Northwest Bank, Warren, PA

Northwest Bank Inc, (NWBI) headquartered here in Warren and where my fiancee Beth works as an auditor, was voted best bank in customer satisfaction by the JD Powers polling company for the Mid Atlantic region...no small accomplishment, and attributable to both the friendly, small town attitude of the employees and a common sense, "old fashioned" style whereby profits are substantiated by actual money and physical assets. What a concept, huh? Anyway, in addition to last years recognition by Forbes as a top institution, this should bode well for the companies future plans. They held a small celebration in town this morning, with representatives from the 170 branches- Warren to Maryland to Florida-taking part.

Healthcare

While walking today I wondered aloud whether it is a fair trade to exchange a healthy gene pool in the name of compassion, which essentially is what our modern health care system does. I do not advocate eugenics, rather am raising the philosophical question, because keeping woefully sick people alive to reproduce instead of dying of 'natural' causes is inevitably preserving so-called defective genes that otherwise might be evolved away. Many of health care's highest cost dollars go to sustaining people through expensive medicines and procedures, and many of the rest of the dollars go to keeping elderly people alive for a few more years. Working in this medical office and talking to nurses and doctors confirms this. The alternative would be to do nothing or divert those dollars to younger, healthier people-or animals or other purposes- but that is both politically and some would say morally unacceptable. I purposely will not offer my organs after death because of these questions, and my firm belief that death is not the enemy as modern medicine imagines. Much of our convoluted system has arisen from noble, compassionate intentions, but I personally feel that diverting money to sickly American adults rather than to the children suffering worldwide is not the morally responsible thing to do. Perhaps compassion in any form and place is all that matters however, regardless of where or to whom it is directed.