Good Wednesday morning, everyone. Can you believe it--the 10th of MARCH already. We are getting rain, which I don't mind because it will melt the remaining snow that much faster. The weather people predict a string of days when the highs won't be below 45. Yesterday the thermometer on the patio registered 62. It was still just above 50 this morning.

I found this article at the Dissident Voice site this morning. Michael K. Smith makes a number of very logical arguments on the health care (or as he calls it, the Disease Care) debate. Anyone who has read anything I posted on this issue knows that I am a confirmed skeptic on the question of how much the proposed reforms will really benefit anyone. The most likely beneficiaries are the health insurance industry and the medical/pharmaceutical industry. If that mess they call reform passes one of the provisions most likely to pass is the mandate that everyone carry health insurance or face a fine for failing to do so. I am sure our legislators (or rather the representatives of big pharma, big insurance, and big medical) think they are being kind and generous by offering need based programs to subsidize the poor and tax credits to take some (not all, by any means) of the sting out of what the middle class will have to pay. That is a massive windfall for them while I have seen nothing that will ensure that costs are in any way contained. Another point that Smith makes that is well taken but largely ignored is that reform fails to address any of the real causes of illness and, if they did, the economic hit for individual companies and industries as well as society in general would be massive.