Eyeing the news from afar

I’m here at the beach where I made the mistake of buying The Oregonian this morning. It doesn't help that the paper costs an outlandish $1.25 here in Manzanita.

Even free, on-line, today’s news is not making me a happy camper.

Your R/x dollars at work

First Pfizer has been fined a mere $2.3 billion (that’s a “B” but it’s small change for Big Pharma) for its latest role in the Great American Healthcare Charade. This particular song-and-dance has the drug giant bribing doctors with vacations, golf dates and massages to get them to prescribe Pfizer drugs. What’s a billion or so to an outfit like Pfizer? We are about to find out.

Worse, than jollying the docs with our insurance premiums, Pfizer is telling them it’s fine to use its pills for purposes unapproved by the FDA. All the better to run up those profits and to stuff those executive millionaires.

Yet the Oregonian reports all this in a vacuum.

Is the major event of these dwindling summer months not healthcare? And are the drug companies not a major player in sabotaging healthcare reform? And could it be that some of the payoff for the bribing of the medical profession is a few hundred million to lobby Congress and spread lies?

And just what are our health insurance premiums being used for. Golf at Pebble Beach? Back rubs?

And why, dear Oregonian editors, is this story on the business page, while valuable front page real estate is turned over Boise’s frenzy about the home team’s butt-heading with the Oregon Ducks tonight?

Priorities, priorities.

I suppose we should be grateful. At least the story made the paper.

Caling Nick Fish!

So did another, barely. This one was tucked away at the bottom of page C5, also in the business section, just before the classified ads.

The headline, miniscule as it is, reads, “Affordable housing plan put aside again.” The story should be read in the context of the Housing Authority of Portland’s proposing to spend $44.5 million to build 115 units (roughly $370,000 per unit) as it teas down and rebuilds the Hillsdale Terrace public housing project in its existing site. It’s an isolated, demeaning drainage gulch at the headwaters of Hillsdale’s Stephens Creek.

Meanwhile, (ALERT, ALERT!) apartments in South Waterfront high-rises will be auctioned off starting at $175,000 each later this month. They should be worth a bid from HAP.

But this little, buried story tells us that affordable housing in South Waterfront is being “pushed back” because the Portland Development Commission has determined that having affordable housing in South Waterfront is “too risky.”

Attention City Commissioner Nick Fish, a former member of the HAP board and now the councils’ housing guy.

Where’s the risk when HAP is ready to spend $370,000 per unit in a market where, at auction, South Waterfront apartments may fetch a mere $200,000, if that?

If Portland’s public housing's left hand, the development commission, had any idea what the right hand, the housing authority, was up to, the two agencies would rush to redirect the Hillsdale Terrace money to South Waterfront.

Healthcare reform worthy of Kennedy's name

I’m sure a few thousand have already suggested that new health reform legislation be named for Senator Ted Kennedy. Fixing our broken healthcare system was his passion.

One condition: name it for Kennedy only if the legislation is worthy of his name and truly reforms the system down to its bones.

If it is simply a sop, forget it. Name it "Blue Dog."

Memo to Jack Ohman at the Oregonian: An editorial cartoon came to me about Kennedy this morning. There he is in the clouds with Bobby and Jack. The three are playing touch football, just as they did when they were kids.

Jack and Teddy are huddling, and Bobby is lined up on defense.

Jack, the quarterback, calls the play for his youngest brother.

The caption reads “Go long.”

As we know, he did.

Optional caption for Catholics: “Hail Mary!”

Dear Ron....

After a flurry of prodding e-mail messages on the subject of health care reform (or the threatened lack of it), I responded today.

Better late than never (and "never" is fast approaching).

What put me over the top? News that among the five senators holding out against the public option is our very own Ron Wyden.

Sheeeesh!

The letter I sent was similar to the one you see below.

In case you are interested (hint, hint), Wyden’s e-mail form can be accessed here:

Senator:

I am writing to urge you to vote for the public option, which is essential to any health care reform package. We need the option because it is NOT out to maximize profits to the detriment of the public's well being.

To the contrary, the public option’s objective is pure and simple — the public’s health.

The savings under a public system are clear:

• No profit motive.

• No exorbitant executive salaries.

• No money for lobbying (and lying) and campaign contributions.

• No inefficient paperwork after the public system converts to computerized record-keeping.

• No astronomical drug prices as the government can negotiate them down through system-wide contracts. (Be sure you pass this provision in the reform package.)

• No marketing abuses by drug companies, including favors and junkets to doctors for using particular drugs.

• No bureaucratic billing and paperwork distractions for doctors. Put doctors on salary so they can focus on practicing medicine.

• No more “illness-centered” medicine. “Wellness-Centered” medicine alone will save billions.

I urge you, as a senate leader on this issue, to step up, speak out and vote for the public option.

Kicking the kickback culture

Three or four years ago, I required my journalism students to subscribe to The New York Times print edition, which they received at a special student rate. As it turned out, the Times gave me the same special rate too, even though I was a regular subscriber.

That made sense, just as textbook companies provide teachers with “desk” copies of required texts.

But as my students turned more and more to the web for information and because the Times offered its content free on-line, I dropped my requirement that they subscribe to the print edition. I did require them to read the Times on-line.

I still get the Times at a reduced rate, as a “professional courtesy.”

Today in the mail I got a notice encouraging me and my fellow college teachers of “politics, economics, communication or freshman English” to make the print edition “part of your course.” The flier suggests requiring students to subscribe at the education rate of $2.25 per week. If the Times weren’t available on-line, the subscription looks like a deal, at least to those of us who still prefer to hold paper in our hands. That’s less than the price of a latte a week, and less fattening.

But here’s the eyebrow-raising part of the flier: if we require the print subscription of our students, we teachers get a free “complimentary” copy of the Times on weekdays.

All we have to do is send the Times a copy of the course syllabus that shows the Times as required reading.

Strange, but visions of “health care reform” and drug company junkets for doctors came immediately to mind. Requiring the Times subscriptions seemed like prescribing medication that isn’t needed or is more expensive.

In the case of a many students, the requirement would be seen as an unnecessary, added cost to their already financially burdensome college years.

How can the New York Times fault health care in this country, when the newspaper itself is willing to cut deals with teachers that are not that far removed from what Abbott Labs, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline do with doctors?

The Times should help eliminate our kickback culture — through example.

The whys of shout-outing and outshouting

What’s with the unruly shout-outing at meetings with members of Congress? Why the uncivil mobs?

The cause is a convergence of confusion, fear, ignorance, surrogate politics, communication fragmentation and cynical, strategic disinformation.

No one, not even the members of Congress, can get their minds around this issue with all its moving parts. The result: Confusion, which well-financed interests groups are only too happy to nurture into fear.

Some of those interests are the same people who brought us Swiftboating, the partisan mob disruption of the 2000 Florida vote recount and now the “birther” distraction.

The nation's vulnerability to such forces wouldn’t be possible it the health reform issue hadn’t become a dense fog of legislation. Suggestible protesters see their worst fears in the miasma Advocates of change, who have joined the shouting, cling to their highest hopes with no idea of consequences.

No one, from the president down, has a clue where all of this is headed. That is scary — as are the mindless shoutfests with their references to violence.

Ten years ago, we might have had a media investigation of the forces at work. Someone might have followed the money trail — and there is a money trail. Someone might have dispassionately dissected the complex health-care issue. (I'm open to suggested links....)

Now, we are now paying a terrible civic and societal price for a shattered media. The result is that few read or listen to opposing views. Minds close and the mouths open. The models for discourse are celebrity blabbers — the Rush Limbaughs, Bill O’Reillys and Keith Olbermanns of media land.

My guess is that growing unemployment may also be at work. Some of the shouting rabble are no doubt paid provocateurs, I don’t like to cite race as a cause for opposition to the president, but in parts of the land, some may be fueled by latent racism.

In any case, right-wing Republicans are already treating the healthcare issue as a test vote on the entire Obama agenda. If you voted against Obama, it’s time to storm the White House. “Socialistic Obama-Care” is the rallying cry. (Quick now, define “Obama-Care” Pause....)

I don’t know what the cure is for our sick, expensive, inequitable, burdensome healthcare system. But I do know that I’m not going to find the answer at the politically charged forums being held this August, the cruelest of months in this trouble-plagued time.