At 04:23 PM 5/4/2009, you wrote: >Woah, Susan, > >No insurance? Of any kind? You're not really old enough for >Medicare already are you? I just met you some 15 years ago. (You >might not remember) You're still a spring chick! Ha! I've tuned for over 30 years now. Age and the family fibro genes are having an effect -- but I can still tune a mean piano. I was just wondering today if I can manage to get to the fifty-year mark. I would only be 82 then. I have car insurance and home owners insurance. The car insurance would pay out a little bit in case I was injured in a traffic accident. Health insurance was just too expensive, and too obviously intended to take advantage of the client, not aid them in any medical emergency. There's a practice getting more and more common these days -- sign up some poor bloke (or bloke-ess), tell them they are covered, (yada yada), collect the huge premiums from them year after year, and if they have a major medical expense, THEN go back through their records with a fine-tooth comb, and tell them that they had a pre-existing condition, no money will be paid out for your recent (massive) treatments. And somehow the idea that they should return all those premiums because the person was never really covered doesn't ever surface. For instance, if someone turns out to have throat cancer, go back and find out that they were treated for one episode of bronchitis forty years before -- sorry, pre-existing condition. I think that gradually over time, policies (particularly policies for the self-employed) have turned from insurance into carefully planned and ruthlessly executed theft. Liability insurance I suspect is counter-productive. By deepening one's pockets it tempts crooked people to sue. After all, if someone is insured for a million dollars, why not try to get it? In all my tuning career, no one has even whispered the word "lawsuit" to me -- except a customer aghast at the idea that I would finish a tuning after an owner has left me alone in the house. "Why, you could be sued for a million dollars!" (He was a lawyer specializing in liability suits. I was extremely glad to finish his tuning and leave his house!) Anyway, life goes on. I didn't insure my tools -- I still have them. If I had insured my cello down through the years, I'd have paid for it three or four times over by now. I don't have yearly physicals. I don't have a regular doctor. I flat-out refused to have mammograms (I don't think radiation over and over again is a good idea.) I get dental work if I need it (broken filling, etc.) not on a schedule. The dental costs tripled when dental insurance became common. My knees are getting bad -- but if I'd gone to an M.D. with them just a couple of years ago, I'd probably have been put on VIOXX. That was a real eye-opener for me. If you don't take any damned medicine, it won't get a chance to give you a heart attack or stroke ... I'm still here, I never had cancer ... life is uncertain, but not always short. I was really disgusted to hear on an NPR program recently than an uninsured person is often charged five or six times as much for the same procedure as an insured person is. That's just plain wrong, and should be forbidden by law. Over time, given large companies and huge amounts of money at stake, corruption happens -- when it gets too bad to continue, the whole rat-infested edifice needs to be torn down (before it collapses of its own weight, in a cloud of powder-post-beetle frass) and rebuilt from scratch. We seem to be about there. We're getting less and less and it's costing more and more. Even given the state of the medical profession these days, if I thought I had appendicitis, or if I broke a bone or if I was in an auto accident, I'd rush to call 911 and be extremely grateful for the help, which I would even attempt to pay for. Some things doctors do supremely well -- the rest they shouldn't be asked to do at all. (In my HUMBLE opinion ...) As far as I am aware, even fully insured people will die of something someday ... maybe before I do? Insurance doesn't prevent injury or illness or loss -- it just pays you money later. (or doesn't ... <grrrr>) Anyway, thanks for the nice thought. Susan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090504/cf4704a9/attachment-0001.html>
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