The hidden agenda

I realized that I’ve been looking at this insurance issue all wrong – here I’ve been viewing BCBS as a bureaucratic heartless incompetent monolith with Oompa Loompas working in customer service, when the truth is more likely that the erstwhile Oompa Loompas are being incentivized to badger sick people to an early grave. I didn’t come to this realization on my own, oh no, but rather through an email from my friend George in Canada, who noted the following:

Geez, I wonder if these people at the insurance companies get special training on how to make their customers extra miserable. Maybe they get extra points and bonuses for certain patients with specific diseases.

Make a cancer patient cry: Gift card to Nordstrom and a week in Cancun.
Get $355 out of them for no reason at all: A free iPod
Show that there was an extra caregiver in the room while the patient was under anesthesia: Bingo, a signed letter of recommendation from the CEO of BCBS and a Starbucks gift card.

My faithful reader (s) are clearly more brilliant than I – if any of you ever want to be a guest Triathlon Goddess blogger for a day or two, just let me know. George, you get dibs. Oh, and by that I mean the traditional meaning of dibs, i.e. first chance, and not the Chicago meaning, i.e. put some random crappy piece of houseware out on the street to save your parking spot after a big snowstorm. Just wanted to clarify.

In another shocker today, I was reading the Sunday paper, and as usual, skimming the obits. Yes, I know that’s kind of weird, but I find myself morbidly curious about women who die at relatively young ages – young being less than 70. Pretty much without exception, unless it’s Gertrude dying at the ripe old age of 92 after working at the sewing factory her whole life and proving herself to be quite the spitfire, the younger ones all die of cancer. Usually breast cancer. This feeds my pessimism, but I also kind of like it because it gives me something else to get pissed off about, rather than the usual nonsensical outrageous bills, the ridiculous weather that will in all likelihood next visit upon us a plague of locusts, the new yuppie neighbors whose 6-foot “privacy” fence is shading my entire yard, the fact of the 21 Dobermans who wound up at Chicago Animal Control after being rescued from the asshats and their puppy mill operation, the price of Wheat Thins, etc. You know, the usual.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the obits. After I saw this one, I looked at the rest of them and noticed that 99% of them read “So-and-so, beloved wife of....”. Or beloved husband. Not a single “POS loser husband who couldn’t even be bothered to cut the grass so we wouldn’t look like the white trash neighbors on the block”. Imagine that. But I digress. The word that actually got my head spinning was this: spinster. SPINSTER!! This poor woman, Wanda Piernikowski or whatever her name was, actually had the stark word “spinster” after her name in her obit. I looked at the front page to see if I had accidentally picked up a copy from 1942, but no.

So just promise me this – if I somehow meet an untimely demise before some man is lucky enough to snag me as his wife, just please PLEASE make sure that word doesn’t make it into print. Describe me as the “crazy party girl” or “triathlon goddess extraordinaire” or “hockey vixen to end all vixens” – but none of this spinster bullshit. Even if I’m 92 and still single and working at the library when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. Deal??