Related to the previous post, on Wilmington, Ohio and DHL—a thread in response to a Columbus Dispatch story about Wilmington called Hope, Gardens nourish town DHL left, posted on a local Ohio bulletin board:

JOSEPH: People have to reconsider how they live and regions have to reconsider how to make themselves economically viable in a recession. Things will change for the better, but we have to bring new ideas to the table. That’s exactly what these residents are doing.

FRANK: Come on now most everyone that worked for DHL grew up on a farm or had a garden when they were growing up. It’s a good ideal to bring green businesses into the area but we all need to do a lot of changing and I don’t think growing a few vegetables is going to help much. Lets all stop driving our big SUVs and DHL employees have a bunch of them. Because the were spoiled for such a long time…

GENERATION LAZY & DUMB: DHL employees were spoiled for a long time? Are you kidding? I worked there while I was in high school. The people got paid like peasants and drove whatever car they could afford. I don’t know where you’re getting that they all drove SUVs…

Also, for an interesting glimpse into DHL work culture, check out this DHL News and Gossip Jobs Forum. Here’s a post from Jobless in Phoenix:

I KNOW I was meeting expectations. I had excellent reviews every year….Even the few who are left are complaining now about the overload of work, and they’ve changed everyones hours…. There are layoffs all over the US. They were even trying to get us to work with the lights off last year to cut back on the electricity to save money…. which we did… I have lots of friends who are still there. They are also in fear of losing their jobs.

Reuters is running a story on Wilmington, Ohio, where the recession has hit especially hard.

Unemployment in this small U.S. town has quadrupled in the past 16 months, but worse is to come as thousands of unemployed workers run out of severance money and benefits.

“Things are going to get tighter around here toward the end of the year,” said David Raizk, mayor of this town of 12,000 in southwestern Ohio. “As benefits run out we’re going to see a greater and greater dependence on the aid that’s available…”

…the local unemployment rate jumped over 14 percent in the wake of DHL’s announcement last November that it would leave the U.S. domestic market altogether with the loss of 9,500 jobs, many of them in Wilmington…

“When DHL came here we felt like we had the world by the horns,” said Mark Daley, 50, a pilot furloughed in July by ABX Air, which handles some international flights for DHL. “We had a new owner with deep pockets who knew what they were doing.”

Now, Daley may lose his home.

These days, every burg in America’s got its own Flickr pool, a collection of photos uploaded by residents. That allows for instant visual access to people and places that otherwise might have remained folded into the abstraction of small-town misery. Click here for images of Wilmington.

And if you missed the “60 Minutes” piece on Wilmington last January, here it is.

The Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review, written by a former health industry executive, acknowledges that the bill will be very good for the health care industry:

It is becoming more and more clear to me that the White House health care strategy this fall is based upon a belief they have been very successful in neutralizing the health care special interests and have therefore prepared the way to a legislative victory…

Health care reform will be very good for the health care business. Insurance companies would benefit from all of the new premiums and even some of the Medicaid money in states where they provide those benefits. Health care providers would receive most of this money as it was passed through by private insurance and Medicaid to pay the providers.

In turn, health care providers and insurers would give up $409 billion in Medicare and Medicaid savings. Insurance companies, drug companies, labs, and device makers would pay $88 billion in new taxes. Insurers would pay excise taxes on high cost health plans which would raise another $215 billion. Both the excise tax and stakeholder taxes would almost certainly be passed on to the customer as new premium or sales taxes….

The President and Democratic leaders have done a masterful job of managing special interest politics.

But they may have overlooked, or taken for granted, the most important special interest of all—the voter/patient.

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Lots of reaction, to say the least, to the long-awaited Baucus bill.  Some reactions from the newspaper-reading class:

NY Times reader comments

Today President Obama called health care reform the “defining struggle of this generation.” Why? Amid all the complexity and red herrings of the seemingly never-ending debate over the legislation currently wending its way through Congress, it may help to delve into the belly of the beast via first-hand accounts of those unlucky enough to meet up with the system at its worst. These extracts have been edited for spelling, grammar, and length. A list of sites from which they were taken can be found at the end of the text. Part I and Part II of this series here.

My dad was having shortness of breath and a low blood pressure and was being transferred to the ER of my managed care organization.

So a man is admitted to the hospital for congestive heart failure and they discharge him after 36 hours?

Is a life not worth more than the cost of 36 hours of hospitalization? Does the almighty dollar really trump adequate medical care? What is wrong with this country?

My mom found out that when they discharged him from the hospital they had noted on the forms “possible viral pneumonia.”

Congestive heart failure and possible pneumonia and they discharged him!

An upper-level employee of my managed-care organization explained to me why they will not help Lyme disease victims. The company views Lyme disease in the same context as AIDS, only Lyme disease is far more common and the risk exposure far greater. AIDS has been and is a large cash drain for the company and they don’t want to repeat the experience. So their solution is to severely limit diagnoses.

One method used by ethically challenged HMO’s and health insurers to discourage extended treatment is to file anonymous complaints to state medical boards against doctors who “overdiagnose and overtreat” Lyme disease.

And one of the many reasons the company fails to diagnose some cancer early is that they have the chutzpah to change the generally medically accepted value for normal on test results so as NOT to find illness. They use a lower hemoglobin for their definition of anemia than is accepted by every other source I have found, for example.  By expanding the definition of “normal,” they reduce the amount of illness (they have to pay for).

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There may be no good way to fire somebody, but bad ways abound. Remember Alec Baldwin’s Glengarry Glen Ross speech, for instance?

“The good news is you’re fired. The bad news is you’ve got – all of you’ve got – just one week to re-gain your jobs…Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. Because we’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired. You get the picture?”

The end-of-the-line tales recounted in How I Got Laid Off don’t reach that level of raw capitalistic dehumanization, perhaps, but they’re no odes to empathy either. The site describes its mission as “capturing and chronicling the stories of the people who have recently been ‘let go,’ including the often despicable methods in which they were dispatched.”

With the number of unemployed pushing 15 million, there’s certainly no shortage of material to choose from.

Examples:

Outstanding review—you’re out of here

On the morning of my review…(my boss said) “I’m going to have to let you go.”…I was told I had until Friday to return my equipment and clean out my office. I cannot begin to describe the cold, detached way in which my removal was described. I was to report into the office on Friday, with my laptop, and any other company provided equipment, clean out my desk, sign my termination papers and leave immediately. It was as if I was speaking to a completely different person then the boss I had come to admire. What made things worse was when I was informed that, per company policy, management was unable to give me a letter of recommendation. I could not ask my present or any previous supervisors for any kind of letter detailing my work ethic or performance.

Several days passed, and I was called by HR because there had been an error in my termination papers. Apparently they had miscalculated my severance pay, and I would be receiving about $3000 less than I had expected. I was asked to resign the new termination papers and send them back in to the company. When I objected I was informed that my check would not be sent until the newly signed papers had been received by HR.

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Amid the posturing, politicking, and general confusion of the health care debate, it’s easy to lose sight of the situation on the ground and the reasons that reform made it to the top of the agenda in the first place. The growing number of uninsured is one major factor, and the sense of powerlessness among many who have been forced to negotiate and plead with their insurance companies is another. In a series of posts this week we present health care horror stories gleaned from consumer sites online. Keeping in mind that a license to complain is issued with every keyboard nowadays, the sheer breadth and scope of these Kafkaesque encounters, coupled with the frequent tone of weariness and desperation in their recounting, serve as a powerful indictment of the present system.These extracts have been edited for spelling, grammar, and length. A list of sites from which they were taken can be found at the end of the text. Part I in this series here.

On January 20, the local hospital called to say they had a kidney ready for my wife’s transplant, but we couldn’t have it done because the insurance hadn’t approved it. Now, the company tells us they will not approve a transplant in Tulsa; it has to be done at Baylor University in Texas. Baylor told my wife that she has to fill out a bunch of forms and wait again for a kidney. It’s going to be expensive for us to spend time in Texas. Meanwhile, my wife’s company is again up for sale. If they cut back on employment, move to a different region, cancel insurance or change insurance companies, she will again be unable to get the transplant. Please complain to your congressmen and other politicians. This kind of thing must stop.

My first run-in with managed care was when I went to the HMO emergency room for severe pain in my back right where the kidneys are. After a 4-hour wait they took a urine sample. Since that came up normal, they sent me away with instructions to make an appointment with my primary care physician (PCP).

I did that, figuring I could bear the pain for that long. Two weeks later I went to see the PCP, only to be told that I needed to reschedule. I saw her two weeks later; she ordered some blood tests and a urinalysis, and referred me to a urologist.

Four more weeks went by before I could see the urologist. He ordered another urinalysis – the one ordered by my PCP had been thrown out because a PCP is not authorized to order a urinalysis! Two more weeks of pain, and I went back, only to find that there were no clear results and I should have yet another test.

It took 6 more weeks to get that test scheduled. When I showed up, I was told that the machine that develops the X-ray films was not working, and I would have to reschedule. Four more weeks. The total elapsed time is now about 6 months. If this had been an unusual kidney infection I would have long since been dead. Apparently the HMO wished I was.

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The Huffington Post asked its readers who have started small businesses after losing their jobs to send in their stories. The site then picked 31 to represent in a slide show it calls “The Recession’s Accidental Entrepeneurs.”

Here is the entry voted the best of the lot by Huffington Post readers:

MovieWedge

MovieWedge was developed after a plane ride with my mom where I wanted to show her some movies I had saved on my iPhone to pass the time. After holding my phone for about 30 minutes I began to get tired. I tried stacking it up on magazines, soda cans, crumpled up paper, you name it! I swore once I came back home I’d buy something to alleviate this problem. I looked and looked and found nothing. Then the proverbial lightbulb went off in my head. I brainstormed, did lots of research and development, and after 10 or so prototypes came up with the solution I found to be the most elegant. The MovieWedge (www.moviewedge.com). I started selling it in March of 2009 and it’s been quite a success.

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Amid the posturing, politicking, and general confusion of the health care debate, it’s easy to lose sight of the situation on the ground and the reasons that reform made it to the top of the agenda in the first place. The growing number of uninsured is one major factor, and the sense of powerlessness among many who have been forced to negotiate and plead with their insurance companies is another. In a series of posts this week we present some health care horror stories gleaned from consumer sites online. Keeping in mind that a license to complain is issued with every keyboard nowadays, the sheer breadth and scope of these Kafkaesque encounters, coupled with the frequent tone of weariness and desperation, serve as a powerful indictment of the present system.

The extracts in these posts are edited for spelling and grammar. A list of sites from which they were taken can be found at the end of the text.

My 16 yr. old son was taken by helicopter to the nearest trauma center due to a motorcycle crash. My PPO will not pay the E.R. bill, stating it was an out of network hospital. I had no choice which hospital he was taken to–state law says in a life and limb situation he must be taken to the nearest trauma center. He had lacerated his pancreas–cost for 8 day stay is $78,900, only for room and board. Insurance company has a special circumstance clause they are not following….What to do. Denied appeal.

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Here’s what you need to know about Jay Field: He’s been a camp counselor, house painter, swimming pool technician, book shelver, cake jockey, would-be Internet mogul, and public radio journalist. But he lost that last job at the start of the recession and “finding a new gig, in or out of journalism, has been far harder than I would have ever imagined.” So now he’s a cab driver, a blogging cab driver. Recession Taxi includes musings on his new lifestyle, plus a bit of original reporting. An extract from a post called Eviction Man:

You can’t get away from recession stories. They’re everywhere you go.

I pulled up to this building a few minutes early and there was drama. Two patrol cars marked “Cook County Sheriff” were parked out front… Ten or fifteen minutes passed before the deputies calmly walked out of the building and got in their squad cars…As the officers drove off, a tall, older-looking gentleman with a neatly trimmed, white beard walked out, holding a vacuum.

“Eviction,” said Joseph Laubinger, a real estate agent from Grayslake, IL.

The bank had foreclosed.

But the owner, it turns out, had been dead for some time.

There aren’t too many things you can do in this world, after they return your ashes to the earth. But take heart. You can still be evicted!

“It’s hard,” said Laubinger, as he loaded his vacuum into the trunk of his Toyota Prius. “There are a lot of people who got a bad break. It’s people who lost jobs (and are) crushed with bills.”…(He) says he’s never been busier.

“I work approximately 16, 17, 18 hours a day.”

He says foreclosure evictions were a small part of his business between 1995 and 2002. Then, when the housing market heated up, he worked full-time on the retail side of things. But since 2006, it’s been evictions, evictions, evictions–often seven days a week.

Check it out.