Our Cobra health coverage got messed up last week. We got billed $635 for my partner's 15-minute doctor's visit: $300 for the gynocologist and $315 for the lab tests. Thank god for Congress: they just rejected a provision in the health legislation that forced insurance companies to cover praying. That is to pay for someone to come to your bedside or home to pray for you.
The madness is this: this provision passed the Senate and House committees dealing with health care reform. They packaged it as being opposed to discrimination against religion in healthcare! Orrin Hatch R-Utah was backing it, as was the former Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry and the late Edward Kennedy.
When laughing about this madness with some workers yesterday, I mentioned that the Christian Scientists group was behind this 'praying as a medicine' thing. Someone chipped in, "Oh its the Tom Cruise people!" Someone else clarified that that was the Scientologists. "Right, that's the Christian Scientist crowd, they don't allow medicine, right?" The confusion ended when someone summed it up, "religion and science are separate things. How can it be a religion and science?"
Well, this much wisdom was amiss with the Democrat and Republican Senators that passed 'praying as a medical cost.'
Having just come off 10-months unemployment, I guess I missed out on the #1 rising employment opportunity: to sit alongside someone dying, and pray for them: for $100-an-hour. (don't worry your health insurance may cover it!)
Well my partner's lab tests came out good and we didn't need to "pay for pray" for that.
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