In an outrageous example of government failure, the town of Tracy, CA has decided to start charging residents to use 911 for medical emergencies. They can choose to pay a $48 a year “subscription” or pay $300 per call. If you’re an out-of-state resident dialing 911 for a medical emergency, then you get charged $400. Unbelievable:
This is going to do nothing except discourage people to call 911, which is a very bad thing. Apparently, that’s what Tracy officials want — if there’s not a fire, a burglary, or a car wreck, then don’t bother authorities. Suck it up and get to the hospital on your own!
Of course, driving yourself or someone else to the hospital when there is a serious medical emergency is an extremely bad idea. Ambulances and EMTs are vital for a reason. They can administer IVs or — in a worst-case scenario — use a defibrillator. EMTs and paramedics are trained to get you to the hospital alive. You can’t do any of that in your minivan or your SUV.
What’s so outrageous about this is that this is what your taxes are supposed to pay for. Of course, there has to be some government official saying that they just have to charge this money or else funding from mysterious, unnamed programs will be cut. And it’s always these vital programs that get cut: police, fire, emergency services. Cutting back on welfare? Absolutely out of the question. You would think that city taxes would first and foremost go to emergency services, but clearly in Tracy, that isn’t the case. So that makes me wonder: what are their first priorities with tax dollars?
Also, what will happen if someone can’t pay for their $300 911 phone call and they have to call again? Will emergency services just not show up? And to hear a city council member shrugging it off, saying, “What is someone’s life worth?”, sent chills up my spine. Is the lesson basically that you have to decide whether or not to call 911 for Grandma, and pay $300, or risk letting Grandma die? Apparently, the attitude of the Tracy city council is that if you aren’t willing to pay the exorbitant fee to have emergency services come and treat you, then your life must not be worth that much to you.
The other problem with this is that there are plenty of residents who might stop being good Samaritans. Facts tend to get garbled as they get passed around, and people might incorrectly think that if they report that their neighbor’s house is on fire, they’ll get charged $300… and so they don’t make the call. Even if it is a medical emergency — let’s say you’re sitting in the park and have a heart attack — and a stranger has a cell phone, they might decide against calling 911.
Perhaps its time to start privatizing emergency services.
Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!
Quite an explosive leak! I wonder how this will affect things? It is certainly a thuggish and dangerous thing for Obama to play with National Security over this craptacular idea of socialized medicine. Quite a desperate move.
According to a Senate aide, the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list if Nelson doesn’t fall into line.
Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in Southeastern Nebraska. As our source put it, this is a “naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson’s vote.” They are “threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?” asked the Senate staffer.
Indeed, Offutt is the headquarters for US Strategic Command, the successor to Strategic Air Command, and not by accident. STRATCOM was located in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Its closure would be a massive blow to the economy of the state of Nebraska, but it would also be another example of this administration playing politics with our national security.
So much for the idea of Obama trying to save jobs and improve the economy!
Without Nelson’s vote, since all Republicans are still in line to oppose this, Reid is still left with 59 votes. So, some arm twisting is taking place. Nelson doesn’t want this bill to fund abortions so he is now being threatened, and national security along with him. How shameful this would be if Democrats felt shame.
The Obama administration has little left to use for leverage. Why not national security? After all, if we’re going to bring terrorists into Illinois, what does it matter if we put the US Strategic Command on wheels for a few years?
Over the last few months we’ve talked about several instances of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) committing vote fraud in elections for in-home healthcare workers to chose a union. We have also reported on the shaky UHW election in Dec. of 2008. (Here, here, and here) Even with those instances extant we have more SEIU vote fraud to report.
The SEIU is still perpetrating fraudulent elections, intimidating union voters, and trying to strong-arm members into accepting SEIU dominance despite what they may want. Recently the Wall Street Journal had another story detailing the SEIU’s un-democratic actions.
Among other things, the Journal is reporting that SEIU officials working with its sister union, California’s UHW, have been threatening deportation to Hispanic union members that were considering a vote for a new union going by the name National Union of Health Workers (NUHW).
The NUHW is a new union made up of disgruntled members of the UHW that quit to form a new union. These new union folks cite illicit actions meant to force them to accept absorption by the SEIU last year as the reason for starting the new union. And since the birth of the NUHW a fight has been brewing as the SEIU and the new NUHW vie to take each other’s membership in new voting all across California. The NUHW has succeeded in calling “decertification” votes to oust the SEIU out of the healthcare industry and an epic battle has ensued between these unions. It is a battle that the SEIU has been waging with the dirtiest of tricks.
One thing that the SEIU has brought to this fight is a deep pocketbook.
The Journal reports that the, “SEIU shipped in 950 or so staff and spent an estimated $10 million on mailings, advertising, phone banks, door-to-door canvassing and the like.” This is the sort of big money effort that the young NUHW cannot hope to match.
The Journal also reports on some of the intimidation that SEIU operatives were charged to carry out. The Journal found an operative for the SEIU named Carols Martinez who has decided to speak out on what the SEIU made him do to cajole Spanish speaking union members into voting the SEIU’s way.
Speaking in an interview over a sandwich at a hotel in the Bay Area late last month, Mr. Martinez says he was instructed by superiors to tell the workers that if they voted against the SEIU, they could lose their medical benefits, see their green cards or citizenship revoked and possibly be deported. He says he and other staffers were also told to pressure voters to spoil ballots that had been filled out for the NUHW. In other instances he filled ballots out for them. He says he even took some to the post office, as did other SEIU campaign workers.
…Mr. Martinez says he raised his concerns directly with Mr. Regan and other superiors. He also says he tried to submit a complaint with two state agencies but was ignored. He then repeated these charges under oath before an NUHW lawyer. Six other Fresno workers confirmed parts of his account in affidavits. For example, Adriana Gomez, a home-care worker, said that Mr. Martinez “took my ballot and made a mark for the SEIU team.”
The NUHW has now filed complaints against the heavy-handed tactics employed by the SEIU.
I cannot stress enough that this is the brain child of SEIU president Andy Stern. Stern is well known for his somewhat megalomaniac pretensions of becoming the leader of all unions not just that of the SEIU. He envisions a personal empire of unions so powerful that it also controls the federal government.
We can also see that this man has an inordinate amount of influence with President Barack Obama, evidence of which is the fact that Stern has been the most frequent visitor to the White House offering his consultation. It is assured that Obama has signed onto Stern’s plans and has placed the powers of the federal government at Stern’s disposal.
Of course, the shame of it is is that we can see that Stern will do anything to gain power despite how illicit, undemocratic, or anti-American it is. That he is so close to President Obama certainly makes one fear that the President himself is a party to Stern’s antics.
As each month passes we see more and more proof of the unprincipled man that SEIU President Andy Stern is. And we see that this is the sort of person that Obama “pals around with,” if you will.
It’s called “pink sheeting,” a practice employed by union bosses to bully their membership to vote the “right” way. The practice consists of forcing employees to reveal deeply personal information about themselves — such as abusive relationships, addictions, or legal trouble — so that these items can be used against the employees at a later date to elicit cooperative behavior.
Union members are denouncing the practice of pink sheeting while union chiefs, particularly those of the hotel employees union UNITE HERE, are either denying that they use the method or saying that the practice has been stopped.
More than a dozen organizers said in interviews that they had often been pressured to detail such personal anguish — sometimes under the threat of dismissal from their union positions — and that their supervisors later used the information to press them to comply with their orders.
Naturally, UNITE HERE officials claim this practice doesn’t happen.
John W. Wilhelm, Unite Here’s president, condemned the tactics. “I have zero tolerance for inappropriate intrusions into people’s private and personal lives,” he said. “I have not personally used these techniques, and I have taken a very strong stand against them.”
One of the excuses union leaders have given for the emergence of this controversy is interesting, too. It reveals another long-standing “practice” of sorts going on behind the scenes in uiniondom of late. Wilhelm claims that this whole thing is but a campaign perpetrated by rival union the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) to discredit UNITE HERE.
This is a piece with the sort of goon tactics that SEIU President Andy Stern has been employing all across the country. Stern has been methodically attempting to destroy every smaller union in order to absorb them into one mega-union and he doesn’t care at all how it gets done.
In California he’s hired intimidation squads to force in-home healthcare workers to vote for the SEIU (here and here), not to mention the underhanded tactics he’s employed to destroy the NUHW healthcare workers union in the Golden State. An SEIU thug recently tried to intimidate a Boy Scout in Pennsylvania. The SEIU tried to force private citizens in Illinois into a union without their consent… and these are only the recent outrages perpetrated by Stern’s union thug squads at the SEIU.
Still, despite UNITE HERE President Wilhelm’s protestations, multiple members of his own union, and folks in supervisory positions to boot, have attested to the pink sheeting practice.
In an open letter released in October, four hotel workers attested to the practice saying, “This practice is a cynical and manipulative system of control. It is a tactic designed to keep those involved in the union’s work from straying from the directives of the union leadership.”
This all testifies to the fact that unions are not the free associative organizations that they are painted as. It shows that coercion, even violence is perpetrated by union chiefs to keep employees in line. Unions are essentially anti-American in practice and this is just one more example of that truth.
It’s called “pink sheeting,” a practice employed by union bosses to bully their membership to vote the “right” way. The practice consists of forcing employees to reveal deeply personal information about themselves — such as abusive relationships, addictions, or legal trouble — so that these items can be used against the employees at a later date to elicit cooperative behavior.