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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 8, 2019)
A4 East Oregonian Friday, February 8, 2019 CHRISTOPHER RUSH Publisher KATHRYN B. BROWN Owner DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor WYATT HAUPT JR. News Editor Founded October 16, 1875 OUR VIEW Tip of the Hat, kick in the pants A tip of the hat to the FFA funding bill, sponsored by Rep. Greg Barreto (R-Cove), that would add $1.4 million to pay for com- petitions, training and leadership courses and conventions. There’s also $600,000 from the Oregon Department of Education to support ag and science teachers. For our money, there’s no better invest- ment than FFA. Districts both rural and urban should have thriving programs, pre- paring students for a world that needs to be fed, day after day and year after year. We’ve seen the bounty of the harvest in Eastern Oregon, with programs that grow some of the finest young leaders in our schools. And while fundraising can be a helpful exercise, students and teach- ers shouldn’t be reliant on the kindness of strangers to make well-earned trips to con- ventions and competitions. Each school district will continue to make decisions on how to fund its own pro- grams, including stipends for advisors. But adding state assistance will make sure FFA can thrive in districts large and small. The world needs more leaders, and rural Oregon needs more trained experts in agri- culture. This bill — House Bill 2444 — is a way to get both. A kick in the pants and a “get a move on” to the Western Fire Chiefs Associa- tion, tasked with conducting a search to find the next Pendleton fire chief. Paul Berardi, the interim fire chief, has been in Pendleton since October. The posi- tion hasn’t been filled full time since April. A new fire station is under construction. The department is in need of some stability. To that end, Pendleton is taking the advice of the fire chiefs association, who suggested keeping Berardi as interim during a larger search. It also planned to start a job listing in January. We’d like to see that process begin so the department can move into its next phase with a permanent leader. A tip of the hat to Umatilla County for setting the standard with its September haz- ardous waste cleanup event. And a special tip to Gina Miller, who planned and pulled off the project. Twelve tons of potentially harmful mate- rial is quite a haul, and we’re glad to have it out of our garages and sheds. Because of the drop-off event’s success, other state agencies are looking to replicate EO file photo The new class of leadership for the Oregon FFA lower the gavel and officially close the 2012 Oregon FFA State Convention on Monday in Hermiston. it. It’s an area where the county can be a proud leader. A kick in the pants to the risky drivers who insist that posted speed limits are good for all weather conditions, believe the open road is a good place for a text conversation and think they’re invincible. We’ve learned sadly, again and again, it’s not true. And as another winter storm bears down on Eastern Oregon, we ask that you prepare for travel with caution. There’s a false notion that one becomes a “good driver” based on years of experience behind the wheel. The opposite is often true — routine breeds complacency, and a per- son can forget they’re piloting several tons of metal and glass at breakneck speeds. This is intensified in bad weather, and small bad habits are multiplied. The conse- quences can be deadly for you and others. If you’re a good driver, prove it by acknowledging your bad habits and put- ting them aside, especially when roads are treacherous. OTHER VIEWS OTHER VIEWS Don’t turn medical database into arresting tool Trump versus the socialist menace Register-Guard L aw enforcement advo- cates would like to chip away at Oregonians’ health privacy. They want access to prescription records maintained by the Oregon Health Authority without judi- cial review. That’s a terrible idea. The OHA oversees a Pre- scription Drug Monitoring Pro- gram that tracks who prescribes what to whom. The database is walled off from casual review to protect privacy. Mostly only medical professionals can look at the records. That way a doc- tor can check to see if a patient is taking any other drugs that might react badly with something she is considering prescribing. The program monitors pre- scriptions for opioids, amphet- amines, narcotics, anabolic steroids and other addictive or street-popular drugs. Pharma- cists enter data about patients (name, date of birth, etc.) and their prescribing doctor after filling a prescription. Law enforcement has lim- ited access to these state health records. They must obtain a court order as part of an active drug-related investigation. State health licensing boards also can review the data as part of an active investigation into a licensee. Requiring law enforcement to get a warrant is the same rea- sonable check that applies to so many other pieces of personal information. Judicial scrutiny prevents abuse. But Oregon Secretary of State Dennis Richardson’s auditors think it’s too much of a barrier. In an audit released in December, they recommended allowing police to skip the warrant. The idea has insidious appeal. Why not help cops catch the addicts and dealers who are buying up too many drugs or doctors who hand out prescriptions too easily? “Trust us, we have only your best interests at heart,” should never fly as a reason to give up privacy. The nation’s Found- ers wrote the Fourth Amend- ment specifically to protect Americans against govern- ment’s sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong. History is full of cases where government abused even small invasions of privacy implemented with the best stated intentions. Look no further than the National Secu- rity Agency’s program of war- rantless wiretapping. Sometimes there is an over- whelmingly compelling rea- son to carve out an exception to privacy, but law enforcement and state auditors need to make a much stronger case for this one. The public should make an informed choice. People have legitimate rea- sons to worry about their health privacy beyond the self-evi- dent fact that our health is no one’s business but our own. If records about health conditions and prescription drug use leak out, insurance companies and employers might turn it against people. And there’s no reason to trust that law enforcement or other investigators will main- tain confidentiality considering the many data breaches com- panies and governments have had in recent years. The fewer places such information is stored, the better. Oregon and most other states track prescriptions to help with health care, not arrests. Sub- stance use disorders are a med- ical condition that requires health care intervention and support, not just criminal jus- tice. America cannot arrest its way out of the opioid epidemic. Turning a medical database into a law enforcement tool would violate the fundamental reason the it exists. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. I n 1961, America faced what industry, never mind the reality conservatives considered that there is essentially nobody in a mortal threat: calls for a American political life who advo- cates such things. national health insurance pro- gram covering senior citizens. In The trick — and “trick” is the an attempt to avert this awful fate, right word — involves shuttling the American Medical Association between these utterly different launched what it called Operation meanings, and hoping that people Coffee Cup, a pioneering attempt don’t notice. You say you want free at viral marketing. college tuition? Think of Here’s how it worked: all the people who died Doctors’ wives (hey, it in the Ukraine famine! was 1961) were asked to And no, this isn’t a cari- cature: Read the strange, invite their friends over smarmy report on social- and play them a recording ism that Trump’s econ- in which Ronald Reagan omists released last fall; explained that socialized that’s pretty much how its medicine would destroy P aul argument goes. American freedom. The K rugman So let’s talk about housewives, in turn, were COMMENT what’s really on the table. supposed to write letters Some progressive U.S. to Congress denouncing politicians now describe them- the menace of Medicare. selves as socialists, and a signifi- Obviously the strategy didn’t cant number of voters, including work; Medicare not only came a majority of voters under 30, say into existence, but it became so they approve of socialism. But nei- popular that these days Republi- cans routinely (and falsely) accuse ther the politicians nor the voters Democrats of planning to cut the are clamoring for government sei- zure of the means of production. program’s funding. But the strat- egy — claiming that any attempt Instead, they’ve taken on board to strengthen the social safety net conservative rhetoric that describes or limit inequality will put us on anything that tempers the excesses a slippery slope to totalitarianism of a market economy as socialism, — endures. and in effect said, “Well, in that And so it was that Donald case, I’m a socialist.” Trump, in his State of the Union What Americans who support address, briefly turned from his “socialism” actually want is what usual warnings about scary brown the rest of the world calls social people to warnings about the threat democracy: A market economy, from socialism. but with extreme hardship limited What do Trump’s people, or by a strong social safety net and conservatives in general, mean extreme inequality limited by pro- gressive taxation. They want us to by “socialism”? The answer is, it look like Denmark or Norway, not depends. Venezuela. Sometimes it means any kind And in case you haven’t been of economic liberalism. Thus after there, the Nordic countries are not, the SOTU, Steven Mnuchin, the in fact, hellholes. They have some- Treasury secretary, lauded the what lower gross domestic prod- Trump economy and declared that uct per capita than we do, but that’s “we’re not going back to social- ism” — i.e., apparently America largely because they take more itself was a socialist hellhole as vacations. Compared with Amer- ica, they have higher life expec- recently as 2016. Who knew? tancy, much less poverty and Other times, however, it means significantly higher overall life Soviet-style central planning, or satisfaction. Oh, and they have Venezuela-style nationalization of The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. high levels of entrepreneurship — because people are more willing to take the risk of starting a business when they know that they won’t lose their health care or plunge into abject poverty if they fail. Trump’s economists clearly had a hard time fitting the reality of Nordic societies into their anti-so- cialist manifesto. In some places they say that the Nordics aren’t really socialist; in others they try desperately to show that despite appearances, Danes and Swedes are suffering — for example, it’s expensive for them to operate a pickup truck. I am not making this up. What about the slippery slope from liberalism to totalitarianism? There’s absolutely no evidence that it exists. Medicare didn’t destroy freedom. Stalinist Russia and Mao- ist China didn’t evolve out of social democracies. Venezuela was a cor- rupt petrostate long before Hugo Chávez came along. If there’s a road to serfdom, I can’t think of any nation that took it. So scaremongering over social- ism is both silly and dishonest. But will it be politically effective? Probably not. After all, voters overwhelmingly support most of the policies proposed by Ameri- can “socialists,” including higher taxes on the wealthy and making Medicare available to everyone (although they don’t support plans that would force people to give up private insurance — a warn- ing to Democrats not to make sin- gle-payer purity a litmus test). On the other hand, we should never discount the power of dis- honesty. Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the sec- ond coming of Leon Trotsky, and millions of people will believe them. Let’s just hope that the rest of the media report the clean lit- tle secret of American socialism, which is that it isn’t radical at all. ——— Paul Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times. Send letters to managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 9780, or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
