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The ADVANCE, July 21, 2021 /Page 5A
OPINIONS
“I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his repute for the freedom to think,
And when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t’other half for the freedom to speak.”
—James Russell Lowell
editorials
Just Do It!
Consider this
a public service an
nouncement pro
claiming the virtues
of getting colonos
copies. I know. I
know. They’re weird.
The prep is hellishly
disgusting. They involve a part of the body
we don’t usually talk about over lunch or
cocktails. No one likes to talk about colo
noscopies, but I want to change that. I want
people to not only talk about them, but go
and get them when their doctor recom
mends they do so.
The bottom line is this — colonosco
pies save lives. I believe they’ve saved mine.
So I’m willing to go out on a limb here and
talk openly about them in hopes I can con
vince a few of you to schedule one soon. I
want to remove the stigma associated with
colonoscopies.
A colonoscopy is a procedure doctors
use to probe around looking for abnormali
ties on the inside of a person’s colon — also
known as the large intestine — and rectum.
During the procedure, the doctor inserts a
long, flexible, lighted scope into the rectum,
then gently advances it all the way to the
end of the patient’s large intestine.
Think about it like this — your large in
testine is like a pipe, and the doctor is like a
plumber who uses a live-feed camera with a
bright light to look for problems associated
with the pipe so he or she can diagnose and
fix the problem.
It’s hard to examine the wall of the large
intestine if it is full of “stuff,” so the day be
fore, patients take part in something called
“prep.” In keeping with my plumber/pipe
analogy, prep is something akin to putting
Drano down a drain to clear the clogs in a
pipe. I’m not sure what’s in the prep solu
tion, but you drink a bunch of it, and before
you know it, swoosh, everything packed in
your large intestine comes shooting out. It’s
quite amazing.
And a word of caution for newbies
Please see Amber page 12A
From the Porch
By Amber Nagle
LETTER TO THE EDITOR...
The First
Goal of HCA
From August 2000 until May 2006,1
was the Chief Financial Officer at Mead
ows Regional Medical Center having been
recruited to assist in the financial and op
erational turnaround. During my tenure,
a number of quality physicians were re
cruited who were first and foremost dedi
cated to quality medicine. External con
trols including declining reimbursement
rates were factors in their relocating from
urban settings to Vidalia.
Now, Meadows has been sold to a for-
profit healthcare organization, Hospital
Corporation of America, a/k/a HCA for
which I also was retained as an interim
hospital CFO in the late 1990s.
In my opinion, HCA’s first and fore
most goal is protection of their publicly
stated stock values and stockholder re
turn and not a commitment to the medi
cal services of the communities wherein
they own-manage facilities. Again, in my
opinion, they may publicly promote qual
ity services, but that is not the underlying
first goal.
In a Chattanooga Times Free Press ar
ticle last week, which I have forwarded
to The Advance, the correspondent, Jan
Hancock of Kaiser Health News, writes
of new creative fees to enhance revenues.
The most significant of these is a “trauma
activation fee” of $17,000 at Chippenham
Hospital in Richmond, VA. In my opin
ion, your service area can expect more of
the same.
I have great compassion for the resi
dents of the Meadows medical service
area and their expectations, however and
in my opinion, the future will be much
different and much more expensive than
in the past.
The late John McNames, Chair of the
Meadows Alliance Board, had a vision for
Meadows’ future that did not include a
transaction such as the one that has taken
place. He was very, very committed to
Vidalia and the surrounding service area.
Granted, time changes many factors, but
had he survived, I do not believe control
would have been ceded to a for-profit or
ganization.
Ron Peterson, CPA
Chattanooga, TN
Battery Power
I'm out of juice.
It is a pity how ev
erything we have and
use depends upon
some measure of
electric power.
The easiest to see
is the cell phone,
which is powered by
battery. Beyond that,
just about everything else is powered by bat
teries.
That is nothing new. Can you recall
when the telephone always worked? Even
when the local power was out, the telephone
worked.
Even then the telephone system was run
on battery power.
Last year at the big box store, I watched
a customer search around a wide screen tele
vision for the “power” and other buttons
normally seen on the right side.
They weren't there. There is no way to
change the power, volume, channel except
via the remote.
If the remote gives out, you have to have
another on standby.
This is just backwards from when there
were no television remotes, and any change
required a walk to the television set.
At the rate we're going, the two remotes
required to run the television set at this
house will have short lives since they are
dropped every day. As of this writing, they
are held together by rubber bands to keep
the remotes together when they hit the floor
and to prevent escaping batteries.
I sat down and tried a make a list of
things around this house that do not run on
batteries. I got as far as a ball point pen.
The most fun I've had with low power
came from a tiny transmitter/receiver pow
ered by a 9 volt battery which used to be
called a transistor radio battery. The trans
mitter put out about a third of a watt of
power but worked just fine.
On a camping trip I used a small solar
charger to boost up the batteries on my mo
bile phone, and free current felt good.
The old crank type telephones used dry
cell batteries, as did early broadcast radio re
ceivers.
Batteries have been around for a very
long time. There is speculation that a pottery
jug found in Iraq was actually an early bat
tery, in fact it is called the “Baghdad Battery”
There were no electronics two thousand
years ago that needed power, so what was it
for?
Maybe electroplating one metal with a
thin layer of another more valuable metal.
Some experts suggested that ancients
might have electroplated silver objects with a
thin layer of gold.
I can believe that.
Crooks have been with us a long time
only now they are on television.
joenphillips@yahoo.com
By Joe Phillips
Dear Me
Vernon Jones talks about
running for governor
Strong
opinions begat
strong reactions.
I recently begat-
ted a strong
opinion about
Republican gu
bernatorial can
didate Vernon
Jones and he be-
gatted a strong
reaction right
back at me. Good for him. Many in
trepid public servants poked by my sti
letto do one of two things: They sulk or
ignore me, hoping I will be abducted by
space aliens and transported to some
distant hostile planet or to Detroit City,
whichever will be most unpleasant. (I’m
guessing Detroit City.)
It seems I remarked that at the
recent state Republican convention on
Jekyll Island, a number of delegates
booed the incumbent governor who got
a voting rights bill passed that Democrats
hate, guided us through an
unprecedented pandemic and presides
over a state budget surplus of nearly $3
billion. Not enough for the boo-birds.
They think he didn’t do all he could
have or should have done to ensure
Donald Trump’s reelection.
Instead, they cheered for Vernon
Jones, who is running against Gov. Brian
Kemp in the upcoming Republican
primary. I found that interesting, given
that - to quote an anonymous modest
but much-beloved columnist - Jones
carries more baggage than an airport
carousel. That is what begatted me a
phone call from the man. It seems he
had read that somewhere.
In case you happen not to be
familiar with Vernon Jones, he is a
former state representative (1993 to
2001 and 2017 to 2021) and was chief
executive officer of DeKalb County
from 2001 to 2009. Now, he has decided
to take a shot at becoming our 84th
governor.
He is also a newly-minted
Republican, having changed parties in
January of this year. “I’m a Black MAGA
man,” he told the conservative Breitbart
News recently, referring to Trump’s
Make America Great Again movement.
To date, he has not been formally
endorsed by The Man himself, but he
has received the endorsements of
Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani; Bernard
B. Kerik, former New York police
commissioner, pardoned by Donald
Trump after having served time for
felony tax and false statement charges;
the Atlanta Tea Party and Russ
Abernathy, former Henry County Chief
of Police.
As to switching parties, Jones
reminded me quickly that such folks as
Ronald Reagan, Sonny Perdue, Nathan
Deal and - yes - Donald Trump did just
that.
His platform is pure-red Republican:
“Refund police, not defund police;” ban
the teaching of Critical Race Theory in
Georgia public schools; pro-life and an
“A” rating from the National Rifle
Association while in the Legislature. He
thinks what differentiates himself from
Kemp or any other Republican is that he
can broaden the party’s appeal with
Blacks.
Jones says that Democrats take the
Black vote for granted. He believes many
By Dick Yarbrough
Blacks are more conservative than given
credit and thinks the Democratic Party
is “pandering” to Black voters. “The
Democratic Party does not want Black
people to leave their mental plantation,”
he says, “They don’t want to accept that
we are free people with free minds.”
Vernon Jones believes he is the only
Republican that can beat Stacey Abrams.
“I want to see Stacey Abrams try and
play the race card with me,” he says. He’s
got a point there.
Jones saves his harshest criticism for
the governor. “We lost two United States
Senate seats and we lost the presidential
election because of Brian Kemp. He is
directly responsible for that happening.
He was so afraid of Stacey Abrams
running against him that he caved in to
her,” referring to an agreement between
Abrams and Kemp prior to the last
election which changed signature
verifications and added drop boxes. “He
has no backbone. He doesn’t stand up to
Stacey Abrams.”
Jones is busy crisscrossing the state
and making his case as the Republican
gubernatorial candidate and recently
won a straw poll of Republicans in
Forsyth County.
As for the baggage to which I refer,
Jones has had what the Atlanta
Newspapers call a history of
“misconduct” regarding his treatment of
women. He denies all charges and says
he was never found guilty of any
improper conduct “with anyone, at any
time.”
Can Vernon Jones indeed defeat
Brian Kemp in the Republican primary
and the Democratic candidate who is
predicted to be Stacy Abrams in the
2022 general election? Logic would say
it is a steep uphill battle, but Jones thinks
he can win.
Remember that I’m the guy who
stated unequivocally some years back
that an obscure state senator from
Bonaire named Sonny Perdue could
never defeat a powerful sitting governor
named Roy Barnes. And how did that
turn out?
You can reach Dick Yarbrough at dick@
dickyarbrough.com; at P.O. Box 725373,
Atlanta, Georgia 31139 or on Facebook at
www.facebook.com/dickyarb.
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