A8 The BulleTin • Wednesday, May 12, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Knopp, Zika and
Kropf pick priorities
S
tate Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend, and state Reps. Jack Zika,
R-Redmond, and Jason Kropf, D-Bend, just sent a clear
signal about their priorities.
Knopp had $4 million to spend.
Zika and Kropf each had $2 million
to spend. It was money from the
federal American Rescue Plan Act.
Knopp told us they coordinated to
try to get the most out of the $8 mil-
lion for the area.
Knopp put $1 million toward a
new well in Redmond to keep up
with water demand. He put $1 mil-
lion toward early learning and child
care at the Little Kits Early Learning
and Childcare and Center at Ore-
gon State University-Cascades. And
he put $2 million toward improving
crossings across U.S. Highway 97 and
the Burlington Northern Santa Fe
Railway in Bend, making travel safer
for bicyclists, pedestrians, cars and
trains.
Zika put $1 million to Redmond’s
neighborhood revitalization pro-
gram that includes sidewalks to
make it easier and safer for people to
get around. He put $800,000 toward
NeighborImpact’s efforts toward
child care and for a food bank. And
the remaining $200,000 toward Red-
mond’s REACH program and the
Redmond Early Learning Center to
expand child care.
As we have already reported,
Kropf put his $2 million toward
Bend being able to acquire and reno-
vate a low-barrier homeless shelter.
If you were to sum it all up, trans-
portation safety, fighting homeless-
ness, child care and water supply
were all winners.
Knopp, Zika and Kropf were hired
by voters to pick priorities and make
such decisions about how to spend
taxpayer dollars. Maybe you voted
for them. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe
you don’t like their positions on
some issues or the party they are as-
sociated with. They did here, though,
work together and in good faith on
solving some of the region’s prob-
lems. Here, they made good choices.
Is Oregon ready for a cap
on health care cost growth?
E
ver thought the size of your
medical bill should be a
crime? In a way, that may be
coming to Oregon.
The Oregon Legislature is set to
pass a bill that would direct the Ore-
gon Health Authority to set up civil
penalties for health providers that
fail to control costs or don’t report
their cost growth. It’s one of Oregon’s
efforts to try to keep health care
costs down.
House Bill 2081 doesn’t establish
the target rate of health care cost
growth, though the plan is the state
will do that. What the bill does is
make it clear that providers have to
come up with a plan for improve-
ment if they miss the target and can’t
provide an adequate explanation.
And if a provider doesn’t meet the
target for three out of five years or
doesn’t participate in the program,
there will be a financial penalty.
The bill says the penalty should
take into consideration the size of
the entity, the efforts it made, other
penalties and its overall perfor-
mance in reducing costs. The bill
doesn’t set the actual penalties. OHA
will do that. The first penalties could
not be imposed until Jan 1. 2026.
The bill seems almost certain to be-
come law.
The Oregon Association of Hos-
pitals and Health Systems has stated
bluntly that Oregon providers have
been in a health care crisis and are
not ready for it. “We must be clear –
hospitals have not had the capacity
to build the necessary infrastructure,
partnerships, and data capabilities to
operate under a cost growth target,”
it wrote in testimony about the bill.
Most Oregonians do want some-
thing to be done to hold down
health care costs. Growth targets
have had some success in other
states. But the concern is always that
quality and access may decline. And
the other worry is that costs may
shift, rather than truly go down.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
My Nickel’s Worth
Pass legislation to fund suicide
hotline
May is Mental Health Month. By
urging my public officials to prioritize
suicide prevention, mental health, and
crisis care, I am hoping to influence
collective change to support #Mental-
Health4All.
Right now, individuals in crisis are
able to call 1-800-273-8255 to reach
the National Suicide Prevention Life-
line. The lifeline provides 24/7, free
and confidential support for peo-
ple in distress and those that care for
them. Soon, it will be much easier to
remember how to reach the lifeline as
the number will be changing to “988”
nationwide by July 2022.
Knowing this, it is critically import-
ant that states pass legislation NOW
to reliably fund 988 and their state’s
crisis response system, just as we
fund 911 and emergency services —
through small fees on our phone bills.
Reliable funding will help to ensure
all 988 callers can reach a counselor
in their own state who is familiar with
and can connect them with local re-
sources. Culturally competent support
and local connections can better help
all callers through their crisis and in
their recovery.
Join me this month in urging your
public officials to fund 988. We all
play a role in changing the culture
Letters policy
Letters should be limited to one issue, con-
tain no more than 250 words and include
the writer’s signature, phone number and
address for verification. We edit letters for
around mental health. Together, we
can ensure #MentalHealth4All.
— Richard Knotts, Bend
Please get vaccinated
As COVID cases continue to spike
we learn of the huge impact on our
business community as they adjust
to changes required while moving
from one risk category to another.
Yes, COVID impacts our business
and entertainment options in a huge
way. This is a serious concern for all
of us. Living with this public health
issue puts the need for vaccination
front and center. Help our community
get to work. If we listen to the public
health professionals discuss the needs
for the usual protocols to push back
COVID infections we are also re-
minded of the need for vaccinations.
Recently Dr. Michael Baker, Jeffer-
son County Public Health director,
made a statement that is worth re-
peating. “If you aren’t getting the vac-
cine out of health for yourself or the
health of your loved ones,” says Baker,
“get the vaccine for your community,
specifically the economic health of
your community.”
Dr. Baker, thank you for remind-
ing us we can help our business and
entertainment community open their
doors to all of us. So, let’s get vacci-
nated and help attack this virus that is
brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons.
We reject poetry, personal attacks, form
letters, letters submitted elsewhere and
those appropriate for other sections of The
Bulletin. Writers are limited to one letter or
guest column every 30 days.
penetrating our lives.
In my view, getting vaccinated is the
best way to help our community open
up and thrive.
—Gloria Olson, Redmond
Double talk from candidates
I was quite surprised to read (May
9) that Joyce Waring sees Maria Lo-
pez-Dauenhauer as a school board
candidate of “...unity and common
sense...” after seeing weeks of that can-
didate’s ads featuring strangely per-
sonal attacks on her opponent but no
clear ideas for our schools.
I also don’t understand how she
and the other three candidates in her
bloc (Imel, Henton, and Haffner) can
advertise they are “Parents not Pol-
iticians” then spend time ignoring
local audiences while appearing on
political radio and TV. Henton did
speak to the Sunriver Rotary but had
no answer when asked for thoughts
or views on school direction post-
COVID.
Lopez-Dauenhauer claims she’s not
political but expects schools to teach
our kids to love their country. I have
high hopes the voters in our school
district won’t buy such insincere dou-
ble-talk from candidates who have
largely refused to even talk to local
voters.
—Les Adams, Three Rivers
How to submit
Please address your submission to either
My Nickel’s Worth or Guest Column and
send it to The Bulletin. Email submissions
are preferred. letters@bendbulletin.com
Talk of secession gets United States history all wrong
BY ALAN TAYLOR
Special to The Washington Post
I
n our polarized times, talk of se-
cession blooms on the losing side
of bitterly contested national elec-
tions. After the 2016 election, some
liberal Californians proposed a ref-
erendum to seek independence. Last
December in Texas, a few leading
Republicans actually threatened to
secede from a nation whose courts
would not overturn the 2020 presi-
dential election. This talk of secession
reflects animosities and fears, but it is
also fundamentally based on a mythic
and rosy version of our political ori-
gins — one that never was.
Modern secessionists claim that the
Founders united to support an Amer-
ican creed that looks conveniently like
their vision for America today. They
blame their political opponents for
betraying this political utopia.
In reality, however, the early Amer-
ican Republic was anything but a
harmonious utopia. The Founders
fiercely disagreed about how to gov-
ern the republic and they created a
Union specifically designed to keep
the peace between their diverse and
fractious states. So powerful were an-
imosities and fear of disunion and
potential foreign meddling that might
promote it that the United States set
out on a path of expansion to push
enemies away and relieve tensions do-
mestically.
After winning independence, the
United States began to unravel during
the mid-1780s. The smaller states
dreaded domination by larger ones.
Frontier settlements threatened to
123RF
break away from the east (and Ver-
mont succeeded for a decade.) Con-
necticut men fought to take away the
northern third of Pennsylvania; the
rest of New England threatened a hos-
tile takeover of Rhode Island. Alexan-
der Hamilton denounced the states as
“little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous
commonwealths, the wretched nurs-
eries of unceasing discord.” Benjamin
Franklin agreed, “Our States are on
the point of separation, only to meet
hereafter for the purpose of cutting
one another’s throats.”
At the end of that decade, Hamilton
and Franklin helped to draft and rat-
ify a new federal constitution meant
to form “a more perfect Union.” Lead-
ing Americans understood this as a
necessary step to keep the peace be-
tween the states and avert a future
civil war. It also would help them
manage a cooperative effort to occupy
the continent.
And yet, leaders like Patrick Henry
and Sam Adams also feared that the
new federal government might be-
come too powerful and tyrannical.
Having resisted Britain’s centralizing
might, many citizens balked at creat-
ing a consolidated nation. They sup-
ported a Union just strong enough
to help the states but not powerful
enough to subordinate them. While
the pressures of the Revolutionary
War had pulled the states together, a
dread of central power kept pushing
them apart.
Consequently, the Union became
both cherished and feared by citizens.
When informed of the new federal
Constitution in 1787, South Carolina
farmers staged a funeral for a coffin
labeled “Liberty.” They warned that
freedom could not endure if power
passed “into the hands of men who
live one thousand miles distant from
you.” Dread of a national elite, there-
fore, has deep roots in our politics.
Americans also feared that a for-
eign power would exploit these dis-
affected elements within the fragile
Union. They understood that the
country had dangerous fault lines
within. Indigenous and enslaved
people could ally with the British or
Spanish empires to overthrow the
United States. During the 1780s and
1790s, those empires armed Native
peoples to resist the United States and
provided safe havens for runaway en-
slaved people. Indeed foreigners could
even exploit jealousies between the
states to provoke disunion, as the Brit-
ish nearly did with the New England
states during the War of 1812.
That fear drove American leaders
to expand deep into the continent
to push rival empires — British and
Spanish — farther away from the
United States. Leaders also distrusted
their own settlers, fearing that they
might break away to join another
empire or form their own, indepen-
dent republics, as Vermont and east-
ern Tennessee had done temporarily
during the 1780s.
Perhaps nobody embodied these
contradictions quite like Andrew
Jackson. During the 1780s, he had
covertly taken an oath of allegiance
to Spain to trade enslaved people
with that empire’s colonists at Nat-
chez. Thirty years later, he became a
staunch American nationalist, who
destroyed Indian resistance in Ala-
bama and seized Spanish-held Flor-
ida to eliminate a haven for runaway
enslaved people. As president, he de-
fended the Union in the nullification
crisis with South Carolina, but then
appeased the white Carolinians by
permitting their suppression of aboli-
tionist writings sent through the mail.
During the early 1840s, Jackson
dreaded that the British meant to
grab Texas, then an independent re-
public that had rebelled against Mex-
ican rule. If the British succeeded,
they would, Jackson predicted, rally
“hordes of savages” and runaways
to spread “servile war” throughout
the South. By annexing Texas to the
United States, Jackson thought the
United States could perpetuate “our
republican system, and . . . our glo-
rious Union.” He spoke for many
Americans, who insisted that their
freedom and Union demanded west-
ward expansion, including the exten-
sion of slavery for others.
During the 19th century, most
Americans tried to hold their Union
together through territorial expan-
sion, but instead they provoked a
bloodbath. Unionists restored the
nation through war and resumed
adding territory — first Alaska, then
Hawaii. But we have run out of places
to acquire while the distrust between
people of red and blue states has in-
creased, creating new fault lines with
ominous possibilities — unless we
cherish a Union essential to our mu-
tual safety.
e e
Alan Taylor is author of “American Republics:
A Continental History of the United States,
1783-1850”