Being Sick of People Avoiding the Moral Imperative to Offer Universal Healthcare

Giving U.S. people access to affordable, quality, preventative medical care and never denying them healthcare would fulfill the promise our ancestors made in the Constitution. They committed to form a more perfect union, establish justice, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

But our healthcare systems have not delivered a more perfect union and we are now obsessing about administering the Affordable Care Act, as if routine administration could prevent us from delivering justice and general welfare.

The doctors, pharmacists, nurses and hospital assistants who care for me are among the more perfect people I know, but we’ve encased them in a system impenetrable by those residents who do not have a right to basic, preventable healthcare until they are sick, even dying in emergency rooms.

The quality of our healthcare is less than other developed nations as documented in piles of research. A recent book by T. R. Reid’s Healing America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, Fairer Health Care gave examples that show our quality is unacceptable. For example, as people over sixty, my wife and I face the lowest quality of life and survival rate in 23 developed nations. Infants produced by our grandchildren would face the lowest survival rate within their first year compared to 23 developed nations.

Building a more perfect healthcare system begins with humbly admitting we should do better, especially since our nation’s per person healthcare costs are more than any other developed nation. 

“We have developed the most fragmented healthcare system in the developed world, with providers sending bills to a vast array of different players,” says Reid. “All the other developed nations have settled on one healthcare system for everybody that means every patient is treated equally, and there’s one set of rules governing treatment and payment.”

He describes our unique approaches for Medicare and Medicaid recipients, military personnel, veterans, Native Americans, people with end-stage renal failure and members of Congress, On top of those there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of private insurance plans with different rules about coverage and payments amounts. No wonder criminals find avenues for fraud.

We hamstring our caregivers with another disadvantage.

“The US is the only developed country that relies on profit-making health insurance companies to pay the essential and elective care,” said Reid.

For-profit insurance companies fulfill their duty to maximize profits for shareholders by spending twenty percent of their overhead to market plans and seek ways to deny claims and refuse coverage, including the basic, affordable preventative care that would improve our health and cut our costs.

 

Reid says Switzerland used to have a similar insurance system until 1994 when citizens voted to require universal coverage through non-profit plans by insurance companies, which could also sell supplemental coverage.

The insurance companies and the conservatives bitterly opposed the referendum, but it’s been successful according to a 2012 Forbes article.

“The general health of the Swiss population is at least as high as that of the U.S. population, while costs and rates of inflation are 40 percent lower as a percentage of the economy,” said Avik Roy, a health care analyst and advisor for Romney.

”To have a high degree of solidarity among the people, all must have an equal right—and particularly, a right to medical care,” said former Swiss president M. Couchepin, a former corporate executive and conservative. “Because it is a profound need for people to be sure, if they are struck by the stroke of destiny, they can have a good health system. Our society must meet that need.” 

The stroke of medical destiny in the U.S. causes one in ten people to live in families unable to pay their medical bills, according to a study published in 2012 by the Center for Disease Control.

Maybe we could obtain an H-1B temporary work visa for Couchepin to serve as our president as we persist on a moral path toward basic, preventive healthcare as a fundamental right in our great nation. 

Include Family Unity in Immigration Reform

 

The blooming hopes for immigrant reform are haunted by the fear Congress won’t repair the restrictions pulling immigrant families apart.

 

Those of us marching this May 1st felt the yearnings of an Immigration Spring.

 

“I firmly believe the most important issue facing this valley, this region, this nation is immigration reform,” announced speaker Steve Lacy, mayor of East Wenatchee and an attorney in personal employment claims.

 

Wenatchee Valley’s Community for the Advancement of Family Education  (CAFÉ) and Centro Latino organized the march. They are affiliated with OneAmerica, the largest immigration advocacy group in Washington State. Their websites and speeches are full of energy and hope after the national election last October.

 

Jorge Chacón, chair of Café and a local psychologist, spoke of their success by transforming the historical theme, ‘Si se puede, Yes we can,’ into a new chant.  “Si se pudo, yes we did it!”

 

Reform is moving rapidly and Wenatchee Valley has powerful voices working on it. Stemilt president West Mathison introduced Jon Wyss, government affairs director of Gebbers Farms in Manson and Brewster as one of the people working on this issue in Washington, D.C.

 

“He’s talking directly with the people who are writing the actual law,” said Jean Speidel,  and employee of Speidel law firm which includes immigration law in its practice areas.

 

During the march Wyss told me the U.S. Senate should start marking up the language of the bill on May 6.

 

Hopes are rising because immigration reform is bi-partisan. After speakers including Wenatchee Mayor Frank Kuntz, Karen Keleman, chair of the Douglas County Democrats told the crowd, “I hope you noticed this is a bi-partisan issue. Some of the speakers you’ve heard have been Republicans.”

 

Despite the enthusiasm, OneAmeria and local leaders fear reform won’t eliminate the procedures that are forcing productive workers to leave their families, jeopardizing education for documented residents and restricting the ability of employers to find workers.

 

Those fears rose above the crowd of adults and children walking together and carrying signs saying keep families together.

 

Susan Griggs, an Hispanic church pastor from my Methodist church met a pastor from Detroit whose family experienced problems after they entered the U.S. on her husband’s work visa. When she and husband separated, she kept their two children who were graduating from high school with scholarships to attend college.

 

Her husband returned to Mexico and she lost her documented status. The church helped her get a work visa, but her children could not get theirs at the same time. The teenagers (18 and 19) returned to Mexico to live without either parent in a foreign land and take preparatory Spanish classes before they could enroll in the university.

 

Selling Mexican food for additional income, the mother financed their education, visited them periodically and managed her own household. Finally support from an attorney and congressional members permitted her children to get visas.

 

Phil Safar, a Wenatchee immigration attorney, knows the impacts on families, especially unreasonable barriers in the law that bar immigrants from re-entering the US.

 

“I see it every day in my practice, sometimes waiting as long as ten years,” he said during the march. “I’ve just posted a note about the bars on Sen. Rubio’s website.”

 

Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla) is one of eight senators who sponsored the bi-partisan senate immigration bill.

 

State legislators are working on House Bill 1817, the Dream Act that would extend state-based financial aid for graduating students enrolling in college. The bill passed the House 77-20 with the support of Representatives Condotta and Hawkins, but didn’t fet considered by the Senate.

 

“Since the Senate failed to pass it in regular session, bills have to be re-passed by the House and sent to the Senate again,” Wyss told me.

 

This surge for immigration reform should strengthen our local employers, grow our local economy and unite families consistent with our economic and moral values.

 

“Our immigration system is broken,” said Chacón, “and I believe it has spiritually damaged our nation.”

 

We need to restore our immigration system to be worthy of Liberty’s invitation, ”Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.

Keeping Corporate and Individual Taxes Fair Is a Constant Contest

Corporations, just like you and I, cut taxes and thereby reduce government revenues or shift costs to others. Corporations legitimately cutting costs are not evil, just endlessly innovative.

But citizens and state officials need to eliminate loopholes abused by powerful corporations and overcome the armies of attorneys and lobbyists that resist closing the loopholes.

In states with income taxes corporations cut taxes by getting approval from the IRS to reorganize corporate structures into Real Estate Investment Trusts. REITs are defined in IRS section 856 as “any corporation, trust [etc.] … that acts as an investment agent specializing in real estate and real estate mortgages.”

Eisenhower’s administration and Congress created REITs as a way for small investors to purchase stock in a corporation that owns real estate such as office skyscrapers and shopping malls. REITs must have at least 100 individual shareholders.

If REITs pay at least 90 percent of their profit as dividends, they do not have to pay corporate income taxes. Instead the federal government receives equal revenue by taxing dividends as ordinary income.

It’s a constructive win-win arrangement that allows individuals to buy real estate shares like they buy mutual funds.

Business quickly avoided federal income taxes by putting investors into corporations that pay lower taxes. The formerly responsive federal government quickly eliminated that loophole.

Corporations are using REITs to cut state taxes and shift burdens to citizens who are taxed to make up the difference or accept reduced services.

Wal-Mart is not a company I envision as a REIT. But a Wall Street Journal article in 2007 by Jesse Drucker used court records to describe how Wal-Mart set up a REIT in North Carolina to own its stores and rent them to Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart’s REIT got approval from the IRS by selling one percent of the shares to 100 investors, all of whom were Wal-Mart executives, some in other states. Ninety-nine percent of the shares were owned by one subsidiary corporation.

“Wal-Mart, in about 25 states, has been paying most of that rent to itself—and then deducting that amount from its state taxes,” said Drucker. “It has saved Wal-Mart from paying several hundred million dollars in taxes.”

North Carolina, and other states, do not tax dividends paid by corporations to themselves on the assumption they are simply transferring money. North Carolina’s treasurer recovered the $33 million in assessments over four years, an assessment the attorney general defended against Wal-Mart attorneys all the way to the state supreme court.

A 2007 issue of Missouri Law Review published an article by Jennifer Stonecipher, who is currently a defense attorney in Kansas City, that described the difficulty states were having filing lawsuits and passing legislation to correct abuse in REITS.

“Clear and specific legislation is necessary to close the loophole and end the unfair shifting of state tax burdens,” she said.

Corporations are still using the loopholes. Correction Corporation of America, a for-profit company that operates prisons for federal and state governments, converted to a REIT in February 2013.

American Tower, an owner and operator of thousands of communications towers in wireless and broadcast industries, converted to a REIT in 2012.  Its competitor, Equinix, announced it was converting to a REIT and was not worried about potential legislative changes, according to Anton Troianovski in the WSJ on October 11, 2012

“Our advisors have told us that even if they wanted to change the policy around REIT conversions, it would take years because of the bureaucracy,”  said CEO Steve Smith.

State bureaucracies succumb or don’t resist because lobbyists argue closing loopholes is a tax increase and many legislators have pledged to oppose tax increases.

Lobbyists also insist “state governments don’t have a deficit problem, they have a spending problem.”

Hapless legislators must replace revenue lost by the abuse of REITs by cutting spending for education, health, human services and law enforcement or increase individual taxes.

This story is a reminder citizens and their state governments must be vigorous, loyal opposition to corporate interests that abuse useful legislation, force states to cut important services or shift costs to individuals.

Being Lucky to Have a Retreat and a Sense of Mission.

watching coverage ot the Boston Marathon bombing and the West fertilizer explosion and nourished my faith in service.

We stayed at Sager Brown, a 23-acre campus with ten buildings located in Baldwin, an hour-an-a-half drive west of New Orleans. It’s headquarters for relief-supply operations of the United Methodist Church Overseas Relief (UMCOR).

Last year 3,000 volunteers visited the center and its 48,000 square foot depot to ship six million dollars in emergency supplies and services around the world and assist local residents in poverty with monthly food distributions and ongoing housing improvements.

Sager Brown’s work schedules facilitate a third mission: a worship and retreat center for volunteers. Work was scheduled from 9:00 am to 11:30 am and 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm, allowing me time to rest or enjoy watching water in the Bayou Teche ebb and flow with the tides and listen to choruses of unfamiliar bird calls.

People met daily for worship. We enjoyed a spontaneously organized jam session by musicians that turned into an hour-a-half songfest of old time hymns. Volunteers prepared a Thursday vespers service with different Christian faiths among the volunteers.

Dormitories had spotless linoleum floors linking communal bathrooms to comfortable rooms without TVs, radios, or newspapers, limiting outside contact to wireless devices.  I easily retreated from current news by finishing a book and scanning email.

Fulltime staff prepared home-style southern buffets three times a day, beginning promptly by gathering in a circle around the dining room for announcements and an opening prayer. We talked about our various projects or plans for the week, only briefly mentioning the tragic news filtering in. I was glad to focus on the mission at hand.

I volunteered to work on an assembly line in the clean well-lit warehouse to pack items into cleaning buckets. Karen sewed, stitched and packed school supplies into colorful bookbags. Others packed health kits and school-supplies boxes.

In the afternoon I joined friendly, cooperative construction crews working to improve housing conditions requested by local residents and approved by Sager Brown officials.

Tuesday and Thursday mornings all volunteers were asked to load two shipping containers destined for the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Even that work was a celebration of spirit. Teams of six to eight volunteers took turns unloading 47 pallets and stacking boxes within inches of the top of the container. After stacking one row we walked out to the applause from fellow volunteers as the next team headed up the ramp. We chatted and rested until our next turn.

On the way to lunch after we loaded the container on Thursday I saw the truck roll by with 31,584 health care kits headed halfway across the world. I felt linked in service, not just feeling like a helpless observer to the most recent disaster.

That same day headquarters staff was making preparations to ship the clean-up kits I had worked on to people recovering from the fertilizer plant explosion.

Last week I was lucky to be at the Sager Brown retreat that shielded us from the images and talk of tragedies that our house-sitter said, “were everywhere.”

I was even luckier that it was a place of worship where I could make a meaningful contribution to an ongoing mission for those who are suffering..

 

We Are Doing Two Things Right and Both Sound Crazy

Travels have led me to the top of Mayan temples in Guatemala, along patches of Roman Roads in Turkey and inside cliff-dwellers’ homes in Mesa Verde New Mexico, remnants of thriving civilizations that awe me with their grandeur and haunt me with their collapse.

All major civilizations have declined, just as all economic bubbles have burst. Now the question arises whether we’re living with seven billion people in a global civilization approaching the tipping point toward collapse because vital commodities are dangerously dwindling and costs are relentlessly rising.

Amidst this ominous cacophony come optimistic statements that we are creating two escape routes from doom. They are made by Jeremy Grantham, who is the chief investment advisor for GMO, a financial services firm, and who has predicted the collapse of every economic bubble. He is cheered by trends most people, including me, see as problems: declining populations and governmental subsidies for alternative energy.

The UN predicts declining fertility rates in Europe and East Asia are leading to population declines and aging populations by 2050, conditions already existing in Japan, Germany, Lithuania and Ukraine.

Those countries face slower economic growth and financial burdens on younger workers, so analysts and politicians are trying to reverse them. Grantham believes our societies must encourage declining fertility rates and work out the problems because we’ve already overpopulated our planet.

For thousands of years, as Thomas Malthus described in his book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, the global population had never reached one billion because people were repeatedly trampled by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, famine, disease, death and war.

Malthus’ 1798 prediction of doom proved premature because the technological revolution increased food yields, reduced disease and deferred death. In a mere two hundred years population has soared above seven billion with predictions it could reach twelve billion by 2050.

Grantham explains the technological revolution was generated by the discovery of hydrocarbons in coal and oil, harnessing the productivity to propel the population explosion.

“A gallon of gasoline is worth somewhere around 200 man hours of labor,” he said recently on the Charlie Rose show.

The problem is the growth is not sustainable and hydrocarbons are becoming scarcer and more expensive, but the good news is we produced a vast wealth to prepare for alternatives.

“Our goal should be to get everyone out of abject poverty, even if it necessitates some income redistribution, because we have way overstepped sustainable levels,” he said in his April 2011 quarterly report.

Grantham’s optimistic we also have time to build alternative energy sources.  Recent discoveries of natural gas and production of oil reserves from hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling should produce energy at relatively low costs for the U.S. for several decades.

Oil prices are fluctuating around $80 per barrel versus the $16 per barrel we paid in the 1960s and the $30 per barrel in the 1970s. Grantham’s sources in the oil industry tell him exploration and development costs are a minimum of $80 per barrel today.

“It’s never going down again,” he said on the Charlie Rose show.

Grantham acknowledges alternative energy needs subsidies to be competitive, but also believes investments should lower costs like the investments in microchip technology continuously lowered the cost of computing power. For example, he told Rose that Duke Power’s recent discoveries should make the solar panel more competitive.

“The alternative renewable energy of the sun that suppresses demand for coal and oil and other sources such as solar, wind power, storage and grid systems are happening faster than people realize,” Grantham told Charlie Rose.

To be sure other problems haunt our global civilization’s survival, such as violent weather that disrupts food production, declining reserves of irreplaceable essential minerals such as phosphate and phosphorous and agricultural production techniques that deplete soils.

But population declines and alternative energy are two essential pathways that should help us solve those problems.

A Home Seeker and Match Maker for Adoptable Children

Mike Magnotti has a mission: find permanent, adoptive homes for children, particularly those in foster care.  He calls such adoptions, “changing their name from foster kids to sons and daughters.”

Magnotti is the director of New Life Adoptions, a non-profit dedicated to recruit, train and support singles and families from all faiths and walks of life who will adopt infants and orphans in Washington.

“I got a call from a couple who said, ‘Will you help us? We’re not a church going family,” he said. “Of course we will.”

He has exceptional passion, experience and credentials to help. After getting a college degree in Biblical Literature, he worked with the Wenatchee police force handling sexual assault, child abuse and domestic violence, retiring as a sergeant.

He earned two Masters, one in counseling/psychology, worked two years at Catholic Family Services, became certified as a child mental-health professional and a child mental health specialist and received a state license as a mental health counselor.

So of course he helps anyone wanting to adopt, a lengthy process that qualifies families while the state determines when foster children are legally free to be adopted.

He advises families to become licensed as foster parents who can match their home with a child before the state approves an adoption. New Life currently has 11 foster children with foster parents qualified to adopt them.

Parents complete a lengthy application followed by his two hour screening interview and a home study. He’s looking for loving, responsible people with reliable income who pay their bills. He told me he’s working with a dedicated single who’s qualified except she’s heavily in debt.

“I want to see her work with her credit card for a year,” he said.

He’s placed three infants through private adoptions where biological parents choose to place their unborn children with an adoptive family. These adoptions are rare because young single mothers are keeping their babies even in families with histories of drugs, abuse and neglect.

Pregnant mothers tell him placing a baby for adoption would make them a bad person. Not if they knew the families Magnotti finds.

“I could place every newborn who came in here,” he said.

Once parents are qualified the matching process can take time, or not. Magnotti’s website, newlifeadoptions.org, has a story of parents with three kids who considered 13 other children mismatches before adopting five- and six-year old siblings in two weeks.

New Adoption charges NO fees because its budget and his salary is funded by donations from individuals and organizations like his office space provided by New Song Community Church in East Wenatchee.

New Life’s budget has been hard hit by the changing times and could use more donors and a better business plan, Magnotti told me.

He blames himself for not getting his board to raise more money because he doesn’t like to ask for donations and lay guilt trips on people.

He plans to work with retired business leaders at SCORE to develop a business strategy.

He promotes the desperate need for more adoptions in sermons at churches, and speeches at service clubs and governments. He’s provided free suicide intervention training to at least two hundred people, including staff at Wenatchee’s city hall and police department, Young Life and Waterville schools.

“The money I make from doing work on family adoptions goes to the adoption ministry; the money I make from mental health and relationship counseling is private income,” he told me.

“New Life does charge nominal fees for doing work on family and overseas adoptions, but if I had the budget, I would say make my services free for all adoptions,” he told me. “I’ll go talk to anyone, anywhere.”

He’s worth talking with and listening to at 888-2768 and maddog@nwi.net.

Creating Legends for My Grandchildren’s Grandchildren

As a grandfather I want my grandchildren to tell wholesome legends about Karen and me to their grandchildren. A large purple Easter Bunny on my dresser reminds me of how much fun creating legends can be.

Last Easter a glass vase of multicolored jelly beans greeted my three grandsons, aged 14 to 9, at our country club’s brunch. The jelly beans were packed inside the rounded bottom and piled along widening sides until they formed a crown at the brim. A sign invited people to guess the number of jelly beans and win a prize. Our grandsons guessed. I silently dismissed the guessing game as a waste of time.

After brunch the vase stood beside entry sheets and a basket stuffed with guesses. Looking for some way to make a logical count, I impulsively counted 22 jelly beans in an arc roughly a third of the crown. Counting would be impossible.

At that instant a grandson showed up, leaned on his elbows and said, “Oh look, Grampa is guessing the number of jelly beans.”

The others gathered around, expecting a performance I was unprepared to deliver and unquestionably would. I stalled for time.

“There are 66 jelly beans on top,” I said. “Now we need to count the rows.”

My elbow-leaning grandson and I each counted eight rows. “But Grampa, the rows at the bottom are smaller.”

That was one reason I stalled, but the jelly beans formed reasonably even rows except for the rounded bottom. He was stumped. I was triumphant.

The average of any sequence of numbers is half the smallest plus the largest. The average of numbers one-to-three is one plus three equals four, divided by two equals 2.

“True,” I said to him, “but we can compute the average number of jelly beans per row. Assume the last bubble row is one third the top row. That’s 22.”

No one spoke. Numbers mesmerize people so I talked faster.

“We add 22 to 66 and get 88, round that to 90, divide by two and we get 45 jelly beans per row.”

I wrote 45 times 8 equals 360 on the entry sheet.

“Gee,” my grandson assistant said, “I just guessed at my number.”

He got the message.

Stories need embellishment to become legends. “We can’t leave the number at three hundred and sixty,” I said. “Others might make the same calculations.”

I added three to account for the rounded bottom, confidently wrote 363, signed my name and tossed it in the basket.

My number looked precise, but was based on estimates (Legendary analysts don’t guess) of the arc, an assumption the rows were even and a visual assessment of jelly beans in the rounded bottom.

The point is I modeled an analytical approach. And calculating 363 was an exquisitely entertaining performance for me to give my grandchildren to inspire them to use logic.

At the condo their mother and I hid jelly beans and chocolate Easter bunnies in gardens and bushes. We played outdoor games. They watched tennis matches. I emptied waste baskets.

Suddenly the boys rushed into the garage, handing me the phone, shouting, “Grampa, you won.” “The number was right.”

I stared at them, Karen and their mother. Their faces were radiant.

The voice said, “Are you Jim Russell? You got the number right.”

Ahh, the jelly beans. She said there were 362.

I’ve since declared my analysis was infallible; a jelly bean must have rolled away as the judges counted them afterward.

All three grandsons piled in the car to pick up my prize. Even our 9-year-old grandson got the moral.  “You analyzed how to do it instead of guessing.”

I explained again how I used math skills each of them already knew.

Back home, Karen grinned at me hugging my large purple Easter bunny. “Well, I think this time you’ve really convinced them you’re a genius.”

This Easter she suggested it’s time for my bunny to move on.

She’s right. It’s going to my granddaughters, along with the legend for their grandchildren.