How messed up are you?
POSTED BY: Iremisst
UPDATED: Thursday, January 21, 2010 23:52
VIEWED: 19073
PAGE 5 of 10
I paid into the unemployment for 12 years and what I call being lazy during that period was searching for jobs and being shot down. Applying for one job opening with hundreds of other applicants. Rejection is a bitch especially if its for a job that you are over-qualified for and don't even want.
I made a choice to interview for jobs and take on an extra class towards my masters rather than take odd jobs, or a minimum wage job that would just reduce the unemployment benefits. The choice was easy. I just worked harder at school.
I've never been laid off in my life and I collected a fraction of what I put in. Detroit has a 30% unemployment rate. I count myself lucky just to be so underemployed and to be racking up the student loans to better myself.
I may have chosen poorly on a masters though. I'm getting certified to teach and my masters at the same time. The can't beat join em' adage. Yet the aging teachers are not retiring and now schools are laying off. The masters will allow me to teach at a college level but only as adjunct faculty. Its tough to get the full time gig. So I will work multiple jobs for a few more years to come.
Hope that addresses the laziness question. Even with the fullest of full loads I have a 3.7 average and I am on the Deans List. Lazy people don't make the Deans List.
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Quote:
Originally posted by xraftermanx:
Every six months I get a dental cleaning and every year I get x-rays. $80 for the cleaning and $50 for the x-rays. A bit less than $3000 and pain.
I don't know where you been gettin' your teeth cleaned, But I've done extensive shopping around in my area and almost everyone charges $200 or more for a cleaning and $100 bucks for xrays and misc. fees these days, sorry no dental colleges here. God forbid you actually have a cavity. I have pretty healthy teeth but messed up roots and nerves and have had to have two root canals. And I'm a frugal son-of-a-gun so if we had been even slighly worse off, woulda just had to have them pulled. On top of that my husband had to have molars (wisdom teeth) surgically removed $500 (six years ago) so for your average family things add up, & too quickly!
But the thing I have the most problem with is your seeming lack of compassion. Peoples lives are complicated, and who are you to judge? Are you perfect? I believe for the most part people try to keep up but everyone needs to ask for help at some point in thier lives, so congrats if you've gotten by, some don't. And it sounds like to me that maybe you haven't had enough compassion in your own life so in taking a tough stance you'll feel better about yourself and your own lack of support...
On that note, I'm sorry you have been out of work for so long, I know how hard it is.
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Also you REALLY should know that harsh mouthwashes have been known for years to be a major contributer to mouth and throat cancers and the FDA has known for years, also they may be making your acidic mouth problem even worse... you might want to try Biotene mouth wash (cvs &walgreens have it) It uses natural ingredients and has mouth lubricants and doesn't kill the helpful bacteria you need in your mouth...Just FYI
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Thank you for that. I do feel for you. I do not want to diminish any hardships that you are going through or have gone through.
In my family a top priority is health. You could say we are cursed with large and small problems. I have a big family so we have seen a lot. I had A-plastic anemia and a bone marrow transplant when I was 3. My mom has PBC and had a liver transplant 16 years ago. My dad had bladder cancer and had it removed 7 years ago. My brother was born with Downs Syndrome and died in surgery. My sister has hypothyroidism. My aunts, uncles, and cousins have a plethora of other ailments.
If we didn't have health insurance we would be paying until we died. Yet that is the way it should be if you are able to afford it and do not purchase it. I take care of my teeth and pay for those dental visits because I have learned the costs of missing a cleaning and having a tiny cavity and paying for it in cash and pain.
I have heard through my parents and their chronies in AZ that some dentist who practice in the US also practice in Mexico for half the price. So that's one way. I saw the work on one guy down there who had a mouthful of trouble and it was good work. Prices in Detroit are cheap. Housing is cheap, buildings are cheap, and a company's overhead is cheap. A little scary sometimes. Murder rate is higher in Detroit than it is in Bagdad. True fact.
Just don't let one entity control any industry. Otherwise we'll get what we had with the phone company years ago. The big innovation for 50 years was the invention of touch tone.
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If you can send me links to peer-reviewed studies and a FDA warning I'll stop using Listerine. The active ingredient in Listerine is alcohol. So if it is true and the studies are peer-reviewed and statistically significant then everyone who drinks adult beverages would have a case.
I'll check into Biotene though. I am always up to try something new. Thanks for the tip.
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Quote:
Just don't let one entity control any industry. Otherwise we'll get what we had with the phone company years ago. The big innovation for 50 years was the invention of touch tone.
You DO have one entity controlling the industry: the health insurance lobby.
Seems you're making an argument for ALLOWING a government-run option. Allowing a not-for-profit insurance option DOES NOT turn control of the entire industry over to the government, unless you readily admit that having only a for-profit industry such as we have now gives control of the entire industry to for-profit insurance companies, which care nothing for your health and everything for their wealth.
Mike
Work is the curse of the Drinking Class.
- Oscar Wilde
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Quote:
Originally posted by Iremisst:
You will never really find me discussing any of those things in open forum.
I might say one or two things but then leave the room, not everyone's cuppa tea, but if someone else puts specific rules in their post I try to follow them out of common decency.
Second, you take care of yourself...GREAT, then you are not currently part of the problem... But for those people who have so many health problems that (through no fault of their own) simply taking care of yourself becomes a Herculean task, so I feel that shouldering some of the burden is the task of our semi-civilized society... Consider yourself blessed to have such unencumbered physical DNA.
Thirdly, while I asked for your oppinions and I appreciate you taking the time to make a contribution, if you think there is no heathcare crisis in this country, then you simply do not know enough people, especially veterans.
You asked for input, and I gave it. Your reply was to claim that I " don't know enough people". Whether I do or not, that's irrelevant. But the concept of a 'crisis' is greatly overused in this country, and in this matter. Saying there's not a crisis isn't saying all's peachy and perfect. There's a lot of middle ground between the two. Now, 'crisis' might be a more accurate word to describe how the Gov't runs the VA Hospital, which I consider separate ( for the time being ) to healthcare for the general public.
Finally, I'll just say this. No one should be forced by the Federal Gov't to pay for someone else's healthcare. ( Those who serve in the military obviously fall outside of that area )
The T.Rex they call JANE!
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In an attempt to respond to the inital thread inquiry:
There have been times when I went without insurance, but I'm still young (in relative terms of course) and I simply took the risk. I currently am covered and yes, it is pricey, but it's the way things are.
I have only had to invoke a claim once in the past 5 years. In 2007 my wife and I flew to California for a wedding. On a journey down the pacific coast highway we decided to stop at a scenic coastal cliff ridge. While my wife went down to the water to dip her toes I (stupidly) thought I might poke around the rock cliff. In flip flops I attempted to scale something that soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division wouldn't have tried. Short story: I fell 15 feet onto a boulder. I was VERY lucky and suffered only a broken finger on my left hand. (Sounded like a piece of dry kindling snapping when it broke).
The time spent in a California ER was horrible. I got labeled a low priority and sat in an ER hallway chair as they attended a heart attack and a burn victim. Eventually an X-ray indicated that the finger was off-joint with a shard floating in the meat. The doc said he could re-set and asked if I wanted a local. I said no suspecting that each and every thing I got that added even a penny of cost would somehow balloon later. So without a local he reset my finger as I sat in that ER hallway chair. It was horribly painful yes....but the honest thing about pain (chris might understand this from his martial arts) is that once you achieve a certain level of it you kinda just find a way to dwell with it until it ends. It stops getting worse....it just IS.
The whole experience cost me a four figure sum WITH insurance and I've often questioned why that was. I turned down the local and refused to take any drugs from them. I never got quartered in a room, having sat in a hallway chair for free the whole 5 hours. The only real costs to the hospital were the X-ray, 45 minutes of a doctors time, 20 minutes of the X-ray tech's time, and the time spent by the admitting receptionist on my admission and release paperwork. When you further consider that those folks were ALREADY at work anyway, what was the real cost?
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Quote:
Those who serve in the military obviously fall outside of that area
Why? Why should I be forced to pay for the healthcare of people who volunteered to go and kill and be killed? Why should I reward them for killing? It was their choice - let THEM pay for it. Nobody should be forced by the federal government to pay for someone else's healthcare, right? Right?
If military, why not cops? If cops, why not firefighters? Teachers? Who's to say who contributes to this nation, and what that contribution is worth?
Quote:
But the concept of a 'crisis' is greatly overused in this country...
On that, we agree. I hate it when they blather on and on about the "terror crisis", when there is clearly no such thing. Gunshot wounds kill ten times as many people every year as terrorists killed on 9/11. Car accidents kill another 10,000 more than that. The freaking FLU kills 30,000 every single year, and there's no crisis there. If 42,000 people dying every year in this country due to not having health insurance isn't a crisis, and if 40 MILLION of us being uninsured ISN'T a crisis, I don't see any reason why we'd ever even worry about 3000 dead in a ginned up "crisis" having to do with alleged terrorism.
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Quote:Yeah, there's pain that means bad is happening, and pain from just the follow-up to bad. The latter is just an experience in tolerance. No biggie in the long run. Like when I had an infected wisdom tooth extracted- the novacaine didn't work, but I knew the pain wasn't a sign of damage, just *adjustment*.
Originally posted by bluesuncompanyman:
It was horribly painful yes....but the honest thing about pain (chris might understand this from his martial arts) is that once you achieve a certain level of it you kinda just find a way to dwell with it until it ends. It stops getting worse....it just IS.
In the words of the great Max Guevarra, whatever.
The laughing Chrisisall
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