I read David Brooks column by that title in the Key West Citizen recently and it's premise won't go away. Grrr! I have to lance the boil...
Funnily enough I don't disagree with him on this one because I have long since viewed health care reform (insurance reform whatever term suits you) as a step away from the devil-leave-the-hindmost attitude of Reaganomics. What the Right calls the rising tide that lifts all boats, dinghies and gin palaces equally. Early on when it became clear that health care reform was a possibility, and noise started to be made about a true public option, I too saw this as a step toward a more social-democratic state in the US. Social democracy as defined by Western Europeans is, broadly speaking a mixed economy as defined by some people in the US. Essentially social democracy offers the population at large a protective safety net of benefits, economic and medical below which the bulk of the population need not fear falling. It can consist of government paid for child care so mothers can work, extensive sometimes permanent unemployment benefits and of course free health care for all. Free in the sense that taxes are twice as high as they are here. In motorcycling terms I read in a magazine recently that a Harley Sportster that sells in the US for less than $10,000 might cost three times that much in Denmark. That's just another way to pay for government programs. We hear a lot of noise about extended European vacations, but Europeans have to pay back their free education with a lifetime of work to garner a modest government pension at the end. Making a sudden (albeit well earned) fortune in Europe is next to impossible compared to the US where large sums of money (used to!) routinely change hands in corporate buyouts and as rewards for creative thinking and hard work...
Brooks's point, and it's a good one, is that by seeking to provide coverage for all in the US we are starting down the path to government oversight in much more than just our health care. It is, as he says, a civilizing effort. As we try to remove the terror of illness or bankruptcy from the lives of ordinary people we inevitably increase costs and thus increase the need for more...taxes! He's right, I don't see how universal coverage can be obtained without increasing costs not matter what they tell us, but here's why I think it is fundamentally necessary, even though my wife and I have adequate coverage as I write (and low taxes in penurious Florida!)
The problem for me lies not with the notion of universal coverage, but the reason why we don't already have it in our free market system. If our private insurance based system worked I would stand alongside all those who sought no change- "If it ain't broke don't fix it!" But it is broke! There are too many horror stories of insurance companies failing us, too many and too well known to go on listing them here. Our system costs more per capita than universal coverage systems underpinned by other industrialized governments, our lives are constrained by lack of health care, by insurance tied to our jobs, by unaffordable premiums and by insurance companies who set the terms that cannot be debated. If you get an unfair or illegal bill to whom do you appeal? This system tortures Americans of good faith and less financial means. It tortures decent families and people forced not only to suffer illness and catastrophe but financial ruin. Something has to change, Senator Lieberman and the Catholic bishops notwithstanding. I have yet to hear a non-coverage horror story from a member of Congress or their families. We deserve no less than they.
And if, in so doing we take one small tentative step down the path to social democracy and away from free market piracy, so be it. If the insurance companies understood how badly they have mauled us we wouldn't need to fight tooth and nail for a strong public option. If I could shop for an insurance policy across state lines to find the cheapest competition we wouldn't need change...If a life flight helicopter to Miami didn't charge $23,000 for 40 minutes in the air...or a ground ambulance $800 for a five mile ride across Key West...If a heart attack didn't cost $70,000 to treat...If insurance companies had to present timely detailed explanations of charges...If co-pays were capped by law....If the chronically ill got government help...If...if...if. Instead we face medical and financial catastrophe like no other industrialized nation and our leaders won't lead us out of the wilderness. Universal coverage is sensible and compassionate, not socialism. And if it is the first step to socialism let the insurance robber barons shoulder the blame, not the sick.
The cost is expected to total something like 200 million dollars but Monroe County is moving forward with the creation of a sewer system all along the Keys. The island I live on, Ramrod Key is undergoing the first stage of this invasive surgery. Observed by the local wildlife, God rot the iguanas and their nasty penchant for eating my vegetable plots.
The county has spent the last two decades valiantly procrastinating this job. The city of Key West tore up it's streets in a giant dust storm a decade ago and wrapped up it's sewage system and superb treatment facility before the county even figured out it was time to get serious. Now that time has come and the State of Florida was threatening all kinds of sturm und drang if the job wasn't done by 2010 but they've relented and extended the deadline to 2015 without fail! It was pretty obvious that getting the Keys sewered by 2010 was a pipe dream, so to speak. Now they are giving it all they've got. And, check this out, there is a bike path going to be built on top of the sewer line! Cool! 
While I am a big fan of bicycle paths and look forward to not having to share the shoulder with dopes driving cars and handling phones at the same time, the person that designed this bike path needs to be taken some place quiet and educated and then shot. In this next picture you will see the new bike path joining the old Flagler bridge across Niles Channel. Which would be excellent if the old bridge wasn't cut in two to allow tall boats to pass under the new (tall) road bridge. The bike path is effectively a path to nowhere.... 
This is the old Flagler Bridge which makes a fine fishing pier... but you can't get to Summerland Key this way and if you are on a bike this is where the new bike path essentially ends. Lame, no?
It's not the end of the world for someone like me who is ready willing and able to hit some pea rock or grass between the new path and the shoulder on the road bridge but this beautiful path that crosses a mile and a half of island needs to be connected to make proper sense.
Instead the engineer who designed this is sending a message that travel by bicycle, as anything more than a recreational tool, is not to be encouraged. It rather reminds me of the brilliant minds that used to allow bicycles to be loaded onto bike racks on the Lower Keys shuttle buses between Marathon and Key West. That program was so successful (obviously!) they shut it down. Instead of finding ways to encourage alternative transportation they just said: Screw it! No more bikes on buses... Who are these people who can't think or be creative!
Granted the shoulder on Highway One bridges aren't that wide but they are entirely usable by bicycles:
Th work is proceeding apace and there are casualties, in the flora. This tree is still alive even as it provides inadequate shade for the back hoe.
This next one wasn't so lucky, yet the workers still propped it up with pieces of wood. I hope there is a better landscape plan for the final product, but just getting a bike path in these financially strapped times seems lie a deal to me:
The whole business of putting sewers the length of the Florida Keys is not without controversy as you might imagine. The cost of individual home hook ups has yet to be assessed, and the numbers vary between a low of around $7,000 and up to $20,000 if all governmental subsidies are withdrawn. The idea is to add the cost of the sewer assessments to utility bills for the individual parcels and spread the repayment plan over a period of time, probably twenty years. Which, rationally speaking, seems entirely do-able to someone like me.
However, as surprising as this may be, not everyone views the installation of modern sewers as a good thing; it turns out not very many people at all are like me, to everyone's chagrin I'm sure. Indeed there are many people who grumble loudly at the cost and the bother and argue that things should be left exactly as they are. And if you want to know how things in the toilet line work right now, read on. If not just look at the pictures.
The way it works right now is that each home has it's own cesspit, and these are supposed to filter all the waste produced by 50,000 permanent residents and millions of visitors. Because these islands are made out of limestone rock they do a terrible job of filtering all that waste, and the result is horrendous pollution, or possibly not. The really odd thing about the sewer debate is the total lack of numbers. It is beyond doubt that the coral reef is deteriorating, whether it's because of human waste in the water or because of agricultural run off from the Everglades or some other thing (climate change?) no one really knows. Nitrates in the water running into Florida Bay do seem to be established as responsible for algae blooms off the Upper Keys but there is no doubt the reef is deteriorating and you'd think shit in the water would be a common sense reason to try to make that one change at least. But we are not a people renowned for our common sense, are we? So the merits of sewers lumbers on in the popular imagination as a subject for debate.
Meanwhile the sewers themselves are getting planted at long last, and every time I ride past the road works i wonder why this project wasn't started twenty years ago. We have to do it now when the country is broke!
Happily the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority is in charge of the work and they seem to be doing a fine job. The first round of sewer installation was carried out by a contract given to a very dubious organization called Key West Resort Utilities that not only did an abysmal job of hooking up the new system (back flows of shit into homes were reported all over the place) they were also investigated for cheating their customers and charging family expenses to the business. After that fiasco, despite friendships between commissioners and the Resort Utility executives the county was obligated to go the public route and awarded the contract to the boring, reliable, capable Aqueduct Authority. Good for Ramrod Key residents, crap (literally) for Stock Island.
This is just the main line they are installing so we will soon see side streets torn up and all that kind of annoyance, but I find it hard to be critical of a plan that will get human waste out of the ocean. I guess that makes me a radical huh?
The new bike path is showing signs of how nice it will be once it's done, check out this kerb:
The work is stretching off into the distance. Up next, I suppose the Torch Keys then Big Pine, then the world!
And this is the other end of the bike path, at the Shell station (slowly being transformed from a Chevron, much to my delight) :
I am impatient, I want it to be finished but I am glad it's getting done at long last.
Once one gets over the cool factor of living in Old Town Key West a home out here could have lots of advantages. Price isn't necessarily one of them. They used to sell for millions but I doubt these homes will ever qualify as low income housing even in a housing depression. Nor should they.
Granted these are technically "dry lots" (no canal access for boats and dockage) and the views are a bit limited, but for some residents that's no reason not to sit out of a cool Fall evening and check the fence line:
A nice big wall could also be construed as an advantage, especially if flowery:
And those garbage bags filled with garden clippings- this is the time of year when everything has to be made pretty for the owner's return. 
Check this, an actual garage:
This garage has a nice long driveway, unusual for many homes in this city:
The 3800 block is nothing if not varied:
It sits on the north side of the Overseas Highway just south (or west of you are going to be pedantic) of the restaurant known as Mangrove Mama's on Sugarloaf Key. I'd noticed it for years as I trudged between the restaurant and Sugarloaf School on this straight stretch of Highway One, but I never stopped to check it out.
That's the thing about yielding to temptation. Sometimes the result doesn't live up to billing! I saw a winding, mysterious little lane leading off into the mangroves. What I found after 100 yards (90 meters) was a double barrelled No Trespassing sign. And a pretty little flower by way of compensation.
...the nature Conservancy. That and three bucks will buy me a large con leche, but I never knew this was where these good people hung out. Now I do, and so do you.
And in the back there was a tall house, possibly the residence protected by all the No Trespassing signs.
Somebody got it into their heads that North Johnson is a real street and needed a real (and very restrictive) speed limit. I wonder what awful traffic violation was committed on this runt of a street that merited the installation of an actual speed limit?
Casting around for something to photograph I saw this yellow International Jeep-like thing sitting under a palm tree all ready to go, everyone's idea of ideal Keys wheels.
Not much to it really, so from now on I'll ride by and know that I'm not missing anything.