By Bertha Cooper

I am pleased to report that I made a trip to California and came back without any travel difficulties.

I spent two days at wedding festivities in Ben Lomon, a few days in Santa Cruz and the remaining days in Temecula.

Since the government shut down the day I left, I thought air travel would suffer. Gratefully, I was wrong. I was prepared to spend hours jockeying flight schedules and felt lucky and relieved when the plane landed as scheduled first in Ontario, Canada and in Seattle.

I had no delays or other problems in leaving or returning home.

News reports told me the delays had started, and air travel might be far less serene for other travelers than what I experienced.

What worked well for me might not go as smoothly for other travelers as air traffic controllers began to participate in the shutdown.

I think about the anxiety and frustration I would be feeling and the possibility that I would miss the wedding if it had been held later.

I felt much compassion for the families traveling to weddings they do not want to miss.

I knew the ongoing government shutdown would impact travel if not directly in Sea-Tac, then by disruptions of incoming flights from other airports.

Catching up, catching on

Wedding, family and travel distracted me from following the politics of the shutdown so I had catching up to do.

I learned that somewhere on a table in a dark room lay a budget agreement to fund the government. The document rested next to a short-term funding measure to keep the government open.

So, what are the issues so serious to cause the government to come to a halt?

The two main issues I found in my review were Democrats wanted tax credits to make health insurance more affordable and a reversal of cuts to certain programs, Medicaid being one.

I gather that Democrats saw the bill as an opportunity to include these features and Republicans saw them as “add-ons,” and did not want them included in the budget bill. Republicans wanted to negotiate the health care proposal separately.

What I saw once again was the failure of our national leaders to deal with the complexity of healthcare in our country.

It will be very hard, complicated work, so much more than any stopgap measure.

I would support the Republicans to separately take on the difficulty of providing health care in our commercialized free market system from other unrelated bills if I thought they were serious about solving the problem of healthcare access for all.

I understand why the Democrats would try to achieve health care access through legislative gimmickry, but I would rather see a real effort to achieve healthcare access for all at a reasonable cost as a policy.

Wherever, whatever, and whenever, developing health care access at a reasonable cost is going to be a hard pull and require every part of our political and governmental systems to really want to get it accomplished for the American people for generations to come.

The hardest work will not work without motivation and a realistic vision.

But it is possible to either do a better job meshing commercial and government-supported healthcare or developing universal healthcare administered through a government entity.

I know it is possible as well as I know it will be difficult, complex and require vision and compromise.

The voting public needs to exert pressure to accomplish universal healthcare.

Healthcare provided in our country is as good as it gets — not that it could not get better — because regulatory bodies require constant vigilance of the professions and practices of the healthcare provided.

But not everyone has access to it, some due to lack of healthcare insurance, which could worsen for everyone on the peninsula if rural hospitals are not supported in upcoming bills.

At this moment rural hospitals are a political pawn. We cannot let Olympic Medical Center be sacrificed.

No one wants their primary source of medical and health care shut down for any reason, especially preventable reasons.

It is past time for our national leaders to get to work on solutions rather that shutting doors to healthcare services needed by the American people.

Nothing else makes sense.