Keeping All Options Open

A few days ago, I’d say Friday, I spoke with a man from Chicago on a forum (the URL escapes me at the moment) about the tragedy in Fort Hood.  He expressed his disappointment and anger at what he felt were religious zealots of whatever faith.  The radicals, the fanatics, he said, were ruining religion for the regular people who are just trying to get by in life.  I hadn’t really heard much about the events at Fort Hood at that point, the investigation still in its early stages at that point.  I didn’t match the other man’s point of view about religious zealotry, but simply offered the point of view that perhaps the suspect had gone crazy.  Now, what I was told, and this is from a self-proclaimed political conservative (important to note because more often, liberals will be concerned about understanding why a crime happened and about rehabilitation and prevention while conservatives have a greater propensity to be focused on punishment and determent) was that saying that the Fort Hood shooter may have been crazy was too easy.

I don’t believe that at all.  Of course, the only thing that I could say at that point anyway would be speculation.  That he may or may not have had some deteriorated mental faculties had no less validity than to suggest, as the other commenter did, that it was a case of a Muslim terrorist who infiltrated the U.S. military.  I had no reason to believe that until an investigation by trained professionals on the scene could say anything one way or another.  However, for me, the important thing is that the possibility of “crazy” is “too easy.”

Believe me, I’ll be the first to admit and agree that many times when it comes to human nature, saying that something or someone is crazy is more of a defense mechanism for the speaker.  Without any clear understanding of what’s in front of them, perhaps without the willingness to understand, saying that something is “crazy” as in simply being beyond the accepted normalcy happens all the time.  What I believe, though, is that there is a right and wrong way to bring up the matter.  If you say that something is crazy as a way to put it out of mind without thinking about it deeply, without having to truly analyze and comprehend what happened… that is not the correct way of looking at it.  Even in the case of true dementia leading to loss of life, there are still lessons to be learned: early warning signs and manifestations of abnormal behavior that, seeing those conditions in the future, someone may be able to act ahead of time and help avert another disaster.  Something can be “crazy” and still be used as a learning experience.

Part of the issue, for those who wish to say that they want to “understand” what happens when an individual decides to go on a rampage and take the lives of as many people as possible, is that saying that someone is insane feels like a cop-out.  As though allowing that person to have a dementia somehow excuses their behavior.  That couldn’t be further from the case.  Even if the justice system states that an individual declared legally incompetent to stand trial should not be pushed forward into the same prison population as a sane convict, at no point is anyone saying that the crimes that the insane person committed are any less bad or wrong.  Insanity doesn’t diminish the gravity of the crime committed, so that’s not the issue.

Still, I don’t prejudge whether somebody who makes the decision to shoot many innocent bystanders may be insane, simply that such an option should be on the table for investigative purposes.  Let the professionals rule that out.  After all, we can look at the tragic shooting incident at Virginia Tech as a case study in how a suspect’s legitimate mental illness was considered taboo, even as psychiatric evaluations in the past clearly indicated that the individual could potentially be a danger to others if left unchecked.  And that’s the important part… not that the VT shooter was an inherently bad person, but that he didn’t have the capacity to fully appreciate what were appropriate behaviors.  And that’s the important lesson here.  Not that the Fort Hood shooter is or is not crazy, I still don’t know enough about that.  But if we’re unwilling to accept the consideration that there are, in fact, high-functioning individuals out there who may nonetheless have some unfortunate mental condition and could do the wrong thing… by not allowing that possibility we inadvertently become complacent about whether such a person could end up hurting somebody.

That’s all I have to say about that.  All well wishes go out to the survivors and surviving families in Fort Hood.

– Sky

A Hypothetical Situation

So, say you’re working.  Say you’re fairly young, 20s to 40s.  You’ve worked, you’ve paid into the social security system, paid your taxes, kept your bills up to date… you’ve done everything that you’re supposed to do.  You’ve done everything right, so far.

Now, say that you get laid off (through no fault of your own) from a great job with good benefits.  You have that “eight month emergency fund” that Suze Orman’s always talking about so you don’t sweat it.  You hit the pavement looking for another job, and meanwhile, you budgeted to the point that all of your bills are paid and you can even pay another 2 months if you had to.

Then, say that you go without finding a job for 2 months.  You’re eager to get back to work but you understand that the average time that it takes for an individual to find a comparable position to what she previously held takes longer and longer every year.  In the meantime, you sign up at contract employment agencies that send you some day work, but nothing longer than a few weeks.  Nobody has the budget (or is willing to allocate the funds) to hire you on, no matter how competent an employee you prove yourself to be within the company.

Then it gets to 4 months and you’re stir crazy.  You volunteered all over town but after a while that starts to cut into your time to search for jobs, especially when you go in person but everybody says that you should go home and apply online since paper applications are an unnecessary expense nowadays and businesses have to cut costs somehow.  Then after you go home, you sign up to Monster, Careerbuilder, Job.com, Yahoo Hotjobs, and many local sites through Craigslist and media outlets.  And even if you spend a few hours crafting your perfect profile on each site, odds are that every time you apply for work at another location, you’ll have to spend another 1 to 3 hours making another job seeker’s profile before you can even begin to tell anyone what position that you’d like to pursue.

Now it’s six months and you’re sweating it.  You never liked the idea of taking from the government so you don’t want to go for unemployment, but you know that even though the most recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor show that the average job seeker spends 6 months looking for work, if you haven’t found steady employment after 4 months hiring managers will perceive that there is something wrong with you, rather than there being something wrong with the job market.  To cope, you think, maybe now you should seriously consider going for unemployment and food stamps.  After all, you don’t want your family to suffer a loss of lifestyle for your pride.  So you put in your paperwork and you wait.

Now, say that you get injured.  Once again, through no fault of your own.  And it’s an injury of moderate severity, you don’t bounce right back from it but it’s not fatal either.  You don’t have health insurance so you have to cover the bills out of your own pocket.  But your savings are budgeted to your home, so you have to decide what you’re going to do about the cost for the hospital.  And that gets pricey.  After all, when you’re in the hospital, you’re charged for, in no particular order:

1. Test after test after extraneous test. Keep in mind that many doctors and hospitals admit to running unnecessary tests simply to make it look like they’re doing everything that they can for someone.  It protects them legally, as well.  Nobody sues for malpractice because a doctor ran too many tests.  They could, as it’s just running up a huge bill, but sadly the healthcare industry accepts this practice and would crush the plaintiff if anyone brought suit about the matter.
2. More tests. You didn’t think they were done, did you?  Personal example, when I went to the hospital a little while back due to high blood sugar (I discovered I’m a Type 2 diabetic) the hospital ran 8 blood tests, claiming that my liver readings were abnormal.  I’m not a surgeon but that seemed odd to me, so I did my own web research.  Turns out that because of my high blood sugar, my liver readings were supposed to be abnormal.  So the hospital ran too many tests to confirm what 2 tests would have accomplished.  No problem for the hospital, right?  The work was done in minutes and they got to charge me well over $3000 for 8 urine tests and two bags of very low concentration saline (read: salt water) that they dripped into my blood intravenously.  The sad thing about that is the doctor even said that I could’ve just stayed home and drank a bunch of jugs of ice water for a few days straight and accomplished the same effect.  Wish somebody had told me that in the waiting room.
3. Receiving a hospital bed. Even if you’re only going to be there in the emergency room for a couple of hours they’ll sit you onto a bed because if you’re on a bed they can charge more than if you’re just around in a private examination room.
4. Giving you food. If you realized that your small Healthy Choice sized container of flank steak, mashed potatoes, carrots, and jello cost $12 per serving, you wouldn’t complain about the quality of hospital food but instead treat it like the best meal you’ve ever eaten.  You’d have to, at that point.
5. Seeing a doctor. And when I say “seeing a doctor” that may or may not mean that the doctor comes over to say “Hi.”  The mere fact that you’ve witnessed a doctor somewhere in your vicinity is enough to get charged for that doctor working on you.
6. Not seeing a doctor. Honestly, if a doctor just happens to hear that you’re on his or her floor while you are being treated, even if it’s only the nurses that have anything to do with you, odds are that doctor will try to claim a visitation fee.  One would say “They shouldn’t do that, it’s dishonest!” but again, it’s accepted practice.  Plus, in the emergency room they don’t have time to check your insurance information, they simply assume that somebody’s going to pay it and add to your tab regardless.
7. Treating you. Oh, yeah, you probably want to get better if you’re seeking medical care.  That’ll cost you.

So getting back to the hypothetical scenario, let’s say that you end up in the hospital for a grand total of three months.  Your medical bills are tremendous at this point.  Obviously the hospital can’t afford the negative press to kick you out before your treatment is complete, even though you’re unable to pay them.  And you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars of healthcare expenses on you at the end of this medical ordeal.  You only had a few thousand left budgeted to the house at this point, and the hospital wants some money upfront just to know that you’re serious about paying them.  So you have to split your costs.  Now you’re broke, and you still don’t have any work.

But you’ve had unemployment for three months, right?  That should help a little back home.

Wrong.  To qualify for unemployment you need to be available to look for work.  While you’re in the hospital laid up in bed, you can’t look.  You can’t interview.  You can’t accept positions.  So you’re ineligible for unemployment for the time that you’re down and out.  You can look now but you’re already broke and that makes you desperate.

What about social security?  Disability benefits through SSI could help.

Scratch that.  Social Security Income benefit rules require that you have a documented disability (according to what the government considers a disability).  That disability has to keep you from being able to work, or at least from being able to make more than $900 a month by your own effort.  And your disability has to have lasted for 12 calendar months, or at least be projected to last at least that long.  Plus, you’re not that old and so you haven’t paid that much into the system — you wouldn’t get very much of a stipend per month anyway.

So now you’re on the hook for medical bills that you have no way of paying, and even the bills at the house (essential things like water, electric/gas, insurance, car if you live in an area with little to no reliable public transportation) are backed up.  So what do you do now?  If you’re loathe to file bankruptcy, which many people are because that can be reported on your credit for up to 10 years and not everybody who reads that credit report will care enough to ask you why you filed bankruptcy, you go into credit debt to pay off your medical bills, then file bankruptcy to discharge as much of the credit debt as possible.  Or if you go ahead and file bankruptcy outright, you can discharge your medical debt.  And don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t.  Hospital bill collectors are not unbiased sources of information on what you can or cannot do.

So you discharge what debt you can, and while you’re on that and having to take downright insulting counseling courses that ask you to write essays on how you can better manage your money so that unpredictable circumstances don’t bankrupt you again, you can rest assured that at least you have those meager food stamps to keep some nourishment in your family’s stomachs.  Although the state is always looking for ways to reduce the EBT benefit as more and more people file for it, so if you were hoping to feed your family a lot of organic, or at least non-processed foods, say goodbye to that dream.  Oh, and since you’re still hard up for cash, you have to move to a much smaller and less comfortable house… or an apartment… you might even have to move in with other people who have families of their own.

Now let’s say that you actively voted against, rallied against reforming healthcare in a way that would keep you from going bankrupt because of medical bills that stacked up on you.  No one is going to laugh at you, and all sympathy should be extended to your family because they probably didn’t have anything to do with what you didn’t want, but at the same time, do not fail to appreciate the hypocritical irony of your belief (with an audaciously straight face) that help should be extended to you when you need it but denied to others because they are not you.

If you believe in “every man for himself” and in that time-honored-yet-antiquated notion of “rugged individualism” then you have to live by it when the time comes for you to pay the piper.  Otherwise, when your neighbor (from across the street, from another town, from another state) needs assistance, lend it to him with a smile and an open hand and genuine statement of “I’m here to help, brother.”

It’s not about socialism, it’s not about trying to steal the country from your children, it’s about being a good person.

 

– Sky