health care – Hank Kalet

Private hospitals are public facilities

The federal ruling that religious schools and health institutions are required to provide coverage for contraception does not violate the religious freedom of religious institutions.

While Catholic bishops throughout the country are taking to their pulpits to denounce the ruling, the reality is that the church’s decision to offer a public service to the larger public places the question in a very different context.

Catholic hospitals, like St. Peter’s in New Brunswick, serve more than just a Roman Catholic population. They serve the entire community.

In many communities, those hospitals are the only health-care facilities.

In almost all cases, the facilities get tax breaks and generally get federal money for services (Medicare, Medicaid, other health-care money).

These facilities benefit greatly from their roles as community facilities.

Given this, it is difficult to see how we can consider them private and allow religious exemptions.

What do you think? Check out the poll on New Brunswick Patch and weigh in.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

The wrong medicine

Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, is considered one of the Senate’s staunchest Medicare defenders. So what is he doing working with U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan on a plan to unravel the federal health-care program?

From the Times:
The new Wyden-Ryan proposal would make major structural changes in Medicare and limit the government’s open-ended financial commitment to the program.

Under the proposal, known as premium support, Medicare would subsidize premiums charged by private insurers that care for beneficiaries under contract with the government.
Congress would establish an insurance exchange for Medicare beneficiaries. Private plans would compete with the traditional Medicare program and would have to provide at least the same benefits. The federal contribution in each region would be based on the cost of the second-cheapest option, whether that was a private plan or traditional Medicare.
In addition, the growth of Medicare would be capped; in general, spending would not be allowed to increase more than the growth of the economy, plus 1 percentage point — a much slower rate of increase than Medicare has historically experienced.

The plan is supposed to open the existing system to competition and lower prices, which seems unlikely. The problem with Medicare is not that it lacks competition, but that it is far too small a program and only includes the segment of society that uses the most health care. What we know about Medicare, when compared with other insurance options, is that it has much lower overhead than the private sector. Its costs have been rising not because of inefficiency but because health-care costs more generally are skyrocketing.

We need to stop talking about Medicare as if it is separate from the larger health-care system and look to it as a solution for the failures of the private insurance industry. With nearly 50 million Americans lacking insurance and private insurers damaging the profitability of American businesses, it is clear that private insurers are not the solution to rising premiums. They are the problem.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Winners in the pension reform debate? Not workers and not NJ taxpayers

Tom Moran says it took “real leadership” for the state Senate to change the state’s pension and benefit rules.

I’d call it shortsighted — and not because it has angered the state’s public worker unions.

The problem with the reform bill, which passed today, is that it accelerates the race to the bottom. The argument being made is that public worker benefits must be brought in line with private sector ones, that the public workers are getting a free ride paid for by the rest of us. It is a brilliant move, of course, because it divides workers, pitting them against each other and ending any chance that workers will act in unison and demand better retirement and health benefits.

Instead, we have private sector folks demanding that public worker benefits be gutted, that they be made to deal with the same crappy benefits offered by the private sector.

The problems we face were created by state legislators and governors of both parties who refused to pay what was needed into the state pension fund over the last two decades and who have spent longer than that pretending that we can expand services without asking anyone to pay.

And now that the bill has come due, we expect the court clerk and the cop on the beat to cover the tab.

We should be demanding that private sector workers get the same benefits as public workers, that we get the same pension benefits and that the rich — who are paying less in taxes now and who are raking in record profits — cover the costs. That can’t happen as long as we scapegoat unions and public sector workers.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

End collective bargaining on health care — by expanding Medicare to everyone

The governor — with support from the Democratic leadership of both houses of the Legislature — wants to end collective bargaining over health benefits for New Jersey public sector unions.

Governor Chris Christie was the big winner last night when he and the state’s top Democratic and Republican legislative leaders announced they had reached agreement on legislation that would require teachers, police, firefighters and other government employees to pay more toward their pensions and healthcare.

The agreement would effectively strip public employees of the right to bargain over health benefits in their union contracts by having the state unilaterally set health benefit contribution levels through legislation. The unions will undoubtedly challenge any such law in court, but previous court opinions in New Jersey, Wisconsin and other states have upheld the legality of such laws.

Maybe they are on to something.

We should end collective bargaining over health benefits — by instituting a single-payer system, a Medicare-for-All. Seems pretty simple to me.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Balancing the budget on the backs of the poor

Gov. Chris Christie’s budget envisions savings in the state’s Medicaid bills, which he says will be instituted through an overhaul that will force the federal government to make changes in the program.

But the plan on table is not so much an overhaul but a rollback that will push more of the costs of the health program designed to help those who cannot afford health care onto the very people it is supposed to help. Christie says “he wants to move Medicaid recipients into managed care” and he is proposing a series of other changes, including cutting reimbursements to nursing homes and a “$3 co-pay at adult day care centers, which take care of more than 12,000 adult residents with mental and physical disabilities. The move is expected to save the state about $1.9 million.”

The savings are minimal in the scheme of the larger budget, but as advocates for the poor and disabled pointed out during a hearing yesterday, the co-pays and other changes “would deter many disabled residents and their families from using the adult day care centers. They said the already cash-strapped facilities would then see less money due to declining enrollment.”

Christie is right to want the federal government to step in and fix Medicaid — though I suspect he has little interest in a real fix (single-payer). In any case, this is not the way to go about balancing the state’s budget.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.