Saturday, September 21, 2013

Losing Ground

The good news is that there is very little chance the mean spirited bill to take 40 billion out of the SNAP program is going to survive the Senate. The bad news is that the Crazy Party is not likely to give up on their program to make being poor even more miserable than it already is.

On the near horizon, the Crazy Party is going to try and shut down the government if  they don't get their way on defunding the ACA and failing that will try and use the debt limit to try again. It is looking very much like everybody's life, if you're a regular person, is going to get a little bit worse. The Congresscritters won't suffer and neither will the fat cats but all the rest of us will.

Speaking of fat cats and suffering...Home Depot announced this week that I won't be able to get health insurance as a part  timer after the end of the year and instead will have to go the ACA exchanges. I went over to the Kaiser website and ran my income and stuff through their ACA calculator and it looks like I will get to pay about twice as much as I do now for the Silver plan and about the same as now for the Bronze plan. I won't know until I actually go out and start looking at the various plan offerings how the new plans will compare to what we have now which is very minimal(read sucks) and limited to a max coverage of 20 thousand a year and 2 thousand for outpatient. I discovered the 2 grand limit the hard way when I had my outpatient hernia surgery a couple of months ago and I got to shell out 4 grand out of pocket. Again, the good news is that I will be 65 next September and Medicare will kick in. I'll only have to deal with the insurance thing for 8 months. The younger part time folks at HD are probably going to be a little more upset than I am about this.

Anyhow, a rainy Saturday here in Georgia so nothing happening in the garden. I have finished and planted 6 raised beds and we needed some rain. I only work 5pm til 9 tonight and noon til 8 tomorrow so really not much of a weekend planned anyway.

Oh, Happy Birthday to minimonk who turns 49 today.

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