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Click on the links below to locate a specific column. Return to Bob's current column You may also simply scroll down to browse through all the columns. September 7, 2008 Wounded veterans need every nickel of our support August 3, 2008 For many seniors, it's the market system in health care that's not rational June 29,2008 Traveling the rails: Too bad it's not the way it used to be May 25,2008 Illegal immigrants touch lives in ways both known and unknown April 20,2008 Don't mess with Social Security; it's not in dire straits March 16,2008 Road less traveled generally not an option for most of us February 10,2008 Take another look at "the Republic for which it stands" January 6,2008 The trap of Medicare Part D for older folks December 2, 2007 Making an argument against capital punishment October 28, 2007 Boomers have their own ideas about aging September 23, 2007 Labor and Labor Day no longer mean what they once did August 19, 2007 Military medical advances are testing our claim as a compassionate nation July 15, 2007 There are no easy answers to immigration dilemma June 10, 2007 Michigan's vision of future compares poorly to that of Arizona May 6, 2007 Boomers need to kick their killer habits April 1, 2007 Let's not forget the soldiers who come home alove - but wounded February 25, 2007 The nation needs to invest in its young people January 21, 2007 Like it or not, picking drug plan is new annual tradition December 17, 2006 Caring for needy is common thread in all religions November 12, 2006 Health care system needs government involvement October 8, 2006 Driving forces of bullying haven't changed much over the years September 3, 2006 On Labor Day, the average worker doesn't have much to celebrate July 30, 2006 America has outgrown the glory days of smoking June 25, 2006 United States needs to do more than just talk about family values May 21, 2006 Nation needs to prepare better for aging baby boomers April 16, 2006 Another generation must learn to save Great American Experiment March 12, 2006 It's harder for men after their spouses die February 5, 2006 Benefit-cut movement bodes ill for older generations
Bob's prior column's from July 2000 - December 2005 Return to top of page September 7, 2008 Wounded veterans need every nickel of our support
As a youngster growing up in Muskegon, I was a big Joe Louis fan. Black men were not allowed to play most professional sports, so the Brown Bomber was one black athlete man that white kids could admire. And it didn’t hurt that I was born in Detroit.
Boxing was big back then. I followed the exploits of Kenny Lane, a Muskegon native, and Chuck Davey, an MSU alumni and Olympic fighter. Some of us would occasionally go to the Catholic Youth Organization gym and watch the Golden Glove contenders work out or take in a match or two.
I didn’t box much myself. I tried, but a couple pops on my beezer convinced me I should seek out sports that required more finesse than endurance and a high tolerance for pain. But I was a fan.
What was somewhat disquieting to me then was the presence at the gym of an older fighter (he was probably in his early forties) who had a cauliflower ear and was a bit punch drunk. The coaches treated him with respect and he was said to have been a smart, up and coming boxer who fell a little short. I attributed his problems to not keeping his guard up.
My enthusiasm for boxing eventually wore off. I finally concluded that for two men with no gripes against each other and in peak physical condition to stand toe to toe and try to scatter each other’s mental marbles was insanely brutal. I confess that, even after my interest in boxing had waned, I was a fan of Mohammad Ali, so it was doubly disturbing when he became a victim of the activity for which he was so highly admired. It reminded me of that old fighter at the CYO gym. My disenchantment was complete.
We’ve learned much about head injuries since then. While the skull can take much abuse, the intricate wiring of the brain and the hearing mechanism are much more fragile than we once thought. We now know that repeated seemingly minor trauma, such as concussions or loud noises, and trauma that can’t be immediately discerned can eventually have a major impact on thinking and hearing, even years after the initial shock.
And we are going to learn much more about head injuries. Young men and women in our military have been subjected to nightmares of explosions and small arms fire, which can exact a considerable toll. Most in combat are issued ear plugs, but those plugs can limit the ability to detect sources of hostile fire, so some don’t wear them. It takes just a few minutes of fire from an automatic weapon to have an impact – a permanent impact – on someone’s hearing.
The Department of Veterans Affairs reports that 70,000 people returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are afflicted with tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears, usually associated with hearing loss. There is no current cure for tinnitus.
Those who were victims of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) face even more dire circumstances. A friend and former colleague of mine was recently appointed by Governor Granholm to alert the medical community about the high incidence of returning veterans with Traumatic Brain Syndrome. Manfred told me that it frequently takes two to three years for the full impact of brain trauma to become apparent. And the Veterans Administration, with its limited funding, has had a tendency to attribute problems to post-combat events, thus denying needy veterans the eligibility for subsidized care.
And a recent article in USA Today revealed that men and women with combat head and neck injuries without very obvious disability are frequently sent back to battle, thus exacerbating injuries that may not become manifest for months or years.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has estimated that over 50,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are permanently disabled. Many will require help that costing millions of dollars each over a lifetime. We have asked them to do a nasty job, often without sufficient protection, and they have complied with honor and dignity. We owe them every nickel they need for their proper support and care.
Return to top of page August 3, 2008 For many seniors, it's the market system in health care that's not rational
Recently Ruth and I were celebrating the high school graduation of a good neighbor and had gravitated toward a cluster of the older generation at the event. As often happens when members of the Medicare set get together, the conversation quickly deteriorated into an organ recital. Each of us, in turn, regaled the others with stories of surgery, medications, consultations, tests, and loss of function, to be met with appropriate expressions of sympathy, clucking of tongues, smiles, and guffaws.
It occurred to me that if one were searching for some insightful observations on health care in the United States, one would be wise to visit a few groups of these Medicare veterans.
We are constantly reminded that here in the United States that our health care system is a part of our private free market system. This older generation has some trouble with that. They like to see their doctors as trusted professionals. That is, highly educated people who put the welfare of their patients above profits. They still see medical practitioners as doctors, rather than “providers,” and themselves as patients, rather than “consumers.”
And the Medicare veterans don’t like being blamed for the increases in health care costs in the U.S. Sure, there are lots more older folks now who use more services, but other countries have a higher percentage of older citizens who have better coverage than we do here and don’t spend close to what our nation does.
They are told that they are reckless consumers who “overuse” medical services. Well, here’s that trust in the professionals again. They feel their doctors are in the best positions to judge how patients can best be treated, given the need, cost, and quality of treatment. With their lives and functions on the line, patients consult with their doctors on the kinds of care available, but seldom discuss money with them.
When one test can give 80% assurance of an accurate diagnosis, and another test that costs maybe three times as much can give a 98% assurance, a “rational consumer” with a life in the balance opts for the safest avenue, in spite of what the free marketers might say about value and prudent shopping.
They are told that health care costs rise very disproportionately in the last year of life. How does one skip the last year of life? Of course, people with diabetes or cancer or heart disease may very well cost the system more in that last year, and people who admitted to an emergency room but don’t make it may spend quite a bit of money that last year, but…health circumstances are inevitably unpredictable and the chances for extended life with reasonable quality is still there. So, do we just forgo those expenditures? Most of them don’t think so.
And they are told that they have little understanding of the costs of health care. Not really. Medicare participants routinely receive Explanations of Benefits, which show them how much is regularly charged for procedures done, how much Medicare paid, and how much they might owe. It’s pretty clear to them that Medicare pays less than the standard charges and what private insurance pays.
When they are told that if Americans had vouchers or tax credits to negotiate health care costs individually, costs would go down, they find that not very credible. If General Motors and Whirlpool and Wal-Mart can’t drive costs down, what chance would Gus and Mildred on their own have?
They know too that the problem with the Medicare Part D drug coverage is that the administration saw to it that the federal government was prohibited from negotiating drug costs with the pharmaceutical industry, and the bill has provided a windfall for the drug and insurance companies, not for the Medicare participants. They know that citizens in every other industrialized nation pay far less for drugs than in the U.S. They feel a bit sold out on drug coverage.
They have a fundamental trust in traditional Medicare, a trust that is not extended to the private insurance market. They speak knowledgeably about rising costs of supplemental insurance. Many will be hit hard when Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan raises their premiums by 15% soon. They see it all as inevitable.
The next generation may take to the private competitive health care system better. But for the current Medicare participants, it’s not a matter of patients not being rational consumers. It’s the market system in health care that is not rational.
Return to top of page June 29,2008 Traveling the rails: Too bad it's not the way it used to be
Back in the '40s, when I was growing up in Muskegon, there were two ways that my family used to visit Grandma and Grandpa in Detroit. The first was the family car, which my dad preferred. He would pile Mom, my sister and me in our old Chevy, and then embark on a grueling, and sometimes harrowing, six-hour trip on two-lane U.S. 16, with one stop around halfway. We all dreaded it.
Occasionally, we would use the second way - the train. With gas and tire rationing for the war effort, it made sense to stay off the highways if we could. I look back on those trips with fond memories. Our neighbor would drive us down to the railroad station, about five miles from our home. We would carry lunches Mom packed, and would settle down in comfortable seats stretch our legs when we felt like it and enjoy the scenery. Rest rooms and drinking water were immediately accessible.
When Ruth and I make our annual trek to Arizona to escape winter for a while, I'm reminded of those pleasant journeys when we catch a glimpse of an Amtrak passenger train gliding through a mountain pass or across the scenic desert. We catch that same nostalgia when we take an occasional Amtrak trip from St, Joe to Chicago - from downtown here to Union Station, with no highway anxiety.
But rail travel is a pale imitation of what is once was. There is no rail passenger from Muskegon to Detroit today. There's no Amtrak into Phoenix or several of the larger American cities once served by passenger trains.
Freight trains are a somewhat different story. When we head west in December, we circle around southern Lake Michigan and struggle with the traffic on I-94, with its two right lanes packed with semis bumper to bumper, and with slush and ice often making things hazardous. When we turn on to I-80 headed for Iowa, the semi traffic drops off considerable. When we reach Iowa, about 60 percent fewer trucks are rolling along with us.
About a half mile north of the highway, one of the reasons becomes apparent. Long freight trains – four engines, with 80 or more cars – go by regularly, hauling goods that could be cluttering up the highways. Once, with Ruth and I stopped overnight in Gallup, N.M., we stayed on the wrong side of old Route 66, the side near the freight yards. We became acutely aware of the enormous amount of rail freight traffic west of the Mississippi. Every 10 to 20 minutes all night long, freight trains loaded with boxes, many labeled China Shipping, Yang Ming, Hanjin and Hyundai, moved materials from the ports on the West Coast to the Midwest and East.. It was impressive.
With the skyrocketing price of fuel, it is a shame we don’t – or can’t – use the rails more extensively. Railrunner, on the Internet, states that semis can move 123 ton miles on a gallon of fuel, but railroads can move more than 400 ton miles on a gallon, more than three times more efficiently. Unfortunately, U.S. rail tends to be confined to long hauls, since the short lines have been largely abandoned and rail beds torn up. That limits the tail options.
And passenger rail, too, is neglected. With air travel becoming more and more expensive and less and less convenient and comfortable, and with highway travel becoming more costly and hectic, it’s a shame that train travel is no longer an option for most of us. Funding for Amtrak is a political football in Washington each year, never mind that taxpayers pay for the building and maintenance of roads and bridges for the infrastructures of our nation’s airports.
In other industrialized countries, the use of rails is considered a critical part of transportation systems, complete with networks of bullet trains, with the public’s use of rail taking the sting out of the high cost of fuel.
In the United States, we have, unfortunately, lost the opportunity to make railroads an integral part of our transportation system. It’s too bad. It’s such an efficient way to more goods – and such a civilized way to travel.
Return to top of page May 25,2008 Illegal immigrants touch lives in ways both known and unknown
Immigration will prove to be a national concern in the upcoming election, with almost every state feeling its impact. But down in Arizona, the national concern about immigration is at a fever pitch, and the trends for the rest of the nation are clear.
Of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the nation, more than 500,000 are now in Arizona. The Federal government is in the painfully slow process of putting up a virtual fence in parts of the southern border of the state, and vigilante groups patrol the desert down there constantly to apprehend Latinos coming north.
But not everyone is supportive of that. The state and local chambers of commerce decry the crackdown on the illegal immigrants. While the state still has a strong defense industry manufacturing base and a burgeoning biotech industry, services – tourism, health care, and hospitality – along with construction and agriculture, provide much of the employment.
Business has been able to capitalize on the cheap labor that comes north from Mexico. It is estimated that over 12% of the state’s economy is provided by illegal immigrants.
Elected officials and law enforcement officers are divided and most have strong opinions. “Sheriff Joe” Arpiao, of Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state, has built a reputation for toughness by making sweeps of neighborhoods and towns with high concentrations of Latinos, triggering strong reactions for key mayors and chiefs of police.
Chiefs of police, while agreeing that finding illegals for deportation is important, contend that racial targeting puts a damper on the reporting of crime, and it is difficult to persuade witnesses and victims to come forward if they fear that they or loved ones or neighbors will be deported. Sheriff Joe and the mayor of Phoenix have threatened formal investigations of each other over the issue.
There is a big humanitarian dimension to the problem. Latinos who have come into the state illegally often marry and have children in the U.S. The children will assimilate with the Anglo culture and go to school here. But if their parents are deported, the children are caught between leaving everything they have ever known and losing their parents. Children coming to Arizona illegally with their parents can be deported too. This past year a well-liked, accomplished, high school valedictorian, who had not been to Mexico since she was months old and didn’t speak Spanish, was deported.
Also, immigrants who entered the U.S. legally on student or work visas invariably apply for citizenship shortly after they arrive. But the process for permanent status is now taking up to ten years. So legal immigrants wake up some morning and find themselves illegal. And if they push the bureaucracy to move faster, they may be simply deported. So they quietly move into society’s shadows.
And there is a community dimension. State law requires that employers hiring illegal immigrants will be fined for the first violation and the license to do business will be pulled for the second violation. Now it is estimated that thousands of nurses and health care technicians -- Filipinos, Koreans, and other Asian-Pacific immigrants, as well as Latinos -- have become illegal immigrants. And, some have asked, if those people are caught up in a sweep, will hospitals, clinics, doctors' offices, nursing homes, and retirement homes be shut down?
The snowbirds in Arizona, along with permanent resident retirees, are pretty confused about it all. Two or three years ago, most adopted a conservative stance, the fundamental “the law is the law” approach. “Let’s send them all home.”
But retirees have discovered that their day-to-day lives, along with their pocket books, have been touched by illegal immigrants more than they realized. In the conversations I have heard, attitudes have softened considerably. “Was Rosa, that nice waitress at Village Inn, an illegal?” “Why don’t the Latino guys who trimmed our shrubs for only $50 last year come around anymore?” “Will the waits at the emergency room be longer than the ten hours we had to wait last year if the Latinos have to leave?”
Along with the retirees, even the Arizona legislature has softened its perspective. With the economy in Arizona tanking and the residential construction industry at a standstill, the stream of illegal immigrants from Mexico is down to a trickle. And after two years of insisting on a crackdown, a majority of the legislators have quietly introduced legislation providing for a guest worker program. It is touted as a measure to push Congress to do something. But it appears that Arizona, with its reputation as a cheap wage state, is realizing how those wages were made so cheap.
Return to top of page April 20,2008 Don't mess with Social Security; it's not in dire straits
The annual report of the Social Security Trustees was released to the press a couple weeks ago. It was similar to last year’s report, with the same concerns that the nation was facing “enormous challenges” with the long term funding of Social Security and Medicare.
Well, Medicare, yes. But not so much with Social Security. A close reading of the report shows that circumstances are a little better than last year, and even the long range problems are more easily solved than many, many other systemic problems facing our country.
Of course, the usual ideological suspects reacted to the report with predictable alarm. The Heritage Foundation found in the report “an urgent need for reform.” The Baltimore Sun called it a “train wreck.” The Cato Institute said we “can’t afford to delay” replacing the current system with a program of “private accounts.”
The public reaction, on the other hand, was tepid. People in retirement or thinking about retirement, who have watched their private pensions sink to less than 1999 levels, are understandably wary about those individual private accounts as the base of their retirement income.
The drumbeat of crisis in Social Security has, however, had its impact in eroding public confidence. Many Boomer friends of mine are convinced that Social Security will not be there when they reach retirement age. But the Trustees’ report discounts that. When the Commission appointed by President Reagan met in 1982 to address the impending insolvency of Social Security, they were looking at the prospect of the Boomers reaching retirement without enough payroll taxes to cover Social Security. So, they reformed the system and created a Trust Fund that would, for the first time, stockpile some payroll taxes to address the demands of the Boomers when their population bulge reached retirement age.
The first of the Boomers would begin retiring in 2001. In about 2017, the stockpile will reach its zenith, and then more money will begin to be taken out than would be going in. In 2045, the trailing edge of the Boomers will be in their 90s, and the Boomer stockpile will be largely exhausted. Actually, the recent report, using the most conservative estimates of economic growth, estimates the stockpile will be gone in 2041. The 1982 Commission’s actions will have worked pretty much as planned.
The recent Trustees report, however, states that after 2041, given those conservative estimates of economic growth, that Social Security will be able to pay only 78% of benefits. That’s up from the 74% cited in last year’s report, because of a new way of looking at immigration. However, with modest reforms, such as a 1.8% increase in payroll taxes, or raising the ceiling on wages taxed, or taxing unearned income, or cutting benefits a bit, or using a combination, the solvency of Social Security can be assured for 75 years and more indefinitely.
But, say the ideologues, workers with individual private accounts would do so much better in the marketplace than workers in a system where the accounts are handled collectively. Well, not really. There is a good object lesson in the case of Nebraska’s public workers retirement system. About 40 years ago, Nebraska’s state and county employees were offered the option of receiving the money that the individual would have gone into the traditional defined benefit system and managing it in the market individually. You guessed it. In a study conducted after 35 years, the traditional system beat the defined contribution system in returns at retirement by over 50%. The professionals, who work at the system full time, just outclass those who don’t have 40 hours a week for market research.
Ordinary folks don’t like, … and can’t afford… risking the primary economic bases of their retirement. In Florida, California, Ohio, and Montana in the past eight years, public employees have been offered the opportunity to manage their own individual retirement accounts. In every case, fewer than 7% have opted to do so.
Social Security investment in U.S. Treasury securities results in 5.5% returns annually. Private accounts proponents say the private market returns over 7% annually. But Anna Sullivan, former Director of the Nebraska Public Employees Retirement System, points out that investment management fees, record-keeping fees, and educational programs for private defined contribution accounts cost about twice as much as defined benefit programs, which, including Social Security, have no individual financial risk.
There is a larger budget problem, however. The Administration and Congress borrowed from the Social Security stockpile to fund a substantial tax cut for the wealthy and to fund the Iraq war and to send our national debt soaring. After 2017, the bill will start to become due. And Congress, exercising the “full faith and credit of the United States government,” will, “upon demand,” repay the Social Security Trust Fund, as it will repay many individual American investors, China, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and others who have invested in the U.S. Treasury. But that’s a problem for Congress, not Social Security.
Return to top of page March 16,2008 Road less traveled generally not an option for most of us
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
From “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost
It has been confirmed time and again that in our later years we have regrets, but mostly regrets for what we didn’t do rather than for what we did.
There are, of course, regrets for those financial daydreams … not buying Microsoft stock at $10 a share, or not buying that little cottage with Lake Michigan frontage 50 years ago. But who knew? They were hardly on our radars years ago.
Some of the most painful regrets relate to personal relationships. Not calling that childhood friend to talk about old times, not taking a close friend to dinner, not forgiving an old enemy, forgetting to do a simple kindness for someone needing a little support – those little things when compassion and decency are overcome by daily routines or self-absorption. Those regrets highlight how we fall short of our self-images.
And there are those regrets involving personal opportunities – not introducing yourself to the person you had a crush on in high school, not taking that special vacation you could have, not buying that nice little sailboat or fishing boat you had your eye on, even not learning another modern language or not trying that off-beat recipe, or not trying gliding, or ballooning or horseback riding. Those regrets usually have few seriously negative consequences, but just remind us that we have only one time around on this planet.
But the ones that can nag most are the regrets over life-altering decisions, such as those relating to career changes. “Would I have been better off if I had dumped my job and tried something new, or tried a new line of work, or moved to another part of the country to see what was possible there?” We tend to see in retrospect the road less traveled as more attractive.
On a recent Sunday Morning show, Herbie Hancock, the jazz great, told about being fired by Miles Davis. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. And indeed, he went on to be a celebrated artist in his own right. So for some it can be a good thing. But what are the odds? Americans who have been laid off in the past ten years have found that their subsequent jobs paid on average 17% less than the jobs they lost. Most were not happy with the change.
And as a society we tend to encourage people to take risks, with the presumption that things generally turn out for the better. Entrepreneurship is made pretty attractive in this country. Yet, the great majority of American enterprises fail within five years. Small businesses create more jobs, but they also lose more jobs.
In America, we tend to divide the world into those who pursue freedom and those who opt for security, with the freedom-loving folks as our moral leaders. Yet a compelling case can be made that true freedom is based in security. Television commercials for financial firms tell us that independence in later years comes only through financial security. Tax breaks for investors are based on the notion that the wealthy can afford to invest without any serious risk to their lifestyles.
Political dictators, tyrannical bosses, and playground bullies all know that denying security is the best weapon to curb freedom and exercise control. In this country the Bill of Rights, enforceable contracts, and neighborhood watch programs all exist to secure individual freedom. With regard to financial independence, health care, and education for all our citizens, we have a ways to go. One can only imagine how creative we could be if those fundamental needs were guaranteed.
It is no accident that many of the entrepreneurs we admire – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Dell, for example -- started out in garages or dorm rooms. Young single people with few obligations toward others and willing to become wedded to a work obsession feel pretty secure, with the options of going back home if things don’t work out. But once a person is married with children, the family’s health care, kids’ education, food on the table, even the time to spend with the family can’t be up for grabs. To risk their well-being for an iffy dream is to be imprudent, irresponsible. There goes the freedom to aim for the gold ring.
Each of us addresses those life-altering decisions with differing perspectives. Some have more substantial financial resources, some have more saleable skills, some have fewer responsibilities, some are more willing to put obligations at risk, some are more confident by nature. It is a question of the relative sense of security. Some may look back in regret that they didn’t make that jump, regardless of their responsibilities as they saw them. They may be a bit too tough on themselves.
As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Sometimes there is a very good reason why that road is less traveled.”
Return to top of page February 10,2008 Take another look at "the Republic for which it stands"
When Ruth and I pulled up next to that truck hauling scrap metal in the Colorado rest stop, we noticed immediately the bath towel-sized rag hanging from rope attached to the back of the cab. We had to get very close to recognize it as an American flag, since the mud and grunge had all but obscured the stars and the stripes. It had been there quite a while too, since the trailing edge was pretty ragged.
I wondered aloud to Ruth if the driver had been instructed as a Boy Scout how to show respect for the flag -- how to keep it pristine, when and how to display it, how to fold it, and how to properly dispose of it. I suspected not.
I also wondered to myself if he knew what the flag represented. I remember our Scout Master parsing the pledge to the flag and telling us that we also pledge allegiance to "the Republic for which it (the flag) stands.” That was, of course, our form of government. We enjoy living in a democratic republic, which is at the center of our patriotism.
Our generation at that time took pride in our government. We learned in civics class about how our government works, how it is grounded in the Constitution, and how we could express our patriotism. We knew enough about the Great Depression, when the private market crumbled and government came to our rescue with the PWA, the CCC, the TVA, Social Security, etc. And we knew how our nation – with 100% government issued (GI) force and resources – a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” defeated fascism in World War II. Later, our government passed Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights legislation, the Older Americans Act, and Head Start. It wasn’t easy, but that’s what democracy was all about.
But then something happened. It probably had something to do with the Cold War. More and more people began to sour on “the Republic for which it stands.” The Cold War helped us interpret the world in stark black and white. The Communists were 100% the force of pure government; so we should be the force of pure free markets. The perspective soon bled over into our domestic politics. Government, by its very nature, came to be perceived as incompetent at best, downright evil at worst.
For those of us who grew up believing in “the Republic for which it stands,” for anyone to equate “we, the people” with a repressive, totalitarian, Stalinist state was unbelievable. But the effort to erode the public confidence in the government was enormously effective. Even President Reagan, the leader of our democratic republic, said, "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”
Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration, tells about her stumping to help pass the Clinton Health Care initiative and hearing older Americans plead with her, "Please, don’t let the government get involved with my Medicare. It is a Godsend.” Many wouldn’t believe her when she told them that the federal government managed it.
Certainly, some attacks on federal bureaucracies are warranted. FEMA’s efforts following Katrina come to mind. But FEMA’s efforts following the California earthquake in 1994 are considered spectacular by all observers except the most virulent anti-government pundits. Bureaucratic failures can usually be attributed to a lack of commitment, training, or resources.
And the private sector is not immune. I have been more satisfied with telephone service with the Social Security Administration than with telephone technical assistance from the manufacturer of my computer, for example.
The private sector and the public sector play complementary roles in our society. The private market provides the means by which we pursue our individual aspirations, creating, buying, and selling goods in the creation of and quest for individual wealth. The public sector is the means by which we “promote the general welfare,” as the Constitution says it. It is the democratic means by which we shape our national vision, sacrifice together for the common good, and formulate the rights and benefits we all should have as citizens of a free society. There will always be tension between the two. But to discredit totally one or the other is a recipe for disaster.
And with globalization the tension is growing stronger. Fifty years ago, it was in the nation’s best interests for materials and products to flow across our borders to foreign markets, as long as capital and jobs stayed here. But today, jobs and money as well as goods, go to other nations. While many in our nation would be appalled at our federal government’s purchase of companies in the U.S. (socialism, they would cry), we are watching China, a Communist state, buy substantial stock in our financial institutions.
And what would Thomas Jefferson think of our strongest anti-public sector media, such as the Washington Times, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal, being foreign-owned?
Our “Republic for which it stands” is under some siege, at a time more and more is asked of it. While many flag-wavers cry that government should stay out of the private market. But when the private sector fails, such as savings and loan fiasco, the tech bubble, the Enron and Tyco scandals, and now the mortgage crisis, we collectively turn to “the Republic for which it stands” to bail us out.
We live when patriotism seems rampant. Flags are everywhere – on clothing, at events with no connection with national purpose or interest, in advertisements. What do they stand for? I suspect it has less to do with content than with depth of feeling. It might be worth looking back again at “the Republic for which it stands.” The state of our national union may depend on it.
Return to top of page January 6,2008 The trap of Medicare Part D for older folks
It has become another end-of-year event for many retirees. Amid the shopping for gifts for grandkids, the decorating, and the preparing for happy family dinners, many older Americans now undertake the annual review of Medicare drug coverage and the effort to avoid as much as possible the upward spiralling costs of drug insurance.
Passage of Part D was supposed to be a magnanimous gesture on the part of the administration and Congress to relieve the pressure of health care on us old folks. As lucky as we are to have Medicare, older Americans today still pay a larger percentage of health care bills out of pocket than they did before Medicare.
But we are discovering that we are not necessarily the primary beneficiaries of Medicare’s Part D. Policymakers have tried to convince us that the introduction of competition will provide a windfall for us. But what happened was that a brand new network of providers – complete with claim agents, marketing armies, and administrators – was created and laid on top of the existing system. Over forty new private organizations just in Michigan alone spend money competing for Medicare dollars … and for the premiums and copays of Michigan’s elders. That can be expensive.
The beauty of the system, we were told, was in the choices made available to us. We wouldn’t want a “one size fits all” system, would we? Well, I would. My choice would be a comprehensive system that covers medication for every ailment I might encounter. But see, you can’t have differences that way. So, how are differences introduced? The different plans have formularies. Those are lists of drugs that the different plans will cover. And each Medicare participant must decide which one plan has the formulary that covers his or her needs the best at the most economical price.
It can be a risky business. What if a participant comes down with an illness that requires a drug not in the participant’s formulary? Well, he should have thought about that earlier. You can apply to make one jump each year to another plan, but there are no guarantees.
Now, the Bush administration wants very much to use Part D to launch the broader Medicare program program into private managed care. Listed on the Medicare web site amid all the Part D providers are what are called Medicare Advantage plans, broad medical plans – HMOs and the like – designed to compete with traditional Medicare. They are assumed to be more efficient than traditional Medicare. But in order to entice these private plans to take Medicare, Congress and the Bush administration pays them over 12% more on the average than they pay Medicare. I guess they can give us efficiency, but we’re going to have to pay for it.
But what is so unnerving about these plans are the incentives built into them. The way they can most easily make the most money is not to pay for services. So they try to enroll people have have few health care needs, so they market in places where few sick people go. If the services for their enrollees are only, say, 30% of their income from Medicare, that 70% is gravy and will never be used for actual health care. The taxpayers pay for that non-service revenue.
And how else can they cash in? By rationing care – limiting the procedures they cover or denying claims. It’s what we hear about regularly in the press and in the media about managed care organizations.
And the out of pocket costs keep rising. Some enrolled older Americans pay more for their drugs than they would without the coverage, but they enroll now because if they enroll later when they need help, there can be a severe penalty. Some plans cut their profits at first to entice people in, then push up premiums dramatically or cut their formularies, figuring that some older folks will simply stick with their original plans without sorting things out.
It’s a complicated system with traps for those not in the know. Fortunately, the good folks at the Area Agency on Aging know where all the tigers are in the jungle and can lead us around to the plan that works best for us. It is reassuring that someone is there to help. But it is not reassuring that the policymakers in Washington aren’t taking action to see that Part D is focused on those who should be the intended beneficiaries – older Americans.
Return to top of page December 2, 2007 Making an argument against capital punishment
“Of course hate is important. Without hate, vengeance is meaningless.” – Professor Irwin Corey, comedian
~~~~~~~~~
The U.S. Supreme Court is struggling with the issue of deciding what methods are humane in administering capital punishment. Individual states are wrestling with executing mentally disabled or young teenagers for murder.
I confess that all these deliberations make me uneasy. I even found it disturbing when Iraqis hanged Saddam Hussein, as cruel and vicious a tyrant as you can find. There is something that seems barbaric to me about destroying a human being who at that moment poses no immediate threat to any one, regardless of what that person had done in the past.
Mr. Carlyon is the man most responsible for my feelings on capital punishment. Mr. Carlyon was my Sunday School teacher at the Wood Avenue Methodist Church in Muskegon when I was in junior high school. He was a well-read, soft spoken, gentle man with an easy smile and a high tolerance for adolescent questions on serious philosophic issues.
His theological principles were grounded less in crime and punishment and more in mercy and compassion. He quoted from the Sermon on the Mount rather liberally and pointed out that the acceptance of capital punishment was a measure of the backwardness of nations – and individual states. He made us feel a little morally superior knowing that Michigan had outlawed capital punishment.
I suspect he would not go so far as the Amish do in forgiveness of their trespassers. The Amish standard is beyond most of us. I suspect Mr. Carlyon would have felt, as I feel, that if someone had killed a loved one, he would want a slow, agonizing, very painful procedure visited upon the criminal. But that’s why friends and family members of victims don’t get to sit on juries.
Further we had just witnessed the end of World War II, and with the Nuremburg Trials underway, practically every American was anxious to exact some measure of punishment for those who had threatened our way of life, at least life imprisonment.
Mr. Carlyon also liked to emphasize redemption. He concluded that in deliberately cutting a life short and eliminating the possibility of repentance and redemption, we are assuming a role best left to God.
My friends and I tended to take a more pragmatic and self-absorbed perspective on redemption. We preferred to explore whether falling from a very tall building wouldn’t be the best way to die, since we could repent like crazy in the time it took us to arrive at the sidewalk. Mr. Carlyon patiently told us that we might not have that choice and it might be better to consider repentance somewhat sooner.
But Mr. Carlyon’s prospect of a prisoner on death row becoming “a changed person” still nags at me.
It is a peculiar irony that the United States ranks with China and Saudi Arabia in the incidence of capital punishment. And secular European nations have outlawed the practice. I suspect we will not give up capital punishment in the near future. But I do wonder, if Mr. Carlyon had had an opportunity to speak to the U.S. Supreme Court, what he would have said.
Return to top of page October 28, 2007 Boomers have their own ideas about aging
It has become fashionable lately for social observers to tell us that “yesterday’s 50 years old is today’s 70 years old.”
Well, not quite. But there is more than a grain of truth in the observation. Life expectancy in the United States has risen in the past fifty years from less than 70 years to almost 80 years. And the best part is that those years have not been tacked on the late-in-life frail years, but have been plopped right in the middle of our lives, expanding those active middle years.
We can thank better nutrition, advanced public health measures, and more sophisticated health care for those expanded middle years. Fifty years ago, most everyone in their 50’s was considered old. Today many people in their 60’s consider themselves middle-aged.
All this has affected the way we perceive ourselves. When I was growing up, we wanted to be “mature,” to live the stress-free, relatively comfortable lives that growing older brought.
But then came the Boomers, … and the Culture of the Young. The nation began to worship youth, and adopted its priorities and idealism and sense of personal independence. The Boomers, who felt their political and social muscle in their youth, became determined not to give it up. They have held on to their obsession with fitness, their commitment to competitive sports, and their pleasure in challenging physical activities. And they have passed those obsessions on to their children.
In 1965, when the nation first recognized that it must create service systems to meet the needs of a Graying America, the social emphasis was on those sedentary activities to which that generation was accustomed – table games, classes on age-related issues, and spectator travel.
But the Boomers will have none of it. And the impact will be hardest on the senior centers, which today enjoy much popular support. Studies in Cortland County, New York, and Fairfax County, Virginia, reveal that the Boomers – almost unanimously -- detest the term “senior citizen” and hate the idea of a “senior center.” They don’t intend to show up.
It is likely that those centers that accommodate to draw the Boomers in will look a lot like Starbucks. They will have wi-fi; will offer trips involving hiking, canoeing, and nature study; and will offer intensive study classes. They most certainly will be linked to libraries, the Y’s and health clubs, nature centers, educational institutions, and local restaurants. Plus, they may be multi-generational.
That isn’t to say that the Boomers and their progeny will not be afflicted with the vagaries of advanced old age. True, the percentage of disabled older persons has shrunk a bit, thanks to medical science. But there will be more frail older Americans than ever in the future simply because of the sheer numbers.
The Area Agency on Aging here in Southwestern Michigan is working hard to help those Boomers help their parents stay in their own homes. And it is scrambling to set up a system to address the increased numbers of Boomers and to meet their desire for independence in the home and other settings where they have the greatest control over their lives. And the Area Agency on Aging is launching an effort to helping make local communities elder-friendly.
The times they are a-changin’. And the Aging Network has its hands full, for sure. And we can be assured that regardless of the effectiveness of the responses, the Boomers will have their way, as they always have.
Return to top of page September 23, 2007 Labor and Labor Day no longer mean what they once did
"The liberal reward of labour increases the industry of the common people. ...Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, that where they are low." -Adam Smith, father of modern capitalism, from "The Wealth of Nations"
This past Labor Day was a quiet one. Only a few large cities had parades, few public officials gave grand speeches about the value of work, few union officials issued formal statements about the contribution of Labor to our national prosperity.
It wasn't always that way. Growing up in a working class neighborhood, I learned early on about the nobility of toil. At my dad's urging, I held part time jobs through junior high and high school - peddling papers, setting bowling pins, stocking grocery store shelves and hauling stock in a grocery warehouse.
It was not only a means of making a few dollars of spending money, but it was a matter of pride and a preparation for a life of work. It was not a bad thing to be a common man. Common men beat hack Hitler's fascism and Japanese imperialism. Common men made this country an industrial giant. Common women put Rosie the Riveter on a popular poster. Aaron Copeland wrote his "Fanfare to the Common Man" as a salute to the power of ordinary folds working in a democracy.
And the nation's toilers, aided by the muscle of their labor unions, were rewarded with relatively comfortable and secure middle-class lives.
The academic base for this widely held principle was the Labor Theory of Value, the understanding that the monetary value of all goods and services ultimately comes from the application of labor - both physical and mental. This theory was accepted by Adam Smith, Abraham Lincoln and most traditional economists, who underscored the importance of a well-paid working class in democracies.
But the rewards of labor don't go to just active laborers. Some of the wealth is gleaned for profit and capital, some of which is used to provide technology to make labor even more productive. And some of it becomes "unearned income" - dividends and capital gains for investors and shareholders. A recent U.S. Census Bureau report found that the average American laborer created $64,000 in wealth in 2005, while average individual income was slightly less that $40,000. The American worker is one of the most productive in the world.
The report also proclaimed that median household income in 2006 was up 0.7 percent, and the poverty rate had dropped from 12.6 percent to 12.3 percent, statistics celebrated in the media.
A closer look at the report, however, reveals disturbing trends for America's workers. Not only has median income not come back to 1999 levels, but also, as the Dow JOnes Market Watch pointed out, "Much of the gains in income came from unearned income, such as income from assets or transfer income, ...Earnings fell 1.1 percent."
And the report showed that the decline in poverty was due entirely to a reduction in the incidence of poverty from 10.1 percent to 9.4 percent for people older that 65, people dependent largely on retirement income and Social Security - unearned income.
David S. Johnson, chief of the Census Bureau's Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, reported that median earned household income didn't fall more because more individual family members took jobs in 2006 to make ends meet. At the same time, Johnson pointed out, the percentage of Americans without health insurance - mostly working Americans - rose from 15.3 percent to 15.8 percent. And all indicators show that things will likely get worse for American workers.
I think back about my working class neighbors when I was growing up. The financial security and middle-class status they felt their hard work had produced would today be dismantled. Technology has eliminated jobs by the thousands. Companies that valued work of their fellow Americans now routinely seek cheap labor in poverty-ridden countries at the expense of American labor. Unions, which fought to help members secure a greater share of the fruits of their labor, have become shells of themselves.
The disparity between the rich and moderate income in America has alarmed some economists, even Alan Greenspan and Secretary of Treasure Paulson and
Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke. But the perception of value of those who toil in factories and offices and farms and institutions to create the wealth of our nation has been eroded seriously, perhaps irretrievable. And we may pay dearly for it the long run.
Return to top of page August 19, 2007 Military medical advances are testing our claim as a compassionate nation
Kevin Seitz, an executive with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, likes to tell audiences that “there are more sick people wandering in nations with high quality health care than in less advanced nations.” As a keen observer of the health care business, he is in a great position to see how that “sick” population in the U.S. grows every day.
Part of the picture has to do with how “disease” is defined. For example, to Americans, cataracts are a medical problem addressed by routine surgery, much to our great satisfaction. But not in most developing nations. Dr. David Brown, a highly skilled and compassionate ophthalmologist with Great Lakes Eye Care, spent two years of his life introducing this new “disease” to people in Africa who thought going blind from cataracts was part of the normal process of living. He gave the miracle of sight to thousands of people afflicted with blindness, “curing” them of their cataracts
Fifty years ago in this country, people often referred to the startlingly erratic behavior in old age as a “second childhood,” or senility. Today we know that such behavior is caused by diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia. And researchers are working hard to find cures.
Sometimes a condition becomes a disease because a method of modifying it is found. For example, is erectile dysfunction – now a common household word on television – a disease? Once it was considered normal aging. With FDA approved drugs to address it, society now perceives it as a disease.
Restless leg syndrome, now with its own acronym – RLS, wasn’t recognized by the medical community until a drug company somewhat inadvertently discovered that that creepy-crawly feeling in the legs could be calmed down by a drug they owned. Eureka! A new disease.
Another part of the “disease” expansion picture is the simple success of our health care research and practice. Our public health system has been so effective at addressing acute illnesses and injuries that many more people stay alive today to face chronic care or other acute illnesses. Many people who not too long ago would have died suddenly from pneumonia, influenza, typhoid, diphtheria, measles, etc, now live long enough to face heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, and cancer, all of which can be protracted illnesses.
Low birth weight babies – even those little over a pound – often survive today because of modern intensive – and expensive – medical techniques. And we know that they will face a disproportionately higher rate of illness than normal birth weight babies.
Our emergency rooms and trauma centers and emergency medical technicians – civilian and military -- have contributed to the growth in the population needing care. While the murder rate in the nation is down, aggravated assault cases are up. That’s because effective emergency systems save many more who would have died in an earlier time, some of whom now may face a lifetime of chronic disability.
The success of our military medical staff is even more dramatic. In World War II, for every fatality in battle there were two injuries. In Vietnam and Korea – the war that gave us MASH units – the ratio was three injuries for every fatality. In Iraq, the ration is an astounding sixteen injuries for every fatality.
We should rejoice in that. It is the least we can do to help those we have asked to sacrifice. But the great majority of those injuries in Iraq are severe – loss of multiple limbs, traumatic brain injuries, spinal injuries, blindness, mental health problems – injuries requiring expensive and long term care, extending to millions of dollars over a lifetime for each injured soldier. Our Veterans Administration, hailed by the Institute of Medicine as the most effective health care system in the nation, has been crushed by the demand for care, and there is little sign of the estimated $300 billion needed to address the problem.
While we can rightly claim that we have cutting edge medical care in the United States, we have yet to come to grips with the successes of that great care. We provide life-enhancement drugs for insured people, while many uninsured needing cancer drugs or knee replacements or mental health care go without. We have preserved life for most older Americans and those with disabilities, but provide them few of the social support they need to manage their lives, letting their lives deteriorate until they can be warehoused. We willingly provide insurance for expensive acute illnesses and some devastating chronic illnesses, but cut back on the public health services that could prevent those illness from occurring. We are willing to provide close to a trillion dollars to send our young men and women to war, but don’t seem to have the will to compensate them for their sacrifices.
It is becoming a test of our claim to be a compassionate nation.
Return to top of page July 15, 2007 There are no easy answers to immigration dilemma
For a few years following the Great Depression and just before the World War, my folks and I lived with my grandparents in Detroit. And I had the good fortune to grow to know well those remarkable people.
My grandpa was a second-generation immigrant of German extraction. He was a quiet, hard-working blue collar worker who spoke with a pronounced German accent. He kept to himself most of the time, but when he met with neighbors who also spoke German, he could get pretty wound up. I remember fondly when he would have me sing German songs with him. To this day, I can’t think of Du, Du Liegst Mir Im Herzen without getting a warm feeling and wanting break out in “ja, ja, ja, ja.” I once asked my mom what the words meant. She had no idea.
My great-grandparents came through Ellis Island when it was far easier for lower income immigrants to become Americans. It was a time when the United States put up barriers to foreign trade through tariffs and opened its shores to migrant laborers willing to work in America’s growing manufacturing industries.
Today, the opposite is true. Goods and services and capital flow freely across national borders, but many Americans are terrified of continued immigration. The politics of the issue is bewildering. Ironically, many policy makers who support free trade, strongly oppose an easier road for immigrants, although they are two sides of the same issue. Both are efforts to find cheap labor, but it is impossible to move real estate to third world nations, so the trick is to import cheap labor to fill jobs in the hospitality industry, agriculture, landscaping, and construction.
This problem didn’t just pop up in the last few years. Some in Congress have lamented that the provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act were not vigorously enforced. But for years migrants had come north to work in our fields with little public concern. President Ronald Reagan, the former governor of a state that used migrant labor extensively, was sympathetic to employers. And some in the administration and Congress were looking for ways to weaken labor unions, and cheap labor was a way to do it. So the will to enforce it was simply not there. So the numbers grew from 2.5 million to 12 million.
There are so many misconceptions about today’s immigration. One is that Latinos refuse to integrate into American society and insist on speaking Spanish. Actually, Latinos are much like other immigrant groups that came before them. The first generation will speak the native tongue, the second will know some of the native language, but the third generation will speak fluently the language of the adopted land and will likely know little of the language of their grandparents. Indeed, Latino communities in border states today fight for funding to teach English to immigrants.
Another misconception is that migrants are costing the nation’s taxpayers a bundle of money. While some studies have found their presence costly, usually centering on the use of emergency rooms, most researchers have found that these immigrants commit less crime, use fewer health resources, and pay more into Social Security than they will ever receive. They pay less income tax because they don’t make enough money to pay much.
Policy makers seem to be searching for a neat answer to the immigration problem. Some have proposed a mass deportation, but moving 12 million people would be like moving out of the country the entire population of Michigan, with Cleveland and Toledo thrown in. And there would be a substantial economic impact. As Senator McCain has said, “If you deport all the illegal immigrants, every resort in Arizona will shut down.” Not to mention farms, construction companies, landscapers, and hospitals and nursing homes.
Some have proposed cracking down hard on employers of illegal immigrants. But farmers are already feeling the pinch as their work force is drying up, and we can already expect food costs to go up substantially. Further, to put on the streets without a means of subsistence millions of men, many between the ages of 18 and 30, gives law enforcement people cold sweats.
But the impact of the immigrants on the American workforce is undeniable. Some say that immigrants take jobs that Americans refuse to take. Not so simple. In right-to-work states bordering Mexico, construction workers are often paid as little as $10.00 an hour – without benefits -- hardly enough income to raise a family. American workers would likely take those jobs if they paid living wages.
There is no neat answer. It is all a part of globalization, the shrinking middle class, and the growing gap between rich and poor. It is certainly different from that simpler time when my grandpa and grandma were easing their family into the role of American citizens.
Return to top of page June 10, 2007 Michigan's vision of future compares poorly to that of Arizona
Ruth and I are snow birds. When the Michigan blizzards threaten in late November, we hike down to Arizona for a few months. Then when the blistering heat seeps in the Southwest, we come back to Michigan to enjoy the emerging Spring. It’s a luxury that comes with retirement for some.
Another little advantage that comes with that migration is the opportunity to see an American state quite different from Michigan, not only in climate, but in social and political perspective. For someone interested in the dynamics of democracy, it’s a way to sharpen one’s understanding of both states.
Arizona and Michigan have one thing in common – divided government. Each has a female Democratic governor. And each has at least one house controlled by the Republicans. But there the similarities stop. While Michigan is facing a horrendous budget deficit, Arizona enjoys a whopping half billion dollar surplus. And the two states have sharply differing visions of their economic futures.
The Michigan legislature, in hopes of stanching the steady stream of layoffs that has crippled the state economy, moved last year to wipe out a major portion of its business taxes. With no ready plan to compensate for the loss of tax income and with the state facing a rapidly eroding bond rating, policymakers targeted Michigan’s educational system, public health care systems, and infrastructure for cuts in services. The goal was jobs, jobs, jobs. A survey of major Michigan universities revealed that a majority of this year’s graduates still intended to head out-of-state for employment.
Arizona’s problems, on the other hand, stem from an inward migration and an economy historically based on agriculture, which is fast eroding, and tourism. But proposals by entrenched lawmakers about using the budget surplus to cut business taxes to provide jobs have been widely criticized. Arizona has apparently had its fill as a low wage state and the citizens have made their views clear.
Many Arizona policymakers, business community, and academic leaders have agreed that while general business tax cuts may provide jobs, those jobs tend to be entry level, dead-end jobs. And the working poor cost the state too much in deteriorating neighborhoods, public insecurity, poor health, high prison populations, and all the other expensive costs associated with poverty.
When surveyed about what to do with the state budget surplus, Arizonans – the general public as well as community leaders -- reveal a strong preference not to cut taxes, but to have the surplus invested in “world-class education systems” accessible to all, a health care system that is as close to universal as can be established, an extensive transportation system for all the state’s residents, and carefully targeted tax incentives aimed at emerging “technology-intensive, export-oriented” high wage industries.
The employers for whom Arizonans are looking aren’t enticed by tax breaks, but by great schools, state of the art health care, a wide range of recreational and cultural opportunities, safe streets, a wide range of public services, well-maintained parks and nature centers, and a vibrant and energetic middle class – all those quality of life issues that the employees those employers want will find attractive. That’s what keeps those university grads at home. A series of articles in the Arizona Republic cited the state’s pursuit not of “jobs,” but of “livelihoods” affording decent, fulfilling lives.
Arizona’s universities, with the help of high-tech businesses, have restructured their campuses and curricula and devised new ways to cooperate; the business community and the universities are exploring ways to raise the numbers of students heading for college; staid old Mesa has opened a new $90 million arts center; Phoenix, with the help of the three universities, is opening within a new downtown campus a gleaming medical research and state of the art health care delivery system; a new billion dollar light rail system will complement the rapidly expanding highway system.
Arizona still has a long way to go. It has shortchanged its schools for too many years, development threatens to swallow up the beautiful places and outstrip the infrastructure, the highways are too often laced with litter, and emergency rooms have long waits. And the immigration issue complicates issues enormously.
But Arizona is no longer a wild west state. It’s looking hard at what it wants to be in the 21st Century. And it hurts that the kind of vision Arizona is shaping is something Michigan can’t even seem to think about.
Return to top of page May 6, 2007 Boomers need to kick their killer habits
A reasonable amount of time has passed so that those interested in making themselves better people can assess their success in meeting New Year’s resolutions and depriving themselves for Lent.
For those of who realize the time for serious personal development is fading, sacrifice can be easier. As the saying goes, “I feel like I’m 35 as long as don’t try to do those things I did when I was 35.” So there’s a lot easy freight to throw overboard, especially with regard to food that doesn’t agree with us any more.
I don’t smoke and I’m not too pudgy, so most sacrifices in life style I make now are less involved with self improvement than in keeping me upright, warm, and taking nourishment. Dr. Smalley and I have regular discussions about cholesterol and triglycerides, as well as the modest exercise, sensible diet, and medication that allow me to keep going back to him.
I suspect that younger people have the same problems with New Year’s resolutions that I did when I was their age. The good intentions at first gradually give way to the occasional slip, with the intentions a bit bent, but still intact. Then more slips and a growing perception that the pre-intention life style wasn’t really so bad, and the final acceptance that one was simply not up to the challenge.
I read somewhere that over 90% of New Year’s resolutions are given up within a year. I don’t know how anyone would know that, but I suspect that’s pretty accurate.
I’ll bet that Lenten sacrifices are far more successful. For one thing, they’re time limited, and as long as the sacrificers can see the goal line, their spines become stiffer. And, of course, the deprivation can be more trivial – giving up chewing gum, red meat, chocolate (make that dark chocolate), American Idol, or whatever.
But some experts have suggested recently that Lent has a different mind set than New Year’s resolutions, and if people were to apply the perspective they have in Lent to their resolutions, they would be more effective. For example, there is a tendency for people deciding to diet to keep their eyes on the distant goal, such as losing weight. Now, an occasional lapse in the effort won’t put weight back on. But an occasional lapse usually leads to other lapses, and an accumulation of lapses can spell failure. Attempts to quit smoking can suffer the same consequences with the occasional lapses.
The experts say that the more effective way is to address each day at a time, as Alcoholics Anonymous participants do, working at the process each day with renewed commitment, and considering any lapse a failure. The long term goal will take care of itself.
Health researchers tell us that smoking is the greatest cause of death and illness in our nation, and that obesity is a growing menace contributing to several chronic illnesses. As a society we can try to assure that non-smokers don’t have to suffer the consequences of second hand smoke. We can try to help smokers cope with their addiction. We can try to encourage restaurants to eliminate transfats and encourage people to exercise. But the actual cessation of smoking and loss of weight will always be a personal issue and a personal responsibility.
And, now after all we have heard about the way the Boomers are reluctant to let the vagaries of age wear them down, we learn that they may be in worse health than we pre-Boomer couch potatoes are. So they may want to take another look at those personal resolutions to kick those habits that can take years off their lives – smoking and excess weight and a sedentary life style – while there’s still time. They really shouldn’t wait until New Year’s or Lent to get things underway. There’s simply too much at stake.
Return to top of page April 1, 2007 Let's not forget the soldiers who come home alove - but wounded
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute." -- U.S. Representative Robert Goodloe Harper, June 18, 1798
It was in our fifth week of basic training and we were getting ready to go through an exercise in short range rifle assault. Two days earlier, we had been in a cozy, comfortable auditorium, sitting in chairs with real backs, listening to a full-bird colonel giving us a patriotic lecture on the traditions of the military. Surrounded by flags and a full honor guard, he told us of those before us who had given their lives to make us free. It was appropriate, I guess, to a group of draftees who needed some inspiration, and it was an impressive performance.
Now we were sitting in bleachers in thirty degree weather and a damp wind in our faces, about to hear a very different, very chilly lecture on the realities of combat. Our Field First Sergeant, a highly-decorated Korean War vet, started, “How many of you are ready to die for your country?” Most hands went up. “Well, in combat, you won’t be fighting for your country or freedom or any of those high-falutin’ things. Look to your right and your left. These men are your new family, the people you will be fighting for. And you haven’t been brought here to die for anything. You’re useless if you’re dead. We want you to destroy the enemy and you can’t do that if you’re not alive.”
He went on, “Don’t be too concerned about actually killing the enemy. You just want to hurt ‘em bad, one way or another. Wounding works even better than killing, because someone killed is just the loss of a man. A wounded man costs the enemy the man himself, the men who have to tend to him, and the rest of the stuff that they need to take care of him.”
His words were realistic and chilling to a bunch of young kids like us. And I recalled them – and the gung-ho colonel’s words -- as I read about the problems our wounded Iraq veterans faced when they returned home. Carrying the tremendous burden we had asked them to carry, they had crossed a line nations have a hard time dealing with. The veterans had ceased to be assets and had become liabilities. And nations are reluctant to put tax dollars into issues that have no potential return.
When someone dies in war, we naturally respond with an outpouring of sympathy. We recognize the sacrifice with ceremony and pageantry, we give our heartfelt thanks to families for their sacrifice, and that’s the end of it.
When men and women are wounded, we demand that they are given the very best possible medical emergency treatment and rehabilitation -- at first. But time and distance take their toll. When urgent medical treatment is exhausted and disabilities are beyond immediate remedy, the line is crossed. When the flag-waving and martial music and impassioned speeches about victory have quieted, these men and women who have sacrificed so much must depend on national gratitude and simple decency – and a different set of values.
This is not new. A friend of mine, who taught psychology, left the classroom in the mid-1970s to accept a commission in the Air Force. He was assigned to a military hospital in Texas counseling wounded veterans. I talked to him a few months after he arrived on post. He was already angry and disillusioned. He told me that the nation was “warehousing” thousands of severely wounded Vietnam veterans who would never leave the premises, that the funding for their care was deeply inadequate and getting worse, and that these men and women had been forgotten, many by their own families and communities. “That’s their thanks from a grateful nation,” he said.
There is a tendency to blame the current inadequacies of military care to “bureaucratic bungling.” However, bureaucracies faced with inadequate resources often begin to measure success by rationing their services -- finding reasons to deny eligibility, placing restrictions on care, “making do.” That’s what the news reports have shown us too many of our severely wounded Iraq war veterans have faced.
And it could become much worse. Experts tell us that many traumatic brain injuries, the consequences of improvised explosive devices in Iraq, may not show up in our veterans for two years or more after they leave combat. Will the IED injury become this war’s Agent Orange injury or will we address the problems of our most seriously wounded veterans with dignity and compassion? This may be one of the most serious tests of our patriotism.
Return to top of page February 25, 2007 The nation needs to invest in its young people
Sixty years ago, when manufacturing was the primary engine driving the American economy, career paths for high school students were pretty clear. And high schools had appropriate channels to guide their charges into their expected futures.
College prep courses were primarily for smart rich kids. For those interested in clerical or retail work, business courses set them in the right direction. Those with some mechanical talents could go into the manual arts, leading eventually to the skilled trades. For the rest of us there was general education, which sent us into manufacturing and related fields.
Growing up in a blue collar neighborhood, all my neighborhood friends and I expected to ultimately find jobs in production of some kind. With a bit of luck we could work at Continental Motors, making specialty engines for boats, buses, and tractors. It paid the best for factory work in Muskegon. It could be sweaty, dirty work, but there were opportunities to make it up to cleaner, easier skilled production work. And even though the work could be mind-numbing, it afforded a relatively comfortable life style, predictable hours, and security.
So everyone expected all the kids in the neighborhood to take that route, … except my mom. I had already inherited an appetite for reading from my folks, but that wasn’t enough for my mom. She insisted I take college prep courses, which I was convinced were a waste of time. I even connived in my senior year to jam my college prep course into mornings so that I could sign up for a co-operative education plan that would allow me to work 35 hours a week in afternoons at Plumb’s Supermarkets. My performance in high school was lackluster at best.
After graduation, my mom insisted I attend Muskegon Junior College, but I covered my bets. Right after my eighteenth birthday, I began work at Continental Motors as a trucker. It was one of the most grueling times of my life. I remember vividly filling a bathtub at one o’clock in the morning while I was trying to read an assignment, falling asleep in my early morning classes, and scrambling to change into my jeans and Li’l Abner shoes right after my 2:00 class to race to punch in by 3:30.
I bumped along through junior college unspectacularly, finally graduating with insufficient funds to go on in school and facing the military draft. So I decided to volunteer for the draft, and went into the U.S. Army where, conveniently, I became eligible for the educational benefits of the G.I. Bill.
After almost two years of service, I applied to and was accepted by Central Michigan University. For the first time, my studies were unencumbered by work or worries about money. And I did well enough not only to graduate but also to be accepted by Michigan State’s graduate school and to continue on the G.I. Bill another year to get my master’s degree. I simply cherished the opportunity to learn and learn and learn.
It might be suggested that my military service changed my mindset. But I entered Central still unsure of how I would do. I’m convinced that I did well because the bumps had been smoothed out for me. The path was clear and the goals were clearly in sight.
Today, manufacturing has given way to the information economy. Economists and policymakers wring their hands about the education gap, which is fostering a frightening income gap. The percentage of college graduates in the U.S. is falling behind that of dozens of other nations competing with us in the global economy. They tell us students today need advanced education the same way I and my neighborhood friends needed high school.
If they really believed that, they would push for the full subsidization of advanced education for every high school graduate in the nation. They would institute a universal G.I. Bill and eliminate work study, loans, specialized grants, and scholarships students must “earn” to study. It would be an investment in our most precious resource – our young people.
How would that be paid for? Well, those tax cuts for wealthy investors the President and Congress enacted five years ago made Wall Street happy, but didn’t do much for Main Street, where most of America’s young people are facing bleak economic futures. Revenue from those tax cuts would pay for the tuition of two-thirds of today’s high school graduates to go on to college.
It would smooth out those bumps that stand in the way of students and their academic success. And it would go far to change that mindset of too many young Americans who believe they aren’t cut out for college. I know. Been there. Done that.
Return to top of page January 21, 2007 Like it or not, picking drug plan is new annual tradition
Amid all the traditional activities of the holiday season – finding that special Christmas gift for our grandson, wrapping presents, packing up to travel to meet family – Ruth and I have added another ritual this year: sorting through the dozens of Medicare prescription drug plans to see if we can pare some costs from a financial burden that has become heavy.
It is, of course, another group activity. I’m not too bad with computers, if I say so myself, but trying to find the best way through the maze of Medicare Part D prescription drug plans is not a task for a mere amateur. We took advantage of the fine professional services offered at the Area Agency on Aging to give us a hand and with the help of one of the resident experts, we were able to find the plans that worked best for us.
A national survey of participants in the Part D program revealed that most were happy with the coverage they received. Indeed, Ruth and I managed to save a couple thousand dollars by subscribing. Could be improved? Absolutely. The complexity of the program is staggering.
There are upward of fifty plans available just in Michigan. And no single program suits everyone. Before I retired, Ruth and I were covered for all our acute health care under a single plan. Now we have Medicare Parts A and B, a supplemental policy that covers both of us, and separate Part D plans. Together we carry around five different cards to provide the necessary patchwork. And each plan has its own copays and deductibles and premiums to which we have to respond. We have our own little blizzard of paperwork.
Each person must find the plan that best covers existing prescription drug needs. The plans use what they call formularies – lists of drug coverage designed to push participants toward the cheaper generic drugs. Some essential drugs may not be covered at all.
What if, you may ask, my doctor wants me to take a brand name drug because the generic drug listed doesn’t work well for me? Your doctor’s recommendation is not something about which the drug plan bean counters are deeply concerned.
And what if I face a critical unforeseen illness for which the drug needed is not listed? Silly you for not having the foresight to know what kind of illness may afflict you in the future. You may be able to appeal for a change in plans, but there are no guarantees. That’s enough to make you feel insecure all by itself.
To make things even more complicated, Wal-Mart, and eventually Costco and Target, are making available some generic drugs at four dollars each. That’s not the great bargain that it may appear on the surface, because those particular drugs are carefully chosen and Wal-Mart still isn’t losing any money. They account for only 1% of the drugs used nationwide. But even then there is a question of whether those generic drug purchases will count toward your copays under the Part D program.
Should Ruth and I be content that we have found the right plans for us? Not really. Even if we don’t come down with some unexpected illness during the year, toward the end of the year the different drug plan managers will review drug usage of their participants. They will dump those drugs that have proved highly unprofitable, change their formularies, or increase premiums in order to enhance profits. I suspect that next year, as in this one, participant costs for Part D plans will go up. And we will take time from holiday festivities to head back to the experts for help.
Could subsidized drug coverage could be less expensive and less complex? Without a doubt. The systems used by the Veterans Administration and TriCare, a medical plan used by many veterans, prove that. Although the ostensible purpose of Part D was to ease the medical cost burden of seniors, the structure and the operation is designed to introduce the profit motive. And building a whole extra layer of competing middlemen with differing bureaucratic demands is enormously costly. And that’s what seniors have to negotiate. Again, trapped by politics.
Never mind the infamous donut hole, which is an entirely different issue.
Return to top of page December 17, 2006 Caring for needy is common thread in all religions
In the mid-50's, military orders were cut to send me to fort leonard Wood to serve as a clerk in a regimental supply unit. I was greeted there by Chief Warrant Office Charles Winthrop. Warrant officers are commissioned officers who tend to think like enlisted men. And Winthrop was no exception. He was down-to-earth, praactical, and unpretentious, with a great sense of humor that he delivered with a down-home Oklahoma drawl.
After I was settled in a bit, he intorduced me around the office and ushered me to the supply warehouse befind the offices. Then, standing in the doorway with his hand on my shoulder, he pronounced, "Specialist, for men working in supply, the world is divided into groups. the non-expendables, things valuable and durable, such as vehicles, weapons, beds and cots, overclothing and office equipment. And the expendables, things that wear out quickly and are readily discarded, such as ammunition, bedding, office supplies, paint, ...and enlisted men."
He glanced at me with a bemused liik to see if I had been paying attention. I said, "I'm sure, sir, not everyone feels that way." He responded with a big smile, "Just in the officers' club, son."
He was, of course, kidding, sort of. Winthroop always treated us enlisted men with courtesy and respect. But enlisted personnel learn early on that theri value is considerable less than that of officers, that they are more expendable than officers, and that rank has its privileges. One learns to live with it.
The military, given its mission, was never designed to be democratic. The expendability of human lives is part of war, and some are marked as more expendable than others. It's in the larger, democratic society, with its principles of equality and the value of every individual, that expendability is contentious.
Historically, our nation has struggled with societal hatred toward people of various races, ethnic groups, religious groups and other groups with limited political poser, and we have worked hard to fashion laws that prevent the hate from making an impact on their lives. But we also tend to be indifferent toward those "expendables" of all races and ethnic groups unalbe to secure the fundamental resources for decent lives: the poor, the frail old, the uneducated, the hungry, the homeless, those without access to health care, those with disabliities needing help, those whose jobs have vanished. Not to mention the citizens of Rwands, Darfur, and dozens of other beleaguered nations around the world.
during this winter season, the holy days for the religions of the childre of Abraham - Jews, Christians, and Mulims - remind us of the indifference the "expendables" of our society face. Recently, we have witnessed the divisive side of religions, which differ primarily in their respective beliefs about the nature of god and Phrophets and other holy beings. Those veliefs define the special nature of each religion - and even individuals sects within each religion - and accord each set of belivers special privileges and reqards for holding those beliefs, setting them apart and deeming them superior to the others. We have seen how those beliefs can trigger hostility and cruelty to those who believe differently.
Yet. at this time of year, believers are also reminded by the words of the founders of their religions - divine or near divine in most cases - that being a chosen people implies less privilege for them and more responsilility toward others, especially toward those who are suffering. the focus of the holidays is on brotherhood and good will toward all. The Hebrew prophets admonished the Children of Israel and Judea to aid theri poor and promote social justice or Yahweh would allow their tribes to be punished. Jesus said, "What you have done to the least of these, you have done to me." "I was a stranger," he said, "and you took me in." Mohammed told the Muslim faithful that helping the hungry and the poor was a religious duty. References to the duty to serve the afficted abound in scriptures.
So there you have it. A tension in all the religins between a perspective emphasizing entitlement for belivers and punishment for transgressors, and a perspective requiring sacrifice by the belivers and the well-being of the "expendables," regardless of their beliefs and their behavior.
We try to invoke live and compassion during this season by giving the occasional onetime gifts to those may be struggling - gift baskers, used clothing, toys, a few dollars in a kettke. And we give gifts to those close to us - family and firends. But that is the easy road.
The hard and rocky path is not to seek out how the "expendables" are different from us, but to find our common humanity, to place value on the quality of theri lives, and to change the circumstances that make them expendable. That seems to be at the heart of most universal religions and is the tough message of this holiday season.
Return to top of page November 12, 2006 Health care system needs government involvement
Here’s an interesting political question: Is health care an essential public service that should be equally accessible to everyone, such as education, law enforcement, and roads, or is it a marketable commodity available according to one’s purchasing power, such as clothing, television sets, and cars?
Almost all other advanced industrialized countries today treat health care as an essential service available to all, regardless of income. In the United States, most ordinary folks see it that way too, but our history works against that perspective. During World War II, wage controls prevented corporations from providing cash incentives to keep scarce workers, so they turned to the provision of health insurance and retirement to employees. Thus was the peculiar private employer-based welfare system born in our nation.
But the problems became obvious quickly. How about those folks not in the workforce, such as retirees and the unemployed, and those working in companies choosing not to offer health insurance? After the war, Harry Truman unsuccessfully pushed Congress to enact a public universal health insurance system. Lyndon Johnson later considered it, but settled for Medicare for retirees and Medicaid for the indigent when it became obvious that Congress had no appetite for a universal system.
But the problems continued to build. In the next thirty years, health care became far more sophisticated and more expensive. More and more employers dropped or decreased coverage. It wasn’t until the Clinton administration that an attempt to address the issue was again proposed. The Clinton plan was a universal plan that joined the private employer-based system with publicly-subsidized supplements in a consumer-focused system using the competitive market. It was called “managed competition.” Although it was a middle-of-the-road plan, insurance companies and the drug companies, sensing a loss of profits, launched a successful all-out campaign to kill the plan.
Since then, things have only gotten worse. No question the United States has the most sophisticated medical care in the world. But 46 million Americans are without health insurance. Emergency rooms are packed. The health status of Americans is as bad as that of citizens of some third world countries. This at a time when we are spending twice as much for health care as even Canada, whose health status far exceeds ours.
Many in the Congress and the administration push privatization as the solution. But there is tough sledding there. The recent Medicare Drug benefit, which the drug companies had a large hand in drawing up, is an effort to privatize Medicare. It encourages retirees to abandon traditional Medicare to go with private managed care corporations, such as HMOs. Seniors have generally resisted it. And, ironically, the administration has had to reimburse the managed care groups at a rate far greater than that for traditional Medicare. So much for efficiency.
The administration is also pushing Health Savings Accounts. They are based partially on the notion that if an individual can negotiate directly with a service provider, he or she can shop around to find a better price. But people in physical stress don’t have time to shop around. Actually, they will pay more for their care than those with Medicare or private group insurance. The government and groups can and do negotiate discounts beforehand. The individual paying out of pocket pays the full freight.
A fundamental problem with the private market is that when there is a standard premium for delivering health care regardless of individual need, the incentive is for the managed care corporation to cream off the healthy folks who don’t need the service and dump those folks who are truly sick. Since 10% of Americans use 80% of the care, the neediest folks are to be avoided for maximum profit.
Another problem is that American corporations simply don’t want to be in the health insurance anymore. They are rapidly shifting costs to their employees or they’re getting out of the business altogether.
And privatization can have an adverse effect on the care itself we get from our doctors. For example, the big box retailers decided this year to get into providing flu shots for Medicare participants. Because companies like WalMart can buy in huge amounts, they are given preference over family doctors for the flu vaccine. Some doctors fear they won’t have enough. Others worry that they may order too much and will be stuck with the costs of flu shots they can’t use. Still others are giving up administering shots altogether. In almost every case there is little coordination between the retailers and family doctors, so if there are any side effects, who takes care of the patient?
Because of the carefully-nurtured and deep-seated fear of public programs in our nation, in spite of the overwhelming support of older Americans – and their families – for traditional Medicare, policymakers are reluctant to address the costly health care problem in the U.S. But the issue comes to the top of every list of political concerns the American public has. And there is every indication that if strong political action isn’t taken, circumstances will only get worse.
Return to top of page October 8, 2006 Driving forces of bullying haven't changed much over the years
Much has been made recently about bullying – the practice of the strong inflicting random violence and harassment on the less strong – particularly in our nation’s schools. Obviously, with the prevalence of gangs and the violent alienated, the concern is well founded.
But bullying isn’t a new phenomenon. When I was a tenth grader, I saw an incident of bullying that has stuck with me ever since. The victim was Darryl, a skinny, shy, quiet tenth-grade loner with a reputation as a talented musician. The bully was Walt, a well-liked and widely-admired senior, scholar, athlete, and officer in his class.
In a time when few kids locked up their bicycles, Walt had adopted a habit of taking bikes from the racks at random and riding them to his destinations around the school campus, leaving the owners to frantically hunt down their lost possessions later. One spring day, after classes, Walt chose Darryl’s bike from among the others and started to ride it across the grounds, when Darryl, carrying his ever-present trombone case, attempted to stop him. Walt just laughed and rode on, and Darryl apparently called him a name. Walt stopped and threw down the bike in a rage and went after Darryl.
By the time I got to the mob, which surrounded the two, the beating had already taken its toll. Darryl’s nose was bleeding, he was spitting blood, and one side of his face was already swelling up. His trombone had been taken from its case, disassembled and strewn down the sidewalk where it lay largely ignored. The crowd was mostly quiet, except for a small coterie of Walt admirers taunting Darryl and egging Walt on.
Walt ordered Darryl to “put up your dukes,” in an attempt to give the fight a semblance of fairness. And each time Darryl raised his hands, Walt would lace into him mercilessly, and Darryl’s pathetic roundhouse swings would bounce off Walt’s arms.
Some of us were sure that authority would come from the high school building to set things right, but our faith was misplaced. Even with several windows open on that warm spring day, the building remained dark and silent.
The whole incident couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes, and it stopped as quickly as it had started. Jerry, another well-liked scholar and athlete, a grade behind Walt but bigger and stronger, pushed his way through the circle, put his hand on Walt’s shoulder, laughed, and told him “Enough, Walt. It’s time to go home.” Walt pulled away and shouted at Jerry, but Jerry just turned his back on him to talk quietly to Darryl, who began to cry, more from what had happened to his cherished trombone, I suspect, than from the pain. Jerry walked Darryl over to the trombone, helped him reassemble it, and gently put it in its case. He then asked someone to get Darryl’s bike. Jerry secured the trombone in the bike’s basket, said a few words to Darryl, and sent him on his way.
Jerry then went over and said something to Walt, who had calmed down, and they both laughed. They walked away together in good spirits, with a small contingent of followers who continued to praise Walt and disparage Darryl. Jerry had brought mere peace to the incident, not justice. But we hadn’t expected much more.
I promised myself then that I would make every effort to stay out of Walt’s way for the rest of his senior year. I had seen a real bully, arrogant and self-righteous, with no fear of retribution, inflict serious pain and physical damage on one of society’s lesser lights over a perceived slight. I wanted no part of him.
I avoided Darryl too all that next year. It was as if his vulnerability and his shame might somehow be contagious. In our senior year, when he occasionally sat at our lunch table, I tried hard to be friendly, but the bullying incident was foremost in my mind. I wanted to tell him that I was embarrassed for not helping him during that awful episode, but for the life of me I couldn’t think of what I would have done differently, so I never mentioned it.
Jerry was by far the most intriguing and puzzling participant. As a force for good, he entered the fray not to confront evil head on and vanquish it, but rather to accommodate and set limits on it. It was as if the good and the evil were more at ease with each other than the socially powerful and the socially isolated were with each other.
A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor told of a national effort to curtail bullying by teaching larger “social norms” that stand against bullying of any kind. I hope it works. But the effort seems to overlook the norms and the allegiances of those smaller social universes -- as gangs, cliques, etc. – those peer groups that drive much of our youthful behavior. Although the incidence of bullying might be greater today and the consequences more profound, I don’t think the complex driving forces of bullying have changed that much since I was a kid.
Return to top of page September 3, 2006 On Labor Day, the average worker doesn't have much to celebrate
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. – Abraham Lincoln
Tomorrow we celebrate Labor Day. But there seems to be much less today about labor to celebrate than fifty years ago. With the American manufacturing industry building its muscle following the trauma of the Great Depression, the labor movement then was welcomed by blue collar workers who had learned to fear soup lines, unemployment, and a capricious stock market that threatened their very lives. And its impact was profound.
Certainly, factory owners and managers lamented the unions’ persistence in fighting for its members. Management dreaded the regular negotiations that often deteriorated into protracted strikes. The public often grumbled about work stoppages that brought inconvenience and friction. Some demands seemed downright picky.
But the public also recognized that no force was more important in creating the Great American Middle Class than the labor movement. It fought for progressive taxation, Social Security, and the private welfare system to provide decent pensions and health care insurance for all workers. It fought to make workplaces safer. But mostly it fought to give their members a greater share of the fruits of their labors, providing the financial base to keep working families solid and flourishing, and lessening poverty and its attendant ills, such as crime and homelessness.
The power of labor unions affected almost everyone. Benefits won by labor through bargaining invariably drifted upward to benefit middle managers and technical staff. Non-union, family-owned businesses pushed worker compensation upward to avoid unionization. Wave after wave of immigrants – Irish, Italians, Poles, Slavs, etc. – as well as the black Americans coming north to work in factories, were assured that the labor unions would look out for their best interests and that they would be treated fairly in the workplace. And labor’s power at the ballot box assured that policymakers gave attention to the concerns of working people.
Many large American newspapers had labor columnists and reporters telling about the positive impact of unions. There were high profile labor radio stations. Chicago’s WCFL, for example, owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor (“the voice of labor in Chicago”), extolled the virtues of labor unions, their victories for middle class Americans, their help for the disenfranchised.
But in the 1970s, labor began to lose its footing. High productivity in manufacturing precipitated the erosion of middle class blue collar jobs. As union shops closed, non-union shops with much lower worker compensation took their places. Globalization assured that many of the middle class jobs would be outsourced offshore at a fraction of the pay. Right to work states enticed corporations to find cheaper labor inside their borders. And the clincher came when President Reagan, with the consent of a Congress not sympathetic to labor, fired the striking air transport controllers, sending a message that the labor movement from that time forward would not be improving the lot of workers, but struggling to keep hard-earned benefits from slipping through their fingers.
Today newspapers tell of old line companies laying off tens of thousands of workers. Columnists revile unions for being “unrealistic,” and for not accepting inevitable financial circumstances that require giving up a middle class life and recognizing that their kids may be even worse off than they were.
At the same time, production revenues drift upward. Some CEO compensation is almost obscene, and the progressive taxation for which labor fought is being flattened by a Congress sympathetic to capital. Over 46 million Americans, most of whom are working, are without health care. For most working Americans, college is out of the question.
Foreclosures are up, the middle class is disintegrating, private debt is growing, two income families are the norm, jails and prisons are overloaded, and the media coverage of the plight of labor is completely overshadowed by television networks whose sole mission is to give minute by minute status and analysis of the stock market.
Some observers have pointed out that in the economic boom of the last five years, most American workers realized no increase in their purchasing power. Even an alarmed Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson gave a key speech telling of the social dangers of “an hourglass” distribution of wealth in the United States. Whether the nation can pull out of this tail spin is unsure, but it is likely that labor will be facing a very tough future.
Return to top of page July 30, 2006 America has outgrown the glory days of smoking
Smoke from a burning cigarette gave me a sense of comfort and security when I was a kid. It meant my dad was home and the family was together. My dad confined his smoking to his favorite chair and certainly never tried to exhale smoke directly at my mom and my sister and me, who didn't smoke.
But the smell of smoke permeated the house and tended to compromise my other aromas of security and comfort - frying bacon and eggs, pot roast dinner, blueberry pie - that would waft from my mom’s kitchen.
And my dad's smoking gave me one other feeling. He had a smoker's cough that afflicted him - and my mom, my sister, and me - each morning. It was a phlegmy, throaty, persistent cough, upsetting enough to convince me that I would never want to smoke.
Not that I didn't think about it from time to time. Smoking was a kind of rite of passage in those days, a sign of maturity and sophistication reflected in older kids and adults we admired. Elegant, confident and witty movie stars, who dazzled the ladies, smoked. They would always use their hands a lot to hold the cigarettes. Movie villains who smoked just let the cigarette dangle out of one side of their mouths and talked out of the other side. If one were to smoke, one had to use the hands. It reflected class and style.
I learned in Army basic training, however, what smoking could really do to people. Out of bivouac, far from and PX, many of my smoker Army buddies ran out of cigarettes. The only ones available were from our K-rations. A pack of four cigarettes manufactured almost 10 years earlier. These young addicted smokers would frantically bid for the cigarettes from us non-smokers. I traded each cigarette, so flimsy and stale it looked as if it would crumble in their hands, for a Baby Ruth candy bar. Some non-smokers demanded 50 cents for each smoke, a lot of money in the ‘50s. And they got it.
It was in the ‘60s when medical research became more sophisticated that we learned that the nicotine addiction my old Army buddies had could kill them. We learned later that the tobacco companies knew about the lethal effects of tobacco early on. And we leaned that the tobacco companies had deliberately targeted young people to hook them, because they knew that the earlier in life a person is hooked on nicotine, the harder it is to quit. They knew!
It triggered a full-scale attack on smoking form health officials in every federal administration from the Carter administration to today. Even the medical community at first was skeptical of the research showing the lethal effects of tobacco, but over a few years, cigarette smoke in doctor’s offices and hospital began to fade. And doctors began to emphasize to their patients that heart disease and cancer lurk in that smoking habit.
Many American communities also responded. Frequently, in university towns, where scientific evidence is taken more seriously than in other municipalities, cigarette smoking began to be banished. Soon other towns, counties and states followed suit.
There was initially a hue and cry from restaurant and bar owners about the loss of customers, but in almost every case, trade did not fall off. Many popular places, sports bars, Irish pubs and college hangouts realized substantial gains. And in communities where no ban on local smoking exists, some restaurants have become smoke free. Just recently, Tosi’s in Stevensville and din’s in St. Joseph have become smoke free.
A month or so ago, the U. S. Surgeon General issued a report on second-hand smoke, stating that non-smokers suffer illness from inhaling smoke from smokers. Health officials and the medical community found the evidence compelling and did not hesitate this time. Locally, the Berrien county Medical society has asked the Healthy Berrien consortium to investigate prospects of making public areas in Berrien county smoke free. Institutional community leaders, such as Whirlpool and Lakeland, have already implemented smoke-free campuses. Others are considering the move. But many businesses are not.
The state of Michigan has a higher incidence of smokers than the rest of the nation; southwestern Michigan has a higher incidence of smokers that the rest of the state. The question is whether the region shares the concerns of its health and medical communites with regard to its young people to take on the issue politically.
Return to top of page June 25, 2006 United States needs to do more than just talk about family values
Once upon a far simpler time, most American workers lived much more predictable lives. With an agreed upon 35 40 hour work week, employees counted on having their evenings and weekends – and generous vacations – free for the care and nurturing of their families. Even shops and stores closed before 6 p.m. to let their people go home to family dinners. Usually on Sundays, only the ice cream parlors and occasional gas station stayed open to accommodate the popular afternoon family drives. And mechanization promised even more time for the family activities.
But something happened. Was it the weakening of unions? The information revolution? Globalization? The rise of the big chain stores? Whatever the reasons, commerce placed ever-increasing demands on the work force to increase production by sacrificing much of that free time. The engines of production revved up into overdrive. The assembly lines picked up speed. Retail stores turned the lights on 24/7. Non-wage workers began putting in 60- to 70-hour work weeks. And all too often, the most valued employees became those who gave up family time to tackle the ever-increasing work burden at the office.
As wages fell for many workers, more and more families needed two jobs to make ends meet, and often those jobs required work at times when families would have gathered together in an earlier era.
But the quest for productivity and efficiency has other consequences.
In order to save money, companies are reducing the employee health care
so critical to families. Vacation