Sometimes when perusing the news, there is a story that makes you say, “Well, duh!”.  Actually, it’s becoming more and more common.  In this article from The Raw Story, an ex-Cigna executive admits that insurers will use any little thing to cancel a policy if they feel you are going to cost them any money.  For example, if you left out that you had a cold or the sniffles in the pre-existing period, they can use that against you.  You’ve faithfully paid your premiums for years and now you have something serious that’s going to require them to spend some money, if they find out you had the slightest illness during the pre-existing period, they can use that to cancel your policy.

I agree that the health care system needs to be fixed, and I agree that it needs to start with insurance companies.  They tend to raise premiums and lower coverage at the same time.  My wife cannot get her insurance to pay for medically necessary anti-histamines because they say that Zyrtec and Claritin are now over the counter and she can buy those.  Nevermind that she knows and her doctor knows that those do not help her and the only ones that do are the prescription pills she is taking now.

However, I do not agree that health care needs to be socialized.  What is the answer?  I don’t know, but I’d sure love to hear some ideas.

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So Wal-Mart and Sam’s club (same owners) decided that they wanted to promote their Pharmacies this week by handing out ACTUAL prescription bottles filled with candy instead of medications.  Clever idea, unfortunately not very strongly thought out in my opinion.  It’s already hard enough to teach children that medications are not something to be taken lightly,  but now they have to be taught that it’s not a tasty afternoon snack.  Good-grief, to know what goes through the minds of people sometimes.

Here’s the link:  http://sbynews.blogspot.com/2009/06/saturday-at-sams-club.html

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I have a love-hate relationship with the news media.  They are, in my mind, a necessary evil.  We are a need-to-know-now generation and the countless news outlets provide just that.  But then, sometimes, they grab hold of something that is less important and don’t let go.  This, too, can be good or bad.  It’s like the time doctors said that too much cholesterol contributes to heart disease.  The media got hold of it and told everyone that cholesterol is bad and should be avoided.  So, new health problems arose and doctors had to say that ’some’ cholesterol is necessary.  There seems to be no balance sometimes in the media.

This article from a Baltimore TV Station, “Millions Ride Risky Subway Cars“, is a good example.  The cars are actually only risky in a train-train crash, and that risk is very low in subway systems.

The DC Metro train crash is a tragedy that killed 9 people and injured scores more.  The NTSB is trying to figure out what happened and the news media is focusing on the crash-worthiness of train cars.  Both are important, but I think the news media is failing to focus on the more urgent matter, at least at first.  Let’s try to figure out what went wrong first, fix that, then fix the train cars.  The question of whether or not the train cars were designed to protect occupants in a crash is secondary to what caused the crash in the first place because if the crash had never happened, crash-worthiness would not have come up.

On the positive side, though, is now that this catastrophe has happened, transit systems across the US will begin evaluating their train cars just in case a crash happens, and this is a good thing.

In a recent trip to Washington, DC, my wife and I rode the DC Metro without any problems at all and I still believe it to be a very safe form of tranportation.  I plan to use the Metro again when I return.

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I was perusing the news and I came across an article from the OC Register telling about a 10-year old girl dying of vascular cancer.  Her last wish was to see the Pixar movie “UP”, which is only in theaters at this time.  The family was trying to get a wheel chair delivered from hospice, but it didn’t come in time for her to go to the theater to see the movie.  By that time, she was too ill to leave the house.

According to the article, a family friend started cold calling Pixar and Disney, but had trouble getting through the automated attendent, which required the caller know the name of who they wanted to talk to.  The friend started just guessing at names until she found someone who answered the phone.  She explained the situation to the Pixar representatives who agreed to help by sending an employee the next day with an unreleased DVD copy of the movie.

The employee arrived with stuffed animals from the movie and the DVD.  After telling some background, they watched the movie.  The girl died about 7 hours later.

It would have been easy for Pixar to tell the family that they didn’t have time and sorry, we can’t do anything about it.  Instead, they made a dying girl’s dream come true.  That’s the type of company I want to patronize.

For more information, please see the article.

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One of my favorite sites to visit to catch up on news is Fark.com.  People submit headlines of news from all around the world and tag them with various tags such as Strange, Obvious, Sad, Florida, Dumbass, etc.  I prefer to skip to the Dumbass, Florida and Asinine tags first because they usually cause me to groan and slap my forehead upon reading about some of the dumb stuff people do.  This article about PETA and a presidential flyswat from the Huffington Post earned an Asinine tag.

According to the article, PETA was apparently not happy when President Obama swatted a fly during a television interview for CNBC.  The PETA spokesman, Bruce Friedrich, said in the article, “swatting a fly on TV indicates he’s not perfect, and we’re happy to say that we wish he hadn’t.”  Oh, brother, give me a break.  What next, mosquitos?  They even sent him humane bug trap that will allow him to catch flies inside and release them outside.

I eat meat.  Pork, beef, venison, and seafood all make a great meal for me.  I believe that God put the animals here to serve man and that He gave man dominion over the animals.  I also believe God wants us to be good stewards with what He has given us, which means don’t waste it and to put it to good use.  I am not against killing animals for human consumption, but I am against killing animals just for fun or out of cruelty.  Notice, I said animals and not insects.  Yes, insects are important to our ecosystem as well, and we shouldn’t just kill all the insects, but I don’t have a problem with killing flies and mosquitos if repelling them doesn’t work.  In fact, I have a handy little hand-held bug zapper that does the job quite well.

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