What part of 30% vs. 5% do some of you not understand?
That’s the difference in insurance vs. Medicare overhead, the 25% part that results in denied care and dropped policies, disastrous bankrupcies when there’s a medical emergency.
And all for a US system that WHO rates number 37 in the world.
Solution: Medicare eligibility age drops a year every year, and the cap is raised to cover it. Or just drop it to zero now, and get it over with. Pull the band-aid off all at once.
"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." –George Santayana
Those who never learned anything of the history get to repeat it flat-footed.
Someday the classified reports from the ’80s will be available, about how we (the US CIA and our ‘off-the-shelf enterprises’) created the Mujahadeen (sp?) by emptying MidEast jails, to play against the Russians. But then, I also like “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” –Aldous Huxley
Usually small areas, and not all at once. Fire Season is here whenever it’s hot, dry, and there’s been a lot of fuel grown. Recently, climate change is bringing Mexico’s hurricanes to help (but not quite in time this week.)
Some of these canyons have been quietly growing for several years, and they are so steep, there’s no way for a ground crew of intrepid firefighters to get in there. Unless there’s homes or human artifacts like the Mt. Wilson observatory and broadcast complex in the path, letting them burn out is the way now.
For most of the past century, there had been vigorous suppression of any burn, until the big Yosemite fire showed that it was often nigh impossible to do anything. When whites first came to that spectacular country, you could “ride at a gallop through the forest and not knock your hat off”, because annually, undergrowth was burned off by lightning in smoky smoldering burns, and then quenched by associated rains. Since that big burn, prescribed burns are posted (at least in the Valley) during safer parts of the year, to avoid such a buildup of fuel.
Here in Altadena, we’ve watched night after night as the burn front creeps and leaps across our lovely foothills, and our friends and neighbors a few blocks uphill have (in some cases against all sense) ignored or obeyed evacuation orders.
The moonrise the past few nights, and sunrise, have been quite orange, and the days tinged orange, a strong smell of smoke and ash deposits on everything.
Now if we can just get the Forest Service to get together some native seeds for re-seeding these areas, instead of the fast-growing imports (read fuel) they have been using to avoid erosion and mudslides once the rains come… It helps, but keeps the cycle going; Sigh (cough, cough).
