The Southern Highland Reader

STATEWIDE–As I touched on here and here, North Carolina’s state health plan will soon be closely tied to the behavior of the people enrolled in the plan. The state will penalize those who are overweight, who smoke, and so forth, and will be among the first few states in the nation to do so.

Some in the media argue that tying behavior to health insurance costs is sensible, although Adam Linker at NC Policy Watch isn’t so sure.

He argues, among other things, that the use of any type of tobacco product will be treated the same as the use of cigarettes, despite varying health risks (he uses cigars as an example). Linker also points out what he sees as a fundamental unfairness of the plan: that low-wage state workers — who are statistically more likely to be in poor health than higher paid workers — are “punished” more severely, because the programs costs aren’t on a sliding scale.

“Imposing a penalty for smoking is one thing. Crippling family budgets for using tobacco is quite another,” Linker writes.

He also points out that the expense of the state plan for lower-paid workers is quite high.

Read more here at the NC Policy Watch blog.

Another story from the Asheville Citizen-Times here.

STATEWIDE–Elaine Mejia at NC Policy Watch reports today on state Senate majority leader Tony Rand’s remarks yesterday at the Budget & Tax Center’s legislative briefing in Fayetteville.

An excerpt:

… state tax revenues are behind projections by $90 million through the end of October. In the grand scheme of things that is not too much money. What is troubling about this is that the state’s revenue forecast assumes that the worst months would be at the beginning of the fiscal year and after that things would begin to head slowly upward. Moreover, the budget for fiscal year 2010-11 assumes that revenues will grow at a rate of 2.8%. If revenues continue to fall behind the forecast the Governor will be forced to take painful mid-year actions to address this year’s gap and the General Assembly will be forced to make another round of budget cuts sooner rather than later.

Read her post here.

NATIONAL–Rob Schofield at NC Policy Watch and the Progressive Pulse provides this list:

Police protection – Just call 911 and competent, honest folks are at my door in minutes
Fire protection — Ditto
Roads –N.C. DOT may be flawed, but imagine if streets were owned by Halliburton
The military – Save the private armies for Somalia
The courts system – One of America’s greatest achievements and a chief guarantor of the capitalist system
Jails – Just look at how badly our current experiments with private prisons have gone
The U.S. Postal Service – Amazingly cheap and effective
Universal public education – At the heart of our success as a democracy
Social Security and Medicare – Anyone who questions these should look at how older Americans lived before we had them.
Public water and sewer services — No privies or polluted wells for me

REGIONAL–NC Policy Watch’s Adam Linker on the impact of proposed health care reform on the 11th District:

In Rep. Heath Shuler’s district approximately 12,000 seniors would avoid hitting the “donut hole” for prescription drug coverage and 134,000 uninsured residents would gain access to health insurance.

Shuler’s resistance to pass meaningful reform is especially egregious considering that nearly 1 in 4 residents of his district do not have health coverage.

STATEWIDE–In 2005, North Carolina Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand shepherded legislation through the senate that allowed out-of-state athletes to come to school at any state university and pay in-state tuition.

That action allows scholarship money to stretch much further, and amounts, according to Chris Fitzsimon at NC Policy Watch, to a $10 million handout to athletics booster clubs.

Writes Fitzsimon:

Ten million dollars for booster clubs is ridiculous anytime, but it’s especially outrageous in a year when university employees will lose their jobs, classes will be cancelled, and students will pay higher tuition.

Read the NC Policy Watch piece here.
Read a piece from the Sunday Raleigh News and Observer here.

STATEWIDE–North Carolina’s “Healthy Youth Act” has traveled a long way since February, when the sex education legislation was introduced by Greensboro state legislator Alma Adams.

It went through four committee hearings and much floor debate before the North Carolina House recently passed the legislation, and it now heads to the Senate, where it faces more opposition.

Among the changes the bill saw as it slogged through committee was a matter of implementation: state lawmakers decided that parents should be allowed to choose whether their child was sent through a “comprehensive” sex-ed track or the “abstinence-based” track that the state has used in recent years.

And then there arose an argument over which of the two would be the default curriculum track if the parent had no preference. (No preference?) Legislators seem inclined to add a third, no-sex-ed track as well.

Read an opinion piece here, from Paige Johnson at NC Policy Watch.

Then, last week, the New York Times ran a story about the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, based in Durham, which has begun the innovative “Birds and the Bees Text Line”, which allows teenagers to text questions about sex to the center from their cell phones, and within 24 hours “receive a cautious, nonjudgmental reply, texted directly to their cellphones, from a nameless, faceless adult.”

Here is an excerpt:

Sex education in the classroom, say many epidemiologists and public health experts, is often ineffective or just insufficient. In many areas of the country, rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases remain constant or are even rising. North Carolina – where schools must teach an abstinence-only curriculum – has the country’s ninth-highest teenage pregnancy rate. Since 2003, when the state’s pregnancy rate declined to a low of 61 per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19, the rates have slowly been climbing. In 2007, that rate rose to 63 per 1,000 girls – 19,615 pregnancies.

Another:

Modeling their service on a similar city program in Alexandria, Va., the North Carolina staff members worked up guidelines: No medical advice – urge questioners to speak with a doctor. Do not advocate abortion. When necessary, refer questioners to local clinics, Web sites or emergency hot lines. Give reasoned, kind advice. Read answers twice before sending. No sarcasm.

Nancy Liddle, of Sylva, thinks the program is worth a shot.

“After living wth a teenager, who, despite my numerous attempts to be open and willing to talk about anything, still won’t ask me anything at all, I can see the beauty of this service,” she says. “Also, she and her friends are absolutely attached to their phones and texting is just how it goes. No talking is ever done. Ever. I’m worried she might throw her thumbs out one day soon.”

There are gaps in the program, Liddle emphasizes, especially for those who might already be in trouble, but for the average kid with a phone in attached to them, she thinks its great for getting nonjudgemental info, quickly and on thier terms.

NATIONAL–This one goes back a few days, but Andrea Verykoukis at the Progressive Pulse blog had choice words for 11th District Congressman Heath Shuler after Shuler voted against the current administration’s stimulus package. Verykoukis went heavy on the football terminology, so why shouldn’t we follow her lead (block)?

She argued that Shuler’s point that he voted with the wishes of his “conservative district” was a little watery, and she went on to quote the Asheville Citizen-Times when it begged to differ — although the paper somehow avoided criticizing Shuler by name.

Here’s a quote from Verykoukis:

Is this guy for real? He’s a Democrat, for God’s sake, and he’s been in Washington for the past two years, and he’s really going to try to pretend the GOP hasn’t been spending like drunken sailors? He’s going to get fiscally responsible with the party that has spent $3 trillion on unnecessary wars and tax breaks for the wealthy that, I might add, most assuredly did not help anyone? Seriously?

Read the whole piece here.

Meanwhile … Shuler’s vote is a hot topic of discussion at MountainXpress.

CULLOWHEE/RALEIGH–”Your tax dollars at work.”

So notes The Progressive Pulse, a blog published by NC Policy Watch, which in turn is a project of the North Carolina Justice Center.

Author Chris Fitzsimon names Western Carolina University and UNC Healthcare among “several” state institutions that are Patron members of the North Carolina Chamber, an affiliate of the United States Chamber of Commerce. These Chambers (which aren’t formally tied to local chambers of commerce, by the way) advocate an agenda that includes the following, in Fitzsimon’s words:

… fighting for lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, while opposing various protections for workers and regulations to protect the environment. For years, the Chamber (formerly known as North Carolinians for Business and Industry) led the opposition to requiring insurance companies to cover mental illnesses the same way they cover physical ailments.

Western ponies up $5,000 per year to take part.

The blog post is here.