Nothing much to say

It's been a decent week.

We have a new roommate (she doesn't cook, and is pleased to discover she need not subsist on Lean Cuisine and similar ilk).

I did some experimental cooking (never used fava beans before... not bad, but a lot of work. More like peas than limas, three lettuces, boil the beans for about three minutes, and toss with just crisped bacon, a bit of the fat, and a healthy dash of balsalmic. The beans will settle to the bottom, like placered gold, so you need to dig to serve them up).

Maia had a nice birthday party... All I had to cook was the bread. The sourdough is effective at raising the bread, but slightly sweet. I need to work on it.

Other than that... well recent news stories (referred to further down, in comments) have me a tad heartsore. I've been waiting on them, for a long time, but the predictable responses are sickening, and so I'll not comment on them now.

Instead, by way of solace I'll share some of Fred Clark's (The Slacktivist) wisdom which closes with, "N.B. Clearly, Christian thinking on wealth and property has "evolved" over the last 1,500 years. It is rather rare, these days, to hear a Christian assert or even defend the idea that "superfluity is theft" -- yet that was the consistent and universal teaching of the church during the first four centuries of Christianity. This evolution or sophistication of Christian teaching is, likely, a concession -- the gradual, frog-in-a-kettle process of accommodation to this world. Yet despite that, again, I'm willing to entertain the idea that this evolution is also in some ways reasonable and justifiable. But it is hypocrisy and nonsense when contemporary Christians who have sold off and abandoned every vestige of the traditional Christian understanding of wealth turn around and insist that the Christian understanding of sexuality is fixed, immutable and eternal. These people strain at the gnat of same-sex love while swallowing the camel of credit card usury. They are so obsessed with their mistaken belief that they live in the most promiscuous society of all time that they have failed to notice they live in the most affluent, the haughtiest, proudest and least concerned with the poor."

Emphasis added

Medical stuff

Got the bills for the kidney stone today.

Yeesh.

Total invoiced bills, rounded off, $8,000.

Five hundred of that is to the radiology lab for the CT scans, which are also billed on the hospital invoice to the tune of $3,700. I guess I wasn't kidding when I told the nurse at Walter Reed that, had I been paying for what they gave me, I'd have been filing bankruptcy after about 48 hours.

The mark-up for the saline, (which I know the rough cost of, because vets use it, and I worked at at vet) was about 14 times the cost of the bags ($222, rounded), the IV catheter cost $325, the tubing for it was, thankfully only $250. The morphine, a bargain at $50, for 10mg. Each time a nurse pushed some drugs, add a hundred bucks for the treatment, so for the bags and the drugs, $700 labor. Not bad for a grand total of 30 minutes worth of work (and I'm including the time spent getting the bags and drugs).

The worst part is the sanskrit billing. I don't recall getting a pair of injections, separately from the stuff pushed IV, but the bill seems to have them.

On the up side, if there is, I think I'd have agreed to most of that, and at that price (certainly the drugs, etc, I'm not so sure about the CT Scans) for the privilege of not screaming myself mute while the stone passed.


And the note on the back, that's the kicker. If we pay promptly (i.e. withing 30 days of today, though I might have to argue the date of reciept, were we to be on the line) we get a 50 percent discount for prompt payment, because I have no insurance.

Which feels like a scam.

I have to confess, even knowing that medical treament in the states is expensive, the sheer speed with which a huge bill gets racked up is astonishing (I made the comment at Walter Reed because I'd gotten lots of treatment in a short time. Fluids, doctors, ER, Spinal Tap, more bloodwork than I know how to describe, CT Scans, 14 doctors, on a total of four teams, plus my attending and the rheumatology team (who basically stopped by to see how I was doing; since it was their regimen of treatment which put me in hospital to begin with), three kinds of antibiotics, some potassium (ow, ow, ow!... not good, and worse the second time, after you've been getting IV Fluids for a week) and other things, I no longer recall. That was the first 2 1/2 days... I was there for almost two-weeks).

If it had been bad, say I'd needed a stent, or had mmore stones and they worried about complications, I'd be filing for bankruptcy. For some shots, a bit of blood work and some fluids. That makes up half the bill. The other half is for 10 minutes of scanning, and the expertise to read the results (I'm assuming the 500 to the radiology lab is for the person who shot the film).

Six hours, $8,000, for non-dedicated treatment (whatever nurse was handy, and the doctor on call).

On the other hand, if one can find the money (all of it) quickly, the bill is far less. Which makes me wonder at the real cost of things. It also means those who rack up really huge bills (say a heart attack, and a $25,000 tab) are screwed. They can't find the money to close the account, so they have to pay the really huge markup.