Some Great Viewpoint on Corbett and Christie

This is a great article about two new, neighboring Governors.

Our region boasts one governor who vents entirely too much, and another who is so quiet, so circumspect on specifics, that his office is being compared to North Korea.

Governor Blowhard of New Jersey is voluble, bombastic, emotional, and unedited. He sounds like a Fox News commentator, while also being mentioned as a possible Republican presidential nominee, which often amounts to the same thing.

When Chris Christie was his state's U.S. attorney, he won convictions against more than 100 elected officials and public workers. Now that he's governor, he has bigger fish to fry, pursuing the nastiest, vilest, most overcompensated form of humanity. Bankers? Mobsters? No, teachers. "I don't understand why it is that I care more about those kids than they do," he said last week, attacking the teachers union, "but it's obvious that I do, because they don't want to change the system."

How Christie managed to gain traction attacking the very talent that draws so many residents to the state remains dumbfounding. New Jersey teachers are among the nation's best paid, averaging $66,600 annually, but many of its schools are among the best, too, befitting a state with a high median income and enviable graduation and literacy rates.

I couldn't agree more. New Jersey pays their teachers well, and gets results that fit with that- they had the best test scores in the nation as Christie announced his $800 million in cuts last year. Christie has refused to tax millionaires at the rate they were taxed at just a few years ago, but has had no problem cutting the money that teaches kids to read. It's unreal. This should be outraging people, but years of mismanagement in New Jersey have jaded people into evening accepting this yutz. Oh yeah, there's more.

Now, I happen to believe that teachers could contribute more of their income toward health care. Many of us already pay plenty. I just don't think you have to go to war to get there.

But that's not the dialogue we're having these days.

Well, with Pennsylvania's silent Tom Corbett, we're not having any dialogue.

While Corbett and Wisconsin's Scott Walker broadcast their intentions - indeed, Christie is a verbal pugilist incapable of keeping quiet - Pennsylvanians are greeted with the sounds of silence. It seems unfair that Governor Garbo has offered no suggestion as to what he plans to whack Tuesday when he announces his budget with $4 billion in spending cuts, except that it will hurt. As his budget secretary, Charles Zogby, says, "The day of reckoning has arrived."

Already, the commonwealth has made a devastating choice. Last week, adultBasic died for lack of support by the governor and legislature. AdultBasic was the bare-bones health-insurance safety net for Pennsylvanians, who paid as little as $36 a month. It cost the state a pittance to run. Launched in 2001 by Republican Govs. Tom Ridge and Mark Schweiker, the program long enjoyed bipartisan support, because it was funded by a mammoth tobacco settlement and the state's healthy four Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance groups. The plan assisted people who weren't poor enough for Medicaid and not old enough for Medicare.

Ah yes, Governor Tom. She meant to say Corbett doesn't broadcast his intentions, and that's true. He just has basically stayed silent, and tried to insure that poor people lose health care that doesn't cost us anything, and of course that natural gas extractors pay no tax here, unlike every other natural gas state. To be clear about AdultBasic, it did not cost much in tax dollars. Tobacco settlements and the non-profit work required by law from "the Blues" in Pennsylvania funded this program.

The article lays out the reality that conservatives deny too.

AdultBasic covered 40,764 Pennsylvanians, almost two-thirds of them women, but the plan's true value was reflected in the enormous waiting list of residents craving coverage: more than half a million. That's one in every 24 state residents.

Last spring, when he was attorney general, Corbett joined the multistate suit against health-care reform while he was also running for governor (a common thread among the other attorneys general), going so far as to mail potential donors a fund-raising letter decrying "the health-care monstrosity." This would be the same attorney general who built his reputation indicting legislators who used their offices for political purposes.

In the wake of adultBasic's death, the Corbett administration suggested Pennsylvanians sign up with the Blues' Special Care policy, which costs $148 a month, four times as much as the killed program, while being less extensive, limiting subscribers to four doctor's visits a year. That's some plan: impossibly expensive and worse coverage.

Since fewer employers offer comprehensive health coverage, Pennsylvania runs the risk of having more uninsured residents, a cost that is passed on through overtaxed health systems, social services, and government entities, all of which face imminent budget cuts of their own.

Poor residents don't simply disappear into the ether because they lack coverage. They get sicker. And poor health is something we all pay for, just as poor schools become an untenable cost because they create an unprepared, underemployed, and uninsured workforce.

It's time we have a talk in America. Failure is more expensive than success. Sure, you can cut spending on education to the point that it has tangible, in classroom effects- and you'll spend more for the fact that you have an uneducated society. Sure, you can cut teacher compensation down to an "acceptable," "private-sector level," but qualified, smart people will not go down this road then, and we'll have worse teachers. Sure, you can cut government aid for health care for poor people, but those people will still get hurt and sick, and will go to the emergency room, and will therefore require payment for those services. Sure, you can sue the government to stop Health Care Reform, but reversion to the system we had before it's passage will only drive up costs, drive down administration of care, and continue to run our deficit higher. You can cut all the dollars from programs that help people if you want, but when those programs fail, you'll pay then too, and a lot more. If we're serious about budget deficits, we need a sensible revenue system in this nation, entitlement reform (not destruction), and curbing of our "security state" spending that grows by leaps and bounds each year. The answers being offered by the likes of Christie and Corbett are stupid, won't work, and will be harmful in the long term. It's death by a thousand cuts.