Living

Today as I stopped in at Safeway for my snack lunch, Pretzel Crisps and hummus with horseradish, I saw a couple deciding on some item for their cart. She had obviously just undergone treatment for cancer or was still in the middle of it. While I applauded her commitment to LIVE by doing the normal things like shopping, I also couldn't help but think of all the immune suppressant effects that chemotherapy and radiation have. While a public place like a good sized grocery store is not as bad as a public place like a classroom, anyplace there are a number of people increase the chances that one of them might be a carrier. Safeway now provides a hand sanitizer for their cashiers and cart pushing customers in recognition of this. I haven't seen one customer use it though, including myself.

Cancer, its treatments, and its treatments' side effects have claimed too many lives and while doing so has claimed its victims' living.

With the American Cancer Society saying in 2008 that one in three women and two in three men will have cancer detected in their lifetimes, there are too many opportunities to stop living while waiting to die. I am fortunate that most of the people in my life who have had cancer, lived and are living to the very end, which for the ones still living I hope is still some distance in the future.

I still am amazed at the amount of laughter we shared during both our trips to Baja Nutri Care for the alternative treatment and training. Still, for most of the cancer patients, this was their last hope and for far too many of them, my wife included, the hope didn't last. But there, most of all, we all were LIVING.

Then I get back home from shopping and read that it is likely that the Public Option will be stripped from the final Health Care Reform bill. While I don't expect any Health Insurance, public option or not, to cover alternative treatments, it would be nice to reduce the costs of the treatments they do cover. The best way would be to go to a single payer system that doesn't allow profits. I'm not sure that a Public Option is the next best way, but it is far better than what now looks to be the eventual product. I think I would prefer strict regulation of health insurers, not only regulating their profits but also the expenses upon which they are allowed to claim profits.

Also, the hodgepodge of legal entities that disallow my son to have COBRA because his New York insurance company doesn't exist in California although the New York company's parent company owns a sister company in California in the same business and with the same name, except for the "of California," has to end.

Instead, we are likely to end up with a mandate to purchase health insurance with fines if we don't and without any controls on profits or expenses. I'm not holding my breath. My $8,000 per year health insurance probably doesn't cover that.