Alone

Not really, but it certainly feels like it on some days from healthcare, to butchered hostages, to sledgehammer politics, to isolationism, to autism realities

Today is an anniversary of sorts for our family, my husband had heart surgery last year on this date. The kind he had was done by entering through the artery in the groin and then fixing the hole in his heart. Technically he could have gone home later that day, but the surgeon wanted to keep him overnight for many reasons. Our insurance company had approved the surgery and in the approval letter it said that everything was up to the surgeon (they used more medical jargon but that was the gist of it). So you would think that included whether the hubby had to stay overnight or not. Apparently the insurance company disagreed and fought with the hospital for over a year about the bill. Finally, I noticed that they had come to an agreement and the bill was paid. By the way, the hospital was in network and so was the doctor. And yes, the insurance company is United Healthcare. And no it’s not ok to kill people withwhom you disagree, and there is something horribly wrong with young people (especially the young women) that they think this Luigi is some kind of folk hero.

Honestly, when I saw that they had originally denied the payment I called the hospital to see what could be done, and the biller told me that they deal with this all the time and have a department that works on these issues. She also assured me that if they cant come to an agreement, the hospital can offer us a payment plan. I told her that is all well and good, but I would never be paying that bill. Not only is it ridiculous, but i simply did not have the money. She told me to wait to see what happens.

I mentioned it to the hubby just last week that the insurance company had still not paid the bill and he said if we get a bill from the hospital we will sue the insurance company since they actually do have to pay it. (Living with a lawyer makes some things alot of fun.) But we both let out a huge sigh when I noticed the payment on my insurance portal.

There is no reason it should be this way. When you fight the insurance company you do feel like this is a battle you fight alone.

And yes, healthcare in this country is broken because of the cost, not because people’s lives don’t get saved. How to fix it, and what is to be done? I have no idea. But what I do know is that I don’t want single payer. Because as Margaret Thatcher said decades ago, “eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Then some unnamed bureaucrat decides whether you live or die. (Just look at the fiasco that is the NHS if you have any doubt.)

I remember when ObamaCare was being debated, well not debated so much as rammed down our throats, that Ezekiel Emanuel, yes one of the Emanuel brothers, who happens to be a medical ethicist, posited that after 70 no one should get life extending surgeries or care, they should just to be made comfortable when they got sick. He decided that since it is all downhill from 70 onwards it wasn’t worth it to society to prolong people’s lives. I remember the reaction. Mostly people letting him know that he is more than welcome to let himself die after 70, the rest of us are planning to live as long as we can and expect medicine to help us. On that note the largest growing segment of the population are octogenarians. (P.S. I am not totally against Obamacare. It has come in handy for us in many ways over the years when it comes to my sons. The presentation was not handled well, and the democrats calling you racist for not liking Obama care didn’t help. And you thought that go to strategy was new for them since 2020.)

So no, I don’t need some bureaucrat or “medical ethicist” deciding whether I live or die. We have also seen what that means in Europe and Canada, with the powers that be deciding that if you have suicide ideation, are depressed, have autism you can opt to kill yourself despite the fact that you are otherwise healthy. That some inadequate psychologist or psychiatrist who has decided that because they cannot cure a person that means the individuals can never be helped (not that they are incompetent) and it is better for the individual and society as a whole that the person be dead. Well considering that the American Psychological Association actually has prominent members now demanding that “zionism” be listed as a mental disorder, I prefer to make my own decisions and not leave my future and my children’s future in the hands of those who present with nazi-ideation.

And we know that health insurance claims are decided by some invisible bureaucrat or worse an AI now, but at least there you have a way to appeal and to also there are rights under law. What would be your rights if everything was run by the government? Look now at the uproar about medicaid funding and medicare payments. Nothing is as simple as some people would like it to be.

Last week Israel buried Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas. Yes, some cities paid homage to these butchered babies and their mom by turning important buildings orange (NYC, Paris, Berlin, Budapest, but not London or Sydney. The question remains if it is time for the remaining Jews of the UK and Australia to leave.). I had a longtime friend facetime me to check on me. She said she knows how bad she felt, and knew I had to feel worse. Other friends did not say a word. I just wonder why everyone in the world didn’t feel as horrible as Jews did? Why was the level of outrage and grief at the murder of a 9 month old and 4 year old categorized according to ethnicity? Oh the gentiles can feel X amount, as opposed to the Jews feeling Y amount? Talk about racializing everything. Can’t all of society just feel unspeakable outrage at the atrocities committed by Hamas? No if, ands, or buts? (The answer for those who don’t know is Yes.) Yes, this week of all weeks, the Jewish People did feel alone (though we know we have some really good friends in this world as well).

I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. Well, those I have known for a very long time anyway. They are not bad people. But sometimes there is nothing to say. And for others it is better to ignore the reality. I have also noticed that for the average person, what is happening in Israel doesn’t matter to their everyday. Oh, they may think about it in passing. But it means nothing in their world. Much like Nazism meant nothing in their world before Pearl Harbor. As I have said before, the powers that be in the US had better pay attention. Because these bastards are here and I am afraid it is only a matter of time (car ramming attack in NoLa notwithstanding) before they rear their evil heads here.

I also noticed that not 1 major news channel referenced the Bibas funeral or how the coffins were handed over. (The spectacle that had Israel pause releasing more murderers and terrorists.) Yet, they keep repeating Hamas’ lies that come out of Gaza. Whether it’s the healthy, well dressed children with pearly white teeth who are apparently living through famine and genocide or the dead being only civilians (Apparently, not one member of Hamas was killed. And please as has been said before, it is tragic that civilians are killed in war, but there is a huge difference between targeting civilians as Hamas did/does, hiding behind civilians as Hamas did/does and collateral damage in targeting an enemy.).

Meanwhile, in the middle of the worse trauma for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the Left doesn’t want money and arms going to Israel, because they think that the Islamo-nazis of Hamas are the righteous side, Bernie and the usual suspects are leading the charge, and the right doesn’t want any foreign spending, being led by that Putin cock-sucker Tucker Carlson and the repugnant antisemitic Candace Owens, because apparently the US is going to build a dome over itself and nothing bad is going to come in and they then can throw all the bad out. Different sides of the same malevolent rather pusillanimous coin.

Sledgehammers are now also good things, not scalpels, to be wielded as the primary weapon in the war against government waste. Listen, I know what DOGE is finding in USAID (funding Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban and now Boko Haram), but there are programs that save people’s lives as well. There are also programs where people have been fired that are needed for our everyday here in the US, be it those who oversee our nuclear weapons program, those who oversee our national parks, those who investigate airline issues or even create the maps for the air traffic controllers to use. Why can’t cabinet secretaries simply be given a target percentage to reduce staff over the year. Didn’t all these people just go through advice and consent by the Senate? Don’t their opinions matter to anyone what needs to be done to streamline their departments? There is also natural attrition due to retirement and they don’t have to be replaced. The older workers also get paid more. So when they leave it is a better savings. As I have mentioned before, why is it so hard to use a little common sense in fixing the government (or better yet, use the Simpson Bowles findings. But of course that was ordered by Obama so Trump couldn’t ever use that.)

And no it’s not ok to up and fire someone without notice, like those listed as probationary. Whether it is allowed under the civil service rules or not, it is not the human thing to do. This is what I see as the problem. The utter lack of humanity. This has actually happened to me in my life on several occasions. No reviews. No notice that anything was wrong. In one job I was called into my supervisors office and fired for typos (yes she had told me about them before)- of course after writing a huge departmental report including charts and graphs, which she put her name on to give to her supervisor, removing mine. And the other firing was when I was out sick, without anyone ever having told me what I hadn’t been doing properly in the job in the first place. (Listen the cruelty also has nothing to do with Musk being on the autism spectrum. As I have said my sons are autistic and they are very attuned to others. And would never go out of their way to hurt anyone, well not on purpose, and when told they were wrong then there is an attempt at a correction and an apology.)

Seriously, Putin is now the good guy (see my description of Tucker Carlson above) according to the GOP? Apparently the US sided with Russia in a UN resolution about the Ukraine war, and demanded (bullied) Israel into siding with them as well. A copout on Israel’s part? Maybe. Self-interest, definitely. Israel needs Trump now. They cant afford to upset him. The war in Gaza is far from over and a nuclear Iran needs to be stopped. It will also help if somehow Putin can be corralled in the Middle East. How, if, or when that will happen, who knows. But realpolitiks stinks (apart from making you angry, disappointed, and disillusioned).

France, the UK and others have come over and bent the knee to Trump. Very interesting. King Charles has also invited Trump to a State Dinner. Supplicants. Discussing ways to move forward. Discussing issues and trying to resolve problems in the NATO alliance and with the war in Ukraine. Zelensky is here to sign a rare minerals deal with the US. (Maybe it’s the rare minerals that Putin really wants, apart from the outlet to the Black Sea…hmmm). But tell me, if there is an invasion or continued war, and the US receipt of those minerals is interrupted, meaning our economy is harmed, how is that going to keep us out of war? I don’t mind having a stake in the rare minerals. Better us than Russia or China. But these minerals are more important than any international military alliance. We learned that you cannot go it alone in this world, no matter what some isolationists think. {Update- real shitshow in the Oval today with Zelensky. No class, no composure, no common sense. Embarrassing, simply embarrassing.)

Then I read an article about autism. I remember when my boys were little, there was no internet and no way to reach out to other parents of special needs children. I always said that in the olden days, when you were alone with a disabled child you were truly alone. In fact, the boys used to watch their programs on our 1 television. My parents feeling bad for me, bought me a small TV for the kitchen so I could at least watch the news. I also remember when personal computers first came out. I bought a Bar Exam test guide and studied with my toddler sitting on my lap in front of the computer. Yes, I passed. (It was my 4th attempt. Still better than the great Justice Louis Brandeis, who legend says it took 6 times for him to pass the NY bar exam.)

The article was about different issues surrounding the autism community. All I know is that once the boys left school, everything in college we had to pay for, including the aid. If we wanted something done for them we had to pay for it ourselves. Fair you say? Well, what do you do when you run out of money? How do you help them? They are not intellectually disabled. They are in fact brilliant. But their disability is very apparent. The head of the special education department in our town used to say of them that they are neither fish nor fowl. They do not fit into the programs set up for adults with disabilities because they do not have an intellectual disability, but they do not fit into the neurotypical world because they are after all noticeably autistic. (Some autistics can hide their disability during the “day.” It takes a huge toll on them, but they do it in order to be able to function in the world. My boys simply can’t do that.)

We are working to find people who will employ them. Trying to figure out what works for them as well. But we have no answer. We are simply throwing things into the wind and seeing if anything sticks at this point. It’s like when you throw spaghetti at the wall (which any true Italian will tell you not to do and that its disgusting), hoping that the pasta is done so everyone can eat. We keep thinking of ways to help so they can launch and have the full lives they want.

And yes there are some benefits we could apply for, but at what point do we tell our sons to give up? (We have instructed the executor of our estate to help them apply for benefits if they don’t have them already once we have passed.) They do have to be able to take care of themselves once we are gone. There was a game we played years ago on twitter, when it was a support system for people, “You know you are an autism parent if”….my response was “you know you are an autism parent if you have a guardian and a special needs trust all set up for your child, but know you still can never ever die.” I remember one autism mom writing, you always ask the question, “who will love my child after I am gone?” You can have family. But everyone has their own lives, with their own problems as well. Who will protect them from bad people, and who will make sure that they have happy lives?)

Here we are once again truly alone, because I don’t have an answer. My special needs estate attorney said we have done everything for them that we could. But it doesn’t feel like it’s enough, that despite everything we do, we feel we are missing something. It feels out of reach, I can’t put my finger on it, but I know there is something else. (PS this is not a woe is me diatribe.) If you can think of anything let me know in the comments. I am open to any and all kind suggestions. I am hoping we are not so alone as I feel sometimes.

IT IS DAY 511 OF THE HOSTAGES BEING STARVED AND HELD IN THE TERROR DUNGEONS OF GAZA 🎗️

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