December 18

Cloudy and rainy today but fairly warm. Should reach the low 50s. We also have some wind rattling the trees. I spent the morning doing a couple of lessons on Duolingo and working on my Ancestry family tree and finding what all their programing will do. Just playing around I found an aunt's obituary on Facebook. That was a surprise.

The news is pretty much what it has been for days. Whether it is healthcare, or the latest school shooting, the shooting in Australia, Trump's push against Venezuela, the Ukraine/Russia mess, the Gaza catastrophe. The talking heads keep talking but the treadmill keeps on running. 

Stray though as some talking head mentions the attempt to get support for a "one time" payment to individuals so they can buy their own health insurance. I said in an earlier post that they are asking people who don't have the money for health insurance without the subsidies to somehow find the money for a "health savings account." But this morning I my thoughts went into a slightly different but parallel line. Once upon a time not so very long ago my dad had a pension and health insurance through the Teamsters which paid out until he died. My stepfather and brother worked in the steel mills and had pension and health insurance through union negotiated plans. Those paid out for stepdad died. My brother is now, and has been for a bit more than a decade, receiving his pension. However, the health care plan has become somewhat unreliable as the company got out of providing direct care through a company run clinic. The union now runs both the pension and health plan but it decided to go with an insurance company which has such a bad reputation for slow, shorted, and contested payments that many medical hospitals and doctors' groups won't accept it. But that is only part of my musings. I am also remembering a process that gained steam in the 1980s where many companies stopped agreeing to provide pensions themselves and pushed employees into IRAs. They argued that such plans would increase because in addition to contributions from the employee and the company the funds would be invested and earn interest. However, many of those funds took severe hits during various downturns and didn't fully recover what was lost. The companies got out from under growing costs as employees got older. However, the costs continued to grow and someone else, usually the employees themselves, had to cover them.

Another stray thought: several commentators have noted that one of the probable consequences of the expected explosion of insurance costs as ACA subsidies go away a lot of people will have to cancel their plans which will force the insurance companies to raise their premiums which will put pressure on their remaining customers. That is a cycle which can't go on very long before the companies have to get out of the market or go bust. See what has happened with homeowners insurance in the wake of all too frequent disasters. Corbin Trent at AMERICA'S UNDOING says much the same thing.

CROOKS&LIARS posted a very telling cartoon on where we are now. I have wondered how long before our government starts to demand all of us carry internal passports and check in with the local police where ever we go. I read about things like that--in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Yet another stray thought: the Trump administration has done a very good job of convincing some of us that their "information" and especially with health information. For most of my life vaccines have proven effective. I am on the cusp. I was born six years before the first polio vaccines were released. I didn't get my first polio shot until I went to boot camp at age 19. Actually, I think that was when I got all of the then available vaccines and I didn't have a choice. But my brother visited yesterday and he said he thought his primary doctor was rather disgusted with him. When the doctor asked if he had received a flu shot, the RSV vaccine, and the latest COVID jab Brother told him "No." Whereupon Brother was reminded that "at your age" getting any of those bugs might mean hospitalization and even death. As the man left Brother reminded him that at his age (a couple of years younger than me) any number of things might kill him. I haven't had those shots either. But I look at it from a different standpoint. I don't often go out of the house and don't encounter crowds so the likelihood of being infected is low. I might get unlucky but who knows. As a couple of elderly characters say, in a novel I like, say when a younger person asks how they are reply "At my age one is either well or dead." So far, I am well. If things were different (I had to go out or a family member I saw came down with something, or there was a particularly virulent variant) I might make a different decision.