Cut on the hand leads to shocking encounter with medical costs

Recently while attempting to move an upright piano, I suffered a large cut on the pad of my thumb. It required stitches.

This happened on a Sunday night, so the only place open to get stitches was the emergency room. I was in the hospital for a total of one hour, and maybe seen by a doctor for a total of 20 minutes, tops. I don't have health insurance partially because I'm not a student, and I can't be covered under my parents plan.

I finally got my bill (or should I say bills) in the mail, and I was shocked: The emergency room bill was around $670, and the doctor bill was $654, for a total of $1,324.

After applying for medical assistance, I was notified that I would not receive any because I am "above poverty." Another interesting part of this: I talked to my father, and he informed me that if I was under his insurance plan that the bill would've been $1,200 because that's his deductible. Therefore, this situation did not encourage me to get insurance at all; it more convinced me to never go to the hospital again.

I figured out that it would have been cheaper for me to fly back east to get treated by my uncle. I wonder how it is to make $2,000 an hour; my bill for the doctor alone was $654, and I only saw him for 20 minutes. The bad thing is, I'm sure my scenario isn't even close to the worst case happening in our country.

Lisa Hargest, Corvallis

Despite costs, hiring four new Corvallis officers is important

How valuable are three minutes? Someone is trying to break into your house and you have just called the cops. If the cops can get to your house three minutes faster, it might save your life.

The Corvallis Budget Commission has $600,000 available to spend in the next fiscal year. Choices are going to have to be made because there is insufficient money for everything. One of the choices is to hire four patrol officers.

Hiring these officers absorbs almost one-half of the funds available. However, a very important - if not the most important - function of government is to protect its citizens; a function surely more important than hiring an administrative specialist for the senior center or subsidizing the aquatic center.

The Corvallis Police Department funded a study that collected the data required to analyze the time a citizen waits for service. However, the contractor did not actually compute the waiting time as a function of the number of patrol officers. Therefore, I did. I found that with 29 officers - the current staffing - the mean time a citizen waits for service is 6.6 minutes. If we hire four more officers, the mean time a citizen waits for service of 3.5 minutes - a reduction of 3.1 minutes.

My analysis can be found at http://www.peak.org/~detweij.

Readers who have had to call, or think they may have to call, the cops need to contact their city councilors and ask them to fund the four officers.

John H. Detweiler, Corvallis

What were these pedestrians and bicyclists thinking?

Monday, Feb. 2 between 4:14 and 4:45 pm:

• I'm leaving the parking lot beside the university bookstore. As I am traveling down the row of cars, two students step out from between parked cars directly in front of my moving vehicle.

• I'm traveling East on Circle Boulevard. A man crosses in front of me from the far side of the street on a bicycle. There is no crosswalk or intersection. He is followed by a boy on his bicycle. There is not sufficient clearance for the boy to cross.

• I'm headed north on Ninth Street. A man comes walking across (no intersection or crosswalk), and I think he will probably stop in the center lane as there is traffic in both lanes headed north. He proceeds directly in front of us.

Yes, I slammed on the brakes in all three instances. No, I didn't hit anyone.

Why are people so careless of safety issues and - even more important - what is the boy on the bicycle learning from his elder?

Be careful folks; the laws are made to protect you!

Sonya G. Richardson, Corvallis

Downtown urban renewal district too costly, unnecessary

There are many important questions to ask about the proposed Corvallis urban renewal district.

The first question is simply: Do we need this? The Web site maintained by urban renewal proponents asks this question in the FAQ section. (http://www.heartofcorvallis.org/faq.html) Even the proponents are forced to admit: "Downtown looks pretty good right now."

But, they claim, maybe someday we will need this. And so, to solve a problem that doesn't exist, they propose creating a district which will siphon $31 million from local government taxes.

How much is $31 million? It is more than twice as big as the $13 million riverfront project built less than 10 years ago. It is more than twice as big as the

$13 million Senior Center project, which voters rejected last November. It is big!

What will we get for $31 million? Proponents have planned only a few small projects worth about $1 million. They will figure out how to spend the other $30 million once they get it.

Where does the $31 million come from? It gets taken from local taxes that would otherwise fund public services such as police, fire, emergency response, libraries, parks and road maintenance. Basic government services all suffer in order to fund downtown urban renewal.

Local government services are in as much financial jeopardy as everything else. Urban renewal blindly commits

$31 million to solve a non-existent problem. It takes funds from other community needs. It is a bad idea. We don't need it.

David Grappo, Corvallis

Media still slanted toward corporations' viewpoint

If you thought that the overwhelming election wins of the Democrats in November, on top of their 2006 midterm wins, would mean more balanced representation in the corporate-owned mass media, you would be mistaken.

Last week the five cable news networks hosted more Republican lawmakers to discuss the economic stimulus plan than Democrats by a 2-to-1 ratio. There were people who predicted the economic disaster, presented solutions and were either ignored altogether or called "shrill" and dismissed, (e.g. Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, Ralph Nader, Naomi Klein, Portland's own Thom Hartmann).

Yet the Gazette-Times instead gave column space Feb. 2 to Martin Feldstein. With his totally discredited supply-side trickle-down approach, he advocates more of the very things that got us into this mess - including capital gains and dividend tax increase postponements benefitting mostly the wealthy and (amazingly!) even more money for a bloated military budget that nearly equals the rest of the worlds' combined.

Not mentioned was a modest financial transactions tax on speculators, which economist Dean Baker says would be enough to "finance a 10 percent across-the-board reduction in the income tax on labor."

Nationalize the bad banks instead of rewarding the speculators with tax dollars. They already are totally dependent on the government anyway. And implement single-payer healthcare like the civilized industrial nations have. A recent study by the California Nurses Association found that a single-payer system would generate 2.6 million new jobs, $317 billion in new business and public revenues and $100 billion in wages.

Ted Daum, Corvallis