Our Health Policy Matters

Claiming that D.C. crime is out of control, President Trump has brought in the National Guard. Never mind that crime rates are down in the District. The optics are compelling. Trump blames homeless people. As Fox News reported , he is giving them two choices – jail or homeless shelters to treat mental health and substance use disorders. If these choices seem reasonable, they aren’t. Sending someone to jail who hasn’t committed a crime is a bad, even unconstitutional, idea. Like our new South Florida gulag, this notion offends many of us. And many, if not most, of the people who are chronically homeless have seriously undertreated mental health conditions. Jails and shelters don’t have the money or resources to provide that treatment. What this boils down to is comfort. Seeing homeless people congregating makes some people uncomfortable. President Trump is suggesting that the freedom to congregate peacefully is a freedom reserved only to some of us – not everyone. There’s bigotry t...

Mayor Florsheim has proposed a budget with a 2.7 mill increase for the coming fiscal year. This will mean an increase in taxes of approximately $500 per year for a home with a market value (not an assessed value) of $250,000, with larger increases for many homes in our city. While I appreciate the time and effort that went into his budget calculation, like many people I don’t believe that this is a sustainable increase on top of the increases of the past few years. What I appreciate even more is that the Mayor has invited members of the public to work together to offer their own perspective and suggestions to the City Council. In the past few weeks, I have offered several short-term suggestions, including a job freeze, a search for an alternative health insurance provider, and greater advocacy at the state level for fairer PILOT funding for Middletown. As an example, the Mayor’s budget proposes $77,800 for a Grantwriter versus zero from the Finance Department. Maybe we wait on that? ...

My wife Pam and I bought private long term care insurance about twenty years ago. It’s a pretty good deal. For about $100 per month, we will someday – when we need it – be eligible for up to $200 a day toward either home health care or nursing home care. Add it up – it could save us hundreds of thousands of dollars as we age. I’ve been a big supporter of long-term care insurance since I was a Connecticut State Legislator in the 1980s. But to be honest, it’s never quite gotten the traction it should have. One of the reasons is that when people are young and healthy, they aren’t thinking about what their long-term care needs might be thirty or forty years down the road. But that’s when premiums would be most affordable. The bigger problem is that it’s really hard for insurers to predict the costs of long-term care that far in advance, too. The costs of care often far exceed those that are estimated way in advance. As a result, the policies that Pam and I have aren’t even offered anymore...

I never held it against Donald Trump that my son died of a fentanyl overdose in January 2021. Yes, he had been President for four years at that point, and he hadn’t really done anything to stop the wave of drugs coming across our southern border. I just figured it was bad luck for Tim – street drugs laced with fentanyl that happened to be in California but could have been anywhere. But when Kamala Harris recast the border crisis last week as a crisis of human, weapons, and drug trafficking, it made me think. Why hadn’t Trump done more when he had the chance? And why does he keep attacking immigrants as people instead of addressing the real problems that sometime accompany open borders? Maybe – if he weren’t so darn weird, angry, and bigoted all the time – this guy could have done something when he was President to secure the border better and reduce the flow of fentanyl into our country. Or even this year, if he weren’t so self-centered he might not have killed the bipartisan border...

When a politician says he has “concepts of a plan” instead of a plan, there is no plan. And yet, that’s where we are with Donald Trump, nine years after he first launched a political campaign promising to replace Obamacare with something cheaper and better, nearly four years after he had four years to try to do just that. And fail. Doubling down during Tuesday’s debate, he claimed he had “concepts of a plan” to replace Obamacare. Really? He’s got nothing. In fact, he sounds just like Nixon sounded in 1968, when he claimed he had a “secret” plan to get us out of Vietnam. That turned out to be no plan at all (remember “Vietnamization?”) and cost us seven more years there and tens of thousands of lives. The Affordable Care Act, about which I wrote plenty in this blog a decade or more ago, wasn’t perfect. But it was a whole lot better than what we had before it – and anything (save a public option) that has been proposed since. Back then, insurers could deny coverage because of pre-exi...

A political leader from Minnesota arrived on the national scene with a message of joy, hope, and equality. He grew up in the rural Midwest and became a teacher after he moved to Minnesota. Known as the “happy warrior,” he made civil rights, the health and nutrition of school children, and support for the underprivileged centerpieces of his policy work. When our country and the world was staring at the rise of fascism, he was a patriot who volunteered three times for military service. At the beginning of his campaign for national office, he said: “Here we are, just as we ought to be, here we are, the people, here we are the spirit of dedication, here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy; and that's the way it's going to be, all the way, too, from here on out. We seek an America able to preserve and nurture all the basic rights of free expression, yet able to reach across the divisions that too often sepa...