Guess I should begin by saying, "See previous blog," or this won't make sense. Presuming you just did that, or are about to.... here goes with a few thoughts to ponder...
Okay, I realize some of my friends, maybe a lot of them, will read this and say something like, "Jesus, do you really sit around and think about this stuff?" Yea, I do... a lot. Call it a quirk, but then I've always been a bit excentric.
Back near the middle of the last century, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, Moral Man, Immoral Society. As the title implies, this is a central dilemma any person of faith must wrestle with. How do I live as a moral person in the midst of what is in so many ways an immoral society?
Okay, so "society" is a big subject. Let's break it down. That was essentially the topic of my last blog on United Health Group screwing your grandmother out of her insulin while putting billions in profits into their corporate and executive pockets. I reached the point where, as a Christian/Buddhist person of faith, I could no longer in good conscience justify--live with myself--working at a job where I'm on the phone telling grandma we're not paying the extra fifteen a month her insulin is going up, then attending a sales meeting where top execs are gleeful over UHG having made 2.7 billion last year, not to mention their six figure incomes. So I walked back to my corporate cubbyhole, scooted my chair across the aisle to my super and said, "I don't belong here. You have my notice."
Granted, not everyone can do that; at least, not immediately. The difficulty, however, in finding ethical employment cannot be avoided merely by saying, "times are tough." Being a person of faith demands we continually evaluate whether the way we earn our daily bread comes down more on the side of the moral than immoral side of the equation.
Put a bit differently, when does it become time for a person of faith to tell the corporate plantation owner to, "Take this job and shove it!"
There are no simple answers. I do have to eat. If I have a family, they too have that nasty and getting more expensive by the day habit. And no one can live without seeking shelter from the storm. Freezing to death is not an option. So we find ourselves in a quandry. If I really think what my company is doing is unethical, do I risk everything and quit without another job? Or is my greater responsibility providing food and shelter and college to my kids, even if it means participating in something I think is wrong, if not even--to this in a moment--evil?
This is not merely an academic exercise in splitting ethical hairs. Be absolutely certain, human history can turn on seemingly insignificant acts of defiant morality. Remember the African-American lady who refused to move to the back of the bus? How she inspired some young preacher to take a stand? And those black kids who had the audacity to order and burger and fries at an all-white lunch counter?
Deciding it was time to pursue more ethical employment was, for me, an act of moral defiance. I just decided I couldn't participate in what was happening to our customers any more; especially when I knew what was happening behind the scenes at UHG. I mean, really, couldn't these corporate types help grandma out by at least being willing to split the difference for her increased costs?
Had I stood up in that meeting and said, "Hey, how can you guys justify making all that money when the lady I got off the phone with is going to have to skip a meal to pay for her insulin?" Doubtless I would have gotten the response, "Look, we get it. This isn't personal. It's just business." And there's the problem Niebuhr recognized: As a person of faith it's impossible to separate the personal from the social.
As a person of faith I must share at least some moral responsibility for the impact of the decisions I make on my job. Those decisions effect the rest of humanity. So if you're my boss, don't tell me to quietly go out back and dump toxic chemicals down the city sewer. Poisoning the global water table is a bit much to ask a person of faith to do.
Yet, here again, there's the temptation to say it's just business.... I'm not responsible... Hey, I was just following orders... Hummm, where have I heard that sentence? And is there really any difference between, "it's just business" and "I was only following orders?"
I'm sure these execs are great guys. They go to church. They tithe. They don't beat their spouses and help the kids with their homework. They bought us a terrific lunch that day! Great private morality. Problem is I can't have one set of values at home, in my private life, and another when I sit down at my work desk. I have to make an honest effort to be morally consistant. My buisness decisions, those decisions I make at work every day, have an impact that goes well beyond my own backyard.
Another mid century thinker, Hannah Arendt, wrote of what she called, "the banality of evil." Evil can be very subtle, very ordinary, very every day and banal. So we have to ask ourselves about the larger picture. What impact does my company, my job, my actions have on the larger environment? How does it impact the people down the road whose well I may have just poisoned because I followed my boss's orders to dump paint thinner down the drain?
How do I live out the balancing act between being a moral person of faith and participating in what is in so many ways an immoral corporate and political environment?
Where is that line? (And why do they keep moving the damn thing?) Because be sure, there is a line. It's inside, or should be inside every person of faith. The first step in learning when to cross it, and when not to, is in knowing where it is.
I'm no pillar of virtue. I simply reached the line, for me, and decided not to cross over. Aiming at moral balance hasn't done much for my checkbook. I do, however, sleep better--at least until the next time.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
How United Health Group is Screwing Your Grandmother
I'm the guy who just told your grandmother that she's going to have to come up with an extra fifteen dollars a week out of pocket to cover her insulin. I sat at my computer and patiently listened while she told me how Social Security is her only income and she just didn't know how she was going to pay for these increases in food costs and prescriptions and the electric bill. But after all that all I could say was, "I'm sorry, but United Healthcare just isn't going to pay for the increase."
I cut off your grandmother after attending an employee meeting with the big wigs of UHC where they gleefully told us how great a job we were doing and how terrific the Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug sales were going and how wonderful it is to be taking such good care of our old people. And how United Health Group just made 2.7 billion dollars. We should be so proud of ourselves!
Can't make that extra fifteen for you insulin, grandma? United Health Group executives have some advice. Try skipping lunch an extra day a week. Screw you, grandma.
How did this happen? When I moved back to my home town of Roanoke, Va., a couple of years ago after an almost forty year absence, I needed a job. United Health Group has a very large call center here and, despite my extreme dislike for health insurance companies, I applied, got hired, went to class for three days, took a state test, and became a licensed health insurance sales agent in all fifty states. My experiences there did not improve my opinion of the industry, to say the least. There was never any doubt about the number one priority: get the sale.... period.
This was during the height of the health care bill debate, and we would get regular emails from company execs about how we should write our representatives and tell them this, that, and the other about what was good or bad about the bill. Of course somewhere in the email would be the proviso, and I quote... "(this is voluntary)." We were coached on how to explain why the company was discontinuing coverage, called Service Area Reduction, which basically meant that UHG didn't make enough profit there that month so we were dumping our seniors, who we're so happy to be taking such good care of, in the street.
Whenever the customer service lines got overloaded we in sales ended up taking their calls. Time and again we sat there listening to grandma and grandad telling us their stories of how food was going up and how uncle Henry had to have his medicine and there just wasn't enough money.... on and on and on.
Our lunch room conversations centered around things like, "I can't believe the shit I'm having to tell people." I started to feel dirty, I mean really filthy, about even being in the building. When my shift ended I couldn't wait to get home and take a shower.
I realize not everyone there was in my position. After seven months of cajolling people into buying a Medicare Advantage Plan that had a higher deductible than last year and would pay for even less, I quit. It encourages me to know that not a single person who was hired with me is still there, mostly for the very same reasons.
The experience raises some interesting questions. Given the economic and medical situations of our elderly, how much is too much money to make? individually as a corporate exec, or employee? How much is too much for a company to make? Couldn't some of that 2.7 billion be used to help cover a few dollars more of grandma's insulin? And how much moral responsibility does an employee incur working for a company that, despite it's protestations and cloaking it's every action in the mantel of corporate righteousness, is screwing grandma? How do these people sleep at night?
The long term answer is universal health insurance, single payer system, with a strong public option to compete with companies like UHG that have essentially no competition. Yes, there are other health care companies. But if you compare their prices online you'll find they're price fixing. You pay the same price for the same coverage no matter what company you choose.
With fewer and fewer of us being able to afford any kind of health insurance, forcing premiums up; with hospital and doctor and drug costs going through the roof; the system as it is will not last a lot longer. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Especially in the US, a country ranked by the World Health Organization as thirty-seventh in providing health services to it's citizens--just behind Costa Rica. Not to mention our having one of the highest infant mortality rates in the industrialized world. I could go on.
Sorry to break it to you grandma, but that company that's telling you how much they care and how well they're going to take care of you.... that's a sales pitch.... and nothing besides. It's an empty promise some guy or girl sitting behind a computer screen reading a script is getting paid to tell you, knowing all the while that what's hidden in all that fine print they're required to read you is what's not going to get paid this year. Believe me, they can't wait to get home and shower off the filth.... and find another job.
I cut off your grandmother after attending an employee meeting with the big wigs of UHC where they gleefully told us how great a job we were doing and how terrific the Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug sales were going and how wonderful it is to be taking such good care of our old people. And how United Health Group just made 2.7 billion dollars. We should be so proud of ourselves!
Can't make that extra fifteen for you insulin, grandma? United Health Group executives have some advice. Try skipping lunch an extra day a week. Screw you, grandma.
How did this happen? When I moved back to my home town of Roanoke, Va., a couple of years ago after an almost forty year absence, I needed a job. United Health Group has a very large call center here and, despite my extreme dislike for health insurance companies, I applied, got hired, went to class for three days, took a state test, and became a licensed health insurance sales agent in all fifty states. My experiences there did not improve my opinion of the industry, to say the least. There was never any doubt about the number one priority: get the sale.... period.
This was during the height of the health care bill debate, and we would get regular emails from company execs about how we should write our representatives and tell them this, that, and the other about what was good or bad about the bill. Of course somewhere in the email would be the proviso, and I quote... "(this is voluntary)." We were coached on how to explain why the company was discontinuing coverage, called Service Area Reduction, which basically meant that UHG didn't make enough profit there that month so we were dumping our seniors, who we're so happy to be taking such good care of, in the street.
Whenever the customer service lines got overloaded we in sales ended up taking their calls. Time and again we sat there listening to grandma and grandad telling us their stories of how food was going up and how uncle Henry had to have his medicine and there just wasn't enough money.... on and on and on.
Our lunch room conversations centered around things like, "I can't believe the shit I'm having to tell people." I started to feel dirty, I mean really filthy, about even being in the building. When my shift ended I couldn't wait to get home and take a shower.
I realize not everyone there was in my position. After seven months of cajolling people into buying a Medicare Advantage Plan that had a higher deductible than last year and would pay for even less, I quit. It encourages me to know that not a single person who was hired with me is still there, mostly for the very same reasons.
The experience raises some interesting questions. Given the economic and medical situations of our elderly, how much is too much money to make? individually as a corporate exec, or employee? How much is too much for a company to make? Couldn't some of that 2.7 billion be used to help cover a few dollars more of grandma's insulin? And how much moral responsibility does an employee incur working for a company that, despite it's protestations and cloaking it's every action in the mantel of corporate righteousness, is screwing grandma? How do these people sleep at night?
The long term answer is universal health insurance, single payer system, with a strong public option to compete with companies like UHG that have essentially no competition. Yes, there are other health care companies. But if you compare their prices online you'll find they're price fixing. You pay the same price for the same coverage no matter what company you choose.
With fewer and fewer of us being able to afford any kind of health insurance, forcing premiums up; with hospital and doctor and drug costs going through the roof; the system as it is will not last a lot longer. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Especially in the US, a country ranked by the World Health Organization as thirty-seventh in providing health services to it's citizens--just behind Costa Rica. Not to mention our having one of the highest infant mortality rates in the industrialized world. I could go on.
Sorry to break it to you grandma, but that company that's telling you how much they care and how well they're going to take care of you.... that's a sales pitch.... and nothing besides. It's an empty promise some guy or girl sitting behind a computer screen reading a script is getting paid to tell you, knowing all the while that what's hidden in all that fine print they're required to read you is what's not going to get paid this year. Believe me, they can't wait to get home and shower off the filth.... and find another job.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
What Keith Richards and Barack Obama Have in Common
"Alan, I swear I'm not kidding. It's true. Everybody who was ever close to the Rolling Stones will tell you it's true."
"Scott," I said, trying to keep a straight face while speaking with a first-rate guitar player who lists Ringo Star's All-Star Rock and Roll Band on his resume; "it's not true. It's an urban legend, pure and simple. Even if it did come from someone inside the Stone's inner circle, how could that be considered reliable? God knows what their blood alcohol, cocaine, grass, heroin content was when they said it. It's an urban legend."
"No way, Alan. No way, man. Keith Richards really does have to have all the old blood flushed out of his body and replaced with new once a month or he'll die. Hell, why do think he looks the way he does?"
After a while, there are some things you just don't argue with a true believer. It's like banging your head into the proverbial brick wall.
Keith Richards, guitar player, singer, songwriter, recent author of the best selling autobiography, "Life"; recovering booze, heroin, and by his own admission damn near everything else addict; the guy who, along with buddies Mick Jagger and Brain Jones founded rock and roll's longest lasting, arguably most creative band: The Rolling Stones. The man who, some remain convinced, has his blood flushed every month.
Then there's Barack Obama, President of the United States. Barack Obama, whose resume commands respect from all but the most incomprehensible dullards the rest of us have the sad misfortune of having to put up with. A resume that includes Harvard Law, the United States Senate, the new START treaty, the first comprehensive health care reform bill in our nation's history. I could go on. But you get the idea.
Two incredibly accomplished individuals. Keith Richards, Rolling Stone. Barack Obama, President of the United States. What could these two possibly have in common?
I've given this considerable thought. Turns out it's not so difficult to figure out. My first clue came when I was watching the tube last night and saw this Fox News guy interviewing a group of Iowa voters. Turns out about half of this focus group believes, despite Obama's repeated affirmations that he's a Christian, that he is nonetheless a Muslim. No doubt these same folk would number themselves among those "birthers" who, again, despite all evidence to the contrary, firmly believe the President really can't be the President because he's not a native born U.S. citizen.
Okay... Here's the connection... Keith Richards, Rolling Stone. Barack Obama, President of the United States. Both men are living proof that if a story, a lie, a myth, or an urban legend gets passed around enough, no matter how shit-all-stupid it is, there are plenty of shit-all-stupid people who will believe it.
This is especially true if they hear it and see it being repeated by members of the official Shit-All-Stupid Leadership Council: St. Sarah the Simple, Glenn John the Bircher Beck, and Rushdumb the Drug Addled Gasbag.
For those of you fortunate enough not to have, prior to this, heard of the Shit-All-Stupid Leadership Council and their minions of morons, let me take this opportunity to point out that it is an offshoot of the Flat Earth Society, the Sun Revolves Around the Earth Consortium, and the Nobody Ever Really Walked on the Moon Fellowship of Bible Thumping Fundamentalists.
What is truly sad about all this is the apparent fact that the Shit-All-Stupid Leadership Council is apparently running the Republican Party.
Where are the voices from Right of Center who are willing to speak out and say, quite simply, "Look folks, if it looks like shit, smells like shit, squishes like shit, and you heard it from the Shit-All-Stupid Leadership Council, it's probably shit?" More traditional Republicans should remember that silence is always taken as agreement.
There will always be those who, despite evidence to the contrary, persist in believing urban legends, myths, lies and the lying liers who tell them. In a free society, they are to be heard, tolerated, and their speech protected. That, however, is not to say we should let the idiots run the country.
Mahalo
"Scott," I said, trying to keep a straight face while speaking with a first-rate guitar player who lists Ringo Star's All-Star Rock and Roll Band on his resume; "it's not true. It's an urban legend, pure and simple. Even if it did come from someone inside the Stone's inner circle, how could that be considered reliable? God knows what their blood alcohol, cocaine, grass, heroin content was when they said it. It's an urban legend."
"No way, Alan. No way, man. Keith Richards really does have to have all the old blood flushed out of his body and replaced with new once a month or he'll die. Hell, why do think he looks the way he does?"
After a while, there are some things you just don't argue with a true believer. It's like banging your head into the proverbial brick wall.
Keith Richards, guitar player, singer, songwriter, recent author of the best selling autobiography, "Life"; recovering booze, heroin, and by his own admission damn near everything else addict; the guy who, along with buddies Mick Jagger and Brain Jones founded rock and roll's longest lasting, arguably most creative band: The Rolling Stones. The man who, some remain convinced, has his blood flushed every month.
Then there's Barack Obama, President of the United States. Barack Obama, whose resume commands respect from all but the most incomprehensible dullards the rest of us have the sad misfortune of having to put up with. A resume that includes Harvard Law, the United States Senate, the new START treaty, the first comprehensive health care reform bill in our nation's history. I could go on. But you get the idea.
Two incredibly accomplished individuals. Keith Richards, Rolling Stone. Barack Obama, President of the United States. What could these two possibly have in common?
I've given this considerable thought. Turns out it's not so difficult to figure out. My first clue came when I was watching the tube last night and saw this Fox News guy interviewing a group of Iowa voters. Turns out about half of this focus group believes, despite Obama's repeated affirmations that he's a Christian, that he is nonetheless a Muslim. No doubt these same folk would number themselves among those "birthers" who, again, despite all evidence to the contrary, firmly believe the President really can't be the President because he's not a native born U.S. citizen.
Okay... Here's the connection... Keith Richards, Rolling Stone. Barack Obama, President of the United States. Both men are living proof that if a story, a lie, a myth, or an urban legend gets passed around enough, no matter how shit-all-stupid it is, there are plenty of shit-all-stupid people who will believe it.
This is especially true if they hear it and see it being repeated by members of the official Shit-All-Stupid Leadership Council: St. Sarah the Simple, Glenn John the Bircher Beck, and Rushdumb the Drug Addled Gasbag.
For those of you fortunate enough not to have, prior to this, heard of the Shit-All-Stupid Leadership Council and their minions of morons, let me take this opportunity to point out that it is an offshoot of the Flat Earth Society, the Sun Revolves Around the Earth Consortium, and the Nobody Ever Really Walked on the Moon Fellowship of Bible Thumping Fundamentalists.
What is truly sad about all this is the apparent fact that the Shit-All-Stupid Leadership Council is apparently running the Republican Party.
Where are the voices from Right of Center who are willing to speak out and say, quite simply, "Look folks, if it looks like shit, smells like shit, squishes like shit, and you heard it from the Shit-All-Stupid Leadership Council, it's probably shit?" More traditional Republicans should remember that silence is always taken as agreement.
There will always be those who, despite evidence to the contrary, persist in believing urban legends, myths, lies and the lying liers who tell them. In a free society, they are to be heard, tolerated, and their speech protected. That, however, is not to say we should let the idiots run the country.
Mahalo
Friday, February 4, 2011
Glenn Beck, Fundamentalist Preacher
We've long passed the point where Glenn Beck in particular, and Fox News in general, can be considered serious, fact based reporting and thoughtful analysis. His most recent explicating of "the coming Caliphat," where he illustrates how the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt is plotting to take over Europe. In Beck's world, every event is reduced to the most simple terms.
Growing up in the very conservative Southern Baptist Church, I remember traveling evangelists who would come for a week of services designed in every detail to accomplish one thing. Convince everyone the world was going to end in just a few months and you'd better come running down the aisle at the hymn of invitation, accept Jesus as your personal savior, and "avoid the wrath of God that's surely coming upon you!"
Like Beck, every evangelist had their charts and blackboards where they would painstakingly illustrate how current events most surely pointed to the end of the world, the second coming, the Book of Revelation coming literally true in our time. How nice to know human history is reducable to such simple interpretations of scripture and current events. According to the old time evangelists who shamelessly used fear tactics to further their religious agenda, there are only good guys and bad guys, right and wrong. What's tragic is that so many people buy into such shallowness.
But then, what can we expect in a country where, by some estimates, more than half of adults can't read beyond an eighth grade level? Now I understand the appeal of Beck, and, of course, Palin.
Beck is like the traveling evangelist, the fundamentalist preachers utilized fear and simplicity to offer comfort in a complex and often frightening world that appears always on the edge of spinning out of control. Why worry? Glenn and company have it all figured out. It's all unfolding according to some sort of divinely ordained plan. How convenient, and reassuring, to believe the people in the streets of Cairo are mere pawns in the Caliph's game. Economics, justice, jobs, food shortages, lack of authentic free and fair elections; too much trouble to think of all that!
Sorry guys, it's just not that simple.
Mahalo
Growing up in the very conservative Southern Baptist Church, I remember traveling evangelists who would come for a week of services designed in every detail to accomplish one thing. Convince everyone the world was going to end in just a few months and you'd better come running down the aisle at the hymn of invitation, accept Jesus as your personal savior, and "avoid the wrath of God that's surely coming upon you!"
Like Beck, every evangelist had their charts and blackboards where they would painstakingly illustrate how current events most surely pointed to the end of the world, the second coming, the Book of Revelation coming literally true in our time. How nice to know human history is reducable to such simple interpretations of scripture and current events. According to the old time evangelists who shamelessly used fear tactics to further their religious agenda, there are only good guys and bad guys, right and wrong. What's tragic is that so many people buy into such shallowness.
But then, what can we expect in a country where, by some estimates, more than half of adults can't read beyond an eighth grade level? Now I understand the appeal of Beck, and, of course, Palin.
Beck is like the traveling evangelist, the fundamentalist preachers utilized fear and simplicity to offer comfort in a complex and often frightening world that appears always on the edge of spinning out of control. Why worry? Glenn and company have it all figured out. It's all unfolding according to some sort of divinely ordained plan. How convenient, and reassuring, to believe the people in the streets of Cairo are mere pawns in the Caliph's game. Economics, justice, jobs, food shortages, lack of authentic free and fair elections; too much trouble to think of all that!
Sorry guys, it's just not that simple.
Mahalo
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