Unraveling the Affordable Care Act and the U.S. Constitution

I.                    The Republican Congress and Trump may yet succeed in destroying the Affordable Healthcare Act without passing another act to make obvious  their petty, mean-spirited assault on healthcare for the poor. It all started in late 2014 with "Little Marco's" nasty little amendment to a must-pass spending bill. “ . . . his plan limiting how much the government can spend to protect insurance companies against financial losses has shown the effectiveness of quiet legislative sabotage.” His handiwork continues to ripple through the U.S. economy today with the support of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/us/politics/marco-rubio-obamacare-affordable-care-act.html

"WASHINGTON — A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law [in 2014] has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.

"The attack stems from two years of effort by Senator Marco Rubio and others in Congress to undermine a key financing mechanism in the law. So for all the Republican talk about dismantling the Affordable Care Act, one Republican presidential hopeful has actually done something toward achieving that goal.

"Mr. Rubio’s efforts against the so-called risk corridor provision of the health law have hardly risen to the forefront of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but his plan limiting how much the government can spend to protect insurance companies against financial losses has shown the effectiveness of quiet legislative sabotage.

"The risk corridors were intended to help some insurance companies if they ended up with too many new sick people on their rolls and too little cash from premiums to cover their medical bills in the first three years under the health law. But because of Mr. Rubio’s efforts, the administration says it will pay only 13 percent of what insurance companies were expecting to receive this year. The payments were supposed to help insurers cope with the risks they assumed when they decided to participate in the law’s new insurance marketplaces.

"Mr. Rubio’s talking point is bumper-sticker ready. The payments, he says, are “a taxpayer-funded bailout for insurance companies.” But without them, insurers say, many consumers will face higher premiums and may have to scramble for other coverage. Already, some insurers have shut down over the unexpected shortfall. . . ."

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid https://www.cms.gov/Newsroom/MediaReleaseDatabase/Press-releases/2017-Press-releases-items/2017-06-13.html  projects this week that 40 rural counties across Nevada, Ohio and Indiana will have no health insurers for 2018, and at least 1,332 counties, 42%, will have only one insurer – an effective monopoly in the state insurance exchanges. All of these counties are in Republican-led Red states which also have the highest poverty rates. http://www.politicususa.com/2014/03/18/fact-republican-run-red-states-americas-highest-poverty-rates.html

II.                  Welcome to libertarian American, (AKA Kochworld). Some history: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/08/on-election-day-the-history-of-fascism-matters/. “Mark Mazower, an acclaimed scholar of 20th-century Europe . . . at Columbia University, illustrated in a lucid essay on the nature of fascism . . . in the Financial Times.”

“ . . . fascism was always about more than the dictators. Indeed, as the conservative political thinker Michael Oakeshott wrote decades ago, it is a kind of liberal illusion to focus on the figure of the dictator, as though one person was the only problem. The real problems lie in the dictator’s shadow, [emphasis added] in the conditions that enable the leader’s rise. The hollowing out of those basic institutions without which no modern state or society can govern itself, the extremism of political discourse — these things are already with us. And seem set to persist in the U.S.”

The biggest challenge to the Koch’s progress is that not all corporations agree on the Koch family’s vision of fascism in America, including selling public infrastructure and services to private corporations, but many other rich White men do agree. Note Airlines for America’s position on privatizing the U.S. Air Traffic Control system here: http://airlines.org/blog/the-truth-about-u-s-airlines-and-atc-reform/

III.                In the shadows, the Koch Organization through agents like ALEC and others has led perhaps as many as 34 states to call for a constitutional amendment, ostensibly to add a balanced budget amendment. http://www.newsmax.com/US/constitutional-convention-Boehner-balanced-budget/2014/04/11/id/565155/

But would they have to stop there? Why not repeal the 17^th Amendment which requires the direct election of U.S. senators? https://www.alec.org/model-policy/draft-resolution-recommending-constitutional-amendment-restoring-election-of-u-s-senators-to-the-legislatures-of-the-sovereign-states/ The Kochs and their Red state puppets would get more of the national power and control they desire to inflict their and their father’s vision on America, http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13014/koch-daddy-and-nazis-revealing-timeline.

Or how about repealing the 14^th Amendment, meant to protect the voting rights of natural born Black Americans. Nativists oppose protecting the rights of children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants. http://www.14thamendment.us/birthright_citizenship/original_intent.html

Have a nice day.

Modern Roundabouts? Modern Smoundabouts? 

By this time I've heard all the local excuses way modern roundabouts won't work here in Albuquerque. Somehow they work fine in Colorado. Vail has at least half a dozen. Los Alamos has a couple. Journal Center has one. Los Poblanos Orchards has one. Who knows?

I attended the latest public meeting about the proposed roundabout at Rio Grande and Candelaria this evening. There was a public protest against the idea two days ago for TV. There was a noisy element in the packed meeting room tonight who insisted on shouting questions and demands at the speakers regardless of the stated protocol to provide respect to all the speakers of the moment.

If I had the patience, I thought of walking up to them and simply asking them politely to sit down and shut up. Channel 7 showed up late, but the heckling is never newsworthy.

Years ago, I listened to a proud doctor argue against a modern roundabout on his route to work. His complaint? He didn't want anybody telling him how fast to drive at 6 AM on his way to work. A roundabout would slow him down in his BMW from 55 MPH down to 25 MPH (maybe 30 MPH) for one minute on Rio Grande whether anyone was watching or not.

On the other side, I've listened to residents along Rio Grande who  have complained loudly ever since the street was "improved" from 2-lanes to 4-lanes between Griegos and Mountain 30 years ago. Traffic speeds doubled, along with noise - and accidents at Candelaria.

At the meeting at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, I listened to a Republican attorney appointed politician complain that the city's roundabout design engineers had committed misfeasance, cherry-picking the traffic data and ignoring allegedly conflicting information, like supposed damaging accident data from existing city roundabouts at Menaul and Indian School and 8th and Central. Essentially they lied, and the City was shoving this project down "the people's throats" - after six years of public planning and hearings of alternative design studies to slow and calm traffic on Rio Grande and reduce accidents at this intersection. But he was not wiling to accuse them to their faces.

I assume the City/APD or the MRCOG has the comparative data on accidents before and after the construction of the two roundabouts. Perhaps the UNM School of Engineering Department of Civil Engineering might have the data, also.
Another case of "not invented here" I'm afraid. Of course the simplest and most expensive solution would be more better traffic enforcement by uniformed officers. Why, the County Commission has just agreed to hire 15 more deputies to work the streets and houses outside the City! Where to start in the wealthier North half of the County? Red-light cameras and speed limit cameras work better and cheaper, too.

Alameda? North 2nd? Osuna? North Edith? North 4th? Rio Grande? Montano? Griegos? Coors? Name your over-engineered arterial or collector street across the NW quadrant of Albuquerque. Every one of those streets drives at least 5~8 MPH on average over the posted limit. BTW, name the importance of traffic enforcement over property crimes.

So the NIMBY wanna-be Tea Baggers are against everything again, and for the status quo and more of the same built by other people - wider streets, faster streets, more bridges through other people's neighborhoods, like the Nature Center (Candelaria), Tinnin Farms (Chavez/Osuna), Corrales (Roy/Meadowlark), etc. Whose big government is making what choices?

But a different publicly contracted engineering response chosen by our representatives, like a modern roundabout? That's BIG government interference in our lives! Do I smell hypochrisy? Or is it just whining, we aren't getting our way. 

FYI: see www.roundabouts.com They work everywhere else outside Albuquerque, even in Vail and Los Alamos. They even save money and lives - in other cities.

Here's a post from the recent past, the week the World Trade Center towers were destroyed with two U.S. airliners and the Pentagon building was hit by another. A fourth plane went down in Pennsylvania in a heroic and tragic flight. Now we can wish it weren't true, but that's the world we live in. The Murrah building taught us another lesson. Now we have Trump. G-d give us grace to carry on.

The Death of an Icon

Column for The Albuquerque Tribune, September 13, 2001

John H. Hooker

9.11!  I stood, stunned, as I watched the TV news on Tuesday. [OMG. I Cried.] Smoke poured from the first tower of the World Trade Center in the early reports. “They” flew a jet plane through the second tower with a burst of flames!  Then the spires of the buildings fell into the smoke. The tallest World Trade Center towers collapsed.  First one, then the other.  I can’t imagine the horror of the end of the people, of the buildings.  Not that the buildings were so big and valuable, but they were a symbol of New York City and thus the United States and our lives and beliefs.  And they were full of people.

A handful of righteous men have killed thousands.  The World Trade Center took over four years and the work of thousands of architects, engineers and skilled journeymen to construct and knit into the fabric of New York City from 1969 to 1973 - and rebuild in 1993.  They rose over a thousand feet from the subway tunnels below ground into the clear, late summer sky over the southern end of Manhattan.  Gone in just a couple of hours.  That these men were able to commandeer our daily technology of air flight to commit this devastation is even more frustrating.

Those towers were not the prettiest buildings in the world, but they were an icon of “the most powerful city in the world.”  We created a powerful target.

In just hours, these men demolished the lives, the desks, and the days and work of the 50,000 people who toiled in the two towers.  But these terrorists will never be able to build anything from their anger and bitterness.

This act of men is not an act of Nature or God.  It is one thing for a building or a town to be ruined by a flood or an earthquake.  We seek meaning in an act of God and Nature as we have for generations.  Was it a consequence of our pride, or folly?  Perhaps we, the builders, find humility then.  An act of vengeful men, offers up just the hatred and fear and pride of the terrorists.  Now we fear our complacency and our reaction.  What can you build from your fear?  It cannot be pretty.

Was it a mistake to build these grand towers?  No.  These men could have picked any number of great works by Americans – the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sears Tower.  Part of the glory of America over the last 100 years is our success in creating fantastic buildings and bridges.  We did it first and better, before anyone else.  Today, the tallest buildings in the world are, in fact, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  They are a point of great pride in Malaysia, but they can’t capture the imagination of the world as these symbols of America do.

Crashing a plane into one side of the sprawling Pentagon seems almost an afterthought in comparison.  But that building holds more import to foreigners perhaps than to us today.  God save the pilot who flew his plane into the ground in southern Pennsylvania.  What a choice he had to make!

Architecture captures the strength and power of the American idea.  These structures are both the response to the needs of our enterprise and a celebration of our success.  That makes them all the more attractive as targets to vent the anger and frustration of men who believe the US and the world have beaten them down and passed them by. 

The destruction of Washington by the British taught us painful lessons at the beginning of the 19^th Century.  The wholesale demolition of buildings and cities in Europe in World War II led us to believe in modern alternatives to our historic ways of building cities, railways and highways.  The last plane crash into the Empire State Building in 1945 was clearly an accident then, and we learned the weaknesses and strengths of our building technology in the years that followed – which led to the even taller towers we have today.  The bombing of one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 taught us new lessons.  Then the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City taught us yet different lessons – some of which are embodied in the new Steven Schiff Federal Courthouse in downtown Albuquerque.

As the dust settles and daily lives are rebuilt, we will discover the lessons of this disaster.  The strength of the US is not just the strengths of its buildings and icons, but our skill to learn and build again.  The citizens of New York City and Washington have re-invented and reconstructed their lives and buildings several times in the face of tragedy.  We will learn and build again with our faith in the future.

Fair Fouls

The Administration of the New Mexico State Fair, the Governor's Office and the Downs at Albuquerque made a grand mistake in the way they agreed to present a request for proposals (RFP) in 2011 for a new 25-year lease to own and operate a Racino at Expo New Mexico.

First, 30 days is just too little time to create a creative, thorough and thoughtful proposal of such complexity and duration. 60 to 90 days would have made much more sense.

Second, the Downs is intimately embedded in the culture of the Fairgrounds, especially the horse business which occupies a significant chunk of the Fairgrounds. Regardless of the change in the Governor's office in 2012 and the concomitant change in the General Manager's office at the State Fair, the culture of the horsemen hasn't changed. But the Downs logically shuffled their management to look much more Republican in the face of the state's Republican leadership and their notoriously highly politicized practices.

Third, the Downs has prepared sophisticated proposals over the past several years of how they would rearrange the Racino to better fit modern gambling with failing horse racing. So they have always been well prepared to deliver a new proposal at a moment's notice.

Where does that leave Laguna Development? They were dealt a weak hand.

This set of circumstances leaves the Interim General Manager who has to put on another Fair in two months in a weak economy and a lean staff, in a highly stressful position. I don't blame him, unless he is a complete political hack. Never met him. Probably never will. Hope he puts on a good Fair in 2012.

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

Frugal Apartheid?

The Tea Party Right Wing Press rails against “Green”building and infill development as tools for the Rich to conspire to oppress the Poor. Their mistake is not that Green building is more economical to own and operate than conventional construction, but the assumption that there is a upper-class bias and conspiracy to hurt the poor and working families in Albuquerque by "gentrification" under the guise of "green construction." Developers build in a regulated market and serve those who buy. Global climate change threatens the rich and poor alike in the desert Southwest. We need to change the rules of the market, empower the poor and work together to reduce our “ecological footprint” to create a greener, more frugal and more sustainable city. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we can hang together or we can hang alone.

The self-proclaimed defenders of the poor point out the systemic failures of conventional land development for working families in Albuquerque – they drive “jalopies” to their affordable houses on the suburban fringe of the city, far from their jobs across town or they live in old decaying houses in old decaying neighborhoods that are "ripe for redevelopment.". And the poor have to shop at cheap warehouse stores to live. “Drive‘till you qualify” is the formula today. But it costs a lot to drive every day to a low-wage job and to shop the cheap big boxes, and the price is rising. These are not problems caused by any “urbanism”new or old, but by the conventional suburban sprawl of Albuquerque and other post-War cities. If we talked about the total cost of housing and driving in the same breath, we could create a new city of opportunity. The Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, www.cnt.org has developed such a formula.

In every American city today, there is a range of housing from 5-acre ranchitos to 1/10-acre townhouses and apartments. Even with that range across Albuquerque, we need to add more housing opportunities for ourselves, our children and our parents. No one can afford every house on the market. Along with McMansions and subsidized, 3-bedroom apartments for poor families, we need more small accessory apartments (for our mothers-in-law and children), new townhouses, new flats (aka condos) and new casitas for more households to enjoy the opportunity of convenience and even home ownership in a growing city with rising land values and growing wealth.

We shouldn’t sneer at the success of yuppies and empty-nesters and others who can afford to live Downtown or in EDo or Nob Hill and ride their bikes to buy a latte. Not everyone wants to live there with limited parking and too manytouristas. Some buyers want a 1-acre estate in Los Ranchos or Corrales. But most people would love to afford that Starbucks’ latte.

We need to keep working families in our sights as we re-build Albuquerque in the 21st Century. They are the key to maintain the social complexity and richness that sustains our city. The rich can afford to buy anything. Social and economic diversity is essential to a great city. All the complaints from Libertarians and Tea Baggers about “oppressive”government regulations don’t change this fact. We need to build equity in the city as we grow.

We cannot expect that gated enclaves for the rich and “Section 8 Housing” for the poor someplace else will build a city. We need all household types, classes and income levelsin relative proximity to enable great civic places. We need assisted-housing policies and techniquesof many kinds for the poor, our children and our elders. We need non-profit developers, land trusts, cooperatives, and the state, city and county to get involved. In simple terms, we need to regulate a city where secretaries and teachers can live next to the children they teach and their employers.

We need to cut through the bureaucracy, to eliminate senseless regulatory barriers, and promote innovation wherever possible. We need a land-value tax policy that rewards investment and new housing inside Albuquerque today. But we run into the constant challenge that there are two things people hate - sprawl and density.

One critic decries a conventional townhouse development on a former landscape nursery next to a city reservoir and across the street from garden apartments. The fact is, the site is miles away from the jobs the future residents will work. The problem is not that the new townhouses will cost a lot of money to build and buy, but that they will cost a lot to own and operate. The price of gasoline is over $3 per gallon today. What will home buyers up there do when gasoline costs $5 per gallon and the bus on Montgomery runs less than 3 times per hour during workdays? Why can’t we build new housing near new jobs or new jobs nearer housing? These are policy questions that can be answered by the city council IF the neighborhood associations want to participate.

We need to take a longer view of all of Albuquerque. What will the city look like when gasoline costs $5 per gallon or more? That time is coming. How will we get to our minimum-wage jobs in our jalopies that the Tea Baggers worry about? How will we afford to shop at Wal-Mart when the nearest self-proclaimed “SuperCenter” is 5 miles from home and Wal-Mart has to import their stuff from China at the same price per gallon? The neighborhood market with local produce and the bus and bike look better and better, but will they exist in that brave new corporate future where five Walton heirs own more than 30 million Americans?

The world is flattening, but it is also rising, and not all of us can rise with it, no matter how much education CNM offers.

It’s not that there are“eco-elitists” out there discriminating against the poor in a latter-day “apartheid.” The world as we have built it is driving down wages and rewarding the rich and the low-wage Chinese workers. How can we reduce the cost of our American lifestyle fast enough to compete against India and China? They’ve got the high-tech jobs today. We don’t. They are teaching enough of their high school children the math skills they need to succeed in today's working world. We aren't.

The city and county will never ask developers to provide housing in every development for all classes, from the homeless to the executives of PNM or UNM athletics. We need to find more middle grounds, a range of housing for each neighborhood that is comfortable for buyers. Former Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk offered a strategy that he found in Montgomery County, Maryland since 1976 –require 10% affordable housing in every subdivision. Add effective transit, and it will work in Albuquerque, too. Montgomery County trades a density bonus for those affordable units, one for one. Courts have found that to be a fair deal for both the county and the developers. The key question here is whether the neighbors will ever accept such heresy. What benefits does the city need to offer them in trade?

Montgomery Blvd. offers that opportunity, as do Lomas, San Mateo, Coors, Menaul, Lomas, Eubank, Central and 4thStreet to select a few key arterials. But this means that we will allow more housing, higher densities and more opportunities for residents today along those corridors, not more restrictions.

But these new homes must be less expensive to own and operate, and that means they must be “green.” So the key for “green building” to serve the needs of the working poor is for us to create incentives to balance the upfront costs of better construction and higher density housing near jobs with economic returns for the builders and developers. It may take tax credits or cash rebates or discounts from the state, city or county and location-efficient mortgages for the buyers to make this happen, but it can be done as a matter of public policy. We need to reduce the tax cost of improving land, but tax the value of land itself (as real estate brokers say, the value in land is “location, location, location!”) We must kick-start very energy efficient construction through stricter codes and appealing tax incentives. The very steps the Republican City Council chose to vote against.

Public officials have a kit of tools they can use to allow developers to create a market for new housing and jobs. We need to expand that kit as far as we can afford to and not simply remind everyone that the market discriminates against the poor. The role of government is to find the best balance between taxes, services, subsidies and support for the rich and poor.

We shouldn’t claim that “green building” is the new apartheid in Albuquerque when green building saves everyone money (and the environment) over time. We must create the public policies that fulfill this equitable and sustainable vision for Albuquerque and New Mexico before our time runs out.

A version of this essay was published in The Albuquerque Tribune in 2007.

Remembering a Vanishing Legacy

New Mexico is hurtling forward into the future, leaving the past behind. The New Economy is definitely faster than the old one. The one we grew up in. It is easy to forget the lessons learned by our predecessors as the memory of each generation fades. Architecture can endure, but even buildings disappear from both the landscape and our memories – if we forget to teach our children.

It takes time and patience to study the past and discover its meaning in the 21^st Century. Kathryn ‘Kit’ Sargeant, a sparkling anthropologist who thought a lot about our local past, died Christmas Eve  2001. A deep memory of our history left. She led studies of old plazas and pueblos and wrote the book with Mary Davis, Shining River, Precious Land, a collection of oral histories of the North Valley of Albuquerque, and a way of life rapidly disappearing as we grow our last crop of houses.

Her friends, neighbors and colleagues know her tireless efforts to rediscover and record the remnants of the Spanish Colonial and Native American settlements throughout the Valley around Albuquerque. This is a past we seldom think about. But she lived with it at home, actively exploring a Pueblo ruin found in her own backyard. She had patience and enthusiasm for the work of discovering the mystery of who these people were and how they lived here in a world before us.

Our modern era is marked by a contempt for the past, for the old ways of doing things. World War I and the Great Depression certainly shattered the promises of the 19^th Century. The past failed us. World War II and the explosion of new technology and the race to space convince many that the future can only be better than anything we did before. So why bother? Henry Ford told everyone, “History is bunk.”

Kit Sargeant certainly held onto the past and reminds us that it is worth remembering. The past has a truth. In buildings, our predecessors discovered solutions in adobe that we still use today. Almost no one today tries to build a pueblo or a hacienda, but those enduring buildings reflect a response to culture, climate, materials and technology of their time.

History teaches modesty, when, for example, a student discovers that “primitive” Egyptians built stone pyramids that were not surpassed in scale for over 3000 years – and finally we have our own Big I! That the Anazasi lived and disappeared from the southwest and the fact that we are standing on ruins of our predecessors should give one pause. Who will stand on the ruins of Albuquerque in 500 or a 1000 years? There are no guarantees of success against drought or pride.

From our Western past, there are lessons of form, order, scale and rhythm in buildings, lessons that are still taught in architecture and design schools across the world. But much of our architectural history is now derided as mere style – the Classical, the Gothic, the Baroque, and now even the Modern. We race through Post Modernism and Neo Rationalism to Deconstructivism. Chaos Theory is popular, too.

At the same time, homebuilders here offer Pueblo and Territorial and California Contemporary houses that look oddly alike (as they all have two or three-car garages in front). Much of the similarity is driven by the economy of construction and the technology available. Everyone builds in wood frame. Stucco is available everywhere. People like pitched roofs, and clay tile is a nice upgrade from asphalt shingles. Adobe is unique here in the Southwest, but not economical.

We have invented a new world today based on our technology and cheap water and gasoline. This is a world far beyond the history of 5,000 years of human civilization, where we race farther away from each other than ever before. The communities of the past in the deserts of the Rio Grande Valley or the Jordan River Valley were much more compact and more locally self-sufficient 2,000 years ago or even 500 years ago than they are today. They weren’t sustainable, though. Part of their failure was the lack of technology and the abundance available then and now from someplace else in times of drought or disaster or war.

As New Mexico struggles with today’s recession, and our climate endures a new cycle of drought, our future may look much more like our distant past. Now that we have built our Albuquerque, the challenge may be to retrench and rediscover how our ancestors survived through their difficult times. Hard lessons learned.

Today, in the middle of a new record year, it is time to dust off Kit’s book and research on old plazas and pueblos, and think about the past. The race begins tomorrow, again.

A version of this essay was published in The Albuquerque Tribune in January 2002.