Here's my take on an issue being debated by the Supreme Court...

Does the Affordable Care Act’s provision requiring health insurance policies to covers medication and procedures that some employers believes are contrary to their religious convictions, constitute an infringement of the employer’s religious freedom?

Provision of health insurance to employees is a fringe benefit and a form of indirect compensation. One solution regarding a conflicted employer’s dilemma regarding the exercise of their religious freedom is for such employers not to provide not to provide coverage to employees, but instead give them a dollar amount equivalent to what they would have contributed to their health insurance insurance. The employees can, then, if they choose, purchase their own health insurance, just as they are free to purchase any other commodity with the money they are paid for their labor.

When an employer provides health insurance for their employees, that benefit is not taxed. In order to make up for the additional income tax the employees would have to pay when they buy their own health insurance, the federal government can and should make the cost of non-employer provided health insurance tax deductible. The net effect on tax revenue would be the same either way.

Book review

KIRKUS

REVIEWS

FORBIDDEN HARVEST

By Peter Rizzolo

Pub Date: May 2nd, 2013 
ISBN: 978-1482647273 
Publisher: CreateSpace 

When the resources of a strained medical system reach critically low levels, one doctor bypasses ethical concerns to act—creating a sophisticated network that saves lives but which also threatens to destroy his career.

When doctors inform Tom Bradshaw that his 12-year-old son, Link, is having a heart attack, he turns incredulous. But the relative stability Link experiences after his initial episode is soon offset by a flurry of negative test results, each of which seems to illuminate more parts of an increasingly threatening outlook. Born with a congenital heart defect, Link is in need of that most precarious of operations: a heart transplant. He finds himself navigating not only hospitals, complex prognoses and more tests, but the lingering grief he feels for his mother, who perished in an auto accident a year prior. Still, he manages to make friends with Marty, a cancer patient, who launches a spying operation that unwittingly discovers the dilemma on which the novel hinges: Dr. Kenneth Bernholtz, a family friend of the Bradshaws’, has been pilfering organs from dead patients in an exasperated attempt to perfect a technology that preserves harvested organs longer than usual. Several races against time ensue as Link’s family struggles to procure him a working heart, Marty tries to determine her fate amid rounds of chemo treatment, and Dr. Bernholtz endeavors to forestall the collapse of his covert operation, which violates official procedures, in an attempt to coordinate more crucial transplantations. Rendered in snappy prose, the narrative nonetheless unfolds at a consistent pace; the dialogue is mostly fresh, the characters, sensitive and realistic. The novel’s climax, which pivots on the tension between patients’ rights and the medical community’s task of saving lives, highlights the profound moral ambiguity and emotional tumult of this still highly relevant issue in bioethics. Bernholtz, committed to his cause to a fault, provides a moving case study in the limits of compassion.

A compelling medical drama, written in taut prose, that addresses with tact, humor, poignancy and sophistication the question of what individuals in desperate circumstances owe to each other.

Diplomacy our only option

Bashar al-Assad has deliberately challenged Obama’s “red line” declaration by going ahead with a heinous chemical weapons attack. It would seem his assessment is that a limited American military response such as cruise missiles against targeted sites, would prove ineffective and would gain him continued military support from Iran and his other allies.

A more significant military response will involve taking out Syria’s robust air defense system…a move that will certainly cost American lives and result in further involvement in what is at this time a civil war involving several competing factions.

Rather than a military response, we should impose every possible diplomatic and economic pressure we can bring to bear on the Syrian regime, while continuing to extend humanitarian aid to the displaced and injured caught up in this tragic civil conflict.

Syrian conflict

Syrian conflict Letter to the editor Raleigh N&O Aug 2013

Bashar al-Assad has deliberately challenged Obama’s “red line” declaration by going ahead with a heinous chemical weapons attack. It would seem his assessment is that a limited American military response such as cruise missiles against targeted sites, would prove ineffective and would gain him continued military support from Iran and his other allies.

A more significant military response will involve taking out Syria’s robust air defense system…a move that will certainly cost American lives and result in further involvement in what is at this time a civil war involving several competing factions.

Rather than a military response, we should impose every possible diplomatic and economic pressure we can bring to bear on the Syrian regime, while continuing to extend humanitarian aid to the displaced and injured caught up in this tragic civil conflict.

Moral Mondays

June 2013 Letter to the editor Raleigh N&O

Who decides what is moral or immoral? Some behaviors reach almost universal agreement, like the immorality of murder, physical and psychological abuse of others, including animals, lying, and cheating….to name a few.

But when what is considered moral, is based solely on political, religious or personal conviction we move from universally accepted mores to prejudicial determination of what is good or bad human behavior.

We will not solves the issues of excessive greed, disregard for the suffering of others, sectarian violence, and poverty, by claiming to occupying the moral high-ground. We need instead to come together to address these pressing problems and discard divisive rhetoric and ideological posturing that invariably lead to polarization and gridlock.

John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Michele Bachmann and others, have exclaimed that their primary goal is to insure that Barack Obama be a one term president. I have several strategies they might employ to accomplish that stated goal.

Encourage state governors to not accept stimulus dollars.

Insist that Obama should have permitted free market forces, the essence of the American way, to have allowed the auto industry to implode.

Do whatever they can to make it difficult for the poor, the young and the disabled to vote in the next election. In the last election those groups voted overwhelmingly for Obama. They can achieve those objectives by shortening the time allowed for early voting, require new forms of voter ID and decrease the number of voting stations.

Resist closing tax loop-holes, and under no circumstance reinstate pre-Bush-era tax rates. Both those moves would help reduce the deficit by billions of dollars but in so doing would take the pressure off of having to make drastic cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, research and investments in infrastructure.

Resist allowing Obama to pass legislation that would please Latino voters...such as significant immigration reform and the Dream Act.

You say they’re already doing those things?

Here are a sampling to my letters to the Editor of the Raleigh News and Observer

2003

There you go again, Mr. President (George W.Bush), you are the using the present soaring price of gasoline to resurrect your longstanding desire to risk potential environmental disaster by permitting drilling for oil on our continental shelf. The hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to build off-shore oil rigs would be better spent by creating incentives to promote further expansion of wind, solar, bio-fuel and other renewable energy sources.

Have you forgotten the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska., one of the most devastating environmental disasters ever to occur at sea? Oil rigs as well as tankers are susseptable to accidental damage, with the potential of spilling millions of gallons of crude oil into our precious off-shore habitat areas.

In the five or more years it would potentioally take to get off-shore oil fields into production, more rapid movement toward hybrid, electric, and hydrogen fueled cars would be a far better way to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil.

2008

During the congressional recess, let’s hope real debate of Health Care Reform legislation takes place.

Questions I would like to see debated:

Would a “public option” reimburse doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and other providers at rates comparable to Medicare reimbursement or at rates comparable to private health insurance plans?

If the former is true, are providers willing to be reimbursed at markedly reduced rates for folks enrolled in a public option? If not, will they have the option to refuse to care for persons insured under the public option?

Those pursuing proposing a public option should be prepared to come up with a ballpark estimate of what it would cost for, say a family of four earning up to $50,000.

What will it cost the government to subsidize those at or below the poverty level

(Currently at $17,650 for a family of four)?

There are obviously many more questions and permutations. But answering the above questions wouldn’t be a bad start.

2011

There are those who have opposed Social Security from its inception, those who would privatize it and those who for ideological reasons would like to eliminate it entirely. I can understand their desire to lump SSI in with discretionary spending, Medicare and defense spending when they discuss the present deficit crisis.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the combined income from payroll taxes, taxes on benefits paid to recipients, and trust fund interest will generate sufficient income to pay Social Security Insurance benefits and Disability Insurance benefits to the year 2037. Social Security has not contributed to our present deficit. And although it will eventually require fixing, now is not the time, as the country struggles with massive unemployment and a painfully slow economic recovery.

Social Security Insurance legislation has been one of the most successful programs in our nation’s history. It must be removed from the present debate on how we as a nation address our present budgetary problems.