Day 164/365 Help The Real Victims!

It's not often that I asked my gentle readers for help, or point them in the direction of helping others, but this time, the situation is dire.

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Please refuse to support the public option or even refuse to support ANY health care reform, since doing so would take food out of the mouths of health care executives.

Please agree that if you have ANY pre-existing health conditions, you certainly are not entitled to insurance that would cost the insurance companies even a dollar.

Please agree to continue to send in your increased premiums every month, because the health insurance companies really NEED that money.

In exchange, they will check and doublecheck your claims, and deny them for many different reasons (a variety of options), from typos to a long-since forgotten cold you had decades ago.

The insurance companies are only thinking of you, and in exchange, we need to think about them, and their overworked executives.

After all, who's more important? You and your family, or the health insurance companies?

Day 162/365 For Your Consideration

Our country has always been good at memorials, Gettysburg National Cemetary for example. Pearl Harbor and the beautiful eternal Arizona Memorial.

This week was spent remembering 9-11 with media events, personal recollections, and the unsettling memory (for me) that Friday was *exactly* the same sort of day it was eight years ago: bright blue sky, blinding sunlight, crisp fall air.

I wonder how different things would be if our country was half as good at preventing death as we are at memorializing it.

Remember:

3,000 people died in the 9-11 attacks.

Consider:

Every two months, 3,000 people die in America because they are denied insurance.

Sixty days from now, the equivalent of another 9-11 attack will kill another 3,000 Americans.

Another sixty days later, another 3,000 will have died.

And so on.

To the tune of 18,000 Americans a year, dying not from terrorist attacks, or disaster, hurricanes, heat waves, earthquakes or floods - but just from not having insurance.

18,000 American sons, daughters, husbands, wives, babies, grandmothers, grandfathers.

What if 18,000 troops were killed tomorrow in Afghanistan? Or 18,000 died in a horrible attack on one of our cities? The public would rise up and demand payback.

Why in the world are we so accepting of this month's health dead, and next month's health dead, and the next month, and the next month, and the next month and the next month.......?

**Figures courtesy of National Academy of Sciences, via Nicholas Kristof http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13kristof.html?_r=1&th&emc=th