Problems are for Solving

Davids home now: Can there be a right to Medical Care
When I was in medical school, there was no insurance. People got care. Doctors charged and received payment with a direct doctor-patient relationship that was mutually sustainable and satisfactory, medically and financially. Poor people received care through the dedication and compassion of the doctor and community.

I was taught, “Save the widow the farm.” That is, when Farmer Joe comes in with a lung cancer, one might encourage him to undergo extensive, expensive surgery that would require that the farm be mortgaged. However, the results were dismal. After Joe’s death, the widow frequently was unable to pay the mortgage and lost the farm.

Instead, one could explain the situation with compassion and frankness and Farmer Joe and his wife, using the same frugality and value system by which they had otherwise lived, would accept the reality of the situation, a reality that bespoke a meager chance of benefit that was not appropriately affordable. Joe’s plight would be alleviated by all palliative means medicine had to offer. This rational, realistic decision was the norm. Indulgence in futile care to the point of threatening the whole system was not a problem.

This is a great blog post from a retired doctor on what’s gone wrong in health care in the last 50 years or so.

People often make resolutions, and rarely keep them. It’s kind of sad, and I’ve hesitated to make any in past years because of my previous lack of consistency in keeping them.

This year, though, I’m going to try again. And by God’s grace, these should be attainable.

1. Be more consistent in my time with family worship than last year. I ended 2008 much better than it began, but there is still room for improvement. I want to not only be more consistent but more deliberate in how the time is spent, so that the children (and the adults!) get more out of it and it’s not just a routine.
2. Be more consistent in my exercising. I had some good months in 2008, and it was certainly better than 2007, but I want to get in at least 10 workouts *every month* in 2009. It’s an attainable goal. More is better, but I want to hit it every month rather than 20 in January and then miss March.
3. Read twelve books. I’ve pared down my blog reading of late, and may continue to purge my RSS feeds. I thought about having this be “read one book every month” but I would rather just get some books read. I may do better than twelve, but my reading habits have been poor in 2008 and so I want to just finish a few more books this year.
4. More writing. Not necessarily blog posts, but I want to do more writing than I did last year. Including letter writing–I want to get back to sitting down with a pen and paper and write people I don’t usually communicate with, and to do it outside of the quick, painless email system. I know I should have something concrete here, but I don’t know what I want to set as a realistic goal.
5. More hospitality. I’ve used my travel schedule as an excuse for not having people over so much this last year, but I want to have at least 10 families over for dinner this year that we’ve never had over before, or at least who haven’t been in my home since 2006.
6. More time with the family. As of January 1, I have 30 days of vacation time and 38 days of personal time. I would like to actually take some of that off this year and use more vacation time for personal use than I did last year. It may be hard around travel, but it needs to be a priority and I’ll have to do a better job of delegating so that it can happen. So concretely, the goal is to start next year with fewer vacation days saved up than this year, by at least 5. That means I need to take off at least 33 days this year. Seems like that should be easy, but it won’t.

I think these are reasonable goals, but the year will show me. I’ll try to post updates as to how I’m doing on all six of these every month or so.

This morning I worked out for the first time for over a month. While I was on the treadmill, after figuring out where I was in my podcast playlist (refer back to the over a month part), I listened to one of the newer Rabbit Room podcasts. It’s a fairly new podcast, and this one was episode six, and there were only seven so far (maybe a short-lived podcast?).

My grandmother died last night, the last of my grandparents to do so (my wife still has two grandparents living), and so it marks the end of an era in my family as well as a time of sadness. Curt McLey, in this podcast, reflects on Lewis’ The Problem of Pain and on his own suffering–a great deal of which God brought into his life in a short time.

He aptly reminds us that suffering is a gift. I won’t even try to duplicate the podcast’s wonderful messages here. It is more than worth the 10 minutes of your time it’ll take to listen.

You can download it here.