No, I haven’t been raptured, work has just been wall to wall.
Archives for July 2014
Gotham Dispatch
So I’m in NYC for my sister and sister-in-law’s Big Fat Gay Wedding. They’ve been together for 15 years — almost as long as my husband and me. We traveled up together from Florida so they could finally make it official.
And while we were here yesterday, a judge in Monroe County (pronounced MON-roe) in the Florida Keys ruled against the state’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Well, it’s too soon to plan a Key West wedding anyway; Governor Voldemort’s AG Pam Bondi (Litigious Barbie) filed an appeal.
But it looks like the anti-gay graffiti that currently defaces Florida’s constitution will eventually be removed. Huzzah!
What are you up to today? Please feel free to discuss whatever.
Why is John getting fucked this time?
JC wrote last night as he got kicked in the balls by the world:
Do you have any idea how hard it is to deal with addiction and get treatment in America? I have gold plated insurance, am comfortably middle class, and I have been going through sheer hell trying to get into a facility. It’s almost like you have to show up with a syringe full of heroin dangling from your arm and a crack pipe in your mouth to get anyone to take you seriously…
Why is this so fucking hard? Am I just incompetent or is it this fucking bad everywhere?…Why is it that getting into rehab requires a fucking PhD in bullshit and the equivalent of a tax attorney’s knowledge of procedure? Isn’t getting clean tough enough? Jeebus
There are a couple of things in play. The first and biggest reason why JC is getting fucked over hard right now is that there are nowhere near enough rehab beds in this country. Most of this is historical in two aspects.
The first is that addictive diseases are now seen as medical issues with significant mental health components. Any other physical health problem would see it treated and paid for as a physical health problem. However diseases of addiction were long seen to be either mental health problems with minimally related physical health problems, or solely a matter of someone needing to sack up. That was the attitude when health insurance started to propogate. Early health insurance had minimal to no mental health coverage, and over the course of the past sixty years, mental health coverage was both slowly added to coverage and poorly paid.
The big policy change on this matter was the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. This act required policies that cover groups of more than fifty (50) people to pay for mental health and recovery services at the same benefit level and same accessibility standards as any other physical health act. A side effect of the act is that providers in this field are slowly starting to see their commercial rates rise. Over the long term, this should mean more beds will be available. PPACA has a couple of policy changes that will decrease the degree of fucking over as well.
The other major policy driving that contributed to John being fucked over this year is the Medicaid Institutions for Mental Diseases exclusion policy:
The IMD exclusion is found in section 1905(a)(B) of the Social Security Act, which prohibits “payments with respect to care or services for any individual who has not attained 65 years of age and who is a patient in an institution for mental diseases” except for “inpatient psychiatric hospital services for individuals under age 21.” The law goes on to define “institutions for mental diseases” as any “hospital, nursing facility, or other institution of more than 16 beds [my emphasis], that is primarily engaged in providing diagnosis, treatment, or care of persons with mental diseases, including medical attention, nursing care, and related services.” The IMD exclusion was intended to ensure that states, rather than the federal government, would have principal responsibility for funding inpatient psychiatric services.
Medicaid is one of the major payers for mental health services in this country. They don’t get to set policy for facilities that don’t bill Medicaid, but there are very few facilities (excluding celebrity rehab spas) that can’t afford to not bill Medicaid. This policy was designed to keep states from closing their state hospitals and long term mental health care facilities and dumping those people onto the Federally paid for portion of Medicaid. The side effect is the facilities that are out there are artificially limited to sixteen beds or less. There are a couple of work-arounds (mainly defining how multiple 16 bed pods are seperate facilities) but there are significant limitations on facilities.
So to recap; in patient rehabilitation and detox services have historically been seen as mental health services which means sporadic coverage at low rates. That is slowly changing. And those providers which do rehab and detox are limited to small facilities. More people have access to these services without supply increasing. And since John is usually a a functional individual on most measures (excluding mopping), he does not need emergency admittance, so he is getting fucked because there are nowhere near enough beds to help the people who need help but can get by at a lower quality of health and living without the service.
State of Play
Do you have any idea how hard it is to deal with addiction and get treatment in America? I have gold plated insurance, am comfortably middle class, and I have been going through sheer hell trying to get into a facility. It’s almost like you have to show up with a syringe full of heroin dangling from your arm and a crack pipe in your mouth to get anyone to take you seriously.
A while back, I went to my general practitioner and tried to get into a rehab facility. He was caught off guard and sent me to some place which was basically a level 4 detox facility (this meant nothing to me when I was first told it). Regardless, I had made the plans, packed my bags, gone to go be admitted, and the doctor there told me there was no way in hell he was admitting me because this was a place for court ordered detox of people who were in a far different place than me, criminal, and basically the people drinking MD under a bridge for 30 years or smoking crack rock and holding people up at gas stations. Basically, he told me that under no circumstances was this the place for me. I’d set aside the time for work. Showed up, got rejected.
Spent another couple months trying to get a place that was right, covered by insurance, and amenable to my time schedule. Found a place in Ft. Myers, Florida, and was getting ready to go, but then they flaked out on me and would never send me proof that my insurance would cover it. I’m not jumping into that kind of scam, especially in Rick Scott’s Florida. Not to mention, I sweat in a meat locker, and Ft. Myers in July sounds like my own personal hell.
So then I just said fuck it. I’m just going with the VA, even though I have private insurance. It’s close, veterans (who bitch more than anyone on the planet) consistently rate their care at the VA higher than civilians rate their hospital experiences, plus there would be a comfort level there because I was around folks I understand. Spent a couple days making arrangements with people at the VA in Pitt, they told me what to bring, packed everything up, and went, thinking I was making a big step.
Guess what. In 2003, under our favorite President, for whom I voted twice, they changed the rules of eligibility. Because I am comfortably middle class and have a retirement account, even though I am a veteran with a combat patch, I am not eligible because I have too much money. At this point, I’m just like, you have to be fucking shitting me.
Get home, called the local hospitals. None of them have facilities for rehab, or if they do, they are all outpatient and they basically give you aspirin for headaches from withdrawal. Called a number of places, and it was all the same.
Finally, I called a hospital which accepts my insurance, and I can’t even set up a rehab appointment, I have to go through their emergency room, and then they will refer me to the clinic. So that is the plan this weekend.
Why is this so fucking hard? Am I just incompetent or is it this fucking bad everywhere? You’d think they would make it much easier for people to voluntarily check in to rehab. I mean, after all, I’m a drunk. A high functioning one, but a drunk nonetheless. Sometimes I cut myself while slicing tomatoes or doing basic everyday things because… I’m fucking drunk. Why is it that getting into rehab requires a fucking PhD in bullshit and the equivalent of a tax attorney’s knowledge of procedure? Isn’t getting clean tough enough? Jeebus.
I’m winding down now. Was really psyched to start today and get shit done, and got home dejected and have just been keyed up and pissed off all night. Not to mention the bullshit of the day we discussed earlier.
Weird fucking world we live in.
Still Alive!
Things were pushed back a few days, so I am back at home until Saturday or Sunday. Went with my bags packed and ready to go, and there were complications beyond my control, so I went home. And man, it sucked. I was totally mentally prepared to surrender and just let it all go, and got basically cock-blocked by bureaucracy. I’ll just get myself stoked up again in a day or two. At this point, I’m so pissed off that I am beginning to take it personally- “FUCK THE MACHINE, I WILL GET SOBER AND YOU WILL HELP ME YOU MOTHERFUCKERS.” Also, the pleasant bonus for the craptacular day was 2 and 1/2 hours of sitting in Pittsburgh traffic listening to Shawn bitch, because he hates sitting in traffic. More than most people. More than even me, and I never pass up an opportunity to get pissed off about something.
Glad to see TBOGG and Zaid posting, and I hope you like their contributions. I honestly have no idea if Betty, Sooner, and Mistermix seriously were raptured, but I do have another guest poster who will be showing up soon. I’ll let her introduce herself, but I think you will like her work.
The news of the day has been rather catastrophic. Apparently Ukrainian separatists shot down a civilian jetliner, killing close to 300 people, using Soviet weaponry. They then allegedly bragged about it on twitter, then, like an American politician busted sending a dick pic, thought they could delete it and no one would notice. There are also alleged recordings between separatist rebels and Russian advisors discussing the attack after the fact. Make of it what you will (cough, cough, Gulf of Tonkin, etc.).
At any rate, from my understanding, these are the folks that Putin whipped up during his blunderous (new word?) Crimean takeover and then essentially bailed on when he was kicked in the dick with financial sanctions. I have no idea what will happen next, but hopefully Europe, dependent on Russian gas and oil, will finally be motivated to do something about the chaos in their backyard.
Meanwhile, on my tv, John McCain is getting his war on, and talking about repercussions and stringent responses. The same John McCain who wanted to arm unknown rebels in Syria. Kinda like Putin armed untrained and unknown separatists in Ukraine. Why is this geriatric fool still on tv and treated as if he knows anything?
In other news, Bibi has launched another invasion into Gaza, meaning that three dead Jewish children will end up in misery and death for untold thousands of Palestinians. Meanwhile, our compliant media is hitting new lows:
Ayman Mohyeldin, the NBC News correspondent who personally witnessed yesterday’s killing by Israel of four Palestinian boys on a Gazan beach and who has received widespread praise for his brave and innovative coverage of the conflict, has been told by NBC executives to leave Gaza immediately. According to an NBC source upset at his treatment, the executives claimed the decision was motivated by “security concerns” as Israel prepares a ground invasion, a claim repeated to me by an NBC executive. But late yesterday, NBC sent another correspondent, Richard Engel, along with an American producer who has never been to Gaza and speaks no Arabic, into Gaza to cover the ongoing Israeli assault (both Mohyeldin and Engel speak Arabic).
Mohyeldin is an Egyptian-American with extensive experience reporting on that region. He has covered dozens of major Middle East events in the last decade for CNN, NBC and Al Jazeera English, where his reporting on the 2008 Israeli assault on Gaza made him a star of the network. NBC aggressively pursued him to leave Al Jazeera, paying him far more than the standard salary for its on-air correspondents.
Yesterday, Mohyeldin witnessed and then reported on the brutal killing by Israeli gunboats of four young boys as they played soccer on a beach in Gaza City. He was instrumental, both in social media and on the air, in conveying to the world the visceral horror of the attack.
Mohyeldin recounted how, moments before their death, he was kicking a soccer ball with the four boys, who were between the ages of 9 and 11 and all from the same family. He posted numerous chilling details on his Twitter and Instagram accounts, including the victims’ names and ages, photographs he took of their anguished parents, and video of one of their mothers as she learned about the death of her young son. He interviewed one of the wounded boys at the hospital shortly before being operated on. He then appeared on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, where he dramatically recounted what he saw.
Despite this powerful first-hand reporting – or perhaps because of it – Mohyeldin was nowhere to be seen on last night’s NBC Nightly News broadcast with Brian Williams. Instead, as Media Bistro’s Jordan Chariton noted, NBC curiously had Richard Engel – who was in Tel Aviv, and had just arrived there an hour or so earlier – “report” on the attack. Charlton wrote that “the decision to have Engel report the story for ‘Nightly’ instead of Mohyeldin angered some NBC News staffers.”
Indeed, numerous NBC employees, including some of the network’s highest-profile stars, were at first confused and then indignant over the use of Engel rather than Mohyeldin to report the story. But what they did not know, and what has not been reported until now, is that Mohyeldin was removed completely from reporting on Gaza by a top NBC executive, David Verdi, who ordered Mohyeldin to leave Gaza immediately.
Also, in Israel, here’s some video of Israeli’s standing on a hill watching missiles rain down on civilians in Gaza, cheering and hooting and hollering:
The reporter that was there was accosted by the Israelis in the area and told if she said anything wrong, they would wreck her car, and she tweeted as much and said they were scum for threatening her, so, of course, she is now America’s #1 anti-Semite to the right-wing blogosphere. Someone threatens to wreck my car, scum seems kind of mild for what I would call them. But I guess when you are caught on film cheering on the deaths of others, you get kind of sensitive and being called scum might hit a little close to home and make you think about what the fuck you are actually doing. So I guess there is that.
Might check in tomorrow. Might not. Today was a really shitty day all around. I was ready.
Some more from Detroit
Here’s some pretty pictures:
And this is Wally Lynn, who is attending NN:
Wally is from Pittsburgh and has a great Pittsburgh accent. He is part of Our Walmart:
We envision a future in which our company treats us, the Associates of Walmart, with respect and dignity. We envision a world where we succeed in our careers, our company succeeds in business, our customers receive great service and value, and Walmart and Associates share all of these goals.
Wally started his own organization for veterans within Our Walmart and that organization is called Our Vets.
I’m just back from Reverend Barber’s speech.
Briefly, he said we have to create a “fusion politics” that is grounded in our values and that we are in the middle of the third progressive uprising of the last 146 years. Obviously, this will have to be fleshed out a bit (he said much more than that) but that’s the general idea.
Think of the (Border) Children!
(John Deering via GoComics.com)
There’s no humanitarian crisis can’t be made a little uglier, with the right stressors. The NYTimes, “Towns Fight to Avoid Taking In Migrant Minors“:
… Overwhelmed by an influx of unaccompanied minors who are fleeing violence in their home countries in Central America, federal officials are searching the country for places to house them and have been forced to scrap some proposed shelter sites in California, Connecticut, Iowa, New York and other states because of widespread opposition from residents and local officials…
Some of the opposition has also bordered on the extreme. A few of the protesters who marched against a proposed shelter in Vassar, MI, on Monday were armed with semiautomatic rifles & handguns. In Virginia, an effort to house the children at the shuttered campus of Saint Paul’s College in Lawrenceville caused such an uproar that federal officials pulled out, even though a five-month lease had been signed. Someone spray-painted anti-immigrant graffiti on a brick wall at a former Army Reserve facility in Westminster, Md., that was being considered as a shelter site.
Some cities have raised health and security concerns. Northeast of Oyster Creek, League City passed a resolution opposing any shelters from opening even though the federal government had no plans to do so. The resolution claimed that “illegal aliens suffering from diseases endemic in their countries of origin are being released into our communities.”…
Aaaand (via Mr. Pierce) up jumps Doctor & Representative Phil Gingrey, R-Marietta GA, airing his fears of the Diseased Foreigner:
As a physician for over 30 years, I am well aware of the dangers infectious diseases pose. In fact, infection diseases remain in the top 10 causes of death in the United States. However, the United States has been successful in mitigating or eradicating many diseases, and others are not indigenous to this country.
As such, reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning. Many of the children who are coming across the border also lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles…
Scabies, swine flu, Ebola — not that Dr. Gingrey wants to fear-monger, mind you. Jim Newell at Salon tells of some people who totally do:
A Baptist charity last week submitted a bid to purchase Weslaco, Texas’s Palm Aire Hotel & Suites for approximately $3.8 million in nongovernmental funds. The group, Baptist Family & Child Services, intended to convert the 600-bed facility into a dormitory for child migrants detained at the border, where it would house them for 15-day periods, “providing medical and mental health care, on-site educational programs, recreational programs and case management.” As of earlier this week, the group was preparing for a hearing before the city of Weslaco’s zoning board in order to secure a conditional permit. BCFS already runs a facility in Harlingen, Texas, but wanted to relocate.
Yesterday, however, BCFS abruptly pulled its proposal, citing “negative backlash caused by information misreported to the public.” What misreported information could they be referring to? Maybe stories like these: “FEDS TO OPEN $50 MILLION RESORT FOR ILLEGAL CHILDREN.”…
The hotel is described elsewhere in conservative media as a “$50 Million Illegal Alien Resort Spa,” “multimillion-dollar hotel complex,” “luxury lodging” and a “fancy hotel.” (Those last two, oddly enough, are from the same story that also describes the Palm Aire as “not exactly Club Med.”)…
Lest I be accused of Northeastern urban-enclave parochialism, I went looking for the local Boston-area news clip where Governor Patrick called the child refugee situation a “humanitarian crisis” and explicitly compared it to a boatload of Jewish children during the Nazi era being turned away from American shores. He’s downgraded his assessment a little since yesterday:
No final decision had been made on whether Massachusetts will shelter some of the unaccompanied children crossing the nation’s southern border illegally, Gov. Deval Patrick said Thursday.
Patrick did confirm that Camp Edwards military base on Cape Cod was among the possible sites being considered as a secure detention facility for the young Central Americans. The base was also used to temporarily house 235 evacuees of Hurricane Katrina in 2005…
Other possible sites were under consideration, Patrick said, though he would not reveal them. He said he did not expect the state to house more than a few hundred of the migrants. More than 57,000 young people have arrived in the U.S. since the fall…