David Triguiero's Idaho

Football Cheer

It’s fall and time for football. The game, however, is secondary to what hyperbolic announcers always refer to “the grand spectacle of football; the clash of titans; a war of gladiators.” Anyone who has spent six hours watching the Super Bowl will tell you that the best part is usually the halftime show when celebrity rock ‘n’ rollers entertain and sometimes have part of their clothing ripped off.

Even in high school, it’s classy cheerleaders, a blaring band and inspiring halftime shows that win championships, not strong-armed quarterbacks, fleet receivers and brutish linemen. Don’t scoff. Remember the Dallas Cowboys were “America’s team,” everybody’s favorite to win the Super Bowl in the 90s; then the team’s new owner tangled with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. The next year they won only one game and were the perennial 200-to-1 shots to win the championship.

At the high school level, where winning and losing means a lot more, the consequences of alienating those responsible for school spirit can be even more devastating. When I was at Weiser High School, it ended the coaching career of the coach who had been brought in three years earlier to rescue the Wolverines from humiliation.

Weiser High School had as many students as the rest of the schools the Snake River Valley Conference and its football players were just as big and just as talented, but it lacked several important basic ingredients for winning championships. Its so-called drill team, under the direction of civics teacher Margaret Duclos, performed Scottish country-dances wearing full-length red skirts topped by white sweaters. The band provided a perfect compliment. Director Ford Smith’s idea of a fire-up-the-team number was a well-disciplined rendition of The Happy Wanderer.

The cheerleaders tried, but with that kind of backup it was almost impossible to get the Pep Club fired up to chant “Go team, fight, fight. Red and white you’re dynamite.”

Over at Emmett, where the brother of Weiser’s new coach had built a strong football program, the band was all drums and brass and could be heard, nay felt, for miles around when the Huskies were pressing toward the end zone. The drill team, in short skirts and sequins, strutted and high kicked in time while the local citizenry roared for its team.

Weiser’s coach must have known he would have to dislodge Duclos and Smith before that atmosphere could be duplicated and a championship won. But they were institutions. To challenge them was to question God.

A showdown came the week before the Wolverines met the Huskies in the traditional Armistice Day game. It had been the Wolverines’ worst season in memory. Not only were they winless in six games, they had scored only 12 points to their opponents’ 196.

Working through football players and other sympathizers, the coach got a motion before student council calling for more support from the band and rill team. There was a heated debate that culminated in band drum major Susan Millbrook telling quarterback Bobby Sturtevant the football team couldn’t win so there was no point in trying.

 Bobby countered that the team would beat Emmett and rub the band’s face in it. That fired up the whole team and for a couple of days it looked like the Wolverines were ready to pull off the upset of the season. On game day, the band was droning its usual mush and the drill team was chanting, “We’ll roll that red and white, hay-andy-andy...” and other nonsense. But the team was on fire. Guys were slapping each other on the shoulder pads, butting heads and yelling at each other. The euphoria lasted until Virgil Lord, the Huskies’ all-state fullback, ran the opening kickoff back for a touchdown. The game pretty much went downhill from there.

At half time with the score thirty-something to nothing the coach seemed overcome with despair and disgust. For a very long moment he stood at the blackboard fingering a piece of chalk. Suddenly he jerked his head up, spun around and spiked the chalk to the floor with such force it vanished in a puff of dust. “It’s the same old bullshit,” he thundered. There was a beat of silence and then Glenn Reeve’s shoulders began to shake uncontrollably. There were a few sniggers, and then someone snorted sharply and began laughing out loud. Soon the whole team was laughing and the poor coach had no choice but to join in the fun. The team went out and played well holding Emmett to less than 50 points – a moral victory all things considered.

The born-again clique in the staff room did not appreciate how the coach’s outbursts broke the tension, much less see the humor in his outburst. Neither did the Weiser Ministerial Association. The coach found another job.

 

Conspiracy of Republican Transvestites

            I went to Calgary to see my new grandson last week and while there came across some very interesting information on American politics. It seems that Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Pallin are not Americans but Canadians. More than that, they are both men in drag.

 You may find this hard to believe, as did I, but I saw a picture of Hillary wearing a pair of well-filled-out Jockey shorts. I was shown the picture by a kindly old man in the University of Calgary subway station. His name was John DeBruyne and he claims to be the rightful prime minister of Canada. He was standing on the platform handing out handwritten Xeroxed pamphlets to students and others going to the university.

I stopped to chat and he told me he was pushed out as leader of the Conservative Alliance Party by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, also an Albertan, after the last election. This made little sense to me because I remembered Harper campaigning as leader of the party, but he said that was an optical illusion perpetrated by “powers” in control of the media. These consisted of “Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers, Royal Canadian Legion executives, Police Commissioners and news executives who covered up our world’s worse known crime – treason. Crimes classified by even Canada’s psychiatrists as ‘unspeakable and mentally sick, so outrageous no one can open mouths!!!” 

Hillary Clinton’s real name is Howard Gordon, a serial rapist who escaped from a Saskatchewan mental hospital. Sarah Pallin is really Richard Anderson, a convicted child molester and rapist who escaped from a federal prison in British Columbia and made her/his way to Alaska. DeBruyne said this was part of a grand plot by homosexuals and transvestites to take over the world. Integrating Canada and the United States was the first step in a global campaign.

Now, this probably sounds as silly to you as it did to me at first hearing; but as I gave it more thought, it became less preposterous. The connection between DeBruyne’s theories and those of Republican brown shirts at so-called Tea Party protests and virulent disruptions of town hall meetings on health care reform became clearer. The so-called “gay agenda” to destroy American family life. President Barack Obama’s supposed foreign birth. Are these widely held Republican beliefs any more preposterous than DeBruyne’s claims?

Alberta is Canada’s most American province, primarily because its oil and natural gas business attracts US companies and investment. I wouldn’t say George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would feel right at home there, but they do have a number of admirers in Alberta; not all of them expat Americans. There is a local fascist party – The Wild Rose Party -- with a strong religious base composed of Fr. Coughlin style Roman Catholics, Vladimir Putin style Russian Orthodox, American style Evangelicals and a few neocon Jews. 

David Frum, who wrote speeches for Bush and is currently at a far right American think tank, was born in Canada to a very wealthy Toronto family. His mother, Barbara Frum, was a famous broadcaster with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC). His father owned the Canadian franchise of Budget Rent a Car among many other things. He is not a member of The Wild Rose Party, of course, and he is not a transvestite, but the possible connections are nonetheless interesting.

I don’t think there are international conspiracies working at this time.  There are conspirators at work, however, you can see them on Fox News daily and they most definitely are striving to create a national movement against President Obama and African-Americans in the United States.  

Old Time Beatles

The other night I listened to a program on National Public Radio about the new digital release of The Beatles’s entire body of work that came to define the1960s and Rock ‘n’ Roll music. I found it tedious. Nostalgia is only interesting to people who didn’t live though the period or those keeners who never grew out of it – the sort who build shrines in their basement and communicate with Elvis or John Lennon through New Age mediums.

Sensible people who actually lived through the era lose interest when it becomes clear they are no longer the people who saw and did all those things. Looking back without rose-colored glasses just muddles all those memories you have spent so many years editing into what they should have been. It’s worse when moviemakers do their own editing as we have seen recently with the Woodstock retrospective. The nostalgists at Warner Bros. created a festival of Rock ‘N’ Roll, peace, harmony and free love. Participants who are honest recall rock ‘n’ roll, rain, traffic jams, open sewers and crabs. Beatles revisionists maintain the ‘60s cultural rebellion did not begin until late in the decade when the group started dressing like psychedelic South American dictators, hanging around with phony swamis, and singing about girls with kaleidoscope eyes.

That may have been the way things unfolded in places like Baltimore and San Francisco, but in Weiser, Idaho folks had more foresight. They knew at their first sighting of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 that trouble was coming. There was more to it than long hair and impudence; they had been through that with Elvis. The British rock group stirred a dormant mistrust of foreigners and people who mess with the natural order of things.

Less than a month after Ed Sullivan the rebellion began at Weiser High School. One day in the boy’s bathrom Tony Raymond combed his hair into long bangs nearly reaching his eyes in front and covering the tops of his ears on the sides. “It’s Paul, she loves you ya, ya, ya…” he sang out. Everyone else joined in. Tony decided he liked his hair that way and so did Ed Mowery, Jay Beeson and John Reed. They went to their next class – government – as The Beatles.

The girls didn’t exactly swoon, but they made it very clear that they liked the boy’s new image. For John this was a heady experience. He announced he was Ringo and beat his desk with pencils singing ya, ya, ya. The chronically conservative teacher, Mrs. Duclos dispatched them instantly to the principal’s office.

Had the boys combed their hair up off their foreheads and ears the matter would have ended there. But the
tried to argue their case. “Our hair is the same length,” insisted Ed Mowery, “just combed different.” Even at that, disaster could have been averted had Tony Raymond not pressed the case to the edge. When Principal Walt Kerfoot finished explaining stolidly how their hairstyle had disrupted civics class and no real men wear bangs, Tony calmly observed that their hair was no more a distraction than the stubble on Mrs. Duclos’s unshaven legs.

Kerfoot sat stunned; never had such sass been spoken in the principal’s office of Weiser High School. There was more going on here than funny hair and he was going to put a stop to it. All four were suspended. It didn’t work, of course, the Mrs. Duclos remark made Tony Raymond the first anti-hero at WHS and the tone was set for the decade.

 

Just Whose Man is Walt?

A week or so ago Rep. Walt Minnick sent a representative to Weiser to discuss health care with local Democratic Party members. There was a good turnout of more than 20 people, but Minnick’s health care guy didn’t turn up. Instead, there was a young man who specialized in agriculture. He was very pleasant and tried to be helpful, but admitted he knew very little about health care. One thing he did know was, “Walt is his own man,” which prefaced each vague, noncommittal reply to questions.

Well, excuse us, but everyone knew that. Walt has been “his own man” since defeating former Republican Rep. Bill Sali in the 2008 election in Idaho’s First District. He has voted with Idaho’s Republican Congressmen so many times that some frustrated Democrats wonder if he means “their own man.” A young woman very active in the health care for all movement pointed out to the nice young man that Minnick got to Washington only because he happened to be running against a “religious psychopath” and could not count on the Republicans being so accommodating in 2010. Rep. Minnick must be his own man, she said, because he isn’t the Democratic Party’s man and he certainly is not her man in Washington.

The nice young man noted that Rep. Minnick is a businessman who knows all about the costs of employing people and paying taxes and the inefficiency of government run institutions. A man in the back said he had worked more than 30 years at NASA and it was definitely not inefficient. Studies showed that the U.S. Post Office was more efficient when it operated as a department of government than it is as a government owned independent corporation, he went on. He finished by pointing out that reliable, independent statistics show Medicare and Medicaid to be significantly more efficient than private health insurance companies. (I’ll throw in a note from Harper’s magazine’s index that private insurance firm’s profits increased nearly 500 percent from 2002 to 2008 while their coverage declined 40 percent.) Meanwhile, the earnest young woman passed around a hastily written petition demanding that Rep. Minnick give full support to the President’s plan, especially the government insurance option. Everyone signed the petition.

The nice young man reminded the gathering that “Walt is his own man” and said he would relate our concerns to him. He had not taken many notes, but perhaps he has a very good memory. He stuffed the earnest young woman’s petition into his file folder and was gone.

The Dream Girl of WJHS

            When I was mired at 13, fed up with childhood but not yet a convincing teenager, I wanted the same things all boys at that frustrating age want for Christmas: a car and a girlfriend. I wasn’t old enough to drive a car, of course and didn’t even know how, but then I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with a girlfriend either. But in Weiser in 1958 these were the two basic requirements for being cool – a Hep Cat.

            The ultimate car at the time was a 1958 Chevrolet Impala two-door hardtop with a continental kit on the back and shining chrome all around. At roughly $3,000 – about equal to my father’s earnings for one year – the car was very much part of the childish dream world that most 13-year-olds still cling to in spite of mounting evidence that it could never exist.

            The ultimate girl was marginally more attainable. Raven hair, alabaster skin, Gigi Martinez was pure beauty – the Cadillac against which all girls were measured as in “She’s almost as good as Gigi.” Her advanced age, she was a ninth-grader, completed the alluring and elusive package.

            Despite all this, I felt I had a definite advantage over the rest of Gigi’s scruffy band of admirers. For one thing, she was a classmate and good friend of my older sister and therefore knew who I was. She even said “hi” on the rare occasions our paths crossed in the closely regulated hallways of the junior high school.

            I was still working on developing a suave reply and had to make do with a sheepish half word half grunt. Even so, I considered myself more mature than average – I read Time magazine – and nearly ready to make the move. I intended to have the line ready for delivery at the New Year’s Eve dance.

            I spent the afternoon before the dance assembling my clothes including a new pair of White Buck shoes as worn by Pat Boone in Bernadine, the movie that defined cool in my junior high years.  One serious problem remained – my hair. Just my luck in an era when hair was the single most important element of style for men, mine was a disaster. Three cowlicks, one on either side of my forehead and a huge rooster tail in the rear ruined any chance I had of being a Hep Cat.

            Desperate, I secretly enlisted the help of by best friends older sister, Mary, a professional hairdresser who smoked and went into bars and thus knew everything about human relationships as well as neat hair. She went to work on my cowlicks with the best plaster available to her profession. The result was a shiny jellyroll with two spit curls meeting in the middle of my forehead.

            I hurried home and had just got in the kitchen door when my sister yelled for me to come into the front room.  I burst into the room and was immediately face to face with Gigi flanked by my sister and two other giggling ninth-grade mafiosa. “Neat hair, who’s the lucky girl tonight?” they all chimed. Obviously my sister had got wind something was up and was waiting for me. I was only thankful she had not found out who the “lucky girl” was supposed to be. That would have been a catastrophic humiliation.

            Needless to say, there was no point in using the line at that point, even if it had been ready. That night, while Gigi glided and dipped with the quarterback, oblivious to the heart she had helped to break, I hung around the punch table with the rest of the motley eighth-grade crew talking about cars and occasionally plowing around the floor with safe ordinary girls who didn’t make your palms sweat just looking at them.

Follow the Pioneers to Soda Springs

    Time was anyone driving the Lincoln Highway on the way to Portland or Seattle would go through historical Caribou County with its variety of springs, lakes and rocky sagebrush vistas. For more than 100 years before that, pioneers in search of a new life plodded the same route along the Oregon Trail, which became the footprint for U.S. Highway 30, the first to cross America.

            The Interstate system disrupted that historical route in the late 1950s, but it is still possible to follow the pioneer’s route. Take the Malad City exit off I-15 and drive a few miles to Preston, the town made famous by the movie Napoleon Dynamite.  From there continue east to Bear Lake and turn north on the Oregon Trail Scenic Highway which takes you north to Soda Springs and back to I-15 at Lava Hot Springs.

            On the trail you can pretend to be emigrants headed for Oregon. You will see some of the white mounds of sediment left by soda springs some of them ten or 12 feet in elevation.  Most of these cones have been graded away, but some remaining rocks show this unusual formation. At the Fairview Cemetery in Soda Springs you can see the wagon box grave of a family of emigrants probably killed by Indians when they fell behind the wagon train in 1861.  Also in Soda Springs is the Ninety Percent Spring that produced soda water for the commercial market in the late 19^th Century.

            This is the center of Mormon country and Church of Jesus Christ Ladder Day Saints original President Brigham Young had a cabin here where he stayed on trips north from Salt Lake City to visit settlements. Originally, Soda Springs was a settlement of LDS dissenters known as Morrisites. Named for Joseph Morris, the sect split from the main church body over certain tenets and eventually died out.

            West of Soda Springs is Hudspeth’s Cutoff where emigrants going to California split from the main Oregon Trail in 1849. Previously, pioneers had continued north to Fort Hall near Blackfoot, Idaho before turning south.  On your way back to I-15 at the Mormon ghost town of Chesterfield, 15 miles west of Soda Springs, you can still see wagon ruts of the Oregon-California Trail.

Foreclosed and Forlorn

        Here in Weiser, the recession has already hit harder than the Great Depression in terms of housing. Once, this tidy little town was known for its well-kept yards. Even during the 1930s, the paint may have looked faded on once grand houses and the roofs may look tattered, but the yards and gardens never looked better.  Rows of sweet corn and beans wafted in the summer breeze, melons peeked out from under bright green leaves and potatoes and carrots waited in the ground to be dug up for dinner. There was not a weed to be seen and the lawn was trimmed neat and short with a push mower.

Today the scene has been reversed in Weiser’s better neighborhoods. The houses stand proud under new roofs with their sides covered in fresh paint and never-fade aluminum or vinyl siding. Their windows however are blank and streaked with dirt, cobwebs and bugs. The front yard is brittle with overgrown, dead grass and weeds reaching two or three feet high. The backyards are the same; some littered with broken trampolines, plastic toys and the general flotsam and jetsam left by uncaring people departing in a hurry. 

Washington County, the second poorest in the state, is being abandoned by once middle class people who have lost their jobs to the recession and their homes to the bank. Once there were new cars parked in the driveway, purchased with home equity loans that hucksters flogged on television, in direct mail circulars and door to door at the height of the “ownership America” years.

Many of the houses still occupied have For Sale signs planted in the front lawn. Few have the backyard vegetable gardens that pulled many people through the Great Depression. Their freezers are filled, or not, with frozen pizzas, tater tots and French fries, ice cream and packaged dinners that pass for food in today’s America.

The banks have been saved and the economy is collapsing more slowly; fewer jobs are being lost and the government tells us that the end is in sight. That’s probably why banks are holding on to these foreclosed family dreams rather than sell them short or at a reduced price to people less flagrant in their borrowing habits. That way the whole borrowing and bankrupting cycle can begin again just like nothing happened.

 

 

 

 

 

WALK AND RIDE THROUGH HISTORY ON WEISER RIVER TRAIL

The Weiser River Trail winds nearly 80 miles through farmlands and forests through the most beautiful and least populated counties in Idaho. Along the way are: excellent fishing, wildlife photography, historical sights and friendly small towns and villages. It is ideal for walking, bicycling and horseback riding.
    U.S. Highway 95 runs parallel to much of the trail providing ready access at several points along the way with parking lots, toilet facilities and picnic areas. Overnight facilities are available at Midvale, Cambridge and the Evergreen Campground in the Payette National Forest. It is best to plan your trop well because private land borders much of the trail, particularly at the southern end, and access is restricted
    Numerous farmers and ranchers opposed the 1994 conversion of the abandoned Pacific and Northern Railroad right-of-way into a trail fearing trespassers and “wild parties” along the route. Their fears proved unfounded, but many still resent what they consider an intrusion on their privacy and there can be unpleasant encounters when confusion arises.  Trail maps clearly mark public rest areas and the location of public lands and are readily available in Weiser, Cambridge and New Meadows.
    The small town of Weiser (pronounced Weezer) is at the southern terminus of the trail and is the best place to find overnight accommodation. It is an interesting and historical town once the center of Idaho’s sheep industry, which at the turn of the 20th Century was the largest in the world. It was also the supply center for mines and forestry mills that once dotted what is still known as the Upper Country north of town.
    Weiser was one of the leading towns in southern Idaho at that time, a wild and wooly place with 25 bars and only 12 churches, most of them small clapboard affairs without permanent clergy. By contrast, Payette, 15 miles to the south, had four bars and 30 brick churches filled to the rafters every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening.  The Oregon Trail Park on the banks of the Snake River was a famous summer gathering place. People came to Weiser from all over southwest Idaho and eastern Oregon to shop and have fun. 
    Crane Creek Reservoir just north of Weiser has been an excellent place to fish for bass and crappie for more than 75 years. It has supplied irrigation water to the farms surrounding Weiser since 1906 when the Galloway Ditch was completed. Wildlife often sighted along the trail include deer, elk, the occasional bear, hawks and wild turkey (introduced in the 1970s).
    The Friends of the Weiser River Trail (weiserrivertrail.org), a nonprofit organization run by local people, looks after the trail clearing it of weeds, constructing parking lots and leisure areas and organizing events. If you are bicycling, be sure to have well slimed tires and carry a puncture repair kit. Volunteers work hard clearing the trail of puncture vine every year, but it is a devious and destructive opponent. 

Around the Block in Payette

When I was five or six years old my grandfather gave me a little project. He told me to go out the front door of their house and walk around the block carefully observing everything then come back and tell him what had changed since our family’s last visit from Stockton, California one year earlier.

I was very excited. For one thing, using the front door at 1134 First Avenue South in Payette was a rare privilege granted only to important guests at my grandparent’s home. More than that, my grandfather didn’t entrust these projects to just any grandchild or great-niece/nephew. My cousin Rob Thurston, who was four years older than I, did them regularly. The previous summer, my older sister, DeeDee, was assigned her first project. This year, 1952, it was my turn.

Before going out the door, I proudly pinned my “I Like Ike” button to the pocket of my shirt. My great uncle Clyde had given me the button when neighborhood kids were teasing me saying I was for (Robert) Taft, Eisenhower’s opponent at the upcoming Republican National Convention. For good measure, I added a (Alf) Landon sunflower from the 1936 presidential election, also a gift from Uncle Clyde.

You couldn’t get any more Republican than my Uncle Clyde, who refused to sign up for social security, choosing to live out his years of retirement on savings carefully accumulated since 1902 operating Thurston Drug Company on Payette’s Main Street. I still have both buttons, although I have not voted for a Republican President since Gerald Ford in 1976.

I went out the front door onto First Avenue South. Walking towards town I first passed Christina Bergman’s house. She was my age and lived with her mother and grandmother, Lillie Soule, who made marvelous molasses cookies and didn’t much care for little boys, although she made an exception in my case. She had been a Jacobsen, one of Payette’s leading families, and had married Mr. Soule, a mining promoter.

Their daughter, whose first name I cannot recall, married Mr. Bergman, who had recently died of cancer. I didn’t know this at the time, of course. Only that Mr. Soule and Mr. Bergman were dead. Sometime later my mother told me that he had a mole on his neck that he kept fooling with for about a year. It turned out to be malignant melanoma and, by the time he went to the doctor the cancer had spread to most of his body.

Mr. Soule had persuaded my grandfather, a metallurgical engineer who had been teaching at the University of Arizona, to return to Payette and run a gold mine planned for Delamar, just over the mountain from Silver City. The mine never came about and my grandparents were stuck in Payette, which was all right with my grandfather who loved prospecting above all else. My grandmother, who loved the prestige of being married to a college professor, never got over it.

Next was Dean Daniel’s house. He was a year younger than I was and we played together regularly. His father was a lawyer. I never knew his first name as everyone called him Crabby. They had a brand new Buick Roadmaster with electric turn signals. When they took me for a ride, Dean said you didn’t have to roll down the window a put your arm out to signal a turn. All you did was push this little lever next to the steering wheel, which went click, click, and click. I couldn’t figure out how the car behind could hear the clicking and Dean said he didn’t know either, but that’s how it worked.

Crabby didn’t explain. He just kept driving. He had a bottle of beer between his legs and a Chesterfield dangling from the corner of his mouth. I learned later, also from my mother, that Crabby was something of a drinker. Once in college when he was waiting, already three sheets to the wind, for his date in the living room of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house, he opened the drawer of and end table relieved himself in it and shut it. He thought he was alone, but my mother and Phyllis Ackers were still in the dining room and had a clear line of sight into the living room.

The next house was occupied by an older couple I did not know. On the corner was Pete and Nedra Laddig’s house. They were in junior high school and did not acknowledge my existence except to tease me. Once Pete accidentally hit me with a shovel opening a cut over my eye that needed three stitches from Dr. Woodward.

Pete and Nedra’s father was dead too. He had been a chiropractor and there was a full sized skeleton hanging in his office. Pete tried to scare Dean, Mark Iseri and I once by leading us there in the dark and shining a flashlight on it. It didn’t work, we knew it was already dead and couldn’t hurt us.
Many years later, my father told me that Dr. Laddig had a second medical practice that was a deep secret. Girls went to him when they didn’t want to have a baby.

In didn’t know anyone on the Second Avenue South side block. As I passed one house three American Legion baseball players were loading bats and gear into the trunk of a car. I asked them if they were the Melon Eaters because my grandfather had told me he saw Walter Johnson pitch for the Weiser Kids against the Payette Melon Eaters. They said they were the Payette Pirates. When it got home my grandfather told me the game he saw was in 1906.

Much later I learned that one of those players would be almost as famous as Walter Johnson. My mother told me that was where Harmon Killebrew the home run king of the 1960s grew up.

When I reached home my grandfather asked me what had changed since the year before. I told him I hadn’t seen anything new. He pointed out that there were now television antennas on some of the houses. I said that was nothing, there were TV antennas everywhere in Stockton. But not in Payette, he said.

How's your Health Care Insurance?

“So, how're you doing’?” It's the first question most people ask each other when the sunshine of spring first breaks through the gray skies of winter here in the northern end of the Treasure Valley.

What they meant, of course, was how's your health. Time was, it was a rhetorical question that did not require an answer beyond “Fine, how about you?”.

But times are changing. Today, “How‘re you doing?” often leads to the question, “How's your health insurance?”  Fewer and fewer people have any insurance and most that do have it have significantly less coverage than just a year or two ago and at substantially higher premiums. Even people who work for the government have seen their coverage decline while their premiums rise.

Meanwhile, doctor’s offices and hospitals are spending ever increasing amounts of time and money billing and collecting from private insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid. Weiser Memorial Hospital pilled up accounts receivable of more than $700,000 before new management turned things around.

The USA used to have the best health care in the world if you considered only people with insurance. If you considered the entire population including the more than 40 million Americans without insurance, it was among the worst in the world. Cuba ranked higher.

Thus, Hillary Clinton’s First Lady Health Care Initiative in 1993 went down without a trace when the private insurance companies now famous Harry and Louise advertisements told well-insured Americans what they stood to lose if a single-payer government insurance program were adopted.

That was then. Now, 15 years later, Harry and Louise have been replaced by Michael Moore, whose propaganda documentary “Sicko” has been packing them in at independent movie houses. It features Americans with health insurance whose plans will not cover the treatment they need. Moore takes them to Canada and Cuba where they receive the treatment denied them in the U.S., free of charge.

As it happens, both Harry and Louise and Michael Moore misrepresented the Canadian health care system. Harry and Louise said it is socialized medicine, which it definitely is not, and Moore said anyone can go into a doctor’s office or clinic and be treated, which they most definitely cannot. You have to be registered with the health care system, which requires a social insurance card and number.  You can go to an emergency room without the provincial health insurance, but you'll be billed.

Technically,  Canadian health insurance is not even single payer system. Each of the 10 provinces has its own health care system paid for by provincial taxes and premiums. The federal government is not directly involved.

The federal government only participates in helping some provinces pay for health care through a complex tax agreement that transfers a portion of tax receipts from richer to poorer provinces to ensure relatively equal services across the country.  These transfers also help pay for all other government services including policing, schools, colleges and universities, parks and recreation, etc.

What about waiting lines? Indeed, they do exist. However, every Canadian registered for health care is assured of a place in line based on the severity of his or her case. If you have cancer or other life-threatening illness, for instance, you'll get immediate treatment.  Where do you get in line in the U.S. if you have no insurance or if your insurance does not cover the treatment recommended by your doctor?

Like American insurers, Canadian plans do not cover experimental treatments except under very special circumstances. Canadians have more avenues of appeal than most American’s, however. They can, and regularly do, go to their Member of Parliament, often with success.

To be sure there are services common at hospitals in Idaho that you cannot get at Canadian hospitals. Private rooms, for one. There are very few of them and they go to patients who need them. For example, private rooms in maternity wards go first to women whose newborns are ill or die during or soon after birth. Needless to say, there is no free valet parking at any Canadian hospital. There is not a lot of parking, especially at city hospitals, and they charge for it.

There is private health insurance in Canada, lots of it. It varies from province to province, but most Canadian plans cover prescription drugs, eye exams, prescription glasses, private or semi-private rooms (if available), ambulance services and nursing homes. Blue Cross is Alberta is free to those with low incomes, usually subject to a means test.

Most working Canadians have private insurance through their employer. The self-employed or consultants can obtain the needed extra insurance at a tiny fraction of the cost of supplemental health insurance in the U.S. Canadians who are not working can easily pass the means test.

Doctors are not required to participate in Canadian health insurance plans. They are perfectly free to charge patients themselves for their services. Of course, they cannot pick and choose – they are either in or out of the plan. If they are in, most provinces do not allow them to charge patients additional fees.

Provincial medical associations negotiate fees with the provincial health department on a regular basis.
Canadian doctors do not buy medical malpractice insurance. The Canadian Medical Association insures all of its members though its own self-administered plan. Why does this work so well? It’s obvious – because any additional medical care, hospitalization or other services required as a result of malpractice is covered by health insurance.

Okay, there is more to it than that, but it would take a separate column to explain. In short, Canadians don’t sue as much as Americans do and Canadian courts do not provide more than compensatory damages. You get your out of pocket expenses and, in the case of wrongful death, the amount the deceased would have been expected to contribute to family income. Pain and suffering is worth at most a couple of thousand dollars and there is no such thing as loss of conjugal bliss.

Beyond compensatory damages – loss of a father’s income or a mother’s child care, for example -- Canadian law limits compensation for wrongful death to $60,000. Until the mid-1990s, it was $3,000.
You can search the streets for hours without finding a lawyer willing to take a case on a contingency basis and, if you find one, he or she will be worth exactly what you pay him or her up front.

Well, you say, Canadian health care sounds like a pretty good deal, but it should be for the amount of taxes you pay up there. Okay, let’s check on that. The latest issue of The Economist has a chart of the gap between what workers are paid and the amount they take home after paying all taxes in 15 industrialized countries. American workers on average take home roughly 70 percent of their earnings and Canadian workers 68 percent.

As a further point of interest, workers in Switzerland, Japan, and Australia take home more than Canadian and American workers; and they have single payer government health insurance.