As you probably know, I work in an extremely competitive business. We fight to scoop each other, to steal viewers from one another, to win. But the truth is, if you've been around for a while and you've been through the fires with each other, you end up not only respecting your competition, you become friends with whom you share a special bond. One such friend is retiring soon and I wanted you to know what a superb journalist he has been.

Tonight, friends of the great Bob Long, Vice President and News Director at KNBC-TV will gather at Bob's favorite restaurant/watering hole (he has one in every city) to hoist a few in his honor, to lament the bean counters who are killing us, and to laugh. 

The late Hunter S. Thompson once famously described TV news like this: The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

Sadly, Thompson was right. But what Thompson didn't know, was there have always been good men and women who have stood up to the thieves and pimps in this business. Bob was in the vanguard of that group. Like any good Marine (which he was), Semper Fi--always faithful--is the code by which he lives. It is the code by which he practices journalism. It is the code by which he protects his people. It is the code by which he treats his friends.

I had the good fortune to work with Bob and to learn from Bob in the 1990s when I was a young reporter at KCAL-TV and Bob was an executive producer. At KCAL, he was a bow-tie wearing, gravel-voiced, old-school tough guy who didn't suffer fools. But if you cared to do it the right way, and you listened to what the old man had to say, he was going to back you up every time. He was and remains as loyal to his friends and to his grunts as any right Marine would. 

Turn on the news on virtually any channel in Los Angeles, and you'll find reporters and anchors who experienced the tutelage of Bob Long. When I talked to him on the phone this week, he described them as his "sleeper cells, ready to burst out of their holes at The Enlightenment" to take back the industry and restore the proper order. It was said in classic "Bob Long speak," an always amusing blend of history-lesson, irony, humor and poetry. A good turn of phrase, a well-written sentence--words--matter to Bob and he inspired a generation of TV news journalists to care about them as much as he does.

And now this larger than life character who we've worked with and respected and loved is leaving. Bob Long retires at the end of this month. The day after he walks out of the newsroom, he boards a plane bound for his next assignment, in Turkey. He has agreed to an appointment at a university in Istanbul to teach journalism ethics. To those students, I say, you couldn't have a better teacher. 

When some conservatives expressed outrage last week and some parents threatened (with trembling voices and tears in their eyes) to keep their children home to shield them from President Obama's  "Back to School" speech to America's students (today at 9 A.M. PDT), I wondered what could be in the speech that would make folks so upset. Now, you can read the speech yourself. The White House released the prepared text in advance of the address and I've pasted it over from the White House website so you make your own judgments.

As President Obama prepares to address the nation next week on health care reform, I thought I'd tell you about our health scare in Italy this summer that resulted in my wife using what's being called "the public option" in the U.S. health care reform debate. That's an option in which a government-sponsored health care insurance plan would compete with private insurance plans.

It happened while we were visiting our favorite seaside town (which the Italian side of Elena's family has been visiting or living in for some 50 years ) on the Italian Riviera. Sounds fancy but it isn't. Our favorite Italian town is a family beach resort that Americans and other foreign visitors tend to bypass on their way to the five-star hotels of the Amalfi Coast. Our digs are decidedly less opulent. But it's still heaven to us. 

We rent a modest one-bedroom apartment that's a stone's throw from a centuries-old church (Here's a picture of Elena and the boys in front of it before the health scare). 

The manager  of the apartment building, Maria, has come to know us by name and looks after us like family.

Each day begins with a visit to a focaccieria where they know me as the "Americano." There are so few of us who ever visit that I stand out like...an American. I try clumsily in what little Italian I know to order a slab of freshly baked focaccia for the day. It's always warm and crispy in the right spots, moist in the right spots--dripping with olive oil and sea salt. It's terrible for my diet, I know, but I'm in Italy, what am I gonna do? 

We spend much of the day on the beach swimming, reading...and eating again.

In Italy, one rents a spot on the beach. For about 20 bucks a day, you get an umbrella, a table and a couple of chairs. You get a family-run cafe right on the beach and clean showers and toilets and locker room facilities. After lunch, most of the Italians go back to their apartments for a rest. We usually stay on the beach and soak up the sun (to live up to the words of Noel Coward who famously said that "only mad men and Englishmen"...Mrs. Buckley is half-British..."go out in the midday sun"). 

At night, we take part in the passeggiatta--or evening stroll. We join hundreds of Italian families who simply window shop, walk and chat while enjoying a gelato.

It was after such a perfect day that Elena began to feel pain in her abdomen. It was a terrible pain that lasted through the night. At dawn, we decided to get her checked out. We assumed it was food poisoning. But after a few hours of tests in the local hospital, it was revealed that Elena wasn't suffering from food poisoning. It was her appendix. And it had to come out. Now.

She was wheeled in to surgery without delay and thankfully, wheeled out soon after healthy, but minus one appendix. We sneaked the boys in for this picture and to reassure them while she was recovering.

But after the surgery came the big question: how are we going to pay for this? We hadn't purchased travel insurance and I wasn't sure if my union health care coverage in the States would cover surgery in Italy. Nearly two months later, we still don't know how or if we'll have to pay for the surgery. So far, we haven't paid a dime and we haven't received a bill. It's probable we will eventually be billed, but it's also possible that they treated Elena as they would any Italian who needed emergency appendix surgery. That is, maybe they treated her for free.

Italians have universal health care for all its residents provided by the government. Is it any good? According to an oft-quoted World Health Organization (WHO) report from 2000, the Italian health care system was ranked second in the world in best overall health care. The United States? We're in 37th. The Italians spend 8.7% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health care compared to the 16% of GDP spent here in the U.S. Italians do have the option of using private health insurance and private physicians but they cannot opt out of contributing to the public health system.

How was the quality of the health care? I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV (old joke) but Elena has recovered nicely and she, believe it or not and considering the circumstances, actually enjoyed her hospital stay. She didn't have a private room. There wasn't a TV or a phone in the room. There wasn't a hospital concierge or a patient advocate or a piano playing by itself in the lobby (as we once experienced at a hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut). In fact in this Italian hospital, one is responsible for bringing their own towels and soap. The rooms are shared--in Elena's case--there were two other women in the room recovering from other ailments. In short, it wasn't plush. 

But it was as clean and as comfortable as any American hospital and Elena was lucky--the company was good. She and her fellow patient-roommates bonded and looked after each other as much as the nurses did. They dined together at a table for each meal. In this hospital, the patients don't receive their meals in bed on a tray. The women sat together at a table and dined on things like freshly made pasta served with turkey and fennel--served on place mats. I'm not joking. This was Italy, after all. The only thing missing from this hospital food was a bottle of Chianti. 

But I tell you about these simple differences--the way the food was delivered, the bringing of your own soap and towels, the lack of a TV in the room-to help make this point. Different isn't necessarily better or worse. It's just different. They do health care differently in Italy--it's the public option, Italian style, and for us on this occasion, it seemed to work.

But does every hospital stay and experience with the national health care  system end as well as ours did? Of course not. Was our experience with the "public option" indicative of how it would work here? No. The "public option" being considered in the U.S. is not like the European single-payer model in which government covers everyone. It would simply be an option for folks whose health insurance premiums are too expensive or who don't have health insurance coverage at all.

Still, is the "public option" worth exploring? My answer would begin with these questions: Does the current system in our country work? Are you satisfied with the way things are now? Is it right that some 46 million Americans don't have coverage? Other questions to consider: Is the public option the solution? Part of the solution? Something that may work elsewhere but wouldn't work here?

Maybe we just got lucky with our use of the "public option" in Italy. We're still waiting for our hospital bill and maybe we'll be shocked when it arrives. Maybe it'll prompt me to curse the Italian health care system. Or maybe, the "public option," while not perfect, actually works in some countries and could in some form work here.

What are your thoughts on the so-called "public option?"