Rationing

Oregon is vigilantly pursuing a controversial experiment intended to extend health care to all of its poor, and which entails rationing health care services for impoverished state residents who are eligible for Medicaid. Before Oregon can implement its contentious Medicaid rationing experiment, however, it must obtain waivers of existing federal Medicaid rules notably including the usual requirement that all eligible women and children are entitled to coverage for necessary physician and hospital services.

Unified theory of Obamaism, final installment: In the service of his ultimate mission - the leveling of social inequalities - President Obama offers a tripartite social-democratic agenda: nationalized health care, federalized education (ultimately guaranteed through college), and a cash-cow carbon tax (or its equivalent) to subsidize the other two. Problem is, the math doesn't add up. Not even a carbon tax would pay for Obama's vastly expanded welfare state. Nor will Midwest Democrats stand for a tax that would devastate their already crumbling region.

Americans put up with sugar rationing in World War II. The small sacrifice made them feel patriotic. Americans put up with coffee rationing. Giving up a second cup for the war effort wasn't all that hard. Though they grumbled and cheated a bit, Americans even put up with tire and gasoline rationing. But they most definitely did not put up with meat rationing. No way. Fifty years ago today, on March 26, 1943, Philadelphia panicked at the mere prospect of meat rationing, set to begin three days hence.

Red stamps were for meat, if you could find it, blue were for vegatables, fruits and beans. That was kitchen common sense in 1942, when the U.S. Office of Price Administration froze certain prices and introduced the nation's homemakers to food rationing. World War II brought shortages of gasoline, rubber, and much more. From then on the nation's coffee and sugar would go to the military first and civilians second. War ration coupons and later tokens in 1944 became the cook's currency as women, who were in the majority of home kitchens then, learned to substitute and stretch.

THE WHOLE idea of Vincent Fumo going to jail is ridiculous. He's a great man who's done many good things for this state, and he made a mistake. There's a reason no one noticed the money he took - all the other good things he was doing in the Senate. If anyone thinks Fumo is an example of corrupt politics, they need to look into a lot of politicians in Philadelphia. Nick DiDonato, Philadelphia No rationing on health care As health-care restructuring is debated, I'm very concerned at the real possibility of rationing.

Under an alternative water-supply plan submitted to the state last week, in a couple of years borough residents could be drinking water from Camden. But local officials doubt the plan will be needed, even though the borough's water supply will be rationed starting in September 1995. The state Department of Environmental Protection and Energy last month placed limits on the amount of water that will be drawn at that time from the diminishing Potomac-Raritan-Magothy Aquifer, which stretches beneath Burlington, Camden and Gloucester Counties.

Georgie Perkins can stand to look at it for only so long - then she groans, turns and stomps into the house, stopping for one last backward glance. "I'm not kidding when I tell you this lawn was beautiful. I was out here every week, mowing and edging, mowing and edging. People going by would stop - they would actually stop and comment on how beautiful it was," she said, standing in the doorway of a well-appointed, brown and beige stucco home that, in the fifth year of California's drought, now has grass to match.

The Washington Township Municipal Utilities Authority (MUA) unanimously imposed a residential building ban last night that would last until the township's water system could draw on a new well scheduled to open in June. The moratorium, which was championed by authority member and Councilman- elect John Rogale, will not affect any commercial development requests for water hookups or any residential developments that have already been approved. Rogale said he hoped the ban would give both the authority and the overcrowded school system time to catch up with the needs of the rapidly developing township.

On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Days later, Germany declared war on the United States. America was now fully involved in the Second World War. And, as it did nationwide, that involvement brought about rapid changes on the home front in this region. Security became a top priority. Several days after the declaration of war, a detachment from the First Regiment, Pennsylvania Defense Corps, was sent to Bridgeport to guard bridges and industries along the Schuylkill, according to an account in the 1983 history, Montgomery County: The Second Hundred Years.

EVERYONE - even the National Rifle Association - agrees with this: We must keep guns out of the wrong hands. The question is how. The single best way - better than banning specific weapons - are universal, computerized background checks. They are designed to keep guns out of the wrong hands, mainly meaning people with a criminal past (or present, as in the case of those with protection-from-abuse orders against them), the mentally ill, those too young to legally own a gun and those on terrorist lists.

Health Care for Some Rights and Rationing in the United States Since 1930 By Beatrix Hoffman University of Chicago Press. 336 pp. $30 Reviewed by Paul Jablow   This much we know: The United States spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation. The outcomes are, for the most part, worse. The questions this raises are "How did we get there?" and "Where do we go from here?" Beatrix Hoffman, a history professor at Northern Illinois University, tells us something about the first and very little about the second.

NEW YORK - A gasoline shortage caused by Superstorm Sandy forced 1970s-era rationing on New Yorkers, adding a fuel-gauge obsession to their frayed nerves and dwindling patience. "I take passenger, I look at gas. I take another passenger, I look at gas," New York City taxi driver Shi Shir K. Roy said Friday. "Tension all the time. " Though rationing that allowed private motorists to fill up only every other day seemed to help with gas lines, it didn't answer motorists' questions about why they had been waiting for days in hours-long lines to fuel up. The confusion led some, like Angel Ventura, to panic.

WASHINGTON - House Republicans resurrected the specter of Medicare rationing Thursday in an election-year vote to repeal cost controls in President Obama's health-care overhaul. In the GOP crosshairs is a board that would be empowered to force cuts to drug companies, insurers, and other service providers if Medicare spending balloons. A Republican plan announced this week, laying down a dividing line between the parties, also would limit Medicare cost increases, but it would rely on competition among private insurance plans.

Several years ago, before I was married and had children of my own, my parents, brother, and I were flying together. I don't remember the location, but I clearly remember the shameful exclamations of fear regarding what I do recognize as a commonplace and - yes - safe form of travel. There were three angsty cowards among us. But my mother, never one to be afraid for stupid reasons, and therefore the sole member of our family who has no qualms about taking to the skies, flipped calmly through a magazine and looked at the rest of us with semi-disdain.

Help children avoid smoking habit After losing my father to lung cancer at a young age, I am fully aware of the devastating impact that premature death from smoking for years can have on a family. I, along with millions of others who have been impacted by the toll tobacco has caused, had long awaited the historic move President Obama made in signing the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. It is imperative that we end the tobacco epidemic - and a good place to start is by protecting our children and preventing them from trying that first cigarette.

THE WHOLE idea of Vincent Fumo going to jail is ridiculous. He's a great man who's done many good things for this state, and he made a mistake. There's a reason no one noticed the money he took - all the other good things he was doing in the Senate. If anyone thinks Fumo is an example of corrupt politics, they need to look into a lot of politicians in Philadelphia. Nick DiDonato, Philadelphia No rationing on health care As health-care restructuring is debated, I'm very concerned at the real possibility of rationing.

President Obama's speech at Cairo University last week constituted the most direct public diplomatic outreach to the Muslim world in U.S. history. As such, Obama should have focused squarely on the one issue that Muslim publics most directly control: the widespread acceptance, if not embrace, of violent extremism. In this respect, the president failed tremendously. To be sure, Obama spoke in no uncertain terms about the evils of violence, calling it contrary to Quranic teachings that decry the killing of innocents.

Unified theory of Obamaism, final installment: In the service of his ultimate mission - the leveling of social inequalities - President Obama offers a tripartite social-democratic agenda: nationalized health care, federalized education (ultimately guaranteed through college), and a cash-cow carbon tax (or its equivalent) to subsidize the other two. Problem is, the math doesn't add up. Not even a carbon tax would pay for Obama's vastly expanded welfare state. Nor will Midwest Democrats stand for a tax that would devastate their already crumbling region.