Got a kick out of the December 17th Board of Supervisors agenda. Under the heading for the County Executive Officer’s report, was the following caption:
“In May 2022, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors approved the first five-year strategic plan that will help guide the critical decisions the Board of Supervisors will face over the next five years with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of life for County residents. Departmental reporting will align with the strategic plan.”
When I clicked on the hyperlink for the strategic plan, there was nothing there.
Which has always been my opinion regarding the value of “strategic plans”: There’s nothing there and never has been.
Reminds me of the old Soviet Union back in the 1970s when the Politburo announced they had just approved their Tenth Five-Year Plan, which was a new set of goals designed to strengthen the country’s economy and would be the very best Five-Year Plan ever.
The question that people from Western countries asked was, “What the hell happened with the first Nine of their Five Year Plans?”
Could ask the very same question here in Mendoland.
Over the years, multiple Boards of Supervisors have talked about various plans, vision statements, mission statements, and abstruse gobbledygook.
I don’t claim to know everything, or even close to everything about the political and governing processes, but I do know and can recognize fairly quickly when things aren’t working right. And here in Mendocino County, more often than not things just don’t work right.
I’ve also learned over the years that most folks understand and believe that our government is truly “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Nowadays they don’t have very high expectations of those people we elect to represent us. It’s a fact that most people are happy if elected officials and their support staff of bureaucrats practice the physicians’ oath of “Do no harm.”
Most politicians today don’t comprehend that there’s a reason why that Great Spirit In The Sky endowed all of us with two ears but just one mouth: Stop talking and start listening to the people you represent.
It’s impossible not to recognize the seemingly institutional dysfunction in the governing process of this county. Too many elected officials and “public servants” who are classified as department heads, middle management, and “staff,” go out of their way to create problems when their main goal and purpose is to provide basic services to the public and solve problems when they arise.
The Supervisors don’t understand their role as elected officials. Elected officials are supposed to carry out the wishes/demands of clear majorities of constituents unless what they’re asking is unlawful or totally unfeasible, neither of which are applicable with 99.9% of the issues they deal with. It’s not the Supervisor’s job to substitute their judgment for that of their constituents when those constituents overwhelmingly demand a different course of action than that contemplated by the Supervisors.
Out of the current BOS incumbents, District 3 Supervisor John Haschak comes closest to understanding these principles, but his colleagues have a long way go.
Here’s a short list of unsolved problems extant in this county that need to be resolved ASAP:
- Settle the civil litigation over the illegal removal of elected Treasurer-Tax Collector/Auditor- Controller Chemise Cubbison.
- Take formal action to rescind the County Counsel’s and Cannabis Department’s “default” opinions regarding illegal expansion of weed cultivation.
- Order an audit of all county homeless, substance abuse, and mental health programs administered by its private-public and private sector providers.
The CEO Killing
Over the years I’ve maintained that Consumer Watchdog (CW), is this country’s preeminent consumer protection organization. Their organization has and continues to carry on the fight against corporate gouging, price-fixing, and other illegal monopolistic practices that economically adversely impact the citizen-consumer.
I’ve written recently about Watcdog’s battles with the state of California over the immediate need for greater public oversight of the insurance industry.
This week, CW’s executive director Jamie Court wrote an outstanding piece on the psychopathic jackass who murdered the CEO of an insurance corporation. Shamefully, internet idiots and mental pygmies piled on social media extolling a cold-blooded killer as some kind of hero.
Speaking as someone who led working people in the Labor Movement (and continues to represent their interests to this day), I can tell you in my many battles with corporate CEOs, the thought never crossed my mind to assassinate any of them for what they represented, although I was tempted on a number of occasions to bust a few of them on the chops.
Might still doesn’t make right, it is the law of the jungle though.
Here’s some of Consumer Watchdog’s Jamie Court’s thoughts on the issue:
The Killing Of A Unitedhealthcare Executive Won’t Improve Anyone’s Insurance
Last week’s shocking killing of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, Brian Thompson, reopened a national wound inflicted by the delay and denial of health coverage to countless Americans.
This was a violent crime that won’t solve anything. But the ensuing organic and spontaneous outpouring of populist anger underscored how many Americans have been cruelly and unjustly denied medical treatment.
After an election that showed widespread discontent with the status quo, this should be a wake-up call for Washington. Despite progress on healthcare coverage and rights, protecting American patients is unfinished business.
In the 1990s, California pioneered a patients’ rights movement that gave those covered by HMOs a right to second opinions, independent medical reviews of coverage denials and guaranteed coverage of certain commonly denied procedures. Many states adopted California’s model, and President Obama’s Affordable Care Act took important steps to insure the uninsured and prevent companies from denying coverage to people who want it. But America’s patients never got equitable access to justice when claims are denied. People who buy their own insurance or get it through a government job or program such as Medicare have the right to sue for damages if they believe they have been harmed by an unreasonable denial. But most of us get health insurance through our jobs and have no such right to go to court, no matter how outrageous the denial or tragic the consequences. More than 100 million Americans have no legal recourse if a health insurance company messes up our claim.
In the 1987 case Pilot Life Insurance Co. vs. Dedeaux, the Supreme Court ruled that people with employer-provided coverage do not have a right to sue their insurer for damages but rather only for the value of the denied benefit. If the covered person dies, any suit is rendered moot.
Despite many attempts to change this, including through Obamacare, the ruling has stood. That’s why insurance companies often act as if they have a license to kill: They face scant legal consequences for any harm they cause by delaying or denying payment for needed care.
This shouldn’t be hard. Congress — whose members do enjoy a right to sue over denials of their own health insurance claims — has many options for limiting the extent of insurers’ exposure to lawsuits, such as making them liable only when they show gross indifference to a patient’s suffering.
Insurance companies pay attention to whether patients can take them to court. At least one company, Aetna, even had a training tape showing how to process claims differently for those with and without a right to sue.
If insurance companies have no legal incentive to approve a claim, they will too often deny or delay it. It’s time for Congress to restore the possibility of justice for millions and answer the urgent calls for reform.
(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)
It’s well past time for Congress to answer many urgent calls for reform, but, for a lot of reasons, it just doesn’t happen. In the case of so-called health care, insurance companies are essentially parasites in a process their presence grossly distorts, often resulting in very real suffering – a national wound, as you say. When something like that goes on interminably, a ‘psychopathic jackass’ will often emerge. If news reports were correct, this one was in constant pain from a previous procedure. The crime itself may not solve anything, but it did call some attention to the problem. When it comes to our system for health care and medical treatment, America is once again the exceptional nation. And not in a good way.
“The Killing Of A Unitedhealthcare Executive Won’t Improve Anyone’s Insurance”
False. In the immediate aftermath of the killing, many on social media pointed at Blue Cross’s decision to refuse coverage for anesthesia if it was needed beyond a preset limit. In other words, if your surgeon needed an extra hour to put your heart back together, you’d be on the hook for the extra anesthesia. Within days, Blue Cross announced that they were reversing the policy.
Lots of things activists were shouting about became mainstream knowledge after the killing. For example, the fact that United Healthcare denied almost a third of claims – twice the average among insurance companies – and that they were using an AI agent that made incorrect decisions 92% of the time.
There are also anecdotal reports of multiple insurance companies relaxing their denials since the event.
I don’t advocate for killing health insurance CEOs. People point out that he had a wife – but they were separated since 2018 and she stands to gain financially from his death. She would have been a suspect for sponsoring the hit had this been a normal investigation. He did have two kids, and that’s sad, but we don’t know the nature of their relationship. Osama bin Laden had more than 20 kids, but I didn’t see anyone crying about them when he was taken out. Brian Thompson killed way more people than Osama bin Laden did.
I’m certainly not going to shed any tears over it. Nor am I going to place blame on Luigi (if indeed he did the deed). Just like Aaron Bushnell, I suspect Luigi wanted to give his life meaning and chose a path that ends up throwing his own life away. He made sure that there would not be collateral damage. Meanwhile, 160million people vote for bombing children in countries that have not attacked us – and consider themselves “civil.” What a sick joke!
And if that makes me one of the “internet idiots and mental pygmies,” so be it.
This bizarre incident is a consequence of a bizarre medical system in which denying coverage means denying medical care. The fundamental problem is that it is a profit-driven system with no consideration about the ethics of companies making money off of people being sick or injured, and the motivation being the less care they provide, the more money they make. The lack of coverage or even the cost of co-pays gets in the way of “early intervention” which saves lives and money. Of the top ten industrialized countries in the world our medical system is the most expensive and we have the worst outcomes in citizen health.
The ever increasing cost of medical coverage is having a negative impact on us in many ways. The inability to pay medical bills is a primary cause of people filing for bankruptcy. The cost to private businesses of paying for health benefits for employees has become an enormous burden and hampers our ability to compete in a world economy with those other nine countries that all have national medical programs paid for by everyone with taxes. In the last 20 years of my teaching career I represented the teachers union in negotiating contracts with the school district. Over time our primary concern became: How can the district absorb the ever ballooning cost of health benefits and still keep salaries up with inflation? And more money for benefits meant less money for educational purposes. It was always a sore point with me that the district would only hire those valuable teacher’s aids on a part time basis so they wouldn’t have to pay for their benefits.
I am sure a real social scientist could find more in the way of negative impacts of our ill-structured medical system and it will take more than killing a CEO to fix it.