Readers scoff at the rosy economic outlook and ponder the future of the University of Minnesota hospital

“I’m not sure what world you live in,” the caller said.

“You can write whatever you want, but that doesn’t make it true,” she added.

That was one of the nicer things to say from readers who called or wrote to complain that my August 15 column gave an overly rosy view of the country’s economy.

I suspected that saying “the economy is booming” would anger some readers. Most of those who have reached out to me or raised criticism in the online comments section have pointed out how much more they pay for gas or groceries these days.

I would like to say to you that I am aware that inflation has been taking a toll on all of us for more than two years. And as I wrote in the column, once prices go up, they’re unlikely to go down again.

While higher prices aren’t the only indicator of economic health, I wish I’d written that credit card balances have skyrocketed this year. That’s important because eventually, consumer spending will decline as people start digging into their debt.

But the overall picture remains surprising. Inflation has slowed significantly without the unemployment spike that many feared the country experienced in the 1980s.

Something else is happening now. As I wrote, I think demographic change is an underestimated influence, but there could be other things as well. Let’s keep trying to understand them.

The day in July, after Sanford Health scrapped its recent attempt to buy Fairview Health, ending fears by some about the future of the University of Minnesota’s healthcare system, I wrote that state and university officials continued to push hard for the development of a Strategy should push US hospitals.

In the column, I asked rhetorically, should the US system run the best and most important healthcare system in the state? One reader e-mailed that the Mayo Clinic in Rochester “is by far the best healthcare system in the state. Not even close.”

This is one of the reasons why the U system dilemma is challenging. In other states, including Wisconsin and Iowa, the universities are undoubtedly the go-to place when faced with the biggest and most challenging health issues.

Mayo removes a fraction of patients with difficult cases from every state and their health care systems. However, that proportion is larger in Minnesota, particularly due to Mayo’s hospital network, which includes several other cities and towns in the southern part of the state.

Healthcare is not, and I am not suggesting that it should be, a purely competitive market. But as officials work on direction for the U.S. health care system this fall, I think Minnesotans would benefit if Mayo faced more competitive pressures than it does.

Policymakers need to decide if this will come from the US. If they choose yes, Minnesotans must recognize that there will be a cost. The state’s investment in Destination Medical Center in Rochester, which began nearly a decade ago, is about $30 million per year over 20 years, or about $600 million.

U officials made it clear earlier this year that they would need $950 million in federal funds to buy back their hospitals and other teaching facilities from Fairview. And that would be just the beginning.

The harshest criticism I received from readers this summer came after I wrote on July 2 that I find it strange that Minnesota lawmakers legalized marijuana before allowing the sale of consumer aerial firecrackers.

Turns out my position in that column didn’t look too good two days later when Minneapolis teenagers stayed out all night, shooting firecrackers and even injuring cops. Some readers wrote to me after this incident and asked if I stand by what I wrote.

Yes. As much as I felt for the police, I still find it odd that marijuana is legalized and not firecrackers. By deciding to legalize either of the two, legislators are making an economic choice: they are reducing the product’s risks or harm in order to prioritize its market.

Speaking of sunshine, following my August 2 column on research at the university into a biological method to eliminate so-called Japanese beetles and their turf-destroying larvae, John Arthur von Hopkins alerted me to the existence of a tiny fly that eats the beetles.

The winning fly, or Istocheta aldrichi, lays eggs on the beetle’s thorax and a larva enters the beetle and begins to eat it from the inside. Arthur took a picture of a Japanese bug in his backyard a few years ago that had a cluster of tiny fly eggs on its thorax.

The US Entomologists, in an update to their online white paper on Japanese beetles last month, noted that the fly “has become more conspicuous in Minnesota over the past four years.”

Just a reminder that nature’s battlefield is more intense than the economic market.