Living in fear as the world turns

That disproven thing is the weakest thing about string theory. They have yet to come up with some test that could disprove it. It’s like maybe it’s true or maybe it isn’t, but it doesn’t make any difference as to how the universe operates.

Let me try this on the coriolis thing. While air is coming from the north pole underneath it the Earth is turning to the east so that air originally headed for San Francisco ends up in Denver so that makes for a net westward wind. But what of wind coming from the equator that wind comes from the east, so how does that explain that? Well I don’t know. I think it has something to do with the area getting bigger when you come from the north and smaller when you come from the south. Ah, I understood it once, and I could probably read the wiki and understand it again, but I’d probably forget it in a few days. It’s like turning the clocks back and forth between the standard and daylight times. I understand it perfectly, but if I talk about it for awhile I reach a point where I don’t understand it anymore.

Talk about things that are hard to understand, I just went through a crisis with my state health insurance. Every year or so they come out with new plans to choose from, and this year, being really broke, they offered only two crappy plans, so I decided to go off and get my own, and then I realized I didn’t know anything about it. There are plans A and B, and sort of a C I think, and D for drugs, and there are HMOs and PPOs and OAPs, and there are Advantage plans and supplemental plans, and Medigap plans, and everybody seems to know about their own plans and nothing about other plans, and when you get somebody to pick up the phone and answer your question, they will give you an answer, but not necessarily the answer to the question that you asked.

I finally determined that I had A and B, the first free, and the second paid through my social security, and what I was getting from the state was something called a supplemental, not the same as an Advantage which everybody told me to avoid like the plague, and not quite the same as an HMO, and I’m not sure where a PPO stands in this and even the insurance people didn’t know what an OAP is.

What I got was a supplemental, which claims to pay everything that A and B doesn’t (although surely there is something they don’t pay, there is always something). It costs about $170 a month. I started thinking, if these guys are taking my $170 a month and paying my bills out of that, surely they are expecting to make a profit, and so wouldn’t I be wiser to do without the policy and just pay out of pocket? The catch in this theory is that the insurance company is paying less on those bills than I would be paying as an individual, and that’s part of how the insurance company makes a profit off of me. In a sense I am paying the insurance company to give me access to those lower fees. I am paying protection.

Damn those guys. I hate them, I hate them, and yet there I am sweet talking to them on the phone and signing up so that they can take my money.

And the thing is, you know, I wouldn’t mind paying some bucks here and there, but those medical bills can be so gargantuan, and we don’t know quite how it works, but we somehow know that if we don’t have insurance we may end up having to shell out every last penny we have and still be in debt. They have us living in fear.

Speaking of fear, do you have bears up there?