Among the people in my age range (60+) are many who are currently dealing with health issues, past and present. It's axiomatic that as you age, your body has ways of letting you know exactly what that is going to mean in your case.
And so when we get together, the conversation more times than not turns to health --our own and that of the others around us.
Furthermore, anyone who has had to navigate our convoluted health care system in this country knows there is a lot to talk about beyond specific medical conditions.
One topic is the many people you meet along the way -- EMTs, doctors, nurses, CNAs PTs, OTs, neurologists, psychiatrists, insurance agents, Medicare reps, AARP reps, Covered California reps, local reps, X-ray operators, CT scan operators, clinicians, PPOs, HMOs, EHRs, counselors, consultants, inpatient, outpatient, rehab and a legion of good-hearted volunteers.
For the most part they are a lot of nice people trying to do their best. And if you don't know some of those acronyms and abbreviations, consider that a good thing.
But many of us get lost in the system somewhere along the way. It is unnecessarily complicated compared to how one gets medical care in other advanced countries, and even some poor countries.
Many of my peers feel they worked their entire careers, paid into expensive corporate health plans and rarely took sick days only to end up retired on Medicare in a country where not every procedure or treatment they need is covered, and those that are covered require a large co-pay.
Let's face it. This just isn't fair. I'm aware that there is not anywhere near to a national consensus, let alone the political will, to establish a nationalized health care system, but frankly that is what we need -- desperately.
And that is one conversation that it shouldn't be up to the elderly, the retired, and the frail to lead.
***
* How Other Nations Pay for Child Care. The U.S. Is an Outlier. -- Rich countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care, compared with $500 in the U.S. The Democrats’ spending bill tries to shrink the gap. (NYT)
* Federal judge blocks enforcement of Texas law banning abortion as early as six weeks (WP)
* A federal judge ordered Texas to suspend the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., which since September has banned most abortions in the second-most populous state. It's the first legal blow to the law, but abortion services may not instantly resume because doctors still fear they could be sued without a more permanent legal decision. [AP]
* A ‘Historic Event’: First Malaria Vaccine Approved by W.H.O. -- Malaria kills about 500,000 people each year, about half of them children in Africa. The new vaccine isn’t perfect, but it will help turn the tide, experts said. (NYT)
* One state, Wyoming, has never taken in refugees. Will it welcome Afghans? (WP)
* The Facebook outage that struck Monday was ultimately a minor inconvenience for most Americans. But in countries like Brazil, it was a destabilizing experience because WhatsApp suddenly went offline with it. More than 2 billion people use WhatsApp. Brazil and India alone are home to nearly one-quarter of them. [HuffPost]
* Cash airlifts planned to bypass Taliban and help Afghans - sources (Reuters)
* The Afghan War: A Photographer’s Journal -- One of the first things the New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks witnessed after arriving in Afghanistan in late 2001, soon after U.S. airstrikes on Oct. 7 opened the invasion, was the execution of a wounded Taliban fighter. The scene shocked him, upending everything he thought he knew about war and about the Afghan Northern Alliance — the U.S.-aligned fighters who had been his guides and protectors, and the Talib’s killers. (NYT)
* Faced with losing their jobs, even the most hesitant are getting vaccinated (NPR)
* Immunity weakens faster in men than women after Pfizer vaccination, study finds (WP)
* The WHO has started shipping COVID-19 medical supplies to North Korea (NPR)
* U.S. weekly jobless claims post biggest drop in three months (Reuters)
* A New Vaccine Strategy for Children: Just One Dose, for Now -- Myocarditis, a rare side effect, occurs mostly after the second dose. So in some countries, officials are trying out single doses for children. (NYT)
* Federal authorities have posted some impressive numbers in the nine months since Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in support of his lies about a stolen election. But they've arrested just a fraction of all the potential defendants who were shown on video committing criminal offenses that prosecutors have said warrant charges, writes Ryan J. Reilly. [HuffPost]
* The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday released a sweeping report about how former President Donald Trump and a top lawyer in the Justice Department attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a coup. (CNN)
* Why Democrats See 3 Governor’s Races as a Sea Wall for Fair Elections -- Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all have Democratic governors and G.O.P.-led legislatures. And in all three battlegrounds, Republicans are pushing hard to rewrite election laws. (NYT)
* Dick Van Dyke Finally Confesses To Zodiac Killings (The Onion)
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