Even way back last August, before the economy was officially in terminal free fall, the issues surrounding a college education were in the news. CNN Money asked, Is college still worth the price?

Most of us have come to understand how necessary a college degree – in anything – is to being able to ’successfully’ compete in today’s complicated modern world. Yet the costs of a degree – any degree – is soaring up to four times the rate of inflation even as both jobs and salaries for college graduates are shrinking. How much sense does it really make for families (or students, via loans) to pay $200,000 for a degree so s/he can get a job that pays $30,000 a year or less?

In a rational economy the rapid inflation of college tuition would slow, stop or even reverse as consumers – the pool of applying students – shrank in response to the spiraling costs. But for this particular commodity, there can be no shortage of applicants due to the recognized importance of said degree to the entire future of the prospective student. It is much easier to replace light bulbs and take public transportation to work in order to save on electric bills and gasoline than it is to forego a college education because it costs more than a graduating student can expect to earn.

Until the recent financial meltdown families felt fairly secure in their savings for their children’s educations, and college loans were readily available at low interest to finance most of the rest. Now the credit has dried up and the savings have been “liquidated” by failing Banks and Wall Street brokerages.

Some applicants are considering the traditional “Work Your Way Through College” option, but the kind of jobs a student can get part time in a college environment often pay minimum wage or even less. This won’t even buy a single textbook, much less pay a semester’s tuition. At this point the cost in time and energy simply isn’t worth it.

Some families are taking advantage of local Community College offerings, most of which have straight transfer programs to state universities following the first two years’ worth of standard requisites and humanities, which the community systems can offer much cheaper than universities do. In some states as worker re-training has become a serious mandate, the costs of tuition can be less than the amount available to students from the Pell Grant system. That of course doesn’t pay for textbooks (still outrageous) or transportation, but those same community colleges are offering more and more courses on-line so that students can do the work from home without having the transportation and meals expense.

Once in the system and receiving the Pell money, students are then eligible for other grants and scholarships the schools – including community colleges – administer. It takes a semester to get into the system, but this may be the least expensive way to do so. The system tends to follow the student – or even run ahead if she or he is obtaining scholarships for grade point maintenance – to the state universities, which have access to even more resources to help students cover the costs of their education.

The trick these days seems to be to avoid loans if at all possible, to NOT spend the savings the family may have accumulated and might still be worth something, but get the degree anyway. Very few careers actually require incoming hires to boast $200,000 degrees, so anyone not expecting to go into those particular careers should avoid the trap.

There are some good online sources for scholarships and grants as well that parents of high schoolers should be signing up with now, to give their kids the best competitive edge in applying as well as the early advantage of winning. Some of these, including FastWeb will target email alerts to what individual colleges and benefactors are offering in your child’s particular fields of interest as well as preferred schools according to your child’s profile. Peterson’s is a similar service, and either or both are highly recommended, FREE services.

So what’s the bottom line? Do what you have to do to get that degree, it’s still worth its weight in gold (and there aren’t a lot of good jobs around right now anyway). Just avoid debt if you can, take advantage of everything you are capable of using, plot your course carefully, and stick to the plan even if it takes longer to get that degree than you’d originally figured. Good luck and happy scholarship hunting!

Links:

The Cost of College In A Bad Economy
15 Ways to Set Yourself Apart in a Recession
Is college still worth the price?
Should your kid work in college?
Beat the college loan crunch
FastWeb: Scholarships, Financial Aid and Colleges
69 Free or Open Source Tools For Students

Let’s face it. The “Recession of 2008″ is now officially over, because it is January, the first month of the “Depression of 2009.” The last jobless statistics for ‘08 showed more than half a million new first-time unemployment filers, which represent only those workers who qualify for unemployment. Final ‘official’ tally for ‘08: 2.6 million jobs lost. These are the worst figures in 16 years, while the average hourly workweek for those underneath the supervisory level doing the real work shrank to the lowest number since the government started keeping such statistics in 1964. That, for the quick-math challenged, is 45 years ago.

Most of us who watch the economic comings and goings in this strange era of bail-outs for super-crooks and callous economic eugenics for working families also know that the ‘official’ statistics don’t come anywhere close to matching what is really going on in the real world. Young workers, seasonal workers, minimum wage workers, temp workers and millions who otherwise don’t qualify for unemployment aid or who have exhausted their eligibility are completely off the books – no one bothers to count them, even if their numbers swell the real unemployment picture to more than double the reported statistics. “Unofficial” numbers can range anywhere from 11.1 million jobless Americans to somewhere very close to 20% of our work force. No one much likes to mention that, since anything more than 10% puts us in that ‘depression’ they’d rather slit their wrists than admit to.

Because lengthy layoffs and lack of available new jobs will tend to swell the ranks of both young and unemployed workers going back to school (one way or another) to expand their horizons, I have found a very interesting website tool called Online College that readers may find helpful for themselves or their children suddenly looking at a bleak employment picture for the foreseeable future. There are good and very useful articles posted to the site, and one stands out right now – 15 Ways to Set Yourself Apart in a Recession.

These are hints on how to make yourself stand out on the job so the bosses looking for employees to lay off skip right over you. Some have to do with expanding your useful role to the company, how to make the best impression while looking for new work, and what you can do educationally while ‘between jobs’ to enhance your hireability when the smoke clears. There are even helpful hints about striking out on your own – always risky even in the best of economic times – to find opportunities that will either get you inside a startup or send you in the direction of starting your own business.

And on that starting your own front, a website called brainz offers some great ideas in 33 Ways to Fund Your Startup Business. With the observation that even in the worst of economic times there is always money out there and people looking to invest, these 33 ideas are pure gold for the budding entrepreneur with a good (and potentially lucrative) idea. Some will cost the idea man less than others, and it’s probably not the best idea in this economic climate to risk one’s own property, if one’s real estate is still worth anything (and that’s not very clear right now in many parts of the country).

In future posts we’ll take a look at some of the ideas out there for small business startups, supply and demand and the most “recession-proof” goods and services people will need regardless of economic situation. So stay tuned, don’t get too discouraged, and begin taking a close look at where your family is right now, what its immediate future looks like, what resources you may have to invest and how best to invest them.

Links:

Free Fall: Jobless Rate Worst Since ‘94
Mid-Cycle Meltdown: Jobless Claims January 15, 2009
15 Ways to Set Yourself Apart in a Recession
33 Ways to Fund Your Startup Business

We’ve seen a lot of desperation as the world (and US) economy tanks in the wake of the mortgage-loss pyramid scheme crash. We’ve heard a lot of hyperbole and rhetoric from the candidates who want to replace Bush-Cheney as President and Vice-President of the United States. This is The Week That Was, votes will be counted tomorrow night, and we should know sometime in the wee hours of Wednesday which of the contestants gets the erstwhile “prize.”

As Wall Street began its precipitous fall, Republican candidate John McCain was busy informing the nation that the ‘fundamentals’ of our economy are strong. No, they aren’t strong, they’re utter failures after years of massive tax cuts to the wealthy, heavy borrowing to support two wars, and the “Unfettered Free Market” [TM] frenzy allowed by blanket de-regulation of the banking and investment sectors.

To get an idea of just how outrageous things had gotten, consider the so-called “Mortgage Meltdown” that took so many once-staid capitalist houses into ruin. We all know that housing prices had ballooned in most urban areas of the country, a ‘bubble’ sustained by the practice of lending to workers whose incomes haven’t seen even a minimal rise in more than 30 years, for houses that cost easily twice as much as they could hope to afford and three times what they were actually worth. Many of these loans were made with specific criminal intent to skim fees off the top, and saddled with adjustable interest rates that worked just like time bombs to force people into bankruptcy.

Knowing that these time bombs would explode X number of years down the line, the banks and futures traders on Wall Street invented a new paper vehicle called “Credit Default Swaps” for the express purpose of betting on strapped families defaulting on their mortgages. [Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny]These are an insurance vehicle, insurance to be paid out to the holders of the policies on bad mortgages. And those policies – as “Credit Default Swaps” were sold and resold hundreds of times. This is what led corporate insurance giant AIG to be one of the first Big-Time Players to fail, our government moved right in to nationalize it.

This situation is a prime example of the philosophy of “Privatizing the Profits, Socializing the Losses.” It’s a bail-out to rich gamblers necessitated by unregulated greed. Pure and simple. Look at how it worked…

The number of risky, possibly criminal, largely ARM mortgages in the US that have or soon will default amounts to approximately 1% of all the mortgages outstanding. The re-insurance scam ended up valuing these mortgages at 5 times the annual Gross Domestic Product of the entire world. They were of course never worth anywhere close to that much, this is just the amount of insurance pay-outs once they DID default. And default they did, that brought Wall Street – and the world markets which participated in the scam – to their knees.

Despite the fact that candidate McCain did not seem to have the slightest grasp on the impending doom (his chief financial advisor Phil Gramm famously called people concerned about the situation “whiners”), his tax promises to the nation if elected is still to maintain George W. Bush’s blanket tax cuts to the top 2% of wealthy citizens and corporate giants. Democratic challenger Barack Obama would reverse this situation by taxing the rich and giving significant tax cuts to the middle classes. Even to the point of eliminating income taxes altogether on seniors who make less than $50,000 a year.

McCain of course calls this tax-the-rich situation “Socialism,” as if that’s as scary a word these days as it was back in the ’50s. It is not. All governments receive taxes and use them to support infrastructure, public education and other social programs, thus all government is essentially socialist at heart. The fine points always apply to who pays the taxes and gets the benefits of governmental largesse.

CNNMoney recently published an article about the different tax plans of the candidates, along with a breakdown of just how much your taxes will go up or down according to your income. McCain, Obama and your tax bill is recommended reading for everyone out there who hasn’t already voted, and is concerned about the recession/depression that we now know will last more than a year.

Then get out there and vote on November 4th, as if your way of life depended on it – because it does!

Links:

McCain, Obama and your tax bill
Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
Economists see recession through 2009

It’s true, and should come as no surprise that modern day pirates are responsible for the current mass chaos in the markets. I mean, this is just the sort of things pirates do, isn’t it? Or, so says Peter Hayes, Senior Lecturer in politics at the University of Sunderland.

In Dr. Hayes’ latest paper, ‘Pirates, Privateers and the contract theories of Hobbes and Locke’, the argument is developed and interesting. Not only did pirates practically invent participatory democracy by electing their captain, voting on major decisions and distributing the booty in fairly equal shares, but they were often backed by financiers in distant countries. Which, according to Hayes, makes your average pirate ship roughly equivalent to a modern corporation.

“Pirates had a democratic structure, and relative equality, but they were doing all this to violate the rights of other people,” Hayes says. “The idea of a social contract is that it protects human rights. But what if you create a social contract to say that we’ll observe rights toward each other, but we won’t observe rights for outsiders?”

Hmmm… Maybe Hayes has a point. Or maybe pirates themselves were an expression of the basic xenophobia that has existed ever since early tribal society. But pirates are a more popular romantic icon these days than simple hunter-gatherers, so Hayes can use them as a selling point. Somehow, the robber barons of today don’t elicit the kind of romantic idol-worship or secret sympathies from the vast amount of us in the out-group they’re busy hijacking day to day.

For the most part, they’re disgusting. Which is why when AIG and other failed brokers and bankers take $70 billion of a trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout to pad the top privateers’ junkets and golden parachutes, the taxpayers aren’t very happy with it. Off with their heads, I say!

While those of us in the less-than 95th percentile of the American income scale celebrated a long Labor Day weekend with family and friends, the 2008 Presidential race heated up, took a bizarre turn, and looks more like a “North Country”-like sit-com every day. The New York Times published some Labor Day editorials that are as remarkably honest as they are politically timely in this era of double-digit inflation for basics like food and fuel, the mortgage crisis tossing millions of families out on the streets, and ever-faster distancing between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ that can positively cause major depression if you think too much about it.

Why? Because things are getting worse, not better. Our shoestring budgets can no longer be thought of a a temporary condition, but something we’ll have to work with all our lives. This is what op-ed contributor Dalton Conley commented on Tuesday in his opinion piece, Rich Man’s Burden.

Conley begins by noticing that less wealthy Americans actually took the weekend off and were happy about it, while wealthier Americans mostly fretted over their BlackBerries and laptops and worked anyway, as if frightened of being left behind if they weren’t working constantly to get ahead. He describes a sort of “red shift” – like that of light reaching us from distant galaxies rushing ever further away from us ever faster – between the middle income group [~$200,000 a year] and the actually rich. The disparity between the middle and the bottom rungs on the economic ladder is not so great and isn’t accelerating much. But once you reach the middle, the rungs get further and further apart.

Princeton economics professor and former vice-chair of the Fed Alan Blinder offered a contrast between the political parties and their economic plans over the weekend that is well worth reading and digesting. He lays things out clearly and simply in what he calls the Great Partisan Growth Divide. The US economy has, on average, grown faster under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.

I call this the Economic Ag Cycle. Where Democrats grow the economy during their ascendency, so that Republicans can move in and reap the money crop (i.e., rob the country blind). Which one might think would balance out over time, but it doesn’t. And that’s why we find ourselves where we are today. From 1948 to 2007, Republicans occupied the White House for a total of 34 years, while Democrats held it only 26 years. There’s simply not been enough wealth grown for the amount of reaping the rich folks have been doing, so we are now worse off than we have been at any time since World War 2.

Income inequality has been on the rise for 30 years. It gets greater and greater the higher up the ladder you go, and Blinder went all the way to the 95% vs. 5% level. Which, btw, is well below the $5 million income level John McCain set as his idea of when people become “rich.” In fact, it’s under $200,000.

Finally, Bob Herbert offers his advice to Head for the High Road and not let ourselves be swayed or fooled by ‘the usual’ political distractions and overblown pandering, but to pay attention to reality on the ground after the last 8 years of Republican reaping. Just as school districts all over the country are suddenly having to deal with huge increases in the number of officially poor and homeless children, those school districts have had to cut funding for programs serving those children due to concurrent huge increases in the costs of food and fuel.

So while I hope you all had a happy Labor Day and enjoyed yourselves immensely, do check out these editorials. They’ll put this political Silly Season into some realistic perspective. Many of us enjoy our lives way too much to be desirous of 24-hour workdays 7 days a week 365 days a year. It’s a rat race that would detract from our quality of life significantly, we only want ‘enough’. Yet if we’re not careful this November, we’re going to get another 4-8 years of less and less, until the American philosophy and the American Dream will become something most citizens can never even hope for. Their children will be less well-educated, they’ll make less money, they’ll have to work harder, they’ll suffer more, and suddenly there won’t be anything left to protect and defend. We must not allow this to happen.

Links:

Rich Man’s Burden
Head for the High Road
Is History Siding with Obama’s Economic Plan?

My eldest grandson graduated from high school in the top 10% of his class a couple of months ago, for which we are inordinately proud – he was taking courses like advanced biology, pre-calc, physics and advanced literature/writing, which most kids around here avoid like the plague. Now we’re facing the costs of getting him through college, since we raised him and of course we will.

We have had to seriously crimp some of our expectations about how this could happen, as things have changed both personally and societally since our children were in college. First, they don’t give out full scholarships to incoming freshmen around here, no matter how well they do in high school. You have to start with your basic Pell Grant and complete at least two semesters before you’re eligible for scholarship or extra grant money. The Pell Grant won’t come in until the second semester because the process doesn’t even start until the student’s already enrolled, so tuition must be paid up front out of pocket, along with all fees and the cost of textbooks.

So for our grandson, we have made concessions. He will work for his father in another state through the fall, save up money to be put toward tuition, books and transportation (or one of those, since they’re all necessities). That means not starting college until January. That will give us time to save for the tuition.

We’ve also decided to begin his academic career at the area community college rather than the university his mother graduated from, because the first year or two is just basic requirements, the CC offers them in a straight transfer program, and the cost is less than a third what the university costs for a full-time student. That way if he does well, he can get into the scholarship system quickly, including those from university when it’s time to make the change.

Tuition at our Community College is less than $700 per semester, which leaves $300 from the basic level Pell Grant to pay for everything else. $300 won’t even buy him lunch, so saving on the cost of books – which can often add up to tuition for the course – is required. Luckily, the CC here knows it’s in an official “economically depressed region” and offers cool alternatives. Most courses have online sources for lesson material, so students needn’t purchase textbooks at all. There’s also a lively book exchange, a used book option, and even a lending library on campus. So we’re hoping to get by at least the first year without having to buy any books at all.

At higher levels, however, he’s going to WANT to purchase books – he’ll want to keep them forever, as source material he can readily access in his future life. So I have found a couple of sources of very good information on how to save a bundle on college textbooks. If you’ve got someone in or getting ready for college, the tips will serve you very well! Check them out:

10 Tips: Save on college textbooks
MSNBC: 10 ways to save on college textbooks

In response to increasing unaffordability of health insurance in America and justifying his repeated vetos of State Children’s Health Insurance Program [SCHIP] expansions, President George W. Bush declared during an appearance in Cleveland last July that:

“The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

As if that weren’t clueless enough, the New York Times reports today (April 23) that one of the nation’s largest health insurers, UnitedHealth, announced disappointing first-quarter earnings (profits), saying the weakening Economy Has Dented Its Prospects. In short, as premiums rise, employers are dropping insurance plans for their employees, more employees are opting out, and rising unemployment is reflected in increasing numbers of uninsured.

The for-profit industry has also shot itself in the foot by increasing premiums to protect its profits over the quickly rising cost of care, not covering people who may have health problems, and simply refusing to pay for health care for the insured. Medical bills now account for a full half of all bankruptcies in the US, and ER treatment is NOT “free.”

So in this installment in the series of inexpensive health care tips, let’s look at some resources out there for people who don’t have insurance, or have “junk insurance” that doesn’t actually cover anything, and those who simply cannot pay cash for doctor’s visits, eye care, dental care, hospitalization or any other aspect of health care in this country.

The readers of this blog have access to a computer (or they wouldn’t be reading). There are some searches you can do through Google or some other search engine to access information on free or sliding scale health care in your area. I did this for my state and locality, western North Carolina. Here are some of the results…

On a search for “free eye care NC” I found Unite for Sight’s Free Health Coverage Program Portal, with hot links to every state. It also links to many sites out there for free basic health care resources, SCHIP coverage programs for children, free eye care, veteran’s insurance by the states, Medicaid and Medicare, free prescription medications, and the states’ free health coverage programs generally. This is a valuable resource page which is featured weekly on CNN International.

In North Carolina, I was also returned a Blue Cross Blue Shield Association page listing a total of 69 free clinics across the state supported by the foundation. North Carolina has the nation’s largest association of free clinics, but it also has a high number (~1.3 million) of uninsured and working poor who don’t have access to insurance. The state Medicaid and Children’s Insurance programs are capped due to funding shortfalls, leaving thousands who qualify for the coverage out in the cold.

The clinics are often traveling, available only on certain days or months. But if you plan ahead and do your homework, this can be a good way to get basic primary care. The NC Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Medical Assistance administers our SCHIP program. The waiting list is long, usually ‘forever’ long in that emergency situations take precedence (as they should), but you never know. Keep applying, someday you might get your children in. The coverage is for all regular and emergency medical needs, and is supposed to be available on a sliding scale to 200% of poverty level income. At that level, it’ll only cost your family $567 per month per child! At poverty level, it’s just $50 a month for one child, $100 for two or more. Plus there are deductibles you must pay out of pocket. I know… not much of a deal, is it? I mean, if you had an extra $100 a month, you could probably just go to the doctor and pay cash.

A better bet when you need help and there are no free clinics available is your local Health Department. Most cities (or counties) offer immunizations and flu shots, cancer screening, child and adult primary care, dental care, and physical examinations for work and school requirements. This is government medicine at its bureaucratic worst, but it is honest-to-goodness medical care. It’s worth bookmarking your area’s health department site for when you may need it. If your family has some income, expect to pay on a sliding scale. So have your income and expenses list ready, along with pay stubs, utility bills, etc. Keep them in a folder or envelope to take with you whenever you access a free or sliding-scale provider.

All I can say is that until and unless America offers single-payer coverage to all citizens, there will be tens of millions of American citizens who have no health care. Estimates of up to 80,000 people die every year due to lack of medical care – don’t let that figure include you or your family. Be prepared to get what you need when you need it, and do NOT take ‘no’ for an answer.

In the most extreme – if you or someone in your family is in serious need and access is being denied, go ahead and bookmark your area’s free legal services association. When in real need, there’s no sense in standing on pride if that means you lose your life or your child’s life. Every other civilized country on the planet offers universal care to their citizens (and most also offer it to visitors). The only reason the US doesn’t have universal care is corporate greed.

I do not believe that some corporate greed-head’s golden parachute or multi-million dollar salary is worth even one person’s untimely death. More people in this country are victims of the “Death by Spreadsheet” industry than fall to terrorists or either of our current wars. This is simply unacceptable. Be a Boy Scout – Be Prepared.

Links:

Economy Has Dented UHC’s Prospects
Free Health Coverage Program Portal
Department of Health and Human Services
Discount Drug Company Assistance Programs

Previous Posts About Health and Health Care:

Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism
Basic Health Maintenance: Part I
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II

The Situation: Desperate, as usual

Even as the many politicians line up on both sides of the party divide to try and convince the citizenry they’re the man or woman for ‘The Job’ of cleaning out the mess our current national leadership has made out of D.C. over the past 6 1/2 years, research studies, issue forums and public opinion polls are consistently tracking growing concerns about the state of health care in America. From many worsening indications, it looks like the patient is fading fast.

It’s not just the cost of health care, though at this point a significant majority of the solid middle class is just a single serious illness or accident away from bankruptcy. Rapidly increasing numbers of the insured are discovering that despite paying more for insurance every month than for the mortgage, their for-profit provider will not actually pay for health care. Most insurance companies these days pay whole departments full of people whose only job is to deny coverage. Other companies are requiring larger co-pays and deductibles, even while raising the premiums. And governments have capped the safety net systems (Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP) so that they can’t accept the millions who have fallen through the cracks.

The public consistently reports health care as at the top of their concerns, right behind the war in Iraq. They’ve plenty to be concerned about. Those emergency rooms President Bush claims are there to take care of the citizens who have no insurance or money are now turning people away, or releasing them untreated. In my area there is a single hospital conglomerate the government allowed to merge a few years ago, that will not treat any state employees and no longer stitches cuts or sets broken bones in the ER. They’ll clean out your cut, put a band-aid on it, x-ray your broken arm and charge you $500 for the hour, but they won’t stitch or set. For that you have to make an appointment with a specialist. They’ll give you a name and phone number, perhaps get seen this week. Oh… and sometimes you can get pain pills, if that break is deformed enough or swollen enough to elicit the nurse’s sympathy. There are usually no doctors on duty.

Real analyses of the situation put the lie to the constant mantra of “best health care in the world!” from greedy politicians taking money from Big Pharma and the insurance companies. The US now ranks at the bottom of the list of industrialized nations in both life expectancy and infant mortality. The racial and class discrepancies are striking and growing worse as the working poor and middle classes put off medical care, doctor and dentist visits, and regular testing that was once routine. They’re sicker by the time they do get seen, and it’s often too late to help them. Insurance company accountants and pencil-pushers are practicing medicine without licences every day, all over the country. This is called “Murder By Spread Sheet.” []

So I think it will be helpful to talk about what regular people living through hard times (or choosing to live on less) can do about their health and basic health care on their own. This project will take up a series of topics, to include educating yourself and your family about being healthy, how to deal with emergencies they don’t treat at the ER anymore, how to avoid high-priced prescription drugs for common ailments, knowing something useful about alternative health care options, and how to tune your family’s diet toward something that enhances their lives every day while NOT killing them.

Provider Priorities

Until very recently on the historical scale – when a family needs at least 2 incomes just to cover food, clothing and shelter – the #1 health care provider was Mom. Fathers and grandparents have also helped to fill these roles, and very often there was a trained nurse (or otherwise titled medicine person) living somewhere within shouting distance and could be counted upon to analyze just about any situation quickly and efficiently as to how serious things might be.

When I was growing up it was also standard operating procedure for every teenager to take Red Cross first aid and life-saving training, with refreshers every June as soon as school let out. Worse, most of us had spent years in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, and had all our necessary badges. Moreover, everyone in my peer group was expected to volunteer for at least 2 out of the 3 summers of high school at the VA hospital or a nursing home, at least 2 days a week. That experience – part of a traditional social ethic our parents brought with them through the Great Depression and World War II – taught us a lot about sickness, injury, pain, depression, loneliness and hopelessness. Things kids seem to be shielded from quite thoroughly these days, when health care is shrouded in the foreign language of scientific sterility and people are so easily persuaded to believe health care is all about big, mysterious machines, Porche-driving specialists and expensive ‘designer’ drugs.

In that less dangerous (and far less obese) world when kids were outside most every day all day doing things that would likely give their parents heart attacks, we could count on the fact that 9 out of 10 of us at the swimming hole knew how to splint a badly broken bone, deal with a poisonous snakebite, stop serious bleeding, bandage cuts, assuage bruises, assess head injuries, remove fish hooks, halt choking, provide CPR to the drowned, even carry an unconscious friend to help without adding to the injury.

For anyone attempting to live on a shoestring budget at this point in history, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to educate yourself on first aid and CPR, to take control of these aspects of caring for yourself and your family. I’ve linked some of the best sources below, but for little investment there are excellent teachers and very good courses available from your local Scout organizations, WMCA and WYCA, your local Red Cross, etc. If you live in a rural area, the volunteer fire department often has classes going at least twice a year that will cost YOU little or nothing if you’ll volunteer a Saturday watch a month.

And don’t be afraid to take it further. I have seen LPN [Licensed Practical Nurse] training offered at local community colleges for a mere $30 per semester (there will only be 2 before licensing) plus textbook, and you can often buy that used. We go to our tri-county “Textbook Fair” every summer, where textbooks that have been replaced by the State Board go on sale or are given away for free. We’ve an entire library shelf of basic nursing, biology, microbiology, first aid, health and other such books we’ve accumulated. We also keep handy a Merck Manual, which is the best printed resource for anyone who cares to identify conditions and know what the proper treatments are. Have a drug manual as well, which is a fat encyclopedia of prescriptions drugs that tells you everything you might want to know about what your doctor prescribed.

Last but not least, if you’ve got a friend or relative who IS a registered (preferably practicing) nurse, you’re three steps ahead of the average man-on-the-street. My sister is an RN case manager at a large private hospital in Florida. It’s her task to follow the diagnoses, testing and treatments to make sure patients are getting the best possible care for what ails them. That, and fighting with insurance companies over what they’ll pay for. Whenever we’ve got a condition we’d like to handle ourselves, I do the initial research and write it down, then give her a call. Sometimes I feel good about my choices, sometimes she tells me to go straight to a real doctor. I trust her judgment.

Nurses don’t get much respect these days, but they are in fact the primary health care providers in our society. A doctor may spend 10 years in medical school and grad school and internship for his/her specialty, and might be a great brain surgeon. But a nurse knows more about basic nutrition, health maintenance, wound management, immediate intervention, disinfecting a sickroom and assessing a patient’s overall state than the doctor does.

Most folks can learn a good deal of this sort of health care wisdom and practice, and can put it to good use in their home. People – including kids – really don’t have to be rushed to the hospital or taken to the clinic or sandwiched into the doctor’s schedule for most of the usual seasonal illnesses or accidents, or even some of the chronic illnesses that have become so prevalent these days.

I’ll talk about what more families can do for themselves in coming installments in this series. In the meantime, do check out the links below and start downloading – or buying (many books are available used for a fraction of list price) – information you can put on your handy health care shelf right next to the first aid kit and pharmaceutical desk reference.

Links:

KidsHealth: First Aid & Safety

HealthWorld Online: Emergency & First Aid

MayoClinic: First-Aid Guide

The Merck Manual of Medical Information (Home Edition)