Mini-vacation

My aunt's funeral is this afternoon, in North Carolina. We had been planning to drive down there to be present in person (driving and camping to avoid excess interaction with other humans along the way), so we scheduled vacation days for Thursday and Friday (so as to take a leisurely drive down and have time to see relatives other than at the funeral) and Monday (so as to take a less-leisurely-but-not-frantic drive home). Then my mother chickened out on account of COVID, so we did the same, and will attend the funeral by Zoom. We unscheduled Thursday's vacation day, but kept Friday and Monday.

So on Friday we drove to the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor modern-sculpture park in the Hudson Valley. It's 500 acres of rolling hills, with pieces of sculpture scattered around everywhere, ranging from pieces the size of a human to towers a hundred feet tall and landscapings hundreds of yards long. 500 acres is rather a lot, really: we got to maybe a third of the sculpture installations before physical exhaustion (shalmestere is extremely sensitive to heat and humidity) sent us home. But it was quite pleasant spending the day surrounded by lovely scenery, with no particular deadlines or goals, seeing the green and feeling the breeze.

Yesterday I had wanted to return to the Hudson Valley for a hike in the mountains with the dogs, such as Anthony's Nose or Storm King. And the weather looked promising for such an endeavor, but there was also a hurricane heading our way, and we didn't want to be caught in it if it arrived a little earlier than predicted.

So we stayed home and did ordinary weekend things like laundry, lawn-mowing, and gardening. I put in a row of bricks along the edge of our front walk, and another along the edge of the walk between our house and the left-hand next-door neighbor, to define the edges more clearly and keep the grass from growing over the walks. And we (mostly shalmestere) cut a bunch of branches off the quince trees in front of the house: we're leaning towards having them removed altogether after this year's crop, if there is a "this year's crop" -- in recent years the squirrels have taken many of the fruit, and the rest have been full of moth-larva poop and not useful for cooking.

The hurricane started making its presence known around 7 PM, when I walked the dogs in a light drizzle. Then went to the grocery store, and by the time I got out the light drizzle had become a downpour. Just at the moment it's not raining, so I'd better walk the dogs before it starts again.

Our wacky health care system, continued

In this post and others, I remarked that the "list price" of most medical procedures is a fiction, applicable to hardly anybody, because every insurance company negotiates deep discounts for its own customers, as a kickback for steering its customers to this particular health care provider.

According to this Times article, the reality is even weirder than that. Not only are list prices dramatically different for the same procedure at different providers in the same area, not only are the discounted prices dramatically different between insurers for the same procedure from the same provider, but many "discounted prices" are actually higher than the price to uninsured patients. Depending on the contract between insurer and employer, the insurer may get paid a percentage of the billed amounts as an administrative fee, so it's in the insurer's interest to negotiate a higher billed amount!

And, not surprisingly, despite the law passed last year with rare bipartisan support requiring health care providers to publish their negotiated price lists, almost none of them have actually done so. They also refuse to tell a patient even the negotiated price for that patient's own procedure, with that patient's own insurer, until after the procedure is done, presumably to prevent people from "shopping around" the way a free market is supposed to work. In some cases the contract between insurer and provider contains a gag rule forbidding either party to divulge the negotiated prices; in other cases they just don't want the public to know, and would much rather pay a trivial $100,000/year fine instead. That is, if the Federal government ever gets around to imposing those fines; so far they've sent warning letters, and ominously threatened non-compliant providers with a second warning letter.

Emma Donoghue

I'm late to the party, having never heard of this author until I saw her mentioned in one of hrj's posts in LHMP, but on that basis I ordered two of Donoghue's books, Kissing the Witch (1997) and The Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) through our local indie bookstore. Both are collections of short stories about women's lives, In Rabbits (which I just finished), each story is based on tantalizing story-fragments surviving from the lives of actual women in history (the title character perpetrated, in the 18th century, the fraud that she had given birth to numerous rabbits, all of whom alas died at birth). Another protagonist is Elizabeth Bell, a black gentrywoman in England whose story also became the 2013 movie Belle. One story is set during the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England, and another has a peripheral character named Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, with whom shalmestere and I are familiar because he wrote a collection of sacred "filks" of secular songs in the 14th century and, infuriatingly, didn't write down any of the music, saying only "this is sung to the tune of _____, which everybody knows."

Donoghue has a knack for engagingly capturing a feel of daily life, of the choices ordinary people (especially women) make to survive in the world. I'm not sure what to say beyond that: the stories and the sometimes-scanty historical facts on which they're based speak for themselves. Highly recommended.

In Witch, each story is a retelling of a classic fairy tale. I have nothing to say about this yet, as I haven't gotten it out of shalmestere's hands to read it for myself.