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Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Saturday, July 8, 2017 Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor MARISSA WILLIAMS Regional Advertising Director MARCY ROSENBERG Circulation Manager JANNA HEIMGARTNER Business Office Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager EO MEDIA GROUP East Oregonian • The Daily Astorian • Capital Press • Hermiston Herald Blue Mountain Eagle • Wallowa County Chieftain • Chinook Observer • Coast River Business Journal Oregon Coast Today • Coast Weekend • Seaside Signal • Cannon Beach Gazette Eastern Oregon Real Estate Guide • Eastern Oregon Marketplace • Coast Marketplace OnlyAg.com • FarmSeller.com • Seaside-Sun.com • NorthwestOpinions.com • DiscoverOurCoast.com OUR VIEW Health care takes all hands on deck Health care has been top of the in the way many Americans access care. But on the other hand, American mind for decades, as the Democrats are accusing Republicans price of medical care in the country of sending millions of Americans has skyrocketed and outcomes here fell well behind other first-world to an early grave by proposing their countries. own changes, which return tax cuts Little progress has been made. to the rich and attempt to give poor Entrenched interests — politics, and middle-class Americans tax-free Big Pharma, insurance companies, alternatives to paying for their lawyers, the American Medical coverage and care. There is broad support for Association, government upgrading and improving health care bureaucracy, etc., etc., etc., — has in America, despite helped keep costs pessimism and on a constant rise. Citizens should the death threats from And the gap between our political parties. us and other rich demand a Even many countries has only honest health Republicans have grown wider when come around to the it comes to life care debate expectancy, infant idea of “Medicare for that rises above all,” a more palatable mortality rates, access to care and to describe a partisanship. way more. more socialized medical system. We must say, Many Democrats of course, that the are OK with wholesale changes to American health care system can the Affordable Care Act, and realize be the best in the world, if you can afford the best. But if we want more that may include scrapping Obama’s signature achievement in order to Americans to live longer, healthier, enact something better. better lives, then how do we make How to do that is terribly the health care system work better complex, and risky. Many politicians for more Americans? have tried and failed to do something If you can answer that question, about it, and others tiptoe around please run for president. and wait for others to take on the For all of us who don’t have the answer, let’s first take a brief view of heavy lift. It’s even more delicate in rural the lay of the land. The Affordable America, where many doctors and Care Act (aka Obamacare) took a hospitals and clinics are surviving shot at improving the system when on razor thin margins, and depend it was passed in 2008. It consisted heavily on government programs of hundreds of pages of rules and like Medicaid. programs and acronyms and pilot American health care is a projects, but at its heart was a simple mangled mess of entrenched concept: the rich and healthy would interests, and at the heart of it the pay more to allow the poor and sick to have health insurance. That’s fine complicated science that is modern medicine. Keeping people healthy and good, and some would argue and alive is something that cannot be a noble effort that does the most done in a vacuum, and the country’s good without unfairly punishing health care structure must somehow those who can’t afford it. Others be both strong and flexible. would argue it is an unfair system Voters and politicians must own — government sticking its messy up to the fact that this country is hands into the free market, personal spending much too much money on decision-making and the plain old luck that affects the trajectory of life it — nearly 20 percent of our entire economy — and we’re not getting in the land of the free. acceptable results. Give the ACA Either way you see it, the ACA credit where it’s due, but own up did not tackle the cost of care in to the fact that there are significant America. And even though more problems with it that need fixing, Americans have health insurance, right now. many cannot afford the subsidized Americans are a wonderful, weird premiums nor pay their share of the group of humans. We’re risk takers, health care they receive, even when we drink too much and eat way too using their government-mandated much, and we drive our cars too far insurance. In those arenas, the ACA and too fast and we have too many has not helped consumers. It has, guns around and we don’t sleep however, helped the millions of enough and we ingest tobacco and sick Americans with pre-existing red meat too darn often. All of those conditions get coverage, which things make us less healthy, but increased the cost in the system more than many projected, including more free. We’re also varied the insurance companies. demographically and culturally and Republicans have loudly railed against the law over the last decade, we live dramatically different lives in urban Chicago or rural Montana, and their win last November as a multi-billionaire in Manhattan gave them the White House and or homeless on the streets of San the ability to make their mark Francisco. This makes a national on American health care. So far, health care system even more they’ve had a troubling health care bill pass the House, a similar bill hit complicated than a country like Sweden or Denmark, which have the a sticking point in the Senate, and have not found enough votes to even best health care systems and quality of life. muster a straight-forward repeal of It will take all hands on deck Obamacare, which would put much to improve health outcomes: A of the pre-2008 rules back in place. more efficient, smarter government We’re not at the precipice of system. Better choices from an apocalypse, however, and the hyperbole from both political parties Americans, from our diets to moves us farther away, not closer to showing up to our annual checkups. Doctors who keep cost in mind. a solution. From Washington, D.C, we should Some Republicans called demand debate that rises above Obamacare the “worst law in our partisanship and frames health history,” which is patently absurd. care as the critically important, The ACA was a rather conservative immensely complex issue it is. approach to making a big change Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of publisher Kathryn Brown, managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, and opinion page editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. OTHER VIEWS The phone is smart, but where’s the big idea? I used a smartphone GPS to find my and most extraordinary act of Divine way through the cobblestoned maze Grace.” As a renegade Catholic of Geneva’s Old Town, in search of monk, Luther might never have seen a handmade machine that changed the his writings find their way out of a world more than any other invention. monastery. But through Gutenberg’s Near a 13th-century cathedral in this democratizing machine, about 300,000 Swiss city on the shores of a lovely copies of Luther’s provocations were lake, I found what I was looking for: a circulated between 1517 and 1520. Gutenberg printing press. Timothy Christianity would never be the same. “This was the internet of its day — Similarly, it’s hard to imagine Egan at least as influential as the iPhone,” the French or American revolutions Comment said Gabriel de Montmollin, director of without those enlightened voices in the Museum of the Reformation, toying print. with the replica of Johann Gutenberg’s great In the beginning of the written word, about invention. It used to take four monks, laboring 5,000 years ago, people scrawled information in a scriptorium with quills on clay. Their messages were over calfskin, up to a year to sometimes bawdy, more produce a single book. often banal. The Greeks With the advance gave us humor, tragedy and in movable type in poetry. Scrolls of papyrus 15th-century Europe, one were portable; Roman press could crank out 3,000 commanders used them as pages a day. Before long, the equivalent of paperbacks, average people could travel tucked into pockets. to places that used to be “On the Nature of unknown to them — with Things,” a poem from maps! Medical information the Roman philosopher passed more freely and Lucretius in the first century quickly, diminishing the sway of quacks. And B.C., was one of the most “dangerously you could find your own way to God, or a radical” things ever written, Stephen way out of believing in God, with access to Greenblatt argued in his book “The Swerve.” formerly forbidden thoughts. Rediscovered and then printed in the early The printing press offered the prospect that stages of the Renaissance on Gutenberg’s tyrants would never be able to kill a book or press, the poetic celebration of the good life suppress an idea. Gutenberg’s brainchild broke overturned much of Europe’s dour medieval the monopoly that clerics had on scripture. And mindset. later, stirred by pamphlets from a version of Count Magna Carta, one of the founding that same press, the American colonies rose up documents in the evolution of free societies, against a king and gave birth to a nation. and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” which So, a question in the summer of this 10th popularized English vernacular, among the anniversary of the iPhone: has the device that highlights of the thousand years or so when is perhaps the most revolutionary of all time books were made by hand-cramped scribes, or given us a single magnificent idea? Nearly printed from wooden blocks. every advancement of the written word Not long after Steve Jobs introduced his through new technology has also advanced iPhone, he said the bound book was probably humankind. headed for history’s attic. Not so fast. After a Sure, you can say the iPhone changed period of rapid growth in e-books, something everything. By putting the world’s recorded closer to the medium for Chaucer’s volumes knowledge in the palm of a hand, it has made a great comeback. revolutionized work, dining, travel and The hope of the iPhone, and the internet socializing. It made us more narcissistic — in general, was that it would free people in here’s more of me doing cool stuff! — and closed societies. But the failure of the Arab it unleashed an army of awful trolls. We Spring, and the continued suppression of ideas no longer have the patience to sit through a in North Korea, China and Iran, has not borne baseball game without that reach to the pocket. that out. And it’s beyond pathetic that the And one more casualty of Apple selling more leader of the free world uses his phone to insult than a billion phones in a decade’s time: women, or send out bizarre videos of him daydreaming has become a lost art. beating up imaginary reporters. Still, for all of that, I’m still waiting to see if The iPhone is still young. It has certainly the iPhone can do what the printing press did been “one of the most important, world- for religion and democracy. This year is also changing and successful products in history,” the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther posting as Apple CEO Tim Cook said. But I’m not sure his 95 theses against the corruption of the if the world changed for the better with the Roman Catholic Church; the Geneva museum iPhone — as it did with the printing press — or makes a strong case that the printing press merely changed. opened more minds than anything else. ■ The museum’s exhibition — “Print! The Timothy Egan has served as Pacific First Pages of a Revolution” — quotes Luther Northwest correspondent and a national as saying that the press was “the greatest enterprise reporter for The New York Times. Can the iPhone do what the printing press did for religion and democracy? YOUR VIEWS Untruthful president cannot allow any criticism of himself This letter is my take on our free press, President Trump and his associates. President Trump has had six months to prove himself worthy of the high office he holds. As Commander in Chief he has handed off the leadership to the military generals, given them carte blanche to do as they will. This is one of many missteps. These six months have been the most chaotic in recorded history. The chaos is made worse by the daily tweets attacking people unjustly. Many members of our free press — CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS and many others — have been viciously attacked. He seems to have a bias against women, particularly journalists. He cannot seem to allow any criticism of himself or his administration even though it is factual. This is speaking truth to power, an essential process that keeps our democracy alive and well. I have found reporters to be truthful in their stories and articles. I followed the fact-checking of almost 450 statements made by President Trump to be untruthful. Apparently this is his mode of conduct in business, TV shows and now the presidency. Trust is so important in this high office; we the people depend on our elected officials to be dependable, truthful and transparent. He has appointed a commission to request voter information — names, addresses, birth dates, last four digits of Social Security numbers, what party he or she belongs to and how he or she cast their vote. Oregon’s Secretary of State, Dennis Richardson, is complying with some of these requests. Many states are protecting their citizens by denying, as they should, any and all possible illegally given information. I am incensed at these requests. Under the guise of checking for voter fraud, these requests are happening now. We have not had any voter fraud. This is wrong and I question the motives behind the requests. We are all at risk when this kind of personal information is revealed. I ask, for what purpose really? Jan Beitel Umatilla LETTERS POLICY The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Submitted letters must be signed by the author. Send to 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
