American Forum Op-Ed

If you blinked, you might have missed Senator Blanche Lincoln change what your child likely eats for lunch at school. Recently, in the wake of Elena Kagan’s confirmation, the Senate quickly and unanimously passed Lincoln’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

After years of negotiations and a recent push from Michelle Obama, the proposal received 30 seconds of floor time, which was more than enough for it to pass without any objection. The Act will reauthorize the federal school lunch program before the September 30 deadline, and it will also take initial steps to make school lunches healthier, safer, and more accessible.

Although it receives a splinter of the attention given to the two wars, healthcare, and the economy, the school lunch program has a huge impact on America. More than half of U.S. children are eligible for Federal School Lunches and the purchasing power impacts the way our food is grown and consumed. Within schools this means that the lunches served under the school lunch program are served to everybody. In a cafeteria there is no “poor” section or “privileged” section -- it is the same food, same kitchen (that is, when there is a kitchen on premises). Unless you pack your son or daughter’s lunch, this proposal mandates what your children are eating.

Studies show that kids’ ability to learn and the nutritional value of the food they eat goes hand in hand. You don’t have to read the academic literature about this -- ask your local teacher what it’s like to teach a class that just consumed French fries and surplus beef served in gobs of undistinguishable “brown sauce.”

Besides encumbering attention-spans, the current school lunch system presents a serious problem: obesity. Children currently enrolled in the federal school lunch program are more likely to be obese than children who are not enrolled. Overall, 30 percent of American children are obese.

We are all stakeholders in this crisis. Obesity is a major factor in our ballooning healthcare costs because increased diabetes and cardiac disease are drains on Medicare, Medicaid and private plans. Obesity not only impacts our pocketbooks, but it also presents a National Security concern -- almost one third of young adults 17-24 years old are too obese to serve in the military. This is a problem that we need to address now. Each year we don’t address obesity, we neglect another class of young Americans.

Doing anything in the Senate these days is no small feat considering the fierce political climate, the bottlenecked Senate calendar, and the 60-plus vote mentality. The proposal passed mainly because the $4.6 billion bill was completely paid for by taking away money from other programs. Almost half of the funding comes from Food Stamps (the SNAP program).

The proposal is a step in the right direction, but the new changes are slight. It adds 6 cents per meal, per child (now a pittance $2.38 per meal). There is also some language that strengthens food safety, mandates wellness education, and sets guidelines for all food sold during school hours (a la carte and vending). The proposal provides funding for school gardens, which is important because they provide physical activity, food, and wellness education simultaneously.

The proposal does not go far enough though. We are missing an opportunity for real solutions to our broken food system.

Next month, the House will soon address the school lunch issue. Their proposal is slightly more ambitious and provides more resources -- $8 billion and more meals to more children. Still, this proposal’s increase (also 6 cents) is still nowhere near the additional $1-$2 more that nutrition experts estimate is necessary to bring school lunch standards up to par.

At the end of the day, neither proposal addresses other fundamental issues with school lunches. Nutritional standards are not enforced and in most schools, real fruits and vegetables are a distant reality.

Every year we delay in aggressively addressing school lunches, we neglect another class of 5 million children who are beholden to the same unhealthy food. Our students are not learning how to eat and enjoy healthy food. Instead they have been fed food influenced heavily by a fast food culture. Are chicken nuggets and French fries really the model of nutrition we want our children to follow? We cannot afford to wait another five years to make important changes in children’s nutrition. The young are where our nation’s obesity crisis begins – and in our schools we need to make nutrition a lesson for life.

MISSISSIPPI FORUM

By Rims Barber

There is a provision of the new Health Reform Law that will help sick Mississippians this year. Nonprofit hospitals will have to meet new indigent care requirements.

Mary Jo went to the hospital recently and was given a bill of over $15,000. She was uninsured and unable to pay more than about $20 per week. It would take her about 15 years to get out from under this debt. Many hospitals are established as private nonprofit entities, and are expected to give back charity care to the community in exchange for their tax-exempt status.

The new Health Reform Law, passed by Congress this year, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, amended Section 501c(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. It now requires nonprofit hospitals to publish guidelines for financial assistance, explain who is eligible, and how a person can apply for assistance.

In order to qualify for nonprofit status, a hospital must:

• Develop written financial assistance policies

• Limit what they charge for services

• Observe fair billing and debt collection practices

• Conduct regular community needs assessments.

With the exception of the needs assessment, these requirements go into effect this year. The Secretary of the Treasury is charged with enforcing the new provisions and has authority to issue further guidance and regulations as needed to make sure they are correctly implemented. The hospitals will report to the I.R.S on their annual 990 forms.

The Mississippi Human Services Agenda wrote all the private nonprofit hospitals in Mississippi asking them how they intended to comply with this new requirement. Only three hospitals responded to our survey, and we were directed to their websites for specifics on their financial assistance/charity care policies.

The web-published sliding scale showed discounts from the hospital charges, based on income. Since most hospitals accept a discount from insurance companies of 30-40 percent as payment in full, we can see that the hospitals are using their sliding scale to grant some patients the same discount as they give insurance companies.

Two hospitals used this sliding scale:

% of Poverty $ for Family of 4 Discount from charges

Below poverty $22,050 100%

100 – 119% $26,240 100%

120 – 139% $30,650 90%

140 – 169% $37,265 80%

170 – 199% $43,880 70%

200 – 299% $62,930 40%

Persons would have to bring documents with them to verify their income when they enter the hospital and declare that they are uninsured.

A major religious nonprofit medical center recently released a policy that allows any uninsured patient who applies during the admission process to have their hospital charges discounted by at least 50 percent (regardless of income), and free care for those under 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

If all our state’s nonprofit hospitals would make the effort to obey the law, and let people know that they may be eligible for discounts on their hospital care (and how they can qualify for this benefit), we would be much better off. People should let their local nonprofit hospitals know that they expect them to follow the law and treat the needy with equity.

Several times I have been invited to the weekly meetings of the Rotary Club of Birmingham. Like any busy business club meeting, with a couple of hundred people in attendance, there is a chorus of knives, forks and spoons, clanging ever so slightly as members try to finish their meal when a speaker begins to speak. This past May, when Bill Finch, former director of Conservation at the Nature Conservancy and longtime nature writer spoke to Rotary it took only 30 seconds before the room fell completely silent.

He was speaking about the Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Only a few weeks after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, Finch described the slow moving invasion that was taking place on Alabama’s and the Gulf Coast’s shores and its devastating impact on our people and the environment. When he finished his presentation, the audience was shell-shocked. I remember walking amongst the members of the club after the meeting – heads were shaking, and shoulders slightly lowered. The members were somber.

According to Finch, we are in the midst of a “severe ecological rearrangement.”

Oil sheens had invaded Grand Bay, Alabama’s model estuary. On Petit Bois Island, an area west of Dauphin Island, 60 tons of oil pebbles and patties have already been picked up. The beaches looked like a Dalmatian.

In some places the effects may not be obvious for a year or two. Because of the toxicity and the oxygen deprivation caused by the spill, whole generations of fish, crabs, and shrimp will be impacted this year, next year and beyond. Life in our estuaries, the beaches and wildlife will change, and in some cases disappear altogether. Whole links in the food chain are broken.

One of the questions within Rotary’s four-way test, the guiding principles members ask of each other is: “Will it be beneficial to all concerned?” We need to start developing strategies and solutions that will benefit all Gulf residents as well as our delicate environment.

One such benefit and strategy has been developed by the Nature Conservancy and endorsed by the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, Mobile Baykeeper, Alabama Coastal Foundation and the Alabama Department of Conservation, which calls for the construction in three to five years of 100 miles of oyster reefs and 1,000 acres of marsh and sea grasses in Mobile Bay. The new reefs will help nurse our local fisheries back to health. Over the last century, we have lost 90 percent of our marshes, sea-grasses and oyster reefs in the bay. The oil spill threatens the remaining fragile habitat which we need to ensure a viable seafood industry. This strategy will repel the effects of the oil spill and start the natural and ecological recovery process.

This crisis will be unlike any other confronted by our state and region. It will take years; maybe even a generation, to address the harm that has been caused. Be mindful, Alaskans are still dealing with the adverse effects of the Exxon Valdez spill, more than 20 years later. This spill is many times greater than that disaster.

In response, Gov. Riley needs to create a permanent non-partisan task force in Alabama to develop beneficial strategies that will nurse the gulf back to health. This is not just a Mobile-South Alabama crisis. We all need to pitch in and help our fellow Alabamians.

Along with the task force, we must insist, that every candidate for Governor, Lt. Governor and Attorney General pledge to work immediately on the oil spill once elected in November, if not sooner. There is no time for a transition.

The motto for Rotary International is “Service Above Self.” Maybe that is why the Rotarians leaving that meeting were so somber. They understood the enormous generational task ahead.

On December 3, 2009, the cable giant Comcast announced plans to buy NBC/Universal from General Electric in a $28 billion merger.

Ever since, lawmakers in Washington and legions of activists have been raising the alarm about the threat such a deal would pose to telecommunication workers, cable and Internet users, and communities of color.

As a result, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), the Justice Department, and two Congressional committees have spent months carefully reviewing the proposed merger. The FCC even held a public hearing on the matter in Chicago last month.

Chief among the concerns the FCC must consider is the impact of the merger on workers. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has promised that “there will be no massive layoffs,” even though every big media merger inevitably brings with it steep job cuts. For example, when AOL bought Time-Warner in 2000, the company laid off some 2,400 employees in the space of a year, about 3 percent of its total pre-merger workforce.

What’s more, Comcast has a long history of attempting to break its employees' unions and firing labor organizers. When Comcast bought AT&T Broadband in 2002, Comcast refused to negotiate a first contract with 16 former AT&T collective bargaining units and forced employees to attend intimidating anti-union meetings. Comcast has also spent lavishly to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act, which aims to strengthen workers’ right to form unions. Unsurprisingly, research shows that Comcast pays its workers 30 percent less in wages and benefits than other, unionized telecom companies.

The FCC must also scrutinize the potential of a combined Comcast/NBC to undermine “network neutrality,” which requires Internet Service Providers to treat all legal Internet content equally. Comcast is America’s leading provider of broadband Internet access and has been caught repeatedly blocking its users' downloads on peer-to-peer file sharing sites. They even sued the FCC over its right to enforce network neutrality and won in a controversial federal court case.

A Comcast buyout of NBC/Universal would also lead to Comcast control of the NBC and Telemundo broadcast networks and 52 cable channels, including MSNBC, Bravo, USA, E!, Style, Versus, and Comcast SportsNet. Having this mother lode of content would give Comcast even greater incentive to discriminate
in favor of its own online video offerings and against video available from BitTorrent, YouTube, or Blip.tv.

A Comcast/NBC merger could also be detrimental to communities of color. This very concern was the main topic of a hearing, also held in Chicago, by the U.S. House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet on July 8, 2010. There, complaints abounded about the lack of diversity in Comcast and NBC hiring practices, the companies' upper-level management and their television programming.

As Representative Maxine Waters pointed out at the hearing, only two of 28 Comcast executives and only two of 18 NBC Universal executives are people of color. Even worse, of the dozens of cable networks currently owned by Comcast and NBC, only one is headed up by a person of color. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists opposes the merger –which will give Comcast control over the second-largest Spanish language TV network in the county-- because they fear it will lead to fewer jobs for Latino broadcast journalists and less coverage of the Latino community.

Comcast and NBC have offered some proposals to address these concerns, but as Stanley E. Washington, president and CEO of the National Coalition of African American Owned Media, said previously: “It’s crumbs and they know it is crumbs.” And as Representative Maxine Waters said at the Chicago House Committee hearing: “Neither Comcast nor NBC made any of these (pro-diversity) moves…until all of this began to unfold.”

Then, there’s the bread-and-butter issues about Comcast and cable television in general: higher cable costs, fewer cable channels (especially fewer independent channels), less funds for public access, education, and government cable channels, and ever worsening customer service.

Over the past five years, Comcast has jacked up its cable rates by nearly 50 percent in certain markets and plans to raise rates by 4 percent for some customers again in August. At the same time, the company has long had the lowest customer satisfaction ratings of any of the country's cable and satellite TV providers.

For all of these reasons, the FCC and the Justice Department should reject the proposed merger, which for the public is decidedly not Comcastic.

Incarceration rates in Missouri are 12 percent higher than the nation. We also spend 6.8 percent of our state budget on the cost of incarceration.

Currently there are over 30,000 men and women in Missouri’s prisons. Reducing that number would substantially reduce costs so we can better spend that money to support the thousands in the state who find themselves out of work, hungry and homeless.

Governors all over the nation are looking hard for ways to stop unnecessary, costly incarceration. Absent some kind of expansive legislative action, this cost-saving strategy rests solely in the hands of the governor. The concern, appropriately, is that if we release these prisoners, will they commit new crimes?

So how can we reduce the prison population, while at the same time, protect Missourians?

The single best indicator of determining whether a person will commit another crime after leaving prison is age. Older prisoners pose a significantly lower risk of recidivism if released.

In addition to their lower risk, older prisoners impose much higher costs on the system as maintenance and medical costs, on average, are two to three times that of a younger prisoner.

Let’s look at a 40-year old prisoner. The prisoner did not have a criminal record before the present offense. The prisoner has already served considerable time and has an excellent institutional record. The prisoner has made use of the rehabilitative, educational and skills-building training provided in the prison. The prisoner has a supportive family and job prospects upon release. It’s easy to see that the prisoner described here (while admittedly rare) should be considered for release to save us all money.

To make it easier, let’s add equity issues into the mix. Missouri has historically sentenced women charged with violent crimes far more harshly than their male counterparts. Issues that have been traditionally excused in men, like alleged infidelity or alleged poor parenting, have been used to taint women, inflame juries, and obscure weaknesses in proof. This has resulted in extremely long sentences and perhaps wrongful convictions.

The problem of gender bias has improved over time but there are women in Missouri prisons who were convicted before societal awareness of this problem existed.

Governor Nixon is considering a clemency case that calls out for release, if not to correct the gender bias that plagued her trial, to reduce the cost of incarceration.

Patty Prewitt is emblematic of the prisoner who should be free. Prewitt’s trial focused far more on her infidelities and suggested bad mothering than on the facts of her case. Not surprisingly, she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for 50 years. Her case is ripe for scrutiny. Even if the equities do not persuade, she is 60 years old, has served 25 years of her sentence, has an excellent institutional record, has participated in virtually every prison program for which she qualified and even created others, has a family eager to have her home, and four job offers waiting for her.

Even former Department of Corrections’ employees support her release. Sixty-five legislators saw the merit in ending her incarceration and urged Governor Nixon to grant her clemency. It’s time to release Patty Prewitt. If not for her, then for all of us who must pay the bills for her incarceration and her inevitably increasing health care needs.

There is nothing more the State of Missouri can do to her or for her. Send her home to her children who have been waiting for their mother for 25 long years and to her aging parents who yearn for her to be with them in their final days.