Santa Clara County makes me happy

I have no desire to live in California. I like Ohio, with (among other things) its four distinct seasons, affordable homes, short commute times, and abundant supply of fresh water. (Not to mention that I'm a complete homebody.)

But right now, I'm envious of the folks in Santa Clara County, which has just banned toys in Happy Meals and the like. Their reason, they claim, is that they don't want to reward children for making poor food choices. To me, that's only the tip of the iceberg.

In my experience, the toys bribe children to choose those restaurants in the first place. If our schedule is such that a run through the drive-thru is inevitable, the girls lobby for one place over the other based on who has which toys. (And if we're just going out to eat somewhere, the girls do the same – they just get vetoed by Mommy and Daddy, who prefer something that more closely resembles "real" food.)

Folks argue that this is unwarranted government intrusion. Parents, they say, are free to not feed their children fast food. We can even ban our children from watching TV so they aren't bombarded with ads touting one fast-food toy or the other. I suspect these folks don't have kids. And if they do, and they've never caved when faced with whiny kids in the back of the van, with a couple hours of running errands and playing taxi behind them and a couple more to go, I, for one, would like to know the secret behind their iron will.

But, as I said, rewarding poor food choices is the tip of the iceberg, and bribery into poor restaurant choices is just the next layer down. Because the reason those restaurant choices are poor isn't just the fat, sodium and calories that the folks in Santa Clara worry about, it's the limited food choices: hamburger or cheeseburger or bits of breaded chicken.

They've become ingrained in our culture as "what kids eat." On my kids' school lunch menu, one of this trinity, or a hot dog, or cheese pizza on Fridays ('cause we're a Catholic school) is offered every day of the week as a backup choice. We didn't have backup choices when I went to school, but these days, there are kids who won't eat anything else. Heck, there are kids who won't eat a breaded chicken patty until you explain that it's just a giant chicken nugget. So, at least once a week, the main choice is also from this limited list. You can have a hamburger or a hot dog, chicken nuggets or a cheeseburger. So many kids are picky eaters to begin with; it's murder trying to get them to expand their food horizons when their peers have convinced them that these are the only things that "taste good."

Public pressure got fast-food places to offer fruit as an alternative to fries; I'm sure if more standards were imposed on kids' meals, they could come up with healthier ones. And as for the kids who've been conditioned to choose burger or burger or nugget, a few years ago, researchers at Stanford University (that's in Santa Clara County, folks – but not covered by the ban, which only extends to the unincorporated areas) discovered that children preferred food (even carrots) in McDonald's packaging to identical food in plain packaging. If McDonald's sold carrots, kids would eat 'em.

But if they did that, they might still offer the doggoned toys! They're just clutter, but my girls treat them as if they're gold. When they were smaller, I donated them liberally to the preschool prize box, but their grade school has no such thing. So now, the girls are each (supposedly) limited to the contents of one lidded bucket. The buckets have been great to have for trips – they could leave the whole thing behind, for all I care. However, I said "supposedly" because, as we've been mucking out Alpha's room, I've found enough more to fill a second bucket at least, and I imagine I'll find the same in Beta's room.

So we get to winnow yet again. And what do we do with the toys we cull? Despite being mostly disposable plastic junk, they're not marked for recycling. So we get to fill more landfills, and China gets keep its exports to the U.S. high. Hmm... maybe the next time I'm asked "girl toy or boy toy," I'll say, "no toy" – if I can endure the screaming.

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Apologies to those kind folks who commented on recent posts, only to have their comments go unpublished for so long. The DSL's been acting up yet again, and I was only able to moderate the comments today.

I am not as crazy as the system

Mr. Sane’s employer just changed insurers, and you most likely know how crazy that gets. Compound that with dealing with the mental-health bureaucracy and it gets even crazier.

I need a refill on my meds soon. Believe me, no one wants me to go off my meds. This is the medication I introduced to my daughters as the “nice Mommy pills,” because before them, I was a screaming banshee. I don’t cuss; my Mom describes me as someone who “wouldn’t say s**t if she had a mouthful,” but when I’m on a low, I go straight to dropping F-bombs. Nah, no personality change there. Not to mention that for this particular med – not one you’ve likely ever heard of; it’s not advertised on TV – going off it can mean that when you go back on, it might not work, and while we took the time to find a new med that did, I’d probably revert to banshee mode. And going off it and back on again increases the risk of its one major side effect, which just happens to be potentially fatal.

However, because this is maintenance medication, insurers want you (in this case, me) to go through their mail-order pharmacies. The prescription has to be written for a 90-day supply; you have to mail it in, yada yada yada. The first problem for me right now is that unlike dealing with a local pharmacy, who is quite happy to take the prescription bottle from your other local pharmacy and transfer your prescription, the mail-order pharmacy wants a completely new prescription. And no, the doctor can’t phone it in.

So, problem number two: I may need to go in for a visit, even though I’m not due for months. I have no idea if/how this is going to be covered. The Summary of Benefits says that coverage for Behavioral Health Services (oh, there’s another rant there; this is SO not “behavioral” – except for the whole banshee thing) depends on the setting in which it is provided. That’s all it says. For any details, I need to check the Certificate.

That’s problem number three. We never got a copy of the Certificate. We got a letter saying that if we sent it in, the insurer would mail us a copy in about a month – or we could check it online. I went through the rigmarole to enroll in their online access a while back only to discover that the Certificate wasn’t available online yet. So I tried again recently – only to be told that to access it, I needed “contract-level permission.” This brought about a call to Mr. Sane’s HR department, who told me to call their insurance broker.

The nice lady at the insurance broker’s kindly e-mailed me a copy of the certificate, which says regarding the company’s mental behavioral health coverage: “See the Schedule of Benefits for any applicable deductible, coinsurance/copayment information.” The Schedule of Benefits says the same thing the Summary of Benefits said. Perhaps Capt. Yossarian could explain it to me, if he really existed.

Actually, the Schedule of Benefits does say one other thing – “Coverage for the Inpatient and Outpatient treatment of Behavioral Health conditions is provided to the same extent and degree as for the treatment of physical illness.” (‘Cause this illness SO isn’t physical.) I take this to mean that I can go to an M.D. in Psychiatry the same way I would go to an M.D. in any other specialty. However, the nice insurance-broker lady said I should call for pre-certification to make sure my doctor was in the insurer’s system.

Which brings up problem number four. I see a doctor at a Major Teaching Hospital, which means I really see a resident. An attending physician drops by, mostly pro forma, at the end of the visit. It’s the resident, not the attending, who issues the prescription. All the attendings at the hospital are listed as in-network; the residents aren’t. I’m not sure of who my resident’s current attending is – they change frequently. And, at the moment, I’m not even sure of who my current resident is – the one I’ve been seeing is finishing his residency, and he said my next med check (at least when it was supposed to be scheduled) would be with a new resident, and I’d get a letter (which I haven’t gotten yet) informing me who my new resident would be.

So – does the insurer care who signs my prescription? What happens if I need an office visit? I call the pre-certification number, and the nice lady there assures me all is well; the docs at Major Teaching Hospital are all on the plan, and the only thing I would need pre-certification for is if I needed psychotherapy. It would stand to reason that if the insurance is OK with the doctor, it would be OK with a prescription from that doctor. But the pre-certification lady can’t speak for the prescription contractor... and very little of this process stands to reason.

So, all it took was a few sessions online, a passel of reading, and a bunch of phone calls to find out that my meds are probably covered. Now I just need to get the actual prescription (which may or may not involve making a new med-check appointment, hopefully sooner than the month or so it usually takes to be seen), get it to the pharmacy, and wait for it to be sent to me. Why on Earth would anyone want to reform a health-care system this efficient?

I hate homework

I've got a bit of a TMJ thing going on, I think. My ear is sore, and my jaw pops occasionally. This morning, it finally seemed to be better, but it came back as the girls were getting ready for school. I think it's from gritting my teeth so often.

I am not a big fan of my children's homework. Apparently, they aren't fans of it, either, or I wouldn't have to nag them about it so much. I'd ask my Mom how she got us to do our homework in grade school, but... we didn't have any homework in grade school. I'm probably dating myself by saying this, but when I was a kid, a primary-grade teacher who assigned homework would have been considered totally incompetent. "What on Earth do you do in that school all day?" parents would have asked. Homework didn't start in earnest until junior high.

I don't know where this push for homework came from. I do know that the primary purpose it seems to serve in this household is to drive Mom crazy.

I have this idyllic picture in my mind of Mr. Sane, who teaches high school, coming home around 4:30 (i.e., only staying after school for an hour or so) and doing the bulk of his grading at home, sitting at the dining table with the girls, while they follow Daddy's good example and do their own homework, and I cook dinner uninterrupted. (Crazy though I am, I'm not crazy enough to imagine my girls coming home from school and promptly doing their homework, getting it done before 4 pm because they realize that the sooner they get it done, the more play time they have.)

But noooo. Mr. Sane waltzes through the door around 6 most nights, just in time for dinner. A dinner I have prepared with many interruptions. In addition to the nagging to actually work instead of teasing each other, there's Beta's belief that any reading assignment must be read out loud to Mom and both girls' belief (reinforced by their teachers, I think) that no assignment is complete until Mom has checked it. Yesterday's assignments resulted in unleavened cornbread. No, we weren't celebrating some bizarre Catholic form of Passover; I just got interrupted enough during the measurement of the dry ingredients that it wasn't till I noticed how unevenly the bread was rising that I realized I had completely missed the baking powder. The tablespoon of baking powder. Here's how it looked:

It was rather... chewy, too. Frankly, I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.

We've encountered a new problem this week -- the "I haven't done my homework because I've been too busy studying" problem. Yesterday, Alpha was busy poring over atlases in preparation for the school's geography bee, so her math homework didn't get done till this morning. The day before, it was Beta who worked on math-fact practice sheets while ignoring her religion homework. Apparently, unassigned homework, with no direct consequences if it's undone, is much more enticing than stuff that will cause you to miss recess or get a bad grade if you don't do it.

Hmm... maybe I can make this work for me. "I absolutely need you to empty out your hockey bags, but if you have time, you might want to put away all the toys in the playroom." It's possible....