Neil deMause: The Website

Why we need a public health insurance option, in 360 words or less:

When my friend was laid off recently, she was happy to learn that, thanks to Obama’s stimulus package, she’d get to keep her family health insurance at a cost of $330 a month.

OK, maybe “happy” is pushing it… [read more]

Beneath the longest headline known to man or blog, I examine the possible fallout of the NYC subway’s first-ever naming-rights deal:

That resounding “Ewwwww!” you heard emanating from Brooklyn was the sound of locals discovering that as part of Bruce Ratner’s revamped deal with the MTA for the Atlantic Yards site, he’s set to get naming rights to the Atlantic Avenue subway station. If it’s approved by the MTA board tomorrow as expected, the new station name — which as Ben Kabak notes at Second Avenue Sagas would bear the unwieldy moniker “Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street/Barclays Center — would presumably be put in place once Ratner’s new basketball arena opens, which is set to happen any century now… [read more]

There are some tentative signs that the recession may finally be able to do what Hurricane Katrina did not: Get the news media to pay attention to the 1 in 8 Americans — or more, depending on how you’re counting — who are living in poverty. Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran a long essay by Barbara Ehrenreich decrying the media focus on the “Nouveau Poor” and noting that while the economic hard times have been hardest on the already-poor, they’ve all but disappeared from the public debate in favor of laid-off stockbrokers forced to limit their vacation travel. (To be fair, the already-poor were mostly never there to begin with.) Notes Ehrenreich bitterly: “‘Low-Wage Worker Loses Job, Home’ is nobody’s idea of news.”

That’s certainly been the case, but could it be changing? Witness today’s Wall Street Journal, which takes a look at rising welfare rolls that actually manages to dig deeper than the usual recitation of stats, citing my former radio comrade Liz Schott to the effect that though welfare rolls are rising, they’re still lagging far behind food stamp enrollments, a sign that there are plenty of needy unable to meet the strict income and work requirements imposed by welfare reform. “But people in between have the hardest time,” one food stamp recipient (and non-Nouveau Rich person) told the Journal. “You don’t make enough money to get by but you make too much to get help.”

The real test, of course, is to see whether this is a trend: While it’s hopeful that the Times piece says “First in a series,” the rest could end up all being about former yacht salesmen who are forced to buy their steaks at Costco. Stay tuned.

Some historical perspective on why the time may be right to cut bait on some big New York development projects:

When the state Senate — back when we had a functioning state Senate — held hearings on Brooklyn’s beleaguered Atlantic Yards project last month, angry construction workers packed the hall to decry the delays that have plagued the plan since developer Bruce Ratner first floated it nearly six years ago. “Build it now!” they chanted. “No more hearings!”

After a week in which more bits continued to flake off of Ratner’s mega project — architect Frank Gehry was ignominiously axed as too expensive, and the initial “Jobs, Housing and Hoops” plan has now been whittled down to, I believe, an $800 million Nets arena and a pair of souvlaki carts — some folks are moaning that we’re seeing a return to the Dark Ages when nothing could get built in the city… [read more]

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Carolyn Lochhead — never my favorite reporter on social issues — has a long piece today on health reform that asserts:

It will mean higher taxes and, potentially, lower benefits for many people. It will mean putting the brakes on how doctors and hospitals practice medicine. It may require employers to provide health insurance and individuals to buy it.

None of these things will be popular. Cost containment, identified by the White House as a key objective, never is.

So let’s see: Taxpayers will have to share the pain, the insured, doctors, employers … anyone left out? Oh yeah, insurance companies. Nowhere in 1,600 words does Lochhead find room for the notion that insurers might have to take a cut in their soaring profit margins — though she cites the National Coalition on Health Care as calling for “short-term restraints” on costs, she fails to mention that one of the restraints they’re calling for is a cap on insurance premiums.

On the bigger picture, meanwhile, Lochhead’s article is murky on the question of exactly which problems health reform is supposed to fix. (This is a common problem in health care coverage, which has quickly come to resemble “horse race” style election stories: all about which side is winning, not whose policies would do what.) While she cites both rising costs and rising numbers of uninsured, these aren’t exactly unrelated trends — aside from those who can’t get insurance because of pre-existing conditions (which would, thankfully, be dealt with by many of the Congressional plans), the uninsured are mostly uninsured because they can’t afford it.

Since there are only two ways to enable people to afford something — make it cheaper, or give them money to pay for it — both problems would seem to require the same solution in the end: Reduce the amount of money flowing to the people who make money off of health care (insurers, doctors, and makers of the machines that go “ping!”). The alternative would be a system that solves a social ill by pumping government money into rich people’s pockets, and surely that’d never fly with … er, never mind.

For those of you in the Twitterverse, I’ve started posting links to all my new articles to Twitter as they appear. You can follow me @neildemause.

For those of you who wouldn’t touch Twitter with a ten-foot pole, there’s still the tried-and-true RSS feed.

A visit to a welfare-to-work program whose participants say it actually, like, works:

Say one thing for the women packing an airless classroom in East Harlem: They’ve mastered call-and-response. “You have skills and education, what else do you need?” asks Angelo Rivera, who is teaching this career development class to a group of about 30 public assistance recipients, all female. “Experience!” comes the answer.

A few minutes later, Rivera throws another one at them: “Ready for the question?” It’s actually a quote, and he wants to know – “Who said that?”

There’s silence, then someone ventures: “Abernathy?”… [read more]

Under the guise of tax reform, New York’s mayor and city council speaker are trying to push through a loophole for large interstate corporations:

You might think that the middle of a recession spawned by massive corporate malfeasance wouldn’t be the best time to propose a giant tax break for corporations. But then, if you’re Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christine Quinn, you might not. Crain’s reports today that the dynamic duo of City Hall has begun a major push to cut taxes for city corporations by $2.7 billion over the next decade, a gift that could eventually be worth more than half a billion dollars a year to city businesses.”… [read more]

Note: Obviously the last line of this article became outdated after the 3 p.m. coup in Albany.

What we’re losing in Detroit:

After a crazy Friday afternoon that featured a preservationist running onto the field at Tiger Stadium to serve a restraining order against the stadium’s demolition — too late to stop a backhoe from taking several bites out of the upper deck — Wayne County Circuit Judge Prentice Edwards is expected today to rule on whether the stadium will stand or fall. If Edwards issues a permanent stay of execution, the Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy, which includes SABR stalwarts Gary Gillette and Rod Nelson, gets to keep plugging away at its plan to save the remaining “Navin Field” section of the grandstand, roughly corresponding to the stadium’s original 1912 dimensions, and convert it into a community ballfield with some of the interior converted to office space and a museum. If not, expect the seat-munching to resume immediately.

The loss to baseball history and potential tourism aside (can you imagine what people would pay now to visit even a sliver of Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds?) there’s something else at risk here: Tiger Stadium is now the last surviving example of an old-style upper deck overhang.”… [read more]

Note that the judge was not impressed by my reasoning.

I didn’t have much room in yesterday’s Metro column to discuss all the ways in which same-sex couples (and unmarried mixed-sex couples) are discriminated against in tax law, Social Security benefits, etc; fortunately, Michele Forsten has a longer piece in today’s Daily News about all the rights she’s denied because of being forced to check off “single” on forms merely because of the gender of her partner. An excellent read.