SURPRISING STUFF
The medical mess we are all caught up in.
The modern medical experience continues to flow toward discovery, the discovery that it’s becoming a sad adventure for most people. Medicare Advantage is a highway robbery contract designed to steal from older citizens. Emergency rooms ask now for only three things; name, date of birth, and insurance coverage that can be instantly checked. Doctor’s offices, when called for an appointment, have staff who basically ask for the same information and then put you on hold to check the insurance before you can even get an appointment. Some, like a local podiatrist who shall remain nameless, located over there by the BP on Highway 50 near Walgreens, won’t book an appointment with anyone who has any kind of governmental insurance. No Medicare, no community care with the Veterans Administration, and no Badger care either. Bring cash and lots of it.
Dentists have raised their fees out of sight, as have veterinarians. Trying to navigate through the literal gauntlet of trying to get quality medical care on any kind of timely basis has become a thing of the past. All doctors quickly become millionaires today, and they act exactly that way. The only way through the mess is to go at it with patience, detached emotion, and never-ending determination and pluck. It’s best to have an advocate, but everyone doesn’t know someone with the knowledge, guts, and aggressive, but laid-back, attack style it takes to really provide the much-needed help.
How the city is suborning the Lake Geneva Regional News.
The story of this subversion of the local media begins a year ago when, out of nowhere on earth, the Lake Geneva Regional News sent representatives to a tourism commission to apply for a five-figure grant to put on an eating entertainment called “Baconfest.” Serving bacon to the public for money somehow having been brought under the umbrella of ‘crusading reporting,’ or something like that.
Then came more fests, each one receiving the same instant approval for five-figure amounts, the money supposedly going to advertising the events, also instantly permitted for an occurrence at local Lake Geneva parks.
Now, the BID (Business Improvement District) comes forth, requesting two five-figure grants, the money to be paid to the advertising affiliate of the Lake Geneva Regional News. What with the normal money the city pays to its ‘official’ newspaper (for notices and legal stuff), and the entirety of grants and payments from tourism, will total will likely exceed a hundred grand this year.
Just what does that mean, in the world of the media?
It means that the Regional News will be very hard put to not get this kind of funding next year. It means that the Regional News, logically and rationally, will not want to print anything that might rock or sink that hundred-thousand-dollar boat. The city’s leadership becomes one of a bunch of cherubic angels, the mayor becomes a deity, and the city council becomes a group made up of sage and wise (Yodo-like) masters of the universe. That’s what has happened, time after time, in the world of the mass media that most of us have come to understand operates a lot more like this new city paid-for newspaper than as an independent voice of and for the people it is supposed to serve.
The Geneva Shore Report has never, and will never, either apply for a Lake Geneva tourism grant or accept one if offered. The GSR currently receives nothing from the City of Lake Geneva, and it will never receive one red cent, as long as the paper remains under current ownership and editorial control.
