After Michael Moore claimed credit for changing the health care vote of his congressman, I was so confused I looked up the boundaries of Bart Stupak’s first Michigan district.
It does not include Flint, but does include the entire upper peninsula, as well as the northeast quadrant of the lower one. It has more land and more counties than any other and probably the lowest population density in the state.
Its boom times came with logging and mining, exploitive industries that moved on when the resources were gone, leaving environmental eyesores that time and the CCC reforested. The soil’s too thin to support farming, the summer’s too short. The region now lives on tourists, seasonal residents, retirees, the neighboring lakes and what natural resources are left.
As I looked at the map, I realized both health insurance and abortion are problems of areas with reasonable, if not now healthy, economies. In Stupak’s district, I imagine the major health crisis is simply finding a doctor.
A study done for the Michigan Medical Society in 2005 listed three counties Stupak represents as having the fewest number of physicians per 100,000 residents: Arenac, Keewenaw and Oscoda. The last two have only one physician. He also represents three counties with high ratios, but such small populations the numbers are probably misleading: Emmett had 32,741 people in 2003, Dickinson 27,186, and Marquette 64,616.
In contrast, Kalamazoo and Genesse counties, some of the hardest hit by the state’s deindustrailization, were still in the top ten best counties for physician availability. Both had grown on lumber, but Kalamazoo replaced the paper industry with a pharmaceutical company and Genesee includes Flint. The drug company was sold, and its operations slowly closed. Even the new research center in Washtenaw county’s Ann Arbor was shut as redundant. Moore has documented what happened to his home town.
The place where I grew up, bordering Kalamazoo and Ingham counties, home of Oldsmobile, was never as rich as Kalamazoo, Flint or Lansing, but had three factories making parts for automobiles, refrigerators and televisions, as well as a community hospital built in 1924. The hospital was sold to private investors in 1967, and closed in 2002, the same year the last large factory moved operations to Mexico.
The town is better off than Keewenaw and Oscoda counties. There are still hospitals in cities 30 miles away, and it still has physicians. The roads, including an interstate, are clear most of the year, unlike the far north, but most of the doctors have Indian sounding last names.
Stupak’s district does not include a single county with an abortion rate near the state’s 12.5 per 1,000 women of child bearing age. Some have numbers so low, they can’t be reported statistically.
With so few physicians, there may be areas with no abortion provider. Women have to go elsewhere, as the residents do for any kind of specialized medical service. Some abortions may be buried in the statistics for young people who leave the region every year, and others may use unlicensed practitioners or folk remedies.
Young, unmarried teenagers, however, aren’t the only ones who seek abortions. When you read oral histories of poor areas or descriptions of folk medicine, you realize that abortion has always existed, regardless of cultural values, among women who felt there was no way they could feed another person. In areas with no self-sustaining economies, perceptions of malnourishment and deprivation may differ, but the edge of subsistence is still there.
The areas with abortion rates above Michigan’s average are all ones that have seen their industrial economies threatened since I graduated from high school: Detroit with 29.2 per 1,000 women, the rest of Wayne County with 17.1, Genesse with 15.2, Kalamazoo with 15.0, Saginaw with 14.3, Ingham with 13.7, and my home county with 13.2.
The high abortion rates seem to reflect the sense of economic desperation of people who see their incomes falling or disappearing. The health reform bill doesn’t address that root problem, only the consequences.
People, like his primary challenger, Connie Saltonstall, ask how Stupak could be against health care reform when there are 44,000 uninsured people in his district. That’s more people than live in many of the constituent counties. The bill doesn’t address the problem of shortages of doctors and nurses, only creates more demand on the existing ones and keeps the Medicaid reimbursements lower than those paid in more affluent areas with lower doctor-patient ratios.
Stupak’s views on abortion probably not only arise from his Roman Catholic background, but from the fact one of his sons committed suicide in 2000. Anyone who’s lost a child that way is likely to have a more emotional view of the value of children.
Moore may like to take credit for helping convince Stupak that many more of his voters and contributors supported health care reform than he may have thought, but Moore’s self congratulations don’t recognize that for Stupak, more than political calculation was involved, and the benefits to his district are not as great as they are to Flint or Saginaw.
Notes:
Michigan Department of Community Health. “Abortion Rates by County of Residence, State of Michigan, Michigan Counties and Detroit City, 1998 - 2008.”
Moore, Michael. “How the People in My District Changed Stupak's Mind and Saved Health Care Reform,” Huffington Post 22 March 2010.
Public Policy Associates, Inc. “The Future Supply and Demand for Physicians in Michigan,” 2005.
Saltonstall, Connie. Campaign website.
Showing posts with label Culture Change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture Change. Show all posts
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Noble Peace
The uproar over the Nobel committee awarding the Peace Prize to Barak Obama reminds me how much the envy and jealousy of the less successful fuels rage against those who do better and how deeply ingrained is the idea of entitlement that underlies their unfulfilled expectations.
In this case, entitlement doesn’t mean a person deserves something by some characteristic of his or her birth, but that if someone puts in time he or she deserves the reward. You pay for four years of college, you deserve a diploma even if you’ve learned nothing. Your daughter takes dance classes every Saturday, she deserves a solo turn in the Nutcracker even if she has no sense of movement.
Men like Jeremiah Wright, Roland Burris and Michael Steele, who’ve worked for years for modest rewards, are angry when they see someone younger do better. They don’t understand that his mere refusal to use their rhetoric and other tools of aggrandizement is one reason he’s more accepted.
People who still think they or Bill Clinton deserves it first forget that the mere televised image of Obama meeting as an equal with heads of European states not comfortable with their African and Arab immigrants gives hope to young people in those countries that perhaps they too can succeed within established institutions despite their inherited outsider status.
Hope for peaceful change is the most important prerequisite for peace, not all the procedural actions that follow.
Despite the grumbling of the less successful, it is not luck or charisma that made Obama a symbol of possibility to the downtrodden. He worked to graduate from school, he worked to become a politician, and he worked to be elected president, and people know that he worked, that little was given to him except some opportunities to work.
If only it had been luck, some wouldn’t be so angry. But when men have worked as hard and not seen the same rewards, it’s difficult for them to see the differences lay elsewhere, not in following the rules they learned in childhood, but in the ability to adapt to changing situations.
And so, ever since Obama began winning delegates to the Democratic convention, we’ve watched the unedifying sight of men who haven’t done all they desire by the current rules, uncomfortable that the rules may have changed. Ideology has nothing to do with the sense of loss dramatized by John McCain, Liz Cheney, Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Glenn Beck and others who make their living as conservative or progressive commentators.
The mere volume of criticism should remind us the change arrived on Inauguration Day and we will either succeed because we deal with it or fail. Our society does not have to endure simply
because we live in it; it is no more an entitlement than anything else, and depends on us all recognizing the good and bad in our current situation and adapting.
Regrets not accepted.
In this case, entitlement doesn’t mean a person deserves something by some characteristic of his or her birth, but that if someone puts in time he or she deserves the reward. You pay for four years of college, you deserve a diploma even if you’ve learned nothing. Your daughter takes dance classes every Saturday, she deserves a solo turn in the Nutcracker even if she has no sense of movement.
Men like Jeremiah Wright, Roland Burris and Michael Steele, who’ve worked for years for modest rewards, are angry when they see someone younger do better. They don’t understand that his mere refusal to use their rhetoric and other tools of aggrandizement is one reason he’s more accepted.
People who still think they or Bill Clinton deserves it first forget that the mere televised image of Obama meeting as an equal with heads of European states not comfortable with their African and Arab immigrants gives hope to young people in those countries that perhaps they too can succeed within established institutions despite their inherited outsider status.
Hope for peaceful change is the most important prerequisite for peace, not all the procedural actions that follow.
Despite the grumbling of the less successful, it is not luck or charisma that made Obama a symbol of possibility to the downtrodden. He worked to graduate from school, he worked to become a politician, and he worked to be elected president, and people know that he worked, that little was given to him except some opportunities to work.
If only it had been luck, some wouldn’t be so angry. But when men have worked as hard and not seen the same rewards, it’s difficult for them to see the differences lay elsewhere, not in following the rules they learned in childhood, but in the ability to adapt to changing situations.
And so, ever since Obama began winning delegates to the Democratic convention, we’ve watched the unedifying sight of men who haven’t done all they desire by the current rules, uncomfortable that the rules may have changed. Ideology has nothing to do with the sense of loss dramatized by John McCain, Liz Cheney, Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Glenn Beck and others who make their living as conservative or progressive commentators.
The mere volume of criticism should remind us the change arrived on Inauguration Day and we will either succeed because we deal with it or fail. Our society does not have to endure simply
because we live in it; it is no more an entitlement than anything else, and depends on us all recognizing the good and bad in our current situation and adapting.
Regrets not accepted.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
A Tale of Two Drunks
Chrysler and General Motors are out of bankruptcy, but their still behaving like two drunks just out of rehab. The one is repeating to himself the list of things he was told he needed to do to stay sober; the other is already eyeing his old hidey holes wondering how soon he can shake his handlers and relax with his old buddies.
Alisa Priddle reports the last of the top managers will leave Chrysler by year’s end and the new CEO, Sergio Marchionne, has been testing younger men from the lower executive ranks. GM still has Fritz Henderson at the top, aided by 77-year-old Bob Lutz, rewarding the next in line.
Now Chrysler workers are telling reporters they’re shocked they’re expected to change. They’ve been told the only thing they can take to their workstation is water. What do they expect?Cigarettes, snacks, cell phones? Just recently, two planes collided over the Hudson while someone in the control tower was on the phone on private business.
They’re surprised that when a car comes down the line with a quality defect, they’re supposed to stop work until the source of the problem is identified. When I was in Detroit in the early 1980's and Toyota was taking away their markets, people were surprised the Japanese would actually stop the line.
Priddle says that when Americans adopted the Japanese concepts, they changed that principal: cars were identified with problems and taken aside to repair after they were completed. They didn’t understand, not stopping the line was the reason people no longer were buying their cars.
For non-Detroiters, not stopping the line goes back to a time when cost accountants calculated the cost per minute of a downed assembly line and everyone understood they would be fired if they were the ones who caused that expense. Those responsible for what’s now called the supply chain covered themselves by ordering excess parts, so there would always be spares when a problem was found. People were hired to deal with storage problems.
When surplus inventory failed, substitute parts were used. I had a friend who worked as a secretary in Ann Arbor in the late 1970's who had an Oldsmobile with Chevy parts. When her car didn’t work right, the dealer forced her to sign away her rights to complain in exchange for fixing the problem. When the car still wasn’t right and she realized she’d been tricked by the dealer, she vowed to never buy a GM car again.
It’s not that the Japanese didn’t understand the cost of stopping the line. However, they didn’t have the land to waste storing excess inventory, so concentrated on supplier quality. When they stop a line, they identify the person or supplier responsible for the root cause. Their goal is to hold the right person accountable, not punish the one who recognizes a problem.
Over at GM, they’ve been promoting an electric battery powered Chevy Volt that could get 230 miles to a gallon of gas as the solution to their problems in late 2010. Only, Business Week reports, they’re already planning to shift the engine from Chevy to Cadillac. Lutz insists they do it even though the Treasury Department’s telling him it’s a bad idea. In fact, he used the bankruptcy organization to remove his internal critics.
Now, the attempt to sell Opel to the Russians without the proprietary technology is in trouble, and GM is thinking maybe they can force the German government to let them keep control after all. They can return to their old ways of surviving their failures: sell more expensive cars like Cadillacs that cost the same to produce as the cheaper priced Chevies; then when that doesn’t work, cover up the losses in the American market with sales from Europe. How they can keep their emerging market open in Russia after insulting Putin over Opel is a question they consider trivial.
A few weeks back the new chairman of GM’s board announced he had met the head of the UAW and some workers and discovered there was no cultural problem to change. Ed Whitacre
doesn’t understand, the cultural problem has never been about the workers, it’s always been about the managers who train those workers to keep the line running at all costs and let them bring anything to the workstation in exchange for filing no grievances that might cause a stoppage.
Meantime, Toyota recognizes it was wooed by GM in the 1980's and may have overindulged a few times, but not so often that it became addicted and changed its biochemistry. The same day Whitacre said there was no culture problem, Akio Toyoda was in Traverse City telling analysts we are "at a point where we must re-invent the automobile" and his company has to return to its original goal of providing affordable, quality vehicles.
Culture change takes time, and doesn’t always follow from severe crisis. Marchionne is seeing the differences at Fiat where no plant has yet achieved all the goals he set, and only three are close. At Chrysler, it’s a Mexican plant that seems to be leading the conversion, followed by one in Brampton, Ontario. The Americans, at all levels, are still having a hard time understanding, when a drunk changes his habits, life changes for the enablers in the family and the local liquor dealers. Change does mean them.
It’s too soon to know the results of government intervention, but at the moment, when both are competing with a sober Toyota, it seems Chrysler is still trying to stay dry, and GM is reminding us they really haven’t proven they have the will to change.
Notes:
Howes, Daniel. "Insiders at New GM Same as They Ever Were," The Detroit News, 24 July 2009.
Priddle, Alisa. "Fiat Takes Aim at Waste in Chrysler Plant Overhauls," The Detroit News, 24 August 2009.
_____. "Jim Press' Departure from Chrysler Will Mark End of Old Regime," The Detroit News, 22 August 2009.
Snell, Robert. "Whitacre: General Motors Will Roll out New Models Early," The Detroit News, 5 August 2009.
Tierney, Christine. "GM Board Sends Chief Opel Negotiator Back to Germany," The Detroit News, 25 August 2009.
_____. "Toyota President: We must Return to Core Principles," The Detroit News, 5 August 2009.
Welch, David. "At GM, Dreams of an Electric Cadillac," Business Week, 21 August 21, 2009.
Alisa Priddle reports the last of the top managers will leave Chrysler by year’s end and the new CEO, Sergio Marchionne, has been testing younger men from the lower executive ranks. GM still has Fritz Henderson at the top, aided by 77-year-old Bob Lutz, rewarding the next in line.
Now Chrysler workers are telling reporters they’re shocked they’re expected to change. They’ve been told the only thing they can take to their workstation is water. What do they expect?Cigarettes, snacks, cell phones? Just recently, two planes collided over the Hudson while someone in the control tower was on the phone on private business.
They’re surprised that when a car comes down the line with a quality defect, they’re supposed to stop work until the source of the problem is identified. When I was in Detroit in the early 1980's and Toyota was taking away their markets, people were surprised the Japanese would actually stop the line.
Priddle says that when Americans adopted the Japanese concepts, they changed that principal: cars were identified with problems and taken aside to repair after they were completed. They didn’t understand, not stopping the line was the reason people no longer were buying their cars.
For non-Detroiters, not stopping the line goes back to a time when cost accountants calculated the cost per minute of a downed assembly line and everyone understood they would be fired if they were the ones who caused that expense. Those responsible for what’s now called the supply chain covered themselves by ordering excess parts, so there would always be spares when a problem was found. People were hired to deal with storage problems.
When surplus inventory failed, substitute parts were used. I had a friend who worked as a secretary in Ann Arbor in the late 1970's who had an Oldsmobile with Chevy parts. When her car didn’t work right, the dealer forced her to sign away her rights to complain in exchange for fixing the problem. When the car still wasn’t right and she realized she’d been tricked by the dealer, she vowed to never buy a GM car again.
It’s not that the Japanese didn’t understand the cost of stopping the line. However, they didn’t have the land to waste storing excess inventory, so concentrated on supplier quality. When they stop a line, they identify the person or supplier responsible for the root cause. Their goal is to hold the right person accountable, not punish the one who recognizes a problem.
Over at GM, they’ve been promoting an electric battery powered Chevy Volt that could get 230 miles to a gallon of gas as the solution to their problems in late 2010. Only, Business Week reports, they’re already planning to shift the engine from Chevy to Cadillac. Lutz insists they do it even though the Treasury Department’s telling him it’s a bad idea. In fact, he used the bankruptcy organization to remove his internal critics.
Now, the attempt to sell Opel to the Russians without the proprietary technology is in trouble, and GM is thinking maybe they can force the German government to let them keep control after all. They can return to their old ways of surviving their failures: sell more expensive cars like Cadillacs that cost the same to produce as the cheaper priced Chevies; then when that doesn’t work, cover up the losses in the American market with sales from Europe. How they can keep their emerging market open in Russia after insulting Putin over Opel is a question they consider trivial.
A few weeks back the new chairman of GM’s board announced he had met the head of the UAW and some workers and discovered there was no cultural problem to change. Ed Whitacre
doesn’t understand, the cultural problem has never been about the workers, it’s always been about the managers who train those workers to keep the line running at all costs and let them bring anything to the workstation in exchange for filing no grievances that might cause a stoppage.
Meantime, Toyota recognizes it was wooed by GM in the 1980's and may have overindulged a few times, but not so often that it became addicted and changed its biochemistry. The same day Whitacre said there was no culture problem, Akio Toyoda was in Traverse City telling analysts we are "at a point where we must re-invent the automobile" and his company has to return to its original goal of providing affordable, quality vehicles.
Culture change takes time, and doesn’t always follow from severe crisis. Marchionne is seeing the differences at Fiat where no plant has yet achieved all the goals he set, and only three are close. At Chrysler, it’s a Mexican plant that seems to be leading the conversion, followed by one in Brampton, Ontario. The Americans, at all levels, are still having a hard time understanding, when a drunk changes his habits, life changes for the enablers in the family and the local liquor dealers. Change does mean them.
It’s too soon to know the results of government intervention, but at the moment, when both are competing with a sober Toyota, it seems Chrysler is still trying to stay dry, and GM is reminding us they really haven’t proven they have the will to change.
Notes:
Howes, Daniel. "Insiders at New GM Same as They Ever Were," The Detroit News, 24 July 2009.
Priddle, Alisa. "Fiat Takes Aim at Waste in Chrysler Plant Overhauls," The Detroit News, 24 August 2009.
_____. "Jim Press' Departure from Chrysler Will Mark End of Old Regime," The Detroit News, 22 August 2009.
Snell, Robert. "Whitacre: General Motors Will Roll out New Models Early," The Detroit News, 5 August 2009.
Tierney, Christine. "GM Board Sends Chief Opel Negotiator Back to Germany," The Detroit News, 25 August 2009.
_____. "Toyota President: We must Return to Core Principles," The Detroit News, 5 August 2009.
Welch, David. "At GM, Dreams of an Electric Cadillac," Business Week, 21 August 21, 2009.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Robert MacNamara - Part 1
Robert MacNamara, former head of Ford Motor, died July 6th, the same day the Detroit papers reported a judge in New York had agreed to General Motor’s accelerated bankruptcy plan.
The juxtaposition of the two stories reminded me of the last time the two were news. On July 23, 1967, a vice squad team raided the after-hours United Community League for Civic Action in Detroit and discovered it filled with people celebrating the return of two men from Viet Nam. They arrested 82, and five days of raw, undefined anger ensued.
George Romney, retired head of American Motors, was Michigan’s governor and he called in the National Guard. The next day, Lyndon Johnson sent army paratroopers from forces under the control of then Secretary of Defense MacNamara.
At the time, racism was identified as the underlying cause, and there was plenty of evidence to support that conclusion. However, I’ve always thought two other trends crossed that night at the corner of Twelfth and Clairmount.
The United States had always been a manufacturing country without enough labor. Engineers looked for ways to increase productivity with better machine tools, at the same time medicine made it possible for men to retire later. The two forces meant that, not only was the economy not producing as many new jobs, but it was opening existing opportunities at a slower rate.
At the same time corporations continued their efforts to reduce labor, baby boomers began entering the job market. The first wave, those born in 1944 and 1945 would have started looking for those shrinking jobs around 1962. If all the economy had to deal with was the miracle child born towards the end of the war, it might eventually have been able to absorb the surge.
But, couples didn’t stop with one or two children. In my neighborhood, probably a third of families had three and four. That increase would have been hitting the employment offices by 1967. Whenever scarcity is temporarily replaced with a surplus, men feel free to exercise secondary reasons in hiring. Latent bigotry resurfaced when men jockied for the remaining jobs.
The draft was one factor that delayed an awareness of the changing nature of the labor market. At that time, all young men were required to register, and many volunteered for two years in peace-time Germany or Korea. Those who were returning in July, 1967, were the ones who had enlisted just after Johnson had officially started the Viet Nam war escalation on January 31,
1965, but before the nature of that change was known. By 1967, opposition to MacNamara’s draft was increasing, and many were criticizing college deferments as unfair taxes on the poor.
We’ve spent a great deal of time and energy since 1967 trying to deal with problems of prejudice and manning the military, but no time wondering how a nation can survive with more people than it can employ. Even now, some still think that because General Motors and the other auto makers have eliminated so many union jobs, all they have to do is sell more cars, and the drag on the economy will disappear. They still refuse to recognize that going from a world of labor scarcity to one of superfluous people is a major cultural change.
The juxtaposition of the two stories reminded me of the last time the two were news. On July 23, 1967, a vice squad team raided the after-hours United Community League for Civic Action in Detroit and discovered it filled with people celebrating the return of two men from Viet Nam. They arrested 82, and five days of raw, undefined anger ensued.
George Romney, retired head of American Motors, was Michigan’s governor and he called in the National Guard. The next day, Lyndon Johnson sent army paratroopers from forces under the control of then Secretary of Defense MacNamara.
At the time, racism was identified as the underlying cause, and there was plenty of evidence to support that conclusion. However, I’ve always thought two other trends crossed that night at the corner of Twelfth and Clairmount.
The United States had always been a manufacturing country without enough labor. Engineers looked for ways to increase productivity with better machine tools, at the same time medicine made it possible for men to retire later. The two forces meant that, not only was the economy not producing as many new jobs, but it was opening existing opportunities at a slower rate.
At the same time corporations continued their efforts to reduce labor, baby boomers began entering the job market. The first wave, those born in 1944 and 1945 would have started looking for those shrinking jobs around 1962. If all the economy had to deal with was the miracle child born towards the end of the war, it might eventually have been able to absorb the surge.
But, couples didn’t stop with one or two children. In my neighborhood, probably a third of families had three and four. That increase would have been hitting the employment offices by 1967. Whenever scarcity is temporarily replaced with a surplus, men feel free to exercise secondary reasons in hiring. Latent bigotry resurfaced when men jockied for the remaining jobs.
The draft was one factor that delayed an awareness of the changing nature of the labor market. At that time, all young men were required to register, and many volunteered for two years in peace-time Germany or Korea. Those who were returning in July, 1967, were the ones who had enlisted just after Johnson had officially started the Viet Nam war escalation on January 31,
1965, but before the nature of that change was known. By 1967, opposition to MacNamara’s draft was increasing, and many were criticizing college deferments as unfair taxes on the poor.
We’ve spent a great deal of time and energy since 1967 trying to deal with problems of prejudice and manning the military, but no time wondering how a nation can survive with more people than it can employ. Even now, some still think that because General Motors and the other auto makers have eliminated so many union jobs, all they have to do is sell more cars, and the drag on the economy will disappear. They still refuse to recognize that going from a world of labor scarcity to one of superfluous people is a major cultural change.
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