Working poor get nailed in every welfare state, earn a dollar or a Euro, lose 50% or more of what you earn in benefits.

Much as you may wish otherwise, the article is not about taxes in Britain or any other "welfare state".

My daughter's been trying to talk to someone at CareFirst about crediting the premium she paid for her husband and son's old plan to the new one they were approved for for all three of them, and has yet to get anything more than a recorded message about "unusually high call volume."  And some really crappy music - not even the occasional, "your call is important to you," or "the estimated wait time is just short of an eternity."  

She pointed me to this story:  

Paperwork problems almost delayed suburban Chicago resident Sheri Zajcew's scheduled surgery Thursday, but Dr. John Venetos decided to operate without a routine go-ahead from the insurance company. That was after Venetos' office manager spent two hours on hold with the insurer Thursday, trying to get an answer about whether the patient needed prior authorization for the surgery. The office manager finally gave up.

[snip]

Venetos, a Chicago digestive system specialist, described "tremendous uncertainty and anxiety" among patients calling his office recently. Some thought they'd signed up for coverage but hadn't received insurance cards yet. Others had insurance policies that were canceled and weren't sure if their coverage had been reinstated after Gov. Pat Quinn decided to allow one-year extensions of canceled plans.

Venetos said he has decided to take a risk and provide care for these patients, at least until there's less confusion about coverage.

"We feel it's the right thing to do," Venetos said. "We may end up stuck holding the bag and not getting paid on these claims."

My daughter finally gave up, stopped payment on the old check and put a new check in the mail for the new plan.

In my case, also with CareFirst, the invoice that usually comes by the 10th of the month arrived on New Year's Eve, and the only bright spot is that, because they failed to give me the required 45 days notice of a rate increase, they are waiving the increase for January.

Politically and sociologically, Hawaii paid a heavy price for that diversity after Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown in 1893 by a U.S. Navy-backed coup d'état, orchestrated by the American Ambassador John L. Stevens and white sugar planters. The so-called "Republic of Hawaii" was then formally annexed by the United States in 1898 against the expressed wishes of its then-native Hawaiian majority, and non-white people soon suffered and withered under the oppressive control of a haole (white) business / military / Republican Party oligarchy, which lasted for the better part of six decades.

But the Republicans were swept away by Hawaii voters in the 1954 territorial elections, a political sea change led in large part by the thousands of discharged U.S. soldiers of Japanese ancestry who were returning to the islands, distinguished combat veterans of the legendary 100th Battalion and 442nd Regiment who were not at all inclined to accept their former subordinate roles in the white-dominated plantation society which had dominated people's lives until the Second World War.

Ironically, the man who successfully plotted the political overthrow of the haole establishment was himself an Irish-American Catholic, John Anthony Burns, who had moved to the islands as a 4-year-old youngster in 1913, when his father was stationed out here with the U.S. Army. But when his father subsequently abandoned the family six years later, his mother was compelled to scratch out a living for herself and her four children as a laundress -- and later as postmaster -- in the poorer neighborhoods of Kalihi-Palama in central Honolulu, where Burns grew up with mostly Japanese-American kids as his neighbors and playmates.

Burns also attended St. Louis School, a venerable Catholic educational institution in east Honolulu with a mostly non-haole student body, where its clergy-faculty instilled in him a very strong social and moral compass, through which he soon developed a particular aversion to the white oligarchy which had its boots on the necks of his friends' families.

As he reached adulthood and joined the Honolulu Police Dept., eventually becoming its youngest captain ever, Burns was determined to change all that and in the process, also cut his fellow haole down to size politically. Out of those friendships and experiences, Burns forged a hardwired and hardcore Democratic Party organization of mostly Asian-American candidates, party officers and precinct officials, most all of whom took their cues from his astute leadership.

Elected in the 1954 landslide as Hawaii's lone non-voting delegate to Congress, Burns had a powerful friend and mentor in Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (D-TX), but his own political inner circle was comprised almost entirely of Japanese-American men and women -- outstanding people such as Bob and Ruth Oshiro, Mitsuo Takubuki, Dan Inouye, George Ariyoshi, Patsy Takemoto Mink and Spark Matsunaga.

Once Hawaii finally achieved statehood and Burns was elected governor in 1962, they all subsequently rose to prominent positions of real influence and leadership. People of color finally began to really come into their own, politically and economically, and their innate liberalism soon asserted itself throughout island society.

After King Kamehameha, King Kalakaua and Queen Liluokalani, Jack Burns arguably stands out as the most singularly influential political leader the modern history of the Hawaiian Islands, and older Japanese-Americans still revere him as one of their own, nearly forty years after his death. As the late Sen. Inouye and the late Congresswoman Mink used to regularly remind people, were it not for Burns' friendship, encouragement and tutelage, neither one of them would have ever gone to law school or ventured into politics.

But there are limits to applying the Hawaii model to the rest of the nation, especially considering this state's unique economy and political makeup.

Hawaii's extraordinary reliance on the federal government -- military spending accounts for 13.5 percent of the state's economy, more than any other state except Virginia -- has helped cushion the state from economic turmoil.

Such is mortal existence, where the limitations of the flesh often trump the brilliance of any mind. Especially, to repeat and emphasize, when the powder-keg lid has been held down for so long, by so many parties, foreign and domestic, and all of whom have held it down for reasons of riches, of the Natural Resources + Unnatural Money = Complete Evil variety.