Joe Kraynak

Schools and Teachers: America’s Scapegoat

For at least the past 20 years, I’ve heard more griping over our “failing schools” and supposedly broken education system than I can stand. I hear it from both political parties, read about in the editorial columns, and watch the pundits blast our schools and teachers on every TV station and online news outlet almost on a daily basis.

I don’t disagree that (overall) today’s students are not as educated as they need to be for today’s world. That’s patently obvious. What I disagree on are the reasons why.

Everyone is quick to blame the teachers and the schools. Politicians constantly rant about holding teachers and schools accountable. I just heard one of the presidential hopefuls talk about making schools and teachers “answerable” to parents and students!

What a crock of bull-loney.

Our society is broken. We have a divorce rate of about 50%. Kids are spending far too much time watching TV, playing video games, and surfing the Web and far too little time playing outside, interacting with one another (in reality rather than “texting”), exploring their environment, and reading. Parents are afraid to send their kids outside, afraid they’ll fall victim to a child molester or drug dealer or other miscreant. And kids’ access to porn and violence via TV, movies, the Internet, and other media is appalling.

Instead of doing something to turn our society around, we take the easy route – blame somebody. Whose fault is it? The schools, the teachers, of course. After all, aren’t they the ones responsible for educating our children?

People, wake up. Our kids are failing because we’re failing our kids. It’s not the schools and the teachers. It’s us – the rest of us who are supposed to care for our children for all that time they’re not in school. We’re too afraid or lazy to turn off the TV; enforce restrictions on video games and bedtimes; make our neighborhoods safer; and encourage our kids to spend some time reading on their own. It’s too difficult to fix a sick society that considers torture movies like Saw as entertainment and easy access to porn as a first amendment right. It’s much easier to just blame someone else.

Doctors vs Health Insurance: Athens vs. Anthem

People who’ve grown up in Crawfordsville, Indiana like to refer to this small town in Central Indiana as “The Athens of the Midwest.” Perhaps it is, and from what’s been going on lately, this might just be the place where the battle lines are drawn between physicians and the health insurance companies, where debate over national health insurance finally gains enough momentum to make a difference.

Over the past couple months, I’ve heard some discussion about Anthem Health Insurance not covering treatment provided by St. Clare Medical Center - the only hospital in Crawfordsville. Apparently, the two parties settled whatever dispute they were having, and the issue kind of faded as a topic in the local gossip chains.

The other day, however, my wife received a letter from Athens Medical Group, where her primary care physician practices. (You can view a PDF version of the letter - 1 meg.) In his letter, CEO of Athens Medical Group, Brett Spencer, MD informs patients that Anthem Insurance Companies are dropping Athens as an “in network” provider. For anyone who’s dealt with health insurance, this is a biggie, because you pay a premium for “out of network” care.

The conflict could affect my family through my wife - forcing her to pay out-of-network if she wants to continue seeing her current providers or to drive a half hour or more out of town to obtain in-network care. My health insurance is even worse. I pay over $2,000 per year for a $10,000 deductible policy to a company (American Medical “Security”) that simply sends me statements explaining why it’s not paying any claims.

What I’m waiting for is the doctors to get totally fed up with the status quo and launch their own national health insurance company through the AMA (American Medical Association). Get rid of the middleman! They could standardize all the forms, so they wouldn’t have to deal with multiple insurance companies and forms, streamline operations, and increase efficiency. Who better to oversee what insurance companies should and should not pay for than the doctors themselves?

And if that doesn’t work, why don’t we just go back to paying cash - out of pocket? Require each doctor to do a set amount of pro-bono work, and get rid of health insurance altogether? What we have now just isn’t working.

Until this gets fixed, I’ve left strict orders with my family. If I have a serious illness and can’t get myself to the hospital, they’re to take the wallet out of my pocket, drive me up in front of the hospital emergency room, and roll me gently out onto the pavement. This is the only way I’ll be able to get the treatment I need without going bankrupt.

If anyone has any detailed information about what’s going on between Athens Medical Group and Anthem Health Insurance Companies or any other similar dispute, please leave a comment. Or just weigh in on the current state of health insurance in the United States.

My New Best Friend: Cortisone… for Allergies

Ever since I had a severe reaction to a combination of pink champagne and Alleve (don’t ask), I’ve had a growing problem with all sorts of allergy symptoms (not to foods, but to airborne allergens) - hives,  runny nose, nasal congestion, sneezing; post-nasal drip, cough, wheezing, and shortness of breath.

Usually, I can control the symptoms by popping Benadryl and shooting NasalCrom up my nose a couple times a day during peak pollen season. This year, my usual treatment regimen didn’t phase the allergies, so back in January, I saw my doctor to see if he could recommend anything. He gave me prescriptions for fexofenadine (generic Allegra) and fluticasone propionate (genric Flonase, a nasal spray). That seemed to do the trick, but I often had to add some Benadryl to the mix when things got bad, especially at night.

I eventually stopped taking the meds and was okay for several months, but a couple weeks ago, the allergies returned with a vengeance. I refilled my prescriptions, stocked up on Benadryl and NasalCrom and hit them with everything in my arsenal:

• Generic Flonase
• Generic Allegra
• NasalCrom
• Benadryl
• Afrin
• Sudafed
• My wife’s Albuterol inhaler or my over-the-counter Primateen Mist (for clearing my lungs)
• Mucinex
• Saline solution irrigation (2 cups water + 1/2 teaspoon sea salt + 1/4 teaspoon baking soda + capful hydrogen peroxide) warmed in the microwave for a minute on high and pumped through my WaterPik using a gadget I rigged for it

Eventually the congestion got so bad, I was tempted to snort a couple lit firecrackers to blast through the blockage, but on second thought realized that would probably be a bad idea. Instead, I visited my doctor. Here’s what he did:

• Added Singulair to my generic Allegra and Flonase (boy is Singulair expensive! With my whopping $18 insurance discount, it cost me $105 for 30 pills).
• Told me to reduce my use of Afrin because over the long-term the “rebound effect” could make me more congested. (I could still use it once a day before bed).
• Told me to lay off the Sudafed and Primateen Mist because it could boost my blood pressure into a range of concern.
• Gave me a shot of cortisone, telling me that it’ll clear me up for at least two weeks.

Soon after that shot, I felt much better. Woke up last night sneezing, but when I took the generic Allegra and the Singulair, the combination cleared me up. This morning, I feel like a champ. I’m even thinking of going jogging later.

Yes, I found a new best friend - Cortisone, I love you! Thanks, doc!

What Good Is a Privacy Policy?

My doctor has a privacy policy. My health insurance company has a privacy policy. When I see my doctor, however, he bills my insurance company for the services he provided and any tests he ordered. The insurance company has never actually paid a claim, because my medical bills never even come close to my $10,000 deductible.

Yet, whenever my doctor dutifully bills the insurance company (so those billing amounts can be applied to the deductible), he’s giving the insurance company personal information about me that they can use to increase my rates. They now have a complete record of any health issues I have… supplied directly by my doctor.

I rarely see the doctor, but over the course of the past few weeks, I had several doctor’s appointments, a chest x-ray, and a few prescriptions for allergy medications. Within a couple weeks of my most recent visit, I received a notice from my health insurance provider, American Medical Security, that the company was raising my premiums.

I suppose the only solution would be to tell the doctor that I don’t have insurance and just pay cash for everything, saving the receipts in the off-chance that my healthcare costs will exceed my deductible. My question remains, however – What good does a privacy policy do if the doctor has to inform the insurance company in order to get paid?

Sure, the privacy policy could help keep this information from others, including my employer or someone else I might not want to know about it, but the people who can use that information to do the most damage to me financially have ready access to it.

Fast Becoming a Minority in America

In a recent article entitled “U.S. to Grow Grayer, More Diverse,” Washington Post Staff Writer N.C. Aizenman calls attention to the fact that according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, “minorities will be majority by 2042.”

I don’t know what to think of this. In a way, I became a minority as soon as I moved out of my heavily Polish neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side in 1978. I quickly became one of the few students of Polish-Ruthenian heritage attending Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. (I did meet one other Pole from “Da Region.”) When I moved to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1984, I felt even more like a minority. In my 20 years of living in Indianapolis, I met only a half dozen Poles (none of whom was very Pole-ish) and not a single Ruthenian. And Crawfordsville, Indiana? Fugget-about-it… I have yet to meet anyone who’s even sampled a perogi.

Personally, I enjoy my minority status. It makes me feel special. When I mention perogi or kapusta, I feel like a traveler from some long-forgotten land. When I speak the few words or phrases I know of Polish, like dziekuje (pronounced jen-ku-ya, meaning thank you) or idz do domu i spac (pronounced eez-dough-dome-oh-spotch meaning go home and go to bed), I feel bilingual. I don’t even mind the fact that people commonly mispronounce my name as Kray-nee-ack (Ruthenian, not Polish), although for the life of me, I can’t imagine how they came up with that mispronunciation.

As a minority, I can blame everything on the majority. After all, if the Polish-Ruthenians were running this country, we’d all have high-paying jobs, low taxes, the best schools in the world, free universal health care, and other perks too numerous to mention. And since my ancestors arrived long after “The White Man” stole the land from the Native Americans and some time after slavery was abolished in the United States, I feel none of the guilt that the majority of Americans often suffer.

So, when I read about “becoming” a minority in America by 2042, it really doesn’t bother me. I’m already there… and loving it.

Beautiful Women

I read somewhere recently that 95-99% of what men find most attractive in women is in the neck up. We’re initially attracted to women and ultimately adore them not primarily for their “from the neck down” bodies but for the intelligence, grace, and sheer joy of life that beams forth from their faces.

This struck me as true and an important lesson to teach our daughters and the other young ladies whose minds we influence. With all the magazines and TV shows and ads constantly reinforcing the message that beauty means being thin - usually overly thin -and showing as much flesh as possible, we need to counterbalance these messages with the truth that most men find beauty not in the breasts and hips, but in the eyes and smile - in confidence, joy, intelligence, and individual expression.

The media’s message of what female beauty consists of is actually counterproductive to cultivating true beauty. It simply makes women, especially young ladies, overly self-conscious, not confident, and perhaps even bitter and unhappy. There’s nothing sexy in that.

Amazon’s Disreputable Marketing of The Tales of Beedle the Bard

Today, I searched Amazon.com Books for “bipolar disorder.” At the top of the list? J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard. That’s weird, I thought, maybe Beedle the Bard has bipolar disorder. Maybe I should order the book to find out.

On second thought, I doubted that Beedle the Bard had bipolar disorder. I decided to look up something else totally unrelated to fiction and J.K. Rowling. So I searched Amazon.com Books for “foreclosure.” Sure enough, at the top of the list again was J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

Now, I know Amazon.com wants to sell books, and this is sure to be a big seller. I don’t mind having the title splashed in my face on the opening Amazon.com page or even in the margins of other pages I look at. I might even be able to tolerate a pop-up ad or two. However, when I search for books on specific topics, I expect Amazon.com to display only books that fit my topic description. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a search tool?

Aren’t We All a Little Psychotic?

Just the other morning, I was staring at a dead bug - a wicked looking red and black insect with wings and stingers and pincers. At least I thought it was dead. I moved my face closer and closer to get a better look at it. When I was only a few inches from it, it started buzzing, and I recoiled and yelled, “Holy….” which instantly woke my wife who was sleeping right next to me.

Yeah, it was all a dream, as starkly vivid as anything I could experience in reality, maybe even a little more real. Sure, it was merely an illusion, something my brain cooked up, but how could it seem so real and how could I accept it as being real? Isn’t that what psychosis is - seeing and hearing things that aren’t there? What was asleep in my brain that prevented me from questioning what I was seeing? What was working overtime in my brain to make me “see” such a nasty looking creature?

I’ll leave all those questions to brain and dream researchers to sort out, but the experience made me realize that we might all be a little psychotic. At least we know from our dreams that we have the capacity for psychosis. When we dream, we become delusional. We hallucinate. We see things that aren’t there and hear sounds in the midst of silence. We have no trouble accepting these dreams as normal parts of our lives.

Yet, when we encounter someone who’s experiencing psychosis, it completely baffles us. We can’t wrap our brain around the notion that while people are awake, they can see things that aren’t there and hear voices when nobody’s speaking. We can’t imagine ever experiencing such a thing even though we experience it every night when we fall asleep.

New Bipolar Blog on Psych Central - Bipolar Beat

Anyone who knows me well is aware that my family has been living with bipolar disorder for nearly a decade. My wife, Cecie, was first diagnosed in 1999 and has had quite a journey trying to discover the right combination of doctor, therapist, and medications to stabilize her moods.

When I first heard the term “bipolar disorder,” I did what I normally do when I’m totally ignorant of something I need to know about - I headed to the bookstore, purchased every book I could find on the subject, and spent every spare moment reading them. I learned a great deal, but none of the books provided me with everything I needed to know about bipolar disorder and what I could do to help.

I thought I could write something better, so in 2005, I pitched the idea of doing Bipolar Disorder For Dummies to an acquisitions editor I knew at John Wiley & Sons, Mikal Belicove. He proceeded to search for and find a suitable co-author for me - someone infinitely more qualified than I was to hand out advice about bipolar - Dr. Candida Fink MD (FinkShrink.com). She had plenty of experiencing diagnosing and treating bipolar disorder in her patients and had already co-authored a book on bipolar disorder in children and teens called The Ups and Downs of Raising a Bipolar Child. She also grew up with bipolar disorder in her family and has a great sense of humor.

A couple years after Bipolar Disorder For Dummies arrived in bookstores, we decided to do our own blog to promote the book. On June 18, 2007, we launched our Bipolar Blog. Now, as anyone in the publishing biz knows, waiting two years to start promoting your book is kind of dumb, but we had a “better late than never” philosophy and figured that our new blog would help us deliver fresh information to the bipolar community and give us a head start should we ever have the opportunity to do a 2nd edition of the book (or some other project).

Recently, John M. Grohol, Psy.D., CEO & Publisher of PsychCentral.com, “discovered” our blog, liked it, and appreciated the way we handled the topic of bipolar disorder in Bipolar Disorder For Dummies. He was in the process of recruiting qualified professionals to blog on specific mental health related topics on his Web site and offered us the opportunity to create and host Psych Central’s bipolar blog. We accepted the offer and have chosen to call our new blog Bipolar Beat. Here, we will be posting articles and insights on topics of interest to those in the bipolar community – people with bipolar disorder and their loved ones, physicians, psychiatrists, therapists, and anyone else who’s interested in learning more about bipolar disorder.

While readers of Bipolar Disorder For Dummies and visitors to our blog are no doubt on their own bipolar journeys, Candida and I have had our own journey of discovery related to both bipolar disorder and blogging. We invite you to explore what we’ve discovered by visiting Bipolar Beat and Bipolar Blog and to share what you discovered with us and with the community we are working to build.

Current Project - Cross-Cultural Selling For Dummies

Over the past several months, I’ve been working with Michael Soon Lee of EthnoConnect, a leading expert on the topic of selling to customers from diverse cultures, and sales guru Ralph R. Roberts to develop Cross-Cultural Selling For Dummies®. We just wrapped up the writing phase of the project and are currently working through author review - when we have the opportunity to review changes and suggestions from editorial and answer their questions.

We’re developing the book primarily for salespeople who want to expand their business into any of various multicultural markets across the country and around the world. (According to the Selig Center for Economic Growth, the combined purchasing power of the multicultural market has grown from $1.39 trillion in 2000 to over $2 trillion in 2006 and is estimated to reach $3 trillion in 2011.) However, the book is useful for others, as well, including small-business owners, entrepreneurs, and any front-line sales or customer service staff. Cross-Cultural Selling For Dummies® provides readers with practical tips and strategies showing them exactly what they need to do to appeal to clientele from different cultures:

• Assess your multicultural readiness (a self-test)
• Develop basic multicultural competency
• Hone your multicultural customer service skills
• Adjust your marketing campaign to make it more appealing to clients from other cultures
• Go beyond marketing to make your entire business multicultural friendly
• Redesign your store or office to make it appeal to a broader clientele
• Adapt your product line for multicultural sales
• Meet and greet prospective clients without turning them off
• Adapt your sales presentation and techniques
• Recognize multicultural buying signals
• Acquire closing techniques that are more effective with clients from other cultures
• Negotiate with clients who may have more experience and expertise with haggling than you do
• Build your referral base in the ethnic community
• Assemble and manage your own multicultural sales team
• Discover commonly held myths about your own culture and others that may be holding you back
• Uncover a host of multicultural resources that can help you transition your business for other markets

The book will be available in bookstores by November 17, 2008 – just in time to make the perfect Christmas present, or Kwanzaa present, or Hanukkah present, or ….