• Shooting down health care reform • Is letting the people decide not reasonable? • Never forgotten
Shooting down health care reform
Jane M. Orient is the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a conservative political advocacy group dedicated since 1943 to keeping universal access to healthcare from becoming a reality (“What presidential health care reform means to you,” Forum, Feb. 25).
This is a group that labels Medicare and Medicaid as evil and the FDA as unconstitutional. In other words, tea party, anyone?
They are discredited as a medical association because of a long history of inaccurate and misleading “studies” tailored to fit their political agenda. The purpose of the AAPS, all 4,000 members, is to sink health care reform.
OK, that said, what about Orient’s arguments? Dire indeed, if they were true. She writes that we will transition from personal care by highly trained physicians to some kind of assembly line care by minimally trained providers.
Does she refer to nurse practitioners? That would be odd, because many, many studies support care by nurse practitioners as being of equal or higher quality than that provided by physicians alone in primary care, partly because they spend more time with each patient in the clinical setting.
Will physicians really abandon health care by the droves? The physicians I know are actually in the profession because they love what they do. Yes, they want and deserve to be paid well, but quite frankly the big money isn’t going to physicians. Its going to the giant insurance and pharmaceutical industries, that, coincidentally, support lobbying groups like the AAPS, hoping they will shoot down health care reform.
Kurt Rutter, Kapa‘a
Is letting the people decide not reasonable?
Thank you Judge Laureta for your letter “Changing the county’s costume” letter of Feb. 25 which keeps discussion about choosing a county manager system before the public.
In theory you are right, Judge, that whether a manager system proposal has citizen support is irrelevant. The Charter Commission and the public should be able to decide an issue on the basis of its merits not its popularity. In practice, however, the Charter Review Commission is unlikely to act on a measure that lacks support. The fact is that the great majority of citizens who have testified before the commission have favored it.
Judge, in your letter you seem to be critical of Ms. Bain and Mr. Lewis because their views about a CM suggest that “the will of the people” and “broad citizen support” are “immaterial and irrelevant to the main issue.”
With all due respect, Judge, Ms. Bain and Mr. Lewis were at many of the prior Charter Review Commission meetings — all televised — where the public almost unanimously testified in support of the CM system and where you were never involved.
Your statement that the Charter Review Commission has been wrestling over the years with county manager questions is inconceivable. Despite substantial input from manager system advocates the Commission consideration of it has been meager. When in November of last year the Commission received the recommendation from its governance committee with its number one recommendation to proceed on consideration of the manager concept, it devoted less than an hour to listen to testimony on the subject and without any discussion by commission members has to date shelved further attention.
You correctly observe that a person chosen to administer county government functions having education and experience is a key feature of the manager system, but then you deviate for four paragraphs to cover changing the title of the mayor’s administrative assistant and specifying qualifications for that office. Any upgrade in the requirements for our county officials may be helpful, but is it of great value to set the standards for the mayor’s assistant above that of the mayor and leave the mayor as the county chief executive officer and responsible for the appointment and oversight of our department heads?
The meaning of your closing paragraph about the county’s “pages of problems” not disappearing with a change of “costume” is ambivalent. Apparently you agree that we do have problems with the present system, and while the manager may not be a cure-all, it is certainly worth a try. All we are asking the Charter Review Commission is to put the manager system on the ballot and let the people decide. Is that not reasonable?
Glenn Mickens, Kapa‘a
Never forgotten
We lost a shining star on our Island last week — as evidenced by the shrine folks have put up at her place of work on Kawaihau Road in Kapa‘a.
Clara Kaneshiro left us way too soon.
There are just some people on this planet that are warm and friendly and huggable and just plain your instant friend. That’s who and what Clara Kaneshiro was — an instant friend.
Our hearts go out to her family, her friends, and Clara’s co-workers. There are not a lot like her, and she left our island so way too soon, but leaving her mark nonetheless.
Fly with your beloved stars my friend — my own world is better to have known you for the brief time we got to grow our friendship. You will never be forgotten.
Su Haynes, Kapa‘a
