A little thing called insurance

Insurance is a funny thing. You pay up front for something that you may or may not need in the future because if you don't and if that thing does happen, then you'll end up paying more than if you sort of "pre-paid" for it through insurance. It sucks living your life expecting that something bad will happen to you, but it would suck worse if you didn't prepare and something bad did happen and there you are stuck with a huge bill because you didn't have insurance. Or better insurance.

I think that fear and anticipation is what caused me to change my insurance provider after going for two years on the free medical plan offered by work, through which I paid nothing per month and 20% of all expenses instead of some fee per month and a flat copay. Because I just went to the doctor regularly and didn't have any life-threatening issues, I didn't spend too much money those years paying medical bills. However, I kept wondering in the back of my head, was I really just lucky those past years and will this next year bring a wave of bad luck with medical issues that I couldn't afford because I didn't have a good insurance plan that covered more than just 80% of accrued costs? That "what if" nag in the back of my head plus the old geezers at work comparing the numbers (between my free plan and the plan that everyone else picked) of out-of-pocket expenses if I landed in the hospital for a few days made me decide to switch.

And now I'm sort of wondering if it was all worth it. Partially because I'm not even sure it saves me money in the short term (if I remain healthy), and partially because now that I switched plans, my prescription drug benefits have changed and any possible long term medications that I had coming through some mail order service need to be totally redone because apparently if I get a prescription of some drug from a doctor, it doesn't really mean that there's some main record of it in the sky that any provider of prescription drugs would just be able to use, I need to send each provider a separate prescription (and in this case, I have to go back to my doctor and request an entirely new prescription). Kind of lame if you ask me. Shouldn't I be able to choose where I get my drugs? Why am I forced into using some specific drug dealer just because it's made some deals with my new insurance company? Lame.

Sappiness is...

I can't stop watching the movie "Love Actually". I want to blame HBO for showing it all day, every day. I actually had never sat down with the intention of watching it, so I haven't seen the whole thing all the way through, but I always seem to catch it at the same time and just leave it there. It's not a great movie, but for some reason I can't stop watching it. I think I like sappy. Like when Emma Thompson opens her Christmas present and instead of the gold necklace she thinks her husband bought for her, it turns out to be some lame CD, at which point she realizes that her husband bought a gold necklace for some other woman. And she goes into the bedroom and listens to the CD and cries. And then she has to come out later and put on a fake happy demeanor in front of her kids. That scene in the bedroom when she's crying and that sappy Joanie Mitchell music is playing in the background is so sad. I think I actually like feeling sad, so watching that movie makes me happy.