NEWS/CITYDESK NEWS NATHANIEL HOFFM AN
“Say that an over whelming majority of the sur vey par ticipants in Boise oppose the Downtown trolley. This fact will be repor ted in The Statesman, and city leaders will be forced to address the issue,” Butcher wrote in an op-ed, while his survey was still open. It was the only specific sur vey example he gave. Even stranger, Butcher conducted the exact same sur vey in Idaho Falls on behalf of the Post-Register, including the Boise trolley question. We’ve seen our fair share of polls, but don’t just take our word on it. Republican pollster Greg Smith had some questions as well. “If my understanding is correct, their methodology is deeply flawed,” Smith said. “You cannot reach the conclusion they have using the sampling frame they did, if I understand it correctly.” The city also has some anecdotal evidence of its own to tout: 57 percent of the people who filled out comment cards at a recent open house on the streetcar favored the plan. And Mayor Dave Bieter has used another scientific sur vey to defend his streetcar proposal. Boise contracts out an annual citizen sur vey, which polled a random sampling of 511 city residents in Januar y. The sur vey firm Opinion Research Corporation found that 43 percent of Boiseans list some aspect of transpor tation and mobility as their highest budget priority for the city, with 21 percent mentioning public transit. The Statesman is not done with its polling, planning more low-cost online sur veys on health care, education, transportation and the economy in the next year. Butcher promises to publish the full results of these studies after the Statesman and the Post-Register get first crack at them. But there’s one more item of note in this tale of modern polling. Butcher offers his ser vices to news outlets as, “a turn-key oppor tunity for newspapers to increase their adver tising revenue and improve the prosperity in their local communities by providing local, credible, and exclusive content based on scientific reader sur veys.” We look for ward to hearing about more the findings. The Boise City Council looked at a different sor t of findings last week as well, the results of a bike safety task force study from this past summer. The Boise City Council enthusiastically accepted the repor t, requesting a sit down with the Ada County Highway District and a briefing on ACHD’s bike plan, indicating that it would consider implementing many of the suggestions in the repor t. Michael Zuzel, with help from police and lawyers, presented the findings of the committee, including suggestions for infrastructure, enforcement and education. As Zuzel had predicted, the three-feetto-pass law garnered the most discussion, with Councilman Alan Shealy suggesting that writing “when possible” into the law would give drivers and excuse not to follow it. “I’m just concerned that ‘when possible’ is going to completely emasculate the three-feet-to-pass,” he said.
Picketers from Idaho Main Street Alliance demanded reform recently outside Regence Blue Shield.
YOU’RE THE REAL COST Spinning health-care reform to the end game NATHANIEL HOFFMAN The Regence Group, which sells Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance in Idaho, Washington, Utah and Oregon, has launched a high-tech political and marketing campaign that the company says helps people understand health-care reform. But critics say the campaign places blame on doctors and patients and ignores the role of the insurance industry in skyrocketing rates, lack of coverage and administrative waste. The campaigns, which include a well-designed Flash-based Web site called whatstherealcost.com, television commercials airing on some stations and—making the rounds on the Web—a new branding headlined “Share the Well” and a fading Facebook/ Twitter push, ask people to take more command over their health, including challenging doctors and pharmacists. “The whole goal of this campaign is a consumer education cost campaign,” said Georganne Benjamin, who works in public affairs at Regence in Boise and helped to design the games on the Web site, including one called Resist the System. “How you win at that one is by challenging the system and not just being compliant with what she’s suggesting.” Don McCanne, a senior health policy fellow at Physicians for a National Health Plan, which advocates for a single public or quasi-public health insurer, argues that the administrative expenses at private health insurance companies are the largest wasted cost in the system. “How many people do you know that request health care that they know they don’t need but they want to have ‘because it’s covered?’ In over 30 years of my very busy family practice, I cannot recall one single patient with such a request. Yet the thrust of this Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield campaign is to blame the patient for requesting too much health care,” McCanne wrote in his daily health-care reform e-mail.
Mike Tatko, media and public relations manger at Regence in Lewiston, said the company is not playing a blame game. “It’s more of a take charge, take a little bit of personal responsibility in your life,” he said. “We talk a lot about personal responsibility.” What about responsibility at the company? “Our administrative costs are about 9 cents on the dollar,” Tatko said. “We’d like to be at 7, we’re not there.” Bob Vestal, a retired medical director at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Boise and a steering committee co-chairman at Idaho Health Care for All, PNHP’s local affiliate, said Regence has a point about personal responsibility. “I think people in this country do need to take more responsibility for their health and well-being and make good choices,” Vestal said. “There’s no way to deny that. On the other hand, what it looks like the insurance industry is doing is shifting the blame. I think they have abused their role in the health-care system by creating difficult challenges for policy holders and making it impossible for some people to afford and retain health insurance. I continue to ask the question, ‘what is the value added that insurance companies bring to the health-care system?’” With both houses of Congress considering viable health-care reform bills, neither single payer advocates nor the health insurance industry are satisfied. John Geyman, author of Do Not Resuscitate, a book that argues for dismantling the private insurance industry, said health insurers say they want reform, but really want universal coverage, or 50 million new subscribers. “I think the insurance industry as a whole is trying to posture like they are reformers and want to help make health care affordable, control prices and all that but they’re a big part of the problem themselves.” Geyman said.
—Nathaniel Hoffman
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| NOVEMBER 4–10, 2009 | BOISEweekly
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