2007-11-21 04:43:00
Ruth writes:
"JJ, who were you in love with in the Sixties?
"You seemed to have written a lot of love songs ... so who was the lucky girl back then?
"Or, were you writing love songs for a girl from your past lives?"
JJ:
My first marriage was in 1970 but I wrote more songs when I was looking for love then when in the married state. Not all my songs were inspired by a love interest. Sometimes I was just being creative, other times I was dreaming of finding my one and only and then other times someone interesting inspired a song.
I found it interesting that when I developed some feelings toward a female that I could tune into her vibration and when I did I always found a song there -- both lyrics and a melody. I concluded that every person has at least one good song in them waiting to be born.
My last love songs were written for Artie shortly after we fell in love. One of them ("Falling in Love Again") is recorded and posted at:
http://www.jjwritings.com/music-lyrics-poetry/index.html
I will post the words of some others later.
Writing books or articles requires a different focus than writing songs and when I shifted my attention to writing philosophy my attention was taken off the more right brain creativity involved in song writing.
You will rarely see a songwriter write a regular book because it requires a different type of focus and makes it difficult to pay the needed attention to his craft.
Matt made some comments on Michael Moore's film "Sicko" and made the statement to the effect that the movie "proves" that socialized medicine works "showing that Canadians and Europeans usually only wait in an ER waiting room for 30-45 minutes and the doctors still live in million dollar homes and doctors are paid based on how well their patients are doing. He even goes to Havana Hospital in Cuba were the so-called evil Cubans gave better treatment to 9/11 rescue workers than our government did."
First everything "works" to some degree. The question is does it work better than private enterprise. The big problem we have is that we do not have an unfettered free enterprise health system here in the United States. The government has already stepped in with so many regulations and attorneys with lawsuits that efficiency is greatly hindered.
The problem is that government steps in and regulates, restricts and creates problems through its meddling. Then when the problem becomes obvious the one who created the problem steps in to fix it thus creating additional problems and additional expenses. When these new problems surface then the government who created them steps in to fix them again creating a vicious cycle until complete control is gained leading to an extremely inefficient and expensive system.
Fifty years ago before the government stepped in to help us poor folk even the poor could afford good medical care and pay for it themselves. As proof I will relate a personal experience.
In 1958 I was injured in an explosion. Altogether I had six operations over several years and was in the hospital over three months. My first hospital room cost us $8 [USD] a day.
My mother was recently divorced and received no child support and had no assets. She and I picked fruit in the summer and she worked for minimum wage at a potato processing plant in the winter.
We paid off the all the medical expenses with no help from the government. It would be impossible for a fruit picker to pay off such a bill today, but back then even the poor folk cold afford to go to the doctor and the hospital.
Back then sometimes the doctor would put a person in the hospital overnight for observation because it was affordable by most.
Unfortunately today a night in the hospital can cost around $1500 [USD]. You don't hear of anyone paying out of his own pocket to go there for a relaxing night of observation these days.
People complain about big oil but they have done a much better job of controlling prices than big hospital. Back in 1958 the price of gas was 39.9 cents [USD] per gallon and my hospital room was $8 [USD] a day. If the price of gas had escalated as much as a hospital room then we would be paying about $75 [USD] a gallon today.
In other words, we have $75 [USD] a gallon health care costs and who do we look to for solutions? The same people who created the problem in the first place -- our friends in the government.
Just think. If we had health care costs low like they were in 1958 then even illegal aliens and fruit pickers could afford to stay in the hospital. If costs were this low we wouldn't even be thinking about socialized medicine as there would be no need for it.
Matt mentions the short waiting time to see doctors in Europe. This may be true but it isn't necessarily a good thing. I spent two years in England in the Sixties and had to go to the doctor several times so I saw first hand the difference between private medical care in the USA. and socialized care in England. First I was surprised that English taxpayers paid for my healthcare while visiting.
It was true that they got you through the waiting line to see the doctor with reasonable speed but to us Americans how this was accomplished was not a good thing.
First, the number of people who go to a doctor there was a lot more than in the USA. Because everything was "free" people went to the doctor a lot more often. Some English I met went once a week whether they were sick or not. It was just part of their schedule.
There was a big difference between being in a doctor's office in socialized England than America. In England we Americans joked that the people seemed to be lined up like cattle and herded through.
In America, at that time, when I went to the doctor he was relaxed and seemed to have all the time needed to hear what the patient had to say. I remember the rude awakening the first time I went to a doctor under socialized medicine. I was quickly escorted in and asked what was the matter. I thought I may have pneumonia and was about a third way through telling him my symptoms when I noticed he was writing a prescription. He handed it to me and said, "Take this."
I was then escorted out and realized how they were able to see so many patients. My doctor back home would have taken ten times the time with me as this guy did.
Then I checked out the prescription and saw it was a new drug I had read about in the paper a few days earlier. It was about ten times the cost of penicillin and I felt bad that the English were spending that kind of money on me, but since the government was paying for it I guess the doctor didn't mind dishing it out.
As far as Moore's claim that the Cuban system is superior to ours this is very deceptive. John Stossel from "20/20" did an investigation and reported that there are a few good facilities in Cuba for the elite but those for average people are rat infested, unclean and in shambles. He showed video of the true condition over there which was much different than was seen in "Sicko."
At this time I prefer to stay away from medical doctors unless I have some real good reason to visit them which hasn't occurred for about 30 years -- and that was for a broken bone. I go to a dermatologist about once a year and a chiropractor once in a while and that is about it.
Good preventive measures is the key to avoiding large medical bills in this age.
Copyright © 2007 by JJ Dewey, All Rights Reserved