Problem with health care is health insurance industry

Problem with health care is health insurance industry
EDITOR:
The Vindicator asks whether Austintown Local School District bus drivers who work a 20-hour week have too sweet a deal by also qualifying for enrollment in an employer-paid health insurance plan.
I can top that. The Austintown school district, as do other school districts throughout the Valley, currently enroll thousands of coverable persons who do no work at all for the school districts that pay their health insurance. They earn no wages, although the value of the health insurance from which they benefit is equal to a part-time minimum-wage job. They pay no union dues, although, for the single purpose of health insurance enrollment, they are better represented than medically uninsured dues-paying bargaining unit workers. Some live nowhere near the school district that pays their health insurance.
Who are these coverable persons who have a health insurance deal that's even better than the part-time school bus drivers? They are the contractually qualifying dependents of health insurance-eligible workers.
The upshot of their being insured is that when contractually qualifying dependents Biff and Missy experience acute flank pain, their ER treatment and emergency appendectomy will cost them (or their parents or insurance-qualifying guardians) a few hundred dollars out of pocket. A medically uninsured worker will be forced to eat the entire 19,000 cost of such treatment.
Should the Austintown school district implement the performance audit's recommendation that bus drivers working fewer than 25 hours a week be disenrolled from health insurance, the school board will have made selected workers worse off for the purpose of conducting health care transactions than selected non-workers. Does that sound fair? Does that sound right?
The devil is commercial health insurance contracts -- the whole darned industry. Forget the talk of "markets" you sometimes hear from self-serving political lobbies. If someone today were to come up with the tortured idea of "food benefits" or "housing benefits" that left some workers starving and homeless, while selected (selected by the "food and housing benefits" industry) non-workers ate and slept comfortably at employer expense, you'd probably slap him silly.
The American Hospital Association originally promoted commercial health insurance for the sole political purpose of blocking national health care. Today, the American Medical Association defends commercial health insurance with a zeal that approaches extremism in a misguided effort to maintain autonomy of private practice.
I urge community leaders to take a good hard look at the disruptive effects commercial health insurance has on employer-employee relations and family relations. Then decide whether commercial health insurance contracts ought to be publicly condemned and prohibited.
JACK LABUSCH
Niles
All it takes is a little ...
EDITOR:
R E S P E C T! Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, said it first and loudest, but politicians all across the Mahoning Valley sometimes forget the true meaning of the word. Mahoning County Commissioner John McNally came the closest to saying the word straight out when asked about the passing of the continuous half percent tax May 8. McNally spoke of sitting down and explaining to the voters about the tax at various meetings across the county.
Commissioners Traficanti, McNally and Ludt have shown respect for the citizens of Mahoning County in the past by going to their areas to hold commissioners meetings over a long period of time, not just during elections. They have also spent millions of dollars in the suburbs and rural areas to relieve a host of problems for many homeowners and taxpayers.
In my humble opinion, the coordinator of the Committee for Our Future, Andrew Hamady, was absolutely incorrect, when he was quoted as saying in the same article, "'the people are beginning to understand and recognize that we can't have economic development in Mahoning County, unless they provide a stable income for the Commissioners."
"We the people" have always understood. We understood when commissioners of long ago promised the half percent tax for building a new jail would cease after the mortgage was paid, and then reneged on the promise. We understood when three following commissioners behaved like drunken sailors while both half percent sales taxes were implemented at the same time. A couple of this group talked down to anyone not with the in crowd at commissioners meetings and spent 1 million at the Canfield Fairgrounds to repair a weathered stadium that had made tons of money on its own in past years.
Respect is a word that worked well this time in the passing of the half percent sales tax. Future elected officials all across the Mahoning Valley would do well to remember the word and that disrespect simply makes American voters angry. No? Check out the renewal levy results in the Jackson-Milton School District.
DAVID METZLER
North Jackson
If Democrats want to win in the future, they must act now
EDITOR:
Now that the Democrats seem quite likely to take both Congress and the White House, it is time for the Democratic Party to worry about more than just getting us out of the mess in Iraq. It is time to reverse the damage done to the middle class by the Republicans over the last 25 years. They could do this with just four simple bills.
1. Restore the progressive income tax. Make it so that people making over 1 million dollars a year pay an 80 percent tax rate. This would help stop the trend for a few Americans (5 percent) to own nearly all of America (80 percent). It would also help stop the elimination of the middle class. It could also stop obvious examples of companies price gouging, like how gasoline has gone from about 1.50 a gallon when Bush entered the White House to over 3 now, resulting in the oil companies having the largest profits in the history of mankind. As a side affect, it could pay off the 9 trillion debt the Republicans have saddled the U.S. taxpayers with.
2. Increase the minimum wage above poverty level. The Republicans have kept the minimum wage so low that hard-working Americans now end up living below the poverty level. Raising the minimum above the poverty level for a family of four would mean a minimum wage of 10 per hour. It's time American businesses stopped paying slave wages anyway.
3. Add a tariff to products brought into the country from any country with an unfair monetary exchange rate. Sure, it's nice to go to Mexico and buy cheap products. But when the results are the loss of nearly every big industry in America to these countries, it is not so nice. This law alone could eventually eliminate poverty in the United States as industries return to the country.
4. Pass a law that states that anyone caught entering the United States illegally may never become a U.S. citizen. When the Republicans made 2 million illegal aliens United States citizens back in the '80s, it opened the flood gate to illegal immigrants from all over the world. This law, combined with the low minimum wage, took jobs away from Americans. Chasing the illegal immigrants out of the country and increasing the minimum wage to a decent wage, could eliminate every ghetto in America's inner cities.
Yes, the Democrats have a chance to reverse the damage that the greed promoted by the Republicans over the last 25 years has done to the United States. That greed has served a handful of people well, but at the expense of millions of working people and it will eventually destroy the United States if it is not reversed.
DON ROWINSKY
Youngstown