Federal Programs

Vaccines – Part One
May 15, 2026
Today’s blog post is about vaccines that were first named by Edward Jenner in a 1798 pamphlet. He was referring to the “smallpox of the cow” or cowpox. To quote from the 2025 book Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality by Dr. Peter McCullough and John Leake, “His proposal for inoculation with a weak form of disease-causing matter to prevent serious illness became the central concept of...
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Rural America – What They Keep Getting Wrong
June 1, 2024
In February 2024, a new book took the latest shot at rural America - White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. It has caused quite a stir. Does the subtitle sound familiar? it’s the latest word used to sell books, scare people, and recruit voters. The title is primarily applied to describe “those people” living in flyover, nowhere land. In the book ...
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100 Million People
July 15, 2022
I thought I’d read it wrong when I saw this heading in a recent posting from Kaiser Health News (KHN). I looked again and saw that the full title of the well-researched article was as follows: “100 Million People in America Are Saddled with Health Care Debt.” This is slightly less than one-third the estimated population in 2022. This 100 million includes 41% of adults “beset by a health ca...
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Out of Sight
April 15, 2024
This post is dedicated to a dear friend and an amazing woman. Several months ago, upon the recommendation of a friend, I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It’s not an easy book to read for two reasons. One is the postmodern vision Mitchell builds within linked stories – past, present, and future. “Like a series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes,” said Michael Chabon. The other reason is t...
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Social In-Security
October 15, 2020
We all face risks to our economic security throughout our lifetime including loss of wages, outliving one’s savings in retirement, and high health care costs at any age. In the US, we claim to meet these and other personal disasters through various social insurance programs – including the Social Security Act of 1935. According to various scholars, the Act was the “foundation on which modern...
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PE – Not Your Gym Class
June 15, 2022
Do you remember when the health insurance wordsmiths came up with “patient-centered care?” Like, who else was being treated? Martians? Now, we have yet another turn of phrase - “profit-centered care.” The latest is private equity (PE) companies acquiring hospitals, doctors, clinics, rehab centers, nursing homes, emergency rooms, and anything else remotely related to give investors a “hea...
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Nordic Know-How
April 1, 2022
Several years ago, I spent two weeks in Iceland, the first one in Reykjavik and the second in the far north. My friend and I stayed at an all-age, downtown hostel with a great bar and café. We met a lot of locals due to the amazing café cuisine. Most had been to the US – a kind of rite of passage like going to Disney Land/World for Americans. On our second week up north, we were in a snow bliz...
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The Catch-22 of US Healthcare
September 5, 2021
I worked in the health insurance industry from 1982 to 1989, with one regrettable relapse. My first job was with an HMO. I actually believed if we provided more preventive services and made care affordable, the health of all Americans would improve. Those were innocent days, before doctors’ practices were owned by venture capitalists, before medicine became Big Pharma, before insurance companies...
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