From the outside, you’d never guess what’s going on in the nondescript old building across Capitol Way from the Starbucks in downtown Olympia. Within those painted concrete slabs, an agency few have heard of is completely reinventing the way people and small businesses will get a precious and often unattainable commodity: health insurance.
If “Obamacare” deserves a face, it’s not Barack’s. It’s a young Seattle boy named Marcelas Owens, whose mother, like thousands of Americans every year, died of a treatable disease.
When fog hangs low in the pines and winter’s old snow melts sullenly on the potholed streets, Brooks Sackett feels no urge to fly south. The snowbird’s siren song – RV parks in the desert, the freedom of an open road, an apartment near a golf course or a beach – leaves him unmoved. Sunless in Spokane? Nope. Here, he has found the light of enough friends and activities to make the winter warm.
Health care, American-style, is about to undergo the biggest change since the enactment of Medicare 48 years ago. In quiet office buildings far from the glare of television cameras, officials worry that people who need these changes have no idea what’s coming. Health insurance is complicated, and there’s been no lack of controversy to obscure the emerging structure of reform.
Mitzi Judd felt burned out after a long career in hair design, so she began working at golf courses. But at a golf course in Spokane’s climate, she said with a chuckle, “you get fired every fall.” So now, at age 60, she is taking classes in the computer technology required to run her own business. She plans to open hair salons in active-living apartment complexes for older adults.
Four-part harmony. Remember it? A generation or two ago, before “American Idol,” before synthesized ringtones, before home stereo systems with their woofers and tweeters and iPod docks, music was not a spectator sport.
