Health Care is Killing America, Conclusion

So what are America’s options to the current system, which is headed for a critical mass, along with—potentially—the nations itself? First, remove the negative rhetoric. Political and economic interests opposed to revamping a system that is clearly headed toward a meltdown can no longer be afforded the power to control the language of the issue. Contrary to popular opinion and patriotic tradition, “socialized medicine” is not a bad word or phrase. Whether people want to believe it or not, we already have mechanisms in place that, if are not socialized...

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Health Care is Killing America, Part 1

Let’s forget for the moment that most Americans simply lack restraint when it comes to our self-indulgent lifestyles; we simply won’t stop overworking, sunbathing, eating processed foods, or drinking and smoking in excess. Not only is this bit of reality a given, but so is the knowledge that our way of life creates a laundry list of accompanying health problems. After all, it’s been said that the aging process is only 20% chronological, but 80% environmental…more of a product of what we do to ourselves than who we are. Ask anyone you know with...

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Special Commentary--What Happened to Childhood? Conclusion

So, in accessing how our children have gone from simply being kids—representing a stage of life that was supposed to be a whole other world away from knowing the complexities of being adults and shouldering adult burdens—to adults in pre-adult bodies, we should all look back at the difference between our own childhood experiences and those of today’s young people. We should measure the costs of what we as adults have taken away from children compared to the benefits of what they have received over the last 20 years or so and wonder. In some school...

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Special Commentary--What Happend To Childhood? Part 2

Because of changing economic realities and our own selfish wants and desires, we adults have blurred the distinction between what was once childhood and adulthood. During the 1980s, the term “latchkey child” was coined in small measure, to express the unappealing nature of the then-growing practice of children left alone at home after school due to working and or otherwise absent parents. Now, especially in urban areas of the country, its not unusual to hear or read accounts about how children are not only left alone for extended periods of time...

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Special Commentary--What Happened To Childhood? Part 1

I have something of a daily ritual which I all-but automatically perform in the small town here in Michigan where I reside. It consists of driving around to one of the newspaper boxes that pepper our small town to pick up a copy get a local daily paper. A simple enough activity, I habitually locate a box, jump out and drop a couple of quarters in the coin slot, pull out a single copy—sometimes scanning the front page for any news of particular note—and fetch the paper home for thorough reading through. Every so often during these daily treks, a...

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