This week, KPTZ’s Chris Bricker and co-host Siobhan Canty, President  & CEO of Jefferson Community Foundation, speak with Ellen Menshaw and Lori Bernstein, activists and organizers from Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action (PSARA). The passage of Medicare in 1965 was historic for covering the medical needs of seniors, but it also created conditions highly attractive for the providers of health care, who the government desperately wanted to accommodate. The arrangement resulted in the federal government surrendering the terms of the program and its costs to private health insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors, who would shape Medicare to maximize their profits at the expense of taxpayers – from 1965 until today. If the trajectory continues, Medicare faces an increasing likelihood of becoming insolvent in the next decade, and barring the passage of Universal Healthcare, privatization will be the result. Ellen and Lori provide us with background and more resources for education, a list of informative events coming up, and ways to get involved.

This summer Wilderbee Farm is hosting Poetry on the Salish Sea, monthly poetry readings in its Meadery Garden by sixteen poets from around the Olympic Peninsula and beyond. The series is free to the public, from May through October. The readings are sponsored by Wilderbee Farm, Imprint Book Store, the Port Townsend Arts Commission, and The Production Alliance. Kathryn Hunt is the series curator. She’s a writer and teacher, and makes her home on the Salish Coast.  She has three well received books of poetry and two chap books to her credit. Kathryn is joined by Alice Derry, author of six volumes of poetry, three chap books, and has thirty years of experience teaching at at Peninsula College where she curated the Foothills Poetry Series. She’s currently working with local tribal members on the Peninsula who are writing poetry.  Kathryn and Alice join us to tell us about poetry, the event, and its participants.