Tag: Medicare

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Randy Haspel’s column, “Give ‘Em Hill” …

I hate people who make Hillary look good. It’s a conspiracy wrapped in a plot inside a fraud.

CL Mullins

Oh look, Hillary won a Kewpie doll. Oh wait, that’s Trey Gowdy. Make it a Kreepie doll.

Jeff

Actually he’s the kid holding the banjo in Deliverance … all growed up.

Packrat

“Dueling Banjos” is his “Eye of the Tiger.”

Jeff

About Toby Sells’ post, “City Engineer Steps Down in First Post-Election Departure” …

He was also the point man who had to rationalize the dangerously designed and indefensible bike lanes on Riverside and was roundly shouted down by residents at the public meetings.

The idea for placing more parking meters downtown was boneheaded, discouraging Memphians from coming downtown. I am glad to see Mr. Cameron leave, and I just hope the next departure will be Mr. Rogers from Memphis Animal Services.

Memphis Tigers

My dad and I rode the Riverside bike lanes almost every weekend. Nobody says a word when they shut down Riverside for a couple months every year, but squeeze out lanes for bicycles, and everyone goes insane.

FUNKbrs

Wow! Absolutely right! Taking over 10,000 motorists a DAY and halving their traffic lanes (and doubling the accident rate) is a small price to pay so Scooter and his dad can ride those bike lanes almost 50 times a year. After all, two to three dozen cyclists a day used those bike lanes! Those selfish motorists! Equally hard to understand is the selfish public expecting to park on a public street! The nerve!

Hopefully, the new mayor will end the tyranny of PC and/or connected, tiny-but-vocal special-interest groups before all the traffic flows and parking in Midtown and downtown is ruined.

ALJ2

To all the folks vilifying the evil PC bike lanes: Just keep in mind that unless you’re able to differentiate yourself as a neighborhood, then you have little to offer. If our product (that is Midtown and downtown) looks and feels exactly like Cordova, then we have nothing meaningful to offer, and convincing people to infill and redevelop becomes an impossible task.

If you allow street life to develop and have your auto commute lengthened by 180 seconds, we can start to differentiate our product in a profound way. If we hold fast to a car-centric vision, then we’re exactly like all the other second-tier Sun Belt cities. Remake the whole of Midtown and downtown in the spirit of Harbor Town and watch what happens.

Apok

If Toney Armstrong’s department would enforce the law on Riverside, those bicycle lanes would still be there. Daily commuters should not use that road as their route.

Clyde

When Exxon/ISIS kicks the price of gas up to $10 a gallon you’ll all be scrambling for your Schwinns.

Nick R

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s “Bacon, Cheese Dip, and Rocket Scientists” …

Ah, the crappy commentary from The Memphis Flyer. Show some more political bias!

Chris Hopper

Perfect, Bruce! Hillary, too, brought home the bacon in the BS “Bengotcha” hearings.

CD

What’s the difference between this editorial and 50,000 plastic cups that say “Pancho’s Cheese Dip?”

Ichabod McCrane

About our elderly …

Isn’t it ironic that conservatives will whine and complain over giving a single mother $200 to feed her hungry kids or provide medical care for our elderly but not bat an eye over wasting $5,000,000 on investigations to hurt Hillary’s presidential bid?

Jim Brasfield

Categories
Music Music Features

Makeshift Benefit Show

Whenever I have friends visiting from out of town, I point out the neon glow of the Sun Studio sign, the jewel that’s the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, and the ’50s glory of Sam Phillips Recording Studio.

Then I head down Peabody Avenue, where I show off the Church Health Center, which, for the last two decades, has been a saving grace for hundreds of local musicians (and plenty of non-playing industry professionals, including me).

The Church Health Center provides medical care for the uninsured and, via programs at the Hope and Healing Center, offers preventative help to a phenomenal number of Memphians.

This month, Memphis musicians are giving back to the Church Health Center with Rock For Love, a benefit organized by Makeshift Music.

J.D. Reager

J.D. Reager, Makeshift’s mouthpiece and a member of the Hope and Healing Center, was hanging out with his friend Marvin Stockwell when the idea for the benefit materialized.

“J.D. and I became friends because he played bass on the third Pezz record,” says Stockwell, Pezz’s longtime guitarist, who spends his daytime hours working as public relations manager for the Church Health Center. “I’d been thinking about a benefit show, and then he brought it up.”

“I know a lot of folks who have had their butts saved by the Church Health Center,” Reager says, “so when we started putting it together, it quickly blew up into this multifaceted event.”

Snowglobe, The Subteens, Holly Cole, Jump Back Jake, Two-Way Radio, The Third Man, Joy Whitlock, and Pezz are all slated to play Rock For Love, which will be held at the Gibson Music Showcase on Friday, July 27th.

All those groups and more — including Shabbadoo, Dragoon, Black Sunday, The Secret Service, Antique Curtains, The Glass, and vocalists Cory Branan, Blair Combest, Susan Marshall, Paul Taylor, and Amy LaVere — have recorded tracks for Makeshift 5, a compilation CD which also benefits the Church Health Center.

“It’s a great cross-section of the music scene,” Stockwell says. “We wanted as broad a group of bands as possible, and we ended up with all varieties of rock-and-roll. It’s extremely gratifying for me in particular, because I’ve been able to combine the two things I’m most passionate about.”

“We put out feelers all over town and recorded a fair amount of tracks at Unclaimed Recordings,” says Reager, who credits Makeshift founder Brad Postlethwaite and his co-workers, Greg Faison and Jeremy Graham, for seeing the project to fruition. “Other stuff trickled in through the mail or via various meet-ups and drop-offs. The CD and show ended up getting sponsored by Ardent Studios, the Center City Commission, TCB Concerts, and other companies, and [screen printer] Sasha Barr has donated 100 percent of his time and printing.”

“People who wouldn’t normally collaborate have a common interest, which is supporting a charity that helps so many of them,” says Stockwell, also noting event components such as a photo booth manned by aristo-rappers Lord T & Eloise and a silent auction run by blogger Rachel Hurley, plus the Live From Memphis video crew and Rocket Science Audio‘s guerrilla engineer Kyle Johnson, who will combine forces for a DVD release of the benefit concert.

“The show itself has become much bigger than the one we set out to organize. People have really come out of the woodwork to support it, which underscores how local musicians feel about the Church Health Center and about the national health-care crisis,” Stockwell adds, noting that the number of uninsured Americans has nearly doubled since the Church Health Center opened its doors.

During the benefit, musicians will have an opportunity to sign up for the Musicians Healthcare Plan, an initiative offered by the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission and Church Health Center.

“I don’t know of any other market that supports their musicians like this,” says Antonio Parkinson, board chairman of the music commission.

For more info on the Church Health Center, visit ChurchHealthCenter.org. For more on Makeshift Music and the Rock For Love benefit, go to MySpace.com/MakeshiftMusicMemphis.com. To learn about the Musicians Healthcare Plan, go to MemphisMusic.org.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Curing Health Care

If there is one subject that the stressed-out, angry, and polarized population of the U.S. of A. agrees on, it is this: that, for all the outdated palaver about ours being the “finest health-care system in the world,” it is nothing of the kind. It is, in fact, as Dr. J. Edward Hill, a Tupelo physician who is past president of the American Medical Association, put it to the downtown Rotary Club on Monday, “a tragically disordered mechanism.”

Hill quoted some disquieting statistics — that almost 47 million Americans have no medical insurance and, thus, no access to any kind of health-care system. Another 20 million have “inadequate” medical coverage. Altogether, almost a fifth of the nation is under-served medically — including nearly a million Tennesseans.

The remedy? Hill’s prescription tilted heavily to what he called “the leverage of free-market economics” and regulatory reform. He sees the national Medicare system and the American health-insurance industry locked in an unholy alliance that has prevented the “price” of medical care (he found the term “costs” too ambiguous) from settling into a self-regulating system that could be both affordable and universal.

As it happens, one of the subjects that is now the subject of a stalemated debate in the Tennessee General Assembly is that of medical tort reform. One or two proposed solutions have barely failed becoming the basis for a bipartisan compromise. While it’s frustrating that agreement hasn’t yet been reached, it’s encouraging that the two sides — consumer interests and trial lawyers on one hand, doctors and economic conservatives on the other — have come this close. (It’s also encouraging, we have to say, that the contentious issue of caps on malpractice awards has apparently been shelved for the time being.) The fact is, everybody knows something has to be done.

Another sign of the gathering synchronicity on the issue was that the first major presidential forum, held over the weekend in Las Vegas, was devoted exclusively to the subject of health-care reform. Disappointingly, Republican candidates, though invited, did not attend. But all of the well-known Democrats did, and between them they constructed useful signposts for the journey ahead. Former North Carolina senator John Edwards suggested an elaborate system that offered incentives to insurance companies and employers, side by side with a Medicare-for-all alternative. Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich (yes, he’s running again and, “viable” or not, deserves to be heard) was all for dispensing with the “subsidized” insurance industry’s role altogether, calling for a national single-payer system. And former senator Mike Gravel of Alaska proposed a national “voucher” system that, in effect, did the same thing.

Whatever we end up with, there is a growing national consensus, linking all the political corners, that our system is outmoded and that something new must take its place. Hill, in his remarks on Monday, cited an epigram by the late Nobel Prize philosopher Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis — real or perceived — produces change.”

Few of us need to be told that we are at crisis point now, and change has got to come.