Things I don't like in books

1. Characters whose life history is basically trauma after trauma after trauma.

2. Plots that exist mainly to further traumatize the characters.

These are not what I look for in my fiction. I do not enjoy reading about people's misery. Yet I also understand that sunshine and bunnies and kumbayah make for rather dull stories, so of course there should be problems and bad things happening. Balance. It's a good thing.

A few brief things on health care reform.

As a goddamned pinko leftist, I don't think it goes quite far enough. Being swamped with Life and trying to get this damned novel edited, I haven't had as much time as I'd like to sit down and read the shit. But I do know that Republican obstructionism and outright lies (death panels, say) are basically that.

Also, they said Medicare would destroy the American government, ruin American health care, and many of the same things they're saying now. Possibly even with the tinge of race-baiting and scaremongering they've got going on.

I don't understand, either, Republican insistence that this goes against the will of the people. Let's see. We've got Democratic majorities in the House and Senate (59/100 is still a majority, regardless of what those who want 60/100 to be a majority say) and a Democrat in the White House. Seems to me the People want Democratic reforms.

Opposition to the actual content of the bill, based on personal philosophy, is all well and good, as long as it has a basis in reality (ie, the actual content of the law), as opposed to the wild-eyed rantings of Michele Bachmann or Rush Limbaugh. (Who said he'd move to Costa Rica, if I recall. Pony up, Rush.)

I can't really fit my opinion on what a health care system should look like into an essay on the internet, and boiling it down to a soundbite is dangerous and inaccurate. I've discussed it at length elsewhere in the past. Some of the things in this bill are things I see as good. For example, insurance companies not being allowed to drop your policy based on some bullshit reason after you get sick. If insurance is supposed to cover your medical costs (that's what you pay fucking premiums for, right?), then it ought to damn well cover your medical costs when you get sick.

I understand the libertarian argument that insurance hides the costs of care from the consumers, and that if we don't know how much full body scans cost, we don't care, and we get them anyway. I take issue with the idea that medical care should be thought of in the same way as buying a washing machine (if you're having a heart attack or have just been in a head-on collision, you're not going to google which hospital has the best prices), BUT. But. The new law will increase transparency. Drug companies will have to disclose payments to physicians. Hospitals will have to post prices.

Increasing the information consumers will have access to in order to make informed decisions is a good thing, isn't it? Yet medical care isn't like getting a washing machine. Sure, you can use ratings to decide which primary care doctor to see, or which orthopedic surgeon to go to for the knee replacement, or any sort of non-emergent (to use the medical jargon) situation. I'm all for that.

But when your doctor says he wants to run a test because that could be cancer, most patients will say "OK," then go wherever the doctor sends them. The situation is not completely analogous to going to Consumer Reports for their opinions on the best washing machine.

I generally like leora's post on the topic, but this comment in particular stood out:

It is going to encourage people who use different plans to rate them, and make those ratings publicly available. Most people really don't know how good or bad their health insurance is. They often get it through work or school, and unless something goes wrong, they just assume they're okay. Their employer may or may not have really looked into what the company has to offer, or may have just gone with something cheap to be able to say they offer health insurance as a benefit. This is hoping to make for more transparency and awareness, while also setting minimum limits so no health insurance can be bad beyond a certain level of bad.

The principle of the free market that many people like takes as a requirement perfect information. You never have perfect information. But the more you strive toward pretty good information, the better competition works. So, there will be competition among different health care plans, with an attempt to make it so that how good a plan actually is is clearer, and thus better plans actually will be more popular.

I'm willing to make concessions to the free market, but only if there are regulations to keep the people from being fucked over.

(Also, DrugMonkey's post made me giggle. It's probably not *nice* of me to have giggled, but with all the right-wing talk about the impending end of the worldAmerica as we know it, it was a nice sarcastic antidote. From another person on the front lines of health care who's actually had to deal with jerkwads on the other end of the phone at the insurance companies, who know as much about medicine as the guy stocking shelves at 2 am.)

This was *supposed* to be quick. Oops. Now I need to eat lunch before my hands start shaking more.

Blah, blah, more writing.

I'm having trouble focusing, and I need to swing by my eye doctor to drop off some frames for computer glasses before COUP, so I think I'll wrap up my writing for the day. (My vision since LASIK is better than 20/20, and I'm a little farsighted, so we'll be turning my old reading glasses into a pair of computer glasses, since I spend so much time at the computer these days.)

Net word count: 499
Total word count: 61579

I need to decide if I want to keep one scene in the POV it's currently in, or if I want to change it. I may want to change it to be consistent with the rest of the chapter. I don't know. What I do know is that I have to get some focus on if I want to get this finished before I go to Germany.

(holy shit, I'm going to Germany! In like 6 weeks! Yikes!)