July 14

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=canada+U.S.+water+conflict&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8Good morning and Happy Bastille Day. And welcome to half past July. Sunny though the sky is looking a bit pale. I don't know if that is because of smoke coming down from Canada or some high thin clouds. I just checked the Weather Channel which reports an air quality alert through tomorrow. We are in a stretch of high 80s and low 90s for temperature. I was able to get out to water the few plants I would like to see survive this year. We haven't had any significant rain for about a week and none is predicted til, maybe, mid week. We'll see if we actually get it. I pulled a couple of weeds but I am deferring the real work for when the temperatures drop enough to allow me to get out for longer periods.

The discussions over the Medicaid cuts the administration promised wouldn't happen but somehow did and what those mean for rural hospitals. Few of the commentators talked about what those cuts mean for URBAN hospitals. Well, this last weekend reporters at one of the Chicago stations talked about that issue. Three hospitals, including one of the largest, are planning staff layoffs and curtailing services or closing entirely. 

The COVID emergency and the extra funding that the Biden Administration managed to get through held off the crisis for a bit but the problems hospitals and other parts of our health care "system" are long standing. One of my brothers was supposed to have back surgery today but found out last week that the hospital he thought he would be using refused his Medicare Advantage insurance. His efforts to find another have hit a brick wall. The problem with insurance isn't a new one for him. A physicians group he has dealt with for a long time no longer accepts Medicare. His problems reminds me of the problem we had trying to find a new family doctor about a decade ago as many were no longer accepting Medicare. The problems include the perennial ones we have heard of so often: low compensation for services, difficulty getting services approved, increased paperwork. Trumps One Big Beautiful (NOT) BILL have only exacerbated the problems.

Watching BBC this morning I was intrigued by a brief mention of a controversy between Canada and the U.S. over water; in particular, over renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty which governs the relationship between the countries with regard to the river. Le Monde published this article on the matter last March. But I found this page by way of GOOGLE which also discusses similar problems over the Great Lakes Compact which covers the Great Lakes. We are also in a diplomatic tussle with Mexico over the distribution of waters from the Lower Colorado River. GOOGLE also had a good article on this issue.