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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (March 17, 2017)
OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2017 Founded in 1873 DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager OUR VIEW E ach week we recognize those people and organizations in the community deserving of public praise for the good things they do to make the North Coast a better place to live, and also those who should be called out for their actions. SHOUTOUTS Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian Seaside head coach Bill Westerholm celebrates his team’s state championship victory on Saturday night. • The Seaside High School boys and girls basketball teams, which each concluded their historic seasons last weekend. The boys team captured the state 4A championship, the first in bas- ketball in the school’s history, while the girls placed third in the state tournament, also their highest finish ever. • Jennifer Holen, Stephanie Meadows, Heather Seppa and Rachel Van Dusen, who were chosen by the Astoria Regatta Association to be mentors in a new program for the 2017 Astoria Regatta Court. According to the association’s president, Dan Travers, the new program will pair local businesswomen with each of the princesses to help them develop their leadership skills. • Cannon Beach Police Chief Jason Schermerhorn, who was recently honored by the local Boy Scouts council with a prestigious Silver Beaver volunteerism award. Schermerhorn is a longtime volunteer in the Boy Scouts Fort Clatsop District, and the honor is the top award a local Boy Scout council can bestow to a volunteer mentor. Recipients are selected from confidential nominations of adult peers and only one award may be presented for every 60 troops. • The organizers of last weekend’s Savor Cannon Beach wine walk, which drew more than 900 attendees for wine and culinary events. Forty wineries participated in venues from the Tolovana Inn to the Visitor Center. Organizers said ticket sales for the event were up 10 percent from last year and 80 percent were advance sales. The festival donated a portion of the pro- ceeds to a local charity, Clatsop Animal Assistance. • Supporters, sponsors and organizers of the annual “Stuff the Truck” Food Drive that set an all-time record for its cam- paign to help feed hungry people in Clatsop County. This year’s drive collected 1,592 pounds of food and garnered $14,159 in contributions to help defray the cost of food distribution for the Clatsop Community Action Regional Food Bank. • Hannah Garhofer, who took top honors in the Miss Clatsop County Scholarship Program when she was crowned Miss Clatsop County last weekend. Garhofer, of Seaside, is a student at Northwest Christian University in Eugene and won the service above self, fitness and congeniality awards and will also compete to be Miss Oregon in June. Nicole Ramsdell, of Astoria, was selected Miss North Coast’s Outstanding Teen and Peyton Sims, of Seaside, was named Miss Clatsop County’s Outstanding Teen. Each of the three will receive a scholarship award and will serve as an ambassador to the community. CALLOUTS • The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, which according to Oregon Public Broadcasting has the sec- ond-worst water-quality permit backlog in the country. Two environmental groups filed a lawsuit this week in Multnomah County that contends the backlog has resulted in some facilities discharging pollutants at levels that may violate protections for the state’s waterways. The suit seeks a court order to force the DEQ to update hundreds of old permits. The problem has existed for more than a decade, and in 2015 the Legislature directed the agency to review its water-quality permitting program. A con- sultant’s report found the DEQ lacked proper staffing to write permits and often failed to coordinate the scientific and regu- latory efforts needed to issue new permits. DEQ officials told OPB they agree there’s a problem, and that it will take time and resources to fix it with a “comprehensive solution.” Suggestions? Do you have a Shoutout or Callout you think we should know about? Let us know at news@dailyastorian.com and we’ll make sure to take a look. The real world of Obamacare repeal By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER Washington Post Writers Group W ASHINGTON — The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but for governments it’s not that easy. Once something is given — say, health insurance coverage to 20 million Americans — you take it away at your peril. This is true for any government benefit, but especially for health care. There’s a reason not one Western democracy with some system of national health care has ever abolished it. The genius of the left is to keep enlarging the entitlement state by creating new giveaways that are politically impossible to repeal. For 20 years, Republicans railed against the New Deal. Yet, when they came back into office in 1953, Eisenhower didn’t just keep Social Security, he expanded it. People hated Obamacare for its highhandedness, incompetence and cost. At the same time, its craft- ers took great care to create new beneficiaries and new expecta- tions. Which makes repeal very complicated. The Congressional Budget Office projects that, under Paul Ryan’s Obamacare replacement bill, 24 million will lose insurance within 10 years, 14 million after the first year. Granted, the number is highly suspect. CBO projects 18 mil- lion covered by the Obamacare exchanges in 2018. But the num- ber today is about 10 million. That means the CBO estimate of those losing coverage is already about 8 million too high. Nonetheless, there will be los- ers. And their stories will be plas- tered wall to wall across the media as sure as night follows day. That scares GOP moderates. And yet the main resistance to Ryan comes from conservative members complaining that the bill is not ideologically pure enough. They mock it as Obamacare Lite. For example, Ryan wants to ease the pain by phasing out Med- icaid expansion through 2020. The conservative Republican Study Committee wants it done next year. This is crazy. For the sake of two year’s savings, why would you risk a political crash landing? Moreover, the idea that you can eradicate Obamacare root and branch is fanciful. For all its cata- strophic flaws, Obamacare changed expectations. Does any Republi- can propose returning to a time AP Photo/Andrew Harnik House Speaker Paul Ryan, accompanied by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., right, speaks at a news conference following a GOP party conference at the Capitol Wednesday. when you can be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition? It’s not just Donald Trump who ran on retaining this new, yes, enti- tlement. Everyone did. But it’s very problematic. If people know that they can sign up for insurance after they get sick, the very idea of insurance is undermined. People won’t sign up when healthy and the insurance companies will go broke. There is no free lunch. GOP hard-liners must accept that Americans have become accustomed to some new health care benefits. So what do you do? Obamacare imposed a monetary fine if you didn’t sign up, for which the Ryan bill substitutes another mecha- nism, less heavy-handed but still government-mandated. The purists who insist upon entirely escaping the heavy hand of government are dreaming. The best you can hope for is to make it less intrusive and more rational, as in the Ryan plan’s block-granting Medicaid. Or instituting a more realistic age-rating system. Sixty-year-olds use six times as much health care as 20-year-olds, yet Obamacare decreed, entirely arbitrarily, that the former could be charged insur- ance premiums no more than three times that of the latter. The GOP bill changes the ratio from 3-to-1 to 5-to-1. Premiums better reflecting risk constitute a major restoration of rationality. (It’s how life insurance works.) Under Obamacare, the young were unwilling to be swin- dled and refused to sign up. With- out their support, the whole system is thus headed into a death spiral of looming insolvency. Rationality, however, has a price. The CBO has already pre- dicted a massive increase in pre- miums for 60-year-olds. That’s the headline. There is no free lunch. GOP hard-liners must accept that Amer- icans have become accustomed to some new health care benefits, just as moderates have to brace them- selves for stories about the inevita- ble losers in any reform. That’s the political price for fulfilling the sev- en-year promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare. Unless, of course, you go the full Machiavelli and throw it all back on the Democrats. How? Republicans could forget about meeting the arcane requirements of “reconciliation” legislation (which requires only 51 votes in the Sen- ate) and send the Senate a replace- ment bill loaded up with every- thing conservative — including, tort reform and insurance competi- tion across state lines. That would require 60 Senate votes. Let the Democrats filibuster it to death — and take the blame when repeal- and-replace fails, Obamacare car- ries on and then collapses under its own weight. Upside: You reap the backlash. Downside: You have to live with your conscience. LETTER TO THE EDITOR Racist funding I n response to “Ballot measure would restrict abortion rights” (The Daily Astorian, March 7): Not so. The ballot measure does nothing to restrict the legal “right” to abor- tion. However, the Supreme Court in 1980 upheld Congress’ right to restrict federal funds for abortion. State funding of abortion is rac- ist. Planned Parenthood locates its newest mega-abortion facilities in minority areas of large cities. The biggest ones are in Houston and Portland. We should not be paying for this. JEAN M. HERMAN Astoria