It's been a little over two years since I wrote about my experiences buying insurance under the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obamacare). Many insurers, including mine, are changing plans or premiums or both this year, so it's a good time for an update.I still work for myself and and remain thrilled that I can buy an individual health insurance plan. For reasons I wrote about before, I was denied individual health insurance after I started my own law firm, and there is no group coverage available t...
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Do The Clothes Make The Woman?
Here is my wish for the coming presidential campaign season: that no matter who the candidates are, we will talk more about substance than appearances. This occurred to me when I read Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column discussing the recent Benghazi Committee hearings. Noonan mentioned that presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was beautifully coiffed and made up and wore a "sober, dark high-end pantsuit." In response to young journalists who told her she wasn't allowed to describe how Cli...
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Entrepreneur Or Ne’re Do Well?
A boyfriend I had in my early twenties was a hard worker but did not like his job. He had no interest in going to college, and he was unimpressed by how long it took most people to build businesses from the ground up, so he looked into various get-rich quick-schemes. He purchased a series of books on how to buy a house with no money down, fix it up and rent it out, then use equity in the first house to help buy another, and so on. The idea was not to earn income through rentals but to sell after...
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Why Write a Thriller Series About A Potential Female Messiah?
People often ask me why, as a non-believer, I'm writing a thriller series that revolves around religion-related concepts. (The Awakening series follows a young woman whose virgin pregnancy might bring the world a female messiah or trigger Armageddon.) First, completely aside from religion, I’ve always been intrigued by world changing or world ending stories. A great example of this type of story is my favorite movie, The Terminator.The Awakening (Book 1) and The Unbelievers (Book 2).Second, the ...
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Kind Words From A Stranger
The week of January 22, 2007, I received two phone calls from complete strangers. The first came on a snowy, bitter Monday evening. A chaplain from Loyola Hospital told me my father was in the emergency room. He needed some tests, and he might feel better if I were there. But when I arrived, I was shown into a small, private waiting room. A chaplain, the pastor from my parents' parish in Brookfield, and my cousin Marty, who lived about a mile from my parents, were there. Logic would have told me...
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Rediscovering Bliss–At The Library
The other day I rode an escalator to the seventh floor, literature and fiction, at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago and felt bliss. It was the second time in as many weeks I'd visited there. This made me happier than I can say because that's more visits to a public library in two weeks than I've made in the entire last decade.For as long as I can remember, I've loved libraries. At five years old, I got my pinkish orange children's card at the Brookfield Public Library. I was so ex...
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The Trouble With Karma
The concept of karma has been around for thousands of years. I confess to having mixed feelings about it. In eastern religions, it refers to the idea that what a person does in past lives and in the present affects the quality of her or his life or perhaps determines certain aspects of it. This concept is summed up in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad statement that whatsoever deed a man does, "that he will reap." A similar sentiment appears in Christian gospels, including in Galatians 6:7: "...whats...
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The Second Mr. de Winter: What If Genders Were Reversed In Rebecca?
My lawyer book group (read more about the lawyer book group here) recently read Daphne Du Maurier’s classic, Rebecca. The book is a suspense/thriller about a young woman who marries a widower whose first wife was lost at sea. After the narrator marries Max de Winter, she becomes mistress of Manderley, a mansion in an isolated area. Roughly twenty years younger than her husband and of a different social class, she feels constantly overshadowed by her predecessor, Rebecca, and nervous around his f...
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Not To Unite But To Divide – Are Religious Disagreements Inevitable?
When I was in junior high, one of my friends had very strict parents. Because I didn't share her Christian denomination (Pentecostal), her parents didn't want her to spend time with me. I decided to join my friend's church youth group. My mom worried about that. When she'd grown up, Catholics were prohibited from attending services at other churches. It was thought that learning too much about other religions would be damaging to their Catholic faith. My mom eventually agreed I could join the yo...
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Live to Work or Work to Live: Thoughts on Work/Life Balance
The other day on a podcast, entrepreneur and author Joanna Penn said something like you only worry about work/life balance when you dislike what you do. This caught my ear. My feelings about how work fits in my life, or how it "should" fit, have changed during the last six months, partly because I've shifted professionally so that most of my work time relates to my thriller writing. Even so, I'm not sure I completely agree with Joanna's comment. During the 14+ years when the majority of my work ...
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