Monday, January 06, 2025

Remote Care


 As our elected officials drift back to Washington, D.C. to resume their bickering, let’s hope they can at least find bipartisan support for extending Medicare reimbursements for Telehealth appointments.

It may seem obscure to younger, healthier folks but the ability to meet with your doctor remotely is critical for people with limited mobility but multiple health challenges. In fact, this issue perfectly encapsulates why we need government in the first place.

Everybody gets old. Along with age comes health problems. Doctors will treat you but they need to get paid. Most of us are of limited means, and Medicare, to which we’ve been contributing our entire working lives, is the government insurance program that reimburses doctors for those services.

During the Covid crisis, as the Times has reported, “Medicare expanded its telemedicine coverage substantially in 2020, and the expansion has regularly been renewed. That could all have ended on Dec. 31.”

The Times details what happened next:

“Supporters of telemedicine, also called telehealth, endured some nail-biting days as Congress considered a continuing resolution to fund the government past year’s end. Included in the 1,500-page bill was a two-year extension for expanded Medicare coverage for telemedicine.

“Republicans had agreed to the resolution, but changed their minds after Elon Musk and Donald Trump condemned it. “That killed the bill,” said Kyle Zebley, senior vice president for public policy at the American Telemedicine Association.

“Finally, Congress approved a narrower version, a three-month extension. So telemedicine lives, at least until March 31.”

So now the viability of this option hangs in the balance as we wait for the new Congress to act. As one of the millions of patients who relies on Telehealth, this one is deeply personal to me. So as the heartless billionaires prepare to cut the government to shreds, let’s hope this one escapes their shredder.

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

Sunday, January 05, 2025

Intermission


 I suspect I’m not the only one who feels a bit lost during this odd lame duck transition before the would-be dictator takes over the White House. I’ve wanted to feel joyful at what is indeed a joyful time of year, but always in the back of my mind there is this sense of foreboding about what comes next.

Accordingly, this newsletter has been a bit light on new political content as I prepare myself for the inauguration and what follows.

So while we’re on auto-pilot more or less, I’ve been posting some of my experiments with painting and photography from the past. There were a ton of transitions in my career (which has now entered its 60th year) and my sometimes chaotic personal life, and I’ve been open that I often went through periods of depression.

At such times, while writing helped me deal with the negative feelings, as did visits to therapists and the medications they prescribed, turning to the visual arts also brought some relief. I would photograph my surroundings, or paint what I saw around me. I absolutely adored color schemes, shapes and angles.

I have no particular skill as a painter or photographer, though one little-known fact about my journalism career is that I published photos in Rolling Stone before my first articles there.

***

Joe Biden’s final days in office may well mark the end of many of the traditions related to the peaceful transfer of power that we didn’t even recognize as significant until now, when they are threatened by a despot. It’s a time of grace and dignity, honoring the nation’s heroes, pardoning those who have earned our forgiveness, and preparing to leave power to a new team of people entrusted to lead the nation.

These feel like things we may not miss until they’re gone. In that regard, Biden’s Medal of Freedom ceremony Saturday was a lovely reminder of how things are supposed to work.

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

Saturday, January 04, 2025

Saturday Mix


Bottle Art (2007)

HEADLINES:

Notes on Photograph:

A mirror reflecting several empty sake bottles filled with water of many colors above stairs and yard.

***

Daily Video:

Bob Dylan - Talkin' World War III Blues (Live At Newport Folk Festival - 1963)

***

R.I.P. Alec Dubro, one of our reporters in the early days of the Center for Investigative Reporting, co-author of Yakuza, and a good friend; aged 80, on New Year’s Day.

at No comments:

Friday, January 03, 2025

Lost in Time

“Time is an illusion.” — Albert Einstein

(Ocean Beach 2008)

HEADLINES:

Lyrics

“Helpless” by Neil Young

There is a town in North Ontario
Dream comfort memory to spare
And in my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there

Blue, blue windows behind the stars
Yellow moon on the rise
Big birds flying across the sky
Throwing shadows on our eyes

Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless
Babe, can you hear me now?
The chains are locked and tied across the door
Baby, sing with me somehow

Blue, blue windows behind the stars
Yellow moon on the rise
Big birds flying across the sky
Throwing shadows on our eyes

Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless 

at No comments:

Thursday, January 02, 2025

Aging and Memory

That older people have memory problems is a given and the object of endless humor. And like many other cliches, stereotypes and random bits of conventional wisdom, this one is at least partially true, but the question is why? 

Ironically, it may be that older adults (60-85) actually have better memories than younger people, but we have to sort through so much more information that the retrieval process becomes an issue.

A study from the the journal Trends in Cognitive Science posits an intriguing theory to bolster this view.

The study suggests that the problem may be brain “clutter,” i.e., older people are trying to form too many associations between too many pieces of information.

Or in a shorthand formulation I prefer, maybe we just know too much.

“It’s not that older adults don’t have enough space to store information,” lead author Tarek Amer said. “There’s just too much information that’s interfering with whatever they’re trying to remember.” 

Older adults may have a harder time focusing on one piece of information because irrelevant information can be “stored in the same memory representation as the one that contains the target information,” Amer said. 

Anyway, I like this study for two reasons — one, because often people tell me that my own memory is noticeably better than when I was younger.

And two…

Oh dear, I can’t remember the second reason.

(I’ve posted earlier versions of this piece several times. Please note that I am not referring to of the cases of dementia that beset some older people. That is a separate, much more tragic matter.)

HEADLINES:

  • Who was Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the suspect in New Orleans truck attack? (Reuters)

  • Fireworks, gas tanks and camping fuel used in Tesla Cybertruck explosion outside Las Vegas Trump Hotel (CNN)

  • Montenegro shooting spree sees gunman kill 12 people including 2 children before turning gun on himself (CBS)

  • Elon Musk changes his name to Kekius Maximus on X (BBC)

  • Where the Panama Canal Quarrel Is Heading (WSJ)

  • At least 3 dead, multiple injured following massive New Year's Eve fireworks explosion in Hawaii (NBC)

  • Duelling arguments take shape in the TikTok-ban case (Economist)

  • Scientists make troubling discovery while researching alligators in the Florida Everglades: 'We need to get ready' (Yahoo)

  • Majority Of Americans Prefer Sprawl To Walkable Cities (The Onion)

  • Meet The ‘Living Fossil’ That’s Older Than The Dinosaurs (Hint: It Also Survived A Nuclear Blast) (Forbes)

  • Elon Musk gets new support in growing lawsuit against OpenAI (WP)

    Man Just Having One Of Those Decades Where He Doesn't Feel Like Doing Anything (The Onion)

 

at No comments:

Wednesday, January 01, 2025

Her Voice

Among my possessions are two things from my grandmother on my father’s side — her wedding ring and a 12-page typed manuscript about growing up in a hard-scrabble frontier family in Canada’s Huron County.

It was a difficult life. Born in the 1870s, she was the second youngest of eight kids. Her father mainly seems to have made money by selling things that he cleared from the land — logs and limestone — or that his wife and kids gathered like wild blueberries and raspberries. They did grow a few crops, and had an apple orchard, plus a few pear trees that didn’t produce. 

They also had a handful of farm animals.

She says that it was a two-mile walk to school and that many times her hands and feet “froze” in winter, but that they were fine once she was able to thaw them out. Her father sounds like a pretty uneven character who was abusive to the point that one by one all of the family members ran away, only to return for a while before disappearing once again.

When they left, they weren’t reachable even if they wanted to talk. There were no telephones yet. For my grandmother, after her own mother finally ran off, life became simply unbearable. She was expected to cook and clean the house for her father and older brothers and to stop going to school, which was her one true love.

Besides being able to see friends at school, she loved to read and write and make up stories.

When she was around 16 she finally ran away from home, taking her younger sister with her. They found another farm family where the situation was friendlier, and for the most part she finished her growing up and schooling there.

Eventually, as an older teen, she found happiness singing and dancing with other farm kids on Saturday nights until three or four in the morning, then grabbing an hour of sleep before rising to do another day’s hard work.

I had read about all of this in her manuscript before but that was soon after she died in the late 1960s, when I didn’t really appreciate it at the time. But recently as I reread it for the first time in many years, a new detail jumped out at me. When she was only 14 or so, my grandmother apparently wrote a book!

It must have been short and definitely was fiction, even though at the time she says she had not yet read a work of fiction by anyone else. She says her siblings loved her book and asked her to read it to them over and over. There is no indication what the story was about.

My grandmother was hardly what you’d call an intellectual. She didn’t come from a long line of literary greats, but she created stories of her own almost by instinct.

This novel of hers from 130 years ago apparently was not preserved. It would have been written with a pencil in some sort of school notebook, which was no doubt lost somewhere along the way.

All I have now is the knowledge that it once existed. Plus the additional fact that her youngest son, my father, also wrote an unpublished novel on his own, which I discovered among his possessions after he died.

At the very least, I know I’m nowhere near the first story-teller in my family. No doubt there were many others in the distant past. And I also won’t be anywhere near the last.

BTW, I also have my grandmother’s wedding ring, a simple metallic thing distinguished by a heart, given to her by David Weir, my grandfather who died two decades before I came onto the scene.

(I first published this two years ago in February.)

(Read also: Finding Dad’s Novel.)

(NOTE: Today we have a special addition of links below from my friend Leslie.)

HEADLINES:

LESLIE’s LINKS:

  • These Renaissance masterpieces cost multiples of Michelangelo’s paintings (WP)

  • Trump Wants Greenland and the Panama Canal. It’s About Climate. (NYT)

  • Ukraine Says It Downed Russian Helicopter With Sea Drone For First Time (RFE)

  • Why the world needs lazier robots (WP)

  • Trump Is Dismantling the Systems That Keep Us Safe. All Americans Will Suffer. (NYT)

  • Ukraine Live Briefing: Russia Halts Gas Flows To Europe Via Ukraine (RFE)

  • Ozempic economics: How GLP-1s will disrupt the economy in 2025 (WP)

  • The Atlantic Beefs Up Politics Coverage Under Trump (NYT)

  • Will The War In Ukraine End In 2025? (RFE)

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)