Gary Crooks

Steven Brill’s in-depth article for Time magazine about why health care prices are so high – particularly for people who are uninsured or underinsured – is like a horror movie. In it, he unearths a dark, mysterious force called the chargemaster that would be right at home in a Stephen King novel. Hospitals use this computerized leviathan to determine the prices for its services and products, but few people can explain the basis for the figures. Suffice it to say that if you don’t have the government or an insurance company negotiating prices for you, the chargemaster becomes more menacing than Cujo. One of Brill’s examples was an uninsured Stamford, Conn., woman who was feeling chest pains and called an ambulance. After a number of hospital tests, she was diagnosed with indigestion. Then she had to swallow a $21,000 bill.

Robed barbarians have thwarted the will of the people ! Taxmageddon is upon us! Relax. Just because the state Supreme Court tossed the supermajority requirement for tax increases, it doesn’t mean we’re in danger of becoming a high-tax state. State legislators inclined to raise taxes have been so thoroughly whipped, they’re likely to keep their tails between their legs.

At a Thursday public presentation on overtreatment in medicine, Dr. Richard Deyo displayed a New Yorker cartoon with a doctor saying to a patient, “You may believe you’ve been overcharged, but remember you’re overmedicated.” That’s as funny as it got, as Deyo politely but firmly pushed the concept of evidence-based medicine at his Riverpoint Campus speech. Deyo is the Kaiser Permanente professor of evidenced-based medicine at the Oregon Health & Science University. Before that, he was a professor at the University of Washington.

It looks like Proposition 2 will squeak past by about 900 votes when the final count is completed. About 40,000 people will end up deciding whether the Spokane City Council should have a supermajority requirement for tax increases. That’s about one in four people of voting age deciding whether three of seven council members should control taxation. One of the arguments for the supermajority is that if the case for a tax increase is strong enough, there shouldn’t be a problem luring five votes. On the other hand, if the case for the supermajority were so strong, it should’ve drawn more people to the polls and picked up the kind of overwhelming support for Proposition 1 (police ombudsman, about 70 percent) and Proposition 3 (libraries, about 66 percent).

I can’t help but get the feeling that the U.S. policy on drones goes something like this: “It sure is hard to figure out who the bad guys are and what they’re up to, so let’s deploy this handy technology and move on.” Even the most heinous villains holed up somewhere are given the option of coming out with their hands up. And if law enforcement does end up blowing them away, the public will eventually become privy to the details. Yes, I know it’s more complicated in the war on terror, but that doesn’t mean we should surrender the principle of accountability.

You say you want a resolution, Well, you know.

Would it kill the people who are mortified by presidential executive orders and their alleged assault on the Constitution to at least read the founding document? “Executive power” is in there. Executive orders are how it’s carried out. The latest complaint relates to President Barack Obama’s executive actions on guns, but it suggests that he is routinely abusing his power. In his first term, he issued 144 executive orders, which puts him on pace for 288 over two terms. Here are the totals for other two-term presidents: George W. Bush, 291; Bill Clinton, 364; Ronald Reagan, 381; and Dwight Eisenhower, 484. Calvin Coolidge issued 1,203 in six years. Franklin Roosevelt issued 3,522 over 12 years.

(Pauline Phillips, better known as “Dear Abby,” died last week at the age of 94. The following is in her honor.)

The Connecticut mass shooting has sprouted a robust discussion on root causes. We have a lot of guns in this country, an estimated 280 million. But as the slogan goes, they don’t kill, people do. So why is it that Americans are more apt to reach for a gun?

Since the slaughter of little children in Newtown, Conn., the debate has raged over what the president and Congress should do about mass shootings and easy access to guns. But pieces of this problem have been quietly shipped to the states, where the gun lobby has successfully loosened many laws, including those addressing the restoration of gun rights to felons and people with a history of mental illness. The justification is that the right to bear arms is as sacrosanct as any other in the Constitution. Public safety be damned. So, we have dual tracks on gun restorations that mirror the marijuana issue. Felons who have been convicted of federal crimes essentially lose their gun rights. So do some people with mental illnesses. But in many states, the rights of both can be restored rather easily.

When I heard Friday’s news of the elementary school massacre, I thought of my kids. When I dropped them off at their schools, we didn’t know about it. I tried to remember what we said. What would’ve been their final words if it had been them? Did I say, “I love you”? Certainly not to my high school son. It’s a guy thing.

The Talking Heads have a tune that goes like this: “Facts all come with a point of view. Facts don’t do what I want them to.” The song was released in 1980, but it’s perfect today. I met with a Gonzaga University journalism class last week to discuss editorial writing, and told them that it wouldn’t surprise me to see opinion pages devoted almost entirely to fact-checking at some point. That’s because politics and the Internet have conspired to produce warring factions with their own versions of reality. Without a set of agreed-upon facts, it becomes difficult to get past the premise of an editorial before someone chimes in with “wrong!”

“Keep government out of my Medicare” – Sign at a political rally President Barack Obama is urging people to send tweets to their congressional representatives with the hashtag #my2k, which represents the $2,000 he claims the average taxpayer will have to fork over if Congress does not agree to lower taxes for 98 percent of Americans.

Ken Burns’ latest documentary, “The Dust Bowl,” provides a timely reminder that junk science once compelled Americans to commit ruinous acts against nature. “Rain follows the plow” was the conventional wisdom of yesteryear. The mere act of turning the soil in the Great Plains would be enough to produce sufficient rainfall to sustain a comfortable farming life, or so the theory went. That’s all the purveyors of Manifest Destiny needed to hear, and so Native Americans and vast buffalo herds were removed with brutal swiftness. Then it was up to the land speculators and other hucksters of the day to sell ancient grasslands as an agricultural wonderland. As it turned out, there was a reason few people lived there, and Mother Nature delivered a decade-long reminder during the Dirty Thirties.

Raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 was part of the secret “grand bargain” that President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner temporarily struck during the summer of 2011, according to documents obtained by reporter Bob Woodward. The idea could very well come up again as both parties try to avert the “fiscal cliff.” The Kaiser Family Foundation studied the effects of such a change, and found that it would save the federal government $5.7 billion in 2014. But just because the feds would be saving money, it doesn’t mean you would. Out-of-pocket costs for those waiting the extra two years would go up by $3.7 billion in that same year.

The nickel tour of the most expensive election in U.S. history: Many Happy returns. It was a bad night for campaign secrecy. The Sunlight Foundation says, “Overall, of the $1.07 billion spent on the general election by some 629 outside groups, just 32 percent yielded the desired results.” Crossroads GPS, Republican strategist Karl Rove’s “dark money” group, squandered 87 percent of its spending on losing causes.

On Election Day, Arizona voters will choose whether to adopt the top-two primary system, and the arguments mirror those waged in Washington before voters resoundingly declared, “Bring it on!” Washington voters passed Initiative 872 in 2004, and after four years of court battles the state held its first top-two primary in 2008. Looking back on the pros and cons of the measure, it’s clear that both sides were guilty of exaggeration.

Confession: I’m addicted to daily hits from Dr. Sam Wang (rhymes with bong) who runs the online Princeton Election Consortium. Wang, a neuroscientist, aggregates state polls, sifts them through his whiz-bang computer model and produces something called the Meta-Margin. My fellow junkies watch this data point as if it were the needle on a gas gauge in the middle of Montana. If it reaches zero, it means an Electoral College tie, 269-269. As of this writing (hang on … be right back), it’s at 1.96 percent. Apparently, this is a significant number, because Mathletes for Obama are turning virtual cartwheels. What’s the Meta-Margin now? Better check. It’s updated several times a day.

Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” line launched a barrage of office product jokes that obscured something important. He didn’t answer the question, which was about women getting equal pay for equal work. It reminded me of Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s “Women’s Day in the Capitol” two years ago, which amounted to an “attagirl” for the important work they do. Spokesman-Review reporter Betsy Z. Russell toted up the number of agency heads at the time and found that 36 percent of them were women. That’s a higher percentage than Gov. Romney’s binders produced in Massachusetts.

Tim Eyman blasted this mass email last week: “Washington is the 4th highest taxed state in the nation:” He inserted a link to a Tax Foundation map revealing that data point. He followed that with: “I-1185 keeps us from hitting #1.” There are two ways to take this: 1) Mr. Eyman has been shockingly ineffective at fighting for lower taxes. 2) The numbers are misleading.

The following item is brought to you by the number 5 trillion. The lack of specifics in Mitt Romney’s tax-cut plan has created chronic confusion. Rates lowered by 20 percent. Nobody pays higher taxes. Nobody pays lower taxes. And it doesn’t add to the deficit.

Winston Churchill once said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Harsh? Perhaps, but Americans are every bit as guilty as their leaders for the rampant partisanship that has paralyzed politics. Republican or Democrat? To many voters, this seems to be the only trait that matters. If you doubt that, consider some recent research.

You are one of the 8.8 million people who were tossed out of work during the Great Recession. It wasn’t your fault, you were told. It’s just that business was bad. You paid your mortgage, and all your other bills. But greater forces conspired to bring you down. Maybe you found a new job. If so, it’s likely that it pays less. Maybe you haven’t found work, because employers aren’t interested in hiring the unemployed. Only those with a job need apply. You thought employers might relax that lazy rule and look a bit deeper at your work history, while keeping in mind that this recession zapped more jobs than the last four combined.

State Treasurer Jim McIntire stopped by the editorial board last week with some revealing graphics about what’s happened with revenue and the budget in Washington. These are pictures lawmakers on the various budgetary committees have seen. McIntire declined to opine on how they’ve reacted, so I will. The first graphic that caught my attention was a pie chart showing how lawmakers and the governor went about balancing the budgets for the 2009-’11 and 2011-’13 bienniums.