Our health care is sick

By Erik Dolson

When I had a small business, I provided health care for my employees and their families. The reason was simple: I did not know how to look them in the eye while turning them away if they had no insurance and they or one of their children faced death from accident or disease. My business was also better off if they were healthy.

Unsurprisingly, I am a believer in universal health care for America. I think that’s one way we Make America Great Again … by recognizing that we share some burdens together. I also believe that a healthy country is a more productive country, and that wonderful talent might contribute to all if we relieved the strain and uncertainty that poor health puts on individuals and families.

“Obamacare” was not a health care system, but a form of insurance. There were many problems with it, mostly the fault of Republican-demanded compromises, but it succeeded in delivering better health to millions who would have othewise suffered.

At this point, I am not advocating for one system or another. My bottom line is simply that adequate health care is a right for every American, and my belief is that in the long run, we will all be better off if that comes to pass.

Many ask “why would we sacrifice the best health care system in the world for an experiment?” Because it is not true that the U.S. health care system is the best in the world. It is best in some limited areas, and not very good in others.

 

What it is especially good at is handing over outrageous $billion$ to drug companies that profit from ownership of politicians.

What it is especially good at is overworking nurses and aides in hospitals and home health centers so more money flows to the bottom line.

What it is especially good at is pushing doctors to limit office visits to 12 minutes or so with staff coding care to maximize insurance and government reembursement.

What it is especialy good at is siphoning off billions to Pharmacy Benefit Managers, allowing pharmaceutical companies to pay kickbacks to PBMs, and allowing pharmaceutical companies to create artifical shortages to jack up prices.

There are many questions on what might work and how. But the fact is that America does not have the best health care system in the world, just the most expensive. We pay about double the average of the rest of the developed world for a system not as good. And we’re not getting our money’s worth.

“Be Deliberate”

By Erik Dolson

Wind howls through shrouds and halyards while rain splatter splats on the deck above in a cadence of the storm. It’s intimidating to think about taking Foxy up the Strait of Juan de Fuca, from Victoria to Friday Harbor, in the morning.

Is this the tail of a front passing through late, or the front of one scheduled for Sunday but arriving early? The plan is to thread the needle between them.

I sent a note off to my mentor Roy. What did he think about weather for the trip? He agreed it looked pretty good, which is what I thought until about two hours ago when this slop moved in. My guess it will break sometime over night, gentle up in the morning and I’ll be out of here without an issue.

Today was spent cleaning up lines on deck, making the jib ready to deploy if it will give me the boost I hope is available. The currents are supposed to be mild, in my face at first but then a small push from behind. We all know what an absolutely stellar tide and current reader I am.

At least I’ll have an indicator of my speed through the water. The little paddle wheel with magnets had lost three of its six paddles, and the hollow within which it spun had sprouted green tendrils of growth. It’s a rush pulling the unit out of its hole in the bottom of the boat for the repair, water rushing in between my feet, and it’s a rush pulling the temporary cap off to put the indicator back in.

But it’s done. When putting the speedo back in, there was more water than I expected sloshing about in the locker. I tasted it. Salt. So the temporary cap was not as water tight as I’d thought. I put a little extra push when tightening the indicator down into its spot in the hull. I’ll check that again in the morning.

Water tanks are full, though making this transit was not on the agenda when I filled them. I was going to take the ferry. That’s a simple trip: hour bus ride from Victoria to Sidney, two hours on the ferry from Sidney to Anacortes where my truck hopefully still sits.

Oh, winter ferry schedule doesn’t include the Vancouver Island to Anacortes run until the end of March? Oooops. Told my daughters I’d be there in Sisters. made business appointments, wanted to be in Seattle in a week for the boat show to buy equipment at a discount. This was going to be a fast turn-around, Victoria to Sisters, Oregon to Victoria in about a week or ten days.

No ferry.

Plane from Victoria to Redmond, Oregon? Short notice plane reservations are really expensive, because after all, they know you probably have little choice. And my truck’s in Anacortes. If I drove back up I’d have two vehicles in Anacortes, none in Oregon, then a boat in Victoria, B.C., Canada.

My friends Jim and Leslee used to do stuff like that, and I named the chaos that inevitably results after them. It can take an act of God to sort it all out.

Which left taking the Ferry to Vancouver, B.C., Canada, then a bus or train to Mt. Vernon, Washington, then bus or cab or friend to Anacortes to my truck. That would just about double trip time, with luck.

But hey, look, there’s a weather window on Saturday, the tidal currents are mild, mid-day. I could take the boat all the way to Anacortes or just to Friday Harbor and take the inter-island ferry to the truck, have dinner with Roy who said I could sleep tomorrow night on his boat, then hit the road, refreshed and ready to roll.

I’d just have to thread a pretty wide needle between storms in the strait of Juan de Fuca.

Which, right now, outside the warm comfy cabin of my boat tied securely to the dock, sounds like a wide-open howling mouth with teeth gulping down January storms from the Pacific.

I wonder if the strait is inhaling the end of the last storm, or the beginning of the next? We’ll take another look in the morning. Roy’s previous advice to “be deliberate” extends to many situations. Plans can change, at least until you’re out there, literally and figuratively over your head.

First thing this mourning

By Erik Dolson

Who knows why it was today?  Because I wasn’t adequately sad, what with a firm, final goodbye from someone I loved but hurt badly enough they’d finally had enough? Because the sun was out? Because it was today, it just was?

This was always going to be one of the places where I’d leave some ashes. It was a crisp lovely day long ago when Leslee and Jim and I leaned up against the tall stone wall that retained heat from a sun that would not set.

We marveled how it just hung there barely moving as crowds flowed by and musicians played for change dropped into guitar cases, the sun perpetuating the afternoon like the singer held on to a refrain of a song we really liked.

On that day we were on the island looking at a boat I thought I might buy. I needed their opinion, we shared values and they had far more experience. After thoroughly going over the boat in a marina 45 minutes to the north, we came downtown to bask against the wall in this exquisite city, then find some Indian food.

I didn’t know on that afternoon, what, five years ago? Six? how little time was left. So much has happened since, and it’s hard to think that Jimmy died coming up on two years ago. Hell, I think I’ve been boating around the San Juan Islands for well over a year with the box Leslee sent with Jimmy in a baggie. Maybe that horrifies some, I think he’d smile, hell, he might have just given me those words.

The time wasn’t right, until today.

God, I miss him. Not like Leslee, of course, or his sons or his grandchildren. But he was my older brother, I trusted him to be him, and I loved him as if we’d spent our whole lives together and not just part of the last half, and even though I always knew he was smarter than me, more compassionate, had higher standards, had achieved more, showed higher honor.

It was hard at times knowing I wasn’t his best friend even though he was mine, that I may not have even been in his top five. He was that loved by those kinds of people. Of course he was. He had an impact, he was, it was frequently said, “larger than life.” Many wanted to bask in that glow.

He could tell stories that would make him laugh so hard he could barely speak, about things he’d done that most would want no one to know. Like the time he ate a bad taco or whatever from a street vendor in some South American or Central American town, then had to get on an airplane for a long flight back to the U.S. About how, when he got off the plane, men in hazmat suits came on board.

I helped him at times, I think, I hope, when he would worry about things. He didn’t know why he procrastinated when a legal brief was due, usually getting it done at the last minute. “Because your subconscious works on it the whole time, until you’re ready to transcribe the ‘story,’ ” I told him. That seemed to give him some relief from self recrimination.

He was a master at story. When writing a brief, he could put the facts into a story that was so persuasive, he had a reputation. He wrote simply but beautifully, better than me, and I was suposedly a “writer.” He’d clerked for one of the top legal minds in Oregon. He was qualified to present arguments to the U.S. Supreme Court. He wrote passages that were incorporated into U.S. law. He fended for the downtrodden, literally saved family farms, shook hands with Willie Nelson.

No, he wasn’t perfect but I loved him as much for his flaws as all that, for his occasional self-doubt, his deep need to know where Leslee was at all times and his dependence on her, his propensity to forget on occasion that he’d told a story before.

Like all of us, he had a warped mirror, at times. Others called him arrogant, not recognizing the difference between arrogance and brilliance and a willingness to express what he knew to be true.

Those attitudes didn’t bother me. I’ve been called arrogant as often as he was, and I have a whole lot less to show for it. It was confidence in some situations, managing not to show insecurities in others.

We’d hang out, sometimes talking deep shit because that was my personality refuge, until he tired of that then would change the subject or go do something else. In Panama once they’d broken the glass on a solar panel. I suggested we cover the shards with epoxy, and we filled the frame with a gelatinous goo that hardened into a glazing that worked well for a while. He thought that was pretty cool.

He loved his own kludges, too, like the time he rewired the automatic control of the water maker on their boat so it operated manually. That fix got them by for a long time, and took some ingenuity to figure out. I think he talked about that more than fighting off banks who wanted to take family farms in the 1980 recession that nobody remembers any more.

I think I’ll leave some ashes in Blind Bay, where he and Leslee watched me bring the boat he helped me buy and drop anchor for the first time, where he called my daughter the “crab whisperer” and made her proud that she could coax claw waving crabs to let go of the cage so they could be dropped back into the bay or into the pot for dinner.

Maybe I’ll make a small boat of folded paper with a candle for a sail and send some ashes off. Maybe I’ll send some down in a crab pot to lure the beasties in. I think he’d think that was fun.

This is the second time I’ve taken ashes to special places. The first time was for my other older brother from a separate mother, Jeff, another brilliant man but one so haunted by the demons we shared that … well, never mind. Some of his ashes were spread in a large Montana Lake, left there as the first snow of the season settled in and roads were about to be closed, so that Jeff could join creeks feeding Flathead Lake and eventually the Columbia River and out to the Pacific Ocean.

Which is where Jimmy’s ashes will wash, the next rain, off the huge stones that make up the wall where the sun sets only with reluctance. Off the bow of my boat, too, where I spread some so that Jimmy could continue to guide me, from a place ahead of the mast.

I’m getting old, but I often think of myself as Jimmy’s little brother. I refuse, as Clint Eastwood says, “to let the old man in.” The day will come when I can’t drive fast cars and sail this boat and maybe I’m already incapable of falling in love. I had to face that again, yesterday, when I read the word, “goodbye.”

Maybe today was the day I spread a bit of ashes because it was a way of not saying goodbye. I put ashes in a place important that I’d shared with him, with them, so that every day for however long I spend here, when I walk past that wall for whatever reason, I will be able to say, “Hi, Jimmy.”

Even if no one hears me.

For Gear Heads.

By Erik Dolson

When I bought the 25 year old boat, I was completely ignorant of electrical systems and the boat had three battery monitors: One in the charger /inverter (charges the main or “house batteries when connected to “shore” power, or takes direct current from the batteries and turns it into alternating current for appliances), one in the master switch panel, and a small round monitor labeled “Balmar” that only retired Balmar Inc. techs remembered and for which Balmar has no information anywhere. I asume it was sourced from another OEM.

None of the three ever agreed with either of the other two as to voltage or current. And, I wasn’t sure if the little round guage wasn’t actually connected to the battery that was used to start the engine, given that unlabeled wires run everywhere.

Let’s not get into the two huge alternators that hung off the main engine and were driven by two too small V-belts impossible to adjust, and a dumb regulator. Boy, did they eat belts. Even a Blalmar smart regulator didn’t cure that (a serpentine belt, did, with one larger alternator. Sometimes you have to KISS a problem away).

Oh, the generator regulator was installed such that the “dripless” shaft seal could toss salt water right at it. Talk about random issues! Burnt wires! The generator exhaust was plumbed into a cockpit drain, which allowed engine noise and diesel smoke unimpeded access to the cockpit during evenings at anchor. The tachometer didn”t need to be replaced despite the insistence of a tech who aparently didn’t grasp open circuit vs volatage under load, and the main engine would not start for a while in Alaska until, again, contacts were sanded and tightened.

So, if three guages don’t tell the same story, get a 4th! Bought a Balmar Smart Guage and wired it myself to one battery of the house bank so that I would absolutley know where and how. This battery monitor agreed with the voltage of the round Balmar guage which also gives amps draw. They were consistetly .2 volts higher than the old panel monitor, which also seems to report amps randomly between 2 and 200, which I put down to age/shunt issues, and a refrigeration system that does not go through the main panel at all but is wired up somewhere in the engine room. I’ll find the connections eventually.

But as long as things were working and somewhat consistent, I wasn’t worried. I was ignorant, almost as good!

That left the charger / inverter, which agreed in volts with the two Balmar guages when it was not charging, but was way off when it was. It also was not fully charging the batteries from shore power, I realized later, though my main engine and generator did, once new regulators were installed. The charger / inverter started to behave once a loose ground was tightened up during the process of sanding engine room electrical bus bar connections.

Then came solar, and the panels, and solar controllers, and a battery sensor that doesn’t broadcast beyond it’s own low profile shadow, and hence even more discovery.

It’s amazing to me how frustrating this can be, but at the same time, how much I love this stuff! I really mean that. What an education!

Like discovering after almost threeee yeeears and uncountable episodes of wiping up diesel while chasing the perfect flame that my Dickenson Diesel Heater doesn’t just want good draft, it really prefers positive cabin pressure! What a hoot!

Foolish fuel funsters

Tesla pickup, art from Gear Junkie

by Erik Dolson

Well, that happened a lot sooner than I thought it would. Pickup drivers blocking access to charging stations for electric vehicles.

Fighting the future is natural, I suppose, and no one wants to be a dinosaur (did they really become diesel fuel belching from those truck exhausts?) either.

Now, I’m not going to suggest this ill-considered “protest” is the result of efforts by Marathon Oil or Koch Industries or the American Petroleum Institute to delay the electrification of transportation. That would be baseless and irresponsible. Maybe they used Facebook.

Industries in America are certainly capable of such chicanery, as the sugar industry blamed fat for obesity, cigarette makers had “scientists” deny the link between smoking and cancer, and Facebook paid PR firms to say they just want to bring people together while working on anti-semitic smears against George Soros.

Morals don’t scale nearly as heavy as profit when it comes time to weigh the gold.

But pickup owners blocking charging stations? Hey, guys? (Call it sexist, but I just don’t see women doing something this juvenile). I have a hobby that burns more fuel per mile than the thirstiest of your rigs, and I have a big diesel to get me there and back. I love my truck just like you love yours, though if the new Tesla pickup can pull an 11,000 pound trailer, I might want to look into that torque monster.

But I’m willing to let the electrics have their share of the road. Unless that damn Prius doing 54 miles an hour won’t get out of the fast lane. That’s not his share of the road, that’s mine.

But even if it was the Russians who started this (they are pretty good at sowing this type of discord), one does have to wonder what you truck owners intend. What exactly are you thinking, here? What’s your goal? What’s the outcome?

Yelling obscenities at people driving an electric vehicle, and preventing them from getting their fuel? I don’t get it. Are you defending a lifestyle? Depriving them of choice so you can gaurantee yours? Just having fun with a little harmless bigotry? Defending America? These are Teslas, men, probably with as much U.S. sourced content as your Dodge Ram, Ford F250 or Chevy 3500.

Do you really think that tractor trailers pulling tankers are less susceptible to disruption than power lines? Do you really think when the tipping point comes and there are more electrics on the road than diesels, and you continue this stupid, childish behavior, you won’t pay a price? Do you really think that in depriving others of freedom of movement, you won’t sacrifice yours?

Or are you just being manipulated by those who profit on oil into doing something that isn’t really in your own interest?