Transparency Flower blooms in the Fall!

A lovely bouquet graces the desks and tables of all of our masters in Washington now. We, the stupid, know when to expect the first sightings but we just have to wait until after the elections to see what they really look like.

This, a story from a friend yesterday:

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a long line at the pharmacy and, as Okies do, I was chatting with the others in line as it was a slow moving line. The lady ahead of me said she had cancer and she was there to get her medicine. She talked about losing her hair and being too sick to get out of the house. The pharmacist told her that her insurance would no longer pay for the refill because it was a pain medication that was addictive so the price went from $5.00 to $97.00. We heard her tell the pharmacist she didn’t have that much money. There was a woman and her husband behind me and when the sick lady was leaving the husband reached out and took her hand and said, “God bless you.” The sick lady thanked him and walked off. In about five seconds she came back and thanked him profusely. It turned out he had slipped her a hundred dollar bill. She got back in line, in front of me, and got her pain pills and was crying when she left. None of us knew each other, but the kindness of strangers can be amazing.

A heart-warming story for sure but tucked in it is something most ominous foretelling a future we can expect. “The pharmacist told her that her insurance would no longer pay for the refill because it was a pain medication that was addictive so the price went from $5.00 to $97.00.”

What if there had been no kind stranger? What if the woman cannot come up with the additional $92.00 next month? Will she be told to go home and just shake it off? The pain of Cancer? Who made the insurance company God, or do we even have to ask?

Maybe as Hussein Obama so compassionately suggested for Jane Sturm’s grandmother – “…maybe your better off, uh not having the surgery but taking uh, the pain killer.”

Woops.

Moving on. From Home n’ Change – Stilton Jarlsberg on Friday wrote – Spring Forward, Fall Over

On Saturday, Healthcare.gov reopens for “open enrollment” so that everyone can see the wonderful new prices that the government didn’t want you to know about until after the election.The Jarlsberg family will be getting involved this time around, thanks to the affordable care act raising the cost of our old “like it, keep it” policy by another $4,000 this year while reducing benefits.

Checking at Healthcare.gov using their “sneak preview” function, we’ve already discovered a few things about finding a replacement policy: none offer as much coverage as our old policy, anything even remotely comparable is going to have a much higher price (although with subsidies, some other poor jerk who is trying to earn a living would have to pick up about half of our bill), and – oh yeah! – virtually no doctors in the area will accept any insurance plan obtained through Healthcare.gov because the rate of reimbursement sucks like a Hoover vacuum cleaner on steroids.

But hey, it could be worse. At least the people who made healthcare less accessible and more expensive when they wrote the Obamacare bill aren’t laughing about how stupid the American people were in failing to stop the law. Oh wait – yes they are.