Daylight saving time, conflicting rights, Medicaid expansion

Does anyone else feel as I do about daylight saving time going into effect in early March? I would rather see some light earlier in the morning until April because it is rarely warm enough to enjoy the outdoors in the evening in March.

The right should get rights right.

We talk about rights a lot. We need to agree on what they are. None of them is absolute.

Citizen A’s right to raise roosters interferes with Citizen B’s right to get a good night’s sleep. A paranoid schizophrenic’s right to own an Uzi interferes with Citizen C’s rights to breathe.

And then society’s right to put people in jail interferes with those people’s right to liberty as society’s right to put people to death interferes with people’s right to life.

Unfortunately, we no longer have the luxury of the Daniel Boone version of rights, namely, just moving to the next mountain as soon as one sees a new neighbor’s smoke rising from the last peak.

When you hear someone go on about rights without saying something about responsibilities, tune him out.

It’s not really surprising that our legislators refuse to seriously consider the possibility of expanding Medicaid. Why would they want to give almost 300,000 more Missourians health care at very little cost to the state?

Why would they want to accept billions of dollars from the federal government when we could just continue paying money to the federal government and watching our tax dollars go to other states instead of helping vulnerable Missourians?

I don’t know whether anyone has checked the leading indicators lately, but the economy is doing fantastic. We certainly don’t need the 24,000 new jobs that Medicaid expansion would create.

And who needs rural hospitals anyway?

With Missouri not passing expansion, almost half the rural hospitals in our state could be hurt because of cuts in federal funding. I’m pretty sure farmers don’t get sick, so I’m not too worried about it.

We should be pretty content with the current system, where all of us pay higher premiums to pay for the uninsureds’ costly and inefficient visits to the emergency room.

As long as our legislators keep focusing on important things, like introducing bills designed to allow religious bigotry, we should be OK.

Trying to understand health care economics makes my head hurt.

Cancer patients pay higher co-pays and deductibles if they take their chemotherapy in pill form rather than by intravenous infusion. IV chemo must be administered by a qualified health care professional in a health care facility that charges facility usage fees on top of it all.

This is clearly a more expensive treatment regimen compared with taking a pill in the convenience of one’s home.

Insurance companies need to explain why they charge higher fees for pill-based chemotherapy. It seemingly defies logic and confuses the public that struggles to understand the workings of the health care delivery system.

Our mayor has been trying to find ways to decrease the incidence of crime and murder in Kansas City.

If the shocking and surprising violence is taken out of the media, it would help reduce the number of images that display murder and horror to unsuspecting viewers.

I have been seeing more and more trailers of upcoming shows that have such violence, often involving guns or explosions. They are horrifying images and mayhem that our children and others who may not be in a stable state of mind can certainly be influenced by.

These are not images that can be controlled. They are surprisingly and shockingly before us.

The only way to prevent their being seen is to keep the TV or games turned off. This is a form of censorship.

I am not advocating censorship, only the control of violent images that are not what parents want their children subjected to. Cigarette smoking has successfully been taken out of TV and movies.

Certainly, we can get regulations about violence in place for the good of the viewing audience. Our children are being desensitized by what they are seeing.

Just ask again, “Is it good for the children?”

For three years, Kansas City’s council, led by Mayor Sly James, has taken off the shelf a transit initiative (put there by 4,000 voters), effectively dictating what the people can and cannot decide themselves.

Even the Missouri Supreme Court’s 7-0 decision that the initiative is constitutional is not deterring this government from continuing to bully the initiative into legal oblivion — this time over a bogus technicality.

As we await a fourth court hearing to put the initiative back on the shelf, here are disturbing concerns for both the court of law and court of public opinion:

• Can this government thwart an initiative vote, even though its own charter (approved by its own people) does not accede it that right?

• Is justice served if this government can litigate an initiative until its purpose becomes moot?

• Is it fair this government can propose restricted elections for its insider streetcar plan while holding off a citywide election on a competing grassroots light-rail initiative?

• Does Missouri case law that says, “Initiatives shall be liberally construed to effectuate their purpose,” mean anything to anybody?

It’s no wonder so many people have lost so much faith in Kansas City’s government.

I continue to be amazed that the discussion of fossil resources does not appear to include whether a tipping point exists and what it may look like. I believe all thinking people would agree that fossil resources have a finite level of supply and that extreme levels of contamination can/will be reached unless a workable abatement is achieved.

Along with all the biased arguments that are put forward, shouldn’t a point of no return be part of an informed discussion? It would appear to me that we are hustling toward that tipping point while all along ignoring the harsher question.

I’m reminded of the adage “when you’re up to your (hips) in alligators, it does no good to recall that you intended to drain the swamp.” Battleships and carriers cannot be turned abruptly, only in stages.

It appears to me that we are most certainly running out of stages.

Whatever happened to accountability in government?

Let’s consider for a moment Solyndra, Fast and Furious, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service scandals, the Benghazi tragedy and lying to the American people regarding Obamacare.

President Richard Nixon was forced to resign for lying in an attempt to cover up the Watergate incident that he didn’t initiate, and yet we have a rogue president who considers himself above the law and the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect and has his fingerprints all over the above-mentioned scandals and just continues to campaign himself out of any accountability.

Am I the only person who sees something wrong with this? Surely, all citizens of this country can’t be in a state of denial.

Maybe it’s true that the president was re-elected by a mass of ignorant voters as is commonly believed.

Hy-Vee’s television commercial with a lady using a cellphone to capture her gas purchase receipt is dangerous. At every gas pump I’ve used, there is a notice posted stating not to use a cellphone while pumping gas.

This is an unsafe act at best. Whoever thought this commercial was a good idea is mistaken.

This story was originally published March 25, 2014 at 5:31 PM with the headline "Daylight saving time, conflicting rights, Medicaid expansion."