North Bay Report: Healthcare, Honeybees and the 'Matriarch' of Occidental

Affordable Healthcare

Political and legal challenges to the federal health care reform law may be getting more attention, but millions of Americans are already feeling the effects of the bill. More of them are here in California than anywhere else.

One of the most immediately popular aspects of theAffordable Care Act is the one that prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage for children based on a pre-existing condition. Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA, notes that this provision will be expanded in another two years.

Will the health care bill still be in effect then? Pollack sees all the current attacks on the measure as being about partisan politics, with little direct concern for the actual provisions of the law itself.

The political process that ultimately gave us the Affordable Care Act quickly turned away from early calls for a single-payer national health policy. Pollack says its unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, but there is a little space left in the law for individual states to attempt some experiments on their own.

Clikck here to see the Families USA state-by-state table of health care act benefits already in effect.

Listen to the full report from KRCB's news director, Bruce Robinson.

Honeybees

Leaked documents from government researchers cast doubts on the approval process for a potent pesticide that is now suspected as a major factor in the massive die-offs of honeybees across the country.

Farmer and agriculture writer/reporter Tom Philpott first made public the likely connection between the Bayer pesticide, the EPA's flawed approval process, and colony collapse disorder in an article he wrote for Grist early this year. Although it drew fevered attention from bee-keepers and the organic farming world, the problems he described failed to garner much attention from the mainstream media. One reason for that, he speculates, was a prior piece in the New York Times that seemed to close the door on pesticide-related causes of colony collapse.

Listen to the the full story from KRCB here.

"Matriarch" of Occidental Passes

Doris Murphy, who became a matriarch to the entire town of Occidental, passed away earlier this week, just a few days after her 101st birthday. The North Bay Report visited with her just before her centennial a year ago, which was marked by big birthday bash at the Occident Center for the Arts. Today, we repeat that report.

When Joe Murphy first brought Doris from San Francisco to Occidental, he showed her the 18 acres of redwood-sheathed ridgetop he had purchased nearby.  For more than two years thereafter, Doris recalls, their weekends were spent traveling to the remote property and constructing the solid green and white house with its large stone fireplace, where  she has lived fulltime since about 1960.

Doris was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, but hitch-hiked south to San Francisco after graduating from Reed College in 1938. There she met Joe Murphy, the influential leader of the Hod Carriers Local 38 union, and a high-profile organizer for the International Workers of the World. But Doris insists that meeting Joe did not inspire her to change her politics.

This picture of Doris and Joe Murphy adorns the cover of Love and Labor, the lively autobiography she wrote at the age of 96.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat published a lenghty obituary for Doris Murphy earlier this week, as well as a lively profile about her and her autobiography, when the book was published in 2007.

Listen to the full story here.

Editor's note: This story was reported and produced by KRCB, and written for Rohnert Park Patch with the permission of KRCB News Director Bruce Robinson.