In November, I had the distinct pleasure of staggering into the emergency room, half-blind from the worst pain I had ever experienced. The doctor took one look at me and knew what was wrong: a dental abscess. She examined me to make sure, but I didn’t need any tests or surgery. I walked out an hour later with a prescription for antibiotics, another for painkillers, and the phone number of a dentist’s office. My face was swollen and scary for another day or so, but all in all the ordeal ended quickly and happily.

And relatively cheaply, as it turns out. For my hour in the hospital, and my ten minutes spent with a doctor, I was charged a measly little $664, presumably because I hadn’t asked for any luxuries like tests or medicine. I didn’t learn that until January; apparently, the hospital likes to wait a couple months before sending the bill.

Nevertheless, the relatively small price tag made me happy. I’d dealt with this hospital once before, with a much more substantial sum of money involved, and although everything got taken care of, that resolution only came after six months of paperwork, phone calls, and general bullshit to which all uninsured people are subjected. This time, it would be easy. I could pay $664.

I just couldn’t pay it right that second. So I called the hospital and set up a payment plan: $55.33 a month for 12 months, with no interest if I paid on time. They were extremely gracious about it. I put my feet up and awaited my first bill.

Two days later, I got an angry call from a collection agency. I explained that I had just set up a payment plan, and they decided to give me the benefit of the doubt, but threatened to call back if it didn’t show up in their records. They didn’t call back.

And my first bill didn’t come. I made sure to check the mail several times a day, but no bill. Perhaps the billing cycle started later than I thought it did? Perhaps it was one of those ridiculous “no payments for three months” situations, because they went to some seminar that told them treating health care like a used car made patients happy? After the second month without a bill arriving, I decided to call them. They scolded me — quite angrily — for calling the wrong number, and directed me to the billing department. The billing department wouldn’t let me do anything without entering my 13-digit account number, which could be found on my bill. I did not have a bill. The automated answering service was not interested.

Last week, I finally received my first bill — for the first three months of payments. I also received a call from my bank, telling me there was some kind of problem with the magnetic strip on my card, so they’d be sending me a new one which I would have to call and activate, and could I please try to avoid using either card until that happened? Fine. I’d pay the bill after I got the new card.

This morning, I got a very stern call from a collection agency. I owed them the full balance of $664. “This seems sudden,” I said, “considering I just got the bill last week.” I was informed that, no, I had owed them money since November. I extracted myself from the situation as delicately as possible (which is to say, not delicately at all), and called the hospital again, this time armed with my 13-digit account number.

The hospital was just as friendly as the collection agency. I was once again scolded, this time for an even more outrageous crime: I had failed to take my original balance, divide it by 12, and send a check for the resulting amount to the hospital despite having never actually received a bill. I was not simply expected to pay my bills, but to write them and send them to myself as well. They assured me they had sent the first two bills, and if I didn’t get them, that wasn’t anyone’s fault — technically true, but dickish.

Frankly, I’m not sure they did send them. In my life, I have seen a lot of bills with several months’ worth of charges on them, and none of them have looked like this. Nothing was itemized. There was no menacingly bolded PAST DUE BALANCE printed above my total balance. There was a single, tidy charge for $165.99 — three months’ payments, conveniently added together — listed by itself.

Luckily, a solution presented itself: I put the whole goddamn $664 balance on my credit card, and will make monthly payments there instead. I could have done that in the first place, but it seemed like a fucking terrible idea at the time, what with the interest, and the threat of insurmountable debt, and the generally evil practices of banks. But now that I’ve seen how the hospital does business, an unethical interest rate seems a small price to pay in exchange for a bill that arrives every month, an operator that is happy to take my call and my money, and the knowledge that my billing cycle lasts a whole month, just like clockwork, and that collection agents won’t threaten me until I’ve done something to deserve it.

Thank you, hospital. You taught me to trust the banks again.

It’s been pointed out on occasion that when things are tough in the United States, church attendance tends to increase. This is mostly because, when people are desperate, they’re more susceptible to believing in any sort of ridiculous hogwash that offers a glimmer of hope. Sure enough, reports have been coming out all month, during this (buzzword alert) global economic recession, that churches, particularly those of evangelical Christians, are seeing a swelling in their ranks.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in Japan, but in their case, rather than begging for mercy, they’re looking for someone to blame. That someone is Bimbogami, the Shinto God of Poverty. Shinto practitioners interested in driving Bimbogami away flock to a special temple, where they can hit a statue of the god with a very large stick.

I’ll say this for polytheism: it does wonders for the division of labor. When a supernatural system has hundreds of deities, each in charge of only a small sector of life, one can choose their own priorities for worship at any given moment, and have some sense that they’re at least talking to the correct department. In contrast, when one believes in a monotheistic system, there is only ever one god to pray to, and that makes just about any prayer seem petty and selfish. If you don’t believe me, just look at the following two phrases, and think about which one seems stupider:

#1. “Hey God of Poverty, fuck off!”

#2. “Hey God In Charge of Everything, help me re-finance my mortgage!”

Doesn’t seem so silly now, does it Westerners? Now if only the Japanese could combine their love of polytheism with their love of robots, we’d really be onto something. Coming soon to a temple near you! Interactive Artificially Intelligent Robotic Idols! You could collect them. Like Pokemon, but with gods.

While watching The Situation Room after work — something I do whenever I’m feeling particularly masochistic, which is surprisingly often — a promo for a new interactive website feature caught my attention.

The new feature is a big United States drawn in shades of pink, which maps out the latest data on unemployment rates. CNN calls it their “Economy Tracker,” which is a name so boring that it’s a bit like taking a gargantuan harshly-lit tomb of bulk consumption and despair and calling it “Sam’s Club.” I, therefore, have decided to give their map the much more descriptive name, “CNN’s Atlas O’ Sadness.”

Click on the “Unemployment” tab, for example, and learn fun facts like Mississippi’s unemployment rate of 8.0%, or Michigan’s even worse rate of 10.6%. Check the “Voices” radio button and you’ll learn that Jon is living off his savings, Michael’s plant closed down, and that Patrick just wants to know when it’ll be OK to cry in front of other men. Head over to the “Jobs by Industry” tab, and you’ll learn that Arizona’s in the shitter, but South Dakota’s doing surprisingly well finding jobs in whatever the hell it is they do in South Dakota.

And don’t forget to finish your learning expedition with a trip to the “Foreclosures” tab, and meet Daniel Sampson, his lovely wife and two adorable children, who won’t have a home to cry in much longer.

Yes, CNN’s Atlas O’ Sadness is a grand buffet of crushed dreams and honey-glazed hardships. Read it with the whole family, right before you sell little Billy to the Shriners. Enjoy!

Around the time I was writing yesterday’s post about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s rejection of 90-odd-million dollars of stimulus money, the Governor of Montana had the same idea I did.

Governor Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, said of Jindal:

Simply what I have said is that if you don’t like these federal dollars, what about the other 95% of the federal dollars you’ve already received? If you reject 98 million dollars for unemployment, why did you receive the 10 billion dollars for all the rest of the programs that came from the federal government?

And that’s not the only conflict! Governor Mark Sanford (R, S.C.) has followed Jindal’s lead and refused a portion of his state aid money. For this, he has come under fire from fellow Republican governor Arnold Fucking Schwarzenegger:

Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money. And I want to say to him: ‘I’ll take it.’ I’m more than happy to take his money or any other governor in this country that doesn’t want to take this money, I take it, because we in California need it.

Way to go, Sanford. You’ve got a cyborg on your ass. Happy now? Or would you prefer it if he got on a motorcycle and chased you around in-character? Because I’m sure it can be arranged.

So anyway, what do we think? Is Schwarzenegger a lone, unlikely voice of reason, or is this just the beginning of a Golden Age of GOP Infighting? Either way, you can’t honestly say you saw this coming a few years ago.

The Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. The Bailout, is moving forward, and people are cautious but hopeful. It may not have been the exact plan Obama envisioned, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we had before. The money is going just about everywhere, including a whole host of provisions to help unemployed workers, including an extended Emergency Unemployment Compensation program. Americans who have been smacked around by the economy finally have a reason to feel slightly happier.

Except in Louisiana, where Governor Bobby Jindal has refused federal aid for the unemployed. Accepting the money for the updated programs would require a change to Louisiana state law, which Jindal is unwilling to make that change out of fear that it could eventually result in a tax increase. Meanwhile, around 25,000 people in Louisiana won’t be getting the benefits they could’ve had in any other state.

When I first heard about this story, I was sure I had Jindal’s motive all figured out: he rejected the money so he could take a stand against “socialism” or “big government” (or whatever Republican leaders think Obama’s nefarious scheme is), and then brag about it during a hypothetical run for the Presidency in 2012. “That sneaky bastard!” I said. “Screwing over 25,000 people to score a few points in a contest that hasn’t even started yet!” Turns out the truth is far dumber.

Jindal has been more than happy to take stimulus money for other things. He’s even been happy to take it for unemployment; if you already qualify for unemployment insurance in Louisiana, you’ll be getting bigger payments. All told, he’s only turning down about $90 million of the money his state was set to receive. His anti-bailout posturing is purely symbolic — he gets to pretend he was the bold rebel who snubbed Obama, but his state still gets most of its money.

Of course, symbolic or not, the gesture still has its consequences. Those 25,000 people are still unemployed, and probably none too happy about it. I guess Jindal thinks he can impress them by claiming he kept their taxes low. Which is true, as long as we’re talking about a crazy alternate universe where those people all start businesses and become wildly successful, and also the emergency programs never get phased out despite their apparent success in ending the emergency.

Or, in the words of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin:

Nagin went on to note that even without Jindal’s approval, state officials will likely go around him to secure federal aid. “[Representative James] Clyburn did something very smart. He said if the government does not want this money, the legislators can vote to accept the money. And I told the governor personally, any dollars he does not want, we will take them.”

And that’s the fiendish plot, in a nutshell. Bobby Jindal gets to claim he fought Washington on this issue, but still gets to take credit for his state’s economic recovery. In fact, I’m going to predict, right now, that this very issue is going to come up in the next round of Republican Presidential primaries.

I’m also going to predict that I will become depressed later tonight, because I’m talking about the 2012 primaries in February of 2009, which is too goddamn early.

I’ve become largely desensitized by all the recent news coverage of layoffs and job cuts across the country. Partly because the topic has come up virtually every day for over a year now, and partly because, as I’ve spent the last eight months working as a glorified janitor just to pay my third of the rent, my feeling is that your average troubled corporate executive can sell one of his houses, pick up a mop, or shut the hell up. Nevertheless, there are special cases in this tiresome recession which still possess the ability to tug at the old sympathy strings. Sure, maybe you don’t care about bank managers or autoworkers, but what about porcupines?

In case you’re confused at this point, let me just confirm that, yes, I did just show you a video of the Director of the Bronx Zoo firing a porcupine. This video was made by the Wildlife Conservation Society in response to budget cuts in New York State (with a specific jab at Governor Paterson thrown in) which are scheduled to drastically reduce funding for all 76 of New York’s zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens. This is a problem because zoos in New York rely heavily on government funding, and New York’s budget is in the same toilet that every other state’s is.

Now, unlike human workers, “fired” animals aren’t literally going to be tossed out onto the street or put on Welfare. CNN’s Christine Romans (who is the most adorable financial advisor I’ve ever seen, by the way) explained the Bronx Zoo’s emergency strategy for gradual animal layoffs:

“Zoo officials say some collections with ’short life cycles’ will not be replaced when they die, and other animals could be sent to other zoos or wildlife sanctuaries.”

I’ve actually seen this strategy in offices, too. Some long-time employee retires, they throw him a party, and then his desk sits empty for months as his position goes unfilled and the people who used to work below him end up doing double the work without a pay raise. While the remaining animals won’t have to increase their Excel spreadsheet output, they will have to be twice as cute to maintain the current level of zoo patronage.

Short of lobbying for changes in the state budget or begging for donations, the only way I see for the Bronx Zoo to keep its full complement of animals is to somehow make the zoo more independently profitable. Not sure how, though. Perhaps they could rent their elephants out for experimental mammoth cloning projects. With, obviously, a clause in the contract that if they actually manage to birth a baby mammoth, the zoo gets to put it on display. That shit would bring in plenty of money.