Mendocino County Today: April 21, 2013

OBAMACARE BAFFLES MENDO

by Mark Scaramella

On Monday, April 8, the Mendocino Board of Supervisors listened to two and a half excruciating hours of impenetrable categories, inclusions, exclusions, penalties, incentives, costs, wrinkles, employees, employers, coverage options, decision points, schedules, deadlines, percentages, limitations, the mentally ill, injured arrestees, injured prisoner anecdotes, income levels, expert after expensive expert, consultant after expensive consultant, compliance requirements, timelines, changes over time, “exchange reinsurance program fees,” cost increases, “the healthcare marketplace,” the pros and cons of existing programs and coverages and when they’ll go out of existence, eligibility criteria, enrollment windows, the definition of “affordable,” community partners, healthcare exchanges, pool populations, healthcare regions, rural vs. urban plans, provider limitations, provider access, subsidies, excise taxes, the “Cadillac tax,” phase-ins, phase-outs, retirees, general fund employees vs. non-general fund employees, retirees vs. current employees, on or off Medicare, “benefit philosophies,” “workforce analysis,” legal and illegal coverage methods, and on and on and on.

Board members seemed so overwhelmed by the barrage of charts, graphs, slides and monologues of wall-to-wall technical jargon, that they had trouble even forming questions. What few questions they did ask were answered with “I don’t know,” “I’m not certain,” “That’s still open,” “that’s possible,” “that wouldn’t make any sense,” “there are many other things you might want to do,” “that could make a big difference,” “we still don’t have a good picture of that,” “this is just a beginning of a dialog,” “this is the kind of thing we have to begin to look at,” etc.

At one point Supervisor Hamburg, who seemed to be trying his best to understand the ununderstandabe, asked, “I’m still kind of stuck on this $3 million penalty. That’s a penalty that the County would have to pay…”

Health insurance consultant Peter McNamara: “That’s correct.”

Hamburg: “If we did what?”

McNamara: “Let’s say come October you have open enrollment for your regular plan and for whatever reason every employee in the county says, ‘You know what? I’m going to the exchange because I want this plan or that plan and it’s not offered by the employer.’ For every employee who does that it’s gonna cost you $3,000 because you currently offer insurance to your employees, but as an employer the federal government is saying the penalties for your employee who has coverage through you and comes to the exchange that’s $3,000.” (Times 1,000 employees would equal $3 million.)

Hamburg: “I don’t understand the logic of that. Why penalize the employer for a decision by the employee?”

Mr. McNamara shook his head in disbelief: “I don’t work for the federal government. I don’t know.” Then he threw up his hands, shrugged his shoulders and added, “There has to be a way to pay for the healthcare, right? And this is… all of these taxes and fees and penalties and call them what you want, they are all meant to provide the revenue in order to cover the uninsured.”

And, he could have added, to guarantee high profits for private insurance companies.

Then there was a discussion of whether the $3,000 per person penalty had to be paid each year or one time. Different people had different answers. As far as we could tell it’s probably charged each year they opt out.

Later in the presentation, when a chart of insurance rates for various plans and coverages was displayed, Supervisor Hamburg explored another subject: “What is the projected stability of these [insurance plan] rates going forward?”

Another consultant named Lee Kemper replied, “To be honest I’m not in a position to say other than what Covered California would tell you and that is that those are the rates that they project in the first year. They will be negotiating the rates in the subsequent years and everything becomes a part of the risk mix and the total size of the population that comes in to be enrolled.”

Hamburg: “I remember a speech given by the, what do we call the health commissioner of California?

Kemper: “The Health and Human Services agency secretary.”

Hamburg: “No, I think this is an elected…”

Kemper: “The insurance commissioner?”

Hamburg: “The insurance commissioner! Yeah. And he was explaining that because he has no authority over the rates that are charged by health insurance companies. He wasn’t expressing a lot of confidence that these rates will be held down. I think there are other states that give that power to that elected insurance commissioner but California is not one of those states.”

Kemper: “That’s correct. We also have another variant. That is that our insurance function is actually provided by the department of managed care which oversees health plans like HMOs and the department of insurance which oversees indemnity plans, regular insurance and a variety of other insurance products. So it’s a little bifurcated.”

Hamburg: “Who benefits from all this diffuse responsibility?”

Kemper: “Well, I’m not sure that you can say who benefits. What I can say is that historically it’s been that way and one of the realities is that overtures to block it, or rather to change it and provide rate-setting approval authority, have been blocked in the legislature.”

Hamburg: “Yeah. Gee — I wonder why.”

Toward the end of the presentation a clearly exasperated Hamburg summed up: “Anyone else who would like to bring up a question or…, or, um… end up an advocate for Single Payer? [Laughs] It would be WAY more simple than this! Oh, god! … Is that somebody in the back or is that just another Single Payer advocate? If nobody else has a question… Maybe we’re all just kind of bleary-eyed [squints] with all this information. Thanks a lot Peter [McNamara] and Lee [Kemper]. [Laughs.] No, I mean it! Thanks a lot.”

Several county staffers repeated that this mind-numbing presentation was “just an introduction,” and there are “lots of decisions to make.” CEO Carmel Angelo noted that the County’s health working group was working on implementation with “our community partners.”

Supervisor Pinches finally spoke up: “Has there ever been a  federal law that was this hard to implement?”

Hamburg: “I’m sure. I’m sure that there was.”

Maybe, but we sure don’t know what it would have been. And Mendocino County is just getting started.

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BUILDING 7. I finally understand. How could I have been so blind? Of course! I see it all now. A bunch of government people, supervised late at night by Bush and Cheney, over a period of months,
 planted explosives in Building 7 without anyone noticing and, finally, as part of the 911 plot also masterminded by Bush and Cheney, took that sucker down. Funny that none of those many
 bomb-planting people have come forward to tell us about it, but of course they were well paid to keep quiet, and if they didn’t keep their mouths shut, Obama, who’s also in on it as a government guy and 33-degree Mason and Club of Rome inductee, would have them killed. Or exiled to the Mendocino List Serve.

AND SO ON into 
an implausibility so vast only a person desperate to believe that the
 American government is so evil it’s now, as a matter of policy, murdering 
its own citizens. I don’t get it. Isn’t plain old multi-war imperialism bad enough? You need complicated internal plots to convince yourself that our ruling circles have taken us in unhealthy directions?


ALEX JONES and the rest of them, several million apparently, are simply more evidence that the internet is very bad for the hopelessly credulous, and that our educational system has
 truly collapsed.

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ANOTHER CRACKPOT mentions that we’re the newspaper recommending military service to young people. That’s right, and here’s why for the umpty tumpty-teenth time: Let’s assume you’re not a person of relative privilege, that you’re a person with options, with an ambitious set of parents who’ve saved up, or can simply afford to send you to college and on into a comfortable life much like the one Mumsy and Popsy have enjoyed. You’re already cruising Easy Street. But if you’re more like the average American high school graduate, bound by birth to the world of hard work, if you can find it, at wages no longer sufficient to realize the American Dream, formerly defined as an eternal mortgage on a house stuffed with gizmos with a couple of new cars parked out front — that dream is out of reach. Permanently. It’s over. You’re Joe Schmoe. You’ve attended Boonville High School for four years, emerging after all those hours paying no attention to irrelevant instruction with zero skills. You’re already half-crippled from getting stoned a lot, and you’ve picked up a lot of bad habits. You’re undisciplined and you can’t do anything that will make you employable with no options for the unskilled. But you’re only 18 and what do you have to look forward to? Not much, because the economy you’ve been born into is not the same one that used to exist, the one where you could do alright for yourself without much or any education. The Army? Why not? “Because,” you say, “at Boonville High School they told us that America does all these bad things around the world and if we join we’re helping the Evil Empire. And we can get killed.” You are just as likely to get killed staying home, driving drunk some night when you pile into a redwood. Even if you happen to go to places where you get shot at, you probably won’t get killed. Or even hurt. You join the military because you’re looking out for yourself, a situation where you can get some experience, learn a few things, save a little money, get yourself fit, get yourself together. You’ll be making a pretty good wage while you’re learning to get up in the morning and do something, and when you get out in four years you can go to college free or get yourself free training to learn a trade. The alternative is hanging around Mendo, maybe catching on with the dope trade, rotating in and out of the County Jail, and doing nothing, never having gone anywhere, never going anywhere. A kid with no prospects can do a lot worse. I did it way back in another life, and I’m glad I did.

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BIKED OVER TO HIPPIE HILL this afternoon to watch the 4-20 festivities. From what I've only recently learned, April 20 at 4:20pm America's stoners all light up at once. I expected something like a few hundred ancient hippies with maybe Wavy Gravy gumming some peace and love blah-blah, but what I found was, well, put it this way — the hippies of '67 looked positively wholesome put alongside this crew. If it had been advertised as Thug Fest 2013 we would have had truth in advertising. Lots of gangstas and no hippies of the traditional doofi type, but acres of tough guys and women very unlike the one who married dear old dad. The entire area between Hippie Hill and the children's playground was wall-to-wall outlaws. A cloud of pot and grill smoke hung over the park. No cops anywhere. Every other person seemed to have an apparatus that boomed out the mayhem recommendations of rap. “You lost, Pops?” a kid asked me, and it belatedly occurred to me that in my khakis and button down blue shirt I was definitely odd man out.  The scene was, for sure, mildly disorienting, and when I saw a large white guy, maybe 40, shirtless, obviously a veteran of many hours on a prison weight pile, his skin festooned with jail tats and a big White Pride announcement, when I saw this guy wade into the crowd with this maniacal grin on his face, I knew bad things were about to happen in Golden Gate Park today, and I made my way to my bike and pedaled home.

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COMMENT OF THE DAY from Dave Lindorff:

“The real terrorists in our midst are not men with knapsacks and white baseball caps who plant homemade bombs. They are not swarthy terrorists from the Middle East. Rather, they are the mostly white men (and women) in business suits on Wall Street and Main Street who callously use their wealth to subvert the political system to their short-term advantage, causing common-sense safety and health precautions to be ignored, or getting those laws watered down or outright cancelled. Of course, a classic terrorist is trying to kill while the corporate executive is often “just” putting concerns about profits ahead of concerns about the safety of workers and people who live nearby, but in the final analysis, the victim of a terrorist’s bomb. The difference is that we won’t see the FBI or the local police tracking down and arresting the killers and maimers in the case of a fertilizer plant explosion. The people responsible for that type of outrage typically just collect their insurance payments (maybe paying some token fine), rebuild, and go on making their dangerous product as before — usually in the same location.”

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EDITOR,

Todd Walton's “Tenuous Grip” reminds me of parallel experiences.  1. Frequently I will glance at a clock and it will be 11:11. Maybe some etheric memory of WW1 life and death?  2. I don't have to go four dates with a female before she dumps me for lack of financial studliness. One or even less is sufficient.  However if I appear in public well-groomed and dressed in better clothes than the standard male slobwear (jeans, T-shirt, baseball cap) I attract attention, only temporarily, though. Clearly the posterior bulge is more important than the anterior one. 3. My mother also made me attend dance classes.  They were taught by an aristocratic Latin American couple. The man had this amazing mustache. Two little lines of hair an eighth of an inch wide descended from each nostril, then made sharply cut turns to either side of his upper lip. He must have had some special razor to trim this thing with every day. We had to learn all this stuff no one cared about: waltzes, cha-chas, foxtrots and so on. One day he announced “Today, boys and girls, we are going to learn the ‘Rock and Roll’.” We all looked at each other and laughed. We're teenagers, it's the 60s, right? He puts “Love Potion #9” on the record player and demonstrates the “Rock and Roll” with his partner in an absurd and stilted upper-class manner, then allows us to continue. The prettiest girl in the class has the temerity to wiggle her hips, so Mustache stops the music and loudly shames her for uncivilized and unladylike behavior. “A lady does not move her hips!” She's mortified, we're all embarrassed by this fool, and that was it for dance class.

Yrs, Jay Williamson

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THE  31ST ANNUAL BOONTLING CLASSIC Footrace is on Sunday May 5th (Cinco de Mayo) at 10am at the AV Elementary School. If you can't find an entry form, email me: brucehering@pacific.net  and I'll send you one. It's that time again! Get in shape for summer fun. Fastest runners get medals and ribbons, but there is a drawing for prizes, too!

Entry Fee: $8 ($2 discount for North Coast Striders members). T-Shirt: $10. Late Reg. Fee: $10. Pre-registration deadline is May 4th. Race day registration is 8:30-9:30am. Plaques to top man and woman. Ribbons to top 3 in each division. Drawing for prizes!

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THE HIGHWAY PATROL seeks witnesses to an apparent hit and run that occurred late Friday night on North State Street near Ukiah that left Jesse Ray Pieri, 26, of Ukiah unconscious in the middle of the frontage road off Highway 101 with serious head injuries and a broken leg. The incident occurred about 11:50pm. Mr. Pieri was found lying in the middle of the 5000 block of North State Street south of Agnes Lane, about five miles north of downtown Ukiah, the California Highway Patrol reported. He was discovered by motorists in a passing car. Any vehicle involved in the collision is assumed to have noticeable front-end damage, the CHP said. Mr. Pieri was flown by medical helicopter to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and was listed in critical condition Saturday. Anyone with information about the incident or the hit and run vehicle/driver is urged to call the California Highway Patrol at 467-4000.

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BROWN ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL CLAIMS ‘DELTA CAN'T BE SAVED’

by Dan Bacher

Recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, Indian tribal leaders, family farmers, environmentalists, Delta residents and many elected officials strongly oppose the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels because they say it will lead to the extinction of Central Valley salmon, steelhead and other fish species.

Natural Resources Secretary John Laird and Governor Jerry Brown have constantly portrayed the BDCP as a visionary effort based on "science" to accomplish the "co-equal goals" of "ecosystem restoration" and "water supply reliability."

"Science has and will continue to drive a holistic resolution securing our water supply and substantially restoring the Delta’s lost habitat," said Laird on March 28. (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/28/1197717/-More-Bay-Delta-Conservation-Plan-Documents-Released)

However, a Brown administration official recently admitted that the Bay Delta Conservation Plan has nothing to do with saving the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the estuary that salmon, steehead, sturgeon, Delta smelt, striped bass and a host of other species depend on for survival.

While speaking with Tom Stokely of the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) at a meeting with Northern California's Native American Tribes on Monday, April 15, Natural Resources Agency Deputy Director Jerry Meral said, "BDCP is not about, and has never been about saving the Delta. The Delta cannot be saved."

"I was flabbergasted because that's not what we've told by politicians and state officials," said Stokely after the meeting.

"Now if Governor Brown and State officials would just stop pretending it's a habitat plan to save fish when speaking with the press," according to Restore the Delta's "Delta Flows" newsletter (http://www.restorethedelta.org/or-is-it-the-point/)

Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, commented, "It is indeed ironic that the BDCP, a supposed habitat conservation plan/natural communities conservation plan developed pursuant, respectively, to the federal and state Endangered Species Act, is not about saving the Delta or its fish. It is rather a giant water grab by Westside San Joaquin agribusiness and SoCal land speculators. Meral has just admitted what we've been saying all along - that the BDCP is a trojan horse for a massive heist of California's water."