2009: Wring Out the Old
That’s “wring” with a “w”, not a typo. 2009 was a sloppy mess of a year and I say “good riddance.”
It’s been two years since I started blogging and I’ve been looking back at my off-and-on efforts with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. Forty posts plus some instructional entries aren’t as much as I’d hoped. But my readers tell me to keep at it. Tomorrow is two years since Gucci, then a one-pound fuzzball, appeared unexpectedly at my front door tucked into my wife’s cleavage, which is still her favorite hangout. Now she’s a seven-pound wonder dog whom most of you know. Getting through 2009 might have been impossible without her.
On a personal level this has been the toughest transition I’ve made in many a year and many of you have suffered through it as well. Going from a proudly independent solo doctor to part of a group, trading my beloved Mac computers for the Brand X variety and having to march to a different drummer haven’t come easily. The old charts are gone and the computer rules the roost. Claudia had her baby boy Daniel on October 17 and will be working elsewhere soon. Brenda has been with me for 15 months now and I hope she continues, but I’m not the boss any more (don’t tell her that!)
Faces are long and tempers short in the doctors’ lounge these days. We had a terrible blow in April when our CEO Al Greene, who had arrived in 2006 and turned Valley Pres around dramatically, died of pancreatic cancer at age 58. Practices built up ethically and deservedly over the years are under siege. The center of the Valley has been hammered economically, not just lately but for decades by the loss of its tax base and the disappearance of thousands of jobs as GM, Hughes, Lockheed and so many others have moved on.
When I began this effort at communication, I hoped to keep politics to a minimum. No chance! What we are witnessing in our beloved USA is an unprecedented assault on our very way of life – not just by zealots of the “religion of peace” but by our own duly elected (with help from the ACORN thugs) government. We have at its head a narcissistic graduate student who has never run a lemonade stand, surrounded by sycophants who answer to no one but him. Our grandchildren are being saddled with trillions of dollars in debt; the dollar is becoming a joke; prostitution is apparently legal as long as it is between consenting congresspersons – and of course the global warming hysterics march on despite the disgrace heaped upon them.
But the big enchilada is health care, one-sixth of our economy and to millions a most personal and painful part of their lives. At this moment Congress is home, I hope hearing the American public loud and clear about the toxic brew they’re trying to make us swallow. I am still hopeful that this overreaching, lying, unread and unreadable 2000+ page monstrosity will die. Hillarycare was less unpopular at this point in 1993 than Obamacare is now, and yet 1994 happened and a lot of the bums were sent packing. I believe that will happen again. There is a lot that needs fixing in health care, as I’ve alluded to earlier. Three real reforms aren’t being dealt with because of political back-scratching – separating health insurance from employment, creating a competitive national health insurance marketplace, and getting rid of the lottery of a runaway malpractice system as California did in 1976.
2009 saw its share of medical advances, mainly in technology. New drugs are few and far-between however. One of the aftereffects of Obamacare would be a worldwide dearth of meaningful research. It costs a billion dollars to develop a new drug or vaccine and the risks of doing so are huge – but that’s the essence of capitalism. In the world of the socialists in D.C. profit is evil – unless it comes in the form of a bribe or a speaker’s fee or whatever else passes for “business as usual” in the seamy back rooms of our nation’s capitol (or Sacramento, etc.)
Every generation seems to have to re-learn Milton Friedman’s famous warning: “There’s no free lunch.” Government never creates wealth, it redistributes it from the earners and creators to those who do neither, keeping a hefty piece for itself. But I see Americans pouring out all over the country, in town hall meetings and “tea parties” and I feel renewed hope that ordinary folks will take back our country and preserve our freedoms.
Our Founding Fathers were courageous and brilliant, but they probably could not have imagined a permanent political class. Service to the public was like PTA meetings – you did it for your children and your community, not to replace work or to enrich yourself. Now we have an administration whose members have had, in 92% of cases, NO private sector experience! We have a tax cheat as Secretary of Treasury, an Attorney General who will, if he gets away with it, commit treason by giving aid and comfort to the enemy, namely KSM, who admitted masterminding 9-11 and asked to be executed. We have 32 unelected czars of dubious allegiance and ability running roughshod over our Constitution. We treat our allies with contempt and bow to dictators and rogues.
We need a slogan for the year ahead. I propose:
LIBERTY AGAIN
IN TWO THOUSAND TEN
Are you still with me? Need a pick-me-up? Read Sarah Palin’s book!
January 11th, 2010 at 8:24 pm
I check your blog at least once a week for any new material. I enjoy your blogs, I find them very helpful, informative and I love the dry sarcasm. But I also like that it feels like I know you better and thats important to me being that when it comes to our baby, we trust you.