aRdent Voice

First of all, my solution for “reform” or actually trust-busting of healthcare for small businesses, self-employed and individuals does not involve tax money, subsidies, or much of anything else from government except mandating some rule changes. Most of these will be at the state level, though it would be necessary to make a small change in HIPAA at the Fed level.

The biggest single problem for all of us “little guys” (small businesses, self-employed and individuals) is the high cost to get into or maintain health insurance coverage, if we can get it at all. This is primarily because the insurance companies and groups, whether private for-profit or run by local or regional non-profit hospital groups, insist on dealing with small entities on a group-by-group basis. This means that a business with 10 employees that includes two or three with chronic conditions or a complicated pregnancy is going to pay a fortune in premiums.

In many cases, the employer simply cannot afford to include enough of the premium in their benefits to have anything left over to actually pay the employees. Since some employees may be able to get coverage through their spouse, the employer may be able to simply not offer healthcare and still attract enough workers. Nonetheless, many small businesses would like to be able to offer coverage to attract a larger pool of workers and perhaps to have group coverage for themselves as well.

This gets really tough if you are self-employed. Unless you are married with a spouse that has good coverage at their job, about the only option is an individual policy. Individual policies are not only very expensive, they also do not have to accept your pre-existing condition the way a group does under HIPAA.

It would seem that the obvious thing to do would be to organize some sort of group that various small businesses and self-employed people could join or affiliate  with so that the insurance companies had to deal with them as a group of say 500 people, rather than many small groups and individuals.  There would be one administrator for the insurance company to deal with and the risk would be spread out over a larger group, so that 2 or 3 people with chronic conditions no longer represented 25% of the group. This affiliation would also be a group under HIPAA, so those in it would have complete portability of their coverage from employer to employer, or  from employer to consultant/contractor.

Anyway, this grouping of lots of small businesses, self-employeds and free-lancers to get affordable health coverage sounds like a great idea, right? Not if you are an insurance company. This sounds like something that has to be prevented,  and that is exactly what has happened. Although it is possible to put together a group and negotiate with perhaps one carrier to give your group coverage based on some sort of membership or professional commonality, it is next to impossible to just get together a mixed bag of several dozen small businesses and free-lancers and define it as a group, then get coverage quotes and let your members make an annual choice on which of several competing levels of coverage they want. Why? Because it is highly profitable for insurers to demand that each employer be defined as a group and make the free-lancer/self-employed apply as individuals. This is especially profitable for them when dealing with self-employed people who usually have to buy individual policies because the insurer can exclude pre-existing conditions. If this were a group plan, the HIPAA rules would not allow them to exclude pre-existing conditions.

As more and more of us become free-lancers, consultants, self-employed, this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue and becoming more and more profitable for the insurers.

What needs to happen here is legislation to force the insurers to deal with independent groups on the same basis as large employers including full portability of coverage. If you have a group of 500 people, it really doesn’t matter whether you all work for the same firm or not as far as your likelihood of illness/disease is concerned, so why are the insurers able to insist that it does?

This is NOT a case of government meddling in private business. Ask anyone that knows me, I’m a raving Libertarian. What this is is getting both state and federal governments to STOP allowing the insurers to cherry-pick the group size and composition they choose to deal with and actually restore free enterprise.

Free enterprise is a wonderful thing when it actually is free. When it uses government to grant monopolies or let it play by “special rules” that no other business gets to play by, it is no longer free enterprise. This is the root problem of our health no-care system now. The insurers, drug-peddlers and various other health-industry lobbyists have so gummed up the works with “special rules” that is has no resemblance whatsoever to free enterprise.

The Democrat solution is take money from some to pay for the rest and the Republican solution is to keep telling us that the Democrats are trying to socialize healthcare, and preaching  status quo ante. Meanwhile both sides continue to rake in campaign cash from the healthcare industry and enjoy a gold-plated benefit plan that we are all paying for.

If small entities and the self-employed could get affordable coverage through groups or co-ops, the numbers of uninsured and underinsured would drop appreciably, without any tax money! Let’s try this before we throw out more $Billions.

Once again the gun-haters have something to scream about and once again they fail to distinguish between those who abide by the laws of the land and those who do not.  It is abundantly clear that some folks just do not understand that making or changing rules only affects the actions of those who abide by those rules.  It is already legal to have loaded firearms on property managed by the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management.

Senator Coburn’s amendment only makes it consistent across the board to also include National Parks  and Wildlife Refuges. Since some of these can be contained within others, it has been pretty complicated and those that were  trying to comply with the laws often had a job trying to find out exactly who managed the land they were hiking or camping on.

Keep in mind also, that this new provision only allows concealed carry if it is already allowed in the state where the park is located and then only if you have a carry permit. For those that enjoy hiking and such in the back country, it will be nice be able to legally protect yourself from predators, whether they have four legs or two. As far as the “worst-case scenario” that is painted by the Brady Campaign (and usually embraced by the Tulsa World) it is highly unlikely that your family is going to be staring down an AK-47 while on a picnic since most states do not allow open carry, and even then pointing or waving a firearm in a manner that appears menacing to others, known as brandishing,  is still a criminal act in most states and locales.

Just because you will be allowed to have a loaded firearm in your vehicle or on your person does not automatically transform the area in a free-fire zone. Much to the chagrin of the local daily fish-wrapper, allowing citizens to carry concealed firearms has not suddenly transformed our streets into a non-stop wild west shootout, so there is no reason to think that it will be any different in federal parks and wildlife refuges.  If anything, it means that these often isolated and remote areas will no longer be “no one will shoot back” areas, and thus be safer for the law-abiding to visit.

When seconds count, the nearest park ranger is only miles away . . .  if you can even get a signal on your cellphone.

And, for the record, I do agree that attaching this provision to the credit card legislation is goofy and says a lot about what is wrong with our Congress and the games that are played in order to get things done.

What do Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity, Rosie O’Donnell and Keith Olbermann all have in common? They are entertainers.

Before you bow down and follow them or anyone else that makes their living by entertaining an audience, keep in mind that it’s all about entertainment and ratings and how much can we sell airtime for. None of these screaming or whining pundits of the airwaves has or is likely to ever run for office or actually “do” anything. At least with cage-fighting there is no pretense that it is anything else but watching gladiators.

The sooner we quit letting entertainment people drive the political agenda, the better off the republic will be. It’s bad enough that we have 24-hour entertainment masquerading as news in order to sell more pharmaceuticals, identity-theft insurance and gold investment schemes. We don’t have to let this bear-baiting in suits run the political process.

Rush and Rosie are both big fat idiots, and we are too if we let people like them drive the bus!

Spent a long weekend in New Orleans, attending the first weekend of the 40th New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Jazzfest runs for two long weekends, featuring seven full days of fantastic music, food, arts & crafts. Some of the biggest and best names in contemporary jazz, blues, zydeco, and other cajun music styles. A dozen stages – yes 12 of them, all running from about 11 am to 7 pm each of the seven days.

The first weekend, the big names were James Taylor, Dave Matthews Band, Robert Cray Band, Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Etta James, Johnny Winter, Pete Seeger.

Etta James at JazzFest 2009

Second weekend features Bonnie Raitt, Tony Bennett, Neil Young, Bon Jovi, Buddy Guy, The Neville Brothers, Dr. John, John Mayall, Poncho Sanchez Latin Band, among others.

This must have cost a fortune. Nah, $35 per day in advance, $50 at the gate. Food and drink prices were very reasonable. Best gumbo and etouffee I’ve eaten for $5 each. Big cups with way more meat and veggies than the cafe we tried on Rue Chartres in the French Quarter for a lot less money. Beers were $4 per can.

Guess what! They actually deal in real money at all the vendor booths. None of this Festscript crap that our city has accepted as gospel.

Being new to the area, we opted for the Jazz Fest shuttle. $14 each, roundtrip. Turns out it was a good buy as the parking was free and secured and the drivers knew how to avoid most of the traffic.

Now the real fun. There were untold thousands and thousands of people there and everyone we ran into was pretty darn decent. We had been told in advance by others to be shocked that Jazzfest would not be the drunken brawl that once was Mardi Gras. They were right. They was a large number of middle-age and older folks and we never did see any loud, rude drunks. We’re thinking that this may be due to having it all in mid afternoon and being done by 7 pm.

Past year’s Jazz Fest have had upwards of 350,000 total attendance. The Times-Picayune showed an aerial shot of the crowd listening to Dave Matthews that they said was “tens of thouands.” And the other 11 stages were also running, though obviously to a smaller crowd.

Bottom line here is that the folks that put this thing together clearly know what they are doing. Many, many people came and went, eat, drank, danced and chilled to lots of different musicians and had a great time. It’s no wonder that this gig is now in its 40th year.

Perhaps, just perhaps, some of our local fest organizers can admit that they don’t know it all and find out how to put together something that runs this smoothly year after year.

Music -James Taylor never connected with the crowd or us. After a few songs we moved to another stage and caught Johnny Winter. Taylor was probably good for those that forgot their lithium that day. Knowing that Dave Matthews would be seriously crowded, we opted for Etta James instead and were very glad we did. She’s on both of our iPods and still has the magic in person at 71. Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra were awesome. They played with Yacub Addy and Odadaa of Ghana. What a fantastic combination. Robert Cray also played an excellent set.

We will definitely go back. Tip – save some serious $ and stay in Slidell. It’s less than 30 minutes to French Quarter or Jazz Fest parking.

David Brooks’ column in today’s NY Times (Money for Idiots) points out that these government bailouts and stimuli will necessarily end up supporting some of the most reckless while ignoring those who were responsible and prudent, but that it is probably inevitable.

This effort faces the same challenge as most government assistance. We want to provide enough help to keep the community from crumbling, but not enough to subsidize and therefore encourage irresponsibility. From there on it gets into definitions of responsibility and crumbling. The assistance has to have a price that is only a little better than collapse to keep it from becoming a subsidy for recklessness.

I do not want my neighborhood to become a sea of empty foreclosed houses, but there are limits on how much I can afford to keep it from happening before it becomes attractive to stop paying my mortgage too.

This is probably not a good time to wonder how we are going to mange all this national debt as the baby boomers come in to social security and medicare with IRAs and 401(k)s that were supposed to keep them comfortable, now worth a fraction of their value.
Seniors will be competing with youth for entry-level jobs in call centers and retail and giving an ever-larger portion of their pay to the government.

Finally someone is going to lay done some reality rules for the firms that take OUR tax money bailout. The administration’s proposed cap on executive compensation is a good start, but also needs to address things like the infamous Merrill-Lynch executive suite remodeling and other extreme perks of the Marie Antoinette class of executive royalty that has driven many of our largest firms into ruin.

Despite what Rush Limbaugh and other entertainers will say, this is NOT undermining free enterprise. This IS the price of coming to the taxpayers with your hand out. Free enterprise means free to succeed and free to fail no matter how large or small.

The enormous salaries, bonuses and stock options are supposedly ensuring that firms can compete for the very best executive talent.  When we look at what these highly-compensated super executives have done to many Wall Street and automotive companies, it is hard to imagine how someone could have done worse. For some time now a variety of business/financial writers have been decrying the bloated compensation for top executives, regardless of their performance, but for the most part the stockholders of these firms were powerless to change it.

At least now the taxpayers won’t have to keep rewarding failed performance in this area and there is a chance that the stockholders may once again have some say.

“If you take the King’s shilling you must do the King’s bidding.”

That seems to be the message we are hearing from Washington these last few weeks. If the “best and brightest” of the new administration’s nominees cannot be bothered to accurately pay their taxes we can only wonder about those passed over for consideration for a senior post in the Executive Branch.

Who would have thought that the “cleanest” one of the bunch would be Hillary Clinton. It looks like the White House needs to get the people that vetted HRC before her campaign to work for Obama’s team now.

And rememeber, if these folks had not been nominated to head an Executive Branch agency, they likely would never have paid the taxes that we now find were long due.

A recent AP Story, picked up by a number of outlets, details that lots of those giant banks that taxpayers are now bailing out have sought government permission to bring in thousands of foreign workers, even while they were laying off lots of American workers.

Why would they do this – because it is cheaper. If you can’t offshore the whole company, then bring in cheaper offshore labor and dump the US workers. These are some of the same giant banks that are pinging us with sudden jumps in credit card interest and incredible fees. Am I shocked and surprised that giant banks are behaving this way? No. Despite tons of public relations efforts from stadium naming rights to landscaping the public roads to anything else that will show banks as good citizens and neighbors, we are still talking about the business of usury. Banking is about one thing – MONEY. Whether you are talking about money changers from centuries past, or Potter’s Bank in “It’s a Wonderful Life” or Shylock from the “Merchant of Venice”, they are all fixated on money – or their pound of flesh in lieu of the money.

It is sad and disappointing that the very banks that came rattling their tin cups to the Treasury to save them from their own rampant greed were also going to great lengths to save money by bringing in foreign workers to fill jobs in U.S. offices while they were dumping U.S. workers. This is a the worst type of abuse of the whole H1-B visa program. This is way below bringing in scabs during a strike to keep the plant or mine running.

It is sad, but unfortunately not terribly surprising. It is the nature of the beast, no matter how much glitter or community relations they try to dress it up with.

The local daily fish wrapper continues to show its true nature while its spirals constrict itself into oblivion. Granted, the story by Michael Bates in this week’s Urban Tulsa Weekly is embarrassing – or at least should be.  However, according to the story about the libel suit in the daily, it is the issue of circulation numbers that prompted the suit. Never mind that a local-family-owned paper is behaving far worse than any corporate behemoth in luring people away from other jobs, just so they can be laid off in less than a year. And this has apparently happened twice in the last twelve months. Never mind that their editorial policy seems to drift back and forth from whatever BOK wants to “build anything anywhere and let the taxpayers pay for it” to “never seen a tax we didn’t like” (except a tax on advertising).

Tactically, I suppose they had to file the suit, otherwise it implies that the story is exactly correct. Whether or not it is, we may never know as these things have a way of being settled to prevent the expenses from going through the roof. In many libel actions, it’s not whether you can prove the truth of your story, it is whether you can afford to go to court in the first place to be able to prove your story.  Fear of the legal expenses in a libel action effectively squelches many stories in small town publications. I certainly applaud Bates and UTW publisher Keith Skrzypcak for going out on the limb for this.

In the Tulsa World story about the suit, World Publisher Robert E. Lorton III is quoted as saying he “does not object to criticism of himself or the World but will not stand for impugning the organization’s honesty.”

So, getting folks to quit a job and come work for you, just to be laid off a few months later is just “business” and does not reflect on the paper’s integrity. This is indicative of the real problem.

What was once a newspaper has become simply a company that prints ads and game scores seven days a week. The odd space that doesn’t carry a hearing aid ad or an Amish miracle heater ad is filled with wire copy, barely rewritten press releases, investigations of puppy mills, or Wayne Greene’s pathetic attempts to find something even lamer and more self-indulgent than Springer Spaniels to write about.

It is especially sad because I know there are still good, capable journalists there. I went to J-school with some of them and have seen the quality of their work, then and now. Sure do miss the Tribune. I didn’t always agree with their positions on things, but at least it actually was a newspaper that was not totally controlled by the local oligarchy.

Who knows, in another year we may be reading Urban Tulsa Daily. Let’s hope so.

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Finally had to throw in a comment on the silliness of the “consultant from out-of-town” observing that our parks look like cemeteries because of all the memorials. News Flash – memorials are NOT in cemeteries, graves are. Memorials are typically spread around a city or town, or located on or near a spot being memorialized. The great memorials in D.C., Lincoln, Washington, Vietnam Veterans, etc. are not in Arlington Cemetery, but rather in the city itself. Likewise, in our fair city we have memorials to a variety of war veterans, as well as individual people and events located throughout the city – not in cemeteries.

Tulsa has been blessed with an abundance of people that we wish to remember. I am also proud that we have a strong spirit of remembering people and events as it encourages us to draw strength from those that have given of themselves in so many ways.

The “Up With Trees” program is a great way to maintain and expand Tulsa’s urban forest. It is not surprising that people would choose to honor friends or family members by donating to this effort and having a small, simple wooden sign added. If you will actually read many of the signs, you will see that many of them honor living people and their efforts to make life in Tulsa better for us all. Tulsa’s people are remarkably generous with their time and their money and a living group of trees is a great way to acknowledge those special people who go the extra mile.

As far as the River Parks in particular, I feel that some of the NatureWorks pieces could be better integrated into the park with landscaping and such, but they are wonderful pieces and I enjoy them whether cycling or driving in the area. There are other pieces of art in River Parks that I do not understand or relate to, but this is a park for all of Tulsa and I would not want to see it dumbed down to the Thomas Kinkade or Terry Redlin level of greeting card works.

In short, Tulsans from all walks of life have given of themselves and I think it is great that we choose to honor them all over town, not just on the courthouse lawn. I also think it is great that we have a variety of art pieces in our public spaces for all to enjoy.  Just because you do not love a particular piece on first viewing doesn’t mean you can’t get something from it if you will open up and give it a try.