Is everything you do a matter of priorities?

My wife and I work constantly to make our farm a better place. But I might fix the leaking cellar door instead of changing the direction of the showerhead, which is what she hoped I’d do first.

Are you faced with this kind of decision every day? Suppose your pickup had 302,000 miles on it, and your spouse’s Rav 4 had 244,000 miles on it.

You might as well drive your pickup until it stops, but your spouse sometimes drives far from home. You check online and see that a new replacement (with only 70,000 miles on it) for the Rav 4 might cost $10,000, which you could pay off at $212 a month.

You could do this if you didn’t already have the $422-a-month expense for your supplemental “health insurance.” But even with Medicare, who would bet a newer car against being completely destroyed by a three-day stay in the hospital? Wouldn’t hiring a tow truck to carry your car from California to St. George, Maine, be much cheaper than three days on oxygen and drugs?

Determining which laws should be enacted first in any country to improve the lives of citizens would seem to be a capricious process. Is there any reason slavery should have been abolished before women were given the right to vote? Or that our friends in same-sex marriages should for so long be deprived of the economic advantages of marriage enjoyed by the rest of us?

You can believe that in some quarters, these pieces of legislation raised howls of rage against an oppressive government, and that in all three cases their dissent was substantiated with quotes from the Good Book.

Because people refuse to protect themselves and others, a law prohibiting drunken driving was enacted in New Jersey in 1906. Eighty or so years later, wearing a seat belt while driving became mandatory in Maine.

Some of our friends do not like any regulation or program administered by the government, so, although they do not need to be convinced of the practicality of driving on their own side of the road, they refuse to wear a seat belt. They refuse to buy “health insurance.” Their grandparents never had to do it, and neither did their parents – and the government is not going to make them do it now.

Although advances in technology and science are moving at a rapid pace, it is hard for many of us to change the way we’ve always done things.

Many older people do not own a computer. I do not know how to answer a cellphone. This does not inconvenience any of the concerned parties, and life goes happily on.

There are, however, aspects of our society that have changed drastically over the past 50 years, and there can be grave economic consequences if every one of us does not stand in line, hat in hand, and ask to come on board. The most serious change is the new way our medical system operates.

Eighty years ago, many of us rural Maine folk were born at home. Aunt Grace stood by with her years of midwife experience. Dr. Keller dropped in later to check on things, and quietly left after pocketing his $2 fee. You know this is true, because your grandmother pasted the receipt in your baby book.

Your grandmother died at home in the same bed you were born in, cared for over a period of months by your mother. It was not uncommon to visit a neighbor and hear cries of inquiry from an aged relative in the back bedroom: “Graaace, Graaace. Who’s here?”

This old way of doing things is no more. Today, we are in the hands of very skilled medical and health care professionals who can prolong our demise for months, or, in the case of young people, many years.

They are well paid for their service, and there’s the rub.

A man well past 80 cheerfully showed me the bill for his heart operation. It was around $342,000.

Does the government program called Medicare pay for all of this? What would the man have done if he were 45 and not covered by government insurance? How does someone earning minimum wage, or even six times that much, pay off a $300,000 hospital bill?

My question is more than academic, because a young neighbor has been hospitalized for some weeks now with a rare disease. He has no insurance to cover even a portion of the expense.

Although doctors expect that his body will again be functional, will he live long enough to recover economically?

It was during a discussion of my young neighbor’s problem that I heard another neighbor say that he also had no “health insurance.” He said he could not afford it.

And here we come back to our original consideration of priorities. My young friend who said he could not afford “health insurance” drives a new car.

EVERYONE’S WELCOME

My 80th birthday party will be held here at the humble farm at noon on July 18. Portland Press Herald staff and readers are invited.

The humble Farmer can be seen on Community Television in and near Portland and visited at his website:

www.thehumblefarmer.com/MainePrivateRadio.html