and, I get a SS check for $589/month. Obviously, I have other sources of income, "They" wanted me to fork over $104.90 for Medicare, part B. I told them it wouldn't do me much good to have medical insurance if I starved, so I declined it.

What is this country's obsession with insurance? Is it due to being sold fear mongering, wholesale, by the likes of the MSM and malefactors such as Fux News? I enjoy extraordinary health and my only medicine is steady, daily exercise, stoicism, study, a sense of purpose, and realism. I don't mean to be cavalier about it and know a lot of health is the luck of the draw, but I don't have time to be sick.

The only insurance I have paid in my life is for the automobile, because the law in TN requires it. I have paid out of tens of thousands of dollars in premiums over the years and have never made a claim. I live in a rural area and the danger/liability is a fraction of what one would undergo in urban driving. By my reckoning, my outlay has subsidized insurance companies and the execs, bad drivers, and scary, city driving. THESE are some of my fears, realized.

I remember my youth and the fifties and sixties, when my parents paid for medicine out of pocket before it became ransomed by the elites selling pigs in pokes.

The one biggest health expenditure I paid out was $7500 for an arm gone limp. I paid $3450 for an MRI and another $1200 for a black doc to shock me to see if the nerves in my left arm worked. 50 jolts. Ouch! $400 worth of PT saved my arm though it is still only about 50%, functional, short of heavy lifting, 4 years later.

The diagnosing doctors dawdled 5 months while my arm withered, you can not go straight to a physical therapist in this state without it first being subscribed. The doctors couldn't decide if my problem was in the nerves in my arm itself, the gang box of nerves in mid-shoulder, or a pinched nerve in my neck.

After saying I needed surgery for months, the surgeon declared he had about a 50/50 chance of helping/hurting me, and said he wouldn't operate on my neck, "with a ten foot pole," after peering at the MRI. Had I been able to go to PT therapy, immediately, before my arm muscles dwindled, therapy would have been incomparably easier and effective, but the doctors here have to have "a piece of the action".

This is my paean to greed and what it did for and to me.

The first rule of being an adequadely paid employee is to keep your poor mouthing (complaining that you do not have enough to live on) ahead of your minimal needs for survival.

I once worked on a commission basis where a service writer distributed work to me and other employees. I kept my complaining to this service writer ahead of my real needs always, talking about how prices were sending me to the poor house and how much everything cost. I was given good work which translated into an adequate paycheck while those who kept their heads down and never complained, sometimes did not do as well as I did on payday.

This is why unions are extremely important to national welfare.

We all know that the insurance companies and scammers other charlatans in our nation will take all we allow them to take, so we have to resist this, and even stop work if they refuse to pay fair wages for work.

Being satisfied will send working people into poverty.