What would honest Abe say?

How are we doing?
I wonder what he would think if he were here with us today?

Now set forever in Marble, in the Rotunda of the US Capital, you can almost see Abe coming back to life

Hand-tinted photograph © by Bennett Hall

Health Care or Health Care Insurance?

People need HEALTH CARE

People do NOT need HEALTH CARE INSURANCE ( except as mandated by the City of SF, state of MASS and soon Planet Obama)

If you watch the messaging of the Pols, what I so often hear sounds like they are all working for the INSURANCE industry - that it is all about protecting their system of distributing the dollars by pooled risk management, to enable MD's to spend millions saving one child.

As is oft pointed out -this system is failing.

SO - what if you eliminate the paperwork, the adjusters, the brokers, the executives, the bean counters- and merely focus on HEALTH CARE - and send the others home to join the unemployed?

this would reduce the cost of HC by 30% and make doctors happy once again, as they could SURPRISE be doctors, and heal the sick vs the 3:1 Staff to MD ratio now common.

Add to this mix - a change in qualifying that allows millions to spent on exotic diseases. Maybe, if your number does come up - it could be OK to let go of life so that others can live - as unfair as this may sound - but the MD's Oath of doing everything to "Save a life", or as you hear that cadence of "We lost the patient", forgets completely that death is an inseparable part of the life journey.

And, those 8 octuplets on the public dime......PLEEEEZE, I should not get started on that one.

Roses for the Gatekeeper

In the cold wind, the dead roses were for the unmovable that guarded the temple of the state, the guardian of the forces that govern and control, and determine who lives and who dies in the name of freedom or democracy or whatever is the Politics of the day

Hand-tinted photograph by Bennett Hall © 1976 • Washington D.C., The Pentagon

Portrait of a Famous Lady

Here is the spirit, the one who knows...but I think She wonders whether we have lost the plot. Does the small coat worn by a child no longer fit the growing man as Jefferson foresaw - this writer thinks so  

Time to try something new She says. Please listen to her

Hand-tinted black and white photography © by Bennett Hall