Legislators need to finally step up, protect vulnerable Arizona children

(PNI) Regarding "CPS crisis deepens" (Republic, Friday):

I have lived in Phoenix since 1974, and nothing for the better has changed at Child Protective Services. While this angers me, it doesn't surprise me.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but, ultimately, it is time for the legislators of our state to get their stuff together and do something to fix this ongoing problem. The children in our state are depending on them to protect them.

So far, they have not done the job.

--Bruce J. Parkhouse, Phoenix

Where is CPS oversight group?

A photo with the article "CPS crisis deepens" on Friday shows at least nine members of an overstaffed oversight committee on Child Protective Services.

Oversight? Where have you been?

--J.B. Shevlin, Payson

New approach to CPS required

The children of Arizona deserve better. We must improve Child Protective Services.

That requires an independent agency, led by an exceptional, dedicated professional who will attend to the morale and resilience of the staff. This is the most emotionally demanding work imaginable: faced daily with life-and-death decisions, caught up in intense and sometimes frightening disputes, and double-bound by the state mandate for family preservation and the humane goal of child protection.

While working closely with police, it should not be a part of an already overstretched public-safety agency.

We need to recognize that there are not enough alternatives available, as foster services are insufficient to compensate for the number of family failures. Poverty is frequently a factor in family breakdown, and as income disparity increases, more and more families live with fewer resources.

We should look for leadership out of state.

--H.G. Whittington, Sun City West

Senate rule change is ill-advised

Regarding "Senate Dems limit GOP use of filibusters" (Republic, Friday):

Changing the Senate rules, which have existed nearly since the beginning of our nation, to remove the option of some filibusters is a radical step that shows the lengths President Barack Obama and the left will go to achieve their revolutionary agenda.

The rules protected the rights of minorities, a very central theme implicit in much of what our founders created. They wanted to ensure that elections could not create a tyranny of the majority, especially after what they experienced as British subjects. The Senate and its rules were a salient aspect of those protections.

President Obama and the Democrats used deceit on "Obamacare" and Benghazi, Libya, to pass the law and to steal an election. The electorate was fooled into believing, so the Democrats in power pushed their agenda. Now that the public sees through the lies and the administration has lost public support, it is abusing its power to change the rules, so it can continue to force upon Americans a revolution they do not want.

The radical left doesn't care that its policies don't work for America. The left, specifically in the persons of President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, will go to any lengths to win, to force their ideology and will upon all of us, no matter what we want.

--Dennis Santillo, Cornville

Rule for in-flight cellphone calls

Any change allowing cellphone calls in flight should be accompanied by isolated grouped seating, so that callers could be limited to annoying each other.

--Dale Woods, Prescott

Filibuster change is far overdue

The filibuster was part of the Senate rules back in the days of the new republic, when transportation was slow, to allow senators to delay a bill and let other senators of their party to arrive to vote. The filibuster has been used and abused by partisan politics by both parties to the detriment to the American people.

President George W. Bush and his Republican Senate were given the mandate by the electorate to govern. President Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate are given the mandate by the electorate to govern. The abuse of the filibuster has reduced and often stopped both administrations from their ability to govern this country.

We are the only democracy in the world that requires 60percent of a body to vote to pass appointments or legislation. All other democracies only need 51percent to do the same. This is not the will of the people. I, as well as many others, I'm sure, am sick and tired of the stagnation in Congress, and in their partisan refusal to do their job.

Thank God there is the courage to put the filibuster to rest, and when the Republican Party is in control of the presidency and the Senate, they need to keep it at rest so they may govern as the electorate intended.

--Richard Ward, Phoenix

Ariz. pension fund has no shame

Arizona's Public Safety Personnel Retirement System's board approved last week retroactive pay raises and an inflation adjustment for some investment-staff members.

Government entities are making large contributions, and retirees had their cost-of-living raises suspended. The fund has done very poorly for several years. On the other hand, even the Arizona State Retirement System, which pays its staff less, has done a much better job. How does this kind of thing keep going on? Have they no shame?

--Barb Montgomery, Phoenix

Copyright 2013 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

Meaningless bills costing legislators their credibility

(PNI) The Legislature is on the cusp of passing a bill making gold and silver a form of money in Arizona. Except you wouldn't be able to pay taxes with the precious metals. No merchant would have to accept "specie," as the bill calls it. Nor could anyone be forced to pay with gold and silver. The whole thing is symbolic at best, a bone for the William Jennings Bryan fringe of the Republican Party. And legislators wonder why they struggle to gain credibility? They're dealing in the wrong currency.

Copyright 2013 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

Legislators, pray for a heart

(PNI) The young woman stood before our leaders and proclaimed a miracle of sorts. Where once she would have been blind, now she can see.

Chantal Duquette, 25, has an autoimmune disease that would rob her of her sight but for the miracle of modern medicine, a miracle she could never afford on the $8.50 an hour she earns while waiting tables to put herself through college.

"AHCCCS ? has been my lifeline, and it is the reason that I can see all of you right now," she recently told the House Appropriations Committee.

It seems a good week to consider the plight of Duquette and others like her. On Dec. 31, 50,000 childless Arizonans who live in poverty will lose their health-care coverage through the state's Medicaid program. The Legislature could make sure that doesn't happen.

The Appropriations Committee held its first hearing last week on Gov. Jan Brewer's proposal to continue covering the Duquettes among us and to expand Medicaid to include an additional 350,000 low-income Arizonans who can't afford insurance.

Republican Party activists across the state are mobilizing to fight Brewer's embrace of "Obamacare," saying we simply can't afford to help all those people.

"Jesus had Judas, Republicans have Governor Brewer," Maricopa County Republican Party Chairman A.J. LaFaro told the committee. He later apologized for comparing the governor to history's most reviled human being.

Brewer's plan -- providing coverage to any Arizonan living at up to 133percent of the federal poverty level ($15,000 a year for a single adult) -- would cost the state nothing. The federal government would pick up most of the tab, and a hospital-bed tax would cover the rest. And if the federal government backed away from the program, so could the state. Supporters say the proposal would reduce charity care at hospitals, which in turn should reduce pressure to boost insurance premiums on the rest of us.

Republicans are aghast, saying Brewer's Medicaid-expansion plan would not only saddle future generations with added debt but strain doctors' offices and emergency rooms across the state with a "tsunami" of new patients.

"There's a real simple rule. When people have insurance, they use it," House Appropriations Committee Chairman John Kavanagh said. "We're putting 400,000 more people into insurance and, quite frankly, they're going to use that insurance in a system that is already overburdened."

Scott Dunham has been a diabetic for 43 years. He lost his job eight months ago and soon will lose his insurance and thus his insulin. Because he has no children, he can't qualify for AHCCCS.

"I actually don't know what to do when that COBRA runs out," he said.

Kavanagh says the answer for people like Dunham isn't to give them "platinum" health-care coverage. The solution, he says, is tort reform, higher copayments to deter unnecessary doctor visits, more competition between insurance companies and other free-market ideas.

"We are in a crisis," Kavanagh said. "We can't afford this fiscal irresponsibility any longer."

Health-care providers described the people they see every day, people saved in emergency rooms yet ultimately doomed by their lack of access to care once the crisis has passed.

The 27-year-old fry cook whose mangled leg was saved after a car accident. But he can't afford antibiotics or skin grafts or much of anything to aid in the healing. A lack of money will likely lead to the lack of a leg: amputation.

The young woman who has a mass but can't afford tests to determine whether it's cancer. If it were, she couldn't afford treatment anyway.

The older woman who arrived at Yuma Regional Medical Center in a diabetic coma. ER doctors pulled Betty through the crisis, but now, her kidneys are shutting down. She needs dialysis to stay alive but simply can't afford it.

"What I would ask you to do while solving the federal problem," said Patrick Walz, the hospital's CEO, "is to think about Betty back in Arizona, who voted for you."

This is a good week to think about Betty and about the 399,999 Arizonans like her, some of whom will surely die without help.

Our Legislature is filled with good and decent Christian people who go to church on Sundays and try to live as God intended and often try to make sure the rest of us do as well. Yet some of them bristled last week whenever anyone brought up matters of faith and morality and the ultimate question: What would Jesus do?

To them, I would say this is a good week, a holy week even, to pray for an answer.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts @arizonarepublic.com.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

Legislators finally do right thing

(PNI) Every now and then, the most astonishing things happen. Pigs take flight, Phoenix freezes over on the Fourth of July, and the most improbable of all? The Arizona Legislature does a good thing.

I know. Amazing, right?

It's hard to believe, but there it is, House Bill 2204.

It's a simple bill, really. It says that a city (or county or state) will continue to pay a portion of the health-insurance costs for the families of its fallen police officers, firefighters and correctional officers.

The bill was prompted, in part, by Glendale's treatment of Cindy Jones. Her 25-year-old husband, Glendale Officer Brad Jones, was killed in the line of duty in October 2011, leaving her with two young children. The city continued the family's health insurance for a year, as required by law.

Several months after his death, Cindy approached city officials to ask if they would continue paying the premiums after the year was up, or at least give her the employee rate -- the one the family would be paying if her husband were still alive.

"Brad's no longer here," she told me a few months ago. "I still have to provide for my kids, not just five years from now, not just 10 years from now, but until they're the age of 18. For me, that's a big worry."

In response, the city offered her the retiree rate: $688 a month, and that's after a subsidy from the police pension fund is applied. That's about 21/2 times what the family would be paying if Officer Jones hadn't been shot to death one night while answering a call to assist a probation officer.

Glendale's incoming mayor, Jerry Weiers, told me in December that he would work on changing the city's policy once he took office. Six weeks into his term, he has followed through on that pledge. As a result, he says Glendale will now pick up the entire insurance tab for the family of any employee who is killed while performing his or her job.

"Doing the right thing is not always hard to do," he told me. "It's just a matter of making people understand it's the right thing."

Which brings us to the Legislature, where the right thing is so often elusive. But not, apparently, this time. At least, not for most of our leaders.

Rep. Bob Robson's HB 2204 would require cities, counties, the state and private prisons to continue offering insurance at the employee rate to the families of law-enforcement officers who die in the line of duty. It would continue until the surviving spouse either remarries or is eligible for Medicare and until the children are grown.

The bill sailed through the Public Safety, Military and Regulatory Affairs Committee on a unanimous vote and cleared the House last week on a 54-5 vote. It now heads to the Senate.

The five who opposed it are Reps. Steve Smith of Maricopa, Carl Seel of Phoenix, Darin Mitchell of the bare mattress, Adam Kwasman of Oro Valley, and Steve Montenegro of Avondale. All five happen to members of Constantin's Army, led by my favorite right-wing Republican Party operative, Constantin Querard.

What they have against police officers' widows, I do not know.

Smith is the legislator with some of the silliest bills going nowhere this year. Among them is one bill to suspend all federal firearms laws and another to reimburse ex-Sen. Russell Pearce for his recall expenses.

I tried calling Smith to find out why he found it unacceptable to use public funds to insure the widows and children of fallen police officers but a moral imperative to use public funds to reimburse Pearce for his non-existent recall expenses. Alas, Smith didn't return my call.

Robson says the bill is simply the right thing to do. He was on the Chandler City Council in 1999 when Officer James Snedigar was shot and killed in a SWAT raid. Officer Snedigar was the first Chandler police officer killed in the line of duty, and Robson says it was an easy call to continue his family on the employee insurance plan.

"We expect these people to do extraordinary things," he told me. "The least we owe them was this."

He's right. It is the least we owe them, and good for him and his colleagues for doing it.

Well, he and 53 of his colleagues, that is.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@ arizonarepublic.com.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

SC GOP legislators ask NJ gov to run for president (AP)

COLUMBIA, S.C. – Some Republican lawmakers in South Carolina are calling on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to run for president.

Ten GOP House members held a news conference Wednesday to try and draft Christie for the race for the Republican nomination. He has repeatedly said he will not run.

Rep. Chris Crawford of Florence says there's obviously some dissatisfaction with the crowded Republican field. He says he understands Christie likes his current job but the country needs him.

Crawford says Christie has proved he can win in a deeply Democratic state and is willing to tackle tough problems and speak bluntly.

Crawford says the Republican legislators will work for Christie and help him win South Carolina, which holds the first-in-the-South presidential primary.

View the original article here