State of Confusion, California-style

As a follow-up to my earlier posts about my problems with Medi-Cal, I thought I'd post an update. Yesterday I received a notice from the County of San Diego that amounted to "nevermind."

The notice was automatically generated, stating that the county had received the "information that we needed" and would reinstate my Medi-Cal benefits. So, the whole imbroglio amounted to nothing, other than a waste of my time, my attorney's, and the county's itself. One wonders how often my little scenario has been repeated statewide, since the governor, allied with obstinate Republicans in the legislature, took a meat cleaver to government.

It seems the governor of this fine state hasn't realized that cutting 24% of the state's budget would have dire consequences, not only for the recipients of state services, but for the proper functioning of the state itself. If the State of California were a body, it's as if Surgeon Arnold cut off a leg and grabbed a crutch. You just can't hobble along on a crutch as easily as you can on your own two sturdy legs.

As the impaired state stumbles toward a near-complete breakdown, everyone will suffer. This is true not just for California's millions of residents, but for every American citizen. The decline and fall of the world's 6th largest economy will drag the whole nation down with it. The great inefficiencies induced by the recent decimation of California's budget will compound exponentially, possibly impeding the state's economic recovery indefinitely.

Grover Norquist, Republican strategist, once said that he wanted to shrink government down to the size where he could "drown it in the bathtub." Based on my experience, the rising tide of anti-government nihilism will sink all boats.

When I Have Fears...

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

My Annual Fight with Medi-Cal

I just got a "Notice of Action" from Medi-Cal yesterday that they will discontinue my benefits on August 31. Of course, I immediately filed an appeal and mailed it off. Many recipients may not be aware (the information is in small, unreadable print on the back of the denial letter), but you can protect your benefits indefinitely by filing an appeal within 90 days of the Notice of Action.

In the notice, they claim I did not return my annual redetermination forms. However, I never received the redetermination forms this year. Their claim is bogus. I have dwelled in my apartment for 17 years, and I would have immediately filled out the forms, had I seen them in my mail.

I am frankly sick and tired of the state discontinuing my Medi-Cal every single year! How many times have I had to file appeals? Last summer I got the cut-off notice as I was lying in my hospital bed recovering from major surgery. The added stress did not help my healing process, obviously. That year, I had mailed in the redetermination forms on time, with a registered mail receipt from the agency, yet they still tried to discontinue my healthcare. The year before that, they tried to discontinue my coverage due to not having received my forms, even though the forms had been languishing on my social worker's desk for six weeks while he took a family vacation to his homeland in Egypt.

I’m beginning to think the state is singling out the “working disabled” like me for extra attention, in an attempt to hassle them off the Medi-Cal enrollment. I have asked Aleyda Toruno, my attorney at California Disability Rights, if she's ever heard of a client with as many erroneous discontinuations as I have experienced. My rough guess is, she hasn't encountered a client as persecuted as I have been.

Furthermore, I believe that these annual threats to discontinue my healthcare constitute a violation of my civil rights. When the state threatens to cut off the coverage of a person on life support, that is the equivalent of a death threat. A stranger would be arrested for showing up at my door and attempting to unplug my ventilator. By what right can the state claim to do the same thing?

Why is it only the crazed, right-wingnuts who yell and scream about their government? We, the disability community, are too docile. Our representative democracy has degenerated into mob-rule (the very thing feared by Hobbes, in "Leviathan.") The oppressed need to get out their pitchforks and torches too.

The Irrationality of the Free Market

I've been reading the new book, "Cheap," by Ellen R. Shell. It's a study of the latter 20th centuy's drive to push prices downward, and thereby devalue labor and destroy the very middle class supposedly being served by Wal-Mart, Target, and even Ikea.

The part of the book I'm reading now deals with the psychology of price. What constitutes a bargain? What is the most fitting price for an item? What is the psychology of mega-stores like Costco, which herd customers like cattle, from stall to stall until the finally reach the exit gates?

What I find fascinating is that people's decisions to shop are not driven wholly by reason. Prices can be manipulated to activate the more primitive segments of the brain; the portions that pre-date most higher-level consciousness. Stores price items at $9.99 because they know that our brains see that as $9.00, not "virtually" $10.00. Even though we're aware of the trickery, we still fall for it. Our deep brains can't resist a good bargain.

Which brings me to ponder the current myth of the "heathcare market." Amazingly, "conservatives" like Huckabee and Palin, who go through all kinds of half-assed contortions to argue against CO2-induced climate change, or to reconcile Bronze Age creation myths with modern-day fossil evidence, suddenly transform themselves into 18th century Rationalists when it comes to market theory.

The argument seems to come down to "give people a choice, and they'll always choose what's best for them." Like Rousseau and Locke, the free-marketeers are wholly trusting in people's ability to act in their own best interest. From the American Civil War, to Germany's twin disasters in the two world wars, we can see that people often choose what's WRONG for themselves, based on emotive factors not completely under their control. These very factors are easily manipulated by those who can profit from humanity's tendency to act on baser instincts.

So, these Lockeans believe that if we give people access to hundreds of insurance policies, they'll select the best. Yet they buttress their arguments with appeals to fear and anger on the part of the masses: Obama's birth certificate, Hitlerism, "death panels," forced abortions.

The very reason we need government intervention in the medical marketplace is that insurance, like all other goods, can be manipulated by the corporate power structure against the best interests of the citizenry.

It's time to pay more attention to Hobbes, and less to Locke (the eternal dichotomy of American governmental philosophy).

The Folly of Health Insurance Reform

I was just watching Michael Medved on MSNB's "The Ed Show" saying, "Most Americans don't want government healthcare, they want INSURANCE REFORM." In an odd coincidence, I taught Michael's snotty litte brother, Ben, in my first Muir Writing class at UCSD in 1978. Anyway, Michael isn't one of the neo-fascist screamers of the Limbaugh and Savage ilk. He at least couches his words in reason.

The problem with insurance-only reform is that it will merely inflate the Ponzi scheme we've already got. I saw Elizabeth Edwards state on the "Daily Show" that at one time a single insurance company CEO made 1 in every $700 spent on healthcare in this country. ONE CEO!

The type of reform Republicans endorse, eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions and requiring that all be insured, will simply add to all our health insurance costs. Why? Because insurance companies will use the new rules to jack up rates. Their excuse will be that covering the truly sick is expensive, and all these government regulations constitute an onerous burden. Their solution will be increased government subsidies to cover their inflated premiums. They'll make money coming and going.

So-called insurance reform, without a government plan to compete, will merely prolong the agony of our intractible and slowly dying system. For-profit insurance will continue to demand its 30% overhead, and that CEO will continue to aggregate his salary. For insurance companies, "single-payer" means we, the rate payers and taxpayers, will continue to pay singularly exhorbitant salaries to their CEOs.

Snivelling Religious Hypocrites

Who cannot help but laugh at Mark Sanford, Senator Ensign, Larry Craig, David Vitter? These snivelling, holier-than-though hypocrites fall one by one. Yet, they continue with the chief error of their ways, even as the blubber in self-pity before the TV cameras. "I've committed a SIN," they repeat like a scatalogical mantra.

My point: Who cares about your sin? We the people don't care about your personal sins; we care about LAW and POLICY. These Republican sex addicts continue to conflate the Bible, which they invariably quote, with the Constitution, which they routinely ignore. They who sat in pompous and pious judgment over Clinton now should face full public wrath over their hypocrisy. If they were fully Christian, they would follow Christ's counsel to "take the log out of your own eye before you remove the mote from your neighbor's eye."

Palin: 0, Letterman: 1

WTF is up with that guttersnipe Sarah Palin? She comes across as shrill and defensive. Was her daughter not knocked up, and paraded around the Republican convention with her ex-boyfriend? As soon as I saw that kid sitting next to Palin's daughter at the convention, I told my nurse, "That kid really doesn't want to be there."

If Palin wants to keep Letterman away from her daughter, she needs to stop making her an example for teen mothers. Stick her in the trailer where she belongs.

Support Letterman, and send Palin back to her tweaker's paradise burg in Alaska. Anyone who shoots wolves from helicopters deserves all the scorn and ridicule we can heap on them.

Long time, no writee

Well, it's been a long time since I've visited this blog. Everything has pretty much been moved to MySpace, and now even that's being replaced by Facebook, or as I like to call it, Wastebook. Then there's Fritter, or... Twitter. We all now compress our thoughts into 140-character slots.

I'll see if I can revive this blog somehow, perhaps by linking it to the other social networking sites. If nothing else, I should archive it, because some of my favorite writing since 2003 is lying fallow here.

First, They Came for the Doctors

First, Scott Roeder, now the Holocaust Museum shooter. The wingnuts are growing bolder and more dangerous. Is there anything more quintessentially American than the lone gunman festering in his mother's basement?

I hear and see the growing hatred of these angry little men, on talk radio and the Internet especially. Rush Limaugh, Bill "Louffa" O'Reilly, Michael Savage: You all have blood on your hands!

"Happiness is a warm gun," wrote John Lennon, who himself was the tragic victim of a lone nutjob's weapon. Is there any surprise that the right-wing kooks are also rabid in their defense of so-called "Second Amendment Rights"?

I think we all need to be prepared for an upswing in violence on the part of that tiny minority who cannot accept that America is changing under their feet. First, they come after the abortionists, then the Jews... No one is safe from the hate-mongering.

Empathy, Schmempathy

"Oh, Cold-hearted Orb that Rules the Night" -- Thy Name is Rush Limbaugh!


I laugh when I hear the Republicans cry about "empathy." They want a judge lacking in what anthropology has proven to be the most human quality: a feeling of mutual identity with another person. But until the Japanese invent Robo-judge, we're going to be stuck with real human beings in the courts, taking both the law and their own backgrounds into account.


What the pro-lifers fear is that "empathy" is a synonym for pro-abortion. That is, an empathetic judge would necessarily sympathize with the plight of living unwed mothers over that of their unborn child. They want to bar all emotion, ruling solely as Strict Constructionists on the literal meaning of the Constitution.

But is this really true? Are pro-lifers not motivated by empathy for fetuses? The blood-spattered baby carriages suborned by the followers of Randall Terry would seem to argue otherwise.


If the US Constitution allowed for the burning of babies on the Altar of Baal, would these strict constructionists be so adamant in setting aside emotion in favor of legalistic minimalism?

"Well, yes Ma'am, we understand you don't belive in child sacrifice, but the Constitution permits it. The LAW is the LAW."


I suspect some of these conservatives, who also form the ranks of the torture supporters among us, would stand with Roland Freisler in support of the Nuremburg Race Laws. After all, if it's the law, it's legal by definition.

Ad astra per mortem

I found this quotation today on Roger Ebert's journal. It's from Vincent van Gogh, on the journey from life to the stars:

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age, would be to go there on foot.

I go there on wheels, or like a spark when the light switch is flicked off. Where does it go? The stars were aborning 13 billion years ago and their light reaches us just now from across the painted ceiling of the universe. It took Michelangelo to paint God on the Cistine Chapel; what God paints us on the frescoes of the sky?

Genetics and Families

Today I signed up for genetic testing at FamilyTreeDNA.com: https://www.familytreedna.com/


I've always been interested in my background, and even though I'm aware of the limitations of this kind of testing, I feel it's worth a try. My biological father's side, the Clements family, supposedly are part Native American (Florida Seminole), and my mom's family claimed to be descendents of the original 1620 Pilgrims, including Roger Williams (founder of Rhode Island).


I'll keep you posted on the results, and whether they meet or exceed my expectations.

American Psycho, Redux

I just saw the breaking news about the crazed lone gunman in Binghamton, New York. What is it about the American psyche that leads a laid-off IBM employee to grab his personal arsenal and slay 15 innocent bystanders? Remember last week's lone maniac at the nursing home in Alabama?

Certainly guns don't "cause" the problem of these mass slaughters. But, they contribute by making the killing easier and faster. Was this what the Founding Fathers meant by a "Well-regulated militia"? Our gun mania, combined with an insatiable appetite for self-gratification via illicit drugs, has led to the near-disintegration of Mexican society. The drug cartels buy their weapons in the US, then transport them across the border to wreak havoc. Unfortunately, our own government is so cowered by the gun lobby that they are afraid to take on the NRA and institute real gun regulation, even for semi-automatic weapons.

Violence begets violence. Jesus said it, but this so-called Judeo-Christian nation has run the trolley off the tracks. What really scares the bejeebus out of me is that some paranoid whackjob in an Idaho trailer or a lonely corner of his mom's basement will take seriously the blubbering mania of Glen Beck and take a shot at one of our leaders. I worry about it every day, as the Republicans become increasingly marginalized and the President grows ever more popular.

On Lance Armstrong's Nuts & Bolts

I noted with interest today the CNN stories on Lance Armstrong's "medical miracle": his bolted-together broken shoulder blade. It's great that doctors are able to put in the screws, bars, and nuts to reassemble the great cyclist's shoulder. But it brings me back to a point that's often on my mind: doctors seem to favor fixing the "healthy" rather than performing the hard work of improving the lives of people with disabilities.

When I suffered the compound fracture of my right leg in 2004, the surgeon chose to fundamentally let my leg heal "as-is." "Your bones are too fragile to put screws in," he announced, which shouldn't be a big deal because "you aren't going to run or ski anyway." So, now I have a short leg, Toulouse Lautrec-style, with a knotted up shin bone that looks like I'm carrying around a baseball inside my leg, when you look at the X-ray films.

My 53 years as a patient in the medical world, makes me believe that the profession, like any other, prefers the easy cases. A cab driver would rather collect a hefty fare for driving an old lady around the block, than picking up three black guys in the hood. A TV repairman would rather order a replacement from the factory than rip the case off an old-fashioned tube TV. Doctors would rather treat a single malfunction in an otherwise healthy patient, than trouble themselves with the difficult choices a disability presents. It's totally understandable, of course--we're all human and we all prefer to walk downhill than to climb a ladder.

So--go, Lance! Win one for the team! But hey, doc--don't forget about the hard cases, too!

Do you ever feel like...

... Your insides have been reassembled by the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Well, that's been my life for the past 7 months. Will it ever end? Where's my Oxycodone?

Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot

When Rush Limbaugh coined the term, “Porkulus,” I was certain he was talking about himself! He obviously has some self-loathing and body-image problems, LOL. That being said, he is first and foremost an entertainer, and he cries all the way to the bank. That’s cool; he, his cat, and his oxycontin are part of what makes America great, as long as he has an audience. However, since he is a comedian, I have a hard time taking anything he says seriously. For example, he used to rant that the Constitution contains no right to privacy, and all druggies should be tossed into the slammer, yet when he was busted, the first thing he did was get his lawyer to whine that his rights to privacy had been violated. Did he learn anything? Apparently not, as a few years later he was busted at the airport with a bottle of someone else’s Viagra. Oh, and why does a big, fat, divorced slob like him need Viagra anyway? If he’s so moral, he should remain celibate.

What I don’t like about him is his wishing Obama will fail. Like it or not, Obama will be our president for the next four years. I always liked Bush as a person, even though he was the worst president in the past 70 years. And I didn’t hope he would fail; rather, I feared he would, and he lived down to the fears. So yes, I “like” and admire Obama, and hope for the best. It’s either that or get the Canadian Visa ready! Hehehe....

There is definitely a lot of crap buried in the stimulus bill, and I think Republicans and Democrats in the Senate will make it much better. If they don’t, that’s why we have elections every 2, 4, and 6 years. ....

A Few Thoughts on Military Engagement

President Obama's recent decision regarding Iraq deployment of our troops, and the eventual withdrawal of combat forces, led me to thinking about some people's political responses to any criticism of the war. Any truly just war cannot be the sole domain of a single political party or philosophy. So, I wrote the reply below to a veteran on another site who seems, like so many of the older vets from the 60s, to still be fighting "hippies" who "diss" our troops.

There has never been a nation in the history of the world, which has not found it necessary to expend its blood and treasure in war. Every country has its Honored Dead whose graveyards lie strewn about distand landscapes. This applies even to nations we have defeated, such as Germany's Bittburg military cemetary (which Reagan took flak for visiting in the 1980s).

While we all should remain cognizant and grateful for the sacrifices of individual servicemen and women, we should not delude ourselves into the belief that there is some unique, solely American reason for engaging in war. "War is diplomacy by other means," it was once said -- and not said by an American.

The military should not be deployed overseas for ideological reasons; rather a "just war" should be fought when necessary for the defense of the nation, not to build an ephemeral democracy in countries whose civilizations arose when our European ancestors were still living in caves. Leave politics aside when discussing our military and its sacrifices, and don't demean their necessary work by belaboring some illusory hippies from the 1960s.

Christ once said, "Let the dead bury the dead." And so it shall always be....

Tweeting with Twitter

Well, all the stories about the Congress members "Tweeting" during the president's speach got me interested. So, you can now follow my exciting life at this URL: http://twitter.com/WriterDavid

Tooth & Nail

So, I went to the Dentist on Monday. "Dr. B" looked at the X-ray of the space between molars where the crown used to be, and said, "the tooth is cracked. You'll have to visit an oral surgeon to have it removed." Holy Toothless Joe, Batman! It seems like I spend half my life at the dentist anymore, at least the half I don't already spend at some other doctor's office. Sigh...

So, next Wednesday, it's off to the oral surgeon. At least his office is in Mira Mesa, so it's not a long drive.

Coraline: La Belle Dame

So, I dragged myself and Harold out of the apartment Saturday night and saw "Coraline" in 3D at the Mira Mesa Edwards. The film was quite enjoyable. If nothing else, it's worth seeing for Henry Selick's artistic mastery of the stop-motion form.

Story-wise, I found the film entertaining, but a little flat compared to Tim Burton's efforts in the genre. If "Nightmare Before Christmas" were a 10, and "Corpse Bride" an 8, then "Coraline" would be a 7.5. I think what Neil Gaiman's plot attempted to achieve, yet missed, was the whimsy of the Burton films, even going back so far as "Beetle Juice."

The story has a decent pedegree, with the villainness strongly resembling Cruella DeVille from the Disney Dalmations film, with a little Ozian Wicked Witch and Wonderland Red Queen thrown in for good measure. Gaiman knows his modern mythology. The "smothering mother" is a nightmare we all can share; at least those of us with a mother! The cat, "wuss puss," was a little Puss n' Boots, and a lot Cheshire Cat. He was one of my favorite characters.

Tim Burton accomplishes something I like to call the "happy macabre," making his stories a visit to death and decay that you're actually glad to have embarked upon. For all Coraline's struggles, in the end, hers is just a slightly dark, scary spider story.

A very good work; only a near miss on greatness. Nevertheless, I intend to buy the Blu-Ray when it comes out for sale.