...still my favorite xkcd comic ever. :/

Part Three: I'm an Entrepreneur?

I managed to find health insurance. Yay!

I also found that the system is nightmare to navigate. And that you definitely don't want to just spring for the first offer that's thrown your way, because the range of responses can be crazily wide. I applied for roughly the same plan at each of the four main providers in our state: high deductible + eligibility for a health savings account. And this is what their pricing algorithms spit out:

Company 1: Sorry, we don't take people with your pre-existing condition.

Company 2: Sorry, we don't take people with your pre-existing condition. But because we're the ensurer of last resort, and have to offer you a plan, here's the plan we stick people like you into: $1,500 deductable, $3000 out of pocket max, and no health savings account. The base price on it would be $60 -$75 a month, if we were offering it to a normal person. But you can have it for the low low price of $435 a month!

Company 3: Sure, we'll offer you our policy, charging you $15 more per month than we would a person without your condition.

Company 4: Sure, we'll offer you our policy, charging you $15 more per month than we'd charge a person without your condition. We're also $50 cheaper per month than company 3. (Of course, we don't have any in-network doctors that specialize in your condition within 100 miles of you, but other than that, you're set).

The Federal Government: If you can hold out for a couple more months, I can give you a lower deductible and possibly larger network of coverage than company 3, for the same price.

My one question is: why couldn't I have just paid someone to research all this for me?

I currently work at a small firm that, among other services, will research and compare life insurance plans, investment funds, and long-term-care insurance plans for our clients. I'm pretty sure there's people out there who run comparisons on auto insurance as well. Schools often have advisers that are there to help you start finding the right fit of a college. But I didn't run into anyone who did anything like this when it came to health insurance. Which doesn't make much sense to me; health insurance can be just as difficult and time-consuming an area to navigate as life insurance, and couple weeks ago, I would have happily paid someone a small fee to do all the footwork for me.

So! If anyone's interested in purchasing individual health insurance in Virginia...give me $50 and I'll troubleshoot the system for you? ;) And if you don't have money, I'll do it anyway, 'cuz health insurance is a good thing to have. (And I figure I need a lot more practice before I try to make an actual business out of my newfound expertise ;) ).

Part 2: Insurers of Last Resort

My second conclusive opinion regarding the whole healthcare deal:

Being charged seven times the base quote for a health insurance policy sucks.

Well, maybe that's more a rant than a conclusive opinion.

But seriously, guys! I'm perfectly happy to pay for all those medications and doctor visits out of pocket! My chronic preexisting condition is pretty darn mild, and inexpensive enough that I'll come nowhere near hitting a moderate deductible anyway. So...could you maybe charge me a bit less than 435 dollars a month? Please? All I'm asking for is basic catastrophic coverage, here: if I get hit by a car, or come down with some super-serious medical condition out of the blue, I don't want to end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

At this rate, I'm just going to allow economic self-interest to take over, and take advantage of my tax dollars at work. Virtus is getting tired.

If there are other private risk pool options out there, they are crazily obscure things that are NOT well advertised. I have found no churches that offer any. Google has given no results, and neither have any of the healthcare resource pages (and I have looked at a heck of a lot). I have been contacted by at least three different scams, though. And I suppose I can still brave a phone tree or two.

Maybe Hillsdale College can set up an insurance pool for its graduates? :) It would solve all my problems, AND it would be an awesome Hillsdalian answer to Obamacare! Win-win!

Yes, I'm being a bit facetious here. But honestly: in many states, my only options for health insurance would seem to be

a) the federal government
b) the state government
c) a private company required by law to take anyone who applies.

Or I could quit my job, and hit the streets and try to find a job at a company that might eventually offer me health insurance. Or I could marry someone with health insurance. Or I could found my own business, and become eligible to join a risk pool of the self-employed. (I'd have to check up on whether they'd be able to decline me, or charge me higher rates. As I really don't care to quit my job, though, I can't say I've looked into this option very thoroughly).

Personally, the marriage option seems the easiest. I'd just need to find someone with insurance willing to sign a contract and enter a strictly business paperwork relationship. Elderly couples sometimes "officially" divorce to avoid losing their home, so why not try the inverse when it comes to health insurance? :)

Health Insurance!

So...after being declined individual coverage by a private health insurance company (one that used to offer me coverage under an employer-sponsored program), I started trying to track down what exact health insurance options exist in my state. More than once, I was very tempted just to pick up the phone and dial my way through the state government phone tree, to someone who could answer this question for me. But...alas, I am a Hillsdale college graduate, and damned if I was going to resort to calling the government for help, even on the matter of whether I was eligible for government help. Virtus tentamine gaudet, et. al.

There are many sites out there about health insurance, with much interesting and thorough information. But the problem is, most of it is just stuff you plain don't need. When you're standing out in the cold, going "Ok, so what on earth are my options now???", there's a very specific and essential list of things you need to know, and you DON'T want to have to sort through fifty thousand web pages to get it.

Thus, the following annotated bibliography is designed to aid anyone who might conceivably face a similar situation.

First, there's healthinsuranceinfo.net. Go here, select your state, and it will answer your questions in a direct and comprehensible way. It is the most user-friendly, layman-friendly site I've been able to find. It's arranged in a very intuitively accessible way. Any jargon is explained in plain English, without making you feel like you're a 3-year-old. Yes, some pages may not be updated with the latest information. Which is an important caveat. But the plusses of the site make it worth the while anyway, so much so that I'm listing it first on this list despite that drawback. (Even for Virginia, which was last updated in 2007, it presents the best explanation of every option except the recently created federal stopgap high risk pool).

To make sure you haven't missed any recent updates, you should cross-reference with the the individual state pages on healthinsurance.org. They are the place that I found the link to the healthinsuranceinfo.org site, and they are the most straightforward of the other sites I looked at. (Well, at least the info pages. I can't vouch for the lobbyist pages).

For information about the federal high-risk pool, this page at healthcare.gov is the best place to look.

healthcare.gov also has the a handy questionnaire you can take, which will spit out some options available to you. It's quick and incomplete, though -- for Virginia, it doesn't even mention that there's an "insurer of last resort," which is a BIG DEAL. I also ran into broken links when I tried to access a page about resources available to me.

Finally, if you want some pretty charts, this page by the Kaiser Foundation isn't bad. It was the thing that first clued me in to the fact that Virginia had this "insurer of last resort" option, though it took quite a bit more searching to figure out exactly what that meant.

And as a postscript, since any post about healthcare has to have some half-baked opinion nowadays, I suppose I should add my first conclusively solid opinion about the whole mess (that I hope even the most libertarian small government people might be able to agree with): If someone is trying to be responsible and buy health insurance, by golly there should be a way for them to at least buy basic catastrophic coverage health insurance. :(

David Hare

One of my sisters acted in an end-of-year directing showcase put on by her college's theatre department. The directing students chose to work with various scenes from the plays of David Hare.

These two plays are worth watching/reading; the mother-daughter dynamics are especially well done.

Amy's View (wiki; also some pages here) - My sister played Esme. (Well, played her for one scene. We cycled through several Esmes over the course of the evening).

The Secret Rapture (wiki)

A Song For Lya

I believe I first read A Song for Lya about a year ago.

Subjectively speaking, it is the best short story (novella?) I've read in ages. I'm not even going to put the qualifier "science fiction" in there.

Objectively speaking, it may not deserve quite that much praise. But it deserves a heck of a lot. My aesthetic sensibilities may have some weaknesses -- including a inexplicable taste for science fiction, and a particular fondness for Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach -- but they aren't completely whacked. The story is excellently crafted, and it is powerful, and it is good. It also managed to win a Hugo award, and almost nabbed a Nebula, so I don't think I'm completely off my rocker here.

Quite honestly, every time I look at it, I think "there's no way this should have worked." It tackles way too many big themes in way too strange a setting. And yet it does work, and beautifully.

((Obligatory caveats: sf genre; some sexual content (that is darn well needed); quite long.))

Science and Poetry

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars--mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. [...] What is the pattern, or the meaning, or why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

~Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p. 59

This is why I have seldom cared for nature-contemplation poetry. Not that I know terribly much of anything about science -- but what I do know is still more than most poems bother to acknowledge, even those that should know better.

It's also why Annie Dillard floored me, when my sister handed me the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (also here) last summer.

"A rosy, complex light fills my kitchen at the end of these lengthening June days. From an explosion on a nearby star eight minutes ago, the light zips through space, particle-wave, strikes the planet, angles on the continent, and filters through a mesh of land dust: clay bits, sod bits, tiny windborne insects, bacteria, shred of wing and leg, gravel dust, grits of carbon, and dried cells of grass, bark, and leaves. [...] The light crosses the valley, threads through the screen on my open kitchen window, and gilds the painted wall. A plank of brightness bends from the wall and extends over the goldfish bowl on the table where I sit. The goldfish's side catches the light and bats it my way; I've an eyeful of fish scale and star." (124-125)

"A whirling air in his swim bladder balances the goldfish's weight in the water; his scales overlap, his feathery gills pump and filter; his eyes work, his heart beats, his liver absorbs, his muscles contract in a wave of extending ripples. The daphnieas he eats have eyes and jointed legs. The algae the daphnieas eat have green cells stacked like checkers or winding in narrow ribbons like spiral staircases up long columns of emptiness. And so on diminishingly down. We have not yet found the dot so small it is uncreated, as it were, like a metal blank, or merely roughed in--and we never shall. We go down landscape after mobile, sculpture after collage, down to molecular structures like a mob dance in Bureghel, down to atoms airy and balanced as a canvas by Klee, down to atomic particles, the heart of the matter, as spirited and wild as any El Greco saints. And it all works." (128)

~Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Chapter 8

(The next chapter is all about death, for the record. Her smashing of any rose-colored glasses is another reason I liked the book).

And I think if anyone is going to write poetry about nature, or Emersonian musings about nature today -- this is probably how they need to write. If nature-based poetry is actually going to wake people up, and grab their attention, this is what it will have to look like. We know -- or at least I know -- too much to be content with dancing golden daffodils and red red roses and purple sunsets. To do less than that, to repeat surface banalities, to pretend we don't know what we now know...it feels false and forced, playing pretend and walking with our ears muffled, in a creation that is far stranger and far grander.

Drefful Mistakes Somewhere

"All systems that deal with the infinite are, besides, exposed to danger from small, unsuspected admixtures of human error, which become deadly when carried to such vast results. The smallest speck of earth's dust, in the focus of an infinite lens, appears magnified among the heavenly orbs as a frightful monster."
~Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, Chapter 23

"Honey, darlin', ye a'n't right, -- dar's a drefful mistake somewhar," she said. "Why, de Lord a'n't like what ye tink."
~Ibid.

"If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."
~John 14:7

People who've talked to me over the past three years or so have probably heard me mention The Minister's Wooing. If only because I quote parts of it, like the above, on my Facebook profile from time to time.

I've said repeatedly that I'm going to write about it. But I never do. As a first post after two years of being gone, however, it seems a good place to start. I won't manage to say everything I want to about the book in this post, but I'll say some.

I first saw the book mentioned here. That post introduces the book and the author better than I can, and frames the historical context better than I can, and introduces some of the essential passages better than I can. So I'll just point there and say "read it now." Also, I think walking the same steps I did in becoming acquainted with the book is helpful in explaining this. And because a lot of what it did for this individual, it also did for me.

The book is a local color novel set in 18th century New England, in which Stowe wrestles with both the northern response to slavery and the Calvinist theology in which she was raised. In particular, she explores the ways in which different personality types and temperaments respond to Calvinist theology, especially the doctrine of predestination.

It's also the most bluntly clear-sighted and sympathetic critique of Calvinism I think I've ever read. (Anyone who calls it a "satire of Calvinism" understands nothing of either Calvinism or Stowe).

Now, I know I'm going to make certain people **facepalm** by bringing this book up in any serious way. In fact, shall I list your objections for you?

"Novels on serious subjects are the curse of serious thought. The difficulty of serious reflection upon any subject, and especially on theological subjects, is incalculably increased by those who overlay the essential parts of the question with a mass of perfectly irrelevant matter, which can have no other effect than to prejudice the feeling in one direction or another.

"The only question about [divine matters] which can interest any rational creature is, whether they are true or false. [...] Now, every one admits that the average tone and temper of every-day existence is not our ultimate rule -- that if theology is worth anything at all, it must form the rule and guide of our daily lives, instead of being guided by them ; and, therefore, a novel which (as all novels must) takes daily life as its standing ground, and shows how it is related to theology, has no tendency whatever to show the truth or falsehood of the theological doctrines which it describes.

"It is impossible not to feel a very strong sense of indignation against those who nibble at such questions, gossip about them, and, as far as their influence extends, try to substitute for the adamantine foundations on which any genuine faith must rest the mere shifting sand and mud of personal sentiment and inclination."

To which I can only say, "you're missing the whole darn point." If I'm feeling argumentative later, maybe I'll expound upon that in detail sometime. (One thing Stowe is arguing, for instance, is precisely that very issue -- that exploring the practical "working out" of a theological system is NOT tangential or irrelevant).

But for now, I will simply say this. Stowe doesn't propose some "hazy emotional personal sentimentality." At all. She reaches her arguments in a roundabout way, but she makes arguments just the same, and makes them quite powerfully. And they include such things as this:

a) Humans are fallible and limited, and our systems of theology and pictures of God are never completely perfect.

b) Jesus is the fullest revelation of God we have been given.

c) In light of (b), passages such as John 14 are probably a bit more central to any understanding of God than Romans 9. And any theological systematizing or pastoral care needs to take this into account.

Is it laid out in precisely those terms? No. But it's there for the taking, amongst chapters 6-8, 18, 23-24. And it's the beginning of a theology that focuses upon Christ as the adamantine foundation of Christianity, Christ as the lens through which the Bible is to be interpreted, and Christ only the true solution to the problem of evil and suffering.

One could do far worse than that.