We are on vacation today.  It’s our first vacation of any kind in about a year, and of course the first since S arrived.  We’re only about 90 minutes from home except that an hour ferry wait made it 2.5 hours.  Frankly, the trip was pretty rough.  When you’re in line for the ferry, you’re inching along at a snail’s pace.  Because you’re moving, the baby has to stay in the car seat.  You can’t pull off and take a break anywhere or you’ll lose your place in line.  And S was fussing and crying and the kids were being annoying.  Yeah.  Finally, after being here a few hours and getting S to bed, I’m starting to feel a bit relaxed.  I don’t think vacationing with a baby is ever really all that relaxing.  We’re probably a couple years at least from a vacation that is in any way truly relaxing.  But still.  It’s good to get out of the house.

Today, my county moves to “Phase 2.”  One 5 person gathering per week is now permitted.  Retail stores can now reopen at limited capacity, and restaurants can open at 50% capacity.  Frankly, I have no interest in going to a retail store or a restaurant or a hair dresser, but I’m glad to see us reopening.  However, I’m mostly depressed because Covid cases and deaths are continuing to surge.  We had another record high number of cases today since early May, and deaths are up the last couple days as well.  The cause is unclear – if the contact tracers know, they aren’t saying.  Cases are apparently up in young people and Seattlites, but are not directly linked to the protests (not that I necessarily trust them to tell us if they were.)  There have been transmissions in households driving it apparently.  But why would there be any change in how Covid is getting transmitted *within* households?  That makes no sense.

I should really stay away from the news and DOH website for a few days.  Tracking this is not helping anyone.  Do I have the willpower to not go to a news website or the DOH website for the rest of our vacation?  I have literally not missed a day monitoring the DOH website since a couple weeks after this started.

And . . . here comes the surge.  It turns out that having tens of thousands of people congregate in close proximity all day long, up to 60,000, is not an awesome idea in the middle of a pandemic.  I said in my last entry that numbers were high that day but had otherwise been good.  Well, numbers have been high every day since then, and just jumped again today.  We’ve had (in my county) an average of 57 new cases per day over the last week as compared to 36 the week before, a 60% increase, and today we had 94 new cases, the first time we’ve had that many since the first week of May.

In my opinion, the government has lost the moral authority to impose restrictions.  They’ve permitted gatherings of tens of thousands while simultaneously forbidding people to leave their homes and have gatherings of even five people.  Now, gatherings of five – FIVE – people are permitted but most everything is still shut down.  And leaders are issuing supportive statements about the protests.  I’ve seen photos of socially distant protests elsewhere, but there has been nothing socially distant about them here.  Ug.  I’m just sick of all of this.

Also, apparently the Washington state DOH has been overcounting negative tests, meaning that they’ve been understating the percent positive tests.  Really?  Why are these people so incompetent?

It’s interesting to me how supporting government-run healthcare has become more or less standard for Democratic candidates.  I can’t argue that people – all people – should have access to healthcare, but I feel a lot of people don’t understand that what people get with government-run healthcare is not the same as what we get here.  I can mainly speak to Ireland and the UK, so that’s what I’ll talk to.

• If you are in the hospital in Ireland, you’ll likely find yourself on a ward.  If not, you’ll be sharing a room.  As far as I can tell, wards don’t even exist on US hospitals anymore, except maybe in the ICU or whatever.  Private rooms are not a standard thing like they are here.
• If you need some kind of treatment for something that’s not life-threatening, you’ll likely have to wait.  A long time.  Here’s a random example of an article on patients waiting 9 months or more to get shots for macular degeneration.  I didn’t KNOW that people had to wait a long time for that treatment, but I guessed they did.  My dad has macular degeneration, and it’s terribly time-critical to get treated.
• When my American grandma got cataracts, she made an appointment and got them removed.  When my Irish great-aunt got cataracts, she got put on a waiting list, and a year later, she got them removed.
• In Ireland, people unsatisfied with public health care pay for private health insurance.  15% of health care expenditures came from private insurance, and 40% of Irish people have some type of private insurance.  My aunt found a lump in her breast.  She was unsatisfied with the care she was getting from the public healthcare system, so she sought private treatment and surgery to have it removed.
• Healthcare is like an HMO.  I’ve enjoyed being on a PPO for over a decade.  As a kid, my parents had an HMO which was super annoying because you couldn’t just go see a doctor if you had a problem.  You needed a referral.  Not a huge deal, but public healthcare tends to follow the HMO model – your GP is a gatekeeper.
• Education requirements are WAY less to qualify as a doctor in other countries outside the US.  It takes five years to qualify as a doctor in Ireland.  In five to six years, you can qualify as a surgeon or specialist.  That’s out of high school, folks.  I actually think this is a good thing, but unless the model is changed, doctors here are going to expect to be paid more.
• GPs in Ireland make $77,000 a year.  GPs in the US average between $140,000 and $190,000 a year, depending on the source.  And we have trouble finding enough GPs even at that salary level.
• As far as I can tell, Medicare is great in the US.  But the rest of us are subsidizing it heavily.  Not only that, I’d assert that the US subsidizes healthcare around the world through paying through the nose for pharmaceuticals and advanced operations and equipment not available elsewhere.  New treatments are debuted in the US, and after they’ve been shown to work well, they move to the rest of the world.  A random example of British kids trying to get to the US for cutting edge cancer treatment.  Cancer treatment is very effective in Europe, but many of those effective treatments were developed and paid for here.
• Despite the fact that a full 12% of Americans are uninsured, cancer survival rates are comparable between the US and Europe.  12% of Americans don’t even have healthcare, but survival rates are the same.  Why?  Shouldn’t they be much higher in Europe?  (It varies with type of cancer; for some types, survival rates are higher in the US, others higher in Europe, but comes out roughly even overall.)

I honestly believe healthcare will not be any cheaper whatsoever if we go to governement-run healthcare in the US.  I suspect that globally, the rate of advancements in healthcare will declines.  I would LOVE to see the US stop subsidizing drugs for the rest of the world, and perhaps government run healthcare would enable that.  I do believe it’s a moral obligation of this country to provide healthcare to all its citizens.  I’m not sure Medicare for all is the way to do that.  Maybe it is.  If Medicare for all IS the right answer, I definitely would be in favor of a gradual expansion – gradually reduce the eligibility age and add in children at the same time.  So, year one, move eligibility to age 55 and also make all children under 1 eligible.  People could still retain private insurance if they wished, but I imagine many or most wouldn’t.  Private insurance would experience a slow decline over the next 30 years while it adapted to a role more similar to that which it plays in Europe.

Cry me a river.  Don’t get me a wrong.  Employees should always advocate for themselves, and I don’t blame Harvard employees for doing so.  However, anyone who works in the private sector will have little or no sympathy for Harvard professors being forced to pay $20 co-pays and have a $250 deductible.

My benefits cost has gone up, and my actual benefits have gone down year after year.  This is at least in part due to Obamacare provisions that, in some cases thankfully, don’t benefit me – 1 million lifetime max being made illegal, healthcare for kids 21 to 26, and no longer being allowed to deny people with pre-existing conditions.  I don’t oppose any of these provisions, but you don’t get anything for nothin’.  If you factor in healthcare, while I got raises, some years, the healthcare cost negated that raise completely.  However, it’s hard to call it a paycut, because Blue had to shell out a lot of extra money as well to cover the 80%/50% (individual/family) share of the premiums.

Five years ago, I had excellent health coverage.  Now I’d describe my health care coverage as OK.  Thankfully, no one has had a serious illness to really test it.  It’s certainly not cheap on Cobra.

These days I have no stomach for reading about sick kids.  It’s not like I ever enjoyed it, but lately, I can’t help but replace the child with L in my mind.  I’m no big proponent of marijuana legalization.  It annoys me when my neighbors smoke pot or when people smoke pot at parties, or pretty much any time when I’m around.  However, I have never understood why medical marijuana should be illegal.  I think a doctor should be able to prescribe whatever a patient needs to make them better, and marijuana should certainly be an option.  I’ve read two stories recently about young children whose lives appeared to be massively improved by marijuana.  In the first case, the child was taking these unbelievably powerful drugs which were basically killing her – and were still not doing a great job stopping the seizures.  But her doctors were hesitant to recommend marijuana, something so benign by comparison.  The second is the headline on CNN today.   This child said  “mama” for the first time after marijuana finally mitigated her seizures after everything else had failed.  Among other things, it’s so inexpensive compared to some of the drugs around.  It just breaks my heart reading about these poor kids.  Thank God they’ve finally found something to help.

We moved yesterday.  I had more contractions yesterday  than I’ve had the entire rest of my pregnancy combined, but we got through it.  Now our house is complete chaos.  I had breakfast in a mixing bowl with a baby spoon and B’s cereal.  Hopefully we’ll be able to get a little bit organized tonight.