7/19/09

Has it ever occurred to anyone that medical costs wouldn't be able to outpace inflation if there was no insurance and we all had to pay out of pocket for common procedures? This is the exact opposite of what we're apparently trying to do, but just bear with me for a second or two. I would have to guess that 95% of our expenses fall in the category of routine procedures that cost less than a few thousand bucks over any six-month time frame. None of us really know what they cost because we only pay a percentage or a flat rate and insurance picks up the rest. Then we really don't know a whole lot about what the insurance costs because most of that is paid by our employers (for roughly 85% of the country). Since we have no idea what things cost, we have no way of knowing what kind of deal we're getting. So prices, quite predictably, rise faster than any other segment of our economy. It's essentially the same as college tuition skyrocketing faster and faster as it gets more and more subsidized. If every student had to pay cash with no subsidies, colleges would either get really cheap really quickly or they would go out of business.

So why not use tax-free savings accounts and do away with standard health insurance, then carry catastrophic coverage for the big stuff? If nobody can afford to pay $500 for an x-ray, then an x-ray can't cost $500. All of the money that we currently pay for premiums could be directed into our savings accounts instead, to pay for the little stuff. Then we could get a catastrophic loss policy with a $5,000 deductible for a couple hundred bucks a month (at most). Seems pretty simple to me. I know that this probably means that I hate poor people or something. I really do think we could afford a safety net for poor people a lot more easily though, if the costs were subject to the same pricing pressures as everything else for which we have to pay cash. I don't know. I'm just a truck driver. The powers that be are wicked smart and they went to Ivy League schools, so I'm probably way off base... or something.

Today was a perfect case study in the futility of following directions from my employer. I got to sleep a little earlier than expected last night and slept rather soundly (for reasons that we won't discuss here). So I was up bright and early this morning. When I got out of bed and looked at my clock, I saw that I could get to my shipper in time to take a ten hour break before I was scheduled to leave with my load. Might as well do that, right? Then I would have as much of my 14 hour clock as possible still available once I got unloaded tomorrow morning.

I made the quick trip over to the shipper and found a parking space among some dropped trailers. I cranked up the A/C on my truck and refrigerated myself into going back to sleep. When I woke, I checked on channelsurfing.net and found that I was just in time to see the playoff in the Open Championship. Groovy. Too bad for Old Tom but it was fun to watch nonetheless. Lost in the hoopla about Watson's meltdown was the fact that Cink played some pretty damn good golf down the stretch, but I digress. Then my Tigers managed to squander another great pitching performance and got swept by the Evil Empire. Bummer.

My instructions said that I was supposed to call some phone number at 5pm and then someone would show up to give me my load. Okay then. I hung around waiting for 5pm to arrive. One of my CTL colleagues showed up a little before 5pm and drove past me to the back of the shipper's building. Right at 5pm, I made my call. I got someone's voicemail. Beauty. I left a message saying that I was there and I was ready to pick up my load and all of that jazz. Nobody called back.

After a few minutes, my colleague came around the corner and told me that my loaded trailer was sitting back there waiting for me. Someone had answered the phone when he called and told him which trailer to take. He had only one delivery (to the same place in Durham as my first drop) and I had two. The trailer number that he had been given was the one with a single drop and the other (mine) had two drops. Okay, so that all worked out well enough, but had I ignored my instructions I might have figured out that my damned trailer was sitting there all day. I could have covered as much of the trip as I cared to cover this afternoon, taken a ten hour break, and then finished off the run. I would have thus left more of tomorrow's hours available to myself. Instead I was a good little employee and did as I was told. I heeded the bit about just-in-time overnight yada yada yada, called when I was told to call, and took my ten hour break before making the drop/hook this evening. There's no telling how it will all play out from here, but now my 14 hour clock will expire at 8:45am.

I decided to take the leisurely route down US-301 through Maryland and across the Potomac, catching up with I-95 in Ruther Glen. There are quite a few red lights along that first stretch in Maryland but it's a pretty mellow ride on the weekend. There was a healthy amount of traffic once I got on the interstate but everything was moving along fairly well, so the whole trip was a relatively easy one. I got to the consignee's location hoping to find that they were some kind of 24-hour outfit and I would be done early. No such luck. My 5am scheduled arrival is apparently an accurate one this time around.

Once someone shows up here and takes the first batch of freight off my trailer, I'll have another twenty or thirty miles or whatever to my final stop in Raleigh. I guess there's a chance that everything can be done quickly and I can get another assignment before my hours run out. Given recent events though, I won't hold my breath. More likely I'll run out of hours and have to take another ten hour break, burning up most of tomorrow in the process. Hey, I did what I was told though. That has to count for something.