George Rothert – Page 2 – GEORGE ROTHERT

RIP Medical Debt

The number one driver of bankruptcies in the United States is the country’s dysfunctional health care system. Medical expenses cause 62% of bankruptcies in the U.S., a statistic unfathomable to residents of other first-world countries. Per capita medical cost in the U.S. was $11,172 in 2018. That’s 17.7% of Gross Domestic Product.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 26% of Americans aged eighteen through sixty-four have difficulty with medical bills, more than half of whom have medical insurance. (Medicare kicks in at age sixty-five.)

Hospitals and other medical providers typically sell their unpaid bills to collection agencies after ninety to a hundred-eighty days. Collection agencies pay pennies on the dollar for the right to collect the full amount of unpaid bills.
Enter RIP Medical Debt. Founded in 2014 by two veteran debt collectors, RIP buys debt portfolios from collection agencies and wipes out the indebtedness at no cost to the indebted. So far they have erased more than $4.5 billion of medical bills for more than 2.5 million individuals and families.

RIP Medical Debt recently purchased unpaid medical bills for the first time directly from a health care provider. Ballad Heath, a network of hospitals in Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina, sold $278 million of unpaid bills to RIP. Terms were not announced, but presumably the deal was more advantageous to RIP Medical Debt than with a collection agency in the middle. More than 80,000 low-income patients will have their outstanding bills, some as old as ten years, wiped out.

RIP Medical Debt is a 501(C)(3) non-profit organization and states that contributions to them are tax deductible. You can make a donation on their web site.

-2

101 Years and Done… or maybe not

Aficionados of Aplets and Cotlets received some bad news in March. Liberty Orchards, makers of the confection for more than a century, announced they would shut down operations in June. After a hundred-and-one years, there would be no more Aplets & Cotlets.

Mark Balaban and Armen Tertsagian, Armenian immigrants, owned a small orchard in Cashmere Washington. (Cashmere lies in central Washington, halfway between Wenatchee—home to the annual Apple Blossom Festival—and Leavenworth—a faux Bavarian village popular with tourists.)

The partners started the company in 1920 as way to sell surplus apples. They concocted Aplets, a candy combining apples and walnuts and gelatin. The confection was based on a candy they remembered called Turkish Delight. A few years later they introduced an apricot flavor, called Cotlets.

A Mother’s Day Story

Jesus brought a few of his disciples with him to a wedding celebration at Cana. It’s likely that relatives of Mary were getting married and so to please his mother he made the two-day walk from his evangelizing base in Judea.

After he arrived, his mother told him the hosts had run out of wine. Jesus responded that he had come to party, not to work. (“Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”) Rather than rebuke her son for speaking so rudely to her or slapping him — or asking who invited the apostles — Mary simply told the servants, ”Do whatever he tells you.”

Jesus ordered the servants to fill containers with water and then draw some off and take it to the chief steward. After tasting it, the steward remarked to the bridegroom that instead of following the custom of serving the good wine first and the lesser wine after the guests’ tastes had been dulled, they had held the best for last.

Even though he spoke rudely to his mother, Jesus didn’t just do what Mary wanted, he made her happy by producing excellent quality wine. And thus Jesus began his rather short career by performing his first supernatural phenomenon not to support his proselytizing, but to please his mother.

Weather and Climate and Space Lasers

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q – Georgia) postulated that Jewish bankers Rothschild, Inc. connived with Pacific Gas & Electric to shoot lasers from space, thus igniting the apocalyptic wildfires to clear space for California’s high-speed rail project. While Rep. Greene’s inanities were garnering headlines, real scientists confirmed that space hurricanes are a real thing.

Scientists had previously warned about the likelihood of space hurricanes, and their potential to wreak havoc on satellites. Now a real space hurricane has been documented. Researchers took satellite images from August 20, 2014 and used 3D imaging to recreate how the hurricane formed and behaved. A 600-mile-wide torrent of plasma had hovered in the Earth’s upper atmosphere over the North Pole. The storm spun counterclockwise for about eight hours, generating spiral-shaped arms, spewing electrons instead of water, before it finally dissipated.

Scientists conjecture that space hurricanes are caused by an “unusually large and rapid transfer of solar wind energy and charged particles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere.” Researchers studying these phenomena say the resulting storms are not uncommon and should be monitored in real time, not six years after the fact. They foresee increasing interference with satellites, disrupting GPS and other communications.

Meanwhile, here on earth, scientists have been measuring the Gulf Stream, known formally as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), since 2004. The Gulf Stream’s powerful ocean current brings warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico into the Atlantic Ocean, past the east coast of the United States, and on to western Europe, altering the climate along its way. It even affects the weather on the western coast of Africa. The current keeps temperatures in these areas warmer during the winter months and helps to cool and regulate heat during the summer.

Using “proxy data” (everything from ships’ logs, to records of ice cores, ocean sediments, and corals collected over time) they can reconstruct the behaviors of the stream back as far as the year 400.

A new study tells us the Gulf Stream is rapidly weakening. It’s now the weakest it’s been in a thousand years.

The reason? Yep, you guessed it: human-caused climate change. Researchers say before the year 2100, melting ice floes will weaken the current and likely will result in rapidly rising sea levels on the U.S. east coast and more intense weather events in Europe, as in increasingly extreme heat waves, and a decrease in summer rainfall.

So here’s another something to worry about. You’re welcome.

Why Not the Ides of April?

In William Shakespeare’s telling, a soothsayer gave warning to Julius Caesar: “Beware the Ides of March.”

Caesar had, in fact, been forewarned, but he did not take it seriously. On his way to the Senate on March 15, 44 B.C., Caesar passed by the seer and sneered, “Well, the Ides of March have come!” The seer responded, “Aye, Caesar; but not gone,”

When he arrived at the Senate, Caesar’s fellow senators attacked him. Twenty-three stab wounds later he was dead. The assassination ignited a civil war that ultimately ended the Roman Republic. By 40 B.C. Caesar’s nephew and understudy, Gaius Octavius, emerged as Rome’s first emperor, calling himself Augustus.

March 15, 44 B.C., the Ides, is a touchstone in Roman history.

Why don’t we call our tax day, April 15, the Ides? There is no Ides of April.

The Ides of March was an important day on the Roman calendar. Originally, March was the first month of the year and the Ides marked the first full moon and kicked off a week of religious celebrations. Later Roman calendars still were keyed to lunar cycles. The ides was calculated to be the 13th for most months, but the 15th in March, May, July, and October.

Julius Caesar’s assassination was not the only memorable Ides-of-March event.

March 15, 1971 – CBS Cancels the “Ed Sullivan Show,”
March 15, 1917 – Czar Nicholas II of Russia signs his abdication papers, ending a 304-year-old royal dynasty and ushering in Bolshevik rule. He and his family are taken captive and, in July 1918, executed before a firing squad.

Click here for more Ides-of-March incidents.

-1

Dolly Fights the Pandemic

Dolly Parton is a country-music superstar and living legend. She is also widely regarded as a generous and all-around nice person. She made the news briefly in April last year for her $1 million contribution to Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s COVID-19 research work. She also encouraged her fans who could afford it to donate to the Vanderbilt project.

A few months later she learned that some of the donated money went to fund development of the Moderna vaccine. Her name had appeared with other sponsors in a preliminary report on the vaccine. “I just felt so proud to have been part of that little seed money that will hopefully grow into something great and help to heal this world,” she said.

Dolly Parton received her Moderna vaccine a few days ago. She appeared appropriately stylish in a dress open at the shoulder as if designed to make the injection easier.

Writer and humorist Roy Blount Jr (not to be confused with Republican Senator Roy Blunt) once said of the singer/songwriter’s performances, that “Dolly Parton makes me want to stand on my chair and wave my hat.”

-1