Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 24
Health care setback shouldn’t be an excuse to walk away from reform
Congressional Republicans’ first serious attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act suffered a crushing defeat Friday with the last-minute cancellation of a House vote on the GOP proposal. While this is a serious setback for President Trump’s agenda, the young administration and its congressional allies should not back away from the critical work of reforming the nation’s costly, complex health care system.
The plot twists and emotional debate over the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the name given to the GOP’s health overhaul, provided enough drama over the past few weeks to rival a reality TV show. Deal sweeteners, such as ill-advisedly weakening “essential benefit” requirements for insurance plans to appease hard-line conservatives, appeared to backfire as moderate Republicans pulled their support.
The deeply flawed AHCA did not merit passage, and it was disappointing to see that Minnesota Republican Reps. Erik Paulsen and Jason Lewis strongly backed the bill. The AHCA would have increased the number of uninsured Americans by 24 million by 2026, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Older people, such as young retirees, would have faced steeper costs. The call to reduce federal Medicaid funding would have jeopardized seniors’ nursing home coverage.
Democrats shouldn’t celebrate the setback. Obamacare has flaws, too, as soaring premiums in Minnesota’s individual insurance market painfully attest. The takeaway from Friday is not that the status quo is fine. Instead, it’s that health care reform is so complex that one party can’t do it alone. Bipartisanship is essential.
Trump likely has little appetite for tackling health care again soon. But the nation’s dealmaker-in-chief should understand the power of time and persistence. Expanding the ranks of allies also helps, which is why he should reach out to Democrats and medical industry groups to find reforms that better balance cost and coverage. Democrats should have a list of serious proposals ready to go.
Health care needn’t be a permanent setback for Trump. The issue is frustratingly complex, but there will be a place in history for a leader who didn’t back down and instead forged ahead to find teamwork and solutions. Trump could, and should, rise to the challenge.
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St. Cloud Times, March 24
Define ’success’ before Northstar test
Does it make sense for St. Cloud to have commuter rail service?
Knock on some legislative wood, but it appears an answer to that question may finally be delivered.
Gov. Mark Dayton announced March 16 he supports spending $3 million to create a short-term test aimed at providing that answer, which has been sought since the day in 2009 when the Northstar commuter rail line first stopped in Big Lake, 11 miles short of the 100,000-plus residents of the immediate St. Cloud metro area .
Dayton’s idea - somewhat similar to a proposal authored last year by St. Cloud Rep. Jim Knoblach - calls for one trip a day, leaving St. Cloud in the morning for Target Field in Minneapolis and returning from there in the evening. A March 17 Times news report said several area legislators like the idea and want to learn more.
Good plan
This board championed such a test as a compromise at the end of the 2016 legislative session, when DFLers and Republicans couldn’t agree on a plan that fell between Knoblach’s desire for cost-neutral testing and Dayton’s vision that an extension would cost $43 million plus operating expenses and rail access charges.
From the March 4, 2016, Times Our View: “… So the key here is compromise. Determine what it will cost to do a short-term experiment. Perhaps the compromise needs to be a few million dollars to cover some expenses and operating costs for a one-year experiment. Not $43 million plus operating costs permanently. No, just a couple of million for a one-year test.”
Granted, $3 million won’t cover a full year, but a six-month test - held ideally to cover fall, winter and spring - should answer the question.
Kudos to the Dayton administration for its proposal. Similarly, kudos to local legislators and constituents for keeping the issue alive this session in St. Paul.
Define success
Because this test will likely determine the long-term future of commuter rail service beyond Big Lake, it’s absolutely critical all sides work together now to identify what factors will determine whether the test is considered successful.
Obviously, ridership numbers will be the biggest key. How many local people will use this train?
That’s a fair question in part because current Northstar service includes several stops along the way, plus service that is not necessarily for work/commuting purposes. Witness the number of people traveling to events like Twins and Vikings games.
This test should be a nonstop run during weekday commuting hours. As appealing as it might be to provide rail service for leisure travelers to the Twin Cities, that was not the origin of Northstar. And given costs, that should not be its primary mission.
Costs are critical
Finally, yes, money is a huge factor. Remember, the initial 40-mile line cost $320 million to build a decade ago. For perspective, that was about the original cost estimate in the late 1990s to build the line all the way to St. Cloud. Almost 30 years later, it’s certain to cost tens of millions more to extend the line 11 miles, plus pay BNSF for track access and cover operating costs.
Please also remember Northstar is heavily subsidized. In its best years, Northstar’s fare revenues have covered not even 20 percent of operating costs. The rest are picked up by taxpayers.
And not to be overlooked, ridership numbers have never really come close to meeting original projections. On average, Northstar trains see 2,534 weekday boardings.
How much one roundtrip a day raises that number certainly is important. But given the costs and complexities experienced to this point with Northstar, legislators and the governor need to define now if that alone will be used to judge the success of this much-needed test.
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Post Bulletin, March 25
Like cheap meat? Then you like big farms
In a perfect world, our nation’s food would be produced on small family farms. Livestock would inhabit airy barns and beautiful pastures. Rural kids would grow up working side-by-side with their parents, and every small town would have a dairy processor, a butcher shop and a grain mill.
We don’t live in that world.
When we eat a hamburger, it probably came from a cow that spent most of its life in a feedlot, eating grain while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of other cows. The eggs most of us buy come from hens that seldom see natural daylight. And our bacon comes from so-called “factory farms” where hogs grow quickly in climate-controlled containment buildings before being shipped off to a processor that handles thousands of hogs each day.
Granted, we can choose other food options. We can pay a premium for cage-free eggs. We can buy grass-fed beef. If we look hard enough and are willing to pay top dollar, we can even find free-range pork and organic dairy products.
But most Americans want to pay the lowest price possible for meat, poultry, eggs, milk and cheese, and that means these products must be produced in the most efficient way possible. An operation that produces 100,000 market-ready hogs each year has lower overhead, higher profits and a more consistent product than 50 small farms that produce 2,000 hogs each.
It’s a market-driven reality. The small hog farms that dotted the landscape of southern Minnesota and Iowa 30 years ago have largely vanished, and 97 percent of the pork we consume today comes from factory farms like the ones being proposed for Zumbrota Township in Goodhue County and in St. Charles Township in Winona County.
We understand why potential neighbors in Goodhue County aren’t thrilled about the Circle K Family Farms Z Finisher, a hog barn that could potentially house as many as 4,700 pigs. That’s a lot of animals, a lot of manure, and a lot of potential for bad odors to waft across the countryside.
Likewise, we understand why 40 people turned out in St. Charles to question the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and representatives of Holden Farms, which wants to expand two existing operations - one south of Elba, the other north of Utica - adding up 4,000 hogs.
But this is Minnesota, in the middle of our nation’s breadbasket. People who choose to live in rural areas should know that farm machinery will occasionally clog up the roads during harvest season. Manure will be spread on fields, especially in the spring before planting, and sometimes the wind will be from the wrong direction.
This doesn’t mean that farm operations have free rein to do whatever they want. Local zoning authorities and the MPCA are charged with protecting the environment and the rights of neighbors, and the operators of large feedlots must clear several regulatory hurdles.
In the Circle K case, the objecting neighbors have filed a lawsuit to block it, claiming, among other things, that the plan approved by the Goodhue County Board had an incomplete site map, incomplete manure spreading plan and used an incorrect “odor model.” The lawsuit has effectively delayed the project for at least eight months, which doesn’t seem an unreasonable amount of time.
The stakes are high, and if the county and the operators of the proposed hog barn can’t get their ducks in a row in that timeframe, then the project shouldn’t happen.
But ultimately, as long as the local and state rules and zoning ordinances are followed, the “not in my backyard” argument shouldn’t be the legal basis for denying permits to livestock operations.
Logistically speaking, such operations need to be relatively near a processing plant, which in turn needs a large supply of workers who live fairly close. Such plants exist in Austin and Worthington, and those plants need a steady supply of hogs from northern Iowa and southern Minnesota.
Our region has no large uninhabited tracts of land where a hog farm won’t have neighbors.
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