Time Article: "Bitter Pill"

We recently started getting Time after using up Matt's airline points that were going to expire (magazines were the only thing we could get with them and there weren't many good choices, but Time is all right). This week, there was only one main "featured" article, a very long one concerning the costs of medical care.
Despite the length, it is definitely worth reading. I think everyone should know about this because if it is valid (and I don't disbelieve it), the ridiculous overpricing of medical care and supplies alone should encourage people to take action. I'm not sure what action, but something.

Here's the article. Again, it's long, but worth reading, maybe not at this moment, but sometime when you have time:

http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/

After a trip in August to the hospital for excruciating kidney stones, and a more recent visit to a doctor and an allergy specialist to try to dig into Matt's hives (five or six years after previous appointments that led to nothing and cost a ton), I could totally relate to this article and I got very incensed reading it. Matt and I hardly had to pay anything near what the people mentioned in this article did, but we still felt the costs of the tests and treatments were ridiculous. Part of it was that we has a (seemingly) high deductible on the first trip and on the second we didn't have insurance, so we had to pay pretty much the whole sum each time ... but when Matt went to the hospital, it was amazing how quickly they were ready to inject painkillers (when the pain had just started to subside, of course) which made him break out in hives worse than I've ever seen, causing them to have to shoot him up with several other drugs, trying to find the right thing to calm the hives. Every time they went to put something in him, Matt looked so unhappy. He hates taking medication of any sort if he can help it. The scan was the most expensive part. I'm not surprised when they say these expensive medical equipments can be paid for easily in a year, leaving only major profits to be made in the future.

At the allergy specialist, after a short discussion, Matt's "tests" began with the doctor scratching a broken tongue depressor down his back. In a few minutes, the scratches were really red and whelped. The doctor acted like this proved what Matt had been saying about having hives so bad. Well, duh. They were pretty extreme whelps, but I think I would have whelped up at least a little if he'd run a broken stick down my back, too. Then of course he was tested for all the common allergens, none of which he was allergic to. We were pretty sure this would be the case. Matt thinks it is more likely his hives get set off by preservatives since his grandfather has something similar happen and has to avoid things with preservatives. But the allergy doctor said that finding that out is really difficult and expensive (as if our 2-hour appointment that ended once more with "Hmm, not sure, it might go away though" [after six years of it not going away] wasn't). I wonder if the tongue depressor was secretly hidden in our costs. I wouldn't be surprised after reading the ridiculous amount of items that patients are often charged for that are supposed to be included in the overall "facility fee" ("Outpatient Bill" Section). I can understand a cost per hour for seeing the doctor and for the (tiny) amount of each liquid allergen used in the allergy test, but they certainly make a lot of money in 2 hours that day in return for not many answers. All the lab tests Matt took at the doctor's office a few weeks before also cost a lot. They all came back regular, no problems, and we are thankful for knowing that doesn't have some weird disease or deficiency ... but there is always that small regret of taking the time and money to find out that everything was fine after all (or not finding out what it is that isn't fine, in reality). No one wants money to be an object when it comes to health, and as I told Matt, since we are doing well saving up right now, I'd rather him go and have to pay the price to know what was wrong or at least that he didn't have cancer or something than worry about it ... but as the examples in this article prove, being helped back to a healthy state doesn't completely erase the worries and issues that come along with nearly all medical encounters.

I like how this article points out that whether you are for or against the Obama Health Plan, it is crucial that we realize that health insurance and providers are not the only part of the problem. There are some comments made about what consequences (good and bad) may come from "Obamacare," but more than anything the article focuses on the underlying problem of exorbitant markups on medical bills for no valid reason and the fact that these "non-profit" institutions are somehow making extreme profits. If these facts are exposed and we do something about the mark ups, I think there would be a change for the better with or without "Obamacare." It is clear that even if we change how medical bills are paid for, there will still be high costs for somebody to pay that don't necessarily need to be there.

Maybe I'll try bargaining next time we go to the hospital, if that is actually a valid possibility. In the "Nonprofit Profitmakers" section there are a few paragraphs about medical billing advocates who help patients negotiate with hospitals to lower bills, and the writer also quotes a couple of people from the medical field who say that the "chargemaster" (a list of prices each hospital has for tests, equipment, and treatments) lists prices not normally paid by most patients (but the writer brings up several cases where in fact patients did have to pay those high prices that vary from hospital to hospital). It sounds like it may be difficult but a possibility to combat ridiculous pricing by arguing against that list, if you could ask about it, especially after reading this article and realizing the real costs of supplies versus what we are charged on the bill. The comments by some of the people he talked to in the medical field were also pretty shocking in some cases.

I have read almost all the article (skimmed a bit in the middle, but looked over the end where he gives solutions as to what we must to do fix this and planning to look over it some more in the future) and I really do think it is worth reading and considering. Maybe some people will say he skews the facts a little - I don't know, I'm not in the medical field, but it's not hard for me to believe that he paints a fairly just picture of what it is really like, from nothing else than experiences in my own life and that of others that show that medical costs are unfathomable in most cases - to the point that some people would rather suffer mild (or major) discomfort than take a chance trying to pay the costs of fixing the problem. It scares me to think that even our own very small-in-comparison bills seemed costly, but looking at the examples this article cites, I can't even imagine having a serious medical issue to deal with.

Piano Shelf and Hammer Bird

Recently, my mother took apart an old piano that my family had gotten after a relative passed away many years ago. We'd kept it in our house for several years, and I had played on it a little, but it was always out of tune and mom wasn't keen on keeping the entire piano downstairs in the basement. Though it's a little sad to see the piano no longer functioning as a musical instrument, I think what she did with the parts with pretty cool and keeps the sentimentality of something that otherwise wasn't really being used:

My dad and mom secured the keys with a board on the back after removing the keyboard from the piano. They used the door from the top of the upright piano (which can be moved to help cover the keys or to place the sheet music on) to hold sheet music and pictures of my grandparents on their wedding day and my mother as a child. The piano belonged to a relative of my grandfather. I like how you can still read the brand, Melville Clark, on the bottom part. The keyboard holds more family pictures and jars with dried roses and piano hammers.

The bench from the piano hold more items: sheet music that belonged to my grandmother, more family photos, and the pedals of the piano. Pretty much all the important parts are still there. I think it looks beautiful. I don't know if I could take apart a well-functioning piano, but if I could buy a rough or badly out of tune one at an auction, I'd love to recreate this shelf/art someday.

So, that's the background of this post, which will now take a different but related path. I don't have a piano to make a shelf like that out of. But, mom gave me some of the hammers from the piano to use for crafts. I may put some in jars like she did, or a shadowbox, but I wanted to look online for some other neat ideas too. Between pinterest and google, I found lots of neat ideas. Here's one:

http://velvetdavinci.com/allimages.php?action=allartists&mode=1&id=&page=77 This is an art site ... not a DIY site. So, I'm copying a little bit ... but it's a pretty simple design and I have hammers of my own to use. I think it's fair.

I decided to take a chance with the cute hammer-tail bird. If you haven't learned already from some of my other DIY posts, I'm a little impatient and sometimes forget that I should take pictures throughout the process if I am going to blog about it later. So, there are some steps that go pretty fast. But I will work on being better about that in the future.

I only have two big-ended hammers and want to save them for something special, so I decided to use one of the three skinny-end hammers I had for the bird. I also have other hammers with blocky ends that couldn't be used for a bird. Probably will use those in a jar or shadowbox.

Here I'm getting ready to cut the rod that separates what will become the body and tail of the bird. Cut it as smooth as you can from each piece then sand a little on each cut area.

Disassembled hammer.

Oops. Like I said, I got excited and skipped a bit. In the art-bird, the artist used some metal to decorate the wing and to create the head. I didn't have anything else I could think of to use except fabric. I had some vintage fabric from my grandmother and used that. I basically decided to "wing" the wing - ha ha - hot-gluing and wrapping the fabric around the end and cutting off extra as I went. This decorated the wing but also covered the spot where I cut off the rod, which was otherwise visible. Then I hot-glued the wing at an angle onto one side of the body.

Here is his head closer up. This was trial-and-error with some fabric and aluminum foil until I got sort of a template. Basically it is just folded over to make a head shape and glued to the top corner of the body. I would like to add something for a beak later like the original, but am not sure what to add yet. I added a button eye and sequin iris which is in the next picture.

Finished birdy! I glued the eye on the spot where there was sort of a semi-circle cut-out on the bird body (covered in the previous pictures by fabric, but visible early on). Then I glued a little sequin to be the iris/pupil. Here he is with my blue Christmas-y bird, his new buddy. It was a feat getting him to stand on his own. He's rear end heavy, as you can imagine. I'll have to find something small but dense to glue to the bottom of his foot for balance.

I feel like I'm becoming as bird-obsessed as my friend over at http://lovinghere.com/. She has a big, fat, white bird on her mantle that I love and a bird-themed poster in her bedroom .... I've got Christmas-y bird,  a fat little blue bird in our bedroom, and now Mr. Hammer Bird. Good thing they are pretty quiet little birds or else Llyr would probably be trying to eat them up. He already touch-touch-touches all over the blue bird in our room whenever he gets up where he shouldn't.