TheGibsonReport.today.com

It’s time to get the “politics” out of health coverage for the poor and uninsured. According to The Washington Post (07-19-07), a bipartisan Senate proposal to boost the State Children’s Health Insurance Program by seven billion dollars a year for five years got a thumbs down from President Bush on July 18, 2007.

Right now the 10-year old program is costing the federal governent $5 billion a year. But the president says the 6.6 million kids whose families can’t afford private insurance don’t need that much of a boost. The president proposes, instead, boosting the program only $1 billion a year for the next five years. Why so little? The president says he doesn’t want an additional 3.3 million children added to the program which the additional funds would cover… for one important reason: the insurance industry would suffer.

Specifically, the president told The Washington Post this - “My concern is that when you expand eligbility… you’re really beginning to open up an avenue for people to switch from private insurance to the government.”

Now that’s an old and familiar argument often served up by economists who argue that freeloaders will come out of the woodwork. This woodwork theory is an effectively protective device for maintaining the status quo. And that is, after all, the conservative way of life, isn’t it? Conservatives want to conserve or keep things as they are. BUT… should the children suffer?

The president is quoted as saying he is not going to “surrender a good and important idea before the debate really gets started.” Yet, the paradox is that expanded funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program is supported by both Republicans and Democrats, at the same time that the leader of the Republican Party does not.

So when President Bush says no deal on a health plan for poorer kids because of what he calls “philosophical” differences… he is clearly putting politics before the health needs of children. He is, in effect, saying let the marketplace solve the problem. That means the president favors subsidizing private insurance companies which are then expected to subsidize health coverage for poor kids.

In other words… a conservative philosophy endorses the idea that the role of government should be minimize; marketplace solutions are the ideal…. even for health care. Sounds like the same philosophical argument for not embracing a national health care system. It’s time to forget the past! The real debate in the 21st century is not likely to begin until citizens arm themselves with knowledge and begin to understand the economic politics driving the health care debate.

Bottom line… What is in the best or common interest of the general public? Health care for all, health care only for those who can purchase it from private insurance companies or be subsidized with the purchase of policies at lower rates?

We should not accept at face value the president’s contention that expanding health coverage for poor kids will pave the way for “people to switch from private insurance.” An informed citizentry needs to ask the following questions: Under what conditions will that happen? What would prompt people who already can’t afford private insurance for their children to switch from the private insurance they already don’t have?

The president’s threat to veto compromised funding bills in the senate and house before the congressional recess in August… deserves a national debate.

Now is the time to speak out and remind legislators and the president of the public interest in the health care needs of non-insured children.

The money that could be used for enhancing education for DC Public School students is going into salaries for top administrators… thanks to Mayor Fenty.  He’s pushing the City Council to pay the new chancellor and the new head of facilities more than $275,000 each - nearly $100,000 more than ever paid to any school administrator in the history of the school system.  What we’re talking about here is POLITICS!!!  Politics forced the mayor’s hand to fill the chancellor position with someone endorsed by the White House and other political insiders.  BUT… as one who has taught in the DC Public School System, let me tell you, what is needed is not better paid administrators as the mayor thinks or better teachers, as the chancellor’s believes… BUT a reduction of bureaucrats and administrators who get to age in place and persist in maintaining mediocrity downtown.  How else does one explain an urban school system in the 21st century using antiquated payroll, attendance, and other methods?  We all know that change is needed in the school system… but it is the approach to change that is suspect. The mayor’s great transformation is not grounded in research. Instead of demanding fact-finding or evidence, politicians at the city, state, and federal level have endorsed theories and the word of an enthusiastic mayo; there’s little evidence that the mayor and his chancellor appreciate how historically difficult change is because of entrenched insiders when they advocate that better teachers will turn the school system around.  WRONG!!! They blew a miracle by not bringing together both insiders and outsiders before the unprecedented take-over.   

I’m a student of the Larry Cuban school of thought and an innovative teacher award recipient, so I know the importance of change from the bottom up as well as the top down.

Without parental, community, teacher, and student involvement, there is a good chance the new chancellor is either going to become a firefighter - putting out fires - or the sister of the little boy who was always plugging up holes in the dam with his fingers.  Busy, yes! Successful? 

This may be a good time to define success or what progress is going to look like over the next few years.  This month the problem is getting the funds for band uniforms… what will the problem be next week or next month for the chancellor?  I can guarantee you that whatever it is, the chancellor is most likely to hear about it first from the media, rather than from her staff.  Unless, of course, she realizes the amount of re-education that is going to have to be done starting right now.  For $250,000 I and probably a few others can show her how…

The head of the very city that is taxed without “voting” representation in Congress… wants to take away the historically created voting rights of the D.C. School Board. But his reason for doing so is amazing. Mayor Adrian Fenty says nine people can’t make effective decisions for the D.C. Public School System. He doesn’t know the history or the fact that there was a time when one or a few didn’t do much better. Fenty’s comment is like saying the D.C. City Council or the House of Representatives can not be effective, either: too many people to be efficient. What is just as paradoxical is the fact that the D.C. Council, both houses of Congress, and President Bush have signed off on an obviously flawed idea and document. For example… The Washington Post revealed in May 2007, that one-third of the mayor’s take over plan wasn’t even original; it was, in fact, copied from a yet untested North Carolina school system plan. BUT… these politicians didn’t blink at the finding of such gross “plagarism” in such an important and putatively transformative document. Nor did they explain why they would vote to take away the voting rights of D.C. citizens for a school board while supporting voting rights for them in the U. S. Congress.

Doesn’t anyone remember the hard fought battles to get an elected mayor for the District of Columbia? Doesn’t anyone remember what it was like before school board members were elected in the District of Columbia?

Where is the rage that a newly elected mayor who hasn’t even demonstrated that he can run one of the most important cities in the world wants to strip DC residents of power?

Where is the rage that the very deputy in charge of the mayor’s take over plan is the very one who admitted he didn’t credit others for borrowing their North Carolina ideas?

Where is the rage when the mayor says he doesn’t need to ask D.C. citizens about his take over plans because he asked the D.C. City Council, instead? So he understands the importance of representation in a democracy. But even more to the point, where is the rage that Congress and the President of the United States are having input on a “state” or local matter?

A victory for the Fenty administration may well translate into a historical loss for the residents of the District of Columbia. Fenty lacks a track record for useful input about the public schools when he sat on the City Council. Just because Congress and President Bush say the Home Rule Charter can be changed to exclude an elected school board… does not mean that it should be done? The same people who are undermining the public school system with private school voucher programs are slowly deconstructing the very infrastructure that is vital to a democracy. Aren’t these the same ones who have declared the DC Public Schools to be in a desperate state? Where’s the rage? I know… it’s been coopted!

Since 1984 federal regulators at the FCC have told parents that the best control for avoiding violent TV is to “turn the TV off.” The FCC’s argument for more than two decades has been that broadcast regulation is based upon “the public’s interest” (marketplace model) rather than the original mandate and narrative of “the public interest” (trusteeship model). Without acknowledging that it is now proposing RE-REGULATION,” the FCC is now trying to get away with trying to get Congress to do what the FCC had the mandate to do… before it redefined the situation and deregulated TV in the 1980s.

The memory the FCC lost about regulating in the public interest for the common good can be found in my unpublished dissertation (1995) — Ideological Narratives and The American Airwaves: Reconstituting the Public Interest.

This work tells the story about how regulatory words came to lose their meaning. Now the shift in regulatory metaphors is coming back to haunt a deregulation-driven agency. But with the broadcast playing field finally leveled, I would argue, that the FCC willl put itself out-of-business without help from Congress. In other words, the FCC which has refused to regulate Cable TV (hence, rising rates), now wants to hide behind Congress with warmed-over and out-of-date TV violence proposals.

With a changed telecommunications landscape, however, Congress may well need a new and different kind of telecommunications regulator. Could it be that FCC now stands for “fainthearted changed choices?”

Surprise! You can’t define “excessively violent” TV programming. In fact, neither Congress nor the FCC has the time to play content police. Perhaps, that’s why we hear swear words being bleeped on one channel but heard loudly on another. Furthermore, just think of all the people who will have to be hired just to respond to the thousands of letters the FCC will get about what is “excessively violent” and what is not. Open the can…. and some funny looking regulatory worms are sure to follow. The FCC has yet to explain, for example, why it regulates some of the channels but not others on our TV sets.

There is a simple solution, however. RE-REGULATE TV again with a mandate that says television should be family programming before 10PM on any kind of TV. That will level the playing field for cable and what will soon be, former over-the-air broadcasters. It’s still a well-kept secret that, thanks to the FCC’s selling of the public airwaves in the 1980s and 1990s, the TV sets we have today are going to be obsolete in two years when over-the-air TV signals go digital. That means the public will be forced to pay more to convert or purchase new TV sets.

Talk about a regulatory nightmare! Rather than getting looped into re-defining the regulatory mandate of the FCC, legislators would do well to take an extremely long look at why the FCC is really urging limits on TV violence. To congratulate the FCC, as some legislators in the Senate have, for issuing an out-of-date TV violence report is to keep the game going… that the FCC matters.

It’s obviously a win-win situation for the FCC: legislators will be blamed no matter which way the regulatory wind on TV violence blows. The pivotal first step to avoid repeating the problems caused by TV deregulation is to examine FCC’s dismantling of key regulations that created the environment for “excessive violence” on TV, in the first place.