A few years back John Green wrote a book called Looking For Alaska. In that book, he had a quote from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edna’s family still owns the copyright to her poems, and John’s publisher told him the quote was too long to count as “fair use” so he either had to shorten the quote or pay Edna’s family. He shortened the quote because he didn’t have money.

In real life, that was the end of it. But let’s say that John Green published his book, and several years later Edna St. Vincent Millay’s family got mad and wanted money for the quote, even though he had shortened it. As copyright law works now, John would go to court and argue that his quote was fair use. Edna’s family would argue that they wanted money and the judge would decide whether John owed them money or not.

Here’s how it would go under SOPA: Edna’s family says that John Green violated their copyright. Because of that, they track down every copy of Looking For Alaska, and every copy of An Abundance of Katherines and every copy of Paper Towns and they halt the printing of The Fault In Our Stars and every copy of every book that John Green ever wrote is piled up and burned. And after that, John can take Edna’s family to court, if he has the money for a lawyer now that his livelihood has been destroyed.

Notice how they didn’t go to court until after John’s life was destroyed? Notice how John Green was presumed guilty and punished without trial? Also notice how everything he ever wrote was destroyed, not just the one thing with potential copyright infringement? This is what congress wants to do to the internet. This is why you should be calling your congressperson and telling the president that if it goes through congress, he needs to Veto it. SOPA is unconstitutional and wrong.

• I have a fantastic husband who handles my roller coaster of moods better than I deserve.
• I have a house that, while lacking storage space, a real refrigerator, and a shower, is at least a place to keep all my books.
• The tea-mostat totally works.
• I live in a country where I can speak my mind without fear of losing my job, getting beaten, or getting pepper sprayed.
• I can go to the doctor whenever I am sick, without wondering whether I can afford it.
• I can get all of my prescription medications for free or very very cheap.
• I can afford to be a full time writer, at least for a little while.

I’m less certain than ever about moving back to the US. I’m watching the government of America treat people in ways that I formerly would have associated with fascist regimes. I see a former democracy. I see a country that was formed on the values of free speech and equal rights for all people devolve into a country where an oligarchy of the wealthy rules, and everyone else is reduced to a feudal peasant working for a corporate lord.

I can’t say with any certainty that I can return to the US. I’m not sure that I’m willing to give up that much of my rights. I’m just thankful that I have the option to stay in another country.

“There is another way we’re getting behind business – by sorting out the banks. Taxpayers bailed you out. Now it’s time for you to repay the favour and start lending to Britain’s small businesses.” – David Cameron (Prime Minister and leader of the British conservative party)

This is the core of why we’re angry at banks. We, as taxpayers, bailed them out and kept them from collapsing. In return, the government and the people expected that the banks would be grateful and invest back in the people who helped them.

Instead of investing in the people, the banks took the money and ran with it. They raised interest rates, and started denying more loans and mortgages, using their new favorite phrase “credit crunch”. Instead of using the bail-out money to rebuild the economy from the base, which was the intention of the bail-out in the first place, they used the bail-out money to pay huge bonuses to their executives. Then they started adding more fees to people’s accounts, claiming that they “had a right to make a profit.”

But do they really have a right to make a profit, when they have done nothing to pay back the huge pile of taxpayer money that they eagerly gobbled up?

Basically, what the American people are saying is, “We want our bail-out money back.” Whether it is in the form of the banks actually paying the money back to the government from their now multiplying profits, or in the form of making banking more affordable to the people who paid that tax money — one way or another, we want our money back.

When a doctor opens a general medicine practice, they go around to all of the major health insurance companies and apply to be a Preferred Provider. In some cases, if they’re part of a big clinic, that clinic makes them automatically signed on as a Preferred Provider. The Preferred Provider agreement that they sign with the health insurance company means that they promise to be generally a pretty good doctor, and in exchange, the health insurance company guarantees to pay them for their services according to a set fee schedule.

Let’s make up a doctor. Dr. Smith just joined up with SuperClinic, and so he is on a bunch of Preferred Provider lists. This means that he gets a ton of new patients and he is guaranteed to get paid by all of them. He decides that he wants to charge $50 for every 15 minute consultation. The fee schedule from the health insurance company will only allow him to be paid $40 per appointment, but that’s ok. He just writes off that extra $10 as a business loss, because as part of the Preferred Provider network, he can’t bill the patient for it. If a patient comes in without insurance, he charges them the full $50 and gets it.

A year goes by and the health insurance company revises their fee schedule. The fee schedule is set based on the average that doctors are billing and the health insurance company finds that doctors are charging more than $40, so they raise their rate for a consultation to $50.

Now Dr. Smith is getting a full $50 for every insured patient and $50 for every uninsured patient. He decides that’s great, but he could be making more. If he raises his prices, he gets to write off some loss from the insured patients, and get more cash from the uninsured. So he starts charging $60 per appointment. If you are his patient, and you have insurance, you never even notice that he raised his prices because your insurance company handles all that.

This occurs every year. Health insurance companies do not pay doctors based on the actual cost of providing services, but based on the average that doctors decide to charge. Doctors have figured this out, so most of them continually charge just slightly higher than the insurance company will pay, in order to ensure that they get themselves a raise every so often.

This same thing happens with hospital services. They started out billing insurance for the actual cost of an aspirin, but then found that they could get more just by telling the insurance company that it cost more, even if it didn’t. Whether they charge $0.30 or $30, the health insurance company pays it.

Because the health insurance company is throwing money around to doctors and hospitals, they have to charge their customers more. And refuse coverage to anyone who is likely to need to go to one of these expensive doctors or hospitals. It is a free market, so the doctors have the right to charge whatever they want, and the health insurance companies are powerless to say, “That aspirin didn’t really cost that much.”

This growing number of people who can’t get insurance end up having to pay the full price for a doctor (which is more than the doctor makes from his insured patients). Those people end up bankrupt from major medical expenses, or they end up chronically ill because they can’t afford a doctor. People who are sick can’t work. So those people end up on welfare rather than just getting the health treatment that they need in order to get healthy and get back to work. This effects the entire economy of the US. Fixing healthcare in America is part of fixing the economy in America.

In a government-managed health care system like in the UK or Canada, everything is cheaper. The doctors are paid a generous yearly salary, based on experience and education. The government pays all of the expenses based on the actual cost of care rather than based on what the doctor feels like charging. So it costs a fraction of what it costs in a free market system for medical care, and it is available to everyone, regardless of pre-existing health conditions.

The American health care system also has higher base costs due to the fact that in order to deal with all of the health insurance companies, clinics have to hire billing specialists, who are trained in filling out insurance forms in order to get maximum money. There is no need for a billing specialist or any kind of insurance specialist in a government-run system. It all runs together as one large government-funded corporation.

I’m not saying that government health care is perfect. No system is perfect. But government-run healthcare can provide decent health services to the most people for the lowest price.

UPDATE:
In light of the Occupy movements, there have been a lot of articles analysing who is in the top 1% of incomes in the US. People in the medical field make up about 15% of the “one percenters”. Not only are regular people being denied healthcare, but it is primarily because a portion of medical practitioners are grossly overpaid. So again, the answer to wealth inequality and the poor economy in America should start with complete reform of the health care system.

A few days later I joined the group in Ryazan and a man walked up to me and said, “You look like you could be from Proctor.” That man was Loren Harrison. He was from Duluth and had been told that a girl from Proctor (a suburb of Duluth) was part of our group from Seattle. He was kind and generous and in every way an example of a great Christian man. I found out that he went to the same church in Duluth as my parents, but didn’t really know them (it was a large church).

When I went back to Duluth for Christmas later that year I was able to introduce my parents to Loren, and also meet Loren’s wife and kids. My parents became fast friends with Loren and his family. In the intervening years, he has done missionary work all over Africa.

Loren suffered from a ruptured brain aneurysm earlier this week. He was airlifted to a hospital with skilled neurosurgeons in Minneapolis, but in spite of their best efforts, he never regained consciousness and passed away yesterday. He was 50 years old.

Loren loved helping people and did missionary work all over the world. He never saw an “us” and “them”, but understood that there are only different faces of “us”. Please pray for his family and friends as we are all struggling with losing someone so suddenly and so young. The world is a worse place with Loren no longer in it.

There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, I just don’t feel very witty or entertaining lately. I feel like anything I write here is going to be a disappointment after spending so long not writing here. And then it compounds the longer I fail to write.

I’m going to be flat-out honest about another reason I’m not posting here. Back in 2008 I left my job with the NHS under not very good circumstances. I had said some things about my job here that offended people. I also said things here that were in no way related to my job — in some cases written as much as 4 or 5 years before I even worked for the NHS — that was used against me in a complaint from my (now former) co-workers. So I am understandably wary about being honest on the internet. But enough time has passed now that I can be honest and mention that when I left that job, the boss basically threatened me and said that if I ever wrote anything negative about anyone working at the NHS again, she’d make sure I never got hired by anyone ever again.

So what has happened here lately? I got hired by a non-profit organization back in January, for a 6 month contract working in clinical trials. I worked those 6 months, and now I’m unemployed again, though I am working a few days this week at my old office as a consultant, to help them with a bit of a backlog.

During my time working there, we lost two of our guinea pigs. Elvis died from unknown causes. He lost weight and then eventually died. After he died, Fudge was distraught. He stopped eating and wasted away, dying about a month after Elvis. Apparently, Fudge didn’t know that it was time to eat if Elvis wasn’t there squeaking about it.

We are down to two pets. Spike is getting old. He’s nearly 6 years old, which is pretty ancient for a guinea pig. He never squeaks at dinner time. He hardly squeaks at all, so it’s been very quiet here. He’s developed an impacted anal gland, so husband has the unenviable job of cleaning out a smelly guinea pig ass every so often.

We still have our hamster Luna. She’s a terrible hamster. She bites and tries to escape and seems to be furious most of the time. I’ve never seen so much hate packed into such a tiny fluffy package. We can’t take her out and play with her because she has a taste for flesh. She doesn’t just bite because she is trying to figure out what your finger is. She bites because she knows it is your finger, and she hates you. We can’t even put her in a rolly ball thing because she can escape from them. Before we had Luna, I didn’t know that hamsters could hiss and growl.

At the moment, I’ve been working on writing more. Not here, obviously. But I’ve been working on a few fiction and non-fiction books that I’d like to write. So I’ve been writing about 1000 words a day, you just don’t get to read it. So far, we’ve been okay financially because I knew my last job was temporary, so I saved up a lot.

The plan is to move to the US sometime next year. Here’s the problem: I’m used to having a lot of paid vacation time, and basically unlimited sick leave, and free healthcare and a pretty good retirement plan. I’ve gotten spoiled living in Europe. I’ve gotten used to being treated like a human being, which is not really encouraged by American corporations. So I’ve looked around at jobs in America that have benefits comparable to those in Europe. So far the only job I’ve found is in Congress. So I might have to run for office when I go back to the US, because politicians are the only people in America who get the same benefits as average people in Europe.