A Time magazine cover story and a week of programming on NBC immediately followed the release of The Shriver Report. This week, California’s First Lady will use the findings to engage participants in her annual conference on women. If the continuing activity fails to “ignite a national conversation,” it won’t be for lack of planning and effort.

Health care reform, crucial to all of us, is especially important to the chronically ill, who need coverage of “maintenance medicine”—everyday care that can be guaranteed in a national system. The author is doing all she can, but she needs some help.

The media and the blog world have been discussing women’s “happiness” quotient since a headlined Huffington Post item offered cumulated poll data indicating they weren’t. The author, who writes about and speaks to women now in their fifties and sixties, reports that she hears quite a different story.