Wednesday. Coffee’s black, the paper’s spread across the desk, and the first thing I learn is the harvest was good.
Strong yields across Cambria County this fall. A farmer named Nagle runs crops and beef out here, and he told a reporter that a combine that cost $70 to $80 an hour to run last year now runs $180 to $200. Diesel hit a record near $6.61 a gallon. The ground did its job. The farmer did his. The fuel bill ate the difference.
Turn the page.
About 85 Teamsters are out on the line at the Abarta Coca-Cola houses in Ebensburg and DuBois. Drivers, warehouse hands, merchandisers, technicians. Their contract ran out September 20 after talks that started in July. The union says the company wanted health costs up 8 percent a year for four years, which stacks to 32. The company says it offered raises, sick time and vacation flexibility. The union has filed it as an unfair labor practice strike.
Read it again. The fight on that loading dock is over health insurance. Hold that thought.
Next page. UPMC for Life is dropping its Medicare Advantage plans with drug coverage in Cambria, Clearfield and Cameron counties for 2027. One local insurance shop invited more than 3,600 of its clients to the 1st Summit Arena to sort it out. Nobody gets moved over automatically. You pick a new plan by December 7 or you find out in January what you lost.
Health insurance again. Seniors this time.
Next page. SNAP benefits went up an average of $18 on October 1. Nice. Since February, though, Pennsylvania families have to prove their rent and utility costs on paper, or the state figures their benefit without those deductions, which can cut it. More adults now have to document 80 hours a month of work, school or volunteering to keep food on the table past three months.
And in January, the same drill comes to Medicaid. Eighty hours a month, reported, verified, or the coverage goes.
Here’s where I put the coffee down.
The diesel price, I can’t pin on one man. A hospital network’s spreadsheet, I can’t pin on one man. A contract fight is between a company and the people who make it money. Some of what’s in this paper is weather and markets and corporate arithmetic.
The paperwork is different. The paperwork was written. Somebody sat down and typed it into H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill, and sent it to a vote. John Joyce voted yes. Our congressman is a physician. He sits on Energy and Commerce, the committee with its hands on Medicare and Medicaid. He knows what happens when you make a sick person or a tired worker prove themselves every few months to a phone tree. Arkansas ran this play in 2018. About 18,000 people lost coverage before a court shut it down.
Those people didn’t stop being poor. They stopped being counted. That’s the design. A program costs less when fewer folks can get through the door, and you don’t have to cut a single benefit on the record. You just make the door heavier.
The bill also hands Pennsylvania a bigger share of the cost of running SNAP, starting this fall. So Harrisburg gets the bill for Washington’s paperwork. Funny how that works.
Speaking of Harrisburg.
The minimum wage in this state is $7.25. It has been $7.25 since 2009. In March the state House passed House Bill 2189, raising it to $11 next year and $15 by 2029. That’s the third time the House has passed a raise. It’s been sitting in the state Senate since spring. A bill doesn’t sit seven months by accident. Somebody’s holding it.
Data centers. The House passed a stack of guardrail bills this year, for zoning, utilities, local say. The only thing that made it into law was a requirement that the big ones report their power and water use. Meanwhile the developers keep circling, and townships around here are writing their own ordinances with a pencil and a prayer, because the folks in the dome couldn’t agree to hand them a better tool.
Skill games. The state Supreme Court gave the legislature 120 days to write rules. The legislature let the clock run out. On October 14, roughly 70,000 machines became contraband overnight. Whatever you think of those machines, the money from them was keeping the lights on at a lot of Legion posts, fire halls and corner bars. Four months’ notice, and the grown-ups in Harrisburg couldn’t land the plane.
So here’s the sum of my morning paper.
The crops came in. The drivers showed up. The nurses and the custodians and the line cooks clocked in. The ground held up and the people held up. And the household still comes out short at the end of the month.
When the field is good and the crew is good and the harvest still loses money, you don’t yell at the corn. You look up the chain to whoever’s running the operation. That’s leadership. That’s where the hand on the lever lives.
Tuesday, November 3, you get to take the hand off the lever. The whole state House is on the ballot. Half the state Senate. And the man who voted to put Medicaid behind a time clock.
Go to the polls. Fire someone.
Twelve counties, every day, no appointment necessary. — Silas Corvin.
Sources (for the Facebook page)
- WJAC, “Cambria County commissioner warns of confusion as UPMC ends Medicare drug plans” (Oct. 2026)
- FOX8, “UPMC Drops Medicare For Some Local Counties” (Oct. 2026)
- WTAJ, “Dozens of ABARTA Coca-Cola workers strike across Cambria, Clearfield counties” (Oct. 20, 2026)
- FOX8, “Local Coca-Cola Distribution Centers Go On Strike” (Oct. 21, 2026)
- International Brotherhood of Teamsters, “Abarta Coca-Cola Teamsters Launch ULP Strike” (Oct. 23, 2026)
- The Center Square, “Farmers face ‘a lot of uncertainty’ as record diesel prices squeeze operations”
- PA DHS, “Increases to SNAP Benefit Amounts Following Annual Adjustment” (Oct. 2026)
- PA DHS, “Federal Changes to Benefits Programs” and HR1 stakeholder briefing (Aug. 26, 2026)
- PA House Democratic Caucus / WPXI / Lewistown Sentinel on HB 2189 passage, 104–95 (March 24, 2026)
- Spotlight PA, “Lawmakers up transparency for data centers, leave $2B tax exemption untouched” (July 2026)
- Pennsylvania State Police, Skill Games Resources (pa.gov/psp/skillgames); CDC Gaming Reports (Oct. 13, 2026)
