Health Care Is Like Public Roads – Everybody Needs It and It Is Cheapest When Government Provides It

Health care is like the roads. Everyone needs it/them without exception.  Some can afford helicopters to minimize their use of the roads, just like some can afford their own darned hospital and staff, but they still need more than that sometime, somewhere.  And those folks are extremely few.  Everyone else needs health care and roads, so why should health care be privately insured, especially when the system has shown itself to be so incredibly costly and ineffective?

A Letter to My Kids About Smoking Tobacco

Hi kids,

I ran across an article by famous Stanford psychology professor Dr. Albert Bandura about the ways people avoid taking responsibility for what humanity is doing to the planet.  Those ways have been analyzed before around why we permit and use tobacco when it is so bad for us.  I took the following from Dr. Bandura’s paper where he talks about “moral disengagement”.  Please read it thoroughly and please stop smoking tobacco.

——–<begin excerpt from Dr. Bandura’s paper>—————————
Consider, by way of example, the enormous environmental resources, human investment, and industrial production activities it takes to grow, manufacture, transport, and market tobacco products that take the lives of over 400,000 people annually in the USA. Moreover, tobacco products account for a sizable share of the soaring health costs in societies requiring a lot of economic activity to fund. High smoking rates worldwide will usher in a global cancer epidemic. Promotion of this deadly product depends heavily on a vast network of otherwise considerate people engaged in a bewildering array of occupational pursuits. It includes (outline structure added by me):
- Agriculturalists defending their livelihood.
- Tobacco executives disputing that nicotine is addictive and that smoking is a major contributor to lung cancer.
- Chemists discovering ammonia as a means to increase the nicotine ‘kick’ by speeding the body’s absorption of nicotine.
- Biotech researchers genetically engineering a tobacco seed that doubles the addictive nicotine content of tobacco plants.
- Movie actors agreeing to smoke in their movies for a hefty fee.
- Funded scientists disputing evidence of harmful effects, and even historians sanitising the history of the tobacco industry.
- Advertisers targeting youth with merchandising and advertising schemes depicting smoking as a sign of youthful hipness, modernity, freedom and women’s liberation.
- Investors and shareholders seeking profits from this deadly product.
- Lawyers fending off liability suits against the tobacco industry.
- Legislators with bountiful campaign contributions not only exempting nicotine from the drug legislation even though it is the most addictive substance, but passing pre-emption laws that block States from regulating tobacco products and their advertising.
- Department of Agriculture essentially banning low-nicotine tobacco by making farmers ineligible for government price supports if they grow low-nicotine varieties.
- President Carter firing his head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for refusing to back off on the regulation of tobacco products.
- Trade representatives threatening sanctions against countries that erect barriers against the importation of US cigarettes.
- Tobacco companies dumping huge quantities of cigarettes in the tiny Caribbean island, Aruba, that serves as the distribution point for drug lords who launder their narcotics money through control of cigarette sales in Latin America.
- US Government opposing a worldwide ban on cigarette advertising and sponsorship of entertainment and sports events even with exemptions for countries with constitutional protection of such activities.

This is a remarkably vast array of environmental resources and talents recruited in the service of a deadly product that sickens and kills people when used as intended. It is an extraordinary feat of moral sanitization of a highly destructive product.

Analysis of the internal documents of the tobacco industry testifies to the extensive use of the various mechanisms of moral disengagement (White et al., 2007). By these exonerative means, employees of the tobacco industry see themselves as victimised defenders of human rights, fighting off zealous health posses, bent on depriving people of the pleasures of smoking. As shown in this example, moral disengagement is not just a matter of intrapsychic machinations operating at a subterranean level. It is rooted in a lot of social machinations by a huge cast of moral disengagers pursuing their livelihood in a diverse array of social systems. By diffusing responsibility through subdivision of the tobacco business, the contributors see themselves as decent legitimate practitioners of their trade rather than as parties to a deadly operation.
————<end of paper excerpt>————————
Smoking tobacco not only damages your health and can lead to your death, it puts money in the hands of people who will make the same thing happen to many others around the world, including organized crime and government agencies who cost us a lot of tax money but waste it on things that are not good for us.
Please read, think, and stop.  Please ask me if you have questions (but call me anyway).
love,
- Dad/Tim

Finally, I AM Somebody!!!

I feel like Steve Martin in the movie The Jerk (if you haven’t seen it, rent it – it is hilarious). He goes nuts when the new phone books arrive and his name is listed, yelling “I AM somebody!” I wrote about this day in my autobiographical song “Can a Mandolin Rock?”, and I finally made it happen. I have resumed writing songs after a 35 year hiatus, and am happier than ever, including with the results. I have 8 under copyright now, with 5 of them on myspace.com, and two more I plan to copyright today, one of which just HAS to go on myspace as well. Please give them a listen and let me know what you think.

MySpace.com – Tim Prosser the Mandolin Maniac – Folk Rock / Indie / Other – www.myspace.com/themandolinmaniac

Now I just need to get a few gigs and publish a CD or two. I have almost enough material for an entire CD of original songs, and another CDs-worth of cover songs I perform solo on mandolin, including songs by Aerosmith, Van Halen, and many others you can currently hear at www.mandolinmaniac.com. Look It Up!

What’s the Real Cost of a Marijuana Ticket in Ann Arbor, MI?

(I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the dates cited in first paragraph, and will refine this item when I have time to do more background research – but the point stands.)
First some background: Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA is a quiet college town of about 110,000 residents with a strongly liberal nature. Sometime in the 1970’s the city council agreed that throwing people in jail for possessing small amounts of marijuana was wrong, and enacted an ordinance providing for a $5 fine for such an offense, instead of much more severe penalties possibly including jail time under state law. Some conservatives have spoken scathingly of Ann Arbor ever since that time, citing the “$5 fine” as proof that the city was a hotbed of vacuous liberalism (or something like that). I am writing this not only to refute that image, but to illustrate where the so-called war on drugs, this failed prohibition in a great many ways identical to the prohibition of alcohol that ended in the 1920’s, has gone.

Last year my friend’s 20 year old daughter had her door broken down at 6AM by the local narcotics enforcement team. It is probable that someone had tipped them off (wrongly) that hard drugs were being sold on the premises, as in the next few weeks they raided a number of homes on lots adjacent to this young woman’s home. They held her and her boyfriend, keeping them standing naked in handcuffs in the living room for around an hour, while they tore the place apart. They pulled down the acoustic tile ceiling, pulled out the contents of the drawers and cupboards, but In the end found nothing but a joint’s worth (perhaps a gram) of marijuana on the coffee table. Finding nothing more, they eventually wrote her a ticket before leaving the place in a shambles.

The real cost was:
+ ticket for marijuana possession $105 (what happened to the $5 fine Ann Arbor is so famous for?)
+ court costs $550
+ attorney $1500 (her father did not want her left to the grossly-overloaded public defenders)
+ 9 months probation @ $45/mo. $405 (sentence reduced from 12 months – could have been worse)
+ 20 weeks of 2-$25 sessions/wk at Dawn Farms rehabilitation center $500
Total: $3160

That’s your FIVE DOLLAR FINE!!!!!!!

That does not include the cost of transportation to the 8 days of community service work, the lost income of those 8 days, transportation to the probation office for random drug tests and meetings with PO, lost income from those appointments, lost income from going to court multiple times, the father’s lost income to attend court and other meetings, etc., etc. …

This illustrates how ridiculous our drug laws are, and how minor offenders get treated like assault weapon-toting organized criminals and have their lives ruined for minor offenses. A parallel is available in how things changed after alcohol prohibition was made law.

Alcohol prohibition failed miserably, building both criminal and government bureaucracies that still exist today. Those bureaucracies have fought to avoid any common sense being applied to this issue, and filled our culture and the world with propaganda about drugs that has caused untold and immense human suffering and destruction far beyond that wrought by the drugs themselves.

How different would our country be if drug problems were addressed by doctors instead of police, judges, lawyers, and jailers?
- half, or less than half, the current prison population and associated cost
- billions of taxpayer dollars available for education, better health care, or a myriad of other positive things
- a much less overloaded police force with more time to apprehend real criminals and not those manufactured by drug prohibition
- significantly more tax revenues if marijuana was treated like alcohol
- many thousands of lives saved every year, not lost to organized crime, gang wars, overdoses, etc.
- reduced revenues for organized crime and anti-government forces in foreign countries
- reduced drug cost when heroin can be used instead of the synthetic heroin oxycodone, and cocain can be used instead of high-priced synthetic versions

The list can go on and on – those are only the alternatives that occurred to me right away – there are many more reasons drug prohibition should be ended, and control of ALL drugs, and not just all but an arbitrarily propagandized short list, should be turned over to medical authorities.  Stop the insanity!  The world will respect us for our good judgement and ability to recover from incredible mistakes of the past.

Bad News Versus Medical Scares

I’m not out of the woods yet, but my pulmonologist thinks I don’t have lung cancer.  He said none of the many spots on my lungs look “busy”, which I interpret to mean that they don’t show the signs of greatly increased circulation development around them characteristic of most cancers.  He has scheduled me for another CT scan in late September (2 months) to see if anything changed.

The lump under my arm that showed up on the scans he couldn’t evaluate, so he is sending me to a surgeon (a Dr. Mazzeo) to have a biopsy taken.  He thinks it may be some kind of lypoma (I have a couple of those on my back that are noticeable, but quite firm, and I’ve had them for over 20 years.)  The more I look at it the larger it looks.  It must be be 9 or more inches vertically and possibly 5 inches wide, but only perhaps 3/4 inch thick at the thickest spot, and mostly a lot thinner.  I just can’t believe I didn’t notice it before, and hope it isn’t growing rapidly.  It’s not firm like my others, but quite soft and squishy.  I’m hoping for the best, but feel like I’m at least near the “edge of the woods.”

Best of luck to you all – Tim
————
I am happy to relate that I had that mass of fatty tissue removed and it was quite benign.  Follow up scans of my lungs have shown no activity, and I have put my health anxieties in remission.  <knock on wood>  All is well, and I thank my very excellent doctors.  Best of luck to all in 2009.  – Tim
PS – The one thing I forgot to ask the surgeon for was to remove the lypomas around my waistline. 

Handling Bad News

Back in January of 2008 I started having just the most vague pain in my left kidney area, and every day for three months it got a little more noticeable. Finally it was becoming an actual “pain”, so I called my doctor in March and went to see him. He poked and prodded me, and suggested maybe it was a kidney stone, but had me get an abdominal CT scan to make sure. The CT showed a couple of tiny stones, which he said shouldn’t be causing me any pain, and a cyst of some sort on my spleen. Over the next month or two the pain subsided and became intermittent, and finally just about went away. On the CT, however, the radiologist had noted a spot on my lung, off to the side in the scan, so I had to go back for a chest CT scan a week or so later. There is no way to know the source of the pain, but I thought it was the cyst on my spleen.

The reading on the chest CT showed a nodule in one of my lungs, and my doctor and I agreed to do another scan in a few months and see if anything had changed. In June I had the follow-up CT scan for comparison, but at a different clinic in St. Joe’s hospital across the street from the first CT lab. After a few days I called my doctor’s office, who told me it would take a full 2 weeks to get the results. After two weeks I called again, and my doctor said the radiologists hadn’t done the comparison, but had noted a nodule 7 mm in size, etc., etc., and he wanted me to see a pulmonologist. The pulmonologist’s office called to schedule the appointment, but on a Friday before a busy weekend, and I missed getting their message until the Monday appointment they wanted me to attend was past. They set me a new appointment with a Dr. Bill Patton for eight days later, on a Wednesday. Meanwhile I had called my doctor’s office a couple of times but he hadn’t called me back, as I wanted to know the results of the comparison report.

Meanwhile, my wife was quite nervous and very upset with my doctor. She’s a neuropsychologist who works at a pain clinic, and today (7/29/08), the day before my pulmonology appointment, she got my information from the radiologists and had two of her doctor colleagues take a look at it. She called me and said she is going to my appointment with me tomorrow, and I knew it must be bad news. She is very dedicated to her work, and wouldn’t have take time off for such a thing if it was routine.

I skipped my regular weight training class tonight, and she came home earlier than usual from work (around 7PM) and we talked. She had the second scan report in her hand, but said the radiologists still don’t have the data from the scan in March. I didn’t read the report in detail myself, but she said it indicates I have multiple nodules in my lungs and a fatty mass of some kind in one armpit. She also is really ticked at my doctor, as the radiologists had sent him their report “stat”.

Having been through one of my second wife’s bouts with cancer right after we got married in 1995, I think I understand the issues and “the drill”. Tomorrow the pulmonologist will want to talk about what they know and set a plan to do a bronchoscopy (my wife’s doctor friends say that’s most likely) to get some cells to test and examine. I think it possible they might also do a needle or other biopsy on the mass under my armpit.

Once they know exactly what they are dealing with I will probably be sent to an oncologist, and a plan for chemotherapy will be set up, with me starting treatments within days. My wife’s friends said it might be sarcoiditis, treatable with steroids, or it might be something called proliferative neoplasm – apparently an aggressive type of cancer. In either case, if there are multiple nodules it would indicate a systemic problem that wouldn’t be addressable through surgery or possibly radiation, so that would save me the cutting and radiation-related discomforts. It could also be something in the middle, not extremely aggressive and susceptible to chemotherapy.

I guess I’ll find out tomorrow. I am resigned to fighting the good fight, staying positive, and making the most of every minute, as I learned to do with my second wife. Nobody knows how long they’ve got, so that’s the best approach for anyone, sick or not. Life is good, and beats the alternative.

At least I don’t have to go through the month of terror and not knowing that I went through with my second wife back in 1995. It took us that long to arrive at the positive attitude I just described, but after that we started having weekly happy hour get-togethers with our best friends and going to the movies once a week. Life was good, even as she went through fourteen months of chemotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant procedure that put her 800 miles away for 6 weeks and almost killed her by itself. She won out, though, and we had another wonderful 5 years together. I hope to do as well or better myself, but at least I already know how to live, come what may.

The saddest part I am facing is how the news may affect my family and friends. I know it will be tough for them, and wish I could spare them that. It will be a life lesson for them, though, and hopefully they will pick up the positive attitude about life that I gained in the past, and it will help them live better lives from here on.

I expect that writing this blog will be therapeutic for me, too. This whole messy thing represents a bit of a speed bump in my life, which was going better and better as I enjoyed my third (and wonderful) marriage, wrote blogs, wrote and played music, and generally did things I love to do like there was no tomorrow. I will continue on with that lifestyle as long as I can, however long that may be, and … now I have something else to blog about!

Please feel free to comment, but I appreciate it if you keep it up-beat and refrain from too much detailed sharing of experiences. It’s different for everybody, but the attitude is what counts. I feel healthy and strong today, probably stronger at 57 than I’ve ever been in my life, and I plan to continue everything I can, including looking for a new job (I was laid off from my day job ten days ago … <bleh>).

Best to all – Tim

Microsoft Provides Protection against Aliens and Paraplegics?

Sitting in a meeting, semi-bored, I noticed that one of the PCs along the wall had on its screen the little box that says “Press control-alt-delete to begin”. It suddenly struck me that I could translate this into “Prove you have both your arms, or one fairly large hand, to begin”. Is this discrimination against people who have lost an arm?

Later it occurred to me that it might also prevent certain types of aliens from using a PC. Is that what they were thinking?

The Education Crisis in America – How Bad Is It?

I sometimes get outside of the college town I live in, and find appalling anecdotal evidence of an education crisis in the U.S.   Last week my wife was in a rehabilitation center and had two odd things occur.  She needed an ice bag for her knee (recent knee surgery), and usually the staff put ice in a plastic bag and then put the plastic bag in a pillow case for her.  On one occasion, however, she noticed that she felt cold and wet.  When she checked, she realized the nurse’s aide had just put ice cubes in the pillow case … no plastic bag involved … and given it to her.

Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, she asked a nurses aide later for some iced tea.  The aide brought her a cup of ice, a tea bag, and some water. This sort of occurrence really scares me.  It was one thing to worry about emergency room aides that couldn’t read or understand the medication instructions, but another to think that there are young people working for us who don’t know enough to put ice in a plastic bag, or to know what iced tea is … Pretty wierd.

Jack Bauer of 24 – Is He Really a Hero?

NPR carried an article this morning, which I heard on my drive to work, which got me thinking.  They noted past iconic media heroes, the Lone Ranger, Batman, and Superman (if I remember correctly) as heroes of the 20th century, and then proposed Jack Bauer, lead character in the ultra-violent TV series “24″, as a hero for the 21st century.

I completely disagree.  The difference I see is that the aforementioned 20th century heroes all were regarded as such because they exemplified positive values, even as they actively defended the defenseless.  The NPR article noted the use of torture and extreme violence by Jack Bauer, even against his own family, and his devotion to a higher goal – the protection of the United States and its citizens at all cost.  They also cited his willingness to put nothing, including his personal safety, ahead of that goal. 

To their credit, the NPR news team did note that, while Jack Bauer frequently uses torture, it has been consistently shown not to work in the real world, and that the show’s producers had been approached with a request to “tone it down”, but resisted doing so, basically saying that it would detract from the show’s appeal.  NPR also noted that the show appeals to many people who see it as indication that there are teams of people working hard to secure our safety (undoubtedly related to the scare tactics the conservative media and administration have used against us since 9/11/01). 

I have great difficulty seeing Jack Bauer in the same light as the 20th century heroes, and don’t believe that killing and torture were practices they would have ever carried out.  In short, we need real heroes with solid, humane principles, not scary, ultra-violent, ends-justifies-the-means TV figures.

On Censorship of Communications Media – Text Messaging

I wrote the following in support of PublicKnowledge.org’s letter writing campaign, as a comment on FCC WT Docket No. 08-7, Petition for Declaratory Ruling that Text Messages and Short Codes are Title II Services or are Title I Services Subject to Section 202 non-Discrimination Rules. More information from the FCC on this issue can be found at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-08-78A1.pdf.

Verizon’s blocking of NARAL’s text messaging campaign violates the principles of Free Speech which are critical to our nation’s democratic system.  The unrestricted ability to communicate with the people and organizations of my choice is just as important in text as it is in voice.