Ready or not, Obamacare is finally here. Polls show that most Americans remain highly skeptical of the law’s benefits. According to a new CNN/ORC International survey released October 1, less than one in five Americans say their families will be better off under the new health care law.

Nevertheless, the controversial law’s passionate defenders insist it represents an historic event.

It extends health care coverage to between 10 and 35 million Americans, depending upon how many will actually choose to sign up, and represents the single biggest change in health care financing since the advent of Medicare in the mid-1960s.

More controversial is the claim that Obamacare will reduce costs for most Americans.

Republicans insist that the costs of Obamacare will be enormous and that they will be borne by middle class families who can ill afford them, especially in the current economy.

Democrats, like the president himself, claim that most families will actually save money with Obamacare. Obama himself claimed that the new law would reduce premium costs for the average family by $2,500 a year.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) insists that Republicans are “desperate” to stop the law before it goes into effect so ordinary people can’t learn more about the law’s many benefits.

“That’s why Republicans want to stop Obamacare,” the Illinois liberal said. “They don’t want these exchanges to be announced. They don’t want people to see these options. They know what’s going to happen.”

Well, like many Americans, I decided to run the numbers for our family.

As a self-employed writer, I’ve bought my family’s health insurance for the past 25 years. We’ve been with Blue Cross ever since my wife and I were married. At first, we had fairly low deductibles… but as premium costs escalated over the past 10 years, we, like most business folk, have gradually raised our deductibles and paid more of our health costs out of pocket. I remember paying about $5,000 for every birth, for example.

Our current Blue Cross plan currently costs us $650 a month or $7,800 a year with a $5,000 per person deductible with a maximum out-of-pocket family limit of $15,000. This is the type of plan that the Democrats ridicule as little more than “catastrophe insurance” and “not really health insurance at all.”

And I must admit, when compared to the taxpayer-provided Cadillac plans government workers and teachers get, I suppose that characterization is fair.

The chief advantage of our current insurance, for us, is that it limits the outrageous fees that hospitals and doctors can charge.

For example, a typical visit to a hospital emergency room two years ago – when one of my sons had severe stomach pains and we suspected appendicitis – was billed at around $10,000. Blue Cross disallowed 90% of that as absurd over-billing and we ended up paying $1,000 out of pocket – still a lot for a 3-hour visit, but a lot less than we would have paid.

Nevertheless, we pay enough in out-of-pocket fees each year that I was willing to give Obamacare the benefit of the doubt.

I spend a lot of time in British Columbia and look longingly at BC Medical Services Plan (MSP)’s monthly premium of $128 per family of three or more — with all primary care (excluding dental) covered. My eldest son’s new British wife extols the virtues of the National Health Service (NHS) which will pay 100% of the costs associated with the delivery of their expected first child – albeit delivered by a China-trained midwife and without the benefit of the epidural American women say is a necessity.

So, using MSNBC’s nifty Obamacare calculator, I decided to take a hard look at the numbers. (You can use the calculator yourself by clicking here.)

We are a solidly middle class family – yet, with so many children, we qualify for a substantial tax credit.

Under Obamacare’s Silver Plan (comparable to our current Blue Cross plan) our annual premiums would cost $18,190 – or $1,515 a month.

That’s $865 more than we’re currently paying – an increase of 133%.

With a projected tax credit of $4,890, however, that would lower our annual premiums to $13,300 ($1,108 per month). That’s still $458 more per month (or 70% more) than we currently pay—and we have to, in effect, loan the government money because we actually have to pay the $1,515 per month and only get a tax credit at the end of the year.

But that’s not all.

All this might be worth it if the Obamacare plan provided better benefits or a lower deductible – but it doesn’t!

The law’s defenders ridicule our current plan as mere “catastrophe insurance” because of the high deductibles and out of pocket costs, but the Obamacare plan for our family has an annual cap on out of pocket expenses of $12,700 – or just a little less than the Blue Cross limit of $15,000.

In other words: Obamacare is just as much “catastrophe insurance” as most high-deductible private plans.

As a result, I calculated the costs of three scenarios: (1) we spend 100% of our out-of-pocket limits; (2) we spend 50% of our annual out of pocket limits; and(3) we spend 0% of our annual out-of-pocket limits (basically, never visit a doctor all year).

Under all three scenarios, Obamacare represents a real increase of $3,200 to $5,500 a year for our family.

Finally, the worst aspect of the new law is that, while you pay substantially more for the same coverage you can get privately, your choice of doctors and providers is more limited under Obamacare. Our Blue Cross PPO plan covers pretty much every doctor and clinic in our area. Obamacare is more like a HMO in that limits the doctors and hospitals to which you have access – in some areas, severely so. (See the Heritage Foundation’s analysis here.)

My conclusion: Obamacare doesn’t make any financial sense whatsoever for our family…and is a lousy deal. We will stick with our Blue Cross plan, which I don’t particularly like, because government provided health care costs more and offers less choice, not more.

By the way, on October 1, the U.S. Senate voted to provide massive subsidies to itself and its staff – so the politicians who voted for Obamacare would not themselves have to pay any of the new costs associated with it.

One final note: As a self-employed business person, I’m pragmatic. I think the U.S. is rich enough that it actually could provide a generous, single-payer health care system that eliminates the over-priced and wasteful system we have now. Medicare really is proof of that.

To fund such a system, I propose we eliminate 30% of the do-nothing government jobs we currently pay for – along with the six-figure, retire-at-50 pensions we also pay for – and use that money to fund the single-payer healthcare system the Democrats want so badly.

Let’s make a deal: In exchange for a single payer system, Democrats will agree to eliminate 30% of all government worker jobs (the assistant sub-deputy undersecretary for the Department of Public Money Wasting) along with their fat pensions – to shrink the government back to what it was in, say, 1990.

That would be a deal the country would support, could afford, and which might actually fix the long-term health care crisis.

The post Crunching the Obamacare Numbers: A Lot More Money for A Lot Less Care first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

My knees are a bloody mess. It’s been a while since I did suwari-waza, the strange practice in traditional Aikido dojos of doing techniques, samurai-style, on your knees. Last week, the sensei spent almost the entire class doing suwari-waza and, when I stood up, the skin on my knees was entirely rubbed off. Ouch!

And yet here it is, the following week, and I am showing up again.

I took up Aikido ten years ago, at the ripe old age of forty, and have been struggling to learn it ever since. The kids wanted to take a martial art and I thought judo might be nice. Something difficult, real fighting, like wrestling.  I looked around for a judo dojo but couldn’t find any near our home. But I did find some Aikido dojos that taught kids and that intrigued me. At the time, Steven Seagal wasn’t yet an incarnate lama, just a Hollywood action star, and I was intrigued by those flashy moves he did. It seemed elegant and different, not like the typical side kicks you saw at the local tae kwon do school.

So, my three sons and I started Aikido together. Week after week, year after year, we drove 30 minutes each way for Aikido classes two or three times a week. One by one, though, the kids lost interest and quit… but I was hooked.

My first teacher was a former ambulance driver who trained at the New York Aikikai and was the apprentice (uchi deschi) of Seiichi Sugano Shihan.  He teaches the traditional “Aikikai” style of Aikido that is taught at Hombu Dojo in Japan and he is affiliated with the U.S. Aikido Federation (East), run by Yoshimitsu Yamada Shihan.

I also trained for a time with Huruo Matsuoka, Steven Seagal’s oldest student and uke, whom you see getting slammed to the mat (hard!) in Seagal’s first movies and in Seagal’s Aikido documentary, The Path Beyond Thought. Matsuoka Sensei is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, a truly gentle and wise man, a devotee of macrobiotics, and he teaches Seagal’s somewhat unusual style of Aikido that is called “tenshin” Aikido. Around the time Seagal discovered that he is an incarnate Tibetan lama or tulku, Matsuoka had some falling out with the pony-tailed Hollywood star, returned to Japan and studied with Abe Sensei, the founder of Aikido (O Sensei’s) calligraphy teacher. Matsuoka came back to America in the early 2000s and started some new dojos where some of my old sensei’s students and my friends came to study. Matsuoka’s Aikido is very advanced and technical – too advanced for someone like me. But I learned a lot from him and heartily recommend his dojo to anyone who lives close enough to study with him.

I now study with students of the legendary Kazuo Chiba Shihan, spread out in locations all over the world. Chiba Sensei is a fairly scary figure in Aikido circles, someone who doesn’t tolerate fools lightly and who is more than willing to make believers out of skeptics. From what I can tell, Chiba’s approach to Aikido is practical and very direct – “we like to make sure a certain amount of pain is involved,” my current teacher says with a smile. What Chiba Sensei’s students are trying to teach me is how to take someone’s balance first before you try any technique — a basic concept in judo (called kuzushi) but which many Aikido schools neglect.  Chiba-affiliated dojos (part of the Birankai federation) in British Columbia include Still Waters Aikikai in Sidney and Mountain Coast Aikikai in Richmond.

So, I’ve been at it for ten years now… and have only scratched the surface. I have to say, I’m really lousy at Aikido. I’m stiff as a board… clumsy… my knees hurt… my ukemi (falling) sucks… and I am still struggling with moves that any beginner knows how to do. But I feel at this point I can at least describe why Aikido captivates so many of its adherents and yet, to outsiders, seems so strange. My wife considers it a bizarre “cult,” akin to people who are in telepathic contact with aliens.

First, Aikido, at least in the mainstream Aikikai style, is the best workout you could ever have. It manages to combine a lot of stretching with tumbling and falling… a serious cardiovascular workout… and the kind of muscular training you’d get with, say, wrestling…. and a little self-defense. After an hour of Aikido, my gi is soaking wet, every muscle in my body hurts and I feel like I’ve been doing yoga for a week. I’ve been tossed around like a sack of potatoes by experts and have had my wrists and shoulder joints twisted out of their sockets. It’s great!

Second, Aikido teaches you weird stuff you don’t learn in a typical rock-‘em, sock-‘em kicking and punching martial art. Whether you’ll ever use this weird, esoteric stuff is another question entirely – but you definitely feel like you’re learning strange Shaolin voodoo, not just how to kick someone in the balls.  I studied Shito-Ryu Karate as a kid with a wonderful hippie carpenter and nidan and love traditional Japanese karate… but Aikido is from an entirely different planet.

The hard part for me is learning how not to use my muscles.  The tendency of every beginner is to try to muscle through the techniques, forcing someone to the mat, for example, or really cranking on a wrist lock.  But the people who really know Aikido use very little muscular force.  They use the weight of their whole bodies… and the ability to move their opponent off balance… so the techniques seem almost effortless.  That is why Aikido is great for women because women are generally not as strong as men and so must learn how to do the techniques correctly.  It’s also why Aikido is a great martial art for people as they get older.  It’s one of the few where technique really can overcome brawn… providing, of course, you actually learn how to do it right.  And that’s the trick!

The post My First Decade of Aikido first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

A sick, twisted member of my Aikido dojo sent me this video: Nuns practicing karate and, at the end, a little judo and Aikido. (One of the nuns does a pretty good sumi-otoshi there, albeit with a judo flair.) Some people really do have too much time on their hands.

The post Video: Contemplative Nuns Doing Aikido first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

To say that the Bible is patriarchal is like saying that Tai Chi is Chinese: It is such a bewildering statement of the obvious that only an academic or reporter would think it a profound revelation.

Yet in the 1970s and ‘80s, literally millions of feminists opened the Bible (some for the first time, some for the millionth time) and were shocked — shocked! –– at what they found.

Not only was the Divinity addressed as “He” – as He had been, both in the original scriptural languages and in vernacular translations, for 2,000 years — but the entire book was riddled with masculine prerogatives and male-oriented language.

The people of Israel are routinely referred to as bnei Israel, literally the “sons of Israel.”

God creates the male human being (the adam) first.

Under the Mosaic Law, men can divorce women at will… but women cannot divorce men.

All of the Twelve Apostles are men. Jesus is a man. St. Paul, the first Christian theologian, is a man.

And on and on it goes: male chauvinism everywhere you turn.

In an era when radical feminists were trying on such linguistic novelties as referring to “seminars” as “ovulars,” the frank “patriarchy” of the Bible drove many feminists to distraction.

That is the only way to understand the phenomenon of Mary Daly, the ex-Catholic nun turned lesbian isolationist who banned all men from her classes at the Jesuit-run Boston College and, in such classics of feminist rage as Gyn/Ecology, Pure Lust and Outercourse, proclaimed that “a woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.”

Of course, many feminists were content to remain within the broad confines of Christianity and Judaism and sought moderate corrections to what they saw as the sexism inherent in western religion — such as the creation of politically-correct “inclusive language” Bibles and so on.

Others, however, were driven to reject western religion altogether as irredeemably sexist — and sought, like Daly, to “discover” (actually create) a new religion known as “feminist spirituality.”

“The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Yahveh,” explained Naomi Goldenberg in her entertaining book, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions “The psychology of the Jewish and Christian religions depends on the masculine image that these religions have of their God.  Feminists change the major psychological impact of Judaism and Christianity when they recognize women as religious leaders and as images of divinity.”

Drawing upon the writings of neo-pagan writers such as “Starhawk” (née Miriam Simos), author of the fascinating chronicle The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, these new feminist theologians asserted that prehistoric peoples all worshipped variations on the Great Mother Goddess – sometimes in conjunction with the “horned god” who died and was resurrected each year.

For tens of thousands of years, they said, primitive societies were matriarchal, ecologically in balance, egalitarian, peaceful, civilized, in touch with their own sexuality and bodies. (Priestesses presided “skyclad” or naked, “embodying the fertility of the Goddess,” explained Starhawk – a far cry from the staid, less tantalizing services found in your average Methodist congregation or Reform synagogue.)

But into this matriarchal utopia disaster struck: Indo-European invaders swept across the European continent, their veins surging with testosterone, bringing with them weapons of killing, patriarchy and (male) hunter gods.

When Christianity arrived on the scene, full of the myriad repressions and patriarchal traditions of Judaism, the Old Religion of the Great Goddess was forced to go underground – in the form of the various goddess-worship Gnostic sects that the early church persecuted and which figured so prominently in The Da Vinci Code.

But the “Old Religion” lived on, secretly practiced by old women (crones) and “witches,” until the “Burning Times” arrived in the Middle Ages – when, according to Starhawk and Mary Daly, some 9 million witches were burned at the stake.

An entire generation of “gender feminists” — now in their 60s and ‘70s — accepted this new mythology hook, line and sinker.

It is still routinely cited by prominent feminist theologians, writers and theoreticians within the Christian churches and, increasingly, within liberal branches of Judaism as well.

There is only one problem with it: It has about as much basis in history as the volcano-dwelling Thetans of Scientology.

Virtually everything taught about the Great Goddess in “feminist spirituality” and Women’s Studies classes – from Berkeley to Boston — is a hoax.

In fact, wicca in general and feminist spirituality in particular were largely the creations of one man…

The post Bible, Patriarchy & Wicca first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

According to rabbinic tradition, the first commandment God gives Adam and Eve in the Garden is to have sex: Pru vehravu, “be fruitful and multiply.”

It’s little wonder, then, that Christian theology has pondered for centuries the place that human sexuality and bodily existence have in God’s plan for the universe.

On the one hand, anyone familiar with the Jewish testament knows that sexual attraction (and sexual sin) permeate virtually every book. What’s more, two centuries of crusading secularism has exaggerated Christian pruddery in the early centuries of Christianity and in the Middle Ages.

On the other hand, it’s also true that the monastic movement that led to so many cultural and educational achievements in the West did tend to emphasize the negative aspects of human sexuality and bodily existence — if only because vowed celibate monks and nuns inevitably saw sexual feelings as temptations to be avoided at all costs.

Into this tangled history stepped the late pope John Paul II.

Raised by his widowed father in Poland during the nightmare of World War II, Karol Wotylwa was a working man, athlete and actor before he became a Catholic priest and a philosopher.

His experience with young married couples during his early years as a pastor — combined with his in-depth study of early 20th century phenomenologists — allowed the young priest to see the sexual embrace and life in the body in an entirely new way: as quite literally a way to God.

When he was elected pope, John Paul delivered a remarkable series of 129 lectures during his Wednesday audiences on what has become known as the Theology of the Body (TOTB) — a very traditional, very radical teaching on human embodiment and sexual attraction that papal biographer George Weigel has described as “a kind of theological time bomb” that will have dramatic consequences …perhaps in the twenty-first century” (Witness to Hope, 343).

John Paul’s argument, in essence, is that both secular libertines and Christian pruddery have missed the point. Human beings are radically, essentially physical. Human beings are not “ghosts in a machine,” as Descartes described it.

In a dramatic way, the entire Christian understanding of the incarnation means that Christians are and must be “pro-sex” and must celebrate the body generally. I would even say that Christians take the body at least as seriously as the devotees of most religions, including even Hinduism. The doctrine of the bodily resurrection reflects the Christian belief that we are our bodies — that if we are to survive death then it must be a physical survival. A disembodied spirit would not be a human being.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna the exact opposite of the Christian view of our essentially bodily natures:

As a man discards his threadbare robes and puts on new, so the Spirit throws off its worn-out bodies and puts on new ones… The Spirit in man is imperishable.

While Christianity agrees with the Gita (and with yoga!) that there is an imperishable, immortal essence of the human being, which, for lack of a better word, the west has traditionally called the “soul,” it does not agree that the physical body is merely incidental to that essence — something that can be “thrown off” for a new one.

Rather, in the Christian view, we are embodied spirits or spiritual bodies — and thus it is our bodies themselves that are (or will be) immortal. Thus, the Christian hope is even more absurdly optimistic than people give us credit for: We actually believe that we will live forever… in glorified “resurrection” bodies, not as disembodied spirits. I’ve never been the least scandalized by Taoists who claim that yoga can lead to physical immortality of a sort or at least extreme longevity: it seems perfectly plausible to me given the Christian revelation.

That is why St. Paul tells the (male) Corinthians that they should take good care of their bodies and not defile themselves with prostitutes — and why Christian practitioners of yoga celebrate the body and do what they can to maintain good health. That is also why Pope John Paul II, in his teachings on the Theology of the Body, emphasized how incarnate human beings come to God in and through their bodies — and that sex, far from being inherently sinful, is actually a way to God.

In John Paul’s teaching, sex (for non-celibate “householders”) is a sacrament (a “sign”) of divine presence because it is the preeminent example of that spiritual intimacy that is the birthright of all human beings.

The post Sex and John Paul II’s Theology of the Body first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

In the early evening of the Fourth of July, my wife was cutting cilantro for a salad we were bringing to a friend’s party. Distracted by yelling children, she accidentally cut her left index finger with the knife. Yikes!

It was a fairly deep cut across a nail, bleeding profusely, and we all agreed she should have it checked out.

Naturally, it being after 5:00 p.m., our regular family doctor’s office was closed tighter than a drum.

We decided that, rather than go to the Emergency Room – where it would cost us an arm and a leg – we would try to go to the “Urgent Care” clinic instead. As a result, we dropped out kids off at the party and drove the five miles to the “Urgent Care” clinic. But it, too, was closed tight with an office sign that proclaimed their office hours from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

At this point, we had no choice: So we drove over to our local community hospital emergency room… where, I must say, we received wonderful care.

First, the admitting staff did their efficient admission procedure on us. Then, a triage nurse of some kind examined my wife’s wound and agreed that, yes, it would be a good idea to have a doctor check it out.

Another nurse took us back into a cubicle where she was propped up on a hospital bed. Her blood pressure and temperature were taken… and some routine medical history questions were asked by a third nurse.

We sat there for about 45 minutes until a young lady doctor strolled in. She was a marvelous doctor, warm, personable, seemingly very competent. She and my wife chatted about their gardens, growing tomatoes and what-not. The doctor decreed that the cut didn’t need and couldn’t accommodate a stitch, with the nail and all. As a result, she briefly cleaned the wound with hydrogen peroxide and then applied some “dermabond,” a SuperGlue-like substance to seal the wound. She also recommended that my wife get a tetanus booster. Yet another nurse came in to wrap the cut finger in a bandage.

We were in the hospital for nearly two hours but the actual treatment took literally five minutes (clean the wound, applying “Dermabond”).

When it was all done, a “billing agent” appeared and demanded further identification for billing (social security number, name of employer, etc.)… which we provided.

Two weeks later, the bill arrived: The hospital billed Anthem Blue Cross $1,659.74. Blue Cross disallowed $906.75 of that, leaving us to pay (because of our high deductible) $753. That works out to about $150 per minute of actual treatment.

And that’s not counting the doctor. She’s an independent contractor and her costs are extra. Her bill was for $342 — $226 for “surgery” and $116 for “emergency service.” Anthem Blue Cross said we had to pay $235.92 and they disallowed $106.08.

Thus, the total cost for fixing a cut finger was $988.92.

This is why medicine is bankrupting America. This was just the cost of fixing a cut finger. Imagine the bloat and built-in waste of, say, a heart bypass operation.

We didn’t need six different nurses… a hospital bed… an admissions staff… a complete medical history… a billing agent… and all the other rigmarole of an emergency room to treat my wife’s cut finger. Any decently trained nurse could have done exactly what the doctor did.

The padding was obvious:  The hospital charged us $374 from “central supply” (that must have been the band-aid they put on my wife’s finger), $117 for “pharmacy injectables” (okay, I guess that sounds reasonable for a tetanus shot) and $1,168 for the emergency room itself.

Yet, doctors now routinely refer patients to emergency rooms because they no longer want to be bothered with such nuisances as cut fingers, especially on weekends. They are clueless about what the costs of such visits actually are. The very poor, naturally, don’t pay anything when they go… they are covered by Medicaid. But it is people like us, who have health insurance, who pay the $150 a minute for routine care.

What is needed is not so much Obama’s socialized medicine – turning the entire country into a gigantic HMO with six-month waiting lists, crowded hospitals and over-worked doctors and nurses – but simply intermediate facilities between a doctor’s office and a critical care emergency room.

Such clinics could provide levels of care from an ordinary nurse to a nurse practitioner to, in worst case situations, a full-fledged M.D. It would save ordinary people a ton of money… and might help solve the health care crisis.

The post The Real Reason Why Health Care is So Expensive first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.