This week’s Dispatches, as promised, is on the incredibly flawed OLS opinion on clean elections.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
Runner’s diary, Thursday
Hit the road for four miles while listening to The Police (a mix of songs from the first two albums).
Questions of life and death
A story that ran today on ABC.com is one of those stories that proves the how American politics has become incapable of dealing with difficult issues.
According to ABC, Barbara Wagner had reached the end-point with her lung cancer, with her only hope being “a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her.” Her insurance company, however, refused to pay for it and instead offered a substitute.
What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.
A heartless response, to be sure, but one that is wholly consistent with a medical system designed to generate profit and not necessarily to provide care.
I have always been ambivalent about legalizing assisted suicide. On the one hand, I don’t believe that we should empower anyone to help another take a life and I don’t think suicide is a solution, that death comes when it comes. But I can understand the urge, when faced with severe, longterm pain. And I’m uncomfortable giving the state a role in such a decision.
But I think the state has to have a role. There is a compelling interest in protecting the patient from a doctor, family member or even an insurance company from pushing death as a cheaper alternative than treatment.
I am not prepared to take a position on Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, or the ballot question being debated in Washington state, but I have to question whether we can continue to allow these decisions to be made based on the market and corporate profits.
“Her case is hardly unique,” said Michigan lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, who defended Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s crusade to legalize physician-assisted deaths. “In the rest of the country insurance companies are making these decisions and are not paying for suicide,” Fieger told ABCNews.com. “Involuntary choices are foisted on people all the time by virtue of denials.”
“I am surprised there hasn’t been a revolt in this country,” he said. “It happens every day and people are helpless.”
It would be easy to paint the insurance companies as the villians in this mess. After all, they sent a horribly insensitive letter and have crafted rules that limit the use of expensive drugs. But they are only acting in the role we’ve assigned them. We have put them in the role of gate-keeper of care, allowing financial decisions to trump medical ones.
First, we have to take the system back and remove profit as its guiding principle. As long as the goal is to maximize profit, we will be looking for ways to cut costs for the sake of cutting costs. That could mean, as in this case, opting for the cheaper drug and death over the expensive one that adds only a few months to life.
Consider this:
But But a 1998 study from Georgetown University’s Center for Clinical Bioethics found a strong link between cost-cutting pressures on physicians and their willingness to prescribe lethal drugs to patients — were it legal to do so.
The study warns that there must be “a sobering degree of caution in legalizing [assisted death] in a medical care environment that is characterized by increasing pressure on physicians to control the cost of care.”
Cancer drugs can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 a month. The cost of lethal medication, on the other hand, is about $35 to $50.
Strict guidelines are needed, and they can only be arrived at via public debate that asks the question: How much is life worth? How much would you be willing to pay to extend your life by a month? By six months? By a year? At what point is it no longer worth it?
And who pays? Should the answers to these questions depend on a patient’s financial situation, as they do now? (The wealthy can by medical services not available to the poor, meaning that the same $4,000 life-extender that was out of reach for Ms. Wagner might be easily obtainable for someone else — and not necessarily Donald Trump.)
The questions are not easy ones, but they have to be asked — especially with the accelorating pace of technological change creating treatment opportunities everyday that were not available in the past.
Surprise: Anti-clean elections groupissues report condemning clean elections
The Center for Competitive Politics — the euphemistically named organization that opposes public financing of elections — has issues what it is calling a “study” that it says shows that special interests still control New Jersey politics.
The organization says that
members of interest groups provided the majority of “qualifying contributions” for candidates participating in the 2007 ?Clean Elections’ pilot project.
The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) was the most frequently represented interest group among contributors.
NJEA members made up more than one quarter of all contributors. Members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) were the top givers to Republican candidates in the 24th district, making up nearly one-third of all donors in that district. NRA members also provided 17.9 percent of contributions to Republicans in the 14th District.
Other interest groups whose members provided significant support included New Jersey Right to Life (18.1 percent to Republicans in the 24th District), NARAL Pro-Choice New Jersey (16.7 percent to Democrats in the 14th District), the Communications Workers of America (16.7 percent to Republicans in the 14th District), and the Sierra Club (15.6 percent to Democrats in the 24th District).
This would be damning if it were more than just a direct-mail attack on the program. While the Center has some academic connections, the so-called study was just a mail survey similar in nature to the surveys that the Democratic and Republican National Committees send out as fundraising tools.
Sen. Bill Baroni, a Mercer County Republican and clean-elections backer, said the numbers issued in the so-called report do not match his experience with the program.
He told PolitickerNJ:
“I don’t know where they got their data, so God bless them. I can tell you that every one of our contributions was one in a series of backyard barbeques and coffee gatherings organized by individuals, along with some mailings,” he said.
Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts, D-Camden, a supporter of clean elections, was more blunt, telling The Star-Ledger,
“This unscientific ‘survey’ and its results are not persuasive at all and just another excuse (for opponents) to oppose the program.”
(Tomorrow’s Dispatches will focus on the Davis decision that opponents are using to challenge clean elections.)
Race and the race — again
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column on race and the presidential race that called Barack Obama’s race the “wild card” in this year’s election. Basically, I said, there will be an element of the electorate that views him only through the prism of his skin color and that could — not will, but could — help determine the outcome.
The Princeton Packet picked it up, as well, leading to this letter to the editor:
I read with amusement and dismay the “Dispatches” column by Hank Kalet in Tuesday’s Packet (“Race and the presidential contest”).
His column ascribing racism to the failure of Obama to open up a bigger lead against John McCain might be more convincing were Obama actually an African-American as Mr. Kalet claims. Last time I looked Obama was biracial, just as are Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter, rather popular public personalities. Next time Mr Kalet may want to “Dispatch” a fact-checker before he launches a diatribe against racism and the November election.
John McCain, on the other hand, is old. His date of birth and appearance confirm this. When I ask my daughter’s friends why they won’t vote for him, I invariably am told, “He looks so old.” I await a column in The Packet on ageism in the presidential contest.
In November, when I and millions of others cast our votes for McCain, race will have nothing to do with it. Indeed, all things equal, I feel a bi-racial or multi-racial president would be quite desireable. Obama’s extraordinary inexperience, perceived arrogance and ultra-liberal political record are why I could never consider him as my November choice.
Nelson Obus
Princeton
Hmmm. First, as readers of the column know, I never said should Obama lose it will be because of racist McCain voters. There no doubt are some, possibly plenty, who are racist. But an Obama loss, if it happens, will be attributable to myriad factors, the same way that a McCain loss will be based on numerous questions.
But to ignore race — especially in the wake of the recent dust-up over who has injected it into the campaign — is to American history and American culture.
The Packet on Friday weighed in, reminding us as much:
True, a voter need hardly be a racist to prefer Sen. McCain to Sen. Obama for president. True also, pollsters and journalists are not mind readers. But the durability of racism is no figment of our imaginations, no matter what color the next president turns out to be.
