Unhealthy Indiana

Yesterday, the IBJ reported the latest data on public health indicators, under a headline that telegraphed the results: “Indiana public health continues to slide.”

When the most recent data is compared to previous studies, it becomes quite clear that Hoosiers are moving in the wrong direction. We are fatter, more sedentary, more diabetic. Hoosiers smoke more than citizens elsewhere, and more of our babies die in infancy.

Not exactly a distinction we would choose.

Furthermore, since our policymakers seem to care a lot more about money than about Hoosier health and well-being, it may be useful to point out that poor health drives up costs. As the IBJ pointed out, Indiana employers spend more per worker on healthcare than employers elsewhere in the country. And that doesn’t include the costs of sick days or reduced productivity as a consequence of health issues. (Forgive me for an indelicate observation: Indiana legislators determined to keep business taxes low don’t seem to understand that the added costs incurred by reason of an unhealthy workforce are just as much a part of business overhead as state income or property taxes.)

No–true to our Hoosier Heritage, which is nothing if not shortsighted–State government is perfectly content to shift health costs to employers, and keep Indiana’s public health spending low. And it is low. In 2012, Indiana ranked 49th out of 50 states in per person spending on public health, despite the fact that preventative public health measures like immunization and screenings demonstrably and dramatically lower overall health costs.

To add insult to injury, Governor Pence has signaled that he will not expand Medicaid in order to participate in the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.” As I have previously noted, there is no rational basis for that decision; it rests entirely upon a perceived political need to pander to a rabid GOP base motivated solely by an unreasoning hatred of President Obama and anything he supports.

If Indiana opts to participate, an estimated 450,000 Hoosiers would benefit. And here’s the kicker: if Indiana does participate, the federal government will pay all the costs for the first three years. The state’s portion would then phase in gradually, topping out  at 10% in 2020.

And if we don’t participate? Well, poor people have this pesky habit of getting sick anyway. And we already pay to treat them–frequently, in the least cost-effective way, when they appear at hospital emergency rooms. When uninsured folks are treated there, the costs of their un-reimbursed care drives up the premiums of those with insurance. If the hospital is public, our taxes go up. If the hospitals still can’t recover their costs, they cut healthcare workers or reduce services. The 10% Indiana would eventually have to pay to cover far more people is unlikely to be more than we are actually paying now in a variety of ways–it would just be more visible and much more cost-effective.

Indiana certainly wouldn’t want to do something that was actually cost-effective.

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Creating God in Our Own Image

I am perpetually bemused by people who know exactly what God thinks–and are  immensely comforted by the discovery that God thinks just exactly the way they do. 

Wow–who’d have guessed!?

The most recent example I’ve stumbled upon comes from American Family Association’s Sandy Rios, who delivered this truly jaw-dropping diatribe on her radio program:

I would not want to be in the shoes of any of the left right now. I would not want to be in Barack Obama’s shoes. I would not want to be in the shoes of homosexual activists. I say that with humility and with fear for them because God will even the score, he will sort things out, he will be God and he will not be mocked. Whereas they think they are getting away with breaking all kinds of moral laws and mocking everyone in the process, they just don’t know God, they don’t know who they are up against and we do. And that should bring out some mercy in us because I wouldn’t want to be—what did that old evangelist say: ‘it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God.’
Unlike all us sinners, you see, Sandy Rios knows God. 
The monumental arrogance and self-delusion displayed by those who purport to know the mind of a deity they themselves describe as all-knowing and all-powerful is certainly mind-blowing.  But what really gets to me is the nature of the God these people have created in their own image: small-minded, vengeful and partisan. Hardly the sort of God worth worshipping.
I don’t mean to be snarky or dismissive, but if God exists, I’m pretty confident she will reward charity, inclusiveness and loving-kindness rather than prejudice and hate. But then,  I must hasten to say that I can’t really know.
Unlike Sandy Rios, I haven’t chatted with God lately.
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Mitch and Purdue: More Evidence of a Bad Fit

One of the most troubling aspects of the current wave of anti-intellectualism we are experiencing is Congress’ declining support for basic research. No matter that we have ample evidence that such research pays massive dividends down the road– the focus on austerity has provided a convenient excuse for cutting the grant opportunities that have led to breakthroughs in science and medicine and have provided the foundation on which technological advances have been based.

In the face of this disinvestment, university presidents and chancellors representing 165 institutions signed a letter in July calling on President Barack Obama and Congress to close what they called the nation’s widening “innovation deficit.”

As JC Online reported,

The letter — signed by presidents of Yale, MIT, most Big Ten universities and all of Purdue’s self-designated peer universities — says declining federal investments in research and cuts as a result of sequestration could lead to fewer U.S.-based innovation and scientific breakthroughs in the future.

Purdue’s President, Mitch Daniels, refused to add Purdue to that list of signatories, citing the deficit. ” I abstained from signing it, in my case, because of its complete omission of any recognition of the severe fiscal condition in which the nation finds itself.”

Where to start?

First, despite Republicans’ adamant refusal to notice,  the U.S. deficit has declined steadily   during the Obama administration.  It will decline 155 billion just in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In fact, we are experiencing the most rapid deficit reduction since WWII.  The reasons for that decline can be debated–as ill-considered as the sequester was, it may well have contributed–but the fact that the deficit has been significantly reduced cannot be denied. Citing the nation’s “severe fiscal condition”  as a reason for Purdue’s non-signatory status simply reinforces a growing public conviction that Mitch Daniels is a partisan politician who does not understand the mission of the university he leads.

The problem is not a prior career in political life. Others have made the transition from politician to academic, and done so successfully. The problem is that Daniels seems utterly unaware of the difference between partisanship and scholarship, between ideology and philosophy, and–as the Zinn controversy so clearly illustrated–between indoctrination and education.

As we know, Daniels orchestrated his move to Purdue, appointing the Trustees who would–surprise!–choose him to lead the University. He evidently viewed the job as simply another platform for partisan persuasion– with the added benefit of seeming disinterestedness. But he clearly didn’t understand what universities are about. Failure to recognize the importance of funded academic research–failure to appreciate the centrality of that research to classroom performance, among other things–is refusal to understand the interests of the institution he leads.

With his refusal to sign the letter, and his purported reason for that refusal, Daniels has chosen Republican talking points over the needs of his University.

It’s really a shame. Had he chosen to use his formidable political skills and partisan connections on behalf of Purdue’s scholarly mission, Daniels could have been a great asset as President, despite the clouded process that delivered him to the office.

That he did not make that choice is becoming clearer by the day.

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From Russia, Without Love

There is a lesson for all of us in Russia’s dramatic repression of gays and gay advocacy, and it isn’t necessarily the lesson we think.

For readers who may have spent the last few weeks on an ice floe in Antartica, here’s the quick-and-dirty: Russia strongman Vladimir Putin suddenly (at least it seemed sudden from an American vantage point) announced what amounted to an official war on homosexuality. The Russian legislature unanimously rubber-stamped a measure imposing huge fines on people found to have engaged in “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” which has increasingly been used to harass, fine and imprison anyone expressing pro-gay sentiments.

Although same-sex relationships are not criminal in Russia, anti-gay sentiment is very strong there, and support for Putin’s vendetta against the GLBT community is high.

Putin is engaging in a time-honored tactic employed by autocrats when things aren’t going so well. His personal prejudices or lack thereof are irrelevant. His goal is distraction, and his  tactic is to identify the most useful “shiny object”—a group sufficiently powerless and unpopular to guarantee that a high-profile campaign against its members will shift citizens’ focus away from what’s wrong with the country.

Eventually, history suggests that the group won’t just be used as a distraction; it will be made the scapegoat for all the things that are wrong with the country. Hitler blamed Germany’s problems on the Jews; in other countries, it has been communists or Muslims or Shi’ites. An academic paper on scapegoating explains why it works:

A strong advantage in scapegoating is that the whole society or a whole social group is raised in status against the targeted minority or individual, and any societal behavior is at the same time legitimized (“Of course we are full of defects, but we do not act like them”).

In order to reap the political benefits of scapegoating, however, it is first necessary to dehumanize members of the targeted group. So gays are promiscuous pedophiles, Jews are scheming, rapacious businessmen, lazy black men lust for white women, Muslims are obsessed with jihad…. Whoever they may be, “they” aren’t people like us. History provides us with a long list of convenient and available stereotypes for almost any group you might want to target.

Scapegoating as a political tactic almost always arises in times of national stress—times  when things aren’t going well, and those in charge need someone to blame.

What is happening in Russia right now is a textbook example. The dissolution of the Soviet Union did not bring nirvana to the long-suffering people of Russia—far from it. Russians have struggled to form democratic governing institutions in a country that has never had them, a country without a culture of self-rule. Much the same upheaval—for many of the same reasons—is occurring in the Middle East, in the wake of the Arab Spring. For that matter, there is unrest in many other parts of the world, including much of Africa.

These are profoundly dangerous times for people who belong to marginalized groups. The temptation to “pull a Putin” will be very great in many of the countries experiencing upheaval. (And yes, if we don’t address America’s growing inequality, it can happen here.)

Gay people are at risk in Russia. We must bring political pressure to bear, and we must work to moderate and reverse Putin’s discriminatory policies. But the real lesson to be learned from this is that we are all in this together. In a dangerous world, we are all vulnerable.

When I was director of Indiana’s ACLU, I constantly reminded people that rights are indivisible. If everyone doesn’t have them, no one really does. A country that can pick on gay people today can pick on Muslims or Christians—or redheads—tomorrow.

As a friend of mine once put it, “Poison gas is a great weapon until the wind shifts.”

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Dear Lord, Where Do They Find These People?

According to Rep. Tom McClintock, there simply is no such thing as white-collar crime.

At a town hall meeting in El Dorado Hills, California on Tuesday, a constituent asked McClintock for his “stance on Wall Street criminal practices.” The congressman responded, “Well first of all, for a criminal practice there has to be a gun. It’s pretty simple.”

I think we know what’s simple, and it isn’t the Congressman’s intriguing theory of what it takes to constitute criminal behavior.

Every day, it seems we meet a new officeholding whack-a-doodle.

This week it was Lee Bright calling Lindsey Graham a “community organizer for the Muslims.” Last week, Steve King explained that for every young immigrant who was a valedictorian, there were a hundred others with “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Before him, Paul Broun insisted that evolution and climate change were “lies from the mouth of hell.” Rand Paul insists that  black people have no trouble voting–and that despite his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and any and all measures to lift people from poverty, he’s all for equality. And of course, almost every week there’s some new insanity from Louie Gohmert, who Charles Pierce memorably called “perhaps the dumbest mammal to enter a legislative chamber since Caligula’s horse.”

There’s a new one just about every day. Michelle Bachmann hasn’t even taken her crazy eyes into retirement yet, and literally dozens of her fellow Republican Congresscritters are contending for her title of  “least securely tethered to reality.”

It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying.

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