December 15

 Cloudy, foggy, and a bit warm for mid December. We had rain overnight and may be getting a light mist in addition to the fog. We have a nice soccer day today with three back-to-back games. I changed out the Fall door wreath for a Winter wreath. I had intended to make some changes but I will wait until I take the wreath down for Spring.

Bill Astore has a good post on the American health wealth care system. Another blogger has called it the "sick care" system. Both get to the same point: the system is designed to make sure the medical insurance industry, corporate medical service industry, drug industry, and medical devices industry stay wealthy and get wealthier. They do that by 1) denying service whenever possible, 2) charging as much in fees (like co-pays) and creating service limitations (lifetime limits) and 3) pushing drugs or treatments which don't rally cure diseases and keeps patients on the hook for their lives (weight loss drugs which work but which you can't stop if you want to maintain the weight loss). 

I will make a couple of observations. First, the insurance industry AS A WHOLE has problems. With the number of weather related/environmental disasters property insurers are also having profitability problems which they deal with in the same way the health sector does: denying claims, paying claimants as little as they can if they can't deny payments all together, refusing to renew coverage (which may lead mortgage holders to call the loans), or jacking up the premiums into the financial stratosphere. And so much insurance is required: auto insurance by law, homeowner's insurance by mortgage holders, property insurance for business by lenders and law, etc. But insurance is becoming an unsustainable financial burden and major time tax for the insured. Second, That some parts of the social media ecosystem seem to consider Mangione something of a hero is hardly surprising. We can't really say how widespread the phenomenon is because social media is a very opaque system. You can't tell legitimate sentiment form rabble rousers or even how many posts are discrete individual and how many are repeaters of some kind. But the outlaw hero is an old theme going back at least as far as Robin Hood who robbed the rich to support the poor. The unpopularity of the railroad robber barons whose business screwed small farmers while giving wealthy industrialists sweetheart deals gave rise to Jesse James and similar bandits. And, long before Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because "that's where the money is" predatory practices by bankers made some bank robbers outlaw heroes. It is an old tradition in western culture.

I would have laughed at this CROOKS & LIARS article if it didn't say something so truly angering about the avarice of the medical industry. If you can make more money doing "surgery" then defining as much as possible as "surgery" is way to pad your bank account.

The ANCIENT MARINER complained about "water, water every where and ne'er a drop to drink. According to this Guardian article the island of Sicily there is too little water anywhere. The mariner was surrounded by sea water (not good to drink) while Sicily is in the midst of an unprecedented drought. The reservoir featured in the article saw the water level drop from 30m cubic feet to 290,000. When the government ordered the local towns to send water to towns in neighboring provinces the local people said "NO" and turned up to guard the distribution center.