The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
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Philadelphia Revelations
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George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
Most Americans alive in 2020 will live to be ninety
Dr. Fisher
During the Twentieth century, average life expectancy for Americans at birth extended from a little less than age fifty, to a little less than age eighty -- roughly thirty years. Looking ahead to the next century, it's entirely reasonable to expect a cure for cancer and Alzheimer's disease to extend life expectancy to ninety-five. It's also reasonable to expect that somewhere along this path we will find such retirement expectations are more than the nation can afford. Everyone will have to go back to work.
Working ten years longer means ten years less time in retirement, and it also means ten years more time to accumulate sufficient savings for whatever time is left. Some people who are already working more than they want to, won't like that. There will be attempts to make retirement cheaper and to extract savings from novel sources, but further improvements in health care will wipe out all those efforts. The normal age for retirement will have to move to at least age seventy, probably seventy-five. If employers have problems with that, the solution will have to be second careers. So, let's shift our attention to people who are lucky enough to afford a thirty year vacation. They must go back to work, too.
A moment's reflection reveals that everyone must have a life goal of accumulating more money than is needed to live out his life. Once average life expectancy levels out to a stable point, ingenious life insurance design could bring us to the point of spending the last dime on the last day, providing we consider it worthwhile to spend the extra insurance administration cost. More likely, human psychology will always demand a little extra comfort from a little extra financial cushion, and there's a relationship with the age of retirement. The later you retire, the more likely it is you will have money to spare. For physical or mental reasons there will be people who can't work, but everyone else knows a simple solution to the problem of being able to retire: don't stop working until you can afford to quit. And by the way, the later you start saving, the longer before you can quit.
We have so far not worried much about the lucky, talented, or just miserly few who achieve life's normal goal of saving just a little more than they need; but that must change, they need to go back to work, too. Philanthropy, a very important part of American life, is struggling and needs their talent. It's likely that our business and economic success as a nation is responsible for diverting our energetic and imaginative talent toward the for-profit sector. The general attitude has been that if things are worthwhile, people will pay for them; businesses run not-for-profit can't really be worth much. That's very wrong, of course, but there's enough truth to it to require some changes.
Nonprofit organizations are often inefficient because efficiency is partly the consequence of seeking a profit. But the analysis must not stop with this hopeless truism; the manageable problem is to find new goals for efficiency which do not directly require profit-seeking. One approach would be for non-profits to create for-profit subsidiaries, later selling them off to enhance their endowment. The tax authorities would want to examine this approach to avoid harming competitive tax-paying entities, or sham arrangements in which the purported subsidiary dominates a nonprofit shell.
However, this and similar approaches merely continue the present mindset about the role of the donors and the volunteers. Nonprofit organizations tend to gravitate toward a professional staff with nominal trustee oversight, relegating the donors to the function of giving or getting donations. If philanthropy is to acquire a new drive toward efficiency to supplant the absent profit motive, the donors must be actively employed in the organization, noticing any waste or inefficiency, sharing the gossip, and appreciating the triumphs. To some degree, a form of this model is found in the auxiliaries of hospitals and museums, where staff administrators generally chafe in private about the class distinctions and disruptive ability to cut across management hierarchies. If this system is to work effectively, it needs to be studied for ways to be less threatening to the younger employees, and to get more useful work from the older ones.
This little morality tale was told to me by two unrelated sources, one of whom was a staff aide to Wilbur Cohen, the author of the Medicare law. And the other was a high official of Pennsylvania Blue Shield, the appointed administrative agent for Medicare in Pennsylvania. Its relevance to the more recent SNAFU with Insurance Exchanges introducing the world to Obamacare should be fairly obvious.
After Lyndon Johnson rammed the Medicare amendment to the Social Security Act through Congress in 1965, he wasn't shy about drawing attention to it. The press was present in great numbers, with staff officials who had a role in crafting the document, members of Congress, and anyone else who was standing around. The legislation was laid before him and signed with twenty different pens to be presented as mementos to the in-group. Each pen was only used to inscribe about half of one letter of his name, so it was a slow but joyful process. As intended, it got lots and lots of publicity.
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H. Ross Perot
So, thousands of thankful old folks saw the ceremony on television, though they heard that the law was in effect immediately, and proceeded to dump their medical bills into a shoe box, sending them to Medicare to be paid. Unfortunately, Medicare didn't have an office, a staff, or even a telephone number. These things take time. As fast as they could, the Medicare staff constructed a system of carriers and intermediaries, carriers for part A, and intermediaries for part B. And almost without exception, appointed the local Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations to be the carriers and intermediaries. Consequently, the organization of Medicare was patterned closely after the organization of the two administrative corporations. Meanwhile, the bills from old folks just kept pouring in through the postal service. It was about all the staff in Washington could do, just to direct the mail out to the local intermediaries and at least get it out of their hair.
Less than a year later, that's how the claims manage to Camp Hill, PA, a little suburban town near Harrisburg. In desperation, Blue Shield had rented a local vacant supermarket and piled the mailbags ten feet high. There were quite a few telephone calls of inquiry, and the old folks were politely told the matter was being looked into. It was beginning to look as though one supermarket wasn't big enough.
Computers were, of course, rented from IBM, who had a policy of renting, not selling, its valuable equipment. Keypunch operators, computer operators were hired, air conditioning was installed, and one team after another of computer programmers was hired -- and fired. Consultants were called, scratched their heads, sent big consultation bills, and turned sadly away. Sorry, but somehow it just doesn't work.
So that's how it happened that one Friday afternoon, a vice-president of Texas Blue Cross named H. Ross Perot came in, accompanied by a fellow with glasses so thick they looked like the bottom of Coca Cola bottles. So far as anyone can remember, the guy with coke-bottle glasses never said one word. The desperate, hopeless mess was explained to Perot, whose salary at that time was rumored to be twenty-five thousand dollars a year, about right for a Blue Cross executive. His background as a kindred Blue Cross person inspired confidence, and the conversation rambled on for an hour or so. Meanwhile, the guy with coke bottles went over to the Penn-Harris Hotel across the street and got to work. By the end of the weekend, he had come back a couple of times, but eventually, would you believe, it really, well it really worked. Contracts were quickly signed, the wheels began to turn, the mailbags in the supermarket began to march through the processing cycle. Blue Shield, the Medicare program, the finances of the nation's elderly, and Lyndon Johnson's reputation -- were all rescued.
As everyone now knows, the Medicare processing contracts made Ross Perot into a billionaire, living on Bermuda in the lap of luxury, eventually upsetting the re-election hopes of George Bush, senior by running for President himself on a third party ticket that had something or other to do with giant sucking sounds. A Congressional investigating committee looked into the outrageous profits Perot had extracted from his homeland's elderly, volleyed and thundered. Whether Perot actually thumbed his nose at them is doubtful, but he certainly was in a position to do so.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to that guy with the coke bottle glasses, no one seems to know.
Until rather recently, most wounded soldiers could expect to die from their wounds. George Washington died of an infected throat, an unlikely outcome today. Infectious diseases are now much less likely to be fatal, while preventive measures are in the process of eliminating fatal heart attacks and strokes. It was mentioned in earlier sections that the two most medically expensive years of anyone's life are likely to become the first and last years of a considerably extended lifetime.
If we could be sure of that, or its timing, it would make modern health insurance design easier. Some people can be expected to outlive a formerly fatal condition, and it should be possible to raise annual premiums a little to account for it. If we were smart, we would try to lower premiums by taking advantage of the extended time for investments, which results. But a new and largely unexpected health cost is the treatment of chronic conditions. That might lead to fewer diseases but more expensive ones. In the past, it was possible to regard chronic illnesses as incompletely cured ones, just a step away from total elimination. However, the cost of diseases in the chronic category has risen so much it undermines attempts to fund it with insurance. People with chronic disease are also living longer. Take atrial fibrillation, from which your author happens to suffer, as an example.
Atrial fibrillation, or AF, is a pretty common disorder whose causes and mechanics do not concern us here. It has occasionally fatal or hospitalizable flare-ups, but for the most part, the patients (before 1990) would make one or two visits to the doctor a year, for checkups and renewal of inexpensive digitalis prescriptions. It was then realized that a small but definite proportion of the patients would have a serious stroke related to forming a clot within the chamber of the heart and throwing it into the brain. That is, although the patients were living a long time with their chronic condition, they were often later actually dying prematurely from preventable strokes. Accordingly, the patients were urged to take anti-clotting pills and monitor progress with weekly blood tests. Although it is true the maintenance costs of this disorder were abruptly raised, these costs would have to be offset by reducing the costs of hospital confinement and wheelchair life at the other end of life. To that would, unfortunately, have to be added the hospitalization and transfusion costs for the rare patient whose anti-clot medication gets out of control and provokes a massive bleeding episode. The net financial cost and gain from this change of treatment have not been completely worked out, but insured patients don't much care about that; they would rather have a weekly blood test than the gruesome experience of paralysis from a stroke. One thing is clear, however. A great many people paid for their blood tests with insurance that covered them when they were 40 or 50 years old and eventually saved money for Medicare because they didn't get a stroke when they were older. The tension between the two coverages held the potential for conflicts of interest to emerge between insurers.
Going forward, further changes occurred in the treatment of atrial fibrillation. By 2012, several medications emerged which did not require the cost and nuisance of weekly blood tests. Switching over to this improved medication, I discovered that the co-payment on my insurance was $68 a month, for the pills alone. By the formula which used to apply, this would imply another 80%, or $270, was paid by Medicare to the drug industry each month. There is no way the patient can be sure of these facts in a cross-subsidy world, but on the face of it, it becomes entirely possible for the drug costs to exceed my share of the cost risk of having a stroke. Since there are several of these drugs, it is possible that competition may drive down the drug cost. In any event, the drug cost will drop substantially when the patents expire, and we will finally be able to estimate the enduring cost/benefit of the new drug compared with its blood-test predecessor. But that's probably not the end of it. Sooner or later, someone will discover a way to prevent or cure atrial fibrillation, generating a new cost cycle, we hope a final and lower one. We go through this history of a single disease entity for the purpose of asking a simple question: How can you predict future health care costs in such a violently changing environment, well enough to construct an insurance design?
You can't. You cannot predict what mixture of diseases will lie in the future, but you can rouse yourself when they start to grow in frequency. You can't predict, so you monitor. And for that you need a professional monitoring organization, preferably acting in conjunction with other monitoring agencies throughout the world while remaining in competition with them for the glory of being right. It might also be well to isolate the monitors from the regulators, just enough to enable them to criticize each other's work because they didn't participate in it.
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The line of reasoning we have been following leads to an unexpected conclusion. When the insurance company is big enough and rich enough, it can ride out occasional additions to the chronic disease category, calculate its per-person cost, and run a responsible insurance company. Just how big it has to be, and how much it has to save in reserves, will, unfortunately, vary with the state of medical science. Eventually, we will get to that end-game of first and last years of life, with only accidents, epidemics, and self-inflicted disease during the interval. My first suggestion is we stop paying insurance for the first year after a new drug's introduction, giving the insurance company a chance to know about its new cost center that was unknown when they set the premiums. The patients could get the drug, but they would have to pay cash in full. While we are being fair, we should extend patent protection by a year to compensate. It would reduce premiums somewhat, because at present they have to set aside a reserve fund for such contingencies, and there might be other ripple effects, like giving competitors an extra year to catch up.
In the meantime, we must still make a guess as to the "actuarial sound" size of a viable subscriber group. In the environment which thinks about these things, the minimum actuarial size of the group is about 2000 subscribers, but only if coverage is limited to a single year. More conservative theorists would put the minimum actuarial size at 5000 members for a one-year premium. At either size or in fact at any size, there is a small but diminishing risk that some quirk will bankrupt the insurance. Therefore, we must return to the insurance, or reinsurance, described at the beginning of this section; that is, excess major medical insurance. The difference is that its proper role is to re-insure groups, not individuals. Although the risk becomes vanishingly small by increasing the size of the subscriber group, some risk always remains for reinsurance coverage. Although there are many twists and turns to be considered, it is worth mastering these complexities. Taken all together, they explain why the insurance industry favors large groups over small ones, one-year coverage instead of lifetime coverage, and either employer-based or government-based re-insurance with a deep pocket. These are entirely legitimate attitudes for people placed in charge of insurance solvency, and woe unto anyone who accepts this responsibility without providing for its inherent risks.
However, in recent years society has been acting as if the advice of insurance executives is to be taken without understanding its parochial limits. Yes, the biggest group we can imagine is the whole nation, and the biggest re-insurance carrier would be the Federal Government. But nothing in such stipulation suggests that it would be desirable for the government to run the insurance, or for national participation to be mandatory, or for a single size to fit everyone. To get to specific problem areas, it is much more desirable to design specific programs for the prison inmates, the mentally handicapped, and the non-citizens for a total of about thirty million people -- than to twist around the whole insurance system which is serving non-retarded, non-prisoner, non-illegal citizens moderately well. To say nothing of ending up with forty million who are still excluded, and an extra cost, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to be a trillion dollars in ten years. Along with with the introduction of all the other curses of bigness, plus a certainty of political meddling. At the very least, don't make things worse.
Secondly, there is nothing in these ancient insurance cautions to preclude the gathering of investment income on the premiums, while at the same time despairing of predicting the costs of the medical care it is assigned to mitigate. There are risks to investing, but they are accepted every day by consenting adults. There is a great deal of bad investment advice in circulation and some outrageous fees. We can expect to hear plenty of it in discussions about sums this large. But surely our political system has the wit to consult with a variety of advisors, and ultimately let the public decide whether letting our elected leaders administer the matter, is cheaper than losing the opportunity entirely.
Third. It should be obvious that there are many important unknowns in the discussion of this subject and a deficit of timely monitoring information. The nation needs a monitoring system of great probity, immediate responses of experts to sudden developments, and the power to invade privacy occasionally to get the data. It is debatable whether a monitoring organization should have regulatory power, but it certainly should have close contact with those who have the power to act. There has to be a defined pathway between the complaint of any citizen, leading to access to those who have the power to do something about it. Both the legal and the medical professions have models to examine which are centuries old, functioning well in spite of having no official power to act. The Federal Reserve, on the other hand, has the power to command and the power to investigate within its field; it is its vaunted independence which might be questioned. It could even be suggested that its independence rests on the public perception that its viewpoints are more likely to be accurate, than are those of whoever seeks influence.
Fourth. Let us have incremental patchwork, by all means. That is the conservative approach to public affairs of great moment. But until the Supreme Court finds a way to remove the anti-trust blockade of Maricopa (1982) and medical malpractice's destruction of practitioner discretion, things are unlikely to make great leaps forward. The path to influencing the Legislative Branch is perhaps more direct, but its seventy-year continuation of income tax preferences for employer-purchased health insurance sends a clear warning. The Sustainable Growth Factor (the "Doc fix") sends a similarly unfortunate signal.
Fifth. But who will watch these watchdogs? The careful reader will perceive how many of the proposed reforms in this book have little to do with the Affordable Care Act, except help ACA exploit public perception that something is wrong, and relies too much on special pleading. The electronic medical record is an example, reflecting reliance on advice from group practices. The dismal failure of the electronic insurance exchanges has indelibly stained the Administration's reputation as a computer authority, so this feature is now up for political sale. Nevertheless, it remains a good idea to permit interstate competition between health insurance companies, since that could create competition between fifty actuarily-sized monopolies while encouraging other insurance companies who do not enjoy similar hospital discount prices to seek equal treatment. It is almost a century past time to insist on equal prices for equal services, by imposing a "most favored nation" requirement, or fixed relationships between hospital costs and hospital prices, regardless of whether they apply to inpatients, emergency room, or outpatient satellite clinics. Strict segregation of patient-care revenues from research funding and totally non-medical activities in teaching hospitals within universities -- ought to require no mentioning. Oversight, perhaps regulation, of the whole accounting system of the medical industry definitely ought to be a function of the monitoring system mentioned in point Three.
Without having such intention at all, I find myself writing a four or five volume essay on Health Savings Accounts. The concept originated in 1981, with a letter to me from John McClaughry of Vermont, who was then a Senior Policy Advisor in the Reagan White House. He had read my satirical book, The Hospital That Ate Chicago, and also was aware that Senator Bill Roth was working on a tax-exempt retirement fund, now called an Individual Retirement Account (IRA). John asked me if I thought two linked concepts might be of any value in paying for medical care.
Since it was exactly the idea I had been looking for, I began pressuring the American Medical Association, in which I was a member of the House of Delegates. Executive Vice President Jim Sammons wrote me he had read my letter three times and still didn't understand it. But one thing led to another, and the AMA endorsed the Medical (later, Health) Savings Account, firmly linked to catastrophic health insurance with a high deductible. It attracted the notice of people in Indiana and Texas, prompted a book by John Goodman, and was enacted into federal law when another Texan, Bill Archer, became Chairman of the Health Subcommittee of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee. John McClaughry went on to run for Governor of Vermont, I went back to practicing Endocrinology in Philadelphia, but Health Savings Accounts with their linked high-deductible insurance quietly went on to enlist subscribers, in the millions.
And then Hillary Clinton emerged with her secret health plan, which I have been given to understand was mostly a national HMO, and later Barack Obama pushed his own plan through an obedient Congress. I have been given to understand many young physicians endorse the Affordable Care Act, but most established practitioners hate it, and nobody yet has successfully explained to me what it was really all about. Meanwhile, although the dual Health Savings Accounts and catastrophic insurance saved 30% according to the American Academy of Actuaries, it was rather quiet about it; and it grew to thirty million subscribers, originally in Indiana and Texas, without much general notice. Curiously, its present leading popularity is in New York and California.
So, I took it up again, but after discovering I was too old to be included in its coverage, decided to write a book about it. The book's theme, as you might guess, was the age limits ought to be widened. That seemed harmless enough, but politics started to heat up. The ACA bill was stalled by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi rammed the Senate version through without any mitigating features the House of Representatives might want to add, the reconciliation was never reconciled, and President Obama was stuck with it. Then followed two bewildering Supreme Court decisions, the disastrous computer failures of the enrollment process, and the even worse failure of the Electronic Medical Record. Dr. wrote a book called The Electronic Doctor , which describes how Mr. Blumenthal diverted thirty billion of the two hundred fifty billion dollars of Stimulus Package to mandatory "meaningful use" of the Electronic Record by doctors, which is consequently widely hated by them. For example, numerous fairly young physicians, including my daughter, her husband, and another comrade in a Philadelphia club, dropped out of flourishing practice before they reached retirement age, complaining they just couldn't stand it.
So, although you can see why I might want to write a book, it was unexpected that I could never complete one as planned. Some unexpected event would come along, invalidating some premise, and I was blocked from the intended completion. When I realized just how wonderful the hidden features of Health Savings Accounts really were, I felt I had to publish a different sort of book. And, although I started a second book the day after I sent the first one to the printer, approximately the same thing happened twice more before the President's term expired. I discovered the HSA's roll-over feature (that had frustrated my hope to join my own plan) effectively solved a much bigger retirement problem. But I had to re-direct because Mrs. Clinton announced she was going to run for President using healthcare as the central issue, once again in secrecy. When I subsequently discovered, lengthening the insurance term limits causes a considerable cost reduction, I had to publish that, but immediately turn to address a Supreme Court decision. Lifetime health insurance, I had discovered, is much cheaper than insurance in bits and pieces. But now, by golly, I find the possibility is very real for the Affordable Care Act to be thrown out, so it became impossible to complete the third book before knowing what was going to happen to subscribers, age 25-65. But I decided to publish what I have, anyway, because including everything else except the Obamacare collision, gave such enormous promise, the unfinished book might prove to be of value in filling the gap. So, if I live that long, the reader may look forward to still another volume devoted to the central but undefined issue, reconciling the unreconciled ACA with Health Savings Accounts. Meanwhile, the public can evaluate what becomes possible for healthcare financing, if people just leave politics at the door and try to fix the problem.
January 17, 1706 (New Style)--Born, the fifteenth child of a Boston candle-maker, Josiah Franklin, and seventh child of his second wife, Abiah Folger Franklin.
Brief acquaintance with school. A rebellious pupil.
Finished second grade, 1715 ,--Ended his formal education.
Apprenticed to his brother James the printer, 1717---They didn't get along. James published New England Courant Franklin, took over when James got jailed for contempt. When James returned, Ben rebelled and escaped to Philadelphia.
Returned to Philadelphia ,(?) 1725. ,--found that Deborah Reed had married John Rogers, who disappeared after stealing a slave. Built a thriving printing company, with sixty or more partners, as a sort of franchise business. In his spare time, founded the Junto, the First Fire Company, the second fire insurance company, lived with Deborah Reed in a common law arrangement. Had previously had an affair with an unknown woman, resulting in the birth of illegitimate son William.
Another son, Franky, born, died at age four of smallpox (1736) after Franklin had refused to have him vaccinated. One daughter, Sally. Founded Library Company of Philadelphia.
Became a hero of King George's War . 1730 ,--but aroused the jealousies of Thomas Penn the Proprietor, by raising ten thousand armed troops with one newspaper ad.
Published Poor Richard's Almanack, currency of New Jersey, Philadelphia Zeitung, .
--Became a favorite of Andrew Hamilton after writing favorably about Peter Zenger case (1735).
Began serious studies of electricity.
Founded University of Pennsylvania--1749,--later had a falling-out about teaching "practical" subjects, and not a divinity school, essentially a town and gown dispute.
Founded Pennsylvania Hospital with Dr. Thomas Bond--1751
Co-signed General Braddock's purchase of wagons and horses because farmers distrusted British. When all were lost in the defeat (1755), he was almost bankrupted as British dithered about repaying him, but eventually did so.
1748, Retired from business at age 42, with eighteen years of pension. Learned to be a gentleman, entered legislative politics, founded the Pennsylvania Hospital, became chairman of Quaker party when the second generation of Penn Family became Episcopalians. Appointed representative of Pennsylvania and sent to England to demand that Pennsylvania become a crown colony in order to be defended against Indians and Catholics.
Second trip to England. 1757 ,--discovered the Gulf Stream, and the nature of hurricanes while a passenger. Settled down as ambassador, bought Craven Street house (now a few feet from Piccadilly), and enjoyed enormous success with important politicians, scientists, and authors, like Voltaire, Priestley, King George, Frederick the Great, Mozart and Beethoven, Lavoisier, and many others. Perfected the theory of electricity after a trip to see the torpedo fish off the coast of France. Eventually spent eighteen years as a retired rich gentleman, in England. Actively involved in Whig politics in Parliament. Throughout, showed himself to be strongly pro-British, continuing to advocate principles of Albany Conference. Following an uproar about lightning rods on St. Paul 's Cathedral, actively antagonized King George iii, who probably urged Wedderburn the Solicitor to excoriate him while he stood in silence in the Cockpit at Whitehall. After a period of depression, Franklin escaped back to America, barely in time to avoid arrest.
Made Ambassador to France, 1783 --Charged with making France our ally in the revolution, and obtaining large grants of funds and gunpowder.
During his long stay in France, he affected the "Poor Richard" pose for French Society, and was spectacularly effective with the King and Prime Minister.
Eventually, had the pleasure of negotiating the Treaty of Paris, ending the war and establishing the nation, while proudly wearing the same blue suit he wore at Wedderburn's earlier performance..
On return to America, 1785 ,--was greeted with universal acclaim, and eventually became the oldest Delegate to the Constitutional Convention, in 1789. The details of the debate were bitterly contested and secret, but it is known he suggested the tie-breaker of a bicameral legislature with two senators for each state, but multiple representatives by proportion to population. The issue was defined by John Dickinson, but the solution was Franklin's. The American Constitution has since outlived all other written Constitutions in history.
Died, April 17, 1790--Buried in Christ Church Cemetery, after a celebrated funeral parade. The President of Pennsylvania.
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
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