Republican plan to eliminate Medicare

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by Mike

Thanks, Tim

Oddly enough, I started reading and listening to Christopher Hitchens just about the time that he was diagnosed with cancer. He earned his cancer(if you can say such a thing) thru heavy hard liquor consumption and cigarettes, whereas my condition was with me from the start. I never smoked (cigarettes) but have, being a good Irish-Catholic, drank my fair share of quality beer

I'm a single dad now(kids are 10 and 12), so I am worried about the possibility of fairly quick death due to aspiration pneumonia. But, I can do a lot of things to be healthier, and may live for another twenty years

BTW, that Astrology/The Factor exacta from Pool 2 pays about $7,000!

Oh, Hitchens. I absolutely despise a lot of his political op-eds, but he says them so eloquently. And his writings on his cancer leave me bawling. He'll be a loss to discourse, for sure. The man can write.

Thanks for sharing about your own medical history, Mike. I think it reminds us all that good health is not something we earn; it really is a gift, and one that those who have it often take for granted. My mother did all the things you were supposed to- ate well, exercised, had kids before she was 30, etc. and yet she was dead of breast cancer at 35. You just never know.

I think we seek to assign blame for a person's bad health on his or her lifestyle because it relieves us of the fear that at any time something could go wrong with our own bodies. And lets us avoid the fact that all of us, at some point, will need health care, and maybe it's a really, really dumb idea to leave it up to private industry to make a profit off of the certainty that we will all become sick at some point.

And I'm glad you spent your time drinking quality beer. Life is too short to drink swill.