Business awaits health-care reform
Small-business owners are growing tired of lengthy delays waiting for Congress to pass much-needed legislation like Obamacare repeal. The American Health Care Act (AHCA), still awaiting a vote in the Senate, will bring relief to small businesses that have seen their costs skyrocket via taxes and mandates throughout Obamacare’s history, the opposite effect of what was promised.
The AHCA will make health care more affordable for small businesses and our employees, eliminating the penalties and costs that have harmed our ability to expand and create more jobs for our communities. But with each new delay, there is increasing risk that another campaign promise will fade into the background yet again.
Small-business owners elected President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress because they promised to deliver results. That led to optimism and hope that our interests would be looked after, and the crushing mandates and costs of Obamacare would be repealed. A continuation of the congressional inaction of the past several years is not what we had in mind.
The Senate must now do its job, and the small-business community in Ohio is calling on Sens. Rob Portman and Sherrod Brown to pass the AHCA.
Aaron Dwyer London sentencing judges, he pins the overcrowding in Ohio prisons as the natural result of two demographics: Ohio’s growing population over decades since it built its last prison, and rising crime rates along with it (Tuesday letter). Maybe it is just time to build more prisons, the judge said.
Crawford’s observations are clearly wrong on both counts. Since 1998 when Ohio built its last prison, the population of this state has barely increased at all, according to U.S. Census data (11.31 million versus 11.65 million, an annual average increase of less than 1 percent over 20 years). As for crime rates, like U.S crime rates generally, Ohio crime rates for all types of crimes, and especially for violent offenses, have been falling uniformly over the past 20 years, and are now at a 30-year low, according to the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services. So, why the overcrowding?
Sentencing judges are not the biggest contributing factor, though some are harsh and many are disinterested in their authority to release deserving offenders from prison after they become legally eligible for release. By far the largest contributing factor is the legislature’s ballooning practice in the past 20 years of enacting “mandatory prison terms,” which deprive a sentencing judge of the discretion of deciding whether an offender goes to prison and whether to release him in the future. Mandatory prison terms are truly a Statehouse-to-prison pipeline.
Barry Wilford Columbus
Joan Noojin Grove City