My doctors are insistent that I need more potassium and have repeatedly pushed me to make bananas a regular part of my diet. I am not the world's biggest fan of bananas, and to my embarrassment, I don't have a good reason why I don't especially enjoy them.
The Banana Splits? Loved 'em. Plain old bananas, not so much.
When we were young children, Mom's mom used to write us checks for birthdays snd holidays. My memory is that they were for five dollars. My Dad would take them to the bank and deposit them (and none of us ever thought about the money again).
I thought about those checks Wednesday when my health insurance company sent me one to settle a lab charge from my kidney treatment facility, whose lab is NOT part of their network (which means the insurance company pays for nothing, sticking me with the charge). The reimbursement drill happens every other month because that's how often a battery of blood tests is done, and since I'm still above ground, I assume I passed.
The lab bills the insurance company over three thousand dollars for the tests. The insurance company tells me I owe the lab one hundred and eighteen dollars and sends me a check for three dollars and seventy-one cents. The lab costs are separate and distinct from the renal support treatments, which are billed at over three thousand dollars a day and reimbursed at five hundred dollars a day.
I have no idea how any of these sums and amounts are arrived at. What I do have is a better appreciation of health insurance since I'm positive I would be dead by now if I had to pay for all of these costs myself. Only occasionally do I wonder how the twenty-eight million-plus Americans without health insurance manage to stay alive.
I should have paid more attention to those Grandma checks at the time because in my retirement years I sure could use them. To say nothing of having a Grandma.
-bill kenny
In the warmth of the post-Election glow, if I may inject a short infusion of pragmatism: with all the billions spent on campaign literature, signs, advertising, and campaign events, how is it that there's never enough money budgeted by anyone's campaign to pay for the pick-up and clean-up of lawn signs in the days after they burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away?
Not sure how finished this election season is nationally, but it's done and dusted where I live. How much will change as a result of how we've voted? Hard to say less than twenty-four hours after the polls closed, but I guess we'll find out together, not that we've been together too often in recent years at any level of our government.
When I was in the Air Force, we had an expression: 'If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?' I've used that a lot in recent years when looking at people seeking my vote for office. I applaud their generosity and admire their energy, but telling me that 'I love my city/county/state' isn't really a qualification for elected office in my book. And assuring me you have the answers when I'm still struggling with the questions gets you a shoulder shrug.
I tease acquaintances that I never allow my lack of knowledge on a subject to keep me from having an opinion on it. If you didn't recognize that sentence as attempted tongue-in-cheek humor, please do us both a favor and find something else to read right now. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested many years ago, "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but NOT to his own facts."
As I've aged, I've grown more short-tempered and quite frankly less kind in my daily interactions with others. And I'm not alone. As part of the Baby Boom Generation who blamed our parents for everything we disliked, I'm not happy that my children blame me. Gets sort of awkward, to be honest.
I fear we're running out of grace for one another, and I suspect yesterday's election results will do little to improve that unless we resolve, each of us, to be a better person. I think many of us still want to change the world but have trouble getting started by changing ourselves. Baby steps.
-bill kenny
That's today's question. You are today's answer.
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Today should be a national holiday because it's Election Day, and nothing's more important than an informed vote. That's your hint to go and cast yours.
Bad officials are elected by good people who decide to not vote.
Don't let that happen today.
-bill kenny
It's almost the first Tuesday in November, and it's time to make your vote count and your voice carry. The letters to the editor, the comments in the readers' online forums of newspapers and social media sites, the calls to the radio shows, the heated discussions with friends and family in your living room or street corner--ALL OF IT MEANS NOTHING if you haven't voted early and don't get thee to a polling place tomorrow between six in the morning and eight in the evening, here in Norwich.
Nothing changes if we don't commit to change. You wanna blame somebody for the mess we're in? Start by looking in the mirror and working your way around the room.
There's more than enough animus masquerading as discussion to last us through the next century. When you realize how much farther and faster we can come by working together, I can't understand why we work so hard to NOT do more of that.
Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting. And no time to do it right the first time, but always time to do it over.
-bill kenny
My doctors are insistent that I need more potassium and have repeatedly pushed me to make bananas a regular part of my diet. I am not the wo...
