Goodness Orchard

There is in the news, heard over the radio and read in the newspaper (I don’t have television) a disturbing dissonance.  I also hear it in conversation with friends and snippets offered by passersby.  

The topic doesn’t seem to matter.  But common amongst it all there seems more passion than fact, more exaggeration than cautious statement, more hubris than humility.  It’s impossible to determine whether they represent a deviation from truth in passionate exaggeration or a devious deliberate lie to advance a cause or defame an opponent.  In the last thirteen years of observing my mother’s life and as her caregiver the final four years, there was never a delay in her health care under the government administrated Medicare program.  When her doctor retired or a specialist was needed for consultation, testing or surgery, the only delays were due to her health status, her indecision about who she wanted, or her doctors’ schedules.

It seems those who dogmatically present examples of Canadian citizens with life-threatening conditions denied timely treatment or a world class scientist who would not be alive had he been treated in a government run health program either do not do their homework or are seeking to sway public opinion with repeated falsehoods promulgated by persons of questionable intent.

I have spent most of my life without health care insurance.  My current “marketplace” insurance for prescription drugs has so far cost me more in the last two years than all the prescriptions I’ve had in 75 years!  The current premium is $48.00 per month but started at $15.00.  I have used it twice in the last four last years for two sinus infections spaced two years apart.  The prescriptions cost less than $35.00 each!  My son has had health care through the Veterans Administration that he could not have afforded before his military service.  Of course he has complained to me of slowness in reporting and some other non-critical health care delivery services.  I experienced this with a hospital with my mother but these incidents had no affect on the timeliness or effectiveness of their care.

Many of my friends are veterans from WWII to current conflicts.  Several have experienced minor glitches from time to time but over all have received timely, quality and effective care whether their needs were related to service or followed their retirement.  More recent negative press related to Veteran health care seems from reliable reports to be associated with specific installations, inadequate funding or incompetent management; deficiencies not uncommon among current citizen care delivery institutions, insurers and for profit health care managements.

Though this seems unrelated to things organic there is a strong connection.  The majority of U.S. farm workers have no health insurance, personal physician or dentist.  Nearly half of my small farm contemporaries have no health insurance and few are covered as I am by Medicare; but I have yet to find an affordable supplementary policy I  can afford.  Yet farming and farm work rank right up there with mining and logging/lumbering among the most hazardous occupation in the U.S.

So I encourage greater skepticism about the passionate media pronouncements that demonize government, ethnic or racial groups or classes of people.  Someone has an agenda about which they do not want you to know.

It is also worth remembering the prosperity of this nation can in large measure be traced to those protections made law that prohibit usury, provide compensation for workers injured on the job, provide for an eight-hour work day which mandates over-time pay for work beyond that limit, regulate the activities and practices of corporations such as those of the former Southern Pacific railroad which nearly strangled California commerce and agriculture earlier in our history and guarantees chartered bank depositors from loss in the event of bank failure.