We started the summer a little early with a trip in May to Missouri to see my Mom.  The girls are getting old enough to appreciate the Grandma that they don’t see as often as they do their other relatives.  I think the highlight was chasing ants and butterflies around Mom’s yard.

Rayna has been to, not one but, two vacation bible schools.  First, she spent a week at a Baptist church in Rochester at the invitation of Emily, her best friend from preschool.  And then, of course, bible school at our own church.  She returned the favor and invited Emily to come along.  Both girls had a great time.

As reported previously, both Rayna and Kaylee have been spending a lot of time in the pool at the Rochester Athletic Club.  Both took swimming lessons and are coming along nicely.  I personally had a great time in Kaylee’s parent/child lessons.

A few weeks ago, we all went to the Minnesota Zoo and had a good day.  I personally enjoyed the giant fish tanks the most.  Kaylee really seemed to get into that too, although she beat a hasty retreat when a shark suddenly swam close by.  Everyone had fun watching a brown bear who was quite a ham and put on a good show for the crowd.

So, it’s been a good summer so far.  Here’s looking forward to a great August!

I guess the most the fundamental question is why we are going through this in the first place?  Why does the President want to push this at a time when we already have two wars (three if you count the war on terror outside of Afghanistan) and a nasty recession on our plate?  I cannot speak for the President.  But I can tell you why I think we need to tackle this issue now.

1)  People are going bankrupt in the US due to the cost of health care.  And I’m not just talking about poor people without insurance or people who made bad choices with their health and/or personal finances.  I’m talking about middle and upper class people who had health insurance and did everything you’re supposed to do but got nailed by a chronic health problem and were abandoned by their insurance company:

• February 03, 2005 – The journal Health Affairs reports that Harvard researchers found that half of all personal bankruptcies declared in 2001 were caused by illness and medical bills.  “Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by illness had health insurance. More than three-quarters were insured at the start of the bankrupting illness. However, 38 percent had lost coverage at least temporarily by the time they filed for bankruptcy.  Most of the medical bankruptcy filers were middle class; 56 percent owned a home and the same number had attended college. In many cases, illness forced breadwinners to take time off from work — losing income and job-based health insurance precisely when families needed it most.”
• June 04, 2009 — BusinessWeek reports on a study in which Harvard and Univerisity of Ohio researchers found that 62% of all personal bankruptcies declared in 2007 were caused by health problems.  “Medical problems caused 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers. And in a finding that surprised even the researchers, 78% of those filers had medical insurance at the start of their illness, including 60.3% who had private coverage, not Medicare or Medicaid.”

2)  The cost of employee health insurance in the US is getting harder to bear, especially for small businesses:

• January 28, 2009 — CNN and Fortune report that small businesses are struggling to provide employee health plans, particularly in a weak economy when they cannot pass the cost on to consumers while staying competitive.  “Premiums on group policies have soared by as much as 30%, on top of double-digit increases in each of the past five years. Coverage is shrinking. Thanks to insurer consolidation, policy choices are more limited than ever. And in a seller’s market for insurance, small business owners have little room to negotiate prices or terms.”
• March 04, 2009 — The Council on Foreign Relations reports that health care costs in the US are undermining the competitiveness of US businesses in the world marketplace.  “Factoring in costs borne by the government, the private sector, and individuals, the United States spends over $1.9 trillion annually on healthcare expenses, more than any other industrialized country. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical School estimate the United States spends 44 percent more per capita than Switzerland, the country with the second highest expenditures, and 134 percent more than the median for member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These costs prompt fears that an increasing number of U.S. businesses will outsource jobs overseas or offshore business operations completely. U.S. economic woes have heightened the burden of healthcare costs both on individuals and businesses.”
• February 11, 2005 — General Motors CEO Richard Wagoner tells the Economic Club of Chicago that “Failing to address the health care crisis would be the worst kind of procrastination, the kind that places our children and our grandchildren at risk and threatens the health and global competitiveness of our nation’s economy.”

3) The insurance company is not your friend and cannot be trusted.  If this last point seems more emotional and less impartial than the others, that’s because it is.  Right around my first birthday (1968), my dad was diagnosed (at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester) with Multiple Sclerosis.  The disease moved fast; by my eighth birthday, he was paralyzed from the waist down and had lost the use of his right hand.  That year, 1975, he left the workforce and lost his health insurance benefit.  The plan allowed him to maintain his coverage but he had to assume the full cost of the premiums.

I guess the plan’s rules didn’t allow them to kick him out because of his disease.  There was nothing, however, to keep the insurance company from increasing the premium.  Which they did.  Every six months.  After a long, expensive progression of premium hikes, my folks had to give in and “voluntarily” withdraw from the plan.  Of course, getting another policy somewhere else was out of the question due to the now pre-existing condition.  For the last 10 or 12 years of Dad’s life, he was without any health insurance at all.  I remember very clearly heart-breaking discussions of what we could do should Dad need hospital care.  I was just getting old enough to understand what was happening and the possibilities were scary.  In the end, Dad never needed to go to the hospital and he quietly passed away in 1994.  We avoided financial armageddon.

The free market is supposed to use competition to get services to the most people for the lowest cost.  Insurance works by spreading risk out amongst as many people as possible to minimize it (risk) for everyone.  Neither of these principles is working in the American health insurance industry and something needs to change.  That’s why I think we can’t afford to do nothing.  Of course, that raises the question of what, exactly, we should do.  That’s another post.

Addendum:  Although I stand by my opinion of insurance companies, I have to say that I have known individual insurance agents who were good, honorable people.  I think the evil happens higher up at the corporate office.

In June, we went down to Missouri to visit my Mom for a few days.  It was a great visit, marred only by the 100 degree, 99% humidity weather.  The girls loved seeing “Grandma Lambright”, who was a bit of a mystery to them, in the flesh.  Rayna still is talking about wanting to go see Grandma Lambright again.  Other highlights of the visit included seeing my old friends Vince and Droid, along with their families, and a trip to see my Dad’s resting place in St. Joe.  The swans and fish were out in force at the cemetery’s pool and the girls had a wonderful time tossing bits of bread into the water to be devoured.

Shortly after we returned from Missouri, Nicole and I decided it was time for Rayna to make the transition to a full-sized bed.  She did really well in the hotel bed on the trip and there didn’t seem any reason to wait.  So, we went to the furniture store and got her a new bed.  We didn’t get a headboard; the side of her toddler bed was designed to function as a headboard when the child moves to a bigger bed.  We then went to Wal-Mart and let her pick her own bedding.  It was a close race and I thought for a minute that she was going to opt for Micky Mouse; in the end, however, it was the Princess gear that got the nod.  Rayna loves her big bed; even now she occasionally thanks me for putting it together.

Kaylee got a little grumpy at all this.  When it dawned on us that she was jealous, we went ahead and converted her crib to a toddler bed, which immediately brightened her mood.  She loves getting in and out of bed on her own. She can’t open the door yet but she’s trying and it’s just a matter of time.  It’s hard to believe how she’s grown.

Speaking of Kaylee, she continues to come into her own.  All her teeth seem to be in, save the four eyeteeth which still give her fits sometimes.  Her vocabulary has exploded this summer and it seems like she’s coming up with new words every day.  She really gets a kick out of saying Rayna’s name and uses it every chance she gets.  Some of her other favorites are “juice”, “Elmo”, and “naked”, which gets used a lot at bathtime.

This year marked Nicole and my fourth wedding anniversary, which doesn’t seem possible.  The time has really flown.  We treated ourselves to a day trip to the Twin Cities while the girls stayed home with a babysitter.  Nothing fancy, just a little shopping and lunch.  It’s just nice to get away by ourselves occasionally.

Speaking of Elmo, we all went to Sesame Street Live last weekend and had a great time.  Kaylee had never been to anything like this and she really likes Elmo so she spent the whole show entranced.  It was fun watching her try to figure out cotton candy.  First she tried chewing it, which didn’t really work.  Licking like a sucker was even less successful.  Finally, she figured out how to just let it dissolve in her mouth.  We got her an Elmo pendent which is up in her room.

We have a massive backlog of photos, which I need to organize, tag, and get loaded to our page on flickr.  I posted a bunch yesterday (including Christmas 2008) and will continue to work on that in the coming days.  Our photostream isn’t in strict chronological order anymore, which offends my sense of the linear, but it’s more important to get stuff up.  I’ll post here when the particularly choice bits go up.

But enough of that.  Things have been going pretty well in the family, albeit at a hectic pace.  We continue preparing to move.  Seems like we’re writing checks left and right and generally spending money like drunken sailors.  We’ve been furniture shopping; the new house is 2 or 3 times the size of our current place and we need to fill it up.  Not all at once, of course.  But we do need more things to sit on.  We’re also in the process of getting all the utilities connected and disconnected, as the case may be.  November 25 will be here before we know it.

Rayna is excited about everything.  We took her and Kaylee there a couple of weeks ago to measure and take pictures of the interior and she understood very well what was going on.  We went down to the two children’s bedrooms and she went into one and loudly announced that this was “Rayna’s room!”  Upon seeing the big soaker bathtub that is much larger than ours, she just stood looking at it for awhile and then simply said “How do I get in?”

Halloween was a lot of fun.  I don’t have any pictures up yet; most of the ones I took came out fuzzy.  Seems I had a setting on the camera misadjusted.  Urgh.  We took them to my office to trick or treat and a lot of others took pictures too, so I’m hopeful to get some photos from them.  So stay tuned for that.  Rayna was a princess and Kaylee was a flower.  That night, we went to a neighborhood church that was having games for awhile and then we trick or treated on our block.  The girls had a good time but Rayna got awful wound up and had a hard time sleeping.  She ended up sitting with me on the couch watching TV until 10:30 or so before she finally settled down.  The fact that I insisted on watching boring news helped too.

Not much else to report.  It’s almost time to start getting the girls ready for bed, after which I’ll settle down to watch the election returns.  Crossing my fingers…

Last weekend, we went out to Tweite’s Pumpkin Patch.  This is an annual tradition for us.  The girls have a good time and we end it all with a wagon ride to the pumpkin patch where we each pick out the perfect pumpkin.  And we buy kettle corn.  We forgot the camera this year so there aren’t many pictures.  We snapped a few with our cell phone cameras but haven’t got them posted yet.

Things are moving forward with the house, much as planned.  The financing is mostly in place; all that’s left is to sign the paper and lock the interest rate in place.  The inspection and appraisal both went well with no unexpected surprises.  We’re still on track to move on 11-26, the day before Thanksgiving.  We’re going over on Friday to take pictures of the interior and measure all the rooms so that we can do some more serious planning on where to put things and how to set it all up.  Right now, we’re working off of memory.  Thanks to all who have helped us out as we make this transition!

First things first.  A few days ago, we got an offer on our house.  We had been working with this prospective buyer for several weeks and everything finally came together.  There was some back and forth negotiating and both sides gave up on a few things but an agreement was finally reached on Thursday.

We had not seriously looked at houses yet, preferring to wait until there was some movement on ours.  Well, things were now moving.  So we took today and visited 5 or 6 places that either we or our realator had selected.  By the end of it, we had settled on a great place that meets all our needs.  Negotiations are still going on but it looks good; we should know by Monday or Tuesday for sure.

Honestly, I’m kind of beat tonight so I’m going to skip any further details.  Trust me, you’ll be hearing more about this in the next few weeks.