Out Among Humans

We didn’t get to be a great nation by being gullible. But when it comes to healthcare, gullible we are.

We spend twice as much as the Japanese, Canadians, British and French. Two dollars spent on healthcare, one dollar wasted.

And the quality of our care? Forbes business magazine reports the U.S. is not ranked within the top ten for medical outcomes.

Hugely profitable medical, pharmaceutical and insurance interests push the argument that Americans should do battle with medical realities with little or no help from our government. That approach can leave families— even those with good coverage through employers — one tumor, one car crash, one tumble-down-the-stairs away from bankruptcy. (Medicare protection can’t come too soon.)

Politicians financed by the medical industry use the word “socialism” to scare us off of a plan to protect all Americans. They talk of free markets, competition and consumer choice, but our current system delivers on none of those promises.

Try unraveling your insurance riders or tracking the charges from an out-of-network emergency-room doctor, you’ll find yourself at the mercy of higher than average call volumes.

This is an election year. Let the candidates know you have an opinion on healthcare.

Their lives were controlled by the god that supplied their heat and light.

It dictated when they would plant and pick. They tracked the phases of the moon, and used the constellations to navigate home safely.

Around the Third Century BC, a Greek named Pythagoras speculated that the Sun is the center of the known universe. His ridiculous idea fell on deaf ears. And as for Earth being a sphere? They laughed.

Two millennia later Isaac Beeckman observed that we see the sun through something that has substance and presses down on us. Oxygen was identified as air’s most abundant element in the 1770s. Again, there were doubters aplenty.

We now know sunshine warms our planet using a short wavelength and that heat radiates back out at night with a longer wavelength. Not everyone agrees that excess ‘greenhouse gases’ trap those longer rays and allow less heat to escape.

There have always been those who distrust science.

Galileo was forced to denounce his heliocentric ‘heresy’ and spend the rest of his life under house arrest. In the 1800s surgeons refused to wash their hands, fearing people would blame them for spreading diseases.

You’re free to deny the sun will rise tomorrow but the Theory of Probability says otherwise — we’re able to predict to a nanosecond when the sun will break the horizon.

This coming Sunday morning at 04:19 (GMT), the Earth’s annual swing around the Sun will reach its solstice. We’ll see the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the exact opposite in the south.

Wendy came out of the gate fast.

By the seventh grade she was attending high-school classes alongside students years ahead. During high-school, she was recruited into undergrad studies at a flagship university.

At the same time Wendy liked earning her way. She babysat at $6.25 an hour, and at age fifteen took a job “breading chicken” until midnight. She had saved $10,000 before she was out of her teens.

She was young when she met the husband with whom she had a son and a daughter. Pursuing of an associate degree at her community college proved difficult and she decided she could afford to take a year off from her education.

Wendy will tell you that was a mistake.

The mother of two was forced back to work full time. She clocked so many hours that the restaurant “rewarded” her with empty promotion that stripped her of overtime pay.

Now years later as general manager at a restaurant chain, she’s responsible for hiring, firing, coaching, planning and sales — she knows hundreds of customers by first name.

The not large woman can “put away a truck” with the best of them. Wendy knows that food service is punishing and that her knees will creep up on her.

One of her goals is to celebrate her fiftieth birthday without a mortgage. She’s anxious to help her daughter in college avoid the crippling debt she finally managed to overcame.

There’s talk of one day owning a coffee house (cozy, lined with books) that will satisfy a love of engaging the public. There’s talk of fascinating places around the world patiently waiting for her to arrive.

But for now there’s a more immediate goal. Wendy Borges is bent on keeping the various generations of her family intact, and within reach. She comes from a community that places a value on these things.