Health Care

I don't know a lot. Anyone who knows me fairly well can confirm that for you. I can name like three trees, and I didn't know that the abbreviation cyn. on California road signs was an actually an abbreviation for canyon, bur rather thought that it wasn't an abbreviation at all but this weird CA proclivity to attach the word cyn to certain roads. I shit you not. The revelation that it was in fact just an abbreviation for canyons came in my early twenties, six years or so after I'd started driving, on a dark night driving back up to my home in Chico and my head lights hit this particular green sign full on, and I had this flash of inspiration like great scientists have when making a breakthrough, except that the breakthrough was that I had been reading road signs like a complete jackass for an obscenely long time.

I don't understand the health care law. I do understand that health care now consumes twice as much of our government budget as it did roughly fifty years ago. I also know that demographically speaking we are getting older. The post war baby boomers are getting up there in age and an era of birth control has lead to a population distribution issue that we haven't really encountered as a country. We're going to have a bunch of people highly dependent on medical treatments that are supposed to be shouldered by a much smaller number of working age folks. This is a problem. And it's the sort of problem that is going to have to be solved creatively. I realize that the majority of people are happy with their health care, but we are first amongst industrialized nations in cost and 34th in quality of care. So, we're not doing it all that well, and it's only going to, demographically and thus cost, get worse. That's why I'm a bit saddened to think that we might start moving backwards on health care. Because we don't really have time to talk about the good old days, which always turn out to have never existed. The health care law, by no means perfect, was a first step, but many more needed to follow. I'm not sure that going back to crawling is going to get us to safety any faster.