the bad news

on healthcare

Yesterday at work, we all received the annual “bad news” envelope. Enclosed was the memo stating that next year our company’s healthcare premium would increase by 21 percent! How is this possible? With all the handwringing about healthcare costs being out of sight, hospital closings, consolidations and increased co-pays, how in the world could it jump that much? This means that even with my employer contributing to the plan, I will pay in excess of $7,000 next year to cover my wife, my daughter and myself. Now, the average household income in the Buffalo area is approximately $37,000, and many of my co-workers make this amount or less. When I ask them how they can afford to spend almost 20 percent of their income on healthcare, I found that many of them don’t. With mortgage and car payments, utilities, food and other necessities, they can’t afford the luxury of our company’s healthcare plan. These are conscientious, intelligent family men that need to forego an essential component of safeguarding their families because of cost. It’s not an “option that they have elected not to pursue,” as I have heard stated repeatedly by those who like the system as it presently exists. Just because a healthcare plan is made available to employees doesn’t automatically make it possible for them to participate.

When needed, the medical services my family and I have received through our HMOs have been stellar. We were never denied any procedure our doctors have requested. But I fear that if some cure to the astronomical costs of healthcare is not found soon, none of the average Buffalo families will have coverage.

I don’t know if “single payer” health care is the answer, but I suspect it may be. We are the only industrialized nation without it. The Canadian friends I have would not swap their system for ours, even with stories of Canadians crossing the border for more timely treatment of certain maladies. They insist chronic and life-threatening conditions are tended to immediately, and it’s the elective or less urgent procedures that may be deferred. What strikes me as more telling is the increase in “medical tourism,” where US citizens will fly to India or other Asian nations for operations they can’t afford to have in the US. We constantly are confronted by pundits telling us how universal healthcare won’t work here in this country: too socialistic, too bureaucratic and too expensive. We laugh at the story of the old lady berating the politician, imploring him to not let the government get their hands on her Medicare! The thing is, most people are happy with this government-run program. The administrative costs for Medicare are four percent, where they are over 14 percent for private healthcare. It’s been shown that in other countries, with some form of universal healthcare, it cost about $2,200 per year to provide medical services, but over $5,000 per person in the US. We pay the highest pharmaceutical prices in the world, even though public grants finance most of the research and development for new drugs. Seems like we taxpayers get charged at both ends of the process.

Why don’t we explore the successes that other nations have had providing these services? Australia has a system that gives basic, but good, healthcare to everyone, and people can supplement the coverage through private healthcare providers. They are able to fund this system using methods that include only a 1.5 percent payroll tax. I’m sure my colleagues at work would pony up $600 a year to cover their families.

As an American, I believe in capitalism and a free market system. Our heathcare system currently subscribes to neither philosophy and actually hinders both. It cost General Motors $1,400 more per car to manufacture in the US as opposed to Canada, just because of healthcare costs. How many more of our declining manufacturers are competitively handicapped in the same way?

We can have a cost-effective universal health care system in the US with the proper political will. Sadly, political will is often dictated by those who, like the health care industry, write the campaign contribution checks. Our national ethic says that every American deserves access to healthcare. The average Buffalo families aren’t looking for a handout. That would be repugnant to them. All they want is a fair shake at affordable family health care.

Dwight Gradolph

Buffalo

correcting

climate change

I’m responding to the letter by Douglas Caskey about “Kyoto: 10 Years Later” (Letters to AV, Artvoice v6n50). Mr. Caskey claims that Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new prime minister, has “made a reversal on his view of Kyoto, realizing that meeting Kyoto targets is a farce, and that to do so would only serve to destroy the economy of Australia.” Since none of my relatives or friends in Australia had voiced this view of Rudd to me in recent conversations, I went online to read the Herald Sun article cited by Mr. Caskey (http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22883548-662,00.html). I found that only the headline and first paragraph of the Herald Sun article (which were sensationalized, presumably to attract readers) supported Mr. Caskey’s view. If one read the whole article, one learned that Mr. Rudd wants to wait until next year, when his government will have completed a report on the economic impact of meeting a proposed greenhouse gas reduction target for 2020 (25-40 percent reduction), before agreeing to that target. Note that the 2020 target is not part of the Kyoto protocol, which Mr. Rudd has signed and fully supports. It’s a target that was proposed by many governments at the recent Bali conference. According to the Herald Sun article, Mr. Rudd remains in favor of a 60 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

I hope that in the future Artvoice will do some fact checking before publishing claims based on selective readings of published news articles.

Joel Huberman

Buffalo

STOP MEDIA CONSOLIDATION

Wake up, fellow citizens! While we’re all busy rushing from store to store to fill our holiday shopping lists, the Federal Communications Commission is busy granting a huge holiday gift to America’s biggest media tycoons, by changing media ownership rules to permit newspaper chains to purchase and operate TV and radio stations in the same media markets in which they publish. While the new policy applies only to the 20 largest US media markets, it gives a green light to consolidation of media ownership in even fewer corporate hands than is already the case. Today, 80 percent of America’s daily newspapers are owned by conglomerates, and the number of large media corporations has shrunk from around 50, 25 years ago, to barely a handful today—the Time Warners, Viacoms and Newscorps of the world. Critics of all stripes and political persuasions fear that this trend will surely continue and intensify under the new “cross-ownership” policy rule change.

It is important to consider today’s hasty rule change in light of the following excerpt from the FCC’s mission statement, taken from its own Web site: “under the Communications Act of 1934, the FCC is charged with allocating spectrum space to maximize the public interest, convenience, or necessity…The Communications Act and its revisions mandate promotion of the public interest, and thus the encouragement of a diversity of voices so as to promote a vibrant democracy.”

In a media landscape where there are no minority-owned/controlled major media corporations, it is difficult to see how a policy which favors more consolidation of media ownership in the same hands can be justified in light of the FCC’s mission statement to promote diversity and democracy in media ownership.

It is also worth noting that the December 18 decision comes on the heels of six public meetings on both coasts in which very few of the hundreds of public commenters expressed any support for relaxation of the cross-ownership restrictions in place for the past 30 years—ever since media consolidation became an issue. At recent Senate hearings, Senator John Kerry said, “You can’t accomplish diversity while simultaneously increasing market concentration. It’s a complete contradiction.” Even stalwart conservative Republicans, like Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, urged a 90-day moratorium to study the likely consequences of this huge policy change. The response of FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, who acts and even looks like a much younger Karl Rove, was basically “I don’t think so.”

So what does this all mean to us here in Buffalo, which is not one of the top 20 media markets? That remains to be seen. Buffalo ranks in the top 50 media markets—perhaps in the next tier to be affected by cross-ownership down the road? A more immediate impact could be what stories are covered (and how) or not covered by the enlargened conglomerates who may own the Buffalo News and the several commercial TV stations in our area down the line. Perhaps you remember when Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns WUTV-29, refused to run the program “Stolen Honor”—John Kerry’s rebuttal to the scurrilous “Swift Boat” attacks on his military service during the 2004 election—on their many stations, including one or more in Ohio. Who knows what impact that arbitrary political decision had on the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, with disputed razor-thin margins for Bush in states like Ohio and Florida.

Diversity of perspectives matters when it comes to media ownership. Despite the Internet, the owners of major newspapers, TV and radio stations and major Web sites like MySpace (recently purchased by Rupert Murdoch) can and do decide what information we have or don’t have easy access to. Hence, we should all resolve to hound our congressional representatives, in both houses—by phone, email, in person—to do whatever is necessary to block further media consolidation ASAP, before the huge auction of analog TV spectrum, also by the FCC, “coincidentally” happening in mid January—right after the holiday break.

Carl Mrozek

Buffalo