David Triguiero's Idaho

Life's No Pop Quiz

The Republicans are once again in opposition and working hard to destroy everything on the Democratic agenda including health care and education reform – the very issues they struggled to resolve during their eight years in power. Apparently, the only thing worse than not resolving a vital issue is for the Democrats to resolve it.

That’s party politics as the say; or is it? In the old days the Democrats worked within the Taft-Hartley Act passed soon after the war even though it gutted the power of unions, one of their base constituencies. The Republicans accepted Medicare and continued it despite their yells of “socialism” when a Democratic Congress and president passed it in the 1960s.

So, when did the Republicans become the negative party of permanent opposition. I don’t know, but soon before George W. Bush became president, a Republican pollster said the party’s objective was to “sow doubt.” Keep the public thinking that there is constant danger lurking on the horizon. There are always terrorist plotting to blow Americans up, tax and spend liberals courting national bankruptcy and American students who “can’t read and write.”

Ignoring the fact that the U.S. leads the world in all fields of education, especially creative technology, the Republicans and their cohort traditionalists harp continuously that American students in general lag behind other countries on geography, math and history tests. It’s pretty hard to argue with them if you believe the purpose of education is to prepare contestants for Jeopardy.

However, life is not a pop quiz, even in today’s modern high-tech world. Knowing how to use information is far more important than the information itself. This requires thinking and reasoning, neither of which are measurable in the back-to-basics quizzes that are the foundation of traditionalist theory.

No one is certain how people acquire the ability to think rationally, probably it is a byproduct of students’ relationships with committed teachers, many of whom may not know how to parse a sentence or spell chrysanthemum, but do know how to learn and to teach. This much is certain: this relationship cannot be achieved when one teacher is thrown in front of a classroom with 35 or 40 small children. More important, children in overcrowded situations do not learn the social skills, which, in today’s complex society, are more important than ever in building a successful life.

The Republican traditionalists say there is no evidence correlating student performance with class size and I can’t argue with them. They also say teachers’ salaries and working conditions have no effect on how students do on tests. Maybe they are right, but that is not the point. The point is there is a lot more to school and education than getting all the answers right.

How's your Health Care Insurance?

“So, how're you doing’?” It's the first question most people ask each other when the sunshine of spring first breaks through the gray skies of winter here in the northern end of the Treasure Valley.

What they meant, of course, was how's your health. Time was, it was a rhetorical question that did not require an answer beyond “Fine, how about you?”.

But times are changing. Today, “How‘re you doing?” often leads to the question, “How's your health insurance?”  Fewer and fewer people have any insurance and most that do have it have significantly less coverage than just a year or two ago and at substantially higher premiums. Even people who work for the government have seen their coverage decline while their premiums rise.

Meanwhile, doctor’s offices and hospitals are spending ever increasing amounts of time and money billing and collecting from private insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid. Weiser Memorial Hospital pilled up accounts receivable of more than $700,000 before new management turned things around.

The USA used to have the best health care in the world if you considered only people with insurance. If you considered the entire population including the more than 40 million Americans without insurance, it was among the worst in the world. Cuba ranked higher.

Thus, Hillary Clinton’s First Lady Health Care Initiative in 1993 went down without a trace when the private insurance companies now famous Harry and Louise advertisements told well-insured Americans what they stood to lose if a single-payer government insurance program were adopted.

That was then. Now, 15 years later, Harry and Louise have been replaced by Michael Moore, whose propaganda documentary “Sicko” has been packing them in at independent movie houses. It features Americans with health insurance whose plans will not cover the treatment they need. Moore takes them to Canada and Cuba where they receive the treatment denied them in the U.S., free of charge.

As it happens, both Harry and Louise and Michael Moore misrepresented the Canadian health care system. Harry and Louise said it is socialized medicine, which it definitely is not, and Moore said anyone can go into a doctor’s office or clinic and be treated, which they most definitely cannot. You have to be registered with the health care system, which requires a social insurance card and number.  You can go to an emergency room without the provincial health insurance, but you'll be billed.

Technically,  Canadian health insurance is not even single payer system. Each of the 10 provinces has its own health care system paid for by provincial taxes and premiums. The federal government is not directly involved.

The federal government only participates in helping some provinces pay for health care through a complex tax agreement that transfers a portion of tax receipts from richer to poorer provinces to ensure relatively equal services across the country.  These transfers also help pay for all other government services including policing, schools, colleges and universities, parks and recreation, etc.

What about waiting lines? Indeed, they do exist. However, every Canadian registered for health care is assured of a place in line based on the severity of his or her case. If you have cancer or other life-threatening illness, for instance, you'll get immediate treatment.  Where do you get in line in the U.S. if you have no insurance or if your insurance does not cover the treatment recommended by your doctor?

Like American insurers, Canadian plans do not cover experimental treatments except under very special circumstances. Canadians have more avenues of appeal than most American’s, however. They can, and regularly do, go to their Member of Parliament, often with success.

To be sure there are services common at hospitals in Idaho that you cannot get at Canadian hospitals. Private rooms, for one. There are very few of them and they go to patients who need them. For example, private rooms in maternity wards go first to women whose newborns are ill or die during or soon after birth. Needless to say, there is no free valet parking at any Canadian hospital. There is not a lot of parking, especially at city hospitals, and they charge for it.

There is private health insurance in Canada, lots of it. It varies from province to province, but most Canadian plans cover prescription drugs, eye exams, prescription glasses, private or semi-private rooms (if available), ambulance services and nursing homes. Blue Cross is Alberta is free to those with low incomes, usually subject to a means test.

Most working Canadians have private insurance through their employer. The self-employed or consultants can obtain the needed extra insurance at a tiny fraction of the cost of supplemental health insurance in the U.S. Canadians who are not working can easily pass the means test.

Doctors are not required to participate in Canadian health insurance plans. They are perfectly free to charge patients themselves for their services. Of course, they cannot pick and choose – they are either in or out of the plan. If they are in, most provinces do not allow them to charge patients additional fees.

Provincial medical associations negotiate fees with the provincial health department on a regular basis.
Canadian doctors do not buy medical malpractice insurance. The Canadian Medical Association insures all of its members though its own self-administered plan. Why does this work so well? It’s obvious – because any additional medical care, hospitalization or other services required as a result of malpractice is covered by health insurance.

Okay, there is more to it than that, but it would take a separate column to explain. In short, Canadians don’t sue as much as Americans do and Canadian courts do not provide more than compensatory damages. You get your out of pocket expenses and, in the case of wrongful death, the amount the deceased would have been expected to contribute to family income. Pain and suffering is worth at most a couple of thousand dollars and there is no such thing as loss of conjugal bliss.

Beyond compensatory damages – loss of a father’s income or a mother’s child care, for example -- Canadian law limits compensation for wrongful death to $60,000. Until the mid-1990s, it was $3,000.
You can search the streets for hours without finding a lawyer willing to take a case on a contingency basis and, if you find one, he or she will be worth exactly what you pay him or her up front.

Well, you say, Canadian health care sounds like a pretty good deal, but it should be for the amount of taxes you pay up there. Okay, let’s check on that. The latest issue of The Economist has a chart of the gap between what workers are paid and the amount they take home after paying all taxes in 15 industrialized countries. American workers on average take home roughly 70 percent of their earnings and Canadian workers 68 percent.

As a further point of interest, workers in Switzerland, Japan, and Australia take home more than Canadian and American workers; and they have single payer government health insurance.

Forced Organ Donation?

Not long ago I heard an interview on BBC World News Tonight with a once very wealthy American who had donated his entire fortune to various charities and foundations.

More than that, however, he had donated one of his two good kidneys to whichever recipient the transplant doctors at a Texas hospital determined was the best match.

I wish I could recall his name, but I can’t. There were stories about the unique donation in most U.S. newspapers and on the television news at the time. It was about a year ago, I think.

I don’t remember him saying he was a practicing Christian, but he did say that he based his actions on the teachings of Jesus Christ, who told his followers to give everything they have to the poor and follow him in poverty and service.

The BBC interviewer asked the donor if he believed people with two healthy kidneys who do not donate one to a person with no kidneys is guilty of murder.

Not murder, the man replied, but certainly they are guilty of causing the death of another human being. Perhaps involuntary manslaughter would be more appropriate, he said, but even that went too far. They are, however, directly responsible for the death of another human being and their actions are therefore immoral, or at least amoral, he said.

That got me thinking. Why not require everyone with two good kidneys to donate one to a compatible person with none? Yes, their only remaining kidney may fail later, but a compatible donor would be easily found and they would be right as rain again in no time.

Livers too. Nobody needs all of their liver and a lot of people have livers that no longer function at all. People could be required to donate a part of their liver to save a life.

I can hear the protests rising as I write. To require organ donation is a clear violation of our most basic civil and human rights. Donating an organ is a great and precious gift to another human being and to humanity. Short of dying for your country on the battlefield it is the ultimate sacrifice. But, it should be the individual’s choice.

But, wait a minute. We have conscripted young men to die on the battlefield in the past and still require them to register for the draft should their country need them to die sometime in the future.

Millions of Americans, in Idaho probably a considerable majority of the population, think pregnant women should be required to carry their baby full term regardless of their health or whether the want to have a child or can afford to raise one.

Is not this a violation of these women’s most basic civil and human rights? Shouldn’t they at least have the choice of deciding whether or not their bodies should be used as a manufacturing center for the human race?

It could be that some women don’t like being forced to bear and raise a child any more than the rest of us would like being forced to donate a kidney to keep someone else alive.

To be sure, every fetus is a unique potential human being even when it is no more than a cluster of cells adhered to the wall of a woman’s uterus. But whose unique potential human being? Society’s? The government’s? In the United States neither society nor the government nurture or house it; and they don’t help the mother pay for the doctor and hospital bills necessary to ensure it comes into this world healthy.

Surely a fetus belongs only to the one person responsible for it. How could any of us think that we own a potential child if we take no responsibility for it apart from forcing its mother to have it.

Anti-gay Just Newer Guise of Old-fashioned Bigotry

A recent column by Bryan Fischer in the Idaho Statesman requires response. Fischer a minister of the Deep Religious Right maintained that a bill promoted by the Idaho Commission on Human Rights (ICHC) to extend human rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity “is a danger to civil liberties (and) violates freedoms of business owners”.

I decided the best commentary on the Rev. Fischer’s anti-gay rights column would be to run it as it might have been written about 40 years ago when President Lyndon Johnson brought the first civil rights legislation before Congress. Whenever any group of people is singled-out to be excluded from basic human rights, civil liberties are at stake.

So, here it is, as it would have been written in 1963 with the changes italicized:

“Leslie Goddard of the Idaho Commission on Human Rights recently promoted S1323, a bill focused on “interracial marriage” and “racial identity” on the pages of the Statesman (It’s time for plain talk about fairness, Feb. 5).

“She says in her column that is matter calls for an open, respectful discussion.” I agree, and happily join the dialogue here. It’s exceedingly odd to see an organization with “Human Rights” it its title push a bill which represents such a clear and present danger to the civil liberties of good-hearted Idahoans. For Ms. Goddard’s bill would punish Idaho employers and landlords who take race into account in business decisions.

“The bill would violate freedom of conscience by forcing businessmen and landlords to compromise their own moral convictions or face potentially crippling lawsuits. It would violate an employer’s constitutional right to freedom of association, his basic right to select a work force that represents the values he wants his business to reflect, by giving government the power to drag him into court for making politically incorrect employment decisions.

“It also would violate the first freedom guaranteed to Americans in the Constitution, the free exercise of religion. Any Christian, Jewish or Muslim business owner who holds time-honored views of marriage and race would become immediately vulnerable to paralyzing legal action.

Why Hound Larry Craig?

“A quiet conscience makes one so serene!
Christians have burnt each other quite persuaded
That all the Apostles would have done as they did”.

Don Juan
Lord Byron c.1820

Lord Byron is probably the last person Larry Craig would identify with and yet the purportedly licentious Victorian poet and the purportedly homosexual U.S. Senator recently abandoned by his legislative colleagues, his party and most of the upright people of Idaho have a great deal in common.
Both were the victims of public hypocrisy, or cant, as the Victorians called it.

Byron, Great Britain’s most admired writer of his time, was forced to live in continental Europe most of his working life because he took up with another man’s wife. Written in Italy, his poem, Don Juan, was a humorous satire on how the British ruling classes publicly demand high moral behavior while privately practicing quite the opposite.

Craig, Idaho’s most admired senator since Frank Church, has been forced out of office because he may or may not have made a pass at an undercover policeman occupying the adjoining stall in a Minneapolis Airport men’s room. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and paid a fine hoping nobody would find out. Everybody did find out, of course, and The Idaho Statesman has been hounding him ever since to admit publicly that he is a homosexual.

Why does the Statesman care if Sen. Larry Craig is or is not a homosexual? A good question. It is not illegal. In fact, self-described liberals in the U.S.A. have been pressing to have homosexuality declared an acceptable lifestyle equal to heterosexuality. Craig has publicly opposed legislation granting equal rights to homosexuals leading the Statesman to declare him a hypocrite who should be exposed.

Beginning early last spring, the newspaper scoured Idaho and the nation in search of men who had been “cruised” (courted) or seduced by the popular senator. The initial investigation came up with nothing. One unidentified man in Washington, D.C. said he had engaged in homosexual trists with Craig at a men’s washroom in the capital. One unidentified Idaho man said the senator had cruised him in a Boise shoe store. An intense interview at the senator’s Boise home produced nothing.

The Statesman, to its credit, shelved the story. It came out again, however, and was published in full when a Washington, D.C. paper published news of Craig’s guilty plea in Minneapolis. Last fall, five men came forward and revealed homosexual contact with the senator. Three of them allowed the Statesman to publish their names.

Why did they break the cardinal rule of the homosexual community and publicly “out” one of their company? Because, they said, Craig was a hypocrite.

The paper announced it had won. Craig was obviously a practicing homosexual and a hypocrite. So, there! It followed soon after with a mawkish story about Craig and two contemporaries at the University of Idaho, an All America football player and successful political activist, whose homosexuality had ruined their lives leading to early deaths.

But, who is the real hypocrite? Is it Senator Larry Craig, who still staunchly maintains he is not a homosexual. Or, is it the Idaho Statesmen, the homosexuals who break their community’s most solemn oath to expose “a hypocrite”, the Republican Party and the rest of upright America now laughing and sneering at the senator.

Is Larry Craig a homosexual? No. He says he is not and that should be all there is to it. He is the only one that can know, just as presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who chucked Craig from his campaign team when the story first broke, is the only person that can state categorically that he, himself, is heterosexual.

Did Larry Craig engage in homosexual acts? Is he sexually attracted to men? Probably, given the evidence that the Statesman so assiduously uncovered. But that does not make him a homosexual any more than middle-aged men who buy Girls Gone Wild videos are child molesters.

Craig, like older men who lust after young women, may consider his attraction to men a temptation he must fight to overcome. Occasionally, he fails, as do old codgers who approach to 21-year-old-women in bars. But the fight goes on.  He opposes pro-homosexual legislation because he believes that is what his constituents expect and because he wants to be re-elected.

Thus Sen. Larry Craig is a flawed human being, as are we all. He is at times a hypocrite, as we all are. However, none of this excuses the humiliation he was forced to endure for being an ordinary human being, with self-proclaimed Christians leading the attack.

To paraphrase Lord Byron, we hounded him to his political death, convinced it was the only moral thing to do. Our consciences are quiet and serene.