Avoiding the problem: Snowe misses the point of healthcare reform

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Over the course of Olympia Snowe's career in the US Senate, companies and workers in the healthcare and insurance industries have been her top donors (except for retirees and retiree political-action committees, which are obviously also concerned with healthcare issues).

And as she wades into the middle of the healthcare-reform debate, Snowe — who declined to answer Phoenix questions about her donors' influence — is urging the exasperated American public to give private health-insurance companies one more chance.

Snowe, who sits on the Senate Finance Committee (which handles healthcare issues), says she is afraid that a government-run health-insurance option (an option, mind you, not a mandatory-participation program) would unfairly compete with the private sector. She told the Associated Press last week, "If you establish a public option at the forefront that goes head-to-head and competes with the private health insurance market the public option will have significant price advantages."

That is, Snowe fears that the public option will be cheaper than the choices offered by private insurers. Of course, lower costs are precisely what Americans are seeking in healthcare reform.

But Snowe — and her colleague Senator Susan Collins (for whom healthcare and insurance-industry gifts are among the top six campaign donors) — are instead seeking to protect the insurers, advocating for delaying the public option until it is demonstrated that the private companies can't expand coverage and decrease costs. Instead, they are advocating a system by which taxpayer-funded subsidies would help Americans pay private insurers' market rates for health-insurance plans.

They neglect two vital facts. First, healthcare is a basic human right — though Snowe, through her press secretary, Julia Wanzco, declined to say whether she believes that, saying only that she supports "universal access" to care. Second, private companies have already proved unwilling to solve the problem: insurance premiums nationwide have doubled over the last 10 years (income hasn't followed suit, obviously), and insurance-company profits have quadrupled. Forty-seven states, including Maine, have near-monopoly situations in which one or only a very few companies control the health-insurance market.

Progressives throughout the country, and all over the Internet, are screaming. And they are acting, seeking tales of woe from those struggling to get and pay for healthcare, sending pollsters out into the streets to ask people for their opinions, and airing television ads urging constituents to contact their senators to urge more reform. Last Wednesday in Portland and Augusta, Mainers took to the streets to oppose the high premiums of Maine's near-monopoly health-insurance provider, Anthem.

Citing figures that show premiums in Maine rose five times faster than the state's median income, and that Anthem continue to show massive profits despite the poor economy, the protesters called on Snowe and Collins to support a public option from the get-go. At the rallies, organized by the Maine People's Alliance, a progressive advocacy group, several Mainers spoke about their problems with the private health-insurance industry, citing high prices and low benefits.

While progressives cite stats like the Wall Street Journal's recent poll showing 75 percent of Americans are strong supporters of an government-run option, both Snowe's and Collins's offices say that the thousands of constituent comments they have received show, in Collins spokesman Kevin Kelley's words, "little agreement on what ought to be done."

Press releases: Nice to meet you

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Rich Connor, the mercurial new co-owner and editor/publisher of the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, the Waterville-based Morning Sentinel, and the Augusta-based Kennebec Journal, is a curious figure, who himself seems a good candidate for interesting copy in the coming years. Here are a few scenes from his first couple weeks of ownership:

• The press conference at which Connor announced his purchase of the papers (you can see the full video at thePhoenix.com/AboutTown) featured lavish praise for his wife, Deborah. And understandably so, as he went on to admit that, while he ran several papers in Texas for six years, THEY WEREN'T PROFITABLE UNTIL HE LEFT to run the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader in Pennsylvania, and Deborah took over the Texas operation.

• During that press conference, he recalled that a friend, a rich woman in Texas, told him that he shouldn't buy the newspapers if he couldn't get a local bank to support it. Perhaps someone should lend him an atlas — he ended up BORROWING THE MONEY FROM BRITISH TAXPAYERS. Citizens Bank, whose Portland office did the paperwork, is owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was taken over last year by the British government during the banking crisis. Maine is part of New England, but, c'mon.

• He also promised to assume that "the customer is always right." Of course, if you define "customer" the way Connor does — someone who is either an employee, a reader, or an advertiser — it's easy to imagine a situation where there are THREE GROUPS WHOSE INTERESTS CAN BE SIMULTANEOUSLY "RIGHT" AND WILDLY DIVERGENT. Here's just one: Should a reporter stay up very late at night, away from her family, to cover a contentious city-council meeting, during which an advertiser's business plan is at stake?

• Perhaps most troubling, he is USING THE PAPERS' MAIN NEWS SPACE IN WAYS HARDLY BEFITTING A SERIOUS NEWS ORGANIZATION. First there was the 1500-word June 21 lead story (it was clearly marked "opinion") describing the astrological projections, as well as the reminiscences of the last time he lived in Maine (more than 40 years ago), that led to his purchase of the paper. Two days later, the lead "story" was about a newspaper promotion that no doubt surprised those "customers" who had paid for their papers: the Press Herald and its sisters are giving away free copies at various locations in their coverage areas. And last Friday, he printed large color photos of his biggest advertisers grinning awkwardly with their Press Herald sales reps on the back page of the front section. (Not to mention his giddily obsequious and boosterish column in Sunday's "Insight" section.)

But Connor was serious when he said, before the assembled cameras (and his bankers): "We will be profitable this year."

What that will look like is unclear. He plans to keep all three papers open (the Sentinel and the KJ are in better financial shape than the Press Herald), and hopes to pay off some debt by selling the Press Herald's downtown-Portland real estate.

There will, though, be significant cost-cutting. Connor's cagey about where, but we have two clues. First there's the press conference's Freudian slip: Confirming that there will be as many as 100 more layoffs in the near future, he added, "we're hoping it will be more than that."

And there is the praise he offered for newsroom staffers who worked until midnight one night and came in at 5 am the next morning. "We didn't ask them to do that," he said. Those employees just took a 10-percent pay cut, and face at best a 75-percent chance of keeping their jobs, so maybe Connor is suggesting he needs volunteer labor.

FairPoint watch: Making a quiet killing — of itself and Maine's economy

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Businesses in downtown Portland are on the move. Retail-property rents are lower than they have been in years, and stores are making deals left and right, with more than a dozen changing location in the past couple months. You don't know where your favorite store will be next — but don't count on calling them to find out where they've gone. They can't take your call — and won't even actually hear it ring.

That's because FairPoint — you remember them, our state's primary telephone-service provider? the nearing-bankruptcy company that has trouble providing phone service to 911 operators or even its own customer-service call centers? — has been making businesses wait more than a month to transfer phone connections to their new locations.

A simple stroll through the Old Port one recent afternoon led to three lengthy conversations with shop owners complaining about FairPoint (we'll save them the embarrassment of identifying them, if only so FairPoint won't target them for further delays). And there are many more, all of whom are talking about complaining to the Maine Public Utilities Commission, canceling their FairPoint service, getting their phone and Internet through TimeWarner Cable, or all three.

Even businesses moving a couple of buildings over, or onto the next block, have waited weeks and still can't get connected. And nobody from FairPoint seems available to help.

"I've spent hours on the phone with them," said one shop owner. "I give up." Another is forced to call a nearby business to process credit-card transactions, because he has no working FairPoint phone line to do it himself.

The problems are well known to state officials: Both Richard Davies, the head of Maine's Office of the Public Advocate (which represents consumers at-large in issues before the state's Public Utilities Commission), and Andrew Hagler, director of telephone and water regulation at the PUC, say they have heard complaints from businesses and residents.

Hagler adds that FairPoint has a "stabilization plan" it is using to mark its progress toward service-as-expected. But company filings with his office show that improvement is slow, and in some cases, not actually happening.

It is, therefore, little wonder that FairPoint recently told federal securities regulators that it might declare bankruptcy, unless its creditors allow it to delay interest payments on more than $500 million in debt (some of which is accruing more than 13-percent interest). In addition, its June 24 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission declared that FairPoint has exhausted its available credit, and its revenues continue to decline.

While Davies says bankruptcy is "clearly ... more than a remote possibility," he is hoping that FairPoint will be able to "stop those losses and get people to come back," so as to avoid another transition to a new owner, or the involvement of a federal bankruptcy court in the state's telecommunications industry.

At least businesses and residents can take heart from one thing: The FairPoint public-relations department is no more responsive than its customer service. Company spokesman Jeff Nevins responded to three interview-seeking voicemails with an e-mail asking for the questions; the Phoenix's reply remained unanswered at our deadline. (Read the questions and the answers — if FairPoint responds — at thePhoenix.com/AboutTown.)

Music Seen: Gypsy Tailwind at Port City Music Hall

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Sometimes "studio magic" doesn't translate well to the stage — especially when 15 musicians perform in a single song. But other times, you wish such large live performances were being recorded for the next album.

Given their connections to crowded-live-act extraordinaire Rustic Overtones (including performances and arrangements by Dave Noyes and Ryan Zoidis), it's no wonder that Gypsy Tailwind's CD-release show falls into the latter category. On Saturday night, they started small(ish), with just five musicians on stage. Frontman Dan Connor sang and played guitar all night, but the double-length set didn't really get going until frontwoman Anna Lombard put down her guitar and focused on singing.

Gently mixing songs from their first record, Halo Sessions (2008) and the new one, Grace, as well as at least one as-yet unreleased tune, the band carefully managed the energy in the 600-person-plus crowd. Connor's smooth crooning, coupled with Lombard's grounded power, held sway — with the occasional guitar, keyboard, drum, and banjo solo — until late in the night, when the crowds started to rush the stage.

Or at least that's how it seemed. During a break in the set, eight music stands, five mikes, five audio-input lines, and five chairs were arranged on stage. What little space remained was soon filled with five string musicians (a cellist, and a pair each of violists and violinists, including sometimes-Rustic band member Angela Doxsey) and a five-piece horn section (with Noyes and Zoidis, there were two trombones, a trumpet, an alto sax, and a baritone sax), who almost immediately got rousing ovations from the crowd.

Arching over all of it, though, were Lombard's vocals, soaring to the heights of the city and never seeming to want to come down.

GT play the Boston Harbor Boat Cruise July 31 and Baystock Music Festival at the Maine State Pier August 8 | gypsytailwind.net

Jailed HIV-positive pregnant woman released - for now

Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix

Quinta Layin Tuleh, the HIV-positive pregnant woman a federal judge in Bangor, Maine, ordered jailed until her baby was delivered, has been released on bail while her appeal of her sentence makes its way through the courts.

In May, Judge John Woodcock Jr. ruled that he would jail Tuleh — who pleaded guilty to possessing false immigration documents — for the rest of her pregnancy because he believed that, if she were in prison, she would be more likely to get medical treatment that would reduce the risk of her fetus contracting HIV. He told her that if she were either not pregnant or not HIV-positive, he would have sentenced her to the 114 days she had already spent in jail and let her go free.

The decision was so unusual that both Tuleh and federal prosecutors appealed the sentence for being too harsh. Fifteen state and national organizations (mainly advocates for women's issues, HIV-patients' rights, and reproductive rights) and medical experts filed a joint document supporting both the appeal and Tuleh's request for bail, saying medical care would be better outside of the prison system, and that keeping her locked up simply for being pregnant and HIV-positive was a dangerous precedent other courts have studiously avoided.

Last week, Woodcock agreed, though he is powerless to alter the sentence — the appeal process removes that option from his jurisdiction. Tuleh and the prosecution have asked the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to immediately overturn the sentence and return the case to Woodcock, with the expectation that, this time, he will sentence her to time served and release her immediately.