fat mogul

It appears that just as I’m starting to enjoy blogging a bit more, life starts to get busy again. I suppose that’s to be expected when expecting. Got more in progress, just not ready quite yet.

Dear Diary:

At best count, I’ve been inside of this strange prison for two hundred sixty-two days.  It appears that they have been decreasing the size of this pliable cage quite considerably over the last few months.  As it is now, I find that I cannot move without rubbing against the walls that surround me.   On a similar note, I’ve begun to notice that the walls are pulsating on a somewhat regular basis.  I don’t have a very good concept of time within this darkened room, but the regularity of this pulsation seems to be growing.  I wonder if my captors have something planned for me in the near future.

An unfortunate side effect of my decreasing space is that I seem to have gotten myself in a very uncomfortable position.  I feels as if my head is pointing towards the ground, and with every day I feel my head getting more and more stuck in the position.  No matter how much I kick at my surroundings, I can’t seem to be able to dislodge my head from it’s current position.  A happier thought regarding that issue, however, is that although my head seems to be getting lodged deeper and deeper within this new-found area, the area I’m approaching also seems to be getting bigger.  I can’t be certain as of yet, but it does appear that this could possibly be some sort of secret exit.  More on this as I am able to explore.

Otherwise, I’m finding my captivity to be rather boring.  The voices I keep hearing seem to be getting more excited about something.  Although I cannot quite understand the language of my captors, I can tell that this is mostly a happy excitedness.  I can only imagine their intentions. . .  Here’s hoping that I can find the end of this secret exit before they can follow through with whatever they are planning.

Handyman League topic # 2, Health Care Reform.  This one’s been huge lately, maybe becoming even more of a talking-head buzz topic than the economy lately, and just under S.C. Governor Sanford.  This topic’s a fairly dear one to me as well, because although I may be very unhappy with the status of health insurance options in the nation today, I get my money from that same industry, and, well, I’d like to keep my house, for right now anyways.

So, unfortunately, this puts me in one of those situations that many of our politicians today seem to be in, which is, I have a conflict of interest.  That doesn’t mean that i don’t have buckets of opinions on the subject.  In fact, knowing how things work from the inside shows me how much more we DO need health care reform.  And, I think we’re starting to think along the right track. 

First topic of discussion, socialized health care.  Nope.  I’m not for it, and here’s the simple reason why, even beyond the fact that it would be the start of putting me out of a job (maybe).   I already have issues with the speed involved in my health care options.  In fact, I went to the Urgent Care office a few weeks ago, having a delayed reaction to my immunotherapy shots, and was told that it would be an hour before anyone could see me.  Now, I personally wasn’t afraid of anaphylactic shock, but. . .well, they should have been (and, I suppose, I probably should have been too).  Luckily a doctor received word of my condition and they pushed me forward in the list.   

I don’t want to bring up a overused analogy, but I can’t help but think about my previous customer service experience with government ran facilities in that I go to one window, wait for way too long just to talk to someone, only to be told that I’m at the wrong window, get to the correct window only to determine that I either filled out the wrong form, or didn’t fill one out at all.  And that, I would fear, could be merely the registration process.  Then you would look at the fact that the government would be reimbursing medical facilities at the bare minimum possible, which means that the doctors would be run even more thin as hospitals and private practitioners would be slashing their budgets for additional help as much as possible.  Looking at the way that CMS currently requires insurance companies to reimburse for Medicare enrollees is a great example of how our medical facilities would be looking to cut corners elsewhere.  I could probably come up with a couple of other reasons for you as well, if you wanted, to go against a fully government regulated social health care system, but, the point’s not to destroy ideas, but to come up with fixes.

So, I do believe that we need something in place to ensure that everyone has health coverage.  Current research estimates that 17% of our nation’s population has limited or even no access to health care.  That’s a lot of people out there, more than likely in the lower class sector of our economy, living without the right to be healthy.   Yet, most states have Medicaid programs in place to assist low income individuals and families, so, I don’t see why we wouldn’t be able to mimic that on a federal level.  Most of the money for our current Medicaid systems comes from federal funding anyways, so why couldn’t we set up some sort of research agenda to develop the best of all of the current products out there to give our population a better chance. 

But that’s still not going to fix the issue, as we’ve got so many people who are above the poverty line, who are fully employed and/or employable, not disabled, and overall not able to get insurance through Medicare or Medicaid.  These people come from all works of life now that more and more employers are discontinuing their health insurance benefits.  How do we help these people? 

Here’s my top 5:

1.  Above everything, we need better standardization of health insurance companies.  Although I don’t believe that the government should be running our nation’s health insurance, I do believe that there should be better regulation of the products offered in correlation to the premiums charged.  And, perhaps, an extension of the idea of a “public plan” which is currently being bantied about, that would still be ran by private parties, but would be subsidised by the government (very similar to our current Medicare/Medicaid systems) and made to meet strict regulatory rules.  If we allow this competition to happen in the marketplace, I believe that we would have a better chance of having products created that would actually appeal and help the market, as opposed to what currently seems to exist.

2.  Plain language laws.  I know that there has been some recent movement in Washington regarding credit card companies being required to use a more vernacular style of writing when selling to potential customers.  I think this could be even more important when dealing with insurance companies.  There’s so much fine print hiding everywhere between all of these companies, that many people don’t see the real differences between their options.  I constantly worried about the fact that a company with an approximate 90% disapproval rating is one of the (if the THE) best selling insurances around the States.  This doesn’t make sense to me.  Make the insurers make their intentions known so that the customers know what they are getting into.

3.  More subsidies.  I really like the idea of subsidies.  But, then again, I’m a big fan of the idea of positive reinforcement.  And I believe that we can get businesses to do what we want with a little bit of reward.  So, I say we offer some sort of tax subsidy to businesses that offer health insurance benefits to their employees.  Something that will defray the cost of offering this benefit, while also giving the opportunity to increase employee morale, should be something every business owner would jump at. 

4.  But I think in this scenario there needs to be another side to the coin.  For companies that employ over so many people (as in, if you’ve got so few people that you can’t get a break in the insurance world for your business) who don’t offer health insurance benefits, increase those taxes.  Call it a health endangerment tax if you need to, but no matter what, make sure companies know that our nation is really serious about offering health benefits to our population.

5.  Better auditing practices of our current insurance subsidies.  If we’re offering money to companies to run our nation’s insurance options, i.e. the many companies that sell Medicare Advantage Plans, we need to verify much better than we currently are that they are following our federal and state regulations much better than I believe is currently being done.  Having family members who deal with billing to Medicare on a frequent basis, I’m well aware of the fact that the status quo of hiring in our private sector claims processing facilities is currently set with a very low bar of standards.  This can NOT stand. 

Just another couple of poorly informed thoughts to take on with you.  Feel free to add your own, completely disagree, or ignore as you wish.  But, more importantly, think about the way the issues in our nation can be fixed, instead of just complaining about them.  In case you haven’t watched the news lately, you can see that our nation is really looking for any feasible option to make these things work.

Handymen HO!

First order of business for the Handyman’s League (decided I liked league better than party) is to determine the issues at hand, the things that are in severe need of some duct tape.  Since it would be a rather boring post (more boring than usual even) for me to just go off on a list of things that need to be fixed, I’ll just start with one, and work up the beginnings of a fix for the issue.

So, obviously with the nation, as well as the world, as it currently is, the biggest issue we could possibly face is the economy.  With so many of our nation’s largest corporations struggling, mostly due to poor management and/or business planning skills, our country, as well as many other countries around the world, is entering (or has entered) a recession.  And, as I’m sure every-one’s aware, our nation’s leaders determined that the best course of action would be to gather up a ton o’ money and hand it out to all of these struggling businesses in an attempt to jump start the economy.  I believe those same leaders are starting to see the major weakness in that plan.  However, the question continues to beg, how does one fix the economy?  It seems that our nation is so confused about monetary matters, that we just toss money at things in the hopes that it will fix things.  I mean, heck, it worked for FDR’s New Deal, didn’t it?  . . .  Yeah. . .

So, we see the issue, and we see that our nation’s already attempted some duct taping over the weak joints, but it just doesn’t seem to be making a difference.  Banks have been swallowed up by other banks, GM is on the verge of closure almost every day, and we’ve got many different large businesses declaring bankrupcy.  I mean, Six Flags, just declared Chapter 11 on a several billion dollar debt, which will now be able to be severely lessened, meaning someone else is not getting their money back, meaning someone else is going to be further hurting for money as well. 

But what’s the root issue?  I mean, no matter how much we seem to push money around from one place to the other, or borrow money from China in order to push in more areas, we still seem to be hemorrhaging money at an astronomical rate.  And that’s what I would consider the key word, hemorrhaging.  Thing of our current economic status as a giant wound, gushing out blood (dollars).  No matter what we do to cover the wound, it still seems to continue gushing, no coagulants (read: bailouts) seem to want to make it stop.  After a while, you’ll start running low on blood and need to receive a transfusion (ie borrow money from other nations).  However, that doesn’t actually fix the wound, that just allows it to bleed out even longer. 

BUT, what if our nation could create more “blood” on it’s own, not requiring a transfusion, but is actually producing more than it’s losing.  How does that happen?  Simple, by producing goods and services that other nations would need.  That means we need to completely rethink our strategy.  Right now, we’re thinking like old-school America.  Old-school America was an America that still believed we could stay out of world affairs because they didn’t directly concern us.  Today’s America needs to realize that we’re dealing with a global economy.  That means, we need to stop looking inwards so much, but outwards.  We need to start thinking of ourselves as one giant business, because that’s exactly what we’ve become.

That’s a lot of words still without any resolution option offered.  So, here goes, the Handyman’s League’s official preliminary business plan for America. 

1.  Stop giving money to failing businesses.  These guys are just continuing to use the money in the same way as they previously were, causing us to have to continually bail them out further.  If a business wants to be bailed out, we need a fully legitimate business plan for how they are going to get back on their feet within 5 years, as well as their plans to immediately cut expenses  at the corporate level without cutting jobs.  Even banks require this type of information when giving out loans, why can’t we when we’re giving out money?

2.  Hire a venture capitalist firm with experience in products that interest foreign countries.  Instead of focusing our large amounts of money on what used to work, we need to be looking to the future.  The first part of that is, of course, investing in new technologies, products, and services.  First, by investing in such things, we can make deals to ensure that these investments will create new jobs on our soil.  Second, by investing in companies that focus on selling things over-seas, we can increase our exports, thereby increasing the value of the dollar.  The more money we receive from other countries, the more money we have (or less we owe to China. . .).  We want to bring in viable currency from an external source, meaning not money that we have to pay back, but money that we own. 

       2a.  There are certain previsions that are currently being put in place that will work towards this, such as the monies that are being promises to alternative energy sources, which is of great interest to foreign countries.  But I think that we should have a multi-fold financial attack on the our neighbors across the oceans.  We need to look towards venture capitalist firms with a strong history of backing stable products with, once again, that strong foreign interest.

3.  Raise minimum wage.  There is absolutely no reason that our poverty level should be higher than the minimum amount of money we pay a full time employee.  I don’t care if this will make things harder for small businesses, corporations, or anyone.  We should not allow people who work full time to live under the poverty level, period.  If businesses can’t handle it (and I’m sorry small businesses, because I love you very much and I know you’ll get hurt most by this) they’ll have to rethink their business strategy.

4.  Directly comes from number 3.  Support entrepreneurs by introducing better hand-holding options for business management.  We currently have great options such as the SBDCs, but I think they could go even further.  This is almost a fail safe option, as there’s many people out there with the financial backing, and the ideas, but not enough of a business-abled brain to actually run a business.  We need to fix this.

5.  For my final bullet point, I unfortunately don’t have a good answer.  I do, however, have a suggestion.  Although I definitely enjoy the idea of higher taxes for the wealthy, as it seems like a great way to bring this money back into the economy, redistribution of wealth really isn’t the answer.  BUT. . . if we were to provider investing subsidies into viable entries into the foreign markets, I believe we would see a great amount of movement of funding from the upper upper class which would once again envigorate the economy merely by having the money move around, instead of sitting in savings accounts and trust funds.

Obviously just a start, and I’m in no way an financially minded individual.  But I believe there’s much that we can do to move in the right direction, and here’s just a few ideas that don’t seem to be being pursued quite strongly enough at the moment.

Tomorrow, I will give you some ideas on what can be done for health care reform, Mr President.

After some responses I received with regards to yesterday’s blog post, I’ve decided to create my own non-party, known as the Handyman’s Party.  This non-partisan party will run on a campaign of repair, not a campaign of strife.  We will work together to find a fix to all of the tears in our nations current status and use a crap-ton of duct tape to put all it all back together.

First step, determining the issues, second step, determining a resolution.

I know today’s blog post is rather short, but I’m working on a good one for you for tomorrow with my fix for the economy. 

Handymen Ho!

(I think partisan politics would be better if they had battle cries. . . )