Medicare for everyone!

According to the Cape Cod Times, the non-profit, bipartisan Economic Policy Institute reports that the number of Americans who do not have health insurance increased to 46.6 million in 2005. The EPI tells us that “….weak employment, combined with rising costs for health insurance, have resulted in many employers canceling coverage and many workers declining to accept coverage when it is offered.”

When is the United States going to join the rest of the industrialized world and make health insurance available to all of us; not just those with good jobs?

The most common way countries use to provide universal health insurance is some sort of single payer plan. People often criticize the single payer plans operated by foreign countries like Canada and Britain, but they seldom mention one of the largest single payer plans in the world, which is right here in the United States.

We call it Medicare, and it covers roughly 42 million Americans, including 6.3 million people under 65 who are permanently disabled.

We think those who oppose universal health insurance do not mention Medicare because they know most people are happy with it. Those on Medicare notice that they are not subject to the same restrictions on doctors and hospitals that are often placed on those in managed care plans. They believe the service they get is reasonably prompt. And they sense that the program operates relatively efficiently.

So, why don’t we simply extend Medicare to everyone?

The only serious problem we can see with this plan is the cost. The Medicare program is already hading for serious financial trouble as the population ages and the ratio of workers to beneficiaries goes down.

We have a suggestion that would solve both problems. It would cure the looming fiscal problem facing Medicare, and, at the same time, provide enough revenue to extend Medicare to every American, rich and poor, old and young. Our suggestion is a Value Added Tax (VAT).

The VAT is a form of sales tax that most European countries (and Canada) use. It is built into the price of products and services. Every time you bought something a portion of what you paid would be used to fund your health insurance.

The VAT should be able to raise enough money to fund a universal Medicare program without causing undue increases in prices. It will also eliminate the tax workers now pay to fund insurance for people who do not work.

Offsetting the increase in taxes we will pay would be the huge reduction in health insurance payments we all make. Company insurance plans could now focus on supplemental health insurance, which is much cheaper.

To reduce the regressive impact common to all sales taxes, we suggest excluding taxes on food, clothing, rents and products that already have sales taxes built in, like gasoline.

Right now, one way or another, the government pays for almost half of all medical costs in the United States through programs like Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and Federal and State employee health insurance. Think of all the money we will save by combining all of those – plus all private insurance, which comes from hundreds of companies, each with their own administrative staffs — into one plan? Even doctors and hospitals would benefit from significantly reduced paperwork!

We have the need, and we have the program that will take care of that need. Now all we need is the will to do it.

Condos or condoms? Be careful when you refuse to adjust zoning.

A recent survey by the Donahue Institute at UMASS and Citizens Housing and Planning Association found that “more than seven in ten (71.3%) Cape and Islands residents support building affordable housing in their neighborhood,” higher than the statewide average of 64.8%.

We have a hard time believing that statistic tells the whole story. We can believe that most Cape and Islands residents understand that affordable housing is necessary to their security and a viable economy, but they do not want to do what is necessary to let that housing be built in their towns. Nearly every attempt to change zoning in a way that would allow multi-family units of any kind, including cluster zoning designed to preserve open space, seems to run into a buzz-saw of opposition.

Too often people talk the talk instead of walk the walk; ” I support affordable housing, just put it somewhere else!” Anything other than single-family homes on acre (or greater) lots is anathema to many Cape residents, and you simply cannot build affordable housing on Cape Cod with single-family homes on an acre.

One of the ideas we have advanced in the past is to allow development of multi-family units – apartments or small condos – on any land zoned for commercial development. But even this idea can meet a lot of resistance.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on a development proposal in San Francisco. When an old armory closed in the Mission District near city hall, developers bought the building and started to work at getting approval to change the zoning from industrial to residential.

Over time, developers sought permission to remodel the building into a church, a storage space or an apartment complex. But every proposal ran into a maze of zoning rules and objections from various interest groups, including those interested in preserving the site as historical and those who wanted it to be exclusively low-income housing.

In the end, one developer decided to stop fighting and find a use that did not require rezoning. Before long he found someone who wanted to turn the building into a film studio, and the city agreed that film production fell within existing zoning. But they overlooked one detail in the paperwork. The movies being produced were to be hardcore pornography.

Seems that the large stone rooms, winding staircases, marble columns and dank basement are perfect for some of the film ideas in the hopper at “Kink Films,” the new owner of the building.

Soon, where soldiers use to march, there will be a bunch of naked people playing paintball for the cameras. And the basement is perfect for a movie about zombies (naked of course)!

Reflexive opposition to any change in one’s neighborhood can sometimes lead to much worse development than that being opposed.

Affordable housing on Cape Cod is essential if we are to just maintain the conditions we have come to appreciate and expect. If we are unable to make reasonable accommodations to fit our needs we all may lose.

How pols hide their compensation

(Submitted by John Feeney)

Whenever we the people try to exercise some control over the compensation of those who lead our governmental and business organizations, the officials we are trying to control show extraordinary cleverness at finding ways around the limits we try to set.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on how chief executives have managed to turn stock options – which were designed to align the interests of stockholders and management – into a feeding trough for themselves, their board members and their top executives, at the expense of stockholders.

Examples of the same sort of chicanery in government have been reported recently in the Cape Cod Times. The Times tells us that some state officials are manipulating state pension rules to pad their retirements. Former State Senator and UMASS president Billy Bulger, for example, got his perks (like housing allowance) added to his salary and raised his pension by $29,000 t(o $196,000 a year.

Now, the Times tells us, former Representatives Thomas George of Yarmouth and Marie Parente are trying to get travel and office allowances calculated as part of their compensation so they can get thousands of dollars per year added to their pensions. (George has already managed to get credit for years of service as town moderator, boosting his pension by about $24,000 a year.)

One such manipulation that has yet to make the news as far as I can see is the attempt by Sandwich selectmen to grant some of them lifelong health benefits despite the vote of Sandwich Town Meeting.

At the town meeting last spring, the voters of Sandwich voted to stop giving paid health insurance to town officials who work part time. This article had to be submitted to the state legislature as a home rule petition, which took several months.

The legislature passed the home rule petition, making it law in Sandwich, but the Selectmen decided that it needed some interpretation. They submitted it to attorneys to decide whether or not it covered current selectmen.

After asking Representative Jeff Perry (who was not at Town Meeting when the vote was taken according to records of Town Clerk’s office), what he felt the legislature was voting on, the lawyers (who were paid by the selectmen out of town funds for their opinion) decided that the bill did not apply to current selectmen. In the end this will probably give lifetime benefits to one Selectman elected just after Town Meeting passed this petition and will do the same for two more selectmen if they get reelected this year.

This legal opinion could cost the town more than one million dollars per individual over the lifetime of those eligible and their spouses! Not bad for a $1,500 a year job and six years of service.

I wrote the petition on which the town voted and I can assure you that I intended to have it apply to current selectmen. Nothing that was said at town meeting contradicted that interpretation. But no one asked me. Instead they relied on the testimony of someone who was not present!

There is no easy way to stop this sort of thing. Those who benefit are very clever at hiding the benefits they receive. My suggestion is that we switch all state, city and town employees to a “defined contribution” plan for both pensions and health insurance.

A defined contribution system would do two things. It would make it much easier for taxpayers to know how much they are giving to their elected officials and employees, and it would limit our obligations to the defined contribution.

John Feeney is the former Chair of the Finance Committee in Sandwich

Wireless municipal Internet is here, now.

At the beginning of last year we wrote that Tempe, Arizona (pop 160,00) was first city of its size in US to be fully covered by wireless Internet service. Since then things have moved faster than we expected. According to the public radio program On The Media (onthemedia.org), no less than 300 municipalities in the United States are currently moving forward with this new technology, offering great benefits to their residents, businesses and visitors.

City-wide, wireless, high-speed Internet service is usually cheaper than cable or DSL and has no wires and no restrictions. It works in homes, businesses, parks, beaches, and on the road.

It seems that that there are several different ways to set up wireless Internet service. St Cloud Florida built its own wireless system using $3 million of tax money, and now offers Internet service free to all residents. The increase in taxes to pay for the system is more than offset, city officials claim, by the $600 or so per year that town residents save on high speed Internet service.

Champagne-Urbana, Illinois, and Corpus Christi, Texas have also created municipally owned systems, but they are not free. Corpus Christi claims the system has saved a lot of money on the city budget, partly by providing on-the-road Internet access to municipal employees, and partly because they use the net to read meters automatically. They claim to have eliminated 21 meter-reading jobs.

Philadelphia has chosen to license a private provider, Earthlink, to build and operate its system. Comcast and Verizon are not happy about this because Earthlink will offer high speed service for only $22 a month — $9.95 for households in the bottom third of income.

Boston (where close to 60% of the households do not have high speed Internet access) is working on a system that is closest to the most common European system in which the government builds the wireless network and then rents time at wholesale rates to as many Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) as want to use it. This creates competition among providers and keeps rates down.

My daughter, who lives in Ireland, was offered a choice of three wireless ISP’s and ten cable ISP’s. They had different speeds and different rates. She chose the one that was best for her.

In Boston, a non-profit corporation has been set up to raise money and build the system. It will then rent out space to various ISP’s at low, wholesale rates. Regular service will not be free, as it is in St. Cloud – they expect rates to be about $10 to $15 a month — but the Boston group envisions the possibility that one ISP will offer a free, ad-supported service.

The United States now ranks 21st in Internet access and affordability, according to the Department of Commerce, right behind Estonia. And Cape Cod is now falling behind many other cities and towns in the U.S.

Time to stop worrying about the gay marriage amendment and turn our attention to something that can keep us ahead of the curve. I look forward to seeing tourism ads that tell prospective Cape Cod visitors that they can take their laptops to the beach!

Where will the wind farms go?

The first time I drove through Southern California, I was struck by the unique beauty of the beaches. Then I drove by a cluster of oil wells! Oil wells? Yes, right on the beach?

I think of those machines moving up and down slowly, like a drinking duck, as they pumped out the last bits of oil from under those beautiful beaches every time I read another aesthetic objection to wind farms.

We expect California to put ugly metal derricks on its beaches. We do not object when huge drilling platforms are floated out into the gulf off Louisiana. We tear down whole mountains to mine coal for electricity. But when someone wants to put a silent, sleek wind tower anywhere near us, we say “Oh, no, not here. Our place is special –unlike any other. Windmills will ruin the unique view!”

Recently, Maine was the scene of a particularly bizarre example of this sort of thinking.
A company called “Maine Mountain Power” proposed a 30-unit wind farm in the northern woods of Maine. The wind farm could provide enough electricity for 40,000 homes and replace 730,000 pounds of pollution per day generated by a conventional fossil fuel plant. It would be built near Reddington, on old logging roads, in a relatively unpopulated area of Maine.

Some of the towers would be visible from the Appalachian Trail and others from the Sugarloaf Ski report, but mockup photographs show that they would appear small and distant.

Approval of the project was put into the hands of the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC) and on December 22nd, 2006, Maine papers reported that the LURC staff had recommended “…approval of a proposed wind farm project for Reddington Pond Range and Black Nubble Mountains near the Sugarloaf ski resort.”

“The staff’s analysis noted that the LURC had received more than 200 letters in support of the project, as well as support from former Maine Governor Angus King and several legislators, the president of Sugarloaf Ski Resort, and the Franklin Journal, Kennebec Journal, Lewiston Sun Journal, and Portland Press Herald.“

Sounds like a “win-win” right? Nope. At the end of January the board of the LURC, which supervises ten million acres of largely uninhabited “unorganized land,” rejected its staff’s recommendations and vetoed the Reddington project citing “concerns about its visual and environmental effects.”

If we cannot put wind farms where they will never be seen by 99.99% of all Americans; if we cannot put them in a small part of ten million acres of woods; if we cannot have them on land that had previously been cleared by loggers, then where can we put them? And if we don’t start building them right now, might it not be too late to save the planet for our grandkids?

Take this test.

If you were asked to vote on the following laws, how would you vote?

Would you vote in favor of a law that required news media to submit any article to an appointed accuracy review commission before publication?

Would you vote in favor of a law that required all public officeholders to take their oath using a Christian or Jewish Bible?

Would you vote in favor of a law allowing cities and towns to pass zoning ordnances forbidding churches or temples or mosques in their community?

Would you vote to allow government tax dollars to support religious schools?

Do you think it should be made illegal for companies to hire lobbyists to press Congress for what they want?

Would you support a law that allows the government to arrest and detain citizens suspected of terrorist activity without having to show any evidence of guilt to a court?

Would you support a law that did not allow bail for accused sex offenders, requiring them to be kept in jail until trial?

If someone commits a crime do you think they should be required to pay for their own lawyer, or apply for private charity?

If you voted yes on any of these eight items, you have voted against a provision in the Bill of Rights in The United States Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court. You would not be alone. I did an informal survey of 28 friends, and more than half (15) of them were in favor of at removing at least one of these rights (seven would remove two or more).

Surveys show that most Americans do not understand the Bill of Rights and the protections it offers. For example, in a recent survey by the Bill of Rights Institute, 53% social studies teachers answered “Yes” when asked whether the government can legally stop publication of news in advance simply by claiming that the information may damage national security. The Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional in 1971.

One of the drawbacks of a democratic government is that it can become a tool for the “tyranny of the majority”. The founders of our form of government made the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution so that no legislature could deny its carefully enumerated rights simply by passing a bill, even if this bill were supported by a majority of voters.

The only way to take these rights away from citizens is to amend the Constitution, and the founders made that very difficult. The battle must be fought not only in Congress but also in every state legislature. That is why the “Equal Rights Amendment” –despite broad support and years of effort — did not pass.

Those who set up the Massachusetts constitution put in a different system. They made it much easier for the will of the people to be expressed in the form of an amendment. One might call it true democracy, but there are times when true democracy is not a good idea.

If the framers had set up a similar system, our guess is that much of the Bill of Rights would have been repealed by now. There are times — and we believe that the amendment forbidding gay marriage is one of them — where the will of the people should not be followed.

Vietnam and Iraq, deja vu all over again?

Arriving in Vietnam for the first time, George Bush could not resist referring to the war in Iraq. Among other things, he said “We’ll succeed –unless we quit.”

Apparently President Bush thinks we could have won the war in Vietnam had we ”stayed the course” beyond the eight years and 58,000 American lives we devoted to the effort. He also seems to believe we are winning the war in Iraq. The facts on the ground do not seem to affect his thinking.

Two other American presidents ignored the facts in Vietnam.

It was twenty-eight years ago, in early 1968, that the Tet offensive shocked us into reconsideration of what we were doing. Even though it failed to achieve the great victory wished for by the North Vietnamese, Tet showed the American people that what they had been told about the state of the war was wrong. We weren’t winning.

After Tet, President Johnson stopped the bombing of the north to jump-start a peace process, which never went anywhere. In November, Richard Nixon was elected president, partly based on a “secret plan” to end the war.

Nixon’s plan was “Vietnamization.” He was going to give the South Vietnamese the resources and training necessary to fight the war themselves, and as they stood up, America would stand down, although they did not use that Bush-like phrase.

Just like the Iraq War today, the Vietnam War was marked by great disagreement over what we should do about a war that was obviously not going the way we had hoped. Could we win it? What would happen if we lost it? The periodicals of the time are full of the debate, and it sounds eerily familiar to the debate we are hearing today over Iraq.

Senator Aiken of Vermont said we should simply “declare victory” and go home. Senator Kennedy argued in favor of a negotiated mutual withdrawal of the North Vietnamese and American armies, leaving the South Vietnamese government and the indigenous Communist rebels (the Viet Cong) to fight it out in a civil war.

Others pushed for a negotiated settlement with the north that would not take the south’s wishes into account, followed by a gradual withdrawal of American troops. All of these would be called “cut and run” today by Karl Rove and his clients.

There was also a movement to replace (once again) the South Vietnamese regime with a “more democratic” government. There was a growing awareness of the corruption and incompetence of the existing leaders.

In fact, we did not change much about our approach and we never did negotiate a peace. Five years after Tet, and almost 30,000 more dead Americans later, we declared the Vietnamese Army ready to win the war on its own, and left. Shortly thereafter North Vietnam took over the whole country. And the world knew we had lost the war.

As time passed Americans learned what most of the world had long known: The war was unnecessary. There was nothing serious at stake. The world went on. There was no domino effect. Communism was not seriously strengthened. And now we are about to sign trade agreements with our former enemy.