Aww...Nuts!

It’s that time of year once again. Harvest time. The roads are clogged with farm machinery as the harvesters move from orchard to orchard. And the air is filled with the fine dust stirred up by those machines. The valley haze grows until you can barely see the mountains. Mt. Shasta disappeared a week ago and Mt. Lassen is fading fast.

Almonds are the most common crop and the nuts fall like rain when the machine grabs the tree and shakes it. Plums and prunes are also harvested by shaking, but the fruit falls onto a soft, upside-down umbrella like contraption that is wrapped around the tree.

Of course, none of this activity is good for the human respiratory system and I have had a persistent cough ever since the harvest began. Plus the red and irritated eyes. And, in another week or two, the almonds will be heaped up in storage and the walnut harvest will begin. More shaking and more dust. I’m already looking forward to the rainy season.

I posted something about healthcare the other day, all about the government deciding that Medicare shouldn’t pay for preventable hospital mistakes, like leaving surgical tools in the patient. Sounds reasonable. But did you notice this part of the article?

“Wall Street analysts are not so sure that loss of income, estimated at about $20 million per year spread over just under 5,000 hospitals in the U.S., is incentive enough for hospitals to reduce errors. ($20,000,000÷5,000 = $4,000)

“Medicare pays hospitals over $100 billion a year, so $20 million is less than 0.02%,” [says Bear Stearns analyst Jason] Gurda…”I’m not expecting a significant impact although it is a first step toward paying for quality.”

According to Wall Street; it’s all about money. I think they’re right.

Proportions and the news. I read that the proportion of overweight children in the US has tripled over the past 20 years and now stands at 17%. The proportion of children who exercise in high school has dropped from 42% in 1991to only 28% in 2004. Is there some link here?

I do know that I was stopped at the signal in Hamilton City yesterday, just as the high school students were returning from ‘lunch’ at the taco wagon and market across the street from the school. Lots of students. So here’s my question; we claim to be a nation that cares deeply about the safety of our children and yet we allow them to leave the safety of the school in the middle of the day… to do what? Answer; we don’t know. We just give them the freedom (and money) to do whatever children like to do when they aren’t being supervised.