Saturday, January 10, 2009

News Clipping Archives

Maryland / Regional

Swimmers lose access to hotel pool (Hagerstown Herald-Mail)

National / International

COBRA Too Costly for Many Unemployed, Report Finds(Washington Post)

Tons of Coal Ash Piling Up Across U.S., Analysis Says (Washington Post)

Opinion

Cocaine and White Teens (New York Times Commentary)

 

 

Swimmers lose access to hotel pool

 

By Andrew Schotz

Hagerstown Herald-Mail

Saturday, January 10, 2009

 

WASHINGTON COUNTY - A group of area residents doesn’t like the Plaza Hotel’s new pool policy: For guests only.

 

Dozens of people from the community, many of them senior citizens, have used the pool in recent years as paying members of an “adult health club” at the hotel.

 

But the arrangement ended last month because it didn’t meet a state health code that requires, among other things, lifeguards for public pools.

 

The Washington County Health Department first told the Halfway hotel in 2001 it couldn’t offer public pool access without meeting certain regulations, department spokesman Rod MacRae said.

 

The hotel was supposed to stop, but the health department learned this past November the program was still going on, MacRae said.

 

Erma Renner, the hotel’s general manager, said she disbanded the club in the middle of December.

 

Some swimmers, such as Dr. Richard Young, are upset and either don’t want to go elsewhere or say they can’t.

 

Young, 87, who lives north of Hagerstown, questioned why lifeguards are needed to protect community swimmers, but not hotel guests, calling it “a question of semantics.”

 

He said he paid $35 a month to swim at the hotel. Swimming was helpful exercise after he tore cartilage in his knee two years ago, he said.

 

Jill Keefer of Halfway said she swam at the Plaza Hotel on and off for about 14 years. It was a good place for therapy for arthritis or a knee replacement, she said, but Keefer was there for recreation.

 

Young, Keefer and nine others signed a protest letter to the editor of The Herald-Mail blasting the health department.

 

“Hydrotherapy is a great asset for body building and outweighs the ‘brain therapy’ being exerted by our local health officials,” the letter says. “If change is not made, these 200+ people can rot and die peacefully at home from poor health, thanks to our health department.”

 

MacRae said it was up to hotel management to decide how to follow the law.

 

“We did not close the pool,” he said.

 

Under state law, hotel pools are generally “semipublic,” said Pamela Engle, chief of the Division of Community Services within the Maryland Department of Health & Mental Hygiene.

 

A semipublic pool has lesser requirements than a public, or “recreational,” pool, which must have a lifeguard on duty and meet more stringent water-quality standards.

 

MacRae said that by charging the public a fee to swim there, the Plaza Hotel had in effect operated a recreational pool without telling the health department.

 

Renner said she tried to phase out the club in November by cutting off new membership and letting current members finish the time for which they paid. But when some club members complained further, Renner stopped the program entirely in December, she said.

 

The Clarion Hotel & Conference Center in Hagerstown had a similar membership system for community use of its pool.

 

Co-owner Lata Milner said she and her husband ended the program when they bought the hotel last year. Some people weren’t happy, but it created safety, security and liability concerns, she said.

 

“There’s plenty of public pools around,” she said.

 

Keefer said community swimmers haven’t given up on using the Plaza Hotel pool again and hope the state representatives they’ve contacted can help change the law.

 

Or maybe, she said, some swimmers can get lifeguard certification, qualifying them to watch over the group.

 

© 1996–2008 The Herald-Mail Company

 

 

 

COBRA Too Costly for Many Unemployed, Report Finds

 

By Ceci Connolly

Washington Post

Saturday, January 10, 2009; D02

 

The cost of buying health insurance for unemployed Americans who try to purchase coverage through a former employer consumes 30 percent to 84 percent of standard unemployment benefits, according to a report released yesterday.

 

Because few people can afford that, the authors say, the result is a growing number of people being hit with the double whammy of no job and no health coverage.

 

In 1985, Congress passed legislation enabling newly unemployed Americans to extend their employer-based health insurance for up to 18 months. But under the program, known as COBRA, the individual must pay 102 percent of the policy's full cost.

 

"COBRA health coverage is great in theory and lousy in reality," said Ron Pollack, whose liberal advocacy group, Families USA, published the analysis. "For the vast majority of workers who are laid off, they and their families are likely to join the ranks of the uninsured."

 

A health insurance policy for the typical single person consumes 30 percent of the average unemployment benefit, the survey found. In the District, Maryland and Virginia, the price of a standard COBRA family plan is three-fourths of the average unemployment check.

 

News yesterday that the unemployment rate jumped to 7.2 percent adds urgency to the problem, Pollack said, because employment and health insurance are often intertwined.

 

For every 1 percentage point rise in unemployment, the number of uninsured Americans climbs by 1.1 percent, according to an analysis last spring by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent research group.

 

Pollack and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the new report highlights the need to include health insurance subsidies in the economic recovery package being crafted this month.

 

"Without that," Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said, "they simply cannot afford to pay for temporary continuation of their health insurance."

 

But Nina Owcharenko, a health policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said it would be wiser to offer unemployed Americans a broad range of health insurance options, including high-deductible private policies or new state-based programs.

 

Given how expensive COBRA is, she said, alternatives would "save the individual money and save taxpayer money."

 

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

 

 

 

Tons of Coal Ash Piling Up Across U.S., Analysis Says

 

Associated Press

Washington Post

Saturday, January 10, 2009; A02

 

Millions of tons of toxic coal ash is piling up in power plant ponds in 32 states, a situation the U.S. government has long recognized as a risk to human health and the environment but has done nothing about.

 

An Associated Press analysis of the most recent Energy Department data found that 156 coal-fired power plants store ash in surface ponds similar to one that ruptured last month in Tennessee. Yesterday, a pond at a northeastern Alabama power plant spilled a different material -- water laced with calcium sulfate, a component of a material known as gypsum -- and some lawmakers said the incident was more evidence that Congress needs to overhaul coal waste regulations.

 

"One disaster convinced me that we ought to subject coal ash impoundments to federal design, construction and inspection requirements," said Rep. Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. "But two incidents in less than three weeks at a TVA site illustrate that we must act swiftly if we hope to ensure a basic level safety for our communities and the environment."

 

The man-made lagoons hold a mixture of the noncombustible ingredients of coal and the ash trapped by equipment designed to reduce air pollution from the power plants.

 

Over the years, the volume of waste has grown as demand for electricity has increased and the federal government has further restricted emissions from power plants.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency eight years ago said it wanted to set a national standard for ponds or landfills used to dispose of wastes produced from burning coal. The agency has yet to act.

 

As a result, coal ash ponds are subject to less regulation than landfills accepting household trash, even though the industry's own estimates show that ash ponds contain tens of thousands of pounds of toxic heavy metals.

 

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

 

 

 

Cocaine and White Teens

 

By Charles M. Blow

New York Times Commentary

Saturday, January 10, 2009

 

Last month, President Bush touted the results of a government-sponsored study by the University of Michigan called Monitoring the Future. It reported a broad decline in drug use among young people since 2001. This included a 24 percent drop in the overall use of illicit drugs. There was one exception he said: abuse of painkillers. But, one important metric that wasn’t mentioned, and that stubbornly resisted the downturn, was the use of cocaine.

 

According to data from the group that produced the report, the percentage of both black and white 12th graders who confessed to using cocaine in the past 30 days has essentially stayed flat since 2001. The major difference is that white usage outweighs black usage 4 to 1. (If you take a longer view back to 1991, when cocaine usage bottomed out following the outrageous ’80s, usage among white 12th graders since then has nearly doubled, while usage among black 12th graders has fallen a bit.)

 

While we turned our attention to pills being swiped from parents’ medicine cabinets, the number of youngsters snorting white lines continued virtually unabated, producing a striking consequence.

 

According to the most recent data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, admissions of white teenagers to drug treatment centers for crack and cocaine abuse soared 76 percent from 2001 to 2006. Crack and cocaine was the only illicit drug category in which the number of admissions for white teens grew over this period, and in 2006 the number was at its highest level since these data have been kept. By contrast, admissions among black teens for crack and cocaine over the same period held steady. By 2006, white admissions outnumbered those for blacks by more than 10 to 1. (It should be noted that admissions for white youths abusing painkillers in 2006, while growing, was still less than half the number of admissions for those abusing cocaine that year.)

 

And there are ominous signs. According to the Monitoring the Future study, the risk of using crack and cocaine, as perceived by teenagers, is going down. The newly released 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment puts it this way: “The decrease in perceived risk suggests that adolescents are becoming less wary of trying cocaine, which may sustain demand for the drug in the near future.”

 

But, in a phone interview, David Murray, chief scientist in the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, insisted that there was good news: a sharp rise in the price of cocaine and a drop in its purity since 2006, among other things, have cut into overall usage.

 

So, I thought, until policy makers put more of a focus on this issue and figure out how to reach these students, should we just hope that teens are too broke for this weak coke? I don’t think so. We need a real strategy, right now.

 

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company