Under a Gibbous Moon

For anyone who has been following my personal Twitter feed knows, my wife was recently laid off of work. When this happens, one of the things that you recieve is your COBRA statement.

As I was reading through it, I was reminded of a frequent argument that I read during the big debate of the health care bill. In its various forms, it stated that anyone who did not have health insurance was just plain lazy, I only pay X dollars out of my check for health insurance and that’s not much.

True, my wife paid about $120 a month for family coverage. Sounds like a reasonable price that anyone could afford. Of course, what made this claim ridiculous is that anyone who has been self-employed (or just pays attention) knows that the employer typically bears the largest portion of the cost for their employees health insurance.

The full cost for my wife’s family coverage health insurance is $1,840.98. Per month. For scale federal minimum wage is $1,256.67 per month.

In an article in Slate, William Saletan tries to make the case that prohibiting people from donating blood based up certain criteria (he specifically uses homosexuality) is outdated.

Unfortunately, his arguments are terribly off base. He says that since all blood is now tested then it doesn’t matter if HIV positive people donate. He then goes on to say how safe the testing is since it’s error rate is somewhere around one in a million. Since approximately sixteen million units of blood are used each year, that means approximately sixteen people will have their lives irrevocably changed because of this stand.

If these sixteen people isn’t good enough, let’s do simple math. It costs money to draw blood. Donors must be screened and then you have to pay someone to draw the blood. Then the blood has to be tested and stored. Of course, all the juice and cookies aren’t free either.

Simply put, allowing high risk people to donate just increases these costs. The reason their high risk is that statistical odds are that more of their blood will have to be dumped (and therefore all the collection and testing money wasted).

What the author fails to realize that these prohibitions are in place not on bigotry but on an acceptable cost/benefit ratio.

No surprisingly, the Recession and it uncertainties have been playing havoc with people’s lives. Now, though, we may have a term to describe it, PTED or Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder.

I’m a little confused about the embitterment. I guess they needed a different word for stress. Then again, cultural stress does tend to make a person bitter.

So, if you have been feeling traumatized by the current goings on in this country. You’re not alone and soon a commercial will tell you how to deal with your trauma.