Health care reform around the country

Leave a reply

It was hard to miss: The White House confab this week with the warring sides in Congress meeting over the heated issue of health care reform. National shows and local stations each weighed creative approaches to coverage:

KQED in San Francisco (home city of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has been a leading advocate of health care reform), put together a page for comments and a live blog of the event. The Sunlight Foundation provided a tool to track donations to members of congress Congressional representatives as they spoke during the summit.

Tennesee had three representatives in their delegation: – two republicans and one democrat, some open to compromise on the health care bill, and one, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who made the case as other Republicans did to “start from scratch,” as WPLN in Nashville, with Capitol News Connection reported .

Nashville is a hub for the health care industry, which doesn’t seem to be hurting as the health care reform debate continues. WPLN reported that four major health are providers in Nashville, including HealthStream, posted positive year-end financial results.

But the urgency of health care reform certainly hasn’t gone away with a few hours of debate at the White House. As WAMC in Albany, NY found, thousands of people in New York alone are at risk without some serious changes:

The failure to enact health care reform this year will lead in the next decade to approximately 13,900 premature deaths of people between 25 and 64 years old in New York according to a report released today by the consumer health group Families USA.

Similar stories are cropping up around the country. For a full video roundup of health care coverage, PBS has a collection of clips from Frontline, NewsHour and more.

Chopinomics

2 Replies
Frederic Chopin, 1849/Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Frederic Chopin, 1849/Credit: Wikimedia Commons

How much would you pay to take a piano lesson from Frederic Chopin? In his time, adjusted for inflation, the price tag on a piano lesson with Chopin would fall somewhere between $50 and $96 in 2010 dollars. Worth it? Classical station WDAV in North Carolina reports:

Considering the average daily wage for an unskilled laborer in Paris was one franc. That’s three weeks’ wages to pay for one lesson if you don’t eat.

To commemorate the composer, Poland put his image on money:

In 1982 Chopin and the first two bars of this Polonaise in F Minor appeared on the Polish 5000 zloty bill. This year, The National Bank of Poland is adding their two cents’ worth with a release of special, collectible Chopin banknote valued at 20 zloty – about $6.77. Fourteen of the new notes if you want a lesson from the old poet of the piano!

There’s a ton of zloty in music today. Apple’s iTunes hit its 10 billionth 99-cent download this week. In an unusual agreement from two bloggers on opposite sides of the political spectrum, Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas and GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini each speculated on Twitter about what that $10 billion in revenue could have gone to, had it been spent in government:

@PatrickRuffini: iTunes songs have been sold 10 billion times…less than the cost of the jobs bill
@Markos responded: Less than monthly cost of wars too!

Trading up

2 Replies

Everyone has a skill they can share. That’s the theory behind the new OurGoods trade school in New York City, a space where artists and performers share each other’s abilities and help each other finish projects.

New Hampshire Public Radio reported on the project earlier this week, and the New York Times also picked it up.

OurGoods certainly isn’t the only trading system to spring up in the recession. A pub in England is allowing patrons to trade their skills for their drinks. The BBC reports:

Some drinkers have also volunteered to wash-up or decorate the pub.
Landlords Matthew Walsh and David Hurst said it was a way for independent pubs to compete with special offers at larger chain bars.

Of course, the barter system is hardly a new thing. In fact it’s the oldest thing on the books. NOVA’s History of Money program reported that bartering may even predate people:

Some would even argue that it’s not purely a human activity; plants and animals have been bartering—in symbiotic relationships—for millions of years.

Going back not quite THAT far, a 1998 PBS NewsHour piece on teachers in a remote area of Russia reminds us that when things are really bad, like in the early years following the fall of the Soviet Union, people tend to automatically switch to a trade-based system to get the things they need – even education.

The local government has started paying its wage arrears through barter. It now lets teachers go to local stores choose the products they need and deduct them from their salaries.

All this trading may seem like it’s under the table, but legally do you still owe taxes if you barter for something? The personal finance blog WalletPop says yes.

No money actually changes hands, so it’s almost as if the transaction didn’t happen, right? Not exactly. The fair market value of goods and services that you receive in exchange for goods or services you provide must be included as income on your tax return even though you don’t receive payment in a traditional way.

Think of barter just like cash: If it would be taxable if paid in cash, it’s taxable if paid in goods or services. If you receive value for goods or services that would normally be taxable to you personally but not as part of a trade or business (such as babysitting income), report it as “other income” on line 21 of your form 1040. If the exchange was part of your trade or business, report the transaction, including income and expenses, on a Schedule C on your form 1040.

Recalling the recall

1 Reply

Lawmakers in Washington are hearing from Toyota executives and auto industry experts this week to determine why some models have uncontrollable acceleration problems and whether Toyota tried to cover up flaws on the many thousands of vehicles that have now been recalled.

Capitol News Connection’s Matt Laslo was at today’s congressional hearings and has been tweeting updates. A snippet of what he’s seen today:

Some conservative members of Congress were more hesitant to slam Toyota outright. Capitol News Connection’s Sara Schiammaco noted in a roundup of opening remarks:

Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., scolded her colleagues on the panel who she said came in during the eleventh hour of the congressional examination to politicize the issue. “This should not be a trial, but rather a hearing to get to the bottom of safety issues,” Blackburn said. “This is a serious issue that has resulted in the loss jobs.”

Michigan Public Radio followed the state’s delegation at the hearings in Washington:

U.P. Congressman Bart Stupak is chairing today’s hearing. He suggests Toyota executives may be trying to hide problems with their vehicles.

“A staff analysis of the documents Toyota provided to the committee, shows that roughly 70 percent of the sudden, unintended acceleration events, recorded in Toyota’s own customer call data base, involve vehicles that are not covered by the floor mat or sticky pedal recalls,” says Stupak.

But the problems for Toyota run even deeper than Congress’s questions. PBS NewsHour’s Gwen Ifill spoke with a reporter in Detroit and analysed the criminal charges Toyota could face if a federal grand jury finds its executives at fault.

Toyota’s complete list of operations and plants in the U.S. can be found here. Take a look and see how your state is being represented at the hearings. If there’s a plant in your area, how has the recall had an impact locally?

Understanding PhRMA

Leave a reply

The Sunlight Foundation digs deep into the new White House health care proposal and how it may anger the powerful drug lobby, PhRMA.

Just last week, former Louisiana Senator Billy Tauzin resigned as head of PhRMA, the trade group representing the pharmaceutical industry. The group had worked closely with the White House to craft a health care bill that didn’t slam the drug companies.

Sunlight reports:

Throughout 2009, PhRMA and major pharmaceutical companies crafted a deal with the White House to limit cost cutting by the industry in exchange for the industry’s support, through over $100 million in television advertising, for health care reform…The White House’s new proposal contains deeper cost cuts than previously agreed to and contains regulations on the relationship between brand-name and generic drug companies that the industry opposes.

Fresh Air’s Terry Gross spoke with Sunlight Foundation writer Paul Blumenthal to clarify the connections between PhRMA and the administration:

Blumenthal says that the CEOs of pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and AstraZeneca attended a series of meetings at the White House throughout the spring and summer, and agreed to spend more than $150 million on ads touting a health care overhaul. That spending and the subsequent lack of progress on the bill, Blumenthal notes, may be why Tauzin resigned.

The Washington Post recently described Tauzin’s role at PhRMA as key:

Tauzin came under sharp criticism for taking the job at PhRMA shortly after helping push through a costly Medicare prescription drug package, which was a boon to drugmakers. Tauzin said he took the position in part because of the role that experimental drugs played in helping him survive a battle with intestinal cancer.

PhRMA, one of the largest health-care organizations in Washington, spent more than $26 million on lobbying last year and has contributed more than $200,000 to federal candidates, mostly Democrats, since 2007.

NPR’s Julie Rovner explains the changes the administration has made to its original proposal:

Sunlight Foundation also analyzed the construction of the first PhRMA health care deal with the administration. The Sunlight Foundation’s commitment to creating more openness in government and providing tools to the public for understanding government data has provided more information about health care reform and other recent initiatives than has ever been available. In an interview with PBS Newshour, Sunlight director Clay Johnson explained the need for Sunlight and similar projects:

Johnson says that feedback is crucial in creating a more transparent relationship between the government and the governed, calling on the American public to be more forgiving with the government in order to see progress. “[Allowing] bad data to exist allows feedback to exist, to correct the data,” he said. “[The public] needs to give government, in some cases, permission to fail.”]