Do something great this holiday season, become an organ donor

I have been an organ donor since I was 18. At that time designating yourself an organ donor on your driver's license was only a few years old. I believed it in strongly then and I still do. It is even in my living will.

Now, some 27 years later, it is a friend of mine who has liver disease and needs a liver transplant. He is one of the nicest people you will ever meet. We don't always agree on everything he's far more to the right that I am politically, but we can have civil, respectful conversations and even listen to each others points of view.

There are no insults thrown, and no talking down to each other, it's political civil discourse, that would be nice to see. BTW he called Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity etc. "flame throwers" and he doesn’t like them. He also calls Michael Moore one too. Well, no one is perfect ;-)

I never got to hear him play in his band, But here he is at the Little Bear (a renowned Colorado night spot) in 1987. He's the one in the stripes.

Here is one of his visits to the hospital. He told me that he created the video the day after he got out of the hospital



He also has a compelling story about his friend Ardis, who had end stage liver disease. He took care of her and she passed away before he was diagnosed with the same illness. He may not last 5 years.

If you aren't an organ donor already, do something great this holiday season and become one!

For more information:
http://www.organdon or.gov/
http://www.unos. org/
http://www.organdon or.org/
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/organ-donation/FL00077

Does your faith approve?
http://www.transplantforlife.org/miracles/religion.html

Here is his blog Billy Bob's Wildride (Billy Bob is his liver, his is Bob)

You've just entered the Twilight Zone

Medical paperwork is a world of co-payments and co-insurers, deductibles, exclusions and contracted fees. Nothing is as it seems: patients receive statements that often do not reflect what is actually owed; telephone calls to customer service agents are at best time-consuming and at worst fruitless. The explanations of benefits that insurers send out - known as E.O.B.'s - are filled with unintelligible codes.

The system is so impenetrable that it mystifies even the most knowledgeable.

"I'm the president's senior adviser on health information technology, and when I get an E.O.B. for my 4-year-old's care, I can't figure out what happened, or what I'm supposed to do," said Dr. David Brailer, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, whose office is in the Department of Health and Human Services. "I can't figure out what care it was related to or who did what."

Dr. Blackford Middleton, a professor at Harvard Medical School with special training in health services research, said he did not fare much better than Dr. Brailer.

"I understand the words of diagnoses and procedures," he said. "But codes? No. Or how things are paid or not paid? I don't understand that."

Dr. Brailer said he often used an analogy to describe the current state of medical billing.

"Suppose you walk into a restaurant," he said, "and you don't get a menu, you don't get any choice of what food you'll eat, they don't tell you what it is when they're serving it to you, they don't tell you what it's going to cost."

NY Times

As if it wasn't scary enough out there.

(hat tip to Prometheus 6)