Just finished page 22 of the Valley Journal. Well put. Beautiful. Now, if only that could be sent
to every student in the state. Regards,
-Howard E. Morseburg
From On The Ranch
“Just like the reporting on the war in Iraq has focused on
the three or four provinces that are having serious problems, there is never
any reporting on the rest of the country, in fact the majority, where there is
no trouble.” One might point out that in the peaceful zones,
none of our soldiers are being killed. They may have tea parties in those
wastelands, but what
is there to report? News means the occurrence of events out of the ordinary. I
can assure you that CNN’s audience would not accept the ‘news’ of weddings,
etc. from those ‘peaceful’ areas. If the news really did their job we would see
the true horrors of this terrible war: woman and children killed and maimed,
families destroyed, young men scarred for life, and then we, the American
people, would finally lift our voices and demand that it end.
Don’t blame the messenger. It is the nature of the business
to report what’s happening, not what is not happening.
To insinuate there’s a political agenda to these choices demeans the courageous
men and women who have given their lives trying to tell us what they saw.
-Ian Bernard
Sorry, Ian, there is nothing I said that would even remotely
resemble “demeaning” our troops who are in Iraq risking their lives on behalf
of you and me and the people of Iraq. The point I was making was that there is
a focus on negative with no mention of anything positive happening there. I
know for a fact because I have had friends there that a lot of positive things
are occurring which we never hear about. I cannot speak to the audience of CNN
but I do know that I would rather fight our enemies somewhere other than on
American soil. You’ve apparently bought the “American aggressor” myth.
-NCH
Dear Nancy,
Your
great editorial on June 8, 1007 says it all! Thank goodness there are many
people who think as you do. We just can’t express it as well as you.
Your
last sentence says it all- “it’s our community, lets plan it together.” I must
believe that this will happen. There is no place in the world that I’ve seen as
beautiful as the Santa Ynez Valley. Keep writing!
Thank
you so much,
-Kathy
Lucian
Dear Valley Journal
Editor,
Introducing MovieCare By Peter Pitts
Imagine turning 65 and finding a letter tucked in your
mailbox offering unlimited movie tickets for just twenty-five bucks a month.
You read through the fine print, and amazingly, the offer isn’t a scam. It’s a
new federal program called “MovieCare.”
Not a bad deal. It’s estimated that seniors spend between
five and six percent of their income on entertainment, and this new program --
funded by the government -- would cover most of those expenses.
In some ways, Medicare Part D provides the same service,
albeit for goods more important than movie tickets. Seniors used to spend about
3.2 percent of their total income on drugs. Thanks to Part D, those expenses
have plummeted, and 20 million seniors who previously lacked prescription drug
coverage now have it.
Not surprisingly, more than eight in ten beneficiaries are
pleased with the drug benefit.
If MovieCare were modeled on the
Medicare drug benefit, more seniors than ever before would be able to go to the
movies, the vast majority of movies would be available, and beneficiaries would
likely enjoy the program as much as they enjoy Part D.
But before long, it’s also likely that some congressional
lawmakers would decide that MovieCare -- despite its
enormous popularity -- was costing taxpayers too much because of heartless
movie studio bosses.
We’d see speeches vilifying studio moguls and their “massive”
profits. We’d see breathless reports of seniors who went to see Flags of Our
Fathers on a Friday night but ended up trapped in a showing of Man of the Year
-- the horror!
Mostly, though, we’d hear endless reports about how movies --
even subsidized ones -- cost too much. Naturally, it would be the government’s
job to do something about it.
Soon enough, some fiery populist in Congress would take
center stage, declaring that the government needs to step in to negotiate movie
prices. Pundits would write angry columns with headlines like “Lower Movie
Prices Now!” and sneeringly refer to anyone who defended industry pricing as a
corporate shill.
Others would call for the nation to adopt the VA’s program, “VetFlix,” which offers lower prices, but only to movies
starring Chevy Chase.
And maybe such negotiations would actually succeed in
bringing down ticket costs at first. But with the movie industry’s revenues
forcibly curtailed, it would become a shell of its former self. And in an
effort to contain costs, the wide array of movie choices that made the plan so
popular at the start would disappear.
Here’s why: The government would only have leverage for a
negotiation if it were willing to exclude certain movies from coverage. As
such, government negotiations would close off viewing options, sticking
beneficiaries with a “movie formulary.” We’d have an Office of MovieCare filled with cinematically clueless bureaucrats
trying to put together a list of available movies.
Want to see the latest Steven Spielberg film? Tough, MovieCare doesn’t cover Spielberg any more.
Want to see this year’s Oscar-nominated documentaries? Too
bad; they weren’t popular enough to demand coverage.
There would inevitably be controversy over so-called “Me-Too”
movies, with some claiming that the industry just repeats the same ideas every
few years. So sequels would be cut (so much for The Godfather Part II), and the
plan would only cover one or two films out of every genre each year.
No need for more than one action film, one romantic comedy,
or one comic book movie, right? Who needs Spider-Man and X-Men when Ghost Rider
and The Punisher will do? Never mind that they’re only superficially similar --
designed to fill the same genre niche, but not remotely similar in terms of
effect -- government bureaucrats at the Office of MovieCare
get to decide what movies are just expensive rehashes of the same old thing.
Naturally, the end result would be the decimation of the
nation’s thriving, innovative, world-leading movie industry. We’d see fewer
films each year, and those that we did see would be cheaply produced and less
original.
Breakthrough special effects, edgy young filmmakers, risky
independent films and big-budget summer blockbusters would all get tossed off
the production charts as studio revenues declined. Studios would be forced to
tailor more and more of their films to meet the limited criteria of the MovieCare formulary.
As absurd as it sounds, this is what proponents of price
negotiations want for the drug industry: less availability, less access, less
innovation, less individual choice. It wouldn’t work for the movies, and it
certainly won’t work for prescription drugs.
Peter J. Pitts is Director of the Center for Medicine in the
Public Interest and a former Associate Commissioner of the FDA.