Uh, health care reform?

Well, the two hot topics for today are the snow and Congress passing the health care reform.

Lots of snow, in case you didn't know and a lot of unhappy people about the so-called health care reform.

In case you didn’t read the specifics about the health care reform, here is a little bit of information. The cost of the bill is $940 billion. Under the new plan, most consumers would be required to have coverage by 2014 and most employers would have to offer it.

That means with almost record unemployment, small business owners will face extra costs if and when they want to hire new employees, assuming they survive the extra costs and can stay in business.

The bill also authorizes the hiring of additional IRS agents to handle the agency’s new responsibility.

If a person does not get health care, they can be penalized. So if somebody is unemployed and does not have the money to pay premiums, they will be penalized. Smart, huh?

Of course there are some additional taxes on the wealthy to help pay for the program. I am not an expert or anything, but it seems like anything the government gets control of, there are problems. Look at Medicare, for example.

Medicare pays some insurance companies money every month to administer programs because it is more efficient than having Medicare do it. Now the government will have a hand in the majority of health care plans.

Eek. I am all in favor of having health care available to all CITIZENS. Lower premiums would be good, also. But it won’t happen. Every year the premium for senior citizens to have Medicare increases. Some doctors won’t deal with all the problems involved with seeing Medicare patients.
Do you think they will want to deal with patients with government insurance? Want more proof, the health care for our veterans is not the best. From what I have heard, many veterans believe the doctors are not the best, there are long waits, etc.

But what can you expect from a group where many of their members are career politicans and have not done anything except run for office and get elected. If they had small businesses, they wouldn’t have to worry about offering health care for their employees. That small business would have been shut down.

Require the politicans to go through the same crud to get medical coverage as your average person. Don’t let them get excellent coverage at no cost to anybody except the taxpayers. Make them go to an ordinary doctor, pay a huge premium, pay co-pays, wait in line like everybody else and not get everything handed to them on a silver platter.

Here are some comments taken from facebook. The names have been deleted because I did not ask permission to use the names. It was funny, I didn’t see one person on my friend list say anything good about the reform.

oh well it took a Carter to get a Reagan, maybe our next president will listen to the american majority, cause it sure won't be this one that's there in 2012.

Well friends our so-called public option died on the Senate floor yesterday. It could have survived, but apparently it had a pre-existing condition.

stupid obama!!!!!!!!

Our Country just went from "Yes You Can" to "No You Can't"

It's a sad day...And I am a working class citizen whose employer doesn't offer medical, 401k or any type of benefits. I pay for my healthcare out of my own pocket and barely make ends meet much less have the ability to save for retirement...So this isn't from a Republican "who is always angry about something"

I can barely afford health insurance for my family now. What happened in Congress last night is another step into the darkness of government run everything. Sickening.

I completely agree!!!!! I don't know how anyone could see that as a good thing or much less vote for it.....

You know, for all the talk of supposedly losing civil liberties under Bush, I feel I've lost much more freedom in the short tenure of Obama. All, the while I also feel less secure.

Probably should start hiding our guns cause they're next!

Now we have to mobilize to get those democrats out of office in November!

I don't just want the democrats out of office. I want the "progressive" republicans out of office too. I want anyone who voted in any way to progress this travesty out of office ASAP.

let's hope WE THE PEOPLE will wake up and fight back at a government that is now telling WE THE PEOPLE how it's going to be. You have to get involved!!!

beware the thought police. Orwell must be rolling in his grave.

And this was just a sample. Surely somebody other than a politician is happy about this? Apparently not the people I know.

If you want to share your views, the Journal's Forum has a new topic on health care reform. It can be found HERE. You do have to register to post, but it is easy to do.

Not necessarily banker hours

Back in the old days, people always used to comment on my having “banker’s hours”.

Sometimes that was true. Go to work around 8 (in the morning), get off at 3 or 4 and play a full round of golf at the Choctaw.

Then I switched banking jobs and the hours got longer (egad!). For a while I sold insurance and the hours even got longer (double egad).

After that, tired of 8 a.m. appointments in Texarkana (four hour drive, trust me, I know well), I got another banking job in Poteau at a bank which will not be named because.

Argh! No more banker hours. Worked at least eight hours a day, seldom took a lunch break and figured out shortly the main part of my job was dealing with angry customers.

No, really. So in September I started publishing a little web site called The LeFlore County Journal. I had wanted to do this for a long time. Some days aren’t all that busy and then other days…

Like Friday, for instance. Got up at the crack of dawn, okay, it was actually a little after seven. But there was light shining in my bedroom window! Worked on the web site for a while and decided if I should cover games.

See, I had been sick all week and was finally starting to feel better. I knew it would be a long day, but dangit, the LCJ peeps hopefully wanted results on games involving the three county teams. That would involve a trip to Muskogee for two games and then travel to McAlester to cover another game.

I knew that would get me home around 11:30 or midnight, and then an hour or so writing stories and processing the pictures.

I decided to at least go to Muskogee and see how I felt. So took care of a few Craigdoos and left a little before 11 for Muskogee.

Got to Muskogee early, which was good since I didn’t know for sure where I was going. I covered two ball games (Heavener girls and Spiro boys), which finished around 4:30.

Talihina didn’t play until 8, but again, I wasn’t sure where I was going so off I went down Hwy. 65. Would I get there early enough to check out Pete’s Place? Millions of people undoubtedly wondered the same question.

The answer: No. It was around 5:30 or so when I got to McAlester and nature was calling my name: Craig, you gotta go! So I did, at some nasty convenience store. Good thing it was numero uno and I didn’t have to touch that toilet seat.

I had to go ALL the way through McAlester. I have never seen so many traffic lights bunched together. The lights would turn red as I approached, go green and hit red again at the next light. I would have said an obscenity except I don’t cuss.

Finally, I got outside of McAlester and kept driving. Passed the place where the bad guys go, I could almost feel the bad karma, but then decided it was hunger.

Then, I saw it! The Southeast Expo Center and a rearload of vehicles already parked there. I found a parking spot where a space was probably not an actual parking spot and made my way inside, after a short wait outside.

I thought at first there had to be a mistake. This looked more like a place to show a prized heifer than a basketball game. The seats were forever away from the temporary court and the score clocks were so far away I could barely see them.

But this was it! I waited in line at the concession stand for about 30 minutes and found a seat on the press row. Nobody asked for credentials, which is good because all I had was a bent business card.

I watched a war in the first game between Konawa and Savanna for the area championship. Savanna was huge, Konawa was the fastest team I have seen for girls.

Anyway, Konawa won. Now it was time for Talihina to play Haworth. The teams had to dress a football field away from the court, or so it seemed.

The Tigers blew the game open in the second quarter and cruised to the win. The game ended around 9:30 and there was a traffic jam outside which would make driving in Dallas seem like an easy chore.

I actually escaped the parking lot, shoving my truck in front of some little bitty car, I waved like I was thanking them but could see a scowl on the driver’s face. In fact, I thought for a second they were telling me I was No. 1!

Drove the nearly deserted two-lane highways and again got hammered by the traffic lights in Wilburton. Caught every one of those suckers. Sat there for a minute, while no cars ever appeared to my left or right. Got home around 11:20 or so, got the pics ready, wrote the stories and did some shameless plugging for the stories on the Journal’s Facebook page and finally got to bed shortly before 1 a.m.

So if you count all the hours I put in to driving, writing two stories and posting four pictures, it was a total of 14 hours.

How’s that for web publisher hours?