In an interview with the Pittsburgh City Paper last week, Dick Dale made a seemingly hyperbolic statement: “I can’t stop touring because I will die.” It’s the sort of thing you hear often from an active man disregarding his suggested retirement age, but Dale followed it up with, “Physically and literally, I will die”: the 78-year-old is literally playing shows to stay alive.

Dale has extreme health problems—painfully damaged vertebrae, diabetes, renal failure, and rectal cancer that has left him with a colostomy bag. Dale has insurance, but it doesn’t cover everything, and little luxuries like changing a colostomy bag more frequently require him to work through the pain and discomfort. The hospital has advised him to stay thrifty, despite the risk of infection that has left him incredibly ill in the past:

“The hospital says change your patch once a week. No! If you don’t change that patch two times a day, the fecal matter eats through your flesh and causes the nerves to rot and they turn black, and the pain is so excruciating that you can’t let anything touch it. That has happened to me because I was following the orders of the hospital.

Once, his colostomy bag broke before a show, leaving his wife Donna (also very ill, with multiple sclerosis) to do the last-minute work of a nurse:
 

I had diarrhea coming all down my legs into my clothes and my pants, and my shirt. m supposed to be up on stage and I had to call [my wife] Lana and go into the bathroom.  Lana washed my clothes out in the sink, I wrung them out and put them back on and did an hour-and-a-half show soaking wet, and then I signed autographs for five-and-a-half hours after.

 
Dale is currently on a 25-city, three-month tour across this godforsaken country, so if you’re able, check out Dick’s tour schedule and try to catch a show. Not only will you be seeing an absolutely brilliant legend, you’ll be helping a man raise the $3,000 a month he requires to stay alive and live with a reasonable amount of dignity. God bless America, land of the greatest health care on earth… if you got the money.
 

 
via Pittsburgh City Paper

 
This didn’t help them much in the credibility stakes, now did it..?

It was odd flipping around the Internet there for a few minutes… Every other tweet coming in was contradicting the one before it. Matt Drudge got it right, but with its vast resources, CNN did not.

By the way, for “research purposes” I subscribe to a number of far-right newsletters and my inbox is being inundated with Tea party and GOP fundraising emails. Dozens have come in in the past 10 minutes.

 
A UCLA study finds a jump in 2009 to 8.2 million adults and children from 6.4 million in 2007 stemming largely from job cuts and the loss of employer-sponsored coverage amid the recession. 1 in 4 people do not have health insurance in the richest and most populous state in the country? This is simply astonishing news and yet there are still people who doubt the need for universal health care? It pains me that people really exist who are so mean and so cheap they’d deny their fellow man a life free from worries that they’ll go bankrupt or become homeless as they go through chemo. It’s sick. It could be them next time! Do these idiots not realize this?

PUBLIC OPTION NOW!

From the front page of today’s Los Angeles TImes:

People who were uninsured for part or all of 2009 accounted for 24.3% of California’s population under age 65—a dramatic increase from 2007 driven largely by Californians who lost employer-sponsored health insurance, particularly over the last year.

Among those over age 18, nearly 1 in 3 had no insurance for all or part of 2009, the UCLA researchers found. The ranks of uninsured children also grew.