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