The desperate desire to escape modernity
Well, I finally bit the bullet and sat down to try and sort out my options for when my work-provided health insurance goes away March 1, and after about an hour of fighting my way through Pennie.com was told my application is "ineligible", with no explanation about why. (My suspicion is that even though I should be eligible due to "life change" circumstances, there's some invisible timeframe for that which I've unknowingly missed. Oh, for the heady days of ~2013, the last time I did this, when nobody cared about anything other than if I had enough money in my checking account.)
My dentist offers a $40-per-month subscription plan that covers pretty much anything they can handle in-house. I know there are doctors in certain parts of the country that offer the same, and a few hospitals too--or at least there were experiments in that direction. Not sure whether any of them have proved successful long-term, but there certainly aren't any in our area.
The thing is, if hospital prices hadn't ballooned to insane proportions ($80,000+ for a 2 night stay in the hospital and a routine surgery), I wouldn't really care about health insurance. I'd be happy to manage payments myself, but the health insurance industry and governmental tinkering in that industry has so disconnected pricing from actual costs, that it's foolish not to have at least catastrophic coverage (assuming they'll let you buy it...!)
All of that to say that I have definite yearnings for some sort of world that's stripped of the vast majority of our existing bureaucracies. The older I get and the more things 'progress', the more unfriendly and inflexible the world feels, and divorced from the actual doing/functioning of things. I know I'll have to start job-hunting soon, but all of my prospects horrify me--and the one job I do want (I think I want, but I'm so burned out on the failings of academia that I don't really trust my judgment on anything at the moment) is quite unavailable to me.
I feel like a foot trapped inside a shoe that's rubbing it raw, wishing desperately for freedom and relief. Which probably mostly just means that I'm running a sleep deficit, but still. Stop the world, please, I'd like to get off.
My dentist offers a $40-per-month subscription plan that covers pretty much anything they can handle in-house. I know there are doctors in certain parts of the country that offer the same, and a few hospitals too--or at least there were experiments in that direction. Not sure whether any of them have proved successful long-term, but there certainly aren't any in our area.
The thing is, if hospital prices hadn't ballooned to insane proportions ($80,000+ for a 2 night stay in the hospital and a routine surgery), I wouldn't really care about health insurance. I'd be happy to manage payments myself, but the health insurance industry and governmental tinkering in that industry has so disconnected pricing from actual costs, that it's foolish not to have at least catastrophic coverage (assuming they'll let you buy it...!)
All of that to say that I have definite yearnings for some sort of world that's stripped of the vast majority of our existing bureaucracies. The older I get and the more things 'progress', the more unfriendly and inflexible the world feels, and divorced from the actual doing/functioning of things. I know I'll have to start job-hunting soon, but all of my prospects horrify me--and the one job I do want (I think I want, but I'm so burned out on the failings of academia that I don't really trust my judgment on anything at the moment) is quite unavailable to me.
I feel like a foot trapped inside a shoe that's rubbing it raw, wishing desperately for freedom and relief. Which probably mostly just means that I'm running a sleep deficit, but still. Stop the world, please, I'd like to get off.