Kaleida and ECMC

Yesterday’s Buffalo Niagara Partnership’s Board of Directors addressed one of the more recent issues becoming yet another wart on the face of Buffalo: The Berger Commission’s mandate to merge Kaleida Health and ECMC into a single entity. The board voted – unanimously, with a few abstentions – to request that the New York State Health Commissioner and State Legislature do whatever is within their authority to implement the Berger Commission plans by the June 30^th, 2008 deadline. That would include that a joint commission comprising Kaleida, ECMC and independent officials (currently called Newco) to take management reins, and that the ECMC Public Benefit Corporation be dissolved.

As of today, ECMC has not come back to the table to discuss merger plans. The June 30^th date is important because prior to that date there is both state and federal money available to assist in the consolidation effort. After June 30^th, all legislative bets are off, and Buffalo may be forced to go it alone.

The request to the BNP Board was spearheaded by Independent Health (Michael Cropp), Health Now (Alphonso O’Neil-White) and Univera (Mary Lee Campbell-Wisley). Their request was more of a plea to demonstrate leadership and a unified front at a time when health care costs are skyrocketing. Their belief was that consolidation and build up of the downtown medical campus establishes the critical mass needed to provide quality care at lower cost. The discussion at the BNP was rather prolonged but eventually the Board decided to back the three HMOs. Expect a full-page spread in an upcoming Buffalo News in the form of a letter to the Health Commissioner.

I found it unfortunate that what was voted on was essentially a request to persons outside of Western New York to make a decision that, as a community, we could not make ourselves.

Sharing the Road

Today, on a gorgeous Memorial Sunday, my wife and I had the all-American dinner – hot dogs – at Ted’s, an iconic institution here in Buffalo.  Neither of us are fond of hot dogs anymore, but we figured once a year is okay.

On the drive home we passed 9 cyclists.

Not one was wearing a helmet.

There is no excuse for children or adults not to be wearing a helmet, what with today’s aerodynamic and comfortable designs.  In that unlucky instance where the cyclist hits the ground hard, the helmet cracks like an egg and absorbs the shock.  Without the helmet your skull does the cracking.

Kids:  What are you thinking? The last thing you need going through your mind is asphalt.

Patio Homes

Today’s Front Page article in the Buffalo News has Amherst Deputy Supervisor Shelly Schratz bemoaning the tax breaks that Amherst patio home owners receive relative to single-family homeowners.  The accompanying photographs show two virtually identical-looking houses:  The $200,000 single-family unit with taxes of $5,440 and the $295,000 patio home unit with taxes of $3,330.

“Half a million dollars”, she said, shaking her head in disgust.  People in this subdivision pay a premium to live in these “patio homes”, she said, yet they pay only about half the property tax of single-family homeowners down the street.

That’s wrong, she said, and the law shouldn’t allow it.

Damn right.  And Schratz should be voted out of office for saying it.

Not once does the article even hint that perhaps, just perhaps, tax burdens on Amherst and other towns might be a little too much for the average homeowner, and that perhaps the town should be looking seriously at ways to cut taxes so that everyone enjoys a tax burden as low as the patio home owners?  That a member of the town council looks at patio home owners as cheaters of the system just floors me.

Small wonder why we tend to have little respect for politicians.

Flight of the Phoenix

By now most people who browse the Internet or catch any national news knows that the Phoenix mission will attempt an autonomous landing on Mars this coming Sunday. We will observe the lander setting down, either in one or many pieces, at 7:53 PM EDT.

Most people won’t care.

Some will decry the millions spent on the mission to dig into Mars’ surface looking for ice, money which could have been spent feeding the hungry or building new roads here on Earth. Others can’t wait for the science that will potentially be revealed by this spacecraft and other spacecraft that will follow in subsequent years.

I, for one, am ambivalent about most of the science but look forward to the ramifications should the mission discover abundant ice as well as key elements needed to sustain life. For if life – even fossilized life – is found a few feet below Mars’ surface, the whole idea of life originating on Earth (or perhaps, to God creating life on Earth) gets thrown into question.

If life exists – or existed – on both Earth and Mars, there are only three possible explanations: They sprang up independent of each other (or as part of a directed Panspermia); some kind of impact on Mars sent biological material into space and eventually to Earth; or some kind of impact on Earth sent biological material into space and eventually to Mars.

Celestial dynamics, gravity and atmospheric pressure dictate that the latter possibility much less likely than the Mars-to-Earth origin of life; so if we eventually get a spacecraft actually landed on the Red Planet that can analyze subsurface material for DNA, we might just determine with pretty reasonable assurance that the Martians were here first.

In the grand scheme of things I’m just curious as to how religious scholars, fundamentalists and secular intellectuals will deal with that.

The Pregnant Man

This is weird. History will not look kindly on us for ever calling this person a man.

Talking to Inmates

This entry is about social justice.

Most of us adults are not as emotionally extreme as we were, say, as teenagers. I know this is not always true, but for the vast majority of us our emotional swings don’t stray off the center line nearly as much as they did when our hormones were raging, when our wisdom was limited and before we put more years under our feet.

People change with time. Last Friday I had to face that reality like never before when I sat with a cold-blooded killer, behind bars for the past 25 years, telling me that after doing his time he’s ready to rejoin society as a changed individual. Only if the New York State Parole Board has its way, his sentence will be “adjusted” so that he never gets out. It’s one of the ways that New York wants to show how tough it is on crime. It’s also sort of like the Parole Board playing the role of judge – passing sentence – and on those grounds it’s being contested in federal court.

There is no doubt that CBK should have gotten a long sentence for his crime. And our society seems willing to go to great lengths to prevent another Willie Horton from occurring, even if it means locking up all violent felons and throwing away the key, without giving merit to whether or not they change with time.

The problem is that most violent crime is not premeditated. It is a crime of rage, of emotional extreme. Now that CBK has spent half his life in jail and has had plenty of time to re-think his life – to come down off the emotional extremes where he lived as a young adult – the people he has worked with the past decade probably agree that he is neither a danger to himself nor to others. Yet he may never get the chance to have a second chance, something his victim’s relatives may wholly agree with but nevertheless makes two victims out of one crime.

Contrast this with the pedophile sex offender, whose crime is an addiction to a socially unacceptable form of sex. I would consider this individual much more likely to fall back on his addiction should he be released back into society. Under New York State law the pedophile will re-enter society after doing his time. The quiet, gray-haired guy who killed someone in his youth and spent an entire generation trying to make amends for it may never get the opportunity.

I’m not convinced that this is equitable justice. Cephus, Bissonette House and other social justice centers would probably agree.

Mom Will Never Again Go to Florida

It’s bad enough that Florida has suffered from fire ants, giant snails, two-inch cockroaches, cane toads and africanized honey bees.

Now it has to deal with pythons.  You know, really big snakes.

These are Burmese Pythons – which can grow to over 20 feet long and weigh 2oo pounds – released into the wild by owners no longer interested in keeping them.  It is estimated that their population in the Everglades is now around 30,000.  They are efficient swimmers and tagged snakes have been shown to swim over 30 miles in 3 hours.

My mom hates snakes.  As kids we had to stomp around to make sure that any garter snakes were scared away, before she would go work in the garden.

She’ll never set foot in Florida again.

AFRICOM – Protecting Africa, or Protecting U.S. Oil Interests?

The U.S. Government has decided to scale back its once-ambitious plans to establish a military headquarters, presence and influence in Africa. Concerns about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy on the African continent created significant grief among African countries believing that U.S. oil interests, and the U.S. wariness toward China (see this article by the Washington Post) were the real reasons. This article refers to the “controlling oil ministry”, and this one sums up the oil angle pretty well. Oh yeah, the oil.

AFRICOM is actually a spinoff of the Carter Doctrine in which the U.S. made a policy shift toward protecting its vital interests via military intervention, if necessary, which included energy reserves.

Containing the unrest in Nigeria was one of the first objectives.  “To prevent such a disruption, the Department of Defense is providing Nigerian military and internal security forces with substantial arms and equipment intended to quell unrest in the Delta region; the Pentagon is also collaborating with Nigerian forces in a number of regional patrol and surveillance efforts aimed at improving security in the Gulf of Guinea, where most of West Africa’s offshore oil and gas fields are located”

The same article makes reference to the U.S. (and world’s) branding of the word “terrorist” to include anyone who might be getting in the way of their own progress, just to draw the U.S. into supporting them. “Simply put, the situation in the Niger Delta is that of ethnic-nationalist movements fighting by any means necessary for the “political objective of advancing the cause of self-determination and equitable sharing of oil-receipts.” It has nothing to do with international terror networks or jihadists.”

And then there’s the U.S. attempt to tame China, which is aggressively pursuing economic agreements with Africa, who it sees as a strategic trading partner and the U.S. sees as the start of a new Cold War.

But U.S. foreign policy has been wrapped around militarism for some time now, and that policy does not sit well on a continent where Western colonialism is still a fresh memory. Hence our government’s turnabout in less than 12 months.  AFRICOM will be diluted by adding a civilian facet to it, but the military will still be in charge.  Headquarters, however, will likely be somewhere on the U.S. East Coast and not anywhere in Africa.

Our country’s seemingly endless use of the military to shape global policy reminds me of the oft-quoted line: “To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”.  Africa, I think, is telling us to either come up with a different policy, or to stay the hell out.

Buffalo is a Closet

A generation ago I met a couple of students from the University of Buffalo, became friends with them, went to their wedding and even lived in the same apartment complex for a year or two. They were civil engineers, I developed software. Our careers took us down very different paths and although I would hear about them from time to time the years passed and we never again made contact.

A few weeks ago my company hired their son, also a graduate of UB. That led to a business connection that now links me back to the couple, to the Department of Transportation and to possible business opportunities with a civil engineering company, coincidental connections that I would not have expected to occur in any large metropolitan area.

But this is Buffalo, and re-connections like this happen frequently because this community is not just close-knit, it’s a closet.

There is a lesson in here about trying hard not to burn bridges. You cannot predict whether or not your paths will later cross in important ways.  Around Buffalo, it is likely that they will.

The Myanmar Catastrophe and Why We Aren’t Doing Anything

The Myanmar government refuses to let foreign aid workers into the country to help distribute aid to the roughly 1.5 million people who have been cut off from food and clean water. The government claims that they themselves can provide the logistics necessary to distribute this aid.

Most countries have either refused or deferred aid unless foreign relief teams can participate in the distribution, out of fear that the aid will not get to those who need it. At least some of what has been distributed was painted over with the names of the generals in charge.

Our government sits with $3 million in aid offered, Australia with $23.4 million, the French with 1500 metric tons of food in a vessel in Myanmar’s waters. We and other governments play the waiting game with the Myanmar government; and the generals appear to be digging in their heels.

In the meantime, 8 days have now gone by since the typhoon hit, and 1.5 million people are still cut off from food and clean water.

In eight more days, the number of deaths from political stalemate will far exceed the carnage caused by the typhoon. I don’t get this at all, and I don’t understand how seeing who blinks first is going to make the world a better place.

If the world’s intention is humanitarian aid, then why not fly in as much as possible to Yangon – inundate the airport with food and supplies – and let the Myanmar military do as much as they can with it? Even with all the suspected corruption and expected diversion of aid, at least some of those 1.5 million might live to next week. So what if the generals want to take credit? Unless, of course, further isolating a junta that’s been in control for 46 years is more important than the plight of those 1.5 million.

Senator John Kerry said, “The only goal right now should be getting help to the people of Burma, however we need to do it.” I couldn’t agree more.

21

Around here most parents’ children see their 21^st birthday. My oldest saw his today.

I think this is a more meaningful milestone for me than it is for him; my work day has certainly been affected by it. The next time we get together – which may be a while, as he goes straight from end-of-semester finals to his summer job in Hartford – I think I’ll ask him to buy the drinks.

Congratulations to my 21-year-old and all those other 21-year-olds out there. Be wise, be careful, and go for that brass ring.

The Signature Bridge Debacle Award

I am awarding the 2008 Signature Bridge Debacle Trophy to ECMC for its stunning refusal to even come to the table to discuss and plan out the Berger Commission’s mandate-now-law to merge the Kaleida and ECMC hospital systems.  ECMC has decided to take the matter to court, a tactic guaranteed to stall the merger for many years to come, and fatten the pockets of the current ECMC management team for many years to come as well.  Oh, the egos.

As Bob Gioia, chairman of the board of directors in charge of the merger, stated today:  “In my almost 30 years of public service, I have never experienced behavior like this, and I’m saddened for this community.”  ECMC, which has the same share of seats on the board as Kaleida, walked out of a recent board meeting and, to my knowledge, has not returned.

The Signature Bridge is the embodiment of long-delayed and overdue promises to improve (or at least the appearance to improve) quality of life in Western New York.  The closing of Main Street to vehicular traffic, the removal of the elevated portion of the I-190 and the Skyway, construction of Bass Pro and now the stalled hospital merger plan join it in infamy.

Excepting perhaps for the possible reopening of Main Street, the hospital merger has by far the most impact, addressing a problem that has cost taxpayer money and reduced the quality of health care for many years – too many beds, too much distribution and overlap of services, and too much overhead in the local health industry.  The cost of infrastructure just to support the roughly one-third of all beds that are routinely empty is money that either cannot be spent on health care for the occupants of those beds that are filled, or is a tax on our insurance premiums and our real estate.

ECMC is supposed to be a health care provider.  It is, instead, a JOBS provider, with health care taking the back seat.