I am A Pre-existing Condition

          I'm over sixty, therefore I AM a pre-existing condition.  That's why I'm afraid to get off Kaiser and take my chances with Trapdoor Insurance Company.  I'm not quite old enough to qualify for Medicare and by the time I reach that age, so I'm told, there will be no Medicare.  What am I supposed to do?  The premium on Kaiser eats up half my income.  Half!  What kind of country is this?

          I have no talent for drawing or painting, but if I did I would make a comic strip showing a man dressed like Evel Knievel.  He's carrying his head under his arm.   The head's eyes are open and apparently conscious.  There are still a few attached nerves, vessels and tendons, going up over his shoulder and down into his body.

            The nurse behind the Emergency Room intake counter is saying, "We're sorry, sir, but there's an eighty percent co-pay on accidental decapitations.  That will be, let's see here....four hundred thousand one hundred eighty seven dollars, without the sutures.  If you want sutures, we have several different models, there's self administered bovine sinew, self administered cotton/silk, intern administered micro-fiber dissolving, resident administered dissolving, all of these options begin at two thousand dollars and increase accordingly.  To have sutures administered by a fully qualified surgeon will be..oh let's see....seventy thousand and change.  You get the top of the line dissolving sutures.  Oh..and I haven't mentioned pain control, have I?"

            The next panel shows the almost-headless man holding out a wallet that is empty of cash or cards.

            In the next panel the nurse says, "I'm terribly sorry, sir," and pulls a giant lever. A trap door opens, whooshing headless motorcycle man down into a deep pit.  On the way down, the chute branches off into various tunnels.  One is labeled 10 percent co-pay, the next is labeled Mysterious Insurance Babble, another is labeled Confusion Gulch.  All these chutes meet in the center of what appears to be a giant donut.  There's a small brass plaque on the underside of the donut upon which is engraved, "Passed by United States Congress at 3:00 A.M., March 11, 2025."

            There are thousands of sick and injured citizens clinging to the sides of the donut, desperately attempting to avoid being sucked down the hole.  Our severely injured motorcyclist has only one arm with which to hold to the donut's surface.  The other arm is keeping his head from detaching from his body.  He doesn't last long.  He slides off the glazed surface of the donut, leaving fingernail tracks as he screams his last desperate cry: I thought I had insurance!!

Thank Goodness I'm Not Happy

           

            If I were happy I'd be miserable.  At this moment in time there is so much suffering on display that if I were happy I'd go nuts with some variation of Survivor's Guilt.  Call it Thriver's Guilt.  It wouldn't be right to be prosperous or to have a great job and a great relationship.  No one else does.  Why should I?

            Fortunately, I'm not very happy.  I mean, I'm not miserable, and that may pass these days for having it Really Great.  I can hear people saying, "Hey, he's not miserable.  That lucky son of a bitch."

            Happiness is like fancy dog food.  It isn't as good as the advertisements say it is.  It isn't made as purely as its makers would have us believe.  Happiness is kind of a gritty mix of stuff: there's some chicken but it's all dried out.  There's filler like bone meal and chemical junk like polysorbate hydro-whamazone.  Modern happiness, hooray!  Not miserable.  That's about as good as it gets.  If you're happy, if you think you've got it all, you're living in a dream world.

If you happen to belong to the one percent of people who have a filthy amount of money, you're not happy either.  Admit it.  Greed is not a happy thing.

            The plain fact is that when other people are so unhappy in such large numbers, it makes personal happiness pretty damn near impossible.

            I'm seventy, a classic baby boomer, ex-hippie artist without a dime to my name.  All the boomers who went to college, got their degrees and made a lot of money...well, whaddya know, they've lost all their money!  They're in psychological shock.  I'm just cruising along, business as usual, living from week to week.  Being broke is normal.  I don't have to weep for everything I've lost.  I never had a house to foreclose, never owned property to lose.

            I have a wonderful relationship but both my wife and I are caught in the medical insurance labyrinth that has become the great booby trap of modern times.

            People of my age group have idiosyncratic health problems.  Baby Boom-itis consists of odd diseases like neuropathy, fibromyalgia, bone spurs, hammer toes and a raft of weird afflictions that have no diagnosis.  They're stress related.  I may be generalizing but it seems that each of us experienced some kind of nightmare between twenty five and fifty.  We had an abusive relationship, an addiction, a horrible divorce, a near-fatal disease, a damaged child or the traumatic loss of a loved one.

            Along the way we became dependent upon prescription drugs or require dialysis or some essential procedure and thus became shackled to the medical system.  Each of us is like half  a pair of Siamese twins.  The other twin, joined at our livers, is a tottering and expensive insurance structure that is arbitrary and beyond comprehension.  

            I call it Insurance That is Not Insurance.  It's Trapdoor Insurance.  You stand at the pharmacist's window, expecting a prescription that will be covered by Medi-hooligan Insurance Corp.  Last month it cost you fifteen dollars.  But oh...

you've reached your maximum expenditure, or haven't spent your minimum, or

dropped through a donut hole and what do you know?  This month the same prescription is four hundred dollars! Floof!  Trapdoor opens!  Next?
           I'm not miserable but I have a sour stomach. I'm incredibly frustrated that no one reads my work.  I'm not happy, so there is that consolation.  I don't have to feel guilty or heedless of other peoples' ratcheting credit card debt, foreclosure, bankruptcy or divorce. 

            All these petty personal bitchings are insignificant compared to the looming Earth-catastrophe that has everyone stashing giant cans of Costco tuna fish in their garages.  Global warming, or, as I like to call it, Warble Gloaming, will fix everything.  In fifty years all of our naive concepts of happiness may have changed drastically.  In fifty years happiness might be a cup of clean water.