Lack of clarity all around with district health costs

Ulster County not equitable in dealing with rail tenants

Dear Editor, Ulster County is not an equal opportunity railroad corridor leasing landlord. Let me give example of the inequality Ulster County will and has shown to its present and future three tenants of the corridor.

Tenant A, the Catskill Mountain Railroad, paying a lease for about $70,000 a year, has to maintain and upgrade the county-owned railroad corridor as part of its leasing agreement. All the while, Ulster County has refused to release FEMA funds to repair its damaged rail caused by the 2011 hurricane Irene and storm Lee. The tourist railroad had to make repairs using its own funds.

Tenant B, the Rail Explorers, who rent rail bikes, will have a leasing agreement with the county being responsible for maintaining and repairing the corridor at the Phoenicia end of the corridor. How interesting Ulster County is now releasing the FEMA funds for repair of the storm-damaged rail while in the past the county refused when Catskill Mountain Railroad was leasing this part of the corridor.

Tenant C, the hikers and bikers, will not have to fund a lease for the use of the middle section of county railroad corridor. Public funds will convert the middle of the corridor to trail-only and public taxpayers will pay for maintaining the trail. Tenant C will not be selfsustaining.

I offer no theories, but let the readers conspire their own theories. LeRoy Hogan Jr. Plattekill, N.Y. Dear Editor, When someone gives me a bill for $36.1 million for health insurance benefits, I ask “how did you get to that?”

I discussed this with Allen Olsen, deputy superintendent for business for the Kingston school district, and the bottom line from that conversation was his comment “we are on an unsuitable path.”

I filed a Freedom of Information request asking what percentage of employees were enrolled in each option, what was the premium and benefit description for each option. The district response was “we don’t answer FOIL questions, we only provide specific documents.”

I filed a new request and got a copy of the teachers contract, Blue Cross Blue Shield and MVP health benefit descriptions, minus premium cost per package and was told to contact the Kingston Teachers Federation for details of their offering.

The union’s response was “we have to get permission from the district.”

To date no response from the union after repeated phone calls over a week and a half.

At the same time, I sent an email to Olsen asking for the same information and to date have no response.

From what the district did provide, I learn teachers pay 5 percent of the premium of their selected provider. I conclude the Blue Cross Blue Shield benefits are far more generous than MVP and, therefore, a more expensive option, but no clue as to what the premium is for either.

As for the union, their strategy seems to be circle the wagons and wait this one out.

From the teachers contract I learn the district pays the same premium for each of the three providers. I am told the union uses the Blue Cross Blue Shield premium in creating their $36.1 million bill to the district for inclusion in the 2017 budget. A simple response from the union could have clarified this observation.

This letter would not be necessary if the District and union had been open and explained how they got to $35.8 million.

Now it’s the taxpayers turn to circle the wagons. Vote no on the 2017-18 budget proposal, vote non on spending $4.3 million to move people, paper, and furniture from the Cioni Building to the Meagher building and do not vote for any school board candidate with a connection to the education establishment. Ronald Dietl Kingston, N.Y.

Faso flubbed his chance to do the right thing

Dear Editor, A letter I wrote to my congressman, Rep. John Faso, RKinderhook, to voice my disagreement with the really bad Republican plan to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act was answered with a boilerplate response, a shining example of political spin, about the position Faso took after listening to “hundreds of citizens” he “personally met with.”

Those personal meetings must have been with supporters who were willing to plunk down money for the privilege of getting personal access to the congressman. He still avoids town hall meetings, where he could personally meet with thousands of his constituents.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is not a bad law, but it’s imperfect. Rising premiums and deductibles exist because the Obama administration caved to Republican obstructionists and included provisions that protect insurance companies’ bottom lines. The act should have included a public option, but didn’t because of insurance company pressure.

If Faso were really concerned about what’s best for Americans’ health, he would drop the “repeal and replace” baloney and work to improve the Affordable Care Act or, preferably, replace it with Medicare for all.

And I wouldn’t worry about the financial future of health insurance companies. They can still make money by competing for the dollars of people who can afford concierge health care, charging those folks whatever the market will bear.

Faso wasn’t in Congress when the Affordable Care Act was discussed and passed, but his presence then wouldn’t have changed the outcome. He’s in Congress now and recently had a chance to do the right thing; he didn’t do it. Joanne M. Still

Accord, N.Y.

“No majority leader wants written on his tombstone that he presided over the end of the Senate,” the minority leader said.

He continued: “Breaking the rules to change the rules is unAmerican. I just hope the majority leader thinks about his legacy, the future of his party and, most importantly, the future of our country before he acts.”

Are these the words of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as the Republican majority changed Senate rules last week to do away with filibusters of Supreme Court nominations?

Actually, they were uttered in 2013, by then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, when Democrats pushed through a similar filibuster change for lesser nominations.

That McConnell did a 180 on the topic — going from the institutional defender of the filibuster to the man who destroyed it — is unsurprising. He has frequently shifted his views to suit the needs of the moment. But in this case, McConnell was correct in 2013, and what he just did last week was even more ruinous than what he accused the Democrats of doing then.

By rights, McConnell’s tombstone should say that he presided over the end of the Senate. And I’d add a second line: “He broke America.” No man has done more in recent years to undermine the functioning of U.S. government. His has been the epitome of unprincipled leadership, the triumph of tactics in service of short-term power.

Back in 1994, McConnell lamented to the conservative Heritage Foundation that Republicans hadn’t used the filibuster enough: “I am a proud guardian of gridlock. I think gridlock is making a big comeback in the country.”

For the next quarter-century, he made sure of it. Back then, he was fighting all attempts at campaign-finance reform and spending limits, championing disclosure of contributions as the antidote. But when the Supreme Court allowed unlimited “dark money” in campaigns without disclosure, McConnell reversed course and has fought all attempts to enact disclosure.

McConnell famously declared in 2010: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis, author of a McConnell biography, “The Cynic,” reports former Republican Sen. Robert Bennett’s account of what McConnell told fellow Republicans after Obama’s election: “Mitch said, ‘We have a new president with an approval rating in the 70 percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that.’”

And that’s what he did. By 2013, for example, 79 of Obama’s nominees had been blocked by filibusters, compared to 68 in the entire previous history of the Republic.

After Justice Antonin Scalia’s death was confirmed last year, it took McConnell less than an hour to say that the vacancy should be filled by the next president. He called keeping Obama’s nominee off the court “one of my proudest moments.”

While other Republicans have, at times, been willing to criticize Donald Trump’s outrages, McConnell has been conspicuously quiescent. Although his predecessors at least attempted collegiality, McConnell practices no such niceties (recall his “nevertheless, she persisted” silencing of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren). But most characteristic of McConnell is his tendency to shift his views to suit current exigencies (on the minimum wage, withdrawal from Iraq, earmarks, abortion, labor and civil rights) and his adroitness at gumming up the works: forcing clerks to spend hours reading a bill aloud on the floor; opposing immigration legislation he’d encouraged; asking for a vote on a debt-ceiling proposal and then trying to filibuster it; urging the Obama administration to support a bipartisan debt commission and then voting against it.

Now comes the filibuster’s demise. In the current cycle of partisan escalation, it’s only a matter of time before the filibuster is abolished for all legislation, killing the tradition of unlimited debate in the Senate dating back to 1789. The founders did this so minority rights would be respected and consensus could be formed — and McConnell is undoing it.

Two years ago, when a Democrat was in the White House, McConnell said he would only abolish filibusters of Supreme Court justices if there were 67 votes for such a change. Last week, he employed a maneuver to do it with 51 votes. It suited his momentary needs, but the damage will remain long after McConnell’s tombstone is engraved.

Dana Milbank is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group.