Whitcomb: Merge to More Efficiently Raise Prices? Don’t Be Highest; New Train Schedules
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Merge to More Efficiently Raise Prices? Don’t Be Highest; New Train Schedules
"A light exists in Spring
Not present in the year
at any other period
When March is scarcely here."
-- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
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“Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
“Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.’’
-- Sir Terry Pratchett (1948- 2015), an English humorist, satirist and author of fantasy novels
“The sooner patients can be removed from the depressing influence of general hospital life the more rapid their convalescence.’’
-- Charles H. Mayo, M.D. (1865-1939), American physician and a co-founder of the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn.
The deal, by reducing some red tape (with the state having just one big system instead of two), might make health care in our region more user-friendly for patients, dissuading more of them from going to Boston’s world-renowned medical institutions, thus keeping more of their money here.
The best example of where the merger could improve health care would be in better connecting Lifespan’s Hasbro Children’s Hospital with Care New England’s Bradley Hospital, a psychiatric institution for children, and Women & Infants Hospital.
But would the huge (especially for such a tiny state) new institution have such power that it would impose much higher prices? Studies have shown that hospital mergers almost inevitably mean higher prices. So, insurance companies, as well as poorly insured patients, may eye a Lifespan-CNE merger with trepidation.
And expect job losses, at least for a while, given the need to eliminate the administrative redundancies created by mergers. Meanwhile, senior- executive salaries in the new entity would probably be even more stratospheric than they are now at the separate “nonprofit” companies, and I imagine the golden parachutes for departing excess senior execs would blot out the sun.
Meanwhile, Boston will remain a magnet for health care, and so it’s conceivable that the behemoth and very prestigious Mass General Brigham hospital group would end up absorbing the Lifespan-CNE giant in the end anyway.
Highest in New England? Ouch!
Yes, taxes on the affluent should be raised – at the federal level. But not at the state level. Rhode Island, facing a hefty revenue shortfall, will be sorely tempted to raise taxes big time on the rich and semi-rich. But that could take it to the position of having the highest tax rate among the New England states – not good if the Ocean State wants to keep and lure business!
If only all six New England states could have the same taxes.
But yes, raise federal levies. After all, Federal Reserve Board monetary policies and Trump administration tax policies have been skewed to boost financial assets, especially stock prices, in the past few years. Since stocks and bonds are mostly owned by the affluent, the wealthy have been further enriched by federal policies even in the COVID-19 recession. Increase capital-gains taxes and the top income-tax rate and use some of that money to help out the states. This will require a lot of multi-state lobbying.
Spreading Out the Trains
The MBTA will soon be changing its commuter-train and subway and bus schedules to not only save money but also to reflect how the lives of so many of us have been permanently changed by the pandemic.
Rush-hour commuting has much diminished in the pandemic and won’t return to its pre-COVID levels. That’s because many people will continue to work at home post-pandemic. Employers have found that they can get at least as much productivity out of their people working remotely as they could in company offices, while saving a lot in office costs. (Unfortunately, some of those costs are thrown onto the employees.) Further, many, maybe most, employees dislike commuting, which has been infamously unpleasant in Greater Boston. But some folks like commuting, for the solitude and thinking time it can give them.
Laboring at home has eroded the old 9-5 job routines, meaning for many longer but more fragmented working hours – and making many homes less of a psychological refuge.
In any event, train and subway travel will be more spread out during the day, and more of it will be non-work-related.
Commonwealth Magazine reports that the plan is to spread MBTA service out across the day at “regular, often hourly intervals rather than concentrating it at morning and evening peak periods.’’ Say hourly or half-hourly rail service between Providence and Boston and hourly service between Worcester and Boston. And some have suggested extending commuter-rail lines from Boston, say all the way out to Pittsfield and Springfield, or to Bourne, on the edge of Cape Cod.
Happily, the agency is dropping a plan to cut off commuter rail service at 9 p.m. weekdays, instead, it will continue service until 11 p.m., important to, for example, many people attending a game or other evening event in Boston.
Whatever, as travel opens up with fading of the pandemic, let’s hope that the public-transit cutbacks that it has caused can be mostly reversed, to avoid a massive increase in automobile traffic, much of it with one person per car.
To read more about the MBTA changes, please hit this link:
Governor Teflon
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker seems politically indestructible. Whatever bad happens under his administration – the latest being the botched vaccination-scheduling rollout and before that some administrative scandals, he remains very popular, with polls showing his approval at over 70 percent.
One reason is that the state, despite COVID-19, remains basically very prosperous. Another is that as a Republican in a very Blue state Mr. Baker has shown strong collaborative skills in dealing with the legislature. His real political base is independents anyway, as the national GOP has headed into right-wing extremism, and some Democrats sometimes forget that most voters don’t consider themselves European-style social democrats.
But I think that above all it’s Baker’s calm, confidence, folksiness and (at least seeming) command of the facts that have made him a Teflon governor. Bay Staters just like him.
Now that Putin’s boy Trump is out of office, the Biden administration plans to punish Russia for its recent massive hack of federal agencies and big U.S. companies in which it stole massive quantities of sensitive information. It will also do something punitive to express its displeasure with Putin’s attempted murder of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
About time!
Let’s Not Avert Our Eyes
Bless the BBC for bearing witness every day to humanitarian disasters around the world – e.g., war crimes in Yemen and Syria and Chinese concentration camps. The reporting is often very painful to see/hear but it can save a lot of lives by appealing to the conscience and arousing campaigns to relieve suffering.
xxx
Reading in another language than your own makes you think a little differently.
I love WalletHub studies. A recent one listed the “most sinful states,’’ measuring anger and hatred, jealousy, excesses and vices, greed, lust, vanity and laziness. They were, in order of sinfulness, Nevada (natch!), California, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, Illinois and Mississippi. Seven Red States, two Blue States and one Purple State (Nevada). The least sinful states included Maine (44th), New Hampshire (46th) and Vermont (48). Utah came in at 47th, Idaho at 49th and Wyoming at 50th. The last three states, which are Red, have large numbers of Mormons, who tend to be very self-disciplined and honorable folks. And northern New England’s good marks reflect its traditional public-spirited state and local civic culture.
Rhode Island came in at 36th, Massachusetts at 35th, and Connecticut at 39th.
It would be interesting to speculate on why the Red States, which generally have much higher levels of overt religiosity than Blue States, have higher levels of sleaze, too. Or maybe these states simply have a higher tolerance for, and social and political acceptance of, hypocrisy.
To read the WalletHub report, please hit this link:
Lies as Big as Texas
Why did the oft-mendacious governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, initially blame wind and solar energy going offline, and not the poorly equipped and maintained natural-gas system, for the Lone Star State’s electricity crisis and the deregulation and obsession with maximizing the short-term profit that let it happen? Simple: Campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel sector.
Baron of the Beats
“In some ways what I really did was mind the store. When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret. If anything I was the last of the bohemians rather than the first of the Beats.”
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti to The Guardian in 2006
The death on Feb. 22 of poet, publisher, essayist and political activist Ferlinghetti at 101 pretty much marked the end of the generation of Bohemians and “Beat Generation’’ going back to the late ‘40s and, especially the ’50s, that I remember as a kid. The literary luminaries included, besides Mr. Ferlinghetti, the novelist Jack Kerouac (On the Road, etc.), the poet Allen Ginsburg, most famous for “Howl,” and the wild novelist William Burroughs (Naked Lunch).
From his base in his famous San Francisco bookstore, City Lights, which he founded in 1953, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the central force in promoting what came to be called “The Beats.’’ I must say I don’t like much like most of the stuff that came out of the group -- too undisciplined. Of course, some of the language seemed outrageous at the time, offending the sensibilities of many “patriotic Americans’’. Now, their work almost seems an innocent and quaint reminder of the Eisenhower era.
(We visited City Lights about 25 years ago, when it seemed dusty and dull.)
Ferlinghetti may have been the best poet in the crowd, as you can see from some of the pieces in his 1958 collection A Coney Island of the Mind.
But I quote here from his 1976 poem “The Old Italians {in San Francisco} Dying,” which includes these lines:
“The old anarchists reading L’Umanita Nova
the ones who loved Sacco & Vanzetti
They are almost gone now
They are sitting and waiting their turn.’’
And now the Beats are pretty much gone, too.
Regions in Search of a Nation
Colin Woodard’s book Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood is at its core a narrative of how wishful thinking, racism and willful ignorance led historians to promote pictures of America that ignored the huge impact of slavery/Jim Crow and regionalism. (Note that a previous Woodard book was entitled American Nations.)
He sees the United States as having developed mostly region by region -- politically, economically and culturally -- and not in a unitary way. Consider “Greater New England’’; the Planter Class of Tidewater Virginia and Maryland down to Georgia, and the tough Scots-Irish in the Border States and interior South. The caste system that developed with slavery had a great deal to do with how the last two groups turned out.
Mr. Woodard mostly tells his tale through biographies of five people: New England’s George Bancroft (1800-1891), a very intellectually dishonest but popular historian; South Carolina writer and politician William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), a romanticist of the slave-owning South, especially its “aristocratic’’ coastal Planter Class; Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) the great abolitionist, orator and writer; historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), whose theories about sectionalism and the role of the frontier revolutionized the teaching of American history, and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), the deeply racist president, political scientist and popular historian.
After reading this book I was again reminded of how it still sometimes seems more a collection of quasi-countries than a unified country. Just look at our national elections up to last November!