Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 109, No. 151, Ed. 1 Monday, December 31, 2012 Page: 4 of 16
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4A
Monday, December 31,2012
OPINION
Denton Record-Chronicle
Denton Record-Chronicle
Published by Denton Publishing Co.,
a subsidiary of A.H. Belo Corporation
MEDIA COMPANY
Founded from weekly newspapers,
the Denton Chronicle, established in 1882,
and the Denton Record, established 1897.
Published daily as the Denton
Record-Chronicle since Aug. 3,1903.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Bill Patterson
Publisher and CEO
Dawn Cobb
Managing Editor
Matthew Zabel
City Editor
Les Cockrell
Region Editor
Mark Finley
News Editor
PAST PUBLISHERS
William C. “Will” Edwards
1903-1927
Robert J. “Bob” Edwards
1927-1945
Riley Cross
1945-1970
Vivian Cross
1970-1986
Fred Patterson
1986-1999
Editorials published in the Denton Record-Chronicle
are determined by the editorial board.
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Editorial
Neighborhoods
stay connected
Neighborhoods are the fabric of our communities.
Many of us live in neighborhoods in and around Denton
where we raise our children, live our lives and find
respite from the bustling world around us.
The neighborhoods are part of our identities — the
places we choose to live. And, in that, the neighborhood
becomes us.
In the past two years, we’ve looked at several of
Denton’s neighborhoods to find out how they started,
what issues are most important to those who live in
them and what makes them unique.
Every neighborhood has its good and bad points — in
some, neighbors keep to themselves, while in others,
neighbors meet annually for holiday get-togethers.
Some wrestle with homeowners’ association rules,
some surround nearby schools with collective support.
A few even sport their own Facebook pages, creating a
“go-to” place for everyone to keep in touch amid lives
that become increasingly hectic.
The series shines a spotlight on the many different
segments of Denton, one that we will continue in the
years to come, and one that we plan to expand to other
surrounding communities.
But what we also hope to do is to start the conversa-
tions that are important to each neighborhood and to
spread the news of how these same neighborhoods sup-
port their residents, seek solutions to issues, plan for the
future and more.
It is part of the new era we find ourselves in — an era
where we are looking for more connections whether it is
online or in print.
In fact, it’s not much unlike how neighborhoods con-
nected in the early 1900s.
Looking back in time, it was not uncommon to read
the newspaper to find out about the special events fellow
residents were planning or about the exciting trip over-
seas a family took or even about the local fundraiser for
someone in need.
That community connection is part of what this series
is all about, only it is just the beginning. In 2013 — just
24 hours from now — we’ll begin planning more ways to
stay connected.
The reason is simple. Without our neighborhoods,
without you, Denton and the surrounding communities
would not be what they are today or will become.
So let’s stay connected.
This day in history: December 31
Today is Monday, Dec. 31,
the 366th and final day of
2012.
On Dec. 31,1862, President
Abraham Lincoln signed an
enabling act paving the way for
Virginia’s western counties to
become the state of West Vir-
ginia, which took place in June
1863.
In 1759, Arthur Guinness
founded his famous brewery at
St. James’s Gate in Dublin.
In 1775, during the Revo-
lutionary War, the British
repulsed an attack by Con-
tinental Army generals Richard
Montgomery and Benedict
Arnold at Quebec; Montgom-
ery was killed.
In 1879, Thomas Edison
first publicly demonstrated his
electric incandescent light in
Menlo Park, N. J.
In 1909, the Manhattan
Bridge, spanning the East
River between Manhattan and
Brooklyn, was officially opened
to vehicular traffic.
In 1946, President Harry S.
Truman officially proclaimed
the end of hostilities in World
Warll.
In 1951, the Marshall Plan
expired after distributing more
than $12 billion in foreign aid.
In 1969, Joseph A. Yablon-
ski, an unsuccessful candidate
for the presidency of the United
Mine Workers of America, was
shot to death with his wife and
daughter in their Clarksville,
Pa., home by hitmen acting at
the orders of UMWA president
Tony Boyle.
In 1972, Major League base-
ball player Roberto Clemente,
38, was killed when a plane
he’d chartered and was travel-
ing on to bring relief supplies to
earthquake-devastated Nicar-
agua crashed shortly after take-
off from Puerto Rico.
In 1985, singer Rick Nelson,
45, and six other people were
killed when fire broke out
aboard a DC-3 that was taking
the group to a New Year’s Eve
performance in Dallas.
In 1986, 97 people were
killed when fire broke out in
the Dupont Plaza Hotel in San
Juan, Puerto Rico. (Three hotel
workers later pleaded guilty in
connection with the blaze.)
In 1987, Robert Mugabe,
prime minister of Zimbabwe,
was sworn in as the country’s
first executive president.
— The Associated Press
Quality can save money
ad, sad, sad that in talking about
budget cuts, we use painful words
^^like “extracting billions from
Medicare” or “slashing the Medicare enti-
tlement.” Has it ever occurred to the gladi-
ators that improving the quality of health
care can also save money?
If Medicare spends less on a patient
because the hospital
does a good job the
first time, that’s what
we call a win-win sit-
uation. The patient
gets better care. The
taxpayers get billed
only once. Yay.
Many ObamaCare
critics simply can’t
say yes to the good HfllTOP
news that the Af-
fordable Care Act
will actually reduce deficits — despite pos-
itive projections by the Congressional
Budget Office. They won’t concede that in a
tremendously wasteful health care system
such as ours, cuts in spending can be made
without inconveniencing patients in the
slightest.
As part of the reforms, Medicare recent-
ly announced bonus and penalty payments
to hospitals based on the quality of care.
The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing
Program is starting to change Medicare’s
role as a dumb check-writing machine.
What crazy incentives does it seek to end?
Example: An elderly woman goes to the
emergency room with pneumonia but
receives the wrong antibiotic. The hospital
gets paid anyway. When she has to be read-
mitted, the hospital gets paid again.
Example: A heart attack patient isn’t
given medication to avert blood clots with-
in 30 minutes of arriving at the hospital, as
required by guidelines. If expensive com-
plications develop as a result, the hospital
and doctors get paid extra to address the
added problems.
It’s like you paid for a new tire, learned
that the tire was defective and was then
asked to pay again for the replacement.
That’s the sort of double-billing Medi-
care has shrugged at. (And never mind the
toll that useless or harmful treatments have
on the patients.)
The new hospital quality program bases
its score on patients’ experience, in addi-
tion to how well hospitals follow clinical
guidelines. Is the hospital clean and quiet?
Do the caregivers manage pain? How well
do doctors and nurses communicate?
Medicare compared 3,000 hospitals and
rewarded 1,557 of them with bonuses and
reduced payments to 1,427 others.
This is but one way the health care re-
forms can push hospitals to spend the tax-
payers’ money more carefully — while im-
proving the patient experience. This fall,
Medicare started cutting payments to hos-
pitals whose patients are readmitted too
often.
Of course, one must ask to what extent
the problems reflect the hospital and to
what extent a tough patient population.
Poor people, for example, often lack
resources and strong social support net-
works.
"It depends on which quality measure
we’re looking at,” Dr. Ashish Jha, a
researcher at the Harvard School of Public
Health, told me. “In the re-admission
penalty program, it’s clear that it’s about
the patient population.” His group found
that the poor were more likely to be read-
mitted regardless of hospital.
Jha said he can’t answer similar ques-
tions yet about the Hospital Value-Based
Purchasing Program. His group is studying
it, and results will be forthcoming in a few
months.
But here is the important takeaway from
this part of ObamaCare: The federal gov-
ernment is now addressing not only how
much it spends on health care but what it is
getting for the money.
The stat that keeps jumping up is that
the United States spends twice the rich-
country average per person on health care
while achieving no better (or worse) out-
comes.
When it comes to health care, yes, we can
do better with less.
FROMA HARROP is a columnist for
The Providence Journal. Her column is
distributed by Creators Syndicate Inc.
Letters to the editor
Plan of attack
The president has spoken. He will enact
gun control by Jan. 1. Right after he has his
winter vacation in Hawaii!
It’s not so important that he would
forego the trip that is going to cost the
Treasury millions of dollars? Going over the
“cliff” is also not of significance that he
would stay in Washington?
One of his highbinders said multiple
times, “You never want a serious crisis to go
to waste.” Rahm Emanuel then went on to
say, “And what I mean is to do things you
could not do before.”
And even Hillary Clinton has been heard
to use the phrase. Is it in the administrative
playbook?
Was everything planned out and typed
up, just waiting for an opportunity? Is all
they have to do is pull their attack plan out
of one of the drawers in the Oval Office?
One thing all this has done is to have all
the guns for sale in Denton gone by this
afternoon.
Larry Jambor,
Denton
Tax-change ideas
Raising the tax rate on the wealthy will
not bring in much revenue but decreasing
or limiting some of their deductions would.
Many corporations and business have so
many deductions available that they can
lower their gross income down to almost
zero.
They can write off their cars claiming to
SUBMISSIONS
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Authorship must be verified. Letters should
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Letters to the editor, RO. Box 369, Denton, IX
76202
use them 100 percent for business. But
sometimes they use them for personal busi-
ness. Some write off their spouses’ cars, as
well, when in fact the spouse never drives
for business, and the business owner takes
their car home then back to work.
This is not a deduction unless they are
going to go somewhere for business on the
way home. Then this is a part deduction.
And some use their cars for trips not relat-
ed to business. Decrease the deduction for
depreciation and do away with investment
tax credit. These changes would be for big
business only.
Restore the capital gains tax back to 28
percent instead of 15 percent.
Leave the deduction for inheritance tax
as is. Lower-income taxpayers rarely have
to pay an inheritance tax.
The wealthy want to pass their fortune
down to their survivors without paying
additional tax. Most of their fortune has
never been taxed.
Gamell Fortner,
Denton
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free press that is supported by the community at large. Our mission every day is to give you unbiased,
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become involved in your community, both with your commentary and your actions.
Some things
are better
left unsaid
M A Washington - ‘Tis the season
when columnists write mea cul-
W W pas, make predictions and list
their resolutions.
Since my culpas are too vast for this tiny
space, my predictions best in retrospect
and my resolutions inevitably ignored, I
thought I’d list a few resolutions for the rest
of the world. These,
too, are likely to be
ignored, but I’ll feel
better getting a few
things off my chest.
Herewith, what
annoys me most:
Hot.
Can we please
shelve this awful
word as used by
adults to refer to oth-
ers? What happened
to “attractive” or “fascinating”? If you’re 18
or younger, I suppose one can be forgiven
for recognizing a person of interest in terms
of hotness, but nothing is less attractive
than adult men and women appraising oth-
ers as “hot” (or not) at a certain age, which
should be about the time one is old enough
to vote.
Hotness, as I understand it, essentially
refers to another’s worthiness to bed. This
is not, in the world I prefer to live in, sub-
ject matter for dinner conversation.
In a related matter, let’s not...
Man up.
How many times during recent elections
have we heard candidates refer to others’
need to “man up”? This was especially jar-
ring when women used the term to refer to
their male opponents, as when Nevada
Republican Sharron Angle told Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid to man up
during a debate.
Sarah Palin, who wasn’t running for any-
thing, nevertheless questioned President
Obama’s manhood, saying that Arizona
Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, thanks to her
tough immigration bill, “has the cojones
that our president does not have.” Classy.
In an ad, Colorado Republican Jane Nor-
ton said her primary opponent for the U.S.
Senate, Ken Buck, should be “man enough”
to do his own campaign dirty work.
What comparable insult might men
bestow on women? “Woman up” has no
parallel meaning, but one can imagine that
challenging a woman’s “womanhood,”
whatever that might mean (fertility? femi-
ninity?), would not go over well.
Buck did manage to produce a weak
rejoinder, urging voters to choose him
because “I don’t wear high heels.”
OK, well, this is cutting right to the core
of voter concerns. A manly Buck versus a
stiletto-ed femme. It is little wonder that
Coloradoans decided to legalize pot. How
else to get through such mind-boggling
debate? Whatever voters had in mind when
they elected Buck, they can’t have felt ele-
vated by their choices.
And little wonder young Americans end
all their sentences with question marks. No
list would be complete without mention of
the annoying habit of the young to state
declarative sentences as queries. Though
not new, this tic has become so common-
place that one worries it may have become
permanently entrenched in the language.
Simple grammar: A declarative state-
ment ends with a period. The voice does
not rise as with a question, punctuated with
a question mark. Yet several times a day, a
young person speaks to me in question
marks.
“So, I ran into Jeff? And he was, like,
wow, you cut your hair? And I was, like, I
know, right?”
The only alternative to the persistent
query is the occasional exclamation:
“OMG. He is so hot!”
I have no idea what the statement-ques-
tion reveals, but it seems to be connected to
some desire to not be judgmental. And this
seems to be tied to the generational procliv-
ity to perceive all things as relative. As in, I
am so totally not, like, committed to any-
thing that could possibly be construed as
slightly offensive to anyone anywhere that I
will say even obviously true things so as to
indicate my willingness to be persuaded,
like, otherwise?
No problem.
Which is, I promise, my last nit. “No
problem” seems now to be the customary
reply to “thank you.” As opposed to the pre-
viously accepted “You’re welcome” or “My
pleasure.”
“Thanks so much for the excellent serv-
ice,” I say to the waiter. “No problem,” he
says.
What does this mean? That it wasn’t all
that much trouble? Or, that service is a
problem to be solved?
Doing something for someone in the line
of duty or out of the goodness of one’s heart
is not a problem solved. It is a gift, a ges-
ture, a sentiment. And when someone
expresses gratitude for that gesture, it is
customary to acknowledge that you were
happy to extend the pleasure, not that it
wasn’t too bad for you.
Which is to say, you’re welcome.
KATHLEEN PARKER writes far the
Orlando Sentinel. Her column is distrib-
uted by Washington Post Writers Group.
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Cobb, Dawn. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 109, No. 151, Ed. 1 Monday, December 31, 2012, newspaper, December 31, 2012; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1102609/m1/4/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .