Toto, I’ve Got a feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

Dad turns 90 on April 13, so from my view, health insurance for seniors (Medicare) is working. As the years roll by, Dr. visits increase and of course the ubiquitous American appetite for prescription medication is spins out of control.

But there is a need to eliminate Medicare wasteful and corrupt spending, just like there is an urgency do the same for the Defense budget. So how do the masses feel, respond, or know what to think about the Budget. Most Americans can't even manage their own household $$$, spending beyond their means, using little of their brain to realize their earning potential.

This debate will now flame across the media and politicians will try to earn points and gain traction from sound bites. Most of these bites will be exaggerations, 1/2 truths, and will be purposely misleading and deceptive. This is how humans play the game.

So we'll never know what is really going on in our Federal and State programs because the accountants that guard the books, play a shell game with revenue streams and expenses, and develop ever more clever ways of creating deceptive P & L statements.

What is to be done? Annie and I talked about this today on the phone and agreed that there is nothing to be done. We sit on the sidelines as we get older, realizing it has always been this way with humans. We are helpless to create change because the evolution of mind, body and spirit takes 1000's of years; but along the way in every cycle of let's say 50,000 years the planet itself shifts, heaves, tips on it's axis and kills off enough living things to reset everything back to start.

How long has this been going on on Earth? Millions, maybe billions of years. No one knows. "It doesn't really matter anyhow"(sing it like the way Chicago did in the 60's and 70's). We will do what we do to stay sane, centered, and in balance. We focus on our family and job. We keep our eyes down staring out our feet as we trek through our lives, hoping for safe passage for all in our sphere.

We need good health as a basic element of our simplistic survival. We rely on the support of the government in a free society to subsidize our lives by giving us what amounts to vouchers to pay for health care and drugs. Wouldn't it make more sense to consider controlling the cost of health care by writing laws that standardize the charges of all health care services on a menu?

Yearly exam=$25  Teeth Cleaning=$15  Xray=$37  Cancer treatment=$175  Eye exam=$9  and so on.

Oh wait, now I remember. The democratic free enterprise system doesn't allow for those kind of controls. The market sets the prices. The wealthy can afford things, the poor cannot. The middle just struggles to get by.

As the Wicked Witch of the West said as she was melting into a pool of oblivion, "What a world, what a world ..... "   

I have a great image for a scene in a different life; a scene where evil do-ers will be completing the Witches speech as they disappear.

An image that someday a young girl (maybe a reincarnation of the David in the David vs. Goliath tale) will wield a sling shot and one small stone, manage to turn a mob into an uprising, and with simple common sense create the game changer.

Here is a hope that she/he will toss the proverbial water on the flames of corporate greed and the CEO's of ExxonMobile, Pfizer, and Halliburton will be melting into the pavement ranting: "Who would have thought that a little girl like you could destroy my wickedness."