Change We Can Believe In-Is it Coming?

If you follow my blog, I have been delinquent. I have excuses. My first is- I am writing a book with my daughter Kali Cress Peterson. It is due to the publishers, New Horizon Press ,on February 1. It is the tightest deadline I have ever had . I am writing like crazy , every morning , every afternoon. The title is Mom Loved You best and I Hate You For It.About midlife siblings , it will be out the fall of 2010.

But that’s not all. I am a nervous wreck over Obama . I think he’s doing it. He got out there, he’s out there today. He may pass health care, he’s coming from behind . Oh my god.
Cross your fingers. Call your Congressman. Change we can believe in might be on the way.

I'll Take You Back- Maybe-Obama and his switch on the public Option

Dear President Obama
I know you have had a lot on that plate of yours .You're so busy that I'm sure you've missed my blog. Maybe you don't even know I broke up with you. Silly you.

I 've had a lot on my plate too- what with getting my hip replaced and plunging into the dreaded Medicare "donut hole ...

I've been spending most of my time in that health care system that I want you to change. But I think it's time to revisit my little break up note. Just in case you forgot, I broke up with you over the public option- the one you weren't supporting

But I've given it a second thought. It's sort of like Jerry Wagenheim. I broke up with him in 5th grade and lived to regret it- actually the next day.

Well it's just amazing because the news  tells me I made the same mistake again, now 50-some years later. I never learn.

Suddenly the thing that made me so mad at you- enough to dump you- has changed. It  looks like you are  bringing back  the public option. Actually- you and Valerie Jarrett- maybe you planned this all along . You're a sneaky pair. Michele too, I'm sure. I would never leave her out. I know you tell her everything and she has to approve or, well, you're in the dog house.

Maybe I should let you out of my dog house because I actually think you are now  backing  my deal breaker- that pubic option in your health care plan. You are sly, teasing us all along just to get Olympia Snowe- I'm worth more but we'll let that slide.

We'll see. All my friends out here in Northern California think I should take you back. But it depends on, well, that public option. Til' you get it passed, I'll be thinking about you - me and 77% of Americans who really want that public option.

Bob D. at the Greek Theater

I saw Bob Dylan Sunday night. He was an entertainer --  facing the audience the entire show, moving around in boots with stilettos heels -- looking sexy at 68 . He reminded me of what I imagine Xavier Cugat or Lionel Hampton was on stage- -hands outstretched as he sang, doing a few steps while he led his guitar orchestra.

One person to my right was at his 51st show. The couple who came with me had seen him in Fresno, and all over California . They were Bob-heads . Everyone exchanged set lists.

He was a Bob Dylan who seemed to like being Bob Dylan. His skin finally felt comfortable, maybe.

It had to be hard being Bob Dylan -- being pinned as the messenger, having your house broken into, your family harassed. He didn't like the messianic role he was given, with 5 kids a wife . Plus all those crazy fans demanding him to be an oracle. It made his life hell, I am guessing.

I am no Bob head, but I've seen him on stage with his back to the audience. Not this time. This time he was center stage, raising his outstretched arms, pivoting and preening.

We sat near where I watched my daughter and son-in-law graduate in 2000, on the cement seats of Berkeley's Greek Theater, with cushions provided to the handicapped section.  I traded stories with a woman about hip replacement as others traded set lists.

He ended with All Along the Watchtower with this pumping kind of polka beat. Maybe it was a Christmas Carol kind of rhythm. He has a Christmas album coming out. I have yet to get my head around that but- you never know...

...as I didn't know. I thought maybe he would die , like Michael Jackson. So I went. Instead, what I saw was a guy who was more alive than when I  saw him at the Oakland Paramount years ago.- and sexy. He sang mostly great new songs- with his craggy voice - his band consisting of three guitars plus this moviestar handsome lead guitarist Charlie Sexton, and the drummer from Letterman's show. They had the cement seats vibrating, with Bob leading like an electric Lionel Hampton.

I think the message really is - don't count Bob out. Never count him out.

The Ninth Year in Afghanistan

Last night --- reflecting on our now 9 year war in Afghanistan , MSNBC’s Richard Engel asked- how many tours of duty can a marriage stand. Soldiers have been asked to do multiple tours of duty because - well we’ve been at this so long.

It made me think of my own family. My Dad did one tour of duty and it maimed my family for 60 years. In fact, before my father ended up in Stalag 17, he had only flown 2 missions . One, he told me was to bomb Florence. Florence -I recall saying in horror. Well as the navigator that was his job.

I was born when he was in a prison camp. He came back a mental ruin. It destroyed my mother’s marriage, his life and my brother’s.

I tried to climb out of the shambles and barely made it .My brother did not and died of alcohol and drug abuse at 44.

I have retold this story in many blogs but what I have to ask now, where does it leave these families whose mothers and fathers are fighting over and over again in the crags of Afghanistan.

My family hid their pain. Do they? My family had no counseling- do they? My family was ripped apart each life at a time and sometimes lives concert-for decades- after one tour of duty.
What will happen to theirs after three? Just wondering.

Today is my brother Harry Steven Cress’s birthday. He would have been 64.This blog is for him in love.

Richard Engel’s special on the eighth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, Tip of The Spear, is on MSNBC tomorrow night.

Bob Dylan at the Greek Theater

It was a full moon in Santa Cruz last night and I watched it rise over the Diablos and Santa Cruz mountains sitting on the edge of Monterey Bay. After being stuck in the house for months , the water attracts me like a magnet. I walked along West Cliff Drive, perched on the cliffs above the beach, three times last week. At Lighthouse Point, a friend and I took in the surfers and the absence of sea lions who hang out on a rock just off the point. They must have been off fishing.

A bride and groom , in full wedding finery, passed us. A photographer followed and then what looked like an anxious Dad, snapping photos in their wake. The bride's white veil trailed in the wind past the lighthouse and the sea lion's abandoned rock.
The joy of where I live is just amazing after sitting in a lounge chair on my brick patio for 6 months.

Several good things have happened since my hip was replaced. I am starting to work on the third edition of my book, Handbook of Geriatric Care Management , Jones and Bartlett, which will be out the summer of 2010. I also got tickets to the Bob Dylan concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley.If something should happen to him, I did not want to regret missing the concert. Both are good signs of recovery.

Sucked down the Donut Hole- A cautionary Tale About The Medicare Drug Plan

On Sunday, leaning on my cane, I was feeling good. My replaced hip is healing well and even though I have some other medical problems, I am headed to a full hip recovery. Standing in line at my local pharmacy, I was picking up two meds. When my turn came the smiling pharmacist arrived at the counter with two containers in hand and asked for my credit card. As she slid the plastic across the screen- BAM!- I almost fell backward .


Clutching my cane I reeled, shocked at the tab of over $350.00 - for two meds.

"There must be some mistake" I pleaded, scowling at the white coated woman. I told her what my regular co-pay was for one med. She scurried to get a print out of my records - this drug had shot from up from a $37.00 co-pay to $126.47. My other med was $240.00. I grabbed my husband's arm and leaned on my good hip .

The young pharmacist peered at my purchase records grimacing. Hesitantly, squirming, she muttered, "I'm afraid you have fallen into the donut hole."

Sure enough, 21 days post-hospitalization I had been sucked down a horrific drain, much like what Edgar Alan Poe described in his short story "The Maelstrom". Poe's giant ocean whirlpool, where the sea opens up and swallow ships whole.




"Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion - heaving, boiling, hissing - gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents."

Heaving, boiling and hissing my medication tab will now shoot up to 1000 a month. That price tag is insane you think, but more than nuts - is that's good. I need to gun the motors to sail across the donut hole pronto. I have to spend $3500 of my own money to reach the point of "catastrophic coverage" (my calm port in the pharma storm).


The more I spend each month the faster I get to the catastrophic coverage dock where the cost of the meds are reduced back to cheaper co-pays. .

I have some words from Tony Soprano to say here that aren't fit for this forum. After all, I am from Atlantic City. I will add this is all due to former president George Bush who cooked this up. He made a deal with the big pharmas to get together a phony drug plan for seniors that looks good but leaves them in a huge lurch if they really get sick and need a slew of meds, especially those who have chosen part D, which I foolishly selected.

Bush wanted to hype himself as a friend to seniors when he was doing his sales pitch to privatize social security- get seniors to invest their social security in the stock market. After the great 2008 stock market crash, with everyone's 401k in the tank , that wasn't that a great Bush idea. He wanted to look like he was helping seniors with this drug plan but really was colluding with the pharmas. He did not bargain with them for medication prices for Medicare like the VA did centuries ago. As both are huge entitlements they have that bull elephants' ability to bargain. But oh no. Bush made no bargains with the Medicare drug plan he put together. Instead he created the so-called donut hole, where spending past $2700 in a year leaves you Tony Soprano screwed. You are like me and instead of paying $37.00 for your medication, you are paying full inflated price .

Obama says he will fix this mess. If passed by Congress, The President's Healthcare Plan begins immediately to close the Medicare "donut hole" - a current egregious gap in its drug benefit - by providing a 50 percent discount on brand-name prescription drugs for seniors, like me, who fall into it. In 2007, over 8 million seniors hit this coverage gap in the standard Medicare drug benefit. By 2019, the President's plan will completely close the "donut hole". I think that's a little too long. The average out-of-pocket spending for such beneficiaries who lack another source of insurance is $4,080.

If passed, it will likely go into effect in July 2010.

This unexpected shrinking of the donut hole, which affects about 26 percent of Part D enrollees, is the result of a second deal made this year between the White House and the pharmaceutical industry. All drug manufacturers agreed to donate half the cost of their brand-name and biologic products (but not generic drugs) to people in the gap, at no cost to the government.


Furthermore, the full cost of drugs bought in the gap will count toward the out-of-pocket limit ($4,350 in 2009) that triggers low-cost catastrophic coverage, even though enrollees will actually pay only half of this amount to get there. So the discount will not reduce their chances of qualifying for catastrophic coverage.

That will not help me today. Although I have to recoved from my hip, with the remaining effects of undiagnosed pneumonia, my prescriptions will still be about $1000 a month.

So write or call your Congressman. Especially if you are a senior or an adult child of aging parents and tell them that you want this Styx-like river between discounted drugs and government imposed poverty closed. In fact, everyone should be calling. Mine is a cautionary tale. I have been denied insurance for a pre-existing condition, been uninsured and have now fallen into the donut hole (see previous blog posts).



I am a poster child for Obama 's Healthcare plan.

Call Your Congresspeople Now- Everyone's Health Depends on It

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell