DES MOINES, IA—Declaring that all voting-age citizens who took the measures would be spared, Hillary Clinton ominously instructed her supporters throughout Iowa to mark their front doors with her campaign logo before sundown, sources confirmed Sunday. “All those residing in Iowa take heed: Your home shall bear the mark of my campaign this eve, or may God help you,” said the Democratic candidate after dispatching a phalanx of campaign staffers to all four corners of the state to spread the message of her directive. “Be within your dwellings with the doors closed and locked before nightfall, and do not cross the threshold before the sun rises again in the sky. The emblem of the red-and-blue H will protect my true voters.” At press time, Clinton issued a statement ordering all Iowan supporters who remain on Monday morning to bring forth their progeny between 18 and 34 years of age to the polls.
My 2015 summary from SecureHorizons, our AARP medicare advantage plan, shows all you need to know that our healthcare system is broken, badly broken. In 2015 I had prostate cancer and as a result had a surgical procedure to remove my prostate, so it was an expensive year with biopsies, diagnosis, procedure and follow-up. I also had a series of physical therapy sessions for an arthritic neck and its left shoulder, elbow and hand sequelae.
Total billed to Securehorizons for the year: $101,000.
Total paid by Securehorizons for the year: $12,000.
Our share: $850.
First reaction might be, really good news! Look how little you had to pay, Charlie, for such an enormous bill. Uh huh. Look more at how little Securehorizons paid for such an enormous bill, about 1/8 or 12% of the total billed. This vast-$78,000-discrepancy says nobody knows what healthcare costs. Nobody knows what’s fair.
Take my very small piece of the total healthcare expenditures in 2015 and extrapolate these ratios. Say hospitals and physicians and other therapies billed $10,000,000,000 to insurance companies. Following the ratio in my 2015 report insurance companies would pay to those vendors approximately $1,200,000,000. That would leave a discrepancy of $7,800,000,000. What happens to the supposed expenses covered by discrepancy? Do hospitals and physicians and therapists go out of business? No, they live to bill another year when the whole sorry mess repeats.
It takes no analytical subtlety to smell the rot. We need to get out from under all these private insurance companies and their administrative rules, their negotiated deals.
Kate’s hair-dresser, to illustrate another problem with this mess, went to the ER when a partially removed splinter in her hand created swelling that made it impossible for her to use her scissors. No work, no money. She had the self-employed persons typical high deductible policy. An E.R. doc removed the splinter. Bill: doc=$1,500, e.r. admittance=$1,800. She refused to pay $3,300 for a splinter removal, stayed resolute and got an 80% reduction in her bill.
Colorado will have a referendum this year to create the first single-payer health plan in the United States. I’m voting for it.
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come. Rabindranath Tagore
Reframing is such a powerful tool. Tagore reframes death. Whether or not he’s right, and how can we know, the notion is a powerful one. The possibility of a new dawn after this life, what could it mean? No way to assess it. But just the idea is intriguing, especially when put against the judgmental metaphysics of most major religious traditions on the one hand and the nihilistic over confidence of latter day positivists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on the other.
The so-called new atheists are really metaphysical curmudgeons, still entranced by the bracing notion of nothing beyond this reality. They conclude that because the matter of metaphysics is beyond measurement, beyond sensory authentication that it is, ipso facto, non existent. This is a peculiar claim. That is, claiming the non-existence of something you cannot access admits, in and of itself, that the way of knowing that produces the conclusion is wrong for the question. Like the metaphysics of heaven and hell, moksha or nirvana, non-existence is not provable either. So, the big metaphysical question requires an agnostic position.
Tagore’s idea, like the analogy between life and death and the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, depends on no dogma. It simply states an alternative possibility. The Otherworld in Celtic mythology had another existence beyond death, though characterizing it as a new dawn would not fit. It was more like a pale version of this world. Still, the hope that death is a doorway rather than a black hole has captured the imagination of countless humans over thousands of years.
Who knows? Perhaps your dying day will include a wakin’ up mornin’. It’s ok with me.
Kate and I went to the Aspen Peak Winery in Bailey last night for seafood paella and Spanish music. I love local events and this one had a good combination of homemade ambiance and terrific food.
On the drive to Bailey, about 20 minutes under normal circumstances, we experienced rush hour on Highway 285. The event was at 6 pm and Bailey is west of us in Park County. Rush hour is rush hour, even in the mountains, and I would not want to make this commute every day, especially after a big snow storm.
Saw a pick-up with a funny, but biting bumper sticker: Save an elk, shoot a land developer. Sort of the flip-side to a 1970’s bumper sticker that has remained in my memory: Sierra Club, kiss my axe. That was in Ely, Minnesota during the debate over the creation of the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area.
Kate’s had a good, but long week organizing the kitchen. She’s ready to get back to sewing. Golden Solar is coming to finish the critter guards on our micro-inverters today. Tai Chi later this morning. Probably chainsaw work later today. The weekend.
My UPS just kicked in and saved my current work. But, now I have to go reset the modem. Sigh. (Well, I’ll be damned. The modem fixed itself.)
We’ve had good production out of our solar arrays this last week, not so much the first three weeks of January. We’ll see how generation averages out in this first year. A learning curve.
Kate’s been organizing, an Iowegian dervish of the kitchen. She’s been much lighter since she started. Glad.
Vega goes in tomorrow for a bandage check and biopsy results. Hoping for good news, aware it’s unlikely.
My sister wrote me today from Singapore: “I’ve never seen such an election as this one-I can’t stand the thought of the Trump as president-is it possible ??? Just seems to so much press here…”
My answer to her follows. It’s how I see the election right now:
His main appeal is to white folks left behind by the current Gilded Age. Is it possible he could be the Republican nominee? Increasingly, amazingly, it seems so. But the Republican establishment, the old and big money doesn’t want him. What he’s doing is splitting the GOP base. That means he’ll be weaker in a general election.
The new demographics of the U.S. imply that people of color, especially Latinos, and younger voters plus the traditional Democratic base of liberal whites, especially women hold the key to the Presidency. If they turn out, and that’s always the big question with the Democratic vote, no Republican candidate has a chance.
However. Both Sanders (my guy) and Hillary have substantial downsides. Still, in an election in which Trump is the alternative I believe the Democratic base will rally-out of revulsion if nothing else.
It is a peculiar election. The one that bears the most resemblance in recent memory might be when George Wallace ran as a third party candidate. He was a right wing populist, too. He carried Indiana and changed its politics ever after. By encouraging the southern diaspora to vote against their economic self-interests, essentially through racist appeals, he moved those voters out of the liberal union voter camp into what would become Nixon’s moral majority and the Reagan Democrats of later years. Much more conservative. Many of those folks are now in the Tea Party or are rabidly pro-Trump.
“Please be very careful if you are outside tonight and if you have animals. My next door neighbor was outside with her dog about 6 tonight and a mountain lion ran out from under her deck and ran between our houses. She got her dog inside quickly.”
More Tai Chi for arthritis. Second class yesterday. Our group of 5 shrank to 3 Kate, me, and another woman about our age, maybe a bit younger. But all of us with arthritis of one sort or another. In other words, people of a certain age.
This is a chi gong style, different from the work I did with Great River Tai Chi in Minneapolis. Arthritis makes tai chi more difficult so the creator of this style modified the moves and the attitude. Both are important. The moves are less crisp, more fluid, less dramatic. The attitude is not perfection but persistence. Keeping people moving is the prime goal of this style, so adjusting the moves to what your body allows is the key.
After tai chi, we went back the National Western Stock Show, this time just Kate and me for one of the draft horse events. Our interest in basic agriculture/horticulture and our interest in Irish Wolfhounds, plus our Midwest rural roots, made seeing these giants of the horse world interesting.
It was a long show, almost four hours. These horses, though, whether pulling buckboards or traps, in two hitch or four hitch combinations, were a pleasure to watch. True horsepower in its original form. Their muscles rippled. Their eyes were intense and their individuality was on full display for those who could see it.
Mules were part of this show, too, though I found them much less interesting, at least visually, than the draft horses. While making sure what a mule was, horse + donkey, I discovered that male donkey, a jack, almost always covers a mare. The result of that union is a mule, usually sterile. On occasion a stallion will cover a female donkey and the result of that union is called a hinny.
The last, and best, part of this four hour show was the weight pull. These horses, in two horse pairs, were attached to a metal sled (no wheels) filled with sand bags. They started at seven thousand pounds or so and ended at fourteen thousand, gradually increasing the load until none of the pairs could pull it beyond twenty feet. (my video)
The heart of these pairs was on display as they dug, pulled easily on the lighter loads, or put shoulders and haunches to bulging as the loads got heavier. With the exception of one pair all the rest put all they had into each pull. It was clear they enjoyed the challenge.
Getting a team connected to the sled, accomplished by putting the sled’s hook ended chain through a metal coupler on the horse’s pole and bar, was often the most interesting part of the pull. Why? Because the horses pull when they think they’re attached to the load, often dragging those trying to hitch them up away from the hook.
Always interested in draft horses. Now even more so.
