Wednesday, September 12, 2012
199¼ pounds
That’s what the scale said this afternoon.
I don’t know how long it’s been since my weight started with a 1 instead of a 2. Two decades? Three? Yeah, I was wearing only my underwear at the time (what do jeans, shirt, and sneakers weigh?), but it’s a momentous milestone no matter how you slice it.
The interesting point is that I haven’t really been trying to lose weight. Oh, I go to a gym a few times a month. But I’m not particularly diligent about eating low-cal stuff. I don’t eschew butter, cream cheese, red meat. Not by any means.
So how have I lost 20-plus pounds in the last several months? I can’t really say, except that I am enjoying more vegetables, such as the lentil-and-kale soup I whipped up a few days ago. And I do think twice before choosing whether to go for a second helping.
I’m now at the next-to-last hole on my belt, and by jeans are mighty loose at the waist. So next time I shop for pants, I’m going to give the next size down a try. I expect they’ll be too tight ... but not nearly as too-tight as they would have been for many, many years. But if it turns out that they fit, what a feeling of accomplishment that would be!
Friday, August 31, 2012
It could be so much worse
I’m fortunate.
When I was laid off from my job last month, I was eligible for continuation of my health insurance. I have enough money saved up that I can pick up the large portion of the premiums that used to be contributed by my employer. I was persistent enough, and knowledgeable enough, to navigate through the shoals of bureaucracy that lay between employer-based and formerly-employed insured status.
It was frustrating for several weeks. For instance, I wasn’t allowed to apply for continuation coverage while still insured. Then I couldn’t write a check for the first month of coverage until my application for continuation coverage was received, processed, and accepted. It took over a week after my check was deposited before my status was updated from no coverage to insured. Even after that change was acknowledged, it required a call to the PBM (pharmacy benefit manager), a business separate from the insurer, to update my prescription insurance.
When it all settled out, the insurance was reinstated retroactively to the first day of the month. But I still had to make sure that the claims rejected while I was in limbo were resubmitted (I haven’t yet contacted the lab that drew and tested a blood sample). Every one of those steps wastes money—customer service operators who could have helped someone else, clerks who had to open, photocopy, and file my applications, eligibility assessors who had to process my paperwork, personnel at my providers who had to send my claims to the insurer for a second time, computers that had to rerun those claims. It was only a little bit of money each time, but of course those infinitesimal amounts add up to big bucks when multiplied by thousands or millions of incidents. At least I get my EOBs electronically, so I didn’t kill many trees by generating all those papers twice.
My office visits and lab tests hadn’t made it through the providers’ billing systems by the time I became retroactively covered, so they had no visible impact on my wallet. Because the office personnel don’t know the alleged prices of their services, they probably couldn’t require up-front payment anyway. Not so when it comes to prescriptions ... I had to pay the full retail price before I could get my medications. Once covered, I went back to the drugstore to have my credit card reimbursed for the cash I’d laid out.
As it happens, I take six “maintenance medicines”, prescriptions that I refill every month. All six are generics, costing appreciably less than the brand name versions of those medications. Even so, the full retail price of a month’s-worth of my meds was rather hefty—$445.74 (brand names would have run $864.67). After my coverage was restored retroactively, I went back to Bartell so that they could resubmit the prescriptions to my insurance. After applying the (appreciably lower) price negotiated by the insurer, and after accounting for the portion of that price paid by the insurer, my out of pocket cost for those six prescriptions came to just $11.98. I have very good insurance.
Similarly, were I not insured, the price of an office visit would be $219.00. My insurer had negotiated an allowed amount of $83.01 for that sort of visit, only about 38% of the alleged retail price. And my out of pocket portion of the insurer-negotiated price comes to a mere $12.45. To reiterate, I have very good insurance.
I knew it would work out as it did. And I had the resources to ease the difficulties of the bureaucratic delays. But suppose I didn’t have a credit card. Suppose I lived from paycheck to paycheck, with only a debit card and a meager bank account. Then, I would have had a problem. Then I might have been forced to choose between maintaining my health and buying groceries, or maybe even between medicines and rent. Forced into such a dilemma, filling prescriptions would undoubtedly fall behind food and shelter.
Being unemployed and uninsured, then, is a double triple-whammy:
- You have much less money coming into your bank account
- The bill for healthcare services is much larger than what an insurer can negotiate with the provider
- You bear responsibility for paying the entire bill
Instead, I’ll just thank my lucky stars that my layoff isn’t the kind of financial and health disaster that it could be if I didn’t have resources. And I’ll pay my insurance premiums every month.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Better know the 36th Legislative District
Revised and cross-posted from HorsesAss.org.
In this report (the third in my series on LD redistricting), the topic is still another Seattle-area Legislative District with an open seat. I have a lot of connections with the 36th, not least of which is that my sister and her family live there. Also, as we’ll soon see, my own precinct used to be—but is no longer—right on the border between the 43rd and the 36th.
NOTE: click on the “Show more...” link below to view the key that defines what the various colors and other symbols on the maps actually mean.
Location -- northwest Seattle, from Belltown to Crown Hill
Senate: Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D), 2014
House 1: Reuven Carlyle (D)
House 2: Mary Lou Dickerson (D), retiring
The 36th District is quite compact, and its borders didn’t change very much in the recent redistricting. It still encompasses most of Belltown and all of Queen Anne, Interbay, Magnolia, and Ballard. Like the 43rd to its east, but now unlike the 46th to its northeast, it lies entirely within the city of Seattle. Not only that—the 36th LD is also entirely within Jim McDermott’s Congressional District (WA-07) and entirely within Larry Phillips’s King County Council District (KC-4). The map below displays the 36th District as it was defined on the 2001 map, prior to the recent redistricting. The map’s scale is 60,000:1.
It is immediately obvious that the new version of the 36th LD is quite similar to the 2001 map. Given the homogeneity of Seattle, and understanding that the LD’s and the city’s population growth was much the same as the state as a whole, there was little reason to make many changes there. We can’t look into the collective mind of the Redistricting Commission, but it appears that they generally chose to concentrate whatever changes took place in Seattle in the redrawn 46th District.
The map of 2011’s 36th District displays the boundaries of the Congressional Districts in its vicinity. Only one of those dashed blue lines is particularly interesting ... the small piece of border in the lower right corner of the image. It demonstrates that the edge of WA-07 comes close to the 36th, but doesn’t quite get there. That piece of the CD’s border (WA-09 is southeast of that line) actually separates the 43rd District from the 37th; the core of Seattle is divided among the three LDs.
The great similarity between the 2001 and 2011 maps of the 36th Legislative District is quite evident when the two are superimposed on one another. Except for some very slight rejiggering in Belltown, the alterations consist of the 36th losing its portion of Fremont (now entirely in the 43rd) and gaining those parts of Greenwood and Phinney Ridge (taken from the 46th) that weren’t already in the District. The new 36th might possibly be a wee bit less Democratic than the old one—the western hillside of Fremont appears to be a tad bluer than the eastern hillside of Phinney Ridge—but that small change will have little effect on the political nature of the LD. The 36th Legislative District remains a solidly Democratic bastion.
As a Fremont resident myself, I’m pleased to see the revised borderline between the 36th and 43rd. Under the 2001 map, my precinct had sat smack-dab on the line between the two LDs. In addition, at least one of the first-draft redistricting maps would have moved the border eastward, thereby transferring me into the 36th. Instead, the new 43rd District takes in 14 precincts that are home to quite a few former stalwarts of the 36th District Democrats. Among those switching into the 43rd are a former LD chair and nearly half a dozen former Executive Board members of the old 36th. Under the newly-drawn map, my precinct is now well inside the boundaries of the 43rd Legislative District, which extends around 10 blocks to my west.
When Mary Lou Dickerson decided to relinquish her House seat, a crowd of aspirants arose immediately. Of the seven declared candidates, one is a self-declared Progressive, one is a Republican (Paulista, actually), and the other five are Democrats. Sounds pretty typical for this solid blue LD.
There is general agreement among the Democrats on the issues. So perhaps the crux of the matter will come down to the candidates’ personal backstories. In alphabetical order, the Democrats are:
- Evan Clifthorne, legislative staffer for Senator Paull Shin (D-21) and native Washingtonian
- Sahar Fathi, staffer for Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien and Iranian-American woman
- Noel Frame, state director of Progressive Majority, former campaign manager, native Washingtonian
- Brett Phillips, green building/energy efficiency expert, son of County Councilmember Larry Phillips, native of the 36th District
- Gael Tarleton, Port of Seattle Commissioner and national security analyst
In a very real sense, this election reminds me of the 2006 open-seat House race here in the 43rd. Back then, we had six excellent Democrats competing for the seat then held by Ed Murray, who was running for the State Senate. In that primary, Jamie Pederson won the Democratic nomination with just 23% of the vote. One difference between then and now is that in 2006 we were temporarily operating under the sensible Open Primary, Private Choice methodology (called Pick-a-Party by Sam Reed) rather than the ridiculous Top Two favored by the inane majority among us. Thus, winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to winning the general election. There was a Republican primary as well in 2006, wherein the winner drew far fewer votes than the sixth-place Democrat ... but appeared on the November ballot.
There was no hint of negative campaigning in our 2006 primary in the 43rd. I’ve detected a hint of non-collegiality in the 36th, though there hasn’t been anything close to real mud-slinging. Perhaps the large number of candidates has prevented a repeat of the 36th’s ugly two-way 2008 race. Races actually, since the Top Two forced it to carry over from the primary to the general election. When there are lots of near-equivalent choices available, it wouldn’t be sensible to alienate any of the electorate. Assuming that two of the Democratic candidates will continue on to the November ballot, could the gloves come off post-primary? We’ll see…
Monday, June 04, 2012
Better know the 11th Legislative District
[Cross-posted (and slightly revised) from HorsesAss]
Number two in my series on redistricting is another Seattle-area LD with an open seat. Two of them, actually, thought one of these will assuredly be filled by the incumbent whose seat will be open in this election. Confused yet? We’re talking, of course, about the 11th District.
NOTE: click on the “Show more...” link below to view the key that defines what the various colors and other symbols on the maps actually mean.
Location -- Tukwila, South Seattle, Renton, Kent
Senate: Margarita Prentice (D), 2012, retiring
House 1: Zack Hudgins (D)
House 2: Bob Hasegawa (D), running for Senate
The 11th District 
is one of the most oddly-shaped LDs in the state, seeming to wrap around the southern shores of Lake Washington without ever actually reaching the lake itself. It’s an industrial and commercial district, thrusting into the port-oriented southwest portion of Seattle in addition to Tukwila, parts of Kent, and some of Renton. Under the 2001 Legislative District map, the bulk of its land area was in that Duwamish River portion of the 11th District. The LD reached almost to the center of Burien. Perhaps your imagination is better than mine, because I can’t think of a metaphor that describes the shape of 11th Legislative District. Its 2001 borders, at the scale of 1:80,000, are shown below:
Viewed by itself, the new version of the 11th LD doesn’t seem all that different from the 2001 map. It remains misshapen, so much so that it (like the 2001 version) might remind you of this infamous image from a Massachusetts newspaper cartoon:
Looking at the new 11th LD more carefully, though, we observe that it no longer reaches, or even approaches, Burien. Also, the district’s border has been “notched” to exclude central Renton, and the 11th extends quite a bit farther to the east than had the 2001 iteration of the Legislative District.
The bulk of the 11th District falls within the 9th Congressional District, and it contributes appreciably to the fiction that the new WA-09 is a majority-minority district. A small portion of the 11th, mostly warehouses between I-5 and SR-99, is in the 7th Congressional District. The suburban-to-rural easternmost part of the new 11th LD falls within WA-08.
When the 2001 and 2011 versions of the 11th Legislative District are superimposed on one another, the locational shift is readily apparent. Some of the changes are fairly small (a precinct here, a precinct there). The loss of Highline and Burien is easy to see, as is the large swath of suburbia, perhaps even exurbia, that is now part of the LD. Industrial grit meets tract houses and strip malls.
Will these alterations in the boundaries of the district change its rock-solid Democratic status? In my opinion, the 11th is somewhat less liberal than it was in 2001, but that doesn’t mean a thing in terms of its representation in Olympia. The Senator and Representatives from the 11th Legislative District are guaranteed to be Democrats, in 2012 and into the foreseeable future.
While it is correct to say that Senator Prentice is retiring, I wonder whether she would have stayed on if she hadn’t been redistricted out of the 11th LD. One might almost suspect that the Renton “notch” I mentioned earlier was created so as to remove her from the district. Unlike Representative Kagi of the 32nd LD (who moved back into her district), Senator Prentice chose to retire rather than try to win office in her new LD, the 37th. Then again, the Senate seat in the 37th isn’t up in this election cycle, so unless she wanted to run for the House she would have had to sit out for a couple of years anyway. Might she unretire and take on Adam Kline in 2014? I have my doubts, as she would be 73 by then.
There’s no doubt that Bob Hasegawa will win the 11th LD Senate seat in November. Even with the addition of a lot of less-than-urban territory, this remains a solidly Democratic district. Hasegawa is well known as a leader in labor and social justice issues, fitting very well with the nature of the 11th. I would have called him a perfect fit if the 11th had retained its previous borders, but this isn’t quite the same district as before. His opponent is a token Republican who didn’t even name the correct office on her C1 form (it says “State Representative").
Zack Hudgins briefly flirted with a run for Secretary of State this cycle, but decided against it a couple of months ago. So he’s running for reelecion to the House 1 seat. He’s opposed by a Democrat who got into the race when it looked like an open seat. Jim Flynn appears to be a serious candidate—his campaign treasurer is Phil Lloyd, whose other clients include Jim McDermott—but I don’t think Hudgins has all that much to worry about.
The big action in the 11th is in the House 2 seat, currently occupied by Hasegawa. Four Democrats are vying for the position, as well as a lone (irrelevant) Republican. All of the Dems have raised decent money so far; the one with the most name recognition, Port Commissioner Rob Holland, has taken in the least. Far ahead of the others, at nearly $250,000(!), is Bobby Virk. As I write this, only one Legislature candidate in the entire state (a self-funding Democrat running for the open Senate seat in the 27th LD) has taken in more money than Virk, who is definitely not trying to buy himself a place in Olympia. His personal contribution to his campaign is negligible.
Clearly, although there are nominally two open seats in the 11th Legislative District, one of those is already spoken for. In the House 2 position, I can’t imagine that Bobby Virk will finish third or lower in the primary. He has, after all, taken in more than three times what his opponents have ... combined. Who will join him on the general election ballot? I have no idea. Perhaps someone more familiar with the 11th Legislative District can edify my readers.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Happy 71st birthday, Bob!
Date of birth: May 24, 1941
Place of birth: Duluth, Minnesota
Name at birth: Robert Allen Zimmerman
In case you somehow don’t know anything about the man born 71 years ago today, here’s an eight-minute profile:
Whether he likes it or not, he is truly The Voice of a Generation. Dylan has created so many brilliant albums, so many wondrous songs ... and he’s still out there playing music. He’s been running the Never Ending Tour since June, 1988 (that’s 24 years, folks!), and shows no sign of stopping.
For your listening pleasure, a few more videos (please excuse the brief ads on some of them).
