A Fun Day and a Mini Rant!

This is the view from my bedroom window. Everyone morning there are people trudging through the bitter cold, slowly wearing a path in the fresh snow as the head towards jobs and school. Most nights there is a loud bang and a continual ruckus as they scrape the parking lot of the gas station behind us. This gas station is oddly empty 95% of the time, and I wonder how they manage to do enough business to support such a new location.



Today we had a good visit. We worked on the alphabet a little and determined the girls know the alphabet song and Angela firmly knows all the letters while Olesya knows most of them. However they do not know the sounds of them. We used tiles to spell our names and Angela made little flash cards of Cyrillic letters, then we placed the equivalent letter in English with the sound next to the Cyrrillic letter. It is confusing when a letter looks like an English letter and yet makes a totally different sound!

We also went over some of our family rules today and travel safety. If you get one answer from mom, don't go to dad to get an answer you like better. Food is not an issue, so don't make it one...you can eat what and when you like but please don't hide it in your room and simply ask before you take anything and 99% of the time you will be told yes unless a meal is soon. Honesty at all times because Mommy DOES catch you (as Kenny grinned and testified! Haha!). A few others such as that. We also went over travel issues such as wearing seat belts on planes, staying with Mommy and Daddy, when they will finally be somewhere where Russian is no longer spoken and what to do if lost, etc. Hopefully some of it will stick :-)!

This afternoon we went over the Oborn's and then we all hung out, and later we had an online adventure as we Skyped Joshie and Kenny's classes back in Montrose! It was cool and not without it's technical glitches, but the kids got a kick out of it. It was nice to hear familiar voices and see...at least for a few minutes...familiar faces!

And now...for my Mini Rant...and no, you are not listening to CSPAN...

I stewed and fretted over this one all night, not only because it scared us a little but because it happens to be one of the political hot buttons I feel passionately about.

Thursday the Oborn's, Yagers and I were sitting around the table talking about this very issue...health care and health insurance. Yesterday Dominick informed me that while we were gone we got a rate increase on our health insurance plan with Blue Cross Blue Shield. We have a high deductible individual Health Savings Account plan, as it was the least expensive we could find. Our premium went up from a couple of bucks below $500 per month to $680 per month. Yes, you read that right...a $180 per month increase in one fell swoop. NO, that is NOT for adding the girls, that will be an additional $110 per month which we totally had planned for.

Tell me how this is possible? How can it go up that much at one time? This is not an age increase, as we already passed our annual contract period for that. This is an across the board increase for all their customers in Colorado. That is approaching a 50% increase in premium for our family!! And get this...that is for an $8000 out of pocket plan per year...and no RX covered until you meet your deductible.

Don't tell me we don't need health care reform of some sort. When the average middle class family is paying as much (if not more in some cases) for their health insurance as they are for their MORTGAGE, there is clearly something amiss. We are quickly approaching a time in America where the middle class will start dropping policies like hot potatoes as they will be priced out of the market for it, and when that happens the entire system will collapse. I am sorry, but having the "best health care in the world" as some people think we have is absolutely pointless if no one can afford that care.

One time a few years back, I did a little research, as this truly has been one an area of concern for me for years, and I checked out the cost of advertising in the Reader's Digest which has all but become a book of drug ads anyway. It was over $125,000 per page, per issue. Drug ads are usually 3 pages in length...$375,000 for one drug advertised in one magazine for one month.

And how many magazines do you see any particular drug advertised in during any given month? And how many times a year do you see those same ads? And that does not include TV, bill boards and other forms of advertising.

No wonder we are paying hundreds of dollars for prescription drugs that are pennies to manufacture...and the sadder fact is that those ads would not be placed if they didn't pay off in higher revenues for the drug companies. So what kind of profit IS there in the manufacturing and selling of drugs?? I am not against profit or capitalism at all, but it has gone too far.

And it trickles down to our monthly premiums as we all have to pay for it one way or the other.

Why did it cost $700+ for 30 seconds in the ER to remove a Lego from Joshua's nose? Don't ask the details of HOW it got up there, but do question why something so simple cost so much. Oh...don't worry...insurance will cover it. No, it won't as our deductible AND premiums are so high we might as well BUY the hospital ourselves!!!

When an entire industry of "Medical Vacations" has doubled and quadrupled in popularity over the past few years and people are willing to travel to India and Singapore to have their hip replacement surgery done or other procedures, and even with travel costs thrown in they save enormous amounts of money...something has to be fixed. Note I am not commenting on the quality of care, because the fact remains...it doesn't matter how good the health care is if you can not access it.

So like millions of Americans, we will go back home and look at our plan, and see how much higher our deductible can go and what it might save us. We will sweat it out realizing that the deductible is now so high we couldn't possible cover it without remortgaging our house and our premium will still be too high to allow us to put any "savings" in our HSA account. Like many, we can't simply "shop it" for a lower premium as we are stuck where we are because of pre-existing conditions such as Kenny's cleft...or something as simple as my history of allergy issues. And as many are discovering, working for a good employer doesn't mean you can afford health coverage either these days as often the plans are even more costly because they cover more and employers are passing on those costs to the employees and not covering famlies much anymore.

We are not the only family this is happening to. My only question is, how much longer can we all continue this way? I don't know what the answer is...is it a broad sweeping change as in "out with the old, in with the new", or is it incremental change that will test the waters and change specific problem areas, hopefully with good results. Do we go with socialized medicine as in Canada? That has its pros and cons as well, as we debated on Thursday. Do we come up with some hybrid plan? I am not sure what the answer is. All I know is we can't live with it, and we sure don't dare live without it. The problem is, how much longer CAN we live with it before it becomes a matter of food on the table or health insurance??? Millions of us would love an answer to that one...

OK. Rant over. Thanks for listening :-)