look like a bad thing, but given what the rest of the bill is about, they could they could basically put anyone out of business that they don’t like.

Page 268: Government regulates rental and purchase of power-driven wheelchairs.

Page 272: Cancer patients get special health care rationing

Page 280: Hospitals will be penalized for what the government deems preventable re-admissions.

Page 298: If a doctor treats a patient during an initial admission that results in a readmission, you will be penalized by the government.

Page 317: Doctors are now prohibited for owning and investing in healthcare companies!

Page 317 line 21: Prohibition on hospital expansion. Hospitals cannot expand without government approval.

Page 341: Government has authority to disqualify Medicare Advantage Plans, HMOs, etc.

Page 379: Telehealth Advisory Committee (healthcare by phone).

Page 425: Government will instruct and consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney, etc.

Page 429: Advance Care Planning Consult will be used to dictate treatment as patient’s health deteriorates. This can include an ORDER for end-of-life plans.

Page 430: Government will decide what level of treatments you may have at end-of-life.

Page 469: Community-based Home Medical Services: ACORN maybe?.

Page 494: Government will cover mental health services: defining, creating and rationing those services.

The next 25 pages deal with creating a medical research facility
The next section is about improving transparency of nursing homes.

And thats about as far as I feel like going. It is a 1000+ page document after all…

Well I’ve just have one of the more crazy months of my life, at least as far as web sites go. You see the host that I have three websites on decided to “sell out” and completely changed over owners and management. Somewhere in that process my three websites went down for pretty much three full days. After that I decided I should find some place else  as the change of owners scared me a bit. So I try and contact the support people to get my domains transferred… A day goes by, two days, three days a week and I don’t hear anything from them despite bombarding them with emails. Finally I get really fed up and threaten legal action (hey, domains are really important) and they finally respond assisting me in the domain transfer process.

Since I have three sites and might end up getting more (working on doing more website work) I figured a resellers account would be good. So I signed up for one of them and just finished transferring the site yesterday. Just in the nick of time too as I got a email this morning saying the shared hosting server I was on had been hacked and all data lost… Lovely!

Anyway, I’ve learned some important things from this.

1. Don’t be sucked in by the whole “free domain with a hosting account” crap, keep your domain at a larger domain registrar like godaddy, joker, dotster, etc..
2. Don’t have your domain at the same place as you host. Its just not worth it if something happens to that host. I say this because larger hosting places like godaddy and dreamhost don’t generally provide the level of service and reliability (at least on the shared hosting or smaller reseller accounts) as a smaller, reputable host does.
3. Lastly, don’t pay for a year in advance. Stick to a month to month or every quarter. The potential savings are just not worth the hassle of trying to get money back  if (its a big if admittedly) something goes wrong.

Let me just close with this: the internet is a ever changing place… I was perfectly happy with the host I had for over a year. They had good uptime, a very helpful staff and decent prices. But in the world of the internet anything can happen.