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Paying For Heart Surgery When You’re Not as Rich as Randy Travis

Celebrities

Travis performs "Three Wooden Crosses"
Travis performs “Three Wooden Crosses” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Very sad news broke this week about Randy Travis. The country crooner, whose hits ironically include a song titled “From the Hard Rock Bottom of my Heart,” was hospitalized with a life-threatening heart problem that arose from viral cardiomyopathy, a condition that is characterized by a weakening of the heart muscle due to a virus. The virus that caused this disease is usually pretty harmless, but in some patients, extremely dangerous complications can arise. For Travis, the complications weakened his heart, and he required hospitalization and emergency heart surgery.

Travis is pretty fortunate, financially.  He is also pretty wealthy. Therefore, the costs associated with this problem are not likely to set him back financially like they would most Americans. How can people who are not rich like Randy Travis pay for heart surgery?

The easiest way to pay for a heart surgery is to let someone else pay for it. This tip may sound like a joke, but it is the way most people pay for heart surgery. Insurance is a risk management system in which many people pay premiums so that they do not have to bear the entire brunt of a financial loss. Some will come out ahead by paying less in premiums than the amount of the health benefits they will receive. Others will be on the opposite end of the stick. Health insurance can come from the private market or the public coffers through programs like Medicare and Medicaid. While there might be a copay for these procedures with insurance, the insured will not have to pay the whole tab.

Another way to pay for heart surgery is by raiding a retirement account. This is not really advisable in most instances, but desperate times can call for desperate measures. The money can then be paid back over time in the best-case scenario, and getting the doctors paid off will take a major burden off of the back of any heart patient.

Taking out a home equity loan can also be a way to pay for a heart surgery. Those who have some equity built up in their home can sometimes find enough to pay off some emergency bills. Of course, it usually takes years to build up this equity, so many will not have this option available to them.

One final way to pay off a heart surgery without being rich like Randy Travis would involve getting a second job. This might cut down on the amount of time available for cardiac rehab, but the doctor will want his or her cut. It is likely that the hospital will be even more serious about getting paid. This will especially be the case if the hospital is for-profit. It might take some time, but those who are able to survive the extra work should be able to eventually pay off their bills.

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Healthcare.gov: Is this failure a warning of what’s to come?

Politicians

English: President Barack Obama's signature on...
English: President Barack Obama’s signature on the health insurance reform bill at the White House, March 23, 2010. The President signed the bill with 22 different pens. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The official launch of online registration for government healthcare has been rife with disastrous glitches from the very beginning. This cataclysmic failure has spurred severe service outages across the country, and this chronically dysfunctional interface serves as foreshadowing for an epidemic of systematic organizational deficiencies. Healthcare.gov is only the first in a series of planned bureaucratic catastrophes.

Luckily, this informative overview exists to demystify the overly complex world of the medical legislation informally known as Obamacare. Being armed with the facts provided below can protect anyone during these times of economic uncertainty in which the destabilizing influence of expensive health treatments can suddenly arise.

The Internet Errors

The requirement of preemptive registration resulted in a complete system crash. The ability to input health data was also starkly limited. Security issues also seemed evident as certificates failed to show updated validations, and there was no indication of where confidential information would be stored.

Lack of Foresight and Oversight

The decision to mandate initial registration was a hastily made last-minute change that failed to consider the magnitude of public interest. This unfortunately coincided with a government shutdown, which left limited federal resources available to respond to claims of malfunctioning servers. The biggest mistake made by the Department of Health and Human Services was underestimating the massive influx of uninsured applicants.

To further complicate woes, a chief contractor behind the layout of healthcare.gov is expected to testify that additional time and money could not have salvaged the doomed enlistment effort. His official testimony will shed light on administrative laziness, and the legislative committee is expected to issue serious reprimands, but nothing will recompense the thousands of individuals deprived access to healthcare registration on the date promised to them years in advance. These problems were completely avoidable, but the team in place refused to promptly pay attention.

Proposed Solutions

The Obama Administration has conveniently remained mum on the topic of minor adjustments to the healthcare law, but Congressional Democrats have proposed implementing small delays to the overall roll-out. The dates for enforcing the individual mandate have become a focal point of discussions to modify Obamacare. Because citizens were not given feasible access to the online enrollment system, it would be unconstitutional to levy fines for their lack of registration.

The Foreboding Warning

If politicians cannot even tackle basic website programming, then they should not be trusted to manage the well-being of millions of Americans. Partisan divisions have made two factions that are fully noncoalescent, which means all future fixes will be the result of an incomplete compromise between two warring parties. Real health concerns have been forgotten by the incessant squabbling of politicians in their ivory towers. This means that every new initiative will only cause further societal strife and struggle. Members of Congress have expanded the breadth of their authority without grasping the technological realm. As a consequence, these politicians will continue overextending the limits of their power, and the public will be left to pick up the pieces.

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Decluttering the House – April 30 Day Project Update

Life

My 30 Day Project for April is to declutter my entire house.   That’s every room, every dresser, every drawer. We’ve got 12 years of jointly accumulated clutter.

Our progress so far has been wonderful.   The main level of our house is almost done.

In our daughters’ room, we put in bunk beds and pulled out a dresser.   With the crib, changing table, and toddler bed removed, they actually have room to play on the floor.  Their closet has been emptied and repurposed as scrapbooking and blanket storage.  Cost: $140 for the bunk beds.

Our son’s room has had a dresser, a desk, and a bed replaced with a loft bed.   Even with the 6 foot tall monstrosity of a bed, his room looks so much bigger.    We still have to clean out his closet, which is mostly artifacts of a business we no longer have, leftovers from when his bedroom was our office.  Cost: $260 for the loft bed.

Our room was depressing. Never dirty, but oh-so-full.   The closet was jam-packed.  The top shelf was full of towels and sheets.   The closet rod couldn’t fit another shirt.   There was a modular shelving system on the floor of the closet–full.  We had three full dressers.   The headboard has 5 foot tall cabinets, half of which were full of makeup and jewelry, the other half with books.   Now, there is 1 empty dresser.   It belonged to my great-grandmother, so it’s going to the shop to be refinished, instead of the garage sale to be sold.   Another dresser has spare room in it.   There’s no need to rearrange the cabinets to get to anything.    The closet is less than half full and there is almost nothing on the floor of the closet.   Gear for my side-line business is stored out of sight and out of the way.  This is so much more relaxing.

We’ve tackled the kitchen, except for 1 cabinet, which is mostly cookbooks and booze.   That will be fun to clean out.

Our front closet was worthless.   It was so full we put hooks on the outside of the door to hang our coats.   We pulled out a dozen coats we never wear.   At least 20 pairs of shoes, some belonging to roommates gone 1o years.   We can actually use the closet now. The shoes and boots all have homes.  Our coats all fit…inside.

We have 1 closet and 1 cabinet left to address on the main level.   There are also 3 small rooms in the basement that need to be gutted–the laundry room, the family room, and a room that has been designated for storage and the litter box.    The last one will be the hardest.    It’s full of remnants of hobbies past and failed ventures.   I’m expecting some fights, flowing every possible direction.

In the process, we’ve filled our dining room with stuff for our garage sale…twice.   It’s all getting priced and boxed as we go through it.   We thrown away anything we won’t be able to sell.   We’ve done all of this with the mutual understanding that nothing is coming back in the house.  After the sale, it will be donated or sold on Craigslist, but it won’t become a part of our lives again.   We are successfully purging so much.    The “skinny clothes” are gone.   When the time comes, they’ll be replaced.  In the meantime, they can be put to better use on someone else.   Hobbies that never took, games that are never played, it’s all going.    We are getting down to the things that are actually used and useful.

It’s interesting to note that the process is getting easier as the month goes by.     My Mother-in-Law is a hoarder.    Those habits get passed down, but what was originally a source of stress has turned into a pleasant chore.

The most wonderful discovery of all?  It turns out we don’t need a better storage system, we just need less stuff.

Update:  This post has been included in the Money Hacks Carnival.

How Much Should You Tip?

Finance

Image by cemre via Flickr

This post from CNN Money has been making the rounds. I’m getting into the game today.

With the holiday season upon us, tipping the people you work with is a tradition in some cases and actually expected in others. Here’s what CNN came up with and my take:

  • Housekeeper. We don’t have one. I’d think $75-100 would make a nice tip/Christmas bonus. I seem to be more generous than average with my imaginary maid. Maybe that’s because of the outfits she wears.
  • Gardener. Once again, we don’t have one. Even if we did, I live in Minnesota and have close to a foot of snow over the patch of weeds I call my garden. If I did have a gardener, I wouldn’t have seen him for a few months by now, anyway. $0!
  • Mail carrier. I’ve only met my mail man a dozen times and I’ve never considered giving him a Christmas present.  Do people really do that?
  • Barber. I don’t have one any more.   My wife has started doing my hair for me.  When I did, I tipped about 25%, but again, I wouldn’t think about a Christmas present.   I only saw him quarterly.   I don’t think my wife has a regular stylist either.  She’s just got a shop she goes to and gets whoever is available.  Is there holiday tipping protocol for that?
  • Garbage collector. No way.  Really?   I don’t know that I’ve seen the same guy twice.  Am I supposed to give a present to the anonymous, interchangeable union guy that drives past my house every Friday?
  • Newspaper carrier. One night, twelve years ago, while my wife was still working graveyard shifts, she had a hard time sleeping on her nights off.  That’s natural for 3rd shift workers.   At about 4AM, she was watching TV and saw someone run past the window.   Scared, she came to wake me up.  I handed her the phone to call the police, while I grabbed the only thing I had for self-defense and went to investigate.   I ran out on the front step–in my boxers, carrying a sword–and saw someone lurking in the neighbor’s yard across the street.   I yelled, “Y0u don’t belong here!” only to hear “I’m delivering the paper!” That’s when I start tipping the newspaper carrier. I stopped when we canceled our subscription a few years later.   Who needs a dead tree in the morning, when there are a million news sites on the internet?

If the majority of people are giving Christmas bonuses to that many people, and are as generous as the article suggests, then I fall far to the loutish end of the bell curve. I am planning to give my virtual assistant 1/12 of the pay he’s earned this year, so that should make up for some of it, but that is an ongoing business relationship.

How do you compare when it comes to holiday tipping?

Side Hustle: The Garage Sale Preparation

Finance

We had a garage sale last week, as a wrap-up to the April 30 Day Project.  We got rained out halfway through the first day of our 3-day sale, but we still managed to clear $1500.  We held the sale in our neighbor’s garage because it had more space and better visibility.

Wednesday night, while carrying boxes over, I missed the step to their property from our driveway and crashed while carrying three boxes.   That’s a twisted ankle and a bleeding knee.  Naturally, while I’m hopping and swearing, everyone is concerned that I’m okay.   The worry-warts.   Anyway, it hurt, so we stopped setting up while we still had a few boxes left in the basement.

[ad name=”inlineleft”]Thursday morning, I decided to show them all.   At 5:30AM, before anybody else is strongly considering the possibility of maybe thinking about getting ready to hit the snooze button, I decided to get the rest of the boxes ready.   They’d all wake up, worried about how I’m feeling, asking if I’m to stiff to carry boxes.  The best way to show them they don’t need to worry would be to have all of the boxes dealt with before they woke up.   So I started.    Up and down the stairs, with a stiff, twisted ankle, gloating to myself about how tough I was…BOOM, down the stairs. I was on my back, sliding down the stairs.    I caught a stair-tread in the small of my back and another on the point of my tailbone.  Mommy?

After I stopped twitching on the floor at the base of the stairs, I managed to get the last of the boxes ready.   Instead of sympathy, I spent the rest of the weekend getting asked if I needed an inflatable doughnut to sit on.  There are places I’d prefer not to have bruised.

Unpacking the boxes made me glad that everything was priced.  We spent 6 weeks going through our entire house–every room, every dresser, every drawer–to eliminate the clutter.   As something went into a box, it got priced, so we didn’t have to do it all at the last minute.  That is the most important time-saving step for a garage sale.   Price it as you pack it. You don’t want to waste hours pricing stuff while tripping over potential customers.

Another preparation tip to do early:  Find tables!   Ask around. You’d be surprised at who has a dozen folding tables collecting dust in his basement.    It’s better to borrow that to rent.    The best price I found was $17.50 to rent an 8′ X 30″ table for a week.   We didn’t have to do that, but we thought we would have to.  I borrowed a few, found a few, and built a few out of sawhorses.

The week before the sale, we placed an ad in the paper. When I placed the ad, the paper called to suggest we change it from running the weekend before to running just the days of the sale.   I agreed, to a point, but their Sunday circulation is miles ahead of the weekday circulation, so why pay to run an ad nobody will see on Thursday?    I ran it Sunday through Tuesday, because I wanted the Sunday ad and we got 3 consecutive days in the price.   Did I actually know better than the paper’s sales-weasel?  Who knows?   I think I made the right decision.

The Sunday before the sale, I posted an ad on Craigslist. Interesting fact: little old ladies use Craiglist to plan their garage-sale adventures.

Two days before the sale, we made signs. Bright pink signs with brighter yellow starbursts. They were all simple. “Mega Sale! 8-5” followed by an arrow and our address. Simple, easy-to-read, and bright. The morning of the sale, after the ibuprofen kicked in, I put the signs up. When you make signs out of paper, always include a crossbar. It rained a lot the first day of the sale, so the signs wilted. The second morning, I went out with some duct tape and crossbars and fixed them all.

The day before the sale, we got cash and change. We had $50 in 1s and 5s and $25 in silver change. No pennies. Nothing was priced to make us need them.

The morning of the sale, we set up two canopy tents in the driveway and pulled the prepared-and-filled table out under them. We finished stacking as much as we could on the tables and called it “open”. There were a few boxes we couldn’t put out due to the rain. We simply ran our of room. At noon, $65 into the sale, we decided enough was enough and shut down–cold, wet, and miserable. Lunch and a nap made the day better.

Later, I’ll discuss the other parts of our successful sale.

Note: The entire series is contained in the Garage Sale Manual on the sidebar.

Update: This post has been included in the Money Hacks Carnival.