Thoughts On A Sunday

The WP Mother-In-Law and I attended the Boston Pops concert last night at Meadowbrook Farm. Looking around it appeared that the two of us were the youngest attendees in the audience. As Deb put it, “There must have been a lot of Q-tips (white haired senior citizens) in the audience.!”

Regardless, it was a great concert. And, as always, they ended the concert with Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever.

I've managed to see the Boston Pops many times over the years. The first time was 1976 at the Hatch Shell in Boston, conducted by the late Arthur Fiedler. I've also seen them during John Williams' tenure as conductor and, of course, with Keith Lockhart at the podium.

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Former President Reagan advisor Michael Deaver has died.

He was 69.

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I find it interesting that milk prices have gone up tremendously, yet dairy farmers are getting paid less for their product, in some cases receiving prices not seen since the 1960's.

New Hampshire dairy farmers are seeing their production costs go ever higher while they receive less and less for their product. It's putting a real strain on their finances, forcing many of them deeper in to debt, even as larger farms in other states are receiving price support subsidies from the federal government.

Something is seriously out of whack when the government is forcing smaller producers out of business while at the same time contributing to the spike in milk prices consumers are paying.

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As a preview to what the Democrats universal health care may look like, all we need to do is look to the Jepp family of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Can you imagine being about to go into labor for four births, and then flying 325 miles to get to the hospital in another country? Incredible. Michelle Lang, Calgary Herald, reported:

Their mother, Calgarian Karen Jepp, was transferred to Benefis Hospital in Montana last week when she began showing signs of going into labour, and no Canadian hospital had enough neonatal intensive-care beds for all four babies.

It’s not like Great Falls, Mont., is a teeming metropolis. With 56,215 people, it is slightly larger than Charleston, W.Va. Calgary has more than a million people.

There is a difference between health care and health insurance. In capitalistic America, the concentration is on health. In socialistic Canada, the emphasis is on paying the bills. The story ended with how much the American hospital charged. Looks like a quarter-million bucks for a 5-day stay. Given that it was the quadruple birth of 2-pound babies two months premature, I’d say it was a bargain.

Americans spend 15% of their income on health care. That’s why Great Falls has enough neo-natal units to handle quadruple births — and a “universal health” nation doesn’t.

This is what the Democrats want to do with our health care system – make it a mirror to the one in Canada and the UK. Then we can all share our horror stories of how bad our health care systems have become. Of course if we do go the way of our neighbor to the north, where will Canadians needing health care go?

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An editorial in the New Hampshire Sunday News (Manchester, NH) warns us about Speaker of House Nancy Pelosi's use of a bill meant to expand health care coverage for 'poor' children is really a means of 'providing' health insurance for adults and families making up to $80,000 per year. It's also being used to hide pork barrel spending meant to give more federal money to specific hospitals and health care providers.

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I find it hard to believe that school starts in many towns in less than two weeks. Where has the summer gone?

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where there's still a few days of summer vacation left, school bus drivers are learning their routes, and where many of us will refuse to see summer end prematurely.