Show COIWANI Editorial Desk: 237-201- a t5alt gakt Par? TPLIS :- ---- ld'1"41 ---- now shouldering increasingly burdencosts might well buy in some health-car- e to such a system but only if assured that rampant medical costs would be contained The Democrats' plan features prommeasures includising ing negotiated payments and an emphasis on preventive medicine but it isn't clear whether the program is truly affordable or could survive the political process President Bush whose spokesmen already are talking about a veto thinks he can get at the issue by tinkering with taxes Many states Utah among them have tired of waiting for the federal ment to solve this crisis Utah has started a program for people who cannot obtain medical in surance at any price because of serious health problems Both public and privately funded programs have been initiated to serve children in low income situations Utah legislators now are considering requiring insurance companies to extend benefits to unmarried dependents up to age 26 Sen John Holmgren sponsor of that legislation also proposes eliminating the waiting period for people who change insurance carriers and making Medicaid available to more e Utahns He is asking the Legislature to finance a couple of limited experiments cost-reducti- low-incom- cost-cuttin- g While better than nothing this piecemeal approach won't cure what ails this nation's health-car- e system In Utah alone 192000 people now lack health insurance Sen Holmgren's legislation would help only of fraction of the total His proposal ignores the average person suddenly slammed with a catastrophic illness requiring long-teror jobless Utalms care or without disabilities Two other bills one sponsored by Rep Janet Rose Lake the other by Sen Karen ShepLake would be more herd comprehensive The fact is however Utah lacks the resources to give all its residents access e to a system whose costs are skyrocketing (Insurance premiums are rising 15 percent a year) Ultimately a system that makes basic medical services available to everyone and strictly controls medical costs will be necessary The horrendous expense of prescription drugs must be cut Paperwork must be reduced Hospitals cannot continue to finance indigent care and duplicative machinery by inflating the bills of paying patients Unnecessary procedures and the unrealistic price of specialized medicine cannot be tolerated Health-car- e providers must be held to basic standards and shielded from devastating lawsuits If costs are controlled employees can continue to rely on their own resources employers and private insurers to cover their medical expenses and the jobless can look to the government for basic care Congressional Democrats are offering some good ideas for achieving necreform in this counessary health-car- e try Utah legislators are obviously trying to provide answers at the state level There is no time to lose in finding measures that will the make it possible for everyone to obtain basic medical services Japanese intrusion The events that have marked Ameri— the ca's recent Pearl Harbor anniversary the presidential excursion the remarks by a JapJapan-consciousne- ss anese official about American workers — have more palpable images than does the Mariners story In this case there is a sense of the Japanese controlling not merely a part of the American market but a part of the American soul the national pastime Almost instinctively Thursday's offer by the owner of the Nintendo video games company to put up $75 million of a $125 million package to buy the Mariners has been depicted as the Japanese swooping in to grab a piece of Major League Baseball This of course is far from the case The Nintendo people were contacted who by Sen Slade Gorton wanted to save the Mariners for the people of Washington The current team Jeff owner of the until March had the city given Smulyan 27 to find a local ownership group or else he'd have to move the struggling franchise out of town So with a more internationally flavored economy than most American cities Seattle's leaders naturally sought out their business brethren one of whom is Nintendo The company's president Hiroshi Yamauchi and his partner Seattle-base- d Arakawa Minoru basically said ld Kyoto-b- ased son-in-la- w ciously like a politician trying to capture for himself some of the pioneering image that President Kennedy personified when he vowed the United States 7 - f V joiloo' i 0 cV2k i 1 I1 I e f -- -- :--- v -- :7- T 4' tik 1 I t 1‘ t 4 if - m - 1 1 " -- — 11 : 1:''44 lvfar: -- -- -- J1 - i le 1 --- -- ' ' t: N - 11111111411b if LW 11 At L ii c- oil - 5tuo e4olnumniwea i ed10001:1041 lt i1 -- I IPA ma - Ilik - 1 4' C) - 1 -t If'--' rt lk i 1 low-inco- ''q J I 1 veto lt Trim 'Auctions' In Economic Development public-privat- cost-cuttin- g "Sure we'll help keep the Mariners in town we'll add 25 baseball players to the 1400 Nintendo employees we already have in the area" This isn't the first time that a Japanese company has offered capital to e help an American city keep its team In fact it happened sports in Salt Lake City Jazz owner Larry Miller couldn't have kept his team here unless he built a new arena and he couldn't have built the Delta Center without the financing of Sumitomo Trust and Banking Co Ltd major-leagu- Similarly Seattle is seeking Japanese financing to keep its team Major League Baseball officials balked when first informed of the offer but they have no basis to deny it The fact is the Mariners are in desperate financial straits precisely because of MLB policies that militate against teams Like the car makers the baseball mavens have only themselves to blame The real revelation in this matter though is the instant negative reaction from baseball commissioner Fay Vincent and others to the Nintendo offer It's as if this item touches spiritual spaces that the automobile fracas doesn't baseball is more ingrained in the national psyche than is a Chevrolet And yet the Japanese have embraced baseball more than any other foreign country has have learned to love the game as Americans do If Americans find something insidious in Japanese ownership of a major-leagu- e team they are manifesting a lack of faith in their own institutions and in their ability to hold on to them — a development more disturbing than the Nintendo Mariners small-mark- would put a man on the moon in the 1960s He also points to the jobs at stake in the space industry conveniently spread among many of the nation's key congressional districts including two in Utah What the president doesn't say is that funding for NASA comes out of the same congressional appropriations committees as money for Veterans fairs Housing and Urban Development EPA and independent agencies including the National Science Foundation Money allocated to the space station which represents a lot of engineering but not much science comes at the expense of these other agencies or even of more worthy science projects within NASA itself Af- invitation to miscalculation and disaster I believe American business for its own future success must look at issues and elements that over time exceed the value of stacks of cash piled on the table and are just as relevant to the corporate bottom line Failure to examine these factors that are the heart and soul of communities in balance with the thickness of their wallets is a serious oversight Failure to consider the economic of employees in an environment with measurably lower costs of living and housing is a serious oversight This cash and carry competition can force communities into the same bind many new owners face in a leveraged heavy debt diminishes community ability to support the very services and quality of life that helped attract the business in the first place American business is criticized for quick-hi- t investment strategies that focus on the next quarter's earnings rather than longterm results That criticism seems justified by the United Airlines example As aggressive advocates of economic development our community must continue to play by today's prevailing rules But for the mutual success and future of American business and a positive' community environment the nation must return to an economic development system that weighs community assets in balance with cash incentives Jerry Abramson By FOR THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE LOUISVILLE — Although 89 other communities already had ordeal our community had fallen by the wayside in a reason for optimism when United Airlines summoned to Chicago representatives of the four remaining cities still contending for a $1 billion United maintenance center Louisville met the original criteria: warm climate east of the Mississippi At $340 million in cash we had the most incentive money on the table We had national statistics proving a lower cost of living better quality of life and greater educational achievement This was an auction and Louisville made a bold bid Yet at the eleventh hour another contender upped the ante And when the auctioneer's hammer fell our able neighbor to the north Indianapolis won this economic development bonanth well-bein- g buy-ou- t: za This bidding process revealed that the focus of economic development competition in this country has evolved over the last auction-styl- e decade into a procedure rather than a thorough balanced assessment of what the competing communities have to offer as a whole — including success of a major factors far more important in the long-terindustrial facility I'm concerned that United Airlines' execution of this pure bidding process may serve as a standard for how American businesses evaluate communities as an investment — a possible cash-up-fro- non-cas- h non-cas- h Jerry E Abramson is mayor of Louisville Ky Czech Leader Can Help 'American Dream' By Frank L Kaplan An essential part of US foreign policy has been to export the "American Dream" This involved promoting capitalism and democracy while containing communism Despite its mythical nature the "dream" worked effectively throughout the Cold War years particularly in Central and Eastern Europe America's vastness abundance and pop culture-baselifestyle when viewed from the outside was seen as a Disney-likalternative to existing conditions Since the Iron Curtain's final rising however people in the former East Bloc states have gained a more complete and accurate impression of America They are now able to see not only the Hollywood-promote- d glitter but the tarnished reality as well This discovery includes the realization that the capitalist model inherent in the "American Dream" when transplanted to Central and Eastern European states doesn't seem to fit perfectly An example may be the subject of press freedom versus press responsibility The issue came alive in Prague during the summer of 1990 after a delegation of prominent US journalists heard Czechoslovakia's presidential press secretary suggest that journalists be jailed if they published the names of 140000 people who had been informers and collaborators for the secret police Michael Zantovsky explained to the bristling Americans that the policy of not revealing the names of former collaborators doesn't necessarily mean they are not guilty of crimes Nor he said does it signify an abridgement of press freedom Rather he claimed it means that "simple compassion" overrides a potentially profit- - or d e then-adopte- 4 e r41 ( d e - I 0 journalistic scoop in a society already brutalized with witch hunts and intimidation by Czechoslovakia Hunfame-motivat- FOR THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE - - gary and Poland Essentially US foreign relations require new thinking conducted within a fresh atmosphere totally free of the Cold War's residue This means that foreign policy and domestic priorities will differ from past ones "Habit may dictate one set of policies interests may dictate a quite different set" writes Robert E Hunter in the winter 1992 issue of Washington Quarterly "and it will not be possible to get from outdated prejudice bureaucratic inertia or intellectual laziness" The director of European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies proposes "a foreign policy" in which each segment is reassessed according to relevance and importance In view of Hunter's "from scratch" approach to policy formation including a revised attitude toward the new Europe it may prove beneficial for US to consider the new thinking emanating from the Continent the birthplace of modem democracy Eastern European countries need new approaches for transforming their societies Their insights based on experience should not be overlooked The works of several philosophers and writers can be considered — Zbygniew Bujak Ladislav Hejdanek and Adam Michnik among them But the essays to which many thinkers most often refer were authored by Vadat? Havel playwright and former political prisoner who in 1992 will enter his third year as Czechoslovakia's president Mr Havel's insights derived from his personal experience with and reflections upon a morally corrupt communist social zero-base- d policy-make- - -f 40 0: ''' - ''St4- 7 ' ' :t fr7 4 - ' - ' -- I Bush in Space President Bush is hitching his political wagon to a star by proposing massive federal spending on Space Station Freedom and NASA missions to the moon and mars In the process he is robbing money from other areas of US science as well as domestic programs in housing veterans affairs and environmental protection Space stations and manned missions to the moon and mars are sexy but there's good reason to believe the money to pay for them could be better spent elsewhere in the nation's budget The president probably isn't thinking about that however He looks suspi- be 11 m Let Nintendo Buy the Mariners The proposed sale of the Seattle Mariners baseball team to a group headed by Japanese interests irritates this country's already inflamed xenophobes It also demonstrates that Americans may be suffering more from a loss of faith in their own institutions than from 111611 ''' ''4 Reform Nation State Must Concentrate on Rising Costs national insurance program called AmeriCare Taxpayers and businesses - 7"-- teXe Health-Cu- e Congress finally is prescribing treatment for the country's medical maladies While dramatic departures from the status quo its proposals are just preliminary steps to the major overhaul of the health-car- e system that awaits this nation The US Senate's Democratic leadership has introduced a plan that would force all employers to provide health insurance for workers or pay a 7 percent to 9 percent payroll tax to finance a - -7 r-7---- Zribunt 1:r1 A22 SUNDAY January 26 1992 9 - - 17- V 'I' ie f Z7 o- - I i4 f1 i"4 ':4 t II 4' i I ::: - ! r ow' sonality" As this country's national election campaigns reach full swing both incumbents and challengers could do worse than to reflect upon Havers poignant words before making voters promises about "the American Dream" Frank L Kaplan an associate professor In the University of Colorado's School of Journalism and Mass Communication writes on Central and East European 1tial (111 t '' ' t tellok11 Rr41 s 1 TWI: i J 'NI ‘ '- IlTek '::o-- - goMEMMR fli 11052MOMINIMEMb vEleelIMMOMb 011b I - ''1 - Z'I - ' )r '-- Mr Havel suggests that only by empowering "the moral and spiritual" in relations among people may humanity avoid disaster and regain a truly human focus which "can lead to the creation of social structures in which a person can once more be a person a specific human per- - 1 : '- -- ik1111 1 41v it S -- ' - -- ' self" - '''1:-- - ft I If '' : it'114- desit i - - ap' advertising to manipulation through television He must discover again within himself a deeper sense of responsibility toward the world which means responsibility toward something higher than him- Irdi 1 ‘ s t rs CR N t: (1990) "Man must in some way come to his senses He must extricate himself from this terrible involvement in both the obvious and the hidden mechanisms of totality from consumption to repression from lcc fr 11t 41' order reveal a penetrating precision of thought regarding a better world views developed while an active dissident Mr Havel first addresses the cause of disorder on the planet before turning to an approach for confronting social ills "As soon as man (used in the collective sense) began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything the world began to lose its human dimension and man began to lose control of it" he reasons in his book Disturbing the Peace tee ' ---- 1 rki---- I 1- -J 1 t |