I have recently joined the ranks of the 47 million Americans without health insurance. I am self-employed, make a good living, and I am healthy to the best of my knowledge. However, I cannot get private health insurance in this United States of America. You know, that place that many say has the “best health care in the world” – even though we are ranked 37th in the world behind places like Malta, Oman, Portugal, Iceland, Belgium, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, and Costa Rica. So much for having the best. We are also the only industrialized nation on earth that does not have cradle-to-grave, universal health care. How we are labeled as having “the best” by those fighting reform is beyond me, but it is crystal-clear that we are nowhere near the best in the world. Instead of trying to help improve our system and help more of our citizens get the care they deserve as fellow human beings, they are working their hardest to defeat reform that won’t negatively affect them in any way. (If they would watch anything other than Faux News, they would understand that.) The only things defeating reform will do is this – it will allow insurance companies to continue to cut you off when you get sick while simultaneously increasing premiums by up to 39% PER YEAR as they are doing in California. Certainly sounds like defeating reform is a good idea…if you happen to be an owner of an insurance company and/or are Superman and will never get sick. I am neither of those – and I no longer have health insurance.

I am 37 years old and healthy. I have always paid my medical bills and have never defaulted on anything. I pay my taxes. I work for a living. Yet because I had a teeny tiny spot of skin cancer removed almost 2 years ago, I have had my applications for health insurance rejected 5 times since January. Five applications, five rejections. In a single month. Why? “A history of skin cancer.” After paying monthly premiums since I was 22 years old and rarely using any of the benefits for anything more than a doctor’s visit, a 20 minute outpatient skin surgery and almost 2 years of cancer-free checkups is considered a “history of skin cancer”. Seems to be a pretty loose interpretation of the word “history” if you ask me. Want to know what a true history is? Well, here it is:

15 years of monthly payments to you for health insurance I barely used.

That’s history, guys. A one-time skin issue is not a history – it’s an event. Might it happen again sometime down the road? Sure, maybe. I get checked every 6 months just in case of that…meaning that it would be caught before it caused any serious damage. But I also suppose I could also get hit by a bus tomorrow and end up being hospitalized for a month. I guess you would call that a “history of getting hit by buses” once I got out, no?

We need reform and we need it today. In fact, we need it yesterday. Insurance companies continue to make billions in profit while cutting the sick from the ranks of the insured. How do you think they are making such huge profits? When you can collect premiums for years and never have to pay out claims, it’s pretty easy to keep the profit margins up.

President Obama, I am not asking for a handout. I don’t need socialized medicine like every other country on earth has already. (Although it is tempting to move to a country that has more concern for its citizens than its corporations) I need a a public option. I am more than willing to pay for health insurance without the help of any taxpayer money. I want to pay my fair share. I want insurance in case I get in a car accident or get sick or get hit by the aforementioned bus. I don’t need it to cover a once a year checkup or even generic drugs – I will happily pay out of my own pocket for that. But what I do need is some insurance against being financially wiped out because I have an accident or my body gets sick. We don’t need a mandate to buy insurance from private companies and we don’t need “socialized” medicine. Those two concepts will never fly here in America, since those against reform think nothing here is socialized. (Well, except for police, fire, EMT, libraries, schools, parks, roads, bridges, the airlines, etc.) What we need is a group plan, sponsored by the Federal Government, that allows those of us who have been deemed “uninsurable” or cannot afford the unregulated insurance market to buy health insurance at reasonable rates. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.

There are 47 million Americans without health insurance. In 2010 America that’s an embarrassing statistic, and one that needs to change. If you like your private health insurance – that’s great. Keep it. You may not like it so much when they drop you for getting sick, but you can keep it. In fact, I would prefer it if you did. However, don’t take away the ability of anyone else to get the insurance they may want and/or deserve – it’s not a very American way of thinking.

Please, President Obama – fix our healthcare system. We elected you to bring change to Washington and we need you to start doing that today. It’s time we stop celebrating corporate interests over the interests of fellow Americans. Enough is enough – help people get the care they need at prices they can afford. Stop letting health insurance companies line their pockets with billions of dollars while Americans lose their homes, their savings, and possibly even their lives trying to get medical care.

It’s just not right, and we can do better. We must.

Photo from Shutterstock

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You can dramatically lower the cost of energy upgrades with incentives offered by your utility company, and local, state and federal governments. This article is a summary for New Mexico homes from the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency, www.dsireusa.org, which is a state-by-state directory. There you can also find incentives for commercial, industrial and agricultural applications as well as rebates on appliance purchases.

Local Incentives

• Kit Carson Electric Co-op, Taos – KCEC customers who install an Electric Thermal Storage (ETS)/Heat Pump system or a stand-alone ETS system qualify for a discounted, Time-Of-Use electric rate for space and water heating usage. Customers are also eligible to receive rebates ranging from $924 up to $3009 depending on the size of the system.
• PNM – PNM will purchase RECs (renewable energy credits) from net-metered solar PV customers at $.13/kWh for 12 years for a system up to 10kW. On systems from 10kW to 1W, the REC is $.15/kWh for 20 years. PNM applies these credits towards their obligations to the NM RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard), which requires 4% of the total generation capacity to come from solar electricity by 2020, and 0.6% from distributed generation in 2020.
• El Paso Electric Company – EPE purchases REC’s (renewable energy credits) from its New Mexico customers who have a small (up to 10kW), net-metered PV system installed. The rate is $0.13 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for a period of 12 years, and the credits are applied to the NM RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard).
• Farmington Electric Utility System – FEUS credits the retail rate of a kWh to residential customers with systems up to 10kW systems of PV, wind, hydro and other (unspecified) non-carbon-based fuels.

State Incentives – Personal Tax Credits

• Solar Market Development Tax Credit – solar hot water, solar space heat, solar thermal process heat, PV, solar space cooling. Tax credit of 10% of purchase and installation costs with a $9,000 cap and maximum 10-year carryover. Heating for pools and hot tubs does not qualify. http://www.emnrd.state.nm.us/ECMD/CleanEnergyTaxIncentives/solartaxcredit.htm
• Sustainable Building Tax Credit – passive solar space heat, solar hot water, solar space heat, PV, wind and daylighting. The credit depends on square footage and certification. The home must be certified as Build Green NM Silver or higher, or LEED-H Silver or higher, or be an Energy Star certified manufactured home. http://www.cleanenergynm.org
• Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit (Personal) – Tax credit of $.01/kWh for wind and biomass, $.027 (average) for solar thermal electric. The minimum size requirement is 1W. http://www.cleanenergynm.org

Federal Incentives

• Residential Renewable Energy Tax Credit – 30% for solar hot water, PV, wind, fuel cells, geothermal heat pumps, and other solar electric technologies.

- $2000 cap on systems installed before 1.1.09

- No cap on systems installed after 12.31.2008

- Expires 12.31.2016

• Residential Energy Efficiency Tax Credit – 30% with $1500 cap for 2009-2010 installations of water heaters, furnaces, boilers, heat pumps, air conditioners, building insulation, windows, doors, roofs, circulation fans used in a qualifying furnace, biomass, stoves that use qualified biomass fuel. http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=tax_credits.tx_index#7
• For more information on federal tax credits, see the Energy Star website, http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=tax_credits.tx_index#7, and the USDOE”™s Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy website, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/financing/.

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• Central and window air conditioners
• Heat pumps
• Furnaces
• Washing Machines
• Dishwashers
• Freezers
• Refrigerators
• Water heaters

For more info, check out the Energy.gov website.

Help support The Good Human! If you do your Amazon shopping through my Amazon link, a very modest sales commission is generated. This is true for any product at Amazon, not just the eco-friendly ones. Please keep this link in mind for all of your Amazon purchases, as when you click through one of them and do any shopping, it really helps keep The Good Human going. -> My Amazon.com Affiliate Link. Thanks!

Last night I attended a screening of “Standing Silent Nation”, a heartbreaking documentary about a Lakota Sioux family trying to make a living growing industrial hemp and the DEA”™s seemingly illegal raids on their tribal lands.

Industrial hemp is an ecologically friendly crop that is totally sustainable; it grows very quickly without needing a great deal of care or water, it does not sap the nutrients out of the soil the way many other crops do, it is resistant to fungus and insects so it does not require toxic pesticides, and it commands a great deal of cash. Hemp can be used to make a wide variety of eco-friendly products including paper, clothing, shoes, lotions, soaps, lip balms and biodegradable plastics. It can be pressed into oil or milled into a very nutritious flour to be used in food products, and it can even be pressed into bricks and used like adobe to build homes with. Here’s the catch: while it is legal in this country to possess products made from hemp, it is not legal to grow hemp as a crop. This means that great costs and carbon miles are incurred to import this sustainable product when it could be grown right here in the US, creating good jobs and enlivening local economies.

Now, for those that do not know, there is a vast difference between industrial hemp and the marijuana plant. The marijuana plant contains about 20% THC (the active drug) while industrial hemp contains less than 1%. There is no way to use industrial hemp to produce marijuana, and many other countries such as Canada, England, Spain, China, and France, have found a way to differentiate between the two plants. In fact, our own government used to separate industrial hemp from marijuana and many of the products used in WWII were actually made of hemp; American farmers were even encouraged to grow hemp by the USDA to support the war effort. Clearly, it is possible to separate industrial hemp from illegal marijuana production, so the question is, in light of all the ecological and financial benefits of hemp, why does the government refuse to acknowledge that the hemp plant is not marijuana?

The Lakota people portrayed in “Standing Silent Nation” are incredibly poor and underemployed, mainly because the federal government has effectively destroyed their indigenous way of life and made it nearly impossible for them to escape poverty. The entire Black Hills region used to belong to the Lakota people; however, the federal government has repeatedly taken more and more of their sacred land away, until the present day Lakota are left with only a series of disconnected parcels of land. While the Pine Ridge reservation highlighted in the movie consists of a couple of million acres, only a small percentage of the land is suitable for farming or raising animals. This leaves thousands of people without work, even though they are willing and able to do so. Enter the White Plume family, who learn about the amazing properties of growing industrial hemp. The White Plumes believe that this could be the way to get themselves, and many of their people, out of poverty while at the same time producing a product that is completely sustainable and good for the earth. They are under the impression that, due to an agreement made with the United States government in 1868, they are free to grow any crop that they wish on their own sovereign land. When their crop is almost ready for harvest, DEA officials come illegally onto tribal land with semi-automatic weapons and conduct a “raid”, destroying this family”™s entire livelihood and their hope of overcoming poverty. This atrocity happens again at the next two harvests as the family goes to court and tries to fight on two accounts:

1. That growing industrial hemp should be separated from growing marijuana
2. That they have the right to grow hemp on tribal lands, even if it is not legal in the rest of America.

You can read more about the plight of the White Plume family here. And while this case seems to be over and this family will probably never get back what was taken from them, the best thing we can do is educate people about the benefits of hemp and help get legislation passed that will make industrial hemp production legal in this country. If you want to get involved and see what you can do to help, check out the Take Action page on Standing Silent Nation.

Photo by prairiedustfilms .

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