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Thursday, May 06, 2010

Grab Yer Dog

For years, I read snippets about a proposed off-leash dog park in Cayucos, near the cemetery.  Then it was a plans for a skate park, then a dog park, then there were lots of objections and the whole thing would disappear off the radar.  Suddenly, a friend told me there was a fenced dog park on the site.  Poof! Like magic.  So I drove up there and sure enough.  Dog park popped up overnight like mushrooms after a rain. 

So, they'll be having a Saturday, MAY 8 grand opening, I believe around 11 a.m.ish, so grab your dog and head out over there for a look see.  Then stop by the Morro Bay dog park at Del Mar park for an additional romp.  They'll be having their grand opening in June.  I'll post that info later.

8 comments:

Watershed Mark said...

(Fortune) -- The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for most Americans -- coverage they know and prize -- will react to the new law's radically different regime of subsidies, penalties, and taxes. Now, we're getting a remarkable inside look at the options AT&T, Deere, and other big companies are weighing to deal with the new legislation.

Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill's critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.

That would dismantle the employer-based system that has reigned since World War II. It would also seem to contradict President Obama's statements that Americans who like their current plans could keep them. And as we'll see, it would hugely magnify the projected costs for the bill, which controls deficits only by assuming that America's employers would remain the backbone of the nation's health care system.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/05/news/companies/dropping_benefits.fortune/index.htm?cnn=yes&hpt=C2

I'm happy to be self employed and think I'll take the dogs for another walk before it gets too much hotter today.

When November 2010 and again in 2012 I hope we will Change it back...

Churadogs said...

Gee, if the employers all dump health care (an original anomaly in a time of worker shortages used as an enticement to lure workers, not as any coherent national plan or idea that, like Mopsey, just became our default/defacto "system') then maybe we'll be forced to seriously ask: "Now, just what was it that the insurance companies brought to the "health" table, except a 20-30%skim off the top for their CEO's and investors?" ?And then maybe look around the world and see how other "civilized" nations handle their "health care."

Unknown said...

...so now do you suppose we'll see a shift of the 20% "skim" from private health companies to a nice not-for-profit national health over-see'er...??? ...or will the new benevolent national health care system bring about a reduction in medical costs with no multimillion dollar CEO's or sales administrators...???

I know if I were still an employeer these days, I would drop health care coverage for the employees in a moment...!!! I'd also ship overseas as many positions as possible to get out from under the unemployment "insurance" and the workers comprehensive "insurance" I used to pay...

Oh well, Obama will save us all...

FOGSWAMP said...

No one said the transition wold be easy.

I don't think a two-tier health care system in capitalistic America is a good idea. If you look at what happened in Australia which has a similar health care system as the Canadian universal single-tier system, instead of saving the taxpayers money, the government had to bail out the private system in order to keep it going, at a cost of $2,2 billion a year.

Also, waiting times, a common complaint in the Canadian system were not helped by the private tier in Australia. In fact, wait times actually increased as a result of private insurance as was observed in England and New Zealand.

I would think if the US really wants the new public system to work with such a large population it should outlaw any private system over a short period of time.

Bev. De Witt-Moylan said...

It would appear from the sign on the gate in the first photo that the Cayucos dog park grand opening is on Saturday, May 8, not June 8, at 11am.

Churadogs said...

Bev, oops, you're right. Corrected that. The Morro Bay dog park's having their to-do in June. Yes. TODAY, May 8 at 11.

Re "health care reform" We didn't "reform" healthcare, we just fed more customers to the pro-profit insurance companies who return no value, just take 20-30% off the top. Reforming "health care" is the conversation we SHOULD have been having but it all got sidetracked by the insurance lobbyists making sure that conversation never took place. We still have crappy health care with poor outcomes and pay more for it than other countries and we REFUSE to think about and discuss WHY that is. So we allowed ourselves to be bamboozled to end up with yet another scam. The only hope is that there may be some provisions in this new bill that will open the doors to actual "health reform" in the way we deliver care that may lead to improvements as people (and doctors and hospitals) catch on that the way we deliver health care is nuts and costs us more & etc. We'll see. I won't hold my breath. We're a nation babies with memory problems, so I don't expect much.

FOGSWAMP said...

I guess there are two fundamentally distinct and competing views on the nature of health care delivery.

Canadians see health care as a social right and it seems that Americans see it as a commodity eh?

The rights approach uses ethical principles to determine the nature and structure of its delivery system.

The commodity model uses economic for profit calculations.

Churadogs said...

That's the philosophical part of it (a dialogue we never had during this recent dust-up) but there's also the practical "delivery," ie. looking for ways of making health care give more bang for the buck. There was several "models" discussed and some of them may be "pilot" programs in the new bill, so we'll see if they pan out. In the amazing book, "The Worst Hard Time" about the Dust Bowl years, it makes clear that the various conservation programs rolled out by FDR actually started as small pilot programs (because farmers were resistent to any change, even though the "old ways" were literally destroying their land) and slowly, over time, when these efforts paid off, more and more farmers realized their benefit and joined in. Perhaps the same will happen here. One approach, for example, is something like what they do at Kaiser, and that's the team approach with all specialists spinning off your main Doctor coordinating treatment. Right now, for example, under Medicare, I can go to any doctor any number of times or for no good reason at all and each time the Doctor will bill the government (and my Blue Cross Supplement will pay the remaining 20% & etc.) even though the treatment isn't doing a lick of good (I may be just Doctor Shopping or maybe I'm a hypocondriac or whatever) The result is a tremendous waste of money with no good outcome. Discharging people from the hospital too soon or with no good followup care, for example, results in re-hospitalization of a now even sicker patient = $$$$$ wasted. In short, there's a "philosophy" of medicine (as you aptly put it - comodity vs. rights) , then there's just the practical. We need an honest discussion of both in this country, which won't happen until the American people grow up and demand some honest adult talk, free of the lies fomented by "vested interests" that are making so much lovely money off our being ignorant babies.