Oregon has that right-to-die law and now we will see how the Federal government, in one fell swoop, can give us all our “right to die.”

But if the situation is static or terminal, zippo. Medicare picks up some hospice costs. Otherwise, the patient’s family is on their own as far a paying the enormous per diem of nursing home care.

But if the situation is static or terminal, zippo. Medicare picks up some hospice costs. Otherwise, the patient’s family is on their own as far a paying the enormous per diem of nursing home care.

It is the older computer stuff that is problematic.Stuff from the 50s, 60s and 70s.

(I say “us” because at 51 I don’t think I’m that old!)

What’s wrong with this picture?

If we can get the seniors to believe the truth, they will be a welcome ally against the Orwellians. Questin is how to let them know. CNN won’t tell them.

Regards

Sounds like a survival novel, doesn’t it?

Regards

I urged Rep. Terry to join with his colleagues and tell the people the truth. This is a travesty of a spending bill.

I hope the people are listening now.

And that’s not counting the real job one might have to take to cope with life under The One.

The part of compensation and benefits I know the least about, in fact almost nothing, is retirement. It was never on my plate since it was the State’s position that it wasn’t subject to collective bargaining. I had enough I had to know about, so I just let it be other people’s problem. Sure, wish I’d paid a lot more attention now that I’m retired and see what a mess they had made of what most would consider a pretty good, reasonably well-funded retirement system. My first clue that something was badly amiss was when I retired, my retiree HI immediately became primary even though my wife was still working and the State was paying in about a $1000/mo. on her behalf and I was never going to pay another dime. When I looked into, I saw when and why it was done; a Democrat administration was trying to claim it was holding down employee HI costs, so, since there are a lot of State employee couples, they just cost shifted to the retiree plan to make it easier to hold down the active costs. There’s all sorts of stupid stuff like that, but the most you get from the retirement people is the old, “there’s no reason, it’s just our policy” or “we’ve always done it that way” dance and you can’t get them to do anything.

To date, I don’t think there’s much direct rationing imposed by Medicare, but there certainly is a lot of price control. The future? Who knows? But retirees vote in huge numbers, so I doubt that there will be mandated reductions in hip surgeries, for example, in favor of breast implants for 20-somethings.

Of course, when Hillary becomes president, Bill might insist on changes!

I remember back in the “tax reform” bill that Rostenkowski headed up in the 80′s, Andy Rooney (I think?) traced a thread throughout the bill. It started with an provision that exempted businesses that met some definition in another part of the bill, then referred to another part of the bill, etc. etc. It ended up after about 6 or 8 flips to completely different parts, to just be defined as ONE particular company in Rostenkowski’s home district. Does anyone else remember seeing this?? Imagine that embedded loophole and multiply it by 535, and you get the idea. In computer programming, we call programs that use multiple ‘GOTO’ statements “spaghetti code”. The congress is expert at writing “spaghetti legislation”. Both are equally incomprehensible and dangerous!

Oddly enough, I think you might actually be ok with that trade off…just this one time…;^)