bullsprings musings

January is the month of survival. Just get through it. The county road gets plowed weekly by Van, the local plow guy, utilizing a massive road grader. It then drifts back in, often within hours, becoming impassable again. Our private road, over an 1/8th of a mile long, has been impassable since sometime in December.I just fed the horses and am watching them eat in a log round pen about 100 feet from the house. An inch of new snow coupled with 30 mph wind gusts completely obliterates the view with regularity. There’s a foot or two of old snow, hard to tell because it continues to shift and drift, becoming what we called cement in my ski bum years. Break through that stuff hauling ass down the Horseshoe Bowl at Breckenridge and you would likely be sidelined to the bar for the rest of the day for rejuvenation.

A Quick Look at the Past Week

Tuesday: Spot the grader plowing out the county road. Carol walks down to where the car and 4-wheel drive truck are parked on the county road, shovels out around the car after the plow goes by and drives to HartselHartsel for mail and essentials at the South Park Mercantile. Hartsel is the closest town at seven miles and has somewhere around one hundred residents.Wednesday: Decide to take the truck down to Woodland Park (round trip 120 miles) to get new tires. Battery isn’t what it used to be and we have to jump start the truck with the car. Temperature’s up to about five degrees and the wind’s blowing like crazy. On the way down we reminisced with stories about the truck, which we purchased in February, 1985. A basic 6-cylinder Ford f-150 for $10,000. We also decide to splurge and get a new battery as the one going bad has been in the truck for ten years. If you want a truck to last a long time, limit its used to 3000 miles per year. Got home and evening chores done before dark (days are definitely getting longer). Had stopped at the Mercantile on the way home and picked up some tire chains for our tractor that UPS delivered there.Thursday: Twenty degree day, sunny, light wind. Pulled the box of tire chains up our road on a snow saucer powered by me. Worked pretty well after I got the box tied securely with rope. It said on the box that it weighed over 70 pounds and I’ve got no reason to think otherwise. Put the chains on the tractor (a vintage 1968 International Cub with front-end loader) and started the process of opening our road. The chains have improved the tractor on this type of snow more than I had hoped for. Staying on the contour as much as possible and breaking the drifts and pushing the snow back from the road as far as possible, a third of the road is opened by the time I have to quit for evening chores.Friday: High of seven degrees, nasty wind. Too cold for machine work. Body aches. Do what has to be done, then read by the fire and take a nap. County road still open. Radio says it’s 47 degrees in Colorado Springs, seventy miles away but out of the mountains on the plains. A whole different world.Saturday: Temperatures climb to the mid-twenties, sunny, calm. Push more snow with the Cub, get almost down to our gate. From the gate to the county road is only 150 feet or so, but it blows in really bad and has an elevation change of about six feet with the road grade tilted crazily to one side. This has a lot to do with the fact that the Rocky Mountains are made of rock. You just do the best you can.Sunday: Another decent day, in the twenties, sunny, not much wind. Another storm (wind and snow) is predicted for Monday so Carol goes to Fairplay (roundtrip 65 miles) for massive grocery shopping trip. She leaves and I clean the breakfast dishes, then break ice in the livestock’s water tank with a digging bar, throwing the ice out (big chunks with my hands, little ones with a scoop made for ice fishermen to keep ice out of their holes). Then start the generator we use for pumping water and fill the stock tank. Then up to the house roof to clean the chimney cap, which is starting to plug with creosote meaning we’ll have to clean the chimney in the next week or so. The ash bucket is full so I spread it on the snow and then dig my three wheeler (circa 1985 Honda) out of a snow drift behind the house and attach the wagon to it. One tire is low so pump it up. Spot Carol coming up the County Road in the truck. The three wheeler starts with two pulls. I give it a little pat, then race to the gate on the newly cleared road and get there just as Carol gets there with as many bags as she can carry. From the gate to the truck, parked for weeks now on the side of the County Road, the road has three to four feet of snow in it, but its so hard we walk over the top of it, never breaking through, and get the groceries ferried to the three wheeler cart. The cart is crammed full and Carol rides behind me on the three wheeler as we creep back up the road to the house. I unload groceries and as Carol puts them up I bring in the night’s supply of firewood, close up the chicken coop after giving the girls some fresh hay for bedding, feed the horses, and start the generator again for showers. It’s a gorgeous sunset, and as I watch I get out the Martin (acoustic guitar) and worked on several songs that continue to evolve as Carol cooks. Tonight will bring another severe storm that will close the county road. It was already questionable today after Friday’s wind, though with 4-wheel drive Carol got through and the pantries are full. My hands are cramping and tingling and my elbow aches, casualties of driving an old tractor in the cold so I put down the guitar and pour a shot of Tequila. I’m looking forward to February.

I’m a musician, among other things, and like so many other musicians, I can’t afford health insurance. I’ve already talked about some reasons why I’m for a single-payer, government-implemented health-insurance program that covers everyone. Here’s another reason: It would be good for business.

Don’t believe me? Talk to the people who run GM or WalMart. Health insurance, as we now know it, is a wild-card external cost that is posing a real threat to profitability for businesses of all size, large or small.

 The Economist magazine, a staunchly pro-market British magazine, recently published a list of the nations that offer the best conditions for conducting business in its Pocket World in Figures. The US was eighth. Not first, not second, not third. Eighth.

First place went to Denmark, second to Finland, third to Canada. All have universal national health-care coverage. Per capita, health care expenditures in 2003 (according to Organization for Economic Cooperative Development or OECD), provide an interesting corollary. Countries that have the lowest costs are doing best in business: Denmark’s per capita cost—$2743; Finland—$2104; Canada’s—$2998. Ours was, and still is, the highest among industrialized nations: $5711 in 2003.

By 2005, our per capita health-care expenditures had risen to $6700, or 16% of gross domestic product. It is expected, under current conditions, to reach 20% of GDP by 2015 (figures from the National Coalition on Health Care). The US is lagging behind these other countries in health-care effectiveness, too. Statistics ranging from life expectancy to infant death rates are more favorable in countries with nationalized health care than here in spite of the fact that many procedures cost twice as much here than they would elsewhere. The US story has changed dramatically over the last thirty or so years. In 1970 we were a leading nation in terms of the quality of our care, and we only spent 7% of GDP, or $352 per person on health care.

What happened and why? A lot of things, such as the rise of for-profit hospitals and HMOs, the increasing power and greed of insurance companies, and the reduction of safety nets. In the short term, those may have helped some businesses and people become wealthy, but in the long term they aren’t helping business. In another OECD report, (statistics published in ODE magazine) the US was one of the lowest countries in terms of self-employment, with just 7.5% of the population self-employed. This kind of blows our myth of being in entrepreneurial heaven.

If we could get this health-care monkey off our back, we might see a renaissance in creativity and new business. As it is people are cautious about leaving any job that has health insurance as a benefit, even as those jobs are becoming more scarce. Are a great many Americans working jobs that we hate or that our destroying our health, mentally and physically, so we can have insurance? Absolutely, and I know plenty of them. We are all getting squeezed tighter and tighter into an untenable system. Other nations with advanced economies have already invented a wheel to get us out of this situation. Why are we trying to reinvent one? “You’re talking socialized medicine!”

 Socialism. That dirty word raises some kind of knee-jerk reaction in so many of us after 30 years of the incessant neo-con propaganda that has put us in the situation we are in now. But truly, we do have a high rate of social spending and chances are you benefit from it. The only people I know of that turn down social security checks are the Amish. If you’re lucky enough to live to 65 you are probably not going to say ‘no’ to Medicare because it reeks of socialism.

 When you drive up the access ramp onto an Interstate highway, or local byway, you are accessing one of the greatest social spending projects of all time. Now we all need an access ramp onto a better health-care system. It will be good for all citizens. It will be good for business, too.

Almost 50 million people in the U.S. have no health insurance because they can’t afford it. They’re self-employed, or their employer can’t or won’t cover them. For decades the price of health insurance has risen exorbitantly with no end in sight.If you are lucky enough to somehow stumble through life for 65 years, then you are rewarded with Medicare (publicly -funded health insurance). Before President Johnson (D) signed this program into existence in the 1960s, all you got was a gold watch (maybe).

Why the ongoing exploding costs in health care? No real containment of costs at the Medicare end of things is one pivitol reason. The health care industry’s new-product development and marketing creates a never ending demand that Medicare picks up. Couple that with AARP’s marketing campaign that essentially bombards our retirees with the message, “You’re never really old, even if you’re ancient.”

We hear about new and wondrous things such as gene mapping and splicing, stem cell treatments, limb regeneration, and so on. The implications are that these wonderful things will all be mainstreamed to the masses and we’ll all live much longer lives and probably be diving off the cliffs of Acapulco at 85. Joint replacement and organ transplants are already old hat. Who is paying for all this stuff? What’s the ultimate price if this progresses to the point wher all elderly human beings are ultimately cloned with the last step being to upload the information from their brains into the clone and then cremated the old and decidedly used “former self”. The propaganda machine has decided that this bloated mess of a health-care system is in trouble because of those slackers who aren’t insured even though they’re paying taxes to finance this Medicare excess. Hillary and others want to make it illegal not to have insurance. Used to be all we had to do was “pay taxes and die.” Some politicians want that changed to “all you have to do is pay taxes, buy health insurance, and die.”

Don’t get sick before 65 sums it up pretty well now.Ideas like this will not make Hillary our next president.

I’m listening to new releases by the old war horses: Neil Young, the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen. All three have great releases out right now. But I also keep going back for tastes of new releases from some acts that have never cracked the musical stratsphere: Bad Religion’s latest, New Maps of Hell, is an extraordinary collection of songs with something to say on our current condition. Ya gotta love the punk-rock riffs carrying the intellectual capital in tunes like New Dark Ages. Another that has been getting a lot of play here lately is Ryan Adams’ Easy Tiger. Punk/country with a troubadour’s sense of reality. Great stuff.