Big Guvment

I was listening to Mike Francese on the FAN yesterday. I have been a Mike fan since he started there 21 years ago. I used to call him up off air to ask for advice about a former student who had become a great high school basketball player. So I feel this long-term relationship with him.

But I am disconcerted when Mike enters into the political arena, which he did with his attack on the proposed health care changes yesterday. Mike takes the view that government can't do anything right. The corollary must be that private is better.

Well, I just had a day and a half of nightmare private plumbing, where a 10 minute job turned into hours. And 10 minutes after the guy left, the place leaked like a hole in a dike without a finger. And I actually know something about plumbing, having done lots of work on my own, including installing baseboard heating. I mean I can solder a joint. And sweat it. And put on the flux. This guy was a destroyer and I ended up with more work needed than when he started.
Hey, Mulgrew, where are all those apprentice plumbers you were working on?

I find Mike's take interesting since he knows his sports, none of which is under government control – at least the last I looked. Well, if you consider that politicians who run government are happy to subsidize any stadium that comes their way, I guess they are involved in sports. But has Mike looked at the privately managed NY Mets lately? Or the Knicks? How about the classic decade long failures in sports management like the San Diego Rockets. Or, even better, J-E-T-S!!!

This lauding of private over public leaves out so much about the enormous failures and errors privately managed organizations make all the time. Microsoft has been notorious for numerous errors in judgment and has wasted billions. Anyone remember Bob? Their bloated software is known not to work until they sell you 3 versions. They can waste these billions because they were brilliant in setting up a monopoly.

This is all pretty funny since Bill Gates thinks he knows what's wrong with public schools, yet brought the Microsoft ethos by getting the first iteration of small schools wrong. Now in the 2nd iteration, he is looking at teacher quality. Guess what Bill? Maybe on the third try you'll get it right. Try class size reduction.

How about all those captains of the financial meltdown? Can you spell A-I-G? How was that private management? The guvment owns so much of them and they don't seem to be doing worse.

Now I read that former Ebay chairwoman Meg Whitman, a McCain advisor (how did that work out) is running for governor of California. Whitman's errors at Ebay in recent years became legendary. Even I scratched my head when she bought SKYPE. (See recent NY Times on this one.) I'm not picking on women here, but how did Carly Fiorina (another McCain advisor who went down in flames) do at HP?

Now when it comes to health care, my wife knows a thing or two. She deals with the thievin' insurance companies and medicare all the time. In terms of competence, guvment wins all the time. (Right now she is looking forward to retirement so she won't have to deal with the the crew at GHI and HIP who don't know who covers what and when.)

So, Mike. Take a broad look at guvment and private and give us a balanced view.

The Great Healthcare Debate

I was going to write this as an addendum to another post, but since NYC Educator put up this great post today (In Which I Face Down the Grim Socialist Machine), comparing his experiences in emergency rooms in the US and the dreaded Canadian single payer system (MUST READ), I'll put my 2 cents in here.

We went into the city to meet a group of friends at the Metropolitan Museum yesterday afternoon. Someone should have sent us to an emergency room for leaving a beautiful Rockaway on a sunny afternoon, but traffic was smooth and we made it in about 40 minutes and I found a parking spot on 86th street off 5th Ave. Not bad.

We met up with our friends, did some museum stuff and then on to the main event - dinner a few blocks away - $35 restaurant week, 3 course delicious dinner.

One couple, a former teacher and a former cop, started talking about all the anti-Obama health care emails they were getting, especially from other teachers. "He has to be stopped," our friend said. "Before the government takes over our health care."

This is not some town hall meeting where people are riled by right wing agitators. These are people from Brooklyn.

My wife, who works in health care, got that look in her eye. She works with all the scuz ball thieving insurance companies and says flat out, medicare is the most efficient and easiest to work with. Thus her support for a single payer system.

The former cop has medicare and his wife will have it fairly soon. So we ask, gently, do they want to give that up? "No, of course not," they say. "Did you know that is a government program?" They didn't. Obama has screwed up big time if they don't.

Did we change their minds? I doubt it.

My take on this? Real health care reform is basically dead. Obama waffled in trying to be a centrist and satisfy all parties and he will end up with tiny changes that will do little good and keep costing a fortune. Now, in the face of the right wing town hall attacks, there are attempts to mobilize that same spirit that he had in the campaign. But I can say as an educator who watched Obama accept the corporate driven ed reform agenda hook, line and sinker - the one area he didn't have to waffle on because he had the teacher unions sucking up – the thrill is gone. I'll just move to Canada or France when I get sick.


Addendum

We got on the line that suggests paying $20. Now I get museumitis after less than an hour and I figure an hour in the museum is worth about 3 bucks. When I hand over $6 and say "two" I get that "cheap bastard" look of disgust. But she hands me two little blue pins.

We go past the security guard who glares at us. The pins look like everyone else's but I'm sure it has an invisible dye that broadcasts "THESE PEOPLE ARE CHEAP."

Well, to make a long story short, the temple of Dendur was ok. Lots of space for such a small temple. I was looking for the Nile to flood while we were standing there.

When I used to take my classes to the MET in the 70's, I think I took them out to pretty much that very spot that the part of the MET houses it when it was still an open field and kids could roll around on it. Then we were off to the great playground across the street on 85th St, where my kids got to mix with all the kids there with their nannies, while I joined them on the benches. Once in a while it felt nice to be nanny for a day. Except they had one and I had 25.

Thursday, June 19th, 5:00 pm - Protest: "National Day of Protest

Join New Yorkers on Thursday June 19th for a day of protest against health insurance profiteering. We will speak-out against the proposed privatization of GHI and HIP and claim Health Care as a basic human right! We will mourn the countless victims of the health insurance industry while marking June nineteenth – a day commemorating the emancipation of slaves in North America. The NYC action is one 17 others nation-wide in solidarity with activists in San Francisco, CA who will be protesting the annual meeting of 38,000 health insurance executives. On June 19th join fellow New Yorkers in declaring our emancipation from for-profit healthcare and support for the single-payer national health insurance bill H. R. 676.

Bring friends & signs.

5:00 pm - Meet at Office of GHI, 441 9th Avenue (34th & 9th)
5:30 pm – March to United Health, One Penn Plaza, (34th St. btw. 7th & 8th)
(A/C/E or 1/2/3 to 34th Street)

For more info on the movement to oppose GHI/HIP privatization:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2008/06/97606.shtml
http://www.myspace.com/saveourhealthcare

For more info on the movement for Single-Payer National Health Insurance:
http://www.healthcare-now.org/
http://www.phimg.org/V2/

March Organizers
Healthcare Now!, The Coalition Against Privatization, Private Health Insurance Must Go! & Physicians for a National Health Program (Metro Chapter)

Supporters
Teachers for a Just Contract (UFT), Independent Community of Educators (UFT), the Take Back Our Union Coalition (TWU Local 100), The Hunger Action Network of NY State, Gangbox: The Construction Worker's News Service, UFT Retirees, D.C. 37 rank-and-file members, D.C. 37 retirees, Socialist Party USA (NYC), & Socialist Action.

More Info: (718) 869-2279, noprivatization@yahoo.com (request flyer)

Cartoon by graphic artist Gary Martin

Hunting Down Bad Teachers

The nationwide focus on quality teaching is curious when compared to lack of focus on quality of physicians, where mistakes lead to people dying. At Friday's ICE meeting, Michael Fiorillo raised a very valid point in comparing the way the US health care and education systems are perceived. He surmised that in reality, the US education system compares rather favorably internationally in comparison to the health care system, where US infant mortality rates are somewhat shameful, among a bunch of other negative stats. Let's say that in poor areas, they are no worse than comparable to each other. Yet, why isn't the Mayor finding a million dollars to root out bad doctors? (I won't even get into the legal profession here.)

I understand the focus on the desire to get rid of “ineffective” teachers but I would love to get people to tell me how to define that. I know plenty of teachers who ended up at private schools and are are considered to be good teachers because the NYC system spit them out due to large class sizes and unruly kids. “Effectiveness” is a relative term. In my first year if I kept the kids from swinging from the lights I was considered effective.

I was part of a group mentoring Teaching Fellows and stories abound of some of them floundering in one school but flourishing in another.

Look at your own schools and from what you can see, what is the % of lousy teachers? Try rating your colleagues in order of effectiveness. Would that list match the administrators’ list? The parents and students’ lists? (I was in Spain 2 years ago at a school where the principal was elected by teachers, parents and kids.) Most bad teachers find a way to migrate out of the classroom, all too often to supervisor’s chair.

There will always be a bell curve of teacher quality no matter what is done and everyone will have some teachers who are great, average and poor. The way to improve quality is to make conditions as ripe as possible for good teaching to take place. But what is occurring is a quota system where principals have to show results in getting rid of some teachers and they often pick on the most vulnerable personality wise, often loners without popular support in the school. In other cases, they pick on teachers who might be good teaching a whole class but struggle in the workshop model. Many have found this to occur when they were slow to adapt to the major changes Diana Lam and Carmen Farina forced down people's throats.

With so many 20-year plus veteran teachers under attack we have to ask, what if they get rid of them all and replace them with first year newbies of unknown quality, many of whom may be worse than the people they are replacing? Are the kids better off?

After the meeting Loretta Prisco sent this item.

A Third of New York’s Worst Repeat Offender Doctors
Continue to Practice Without Licensing Consequences

Statement of Laura MacCleery, Director, Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Division

Nov. 16, 2007

We are shocked – but not surprised – by recent revelations that a New York doctor risked exposing more than 600 people to deadly diseases due to a terrible hygiene practice.

While state health officials delayed public release of the information to patients, the state’s medical board also has let this avoidable public health disaster go utterly unaddressed, incredibly finding no evidence of wrongdoing by the anesthesiologist, Dr. Harvey Finkelstein of Plainview, N.Y.

We immediately took another look at the National Practitioner Data Bank, a record of medical malpractice payments. We found that from 1990 to 2007, only a scant third of doctors with 10 or more medical malpractice payouts had a reportable licensure disciplinary action.

That shoddy record of discipline for the worst offenders deserves a close look by state lawmakers. The “I’ll scratch your back” culture in medicine, in which doctors have claimed they are competent to police themselves, must end before more people are killed by criminal negligence.

To add this insult to patients’ injuries, rather than moving swiftly to address the problem with a subpoena, the state health department took months to negotiate a voluntary agreement from Finkelstein to release patients’ names. Health officials must change their lax attitude and adopt an enforcement mentality, particularly when lives are at stake.

Rate of Discipline Among New York Doctors Who Have Made Medical Malpractice Payments

Number of Payment Reports	Number of Doctors Who Made Payments	Sum of These Payments	Subset of Number of Doctors who had One or More Reportable Licensure Actions	Pct. of Doctors Who Made Payments Who had One or More Reportable Licensure Actions	Pct. of Total Dollars Paid Out Statewide
Total	15624	$8,801,597,900	920	5.9	100.0
1	9435	$2,547,679,350	393	4.2	28.9
2 or more	6189	$6,253,918,550	527	8.5	71.1
3 or more	3057	$4,369,937,700	332	10.9	49.6
4 or more	1631	$3,032,795,700	213	13.1	34.5
5 or more	960	$2,173,580,200	141	14.7	24.7
10 or more	127	$482,470,250	40	31.5	5.5

Source: National Practitioner Data Bank

[The data above reflects information from entire period reported in the NPDB database, and includes payments (both settlements and jury verdicts) reported from September 1, 1990 through June 30, 2007, according to the NPDB Public Use Data File Format Specifications File (http://www.npdb-hipdb.hrsa.gov/pubs/stats/Public_Use_Data_File.pdf).]

Sicko Union

We saw Michael Moore's "Sicko" the other day - at the behest of our 23 year old cousin who just graduated from college. It's nice to see interest in the issue of health insurance from the younger generation. But then again, faced with the prospect that they may have no health insurance, who can blame them?

There is no question the movie will have an impact on the debate, though I always have issues with some of the methods Moore uses in all his movies, especially his disingenuousness. There was also a feeling of exploitation. When you are up against the powerful forces arrayed aghast you on this issue, I guess some of it is justified, though in some cases Moore's case is weakened in his uncritical admiration for, say France, where certain elements of society do not seem exactly enamored, despite free health care. And when Moore points to the fact that so many other services are paid for in the public arena, like schools, I guess he isn't aware of the privatization efforts of people of BloomKlein ilk - by the way, Mike, examining what they did to education in NYC would be a fitting topic for your next documentary. Call it "Sicko II."

But this is about the UFT and the health care issue, inspired by a comment on ICE-mail by Sean Ahern:

"As the owner of HIP does UFT Inc. qualify as a health insurance company? When was the last time our so-called union called for a single payer national health insurance plan? Could it be that their business interests trump all others?"

Now, some members of the UFT will say, "Why should we care about universal health care? We have a pretty good plan." While "Sicko" points to the fact that even people with health plans can find themselves in financial risk at some point, I will take the road of saying that a union that has the resources the UFT has, should be out there fighting for such a basic right for all people in society, especially since so many of our students may not exactly be getting the best health care. Think that affects the job teachers can do?

But I haven't seen the UFT making too many of the political points that unions used to make. And don't expect the AFT to do any more when it has new leadership. As Sean says, they are business unions functioning more in support of the status quo than interested in changing it.