Salad!

Yes, I do things other than cook. But somehow that is what I often think of sharing. I was tired tonight and wanted something different to eat to I got a bag of baby spinach at Safeway and made a fabulous salad.

Take a look!

It had spinach, mandarin orange pieces, dried tart cherries, chevre cheese, and chopped sugar & spice pecans with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing. Winter is really the time for this salad somehow, probably because the spinach and citrus tastes so good in the season of reduced fruit.

Along with the roasted sweet potatoes (that I also got on the way home, a store across the street is quite handy sometimes) it made for a very good dinner. I followed that up with a batch of granola. It's good to have around and the warm oven was nice company on this chilly night. I think we're forecast to get the first frost of the year tonight. Yep. It's November and they're talking about the first frost. This is definitely farther south than I'm used to. 

I was working on my underwriting project today at work. It's complicated in that there are a lot of moving pieces and computer systems to learn but once I figure those out I think it will be fairly straightforward. It's definitely an opportunity to learn about a large government system for providing and tracking client services, mortgage insurance contracts in this case, but similar issues would apply to many other types of services...tracking building projects, grants, highway projects...

And then I walked home and read the news online. Ezra Klein's Wonkblog with the Washington Post often has a couple of interesting pieces and can point me at other good stories too. For example here is a post about where the projected federal budget debt is actually coming from in the next nine years. Answer: the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire completely would do more to reduce the deficit than anything the supercomputer is talking about.

And here's a rant from Jonathan Gruber about the politics and the situation surrounding the Affordable Care Act. I appreciate that he flat-out calls Romney lying for trying to distinguish his Massachusetts health care reform from Obama's federal reform. They are the same approach. The major difference is that Massachusetts got the Feds to pay for their reform and so shifted the costs off of the state books. Nationwide we don't have the option of getting someone else to pay for expanding access to health care services.

And I want to quote Gruber's final lines:

"Basically, this is the last hope for a free-market solution for covering the uninsured. If this fails, then you either give up on the uninsured or you go to single-payer. Those are the only two options left. And the Republicans, if they're willing to stand up and say, 'We give up on the uninsured,' then great, let them say that and let the voters come to the polls and decide, but they won't say that."

Now my late-night amusement is the what-if of the Supreme Court striking down the individual mandate but leaving the rest of the ACA intact. That would be the insurance industry's worst nightmare because they would have to sell insurance policies to people when we become sick. If Congress remains sufficiently gridlocked they might not even take any action to change it which would be a really uncomfortable, and ironic, outcome for all concerned.

It might be the quickest way to get us to national single-payer though.

Well, enough with the wild speculation. We'll hear the Court's decision by June.