My Republican Grandmother next door now understands and supports the public option

Every day I take the dog out and one of our neighbors is a salt of the earth marine widow. She is in her late 80's doesn't drive and opens the garage door and sits with her dog and wait for neighbors to come by and talk.

Well I have been infecting the little group with Obama fever since the primaries. A couple of the women go to a card game and correct the other widows about the lies about Obama.

But she still watches Fox and hates Hannity but kind of likes O'Reilly but doesn't think he is telling a straight story.

Whenever there is a big speech or event she will watch for me and my golden retreiver and then she opens the garage door and wants to talk about what it really means.

I explained to her about the public option but I could tell that she is worried about encroaching government in medical care, even though she is on Medicare which she likes.

Her daughter is in severe pain. The doctor prescribed an epidural. Her insurance company delayed the approval. Finally after 3 weeks her daughter gave up and bought the epidural, the next day the insurance cmopany approved the epidural.

I explained to her that the insurance company knows that epidurals are for pain. They know that sometimes the pain goes away (and then they would save money), or that people self medicate for pain (and they would save money) or that people give up buy it themselves and then have to submit the paperwork for a refund (but many just give up and they save money).

I told her that when they save money the head of the department gets a bonus, the regional vice president gets a bonus and the president gets a bonus, and all of the shareholders get a bonus. When you add all of the hundreds of thousands of delays and deferred treatments it amounts to tens of millions of extra dollars, all the way up the chain.

I pointed out that the Public Option has no incentive to delay the epidural because they don't get any bonuses for saying no. In fact if someone complains then they could get in trouble. So in the Public Option they look on the chart, see that the doctor is authorized, the patient is current in payments and authorize the epidural.

If her daughter had the public option she wouldn't have to have spent the last three weeks in useless pain, and the public option would have been more aggressive in negotiating a lower cost of the epidural too.

Now she understands why the Public Option is so important.

What this nation needs is for the understanding to come first, so the pain doesn't HAVE to last three weeks.

In Germany, there is a joke that says there are three kinds of doctors:

There's the surgeon, who knows nothing, but does everything
There's the psychiatrist who knows everything, but does nothing
And then there's the medical examiner doing autopsies, who knows and does everything, but always an hour too late.

So you have to go from doctor to doctor to doctor until you find the one who believes in the two things that actually are making you ill.

This is the kind of thing folks need to know about the Public Option. I'm so darn tired of the flat out lies and spin the insurance companies and the RW twits are putting out.

I find it mind boggling that there are some people out there who are that STUPID that they actually think big corporations give a tinker darn about THEM. Many years ago I used to be a "suit" and know for sure... it's all about the bottom line. Even when they're "making nice" it's ALL about the BOTTOM LINE and the $$$$$ that goes with that.

companies are playing games with us. Because I have heard these same people who are now saying how great our system is complain about the hassle they go through just to get x,y and z.... It is not foreign to them. They just are so paralyzed by the lies they are hearing that their logic isn't working...

rely on their remaining ignorant.

to be the neighbor of more people.

This will have to be changed.

Cloning may be involved.

and votes. ;)

k&r