American Forum

By Mark Mellman

COLORADO EDITORIAL FORUM

By Emilie C. Ailts and Vicki Cowart

As national health care reform faces its next hurdle -- a conference committee bill that reconciles the House and Senate bills -- we believe it's critical to draw attention to a provision contained in the House bill. This provision, brought by Reps. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) and known as the Stupak abortion coverage ban, would create barriers to women's reproductive health care far worse than any encountered since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

This new abortion coverage ban makes insurance coverage for abortion virtually unavailable for millions of women purchasing insurance plans through the newly created health insurance exchange.

Federal law already bans use of federal funds for abortions, but the Stupak measure goes much further. It denies use of private money -- not just public money -- to cover abortions.

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By Susan Shaer

A flu pandemic is nasty, brutish, and a global danger. All U.S. Senators and other leaders agree, and leap to keep everyone safe and healthy.

Another nasty, brutish and global danger, which additionally is outrageously expensive and out of sync with today’s defense needs, is the continued maintenance of our huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. All our senators should agree on this.

However, since there are threats and plotters, the U.S. needs to have a strong and effective defense.

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By Riane Eisler

The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference makes evident potential catastrophic effects of climate change, including its enormous economic and human tolls. It also clearly shows how poor nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and island states will suffer most from the inevitable floods, droughts and other weather disasters.

But there’s more that needs to be made clear in Copenhagen. If we look closely, there’s a hidden truth with huge implications that we must bring to the attention of conference delegates to ensure that allocated funds actually protect those most vulnerable to these natural disasters.

Studies show that women are 14 times more likely to die in natural disasters. One heart-rending study of a Bangladesh flash flood found that 90 percent of casualties were female. Many factors contributed to this high casualty rate, all were avoidable. A woman’s role in this Southeast Asian nation, as in most of the Middle East and parts of Africa, is one of dependency -- so of course, these Bangladeshi women were not taught to swim. But perhaps the most important factor was that they lived and died in a culture where women are so rigidly controlled that they aren’t permitted to leave their homes without being accompanied by a male family member. When the flash flood occurred, they sadly stayed and drowned.

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By Greg LeRoy

Aside from health-care reform, probably the most divisive issue in Washington today is the $787 billion economic stimulus program.

One camp argues that the Recovery Act has done a good job in preventing the country from plunging into a more serious crisis than the one we’ve got, while another camp says the whole effort has had little effect and was an expensive mistake. We suspect the former conclusion is correct, but would like better evidence.

Most arguments are based on differing assessments of the first round of jobs data released in October. The Recovery Act’s exemplary transparency provisions cover direct federal contracts and some of the grants to states—a limited part of the overall stimulus program. They counted about 640,000 jobs created or saved so far.

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NEW MEXICO EDITORIAL FORUM

By Max Bartlett and Jose Aguilar

TENNESSEE EDITORIAL FORUM

By Dick Williams

The Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA) requires replacement of paperless touchscreen voting machines with optical ballot scanners by November 2010. Optical-scan voting systems read marked paper ballots and tally results, providing a tangible record of the voter's intent. They are now the most widely employed voting systems in the nation, used by 60 percent of voters in other states.

The TVCA was adopted nearly unanimously by the Tennessee Legislature – by both Democrats and Republicans -- and in 2008 enthusiastically signed into law by Gov. Phil Bredesen. But implementation of the law has been ensnarled in legalities and technicalities.

Tennessee's secretary of state and coordinator of elections have argued that the new law requires scanners be federally certified to 2005 standards, and because no machines have yet been certified to that standard, the law cannot be put into effect in time for 2010 Elections.

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By Susan Wysocki and Susan Scanlan

It’s not surprising that women are confused about the recently changed recommendations for cancer screening and prevention. New guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) – the leading medical group that provides health care for women – say women should wait longer to begin cervical-cancer screening and that they should be screened less frequently. On the heels of similar changes to breast-cancer screening guidelines, it’s understandable that many women might see this as a step backward.

On the contrary, the new cervical-cancer screening recommendations reflect advances in our understanding of this disease and in tools now available to prevent it. More importantly, they present an opportunity to educate women about the significant opportunity we have to further prevent – if not eliminate – cervical cancer.

New ACOG screening guidelines recommend women should begin getting Pap tests at age 21 (as opposed to within three years of becoming sexually active) and that, from ages 21 to 29, most women should have Pap tests every two years instead of annually. Additionally, screening for women 30 and older with a history of normal Pap test results now moves to every three years.

By Nan Orrock

When President Obama accepts the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, it is an opportunity to articulate a new international direction, away from nuclear proliferation, away from nuclear tests, and away from loose materials and increased risk. Hopefully, he will join the Nobel Committee in putting out the call that we must act now to reduce the enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons.

It will not be easy, or quick. And it shouldn’t be. As long as nuclear weapons exist, the U.S. must have a safe and reliable arsenal. The road to disarmament is, necessarily and rightly, long, and will take many years and many small steps to guarantee our safety and prevent any cracks in our security. But it is also vital; the longer nuclear weapons lurk, and grow, the graver the danger that a rogue state or a terrorist will use one.

One of the first steps should be to prevent new nuclear weapons. The easiest way to do this is to ban nuclear weapons tests.

Click here to view full op-ed.

See my i-Commentary about this topic here:

MISSOURI FORUM

By Timothy D. McBride

GEORGIA FORUM

By Timothy Sweeney, MPA

MISSISSIPPI FORUM

By Lynn Evans

NORTH CAROLINA EDITORIAL FORUM
by Melissa Reed

by Sarah van Gelder

As the Copenhagen Climate Summit approaches, some world leaders predict there will be either no deal or one so weak that it will be virtually worthless.

Little wonder. Climate change could be one of the toughest issues the world has ever faced, less because of the technical challenges than the politics. That’s why the growing climate movement is so important to watch. Its success could determine if world leaders feel enough heat to take action.

What makes the politics of this moment so challenging? Unlike other critical issues, this one requires that we take action, based on science, before we see much damage. If we wait until the effects of long-term pollution are fully felt, climate scientists tell us, we will have passed critical thresholds that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to turn down the global thermostat.

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GEORGIA FORUM

By Sarah Beth Gehl

As families gather for Thanksgiving this week, we should consider that in just a decade Georgia has deteriorated from average (ranking 22nd) to 4th highest for food insecurity in the nation.

One in seven Georgia households experienced food insecurity during 2006-2008, according to a recently released report by the USDA. The share of Georgia households lacking resources for adequate meals rose from 10.9 percent during 1996-1998 to 14.2 percent during 2006-2008.

These sobering numbers highlight the importance of focusing solutions on combating hunger and poverty in our communities.

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By M. Patricia West, MSSW

Elected officials' religious views should be their own private affair, neither imposed by them upon the nation, nor imposed by the nation as condition to holding public office. This means their private religious views should not be imposed via the current debate over health care reform.

Important life decisions are responsibilities of individuals and families, not of government or religious groups. On that, most of us can agree. There is also a strong history of separation of church and state in America, and one of our founding principles is of freedom from religious intolerance. That's why I was deeply offended when Roman Catholic Church bishops lobbied Congress on health care reform in order to deny millions of women access to abortion.

As an American I am proud of our constitutionally guaranteed right to worship or not as one sees fit, and of our prohibition of government-imposed state religion. But what started out to be about health care for all has morphed into a referendum and debate on abortion unduly influenced by the church. Health care legislation passed by the House of Representatives compromises our personal choices and subverts the principle of abortion neutrality.

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COLORADO EDITORIAL FORUM
By Robin Baker

The excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” plans is a central feature of the Senate Finance Committee's health proposal. Most often, Cadillac plans are described as the "overly generous" or "gold-plated" plans offered to Wall Street types.

In theory, levying a tax on these gold-plated plans will encourage lower spending and help slow the growth rate of health insurance and health care costs.

In addition, the revenue generated from the tax on insurers would provide a significant source of funding for subsidies to help families with low to moderate incomes afford health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates revenues will be about $5 billion in 2013 and increase to $53 billion by 2019.

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ALABAMA FORUM

By Amy Hinton and Lamar Davis

On November 5 a shooting spree at the Fort Hood Soldier Processing Center in Killeen, Texas left 13 soldiers dead and another 29 wounded. Subsequently, the shocking revelation that the alleged perpetrator was an active duty Army psychiatrist seemed to defy belief.

The recent actions attributed to Major Nidal Hasan have been subject to intense media coverage. Few, however, have questioned how such a deeply troubled individual could avoid detection while working in the very mental health system that was intended to be the safety net for our returning troops.

A 2008 RAND Center for Military Health Policy research study reported two significant challenges that face the military mental health system. First, the mental health system has difficulty responding to the treatment needs of soldiers in a timely manner. This is likely due to the intense and pervasive stigma about mental illness that often prevents people from seeking mental health treatment, particularly in the military. Second, the limited availability of mental health resources – services, providers and dedicated funding -- essentially determines access to and quality of treatment. Arguably, the most serious deficiency driving these challenges is the grossly inadequate number of qualified, credentialed mental health professionals available to meet the current demand.

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MISSOURI FORUM
By Liz Forrestal and Caroline Ishida

We are gratified that Gov. Jay Nixon has returned Mark Templeton to his job as Director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Templeton was an unfortunate victim of the recent controversy over elevated levels of the bacterium E. coli in the Lake of the Ozarks. But this flap has distracted from a far more troubling problem: the insufficient monitoring of ALL Missouri waters.

Along with many others, our organizations were dismayed to learn of the serious oversight and bungling of mid-level officials in both the DNR and Governor’s office. The miscommunication between these two offices was inexcusable and deserved to be investigated. Moreover, we completely agree that the lake’s beaches should have been closed to protect public health. But the origins of E. coli in the lake -- and what that says about the water quality monitoring and enforcement program at DNR – should be front and center in this discussion. Furthermore, a large-scale cleanup at the lake like the one Nixon announced is merely a band-aid solution to a larger water quality monitoring and enforcement problem all over the state.

At the root of the problem is that funding for DNR’s water quality monitoring and enforcement program is completely insufficient to protect the health of our waters. General revenue support for DNR was gutted by the Blunt administration, and permit fees have not been raised in more than a decade, even for inflation. These are the problems that should be at the center of the E. coli discussion, and they started well before the arrival of Templeton.

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GEORGIA FORUM
By Kathie McClure

It can be challenging to find an organ donor for someone who needs a transplant.

But when a donor and desperately sick person are matched up, living donors should not be “punished” for their gift, especially by the health insurance industry.

This is a little-known aspect of the health care debate that should be brought to light -- the fact that there is nothing that prevents health insurance companies from either denying coverage or charging higher premiums to those who donate an organ by categorizing them as people with “pre-existing conditions.”

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TEXAS LONE STAR FORUM
By Don Baylor

Commercial innovation remains at the heart of the American tradition. However, innovation should be used to increase American wealth, not destroy it.

Leading up to the financial crisis, gaps in our financial monitoring system unleashed a financial virus still worming through the American economy. Products like overdraft fees, payday loans, and “pick-a-payment” mortgages all damaged our economy. The resulting system crash led to historic levels of foreclosures, lost wealth and chronic unemployment.

As new, complex financial products enter the marketplace, our regulatory firewall must be able to detect toxic financial products and safeguard Americans from financial harm. We need a national solution that honors state authority in order to protect American wealth from future meltdowns. The proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) would help avoid repeat financial disaster by ensuring that all “off-the shelf” financial products can be monitored by one inspector with a clear code book.

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By Anne R. Davis, MD, MPH

Every day, I hear from another woman who is losing her job and her health insurance. Every day, I worry. As an obstetrician/gynecologist, I know firsthand what can happen when a woman can’t afford reproductive health care, whether she has lost her insurance or her insurance doesn’t cover women’s basic needs. Cervical cancer develops unnoticed. Pregnant women go without critical prenatal care. Sexually transmitted diseases progress unchecked. We see the results in the emergency room.

Congress must give women a better shot at staying well. Health care reform must change the rules: Health insurance must be affordable to all women, and the insurance we buy must cover our reproductive health care.

In my own life, I’ve always had good health insurance. I go to my ob/gyn each year for a well-woman exam, my birth control is covered, and my hospital bills were paid when I had my two children. These are medical fundamentals -- women’s health care 101-- yet I consider myself lucky to have them. Too many women are not as fortunate. According to the Guttmacher Institute, more than one in four women or their partners have lost their jobs or health insurance in the past year. The institute also reports that one in four women delayed an ob/gyn visit in the last year to save money.

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NEW MEXICO EDITORIAL FORUM
By Rev. Dr. Holly Beaumont

MINNESOTA EDITORIAL FORUM
By Dan McGrath

By Wendy C. Wolf

WISCONSIN FORUM
By Dr. Doug Laube

NEW MEXICO EDITORIAL FORUM
By Ona Porter

COLORADO EDITORIAL FORUM

By Matt Sundeen

By Hector Garcia

KRWG - Newsmakers in Las Cruces, New Mexico recently aired a program about the multitudes of doctors that are speaking out about healthcare reform. They interviewed New Mexico Editorial Forum author Dr. Sandra Penn, who recently penned an op-ed "Stop Negotiating Away the Public Health Insurance Model" about her views that Congress is letting real reform slip away. You can see her interview for yourself, which occurs at the 5 minute mark.

IOWA FORUM
By Erik Camayd-Freixas

By Ed Smeloff and Scott Denman

Too much heat and too little light are being generated right now inside the Washington, DC Beltway on the issue of global warming. Some electric utilities and allies in the coal and nuclear industries claim that only coal or nuclear reactors can meet future energy needs and combat global climate change. They say there is no other way.

However, beyond the Beltway there is clear evidence that there is another way. There is a prosperous new direction -- without using more polluting coal or building more expensive, dangerous nuclear reactors.

This “third way” takes advantage of America’s vast -- and easily recovered -- energy efficiency ‘reserves’ and dramatically expands reliance on a wealth-creating mix of advanced and renewable energy technologies.

Quietly, but steadily, one major U.S. utility, California’s Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), has spent the last 20 years demonstrating that this “third way” powers economic growth, is easier on the family pocketbook, and slashes air pollution.

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MISSISSIPPI FORUM
By Marsha Meeks Kelly

In another life, I was a public school teacher. English, math and eventually “Skills for Adolescence” were the subjects that consumed my days along with an average of 140 seventh graders.

Every day I worked hard to meet the needs of my students in “inner-city” public schools in Mississippi. I remember the tears of the student who came to me to discuss her pregnancy and how she was going to tell her parents and whether she should get married at 13 years of age.

That year we started a “Peer Ears” program, a peer counseling program, and the next year we started survival skills classes called “Skills for Adolescence.” Too many pregnancies and too many sexually-transmitted diseases forced our school district to incorporate classes to educate our students about their life decisions.

Reading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on the sexual and reproductive health of young people was depressing. So little progress has been made here! Twenty years ago several concerned Mississippians formed a statewide coalition to work with the legislature to ensure a comprehensive K-12 health education curriculum, but we still do not have even a pilot program offering students sex education, despite attempts to institute such a program in the 2009 legislative session.

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By Maureen P. Corry, MPH

“I don’t need maternity care.” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) lobbed this comment against Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s (D-MI) efforts to guarantee maternity coverage as a basic benefit in health care reform. “Your mom probably did,” Stabenow famously shot back. That exchange and the wave of support that followed for Stabenow’s proposals illustrates how out of step Kyl is with a huge majority of Americans, including those in his own party.

Voters across the political spectrum are almost universal in their support for making maternity care an essential health insurance benefit through health care reform, according to a new poll conducted by Mark Mellman and commissioned by the Communications Consortium Media Center and the Women Donors Network. Fully 86 percent of voters strongly support a guaranteed maternity care benefit, and 95 percent believe that women should have the right to decide when to have a child, where to give birth and the health care provider who will attend their birth.

At Childbirth Connection, a 91-year-old national organization advocating high quality, evidence-based maternity care, we are not surprised by these results. We’ve known for years that rapid gains in the quality, value and cost of maternity care are well within reach. Health care reform is our opportunity to ensure that all women and babies get higher quality care with better results, and savings from following best practices can be put toward providing coverage for all.

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PENNSYLVANIA FORUM
By Cathy Raphael

As a midwife in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, my great-great-grandmother Hannah Sandusky brought many healthy children into the world despite the high maternal and infant mortality rates of the time.

I can’t help but wonder what “Bubbe” Hannah – as she was known to all – would make of the fact that today, some 150 years later, the U.S. ranks 42nd globally in maternal mortality rates, the highest among industrialized countries. Maternal mortality is a key indicator of health worldwide and reflects the ability of women to secure not only pregnancy-related services but also other health care services.

What Bubbe Hannah no doubt knew in 1909 surely remains true in 2009: healthy women have healthy babies.

The pending reform of the American health care system recognizes this simple equation, creating -- for the first time ever -- a seamless, lifelong continuum of care for women.

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VIRGINIA FORUM
By Christopher Mattera

NEW MEXICO EDITORIAL FORUM
By Jason Marks

Year in and year out, healthcare costs go up faster than the rate of inflation. This year, we will spend more than $2.5 trillion on healthcare in the U.S., which is over $8,100 per person. Even at that, more than 35 million of our fellow citizens are left without regular healthcare coverage through insurance or a government program.

Health insurers serve as a convenient target, getting criticized for denying care to those that need it most, creating too much red-tape for doctors and other providers, and for diverting too much of our insurance dollars to administrative overhead, profits, executive compensation, and lobbying. But since most insurers pay out 75 to 85 percent of premium dollars in medical reimbursements, the direct savings from taking them entirely out of the system is no more than 25 percent.

If like me, you are concerned not just with the availability and quality of healthcare, but also its affordability, then it is important to understand that we have to look beyond insurance reform and coverage mandates. We must also look also at our healthcare industries, by which I mean doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and so forth. Most importantly, we have to look at -- and fundamentally change -- the current dynamic in which employers, insurers, healthcare providers, and last (and sometimes least) patients come together to deliver and pay for our medical care.

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MISSISSIPPI FORUM
By Lynn Evans

The latest polls on health care reform find that most Americans support it, but they are also confused about what is in the proposals currently being worked on by Congress. No wonder. The amount of misinformation floating around is enough to confuse a rocket scientist.

If the American public is feeling left out of the debate on health care reform, it just might have something to do with the $1.4 million per day being spent on lobbying this single issue by the drug, health insurance and other health-related industries. In addition, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the health care industry has given members of Congress nearly $24 million in campaign contributions this year, on top of the $170 million they gave during the last election.

The drug manufacturers’ trade association, known as PHARMA, has spent more than $92 million lobbying Congress this year and is about to roll out a $150 million ad campaign to cut the discounts on drug products that are being planned to help reduce spiraling health care costs. Having enjoyed the largess of the Bush years, these companies are willing to spend big to keep their profits flowing.

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GEORGIA FORUM

By Harry J. Heiman, MD, MPH

FLORIDA FORUM
By Tony Fransetta

TEXAS LONE STAR FORUM

By Margery Engel Loeb and Camille D. Miller