The first of May

It's a new month and I'm filled with optimism about several things:

-- Spring's arrival. Slept in until 8:30 and woke up to glorious sunshine. Heading into this weekend, we'd had rain 67 of the last 77 days in Portland. No wonder people were gloomy. Today feels like we've finally turned the corner toward warmer, drier days.

-- Life, lived simply: Took Otto on a long walk and appreciated anew some of the simple sights in our neighborhood: Someone's beautifully maintained bed of tulips. A young couple out for a morning run. A couple of graying boomers playing tennis. A yard sale bringing together the young and old. Nice to see the neighborhood coming alive.

-- My health: Went to the store to stock up on the various items I need to prepare for tomorrow's routine procedure: a colonoscopy. Been through it once before, so I know what to expect. Keeping my fingers crossed that there are no problems. And feeling fortunate to have affordable health insurance in these times.

-- Tuesdays, reclaimed: With the end of our bowling league season last week, I can look forward to four months of Tuesdays with no obligations. An extra weeknight will be a luxury for Lori and me. Knowing it's there in the bank makes it easier for me to think about starting another activity -- possibly drop-in volleyball on Wednesday nights. We'll have to see how the knees respond.

-- Work: Just completed four months in my new job as a community news web editor. At times there's been a gulf between what I expected to do and what I've actually done these first few months, but I realize it goes with the territory. Main thing is I feel comfortable in the web-first news environment and hope to have something splashy and tangible to show for my efforts as I work with others on the development of a network of independent bloggers that wound be linked to from OregonLive.com. More details to come in future posts.

-- My blog: I'm adding a new feature, the A to Z Music Month. See the post below for more details.

Photo: www.freepixels.com

First day of winter

Wasn't it just yesterday I was writing about the first day of spring?

Whew! Time does zoom by when you're busy. No need to rehash the specifics, so I'll just launch into a late-year Quick Takes entry.

-- It's 44 degrees and dry at the moment, a far cry from the frigid weather (highs in the teens) of two weeks ago and the thorough soaking we got last week. A year ago, we had a white Christmas -- actually, a little too much snow for most Portlanders' taste, as it ground things to a halt in this snowplow-averse city. I wouldn't mind a light dusting this year, but the forecast is partly sunny with a patch of morning fog. I'll take it.

-- We hopped on the bus at mid-day yesterday and bought a lovely photograph for our new place at Saturday Market. It had been a couple of years (shame on me) since I'd been down there, so it was a pleasant surprise to stroll through the booths under a clear covering just south of the Burnside Bridge. You can smell the market before you see it (a generic greasy smell, comingling the scents of elephant ears and various stir-fries) but it's always fun to see the characters on both sides of the artists' booths.

These last few days at the market are called The Festival of the Last Minute, but there was plenty of elbow room yesterday. Hmmm...Does that mean people had already done most of their shopping? Or is it a sign of the still-weak economy?

-- Today's top headlines are all about what I'd come to fear would never happen: The Senate moved incrementally closer to passing a universal health care bill. Yeah, yeah, yeah...it's far from perfect. But as Obama has said, "Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good." **

We'll see what happens next when the Senate and House conference committee members try to resolve differences in the two plans.-

** Evidently, the quote originated with Voltaire. (I'm not in the habit of quoting 18th century French philosophers, so how was I to know?) Anyway, I learned of that when I clicked on this Web site: The Happiness Project.

From it, I'm sharing author Gretchen Rubin's Twelve Commandments below. Not a bad list...

Twelve Personal Commandments

• Be Gretchen.
• Let it go.
• Act the way I want to feel.
• Do it now.
• Be polite and be fair.
• Enjoy the process.
• Spend out.
• Identify the problem.
• Lighten up.
• Do what ought to be done.
• No calculation.
• There is only love.

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize

Well, that was fast.

Obama's been president not enough nine months and here he is being awarded what, from my perspective, is the single most prestigious award in the world. Some might argue that winning the Nobel for medicine or science might be as high -- or even higher -- an honor. But in my book, you don't get to research medical or scientific breakthroughs, or write transformative literature or develop a novel economic theory, unless there is peace.

Some will call it premature to bestow the award on Obama this early into his term. After all, the Feb. 1 deadline to nominate someone for this year's prize meant his name was put into play less than two weeks after his Jan. 20 inauguration. Plus, with inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic or military hotspots presenting themselves from Pakistan to Palestine, from Iran to North Korea, there's nothing concrete that our new president has accomplished in any of those areas. Which is not to say he won't achieve some kind of breakthrough in due time.

A co-worker at The Oregonian, David Sarasohn, noted wryly in the column he wrote for this Sunday that Arizona State University had opted not to confer an honorary degree on Obama when he spoke at the school's commencement in May, contending that his "body of work is yet to come." As if being the first African American president in our 233-year history wasn't enough of an achievement. I'm guessing ASU would like a do-over.

In the meantime, The Associated Press reports, the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee said awarding Obama the peace prize could be seen as an early vote of confidence intended to build global support for the policies of his young administration.

They lauded the change in global mood wrought by Obama's calls for peace and cooperation, and praised his pledges to reduce the world stock of nuclear arms, ease U.S. conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthen its role in combating climate change.

While I'm among those surprised by the Nobel going to Obama this soon, I have no doubt he will accomplish great things as president.

It's not just his oratorical skills but his towering intellect, calmness under pressure and amazing ability to multitask that make him a transformative international figure. He speaks from the heart, as well as the head, when he calls for diplomatic engagement over brute force as the way to peace. And he has given people around the globe reason to hope for a better future, one in which they can strive to better themselves educationally and economically while the United States moves away from the belligerent, me-first posture the characterized the George W. Bush administration.

Ironic, isn't it, that W's father is the one who vowed in his 1988 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that he would work to make the United States "a kinder and gentler nation."

Wouldn't it be nice to hope that the prestige of winning the Nobel would translate to Obama having greater clout on Capitol Hill? The longer the health care reform "debate" drags on, the more exasperated I become at the influence of the medical insurance companies and the failure (stupidity?) of millions of Americans to realize that comprehensive reform is in their best interests.

I realize there's no direct connection between receiving an international award and rounding up enough votes in the Senate to not only pass legislation but invoke cloture and shut off debate. But one can always wish, right?

Photo by The Associated Press

Quick takes for the AARP set

Carol Goss, 55, right, has retooled her image and landed a job with an architectural firm in Portland.

Journalists like to think in "threes" so here is a trio of items relating to work, romance and, health. Coincidentally, these pieces are all linked by their focus on issues facing people in their 50s.

-- Older workers tend to fare better than younger ones during a recession, the old adage goes, because their experience, skills and seniority give them an advantage when employers are considering layoffs. By another measure, older workers have a more difficult challenge when they find themselves out of work. Age discrimination, though illegal, can be hard to prove; plus, a person's physical appearance (thinning hair, a gut) or how she or he dresses (pleated pants) can be a negative in the eyes of a much younger interviewer.

Paige Parker of The Oregonian took a look at some of the issues facing older workers in a piece that ran earlier this week: "To find a job, older workers might want to look in the mirror..." Nationally, she noted, Nationally, unemployment among workers 45 and older is at its highest in the 61 years the Department of Labor has tracked it.

-- Looking for love? The Rev. Christine Shiber, 57, a Methodist minister in California, was the subject of a New York Times piece, that explored the issues facing women who find themselves single and dating again in their 50s. After divorcing her husband of 30 years, Shiber, below, switched jobs, joined a prayer group, started working out (losing 25 pounds), jumped into social networking, went to dance clubs and reconnected with friends at class reunions -- all to no avail.

"If it feels as if the remarriage odds are bad for a woman in her 50s, they are," reporter Michael Winerip writes. "According to 2001 census data, 41 percent of women 50 and over who’ve been divorced have remarried, while 58.4 percent of divorced men that age are remarried." Why the difference? Men often choose someone younger, less educated and making less money when they remarry.

-- Health care reform. In an earlier post, "Health care for all: Now!" I referenced a newspaper article by T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent, that discussed five myths about health care around the world. The piece was based on reporting he did for a book, "The Healing of America," that recently earned a favorable review in The New York Times.

In the book, Reid describes his experiences in different countries when seeking diagnosis and treatment for a chronically stiff shoulder. Reviewer Abigail Zuger, a doctor herself, says, "The Healing of America” blends subjective and objective into a seamless indictment of our own disastrous system, an eloquent rebuttal against the arguments used to defend it, and appealing alternatives for fixing it. Sounds like a good read.

Photo of Carol Goss by Ross William Hamilton, The Oregonian. Photo of Christine Shiber by Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times.

Going to the doctor

Today I saw my physician for my annual physical. It had been nearly 18 months since my last one and I'd had no issues in between.

"If I were to give you a gold medal and blue ribbon," he asked, "would that tell you what kind of shape you're in?"
With all due modesty, I wasn't surprised. I began the day with a 6:30 a.m. swim, feeling fortunate as always to live five minutes away from the pool and know I have no physical limitations, whether I choose to swim, run, ride a bicycle or lift weights, my usual forms of exercise. My cholesterol levels are good, I take no medication, my blood pressure and heart rate are fine, I've never broken a bone or been hospitalized (except for that tonsillectomy when I was 2)...

So why was I turned down when I applied to increase my life insurance last year?

"Don't get me started," my doctor said. "If you see a doctor for any reason any time in the past year or two, the insurance companies will reject you." He's quit writing letters on behalf of his patients because they're uniformly ignored. He even had to go through several rounds of appeals to get his healthy 21-year-old daughter insured.

I bring all this up not to gloat about my own health but because it's so jarring, and so discouraging, to know the big picture in this country.

Today's Oregonian reported that the cost of family health insurance premiums in Oregon have doubled since 2000, outpacing increases in income by four times.

Between 2000 and 2009, the average annual premium paid by employers and workers for family health coverage climbed from $6,654 to $13,378, a 101 percent jump, reported Families USA, a nonpartisan nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. During the same period, the median earnings of Oregon's workers rose from $22,401 to $27,743, or about 24 percent. (See the report here.)

$13,000-plus for health insurance? That's obscene.

Earlier this week, my colleague Galen Barnett posted the latest raw numbers and percentages of Oregonians without health insurance:

--The number of uninsured in Oregon has increased from 430,000 in 2001 to 621,000 in 2008. The percent of non-elderly adults without insurance increased from 15.2% to 21.5%. And this number only considers people who are uninsured for an entire year -- it does not include people who have more recently lost coverage through the recession, or who had shorter gaps in their coverage.

--The percentage of people with employer-based coverage decreased from 73.1% of the population in 2001 to 69.7% in 2008.

--There were 393,000 employed workers in 2008 who did not have health coverage. The proportion of employed workers from Oregon without insurance has increased, from 14.6% in 2001 to 20.2% in 2008.

The anecdotal and statistical evidence are out there to make the point a hundred times over. Our health care "system" is broken. It's bloated by corporate profits; driven by expensive, defensive medicine; disgraced by its failure to cover more than 40 million Americans; and scandalized by bottom-line decisions that result in heartache or financial ruin for millions more.

A parting shot: Here's a link to a blog post written by a mother of a little boy with autism.
http://autism--tearsofaclown.blogspot.com/2009/09/to-health-with-it.html

AP Photo of President Obama, addressing Congress Sept. 9

Health care for all: Now!

I rise early on this Sunday morning and I'm confronted, once again, by the headlines that should make any clear-thinking American cry out for meaningful health care reform -- and the sooner the better.

From today's editions of The Oregonian:
-- "Big hike in store for health insurance"
Bill Graves' front-page story explains why we're looking at fewer insured people and higher costs that threaten the ability of consumers and small businesses to buy insurance. (Christine Chin Ryan, above, president of a Portland software company, will see health insurance rates for her company jump by 33 percent in September, which means it would cost $663 a month to cover employees such as Giorgio Shaunette, left.)

-- "Obama's health care proposals put Canada's system in spotlight"
An Associated Press story on page 2 reports that while Canadians have their complaints about their health care system -- about long waits for elective care; shortages of doctors and nurses, particularly in rural areas; and the growing costs of covering an aging population -- the system enjoys broad political support from the left and right, including the Conservative administration whose views are similar to U.S. Republicans.

-- "Five myths about health care around the world"
In the Opinion section, former Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid presents the facts (facts, imagine that) that give the lie to a number of misconceptions about health care in other countries. Chief among them: that foreign health care systems are all socialist-based, inefficient, bloated bureaucracies that result in limited choice for patients.

From Bill Moyers' Journal:

-- "Money-Driven Medicine"
On Friday, Moyers presented "an investigation into the profit-hungry 'medical-industrial complex,' " based on the reporting of financial journalist Maggie Mahar. I caught only a part of it, so I'm viewing/listening to it right now, even as I type this post.

We're the best in the world when it comes to "rescue care" (expensive, complex surgery for cancer, for instance), one expert says, but we lag far behind in the basics: treating diabetes, controlling pain, providing primary, preventive or community-based care. Why? U.S. health care is skewed by a system that puts profits over patients. As costs rise, access goes down, down, down -- so much so that emergency room care increasingly is going to middle-class rather than low-income people.

Dr. Donald Berwick, a pediatrician, cuts to the core of the moral issue in a quote that closes the program:

"I think health care is more about love than about most other things. If there isn't at the core of this, two human beings who have agreed to be in a relationship where one is trying to relieve the suffering of another -- which is love -- you can't get to the right answers here.

"It begins so much for me in that relationship -- that everything built around it had better make damn sure it's supporting it, not hurting it."

For nearly 24 years, I have been blessed to work for a company that has furnished generous health insurance (plus dental and vision plans), even going so far as to pay every dollar of my monthly insurance premiums. Starting January 1, that will change; along with other employees, I will begin paying 25 percent of the cost of those premiums. I think that's fair and proper, given that one out of five Oregonians have no insurance at all -- and there are now 46 million uninsured Americans.

To go another year with the bloated, horribly inefficient and frighteningly expensive health care system we have in this country is just unconscionable. If Congress fails to deliver a reform package this summer, it will be a failure of the first magnitude -- even more disappointing than the gridlock that killed federal immigration reform during the Bush Administration.

I suspect I'm preaching to the choir on this blog. If so, I hope you'll take every opportunity to challenge those who would defend the abysmally unfair system we have now -- especially when they resort to parroting the lies, half-truths and misrepresentations spewed by the likes of Limbaugh, Palin and O'Reilly.

If not, if you're one of those who believes the U.S. system is fine as is, take some time to read these stories above. Take some time to view the Bill Moyers video. Then, let's talk.

Photo: Brent Wojahn, The Oregonian

An Oscar-nominated film worth viewing

It's not every day that someone you know is part of the production crew for an Oscar-nominated film. In this, Sophie Harris, associate producer of "The Final Inch," one of the nominees in the Documentary Short Subject category.

Even though another film took home the Oscar, that's no knock on "The Final Inch," a film directed by Portland's Irene Taylor Brodsky. It tells the story of indigenous volunteers as they work tirelessly in India's worst slums to give out free vaccines in hopes of eradicating polio -- one of the last remaining public health scourges.

Sophie is the girlfriend of our oldest son, Nathan, and we're fortunate to know someone with such charm, intelligence and modesty (see quote below). Lori and I watched the film last night and came away impressed with the overall quality as well as the central message -- that, despite cultural, religious and economic obstacles, amazing progress is being made in the international campaign against polio.

Quoting Sophie:

If anyone has 38 minutes and nothing to do, for the next two days the film I worked on that got nominated is going to be streaming free of charge from the HBO website. http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/thefinalinch/video.html
And if you've got HBO, it's showing on there throughout April (showtimes: http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/thefinalinch/index.html)
No pressure if you don't get a chance to watch it, just thought I'd pass along the word as HBO rarely streams stuff for free.

View a trailer here and check out the "The Final Inch" website for more information.

Good health or good luck?

So there I am, doing the crawl in the middle of three lanes at the Northeast Community Center pool. At just after six in the morning, it's not surprising that I have the lane to myself. There are three people in the water; sometimes I have the pool to myself if I time it right.

Midstroke, my mind wanders from how many laps I've done to whatever drifts into my consciousness. Today, it's all about health and health care.

No need for a lengthy screed here. All I want to say is that, in a country as rich as ours, universal health care is something we all deserve and something we all should pay for, whether through private or government insurance. I'm one of the fortunate, working for an employer who provides generous insurance benefits.

I also consider myself fortunate from the standpoint of being extraordinarily healthy. I've never had a broken bone, never had major surgery, don't have any chronic diseases, don't even take prescription medicine. I have no allergies, I skip the annual flu shots and seem to take maybe two sick days a year. I run, I swim and occasionally (not often enough) I lift weights.

On the nutrition side, I'm fortunate to be married to a personal trainer who knows -- and reminds me -- about eating right. Chicken and fish dominate my diet these days, compared to the beefy, cheesy dishes I grew up on. Do I still eat too many sweets? Of course.

My point? I realize I'm very lucky to be able to have this early-morning routine. If my insurance benefits disappeared tomorrow, of course I could still run (although at some point my knees and ankles will say "no mas"). But having the luxury of heated pool and hot shower isn't easily replaced.

Should health care in America depend on who you work for? I don't think so. My good health is partly the result of my own routine and diet, but it's also got something to do with the comfort and security of knowing I can see a doctor or get a medical treatment without going broke. We all deserve that.