Mayor Sam Adams’ office today gave the Oregonian first crack at his new plan, up for a vote next week, to have city insurance cover sex-change procedures for city workers. Portland would join Multnomah County and the city of San Francisco in offering the coverage.
Anyway, this is the thanks the mayor’s office got:
The plan, of course, is a good one. Not that you’d expect the typical O commenter to see that. As the mayor notes in his office’s announcement, Nike, Google, Microsoft and IBM offer the same coverage to employees. “Covering basic, medically-necessary care is a matter of fairness, and it’s the right thing to do,” the mayor says in his statement.
That alone should quiet commenters. But there’s also this: The added cost of adding sexual reassignment surgery to the city’s coverage is expected to be $32,302 a year. It’s small potatoes for such an important gesture. The city’s insurance fund is projected to pay out $41.6 million in the next fiscal year.
Wilmette Week commenters are just as bad/maybe even worse, I don’t know what the fuck is going on.
Is that what really most Oregonians think?
Responding to the unregistered comment, above…
Willamette Week has been “Oust Adams” central for quite some time now. But that’s OK… we are lucky enough to live in a town with multiple (ostensibly) alt-rags with differing points of view.
The Oregonian has always been LGBT-deriding rag (dressed up in various elevations of rhetoric, with the occasional bone thrown to do-gooders), just as OPB has always been a nest of cowards (Postcards from Buster unless a queer sent ’em).
Live and let live.
And there’s Blogtown, the few, the proud, the infinitely less (and somehow more) inane.
Honestly, I think Willmette week seems more libertarian than anything else, and the commenters seem pretty much the same as the Oregonian.
The mercury seems the last paper (or piece of paper) I can pick up and honestly read and enjoy. I don’t have to read about what someone missing a tip is the event of the century or why teachers are a satanic fifth column.
I guess I am more on the left side of the spectrum, and the mercury doesn’t really cater to me but I just enjoy reading it.
This surgery should be considered on par with plastic surgery.
Elective.
Curious, does the Portland Mercury offer such benefits to its employees?
I don’t mind the city ponying up for this, but the “Nike and Google do it!” defense is idiotic. The difference between the city and those companies is those companies make money. A lot of it. The City does the exact opposite. The two entities probably shouldn’t approach employee benefits the same way.
@Chuck – Maybe a better example would be that Multnomah County does it as well.
When I saw that story on the evening news my very first thought was how funny it would be read the Oregonian braintrust’s reaction. They always have to delete homophobic comments off any story mentioning the Mayor, I am sure this one will keep their web editors busy for days.
The oregonian removed my positive comment on the move…telling…
@Chuck, when the city provides a benefit that a private company provides people use the lack of a similar benefit in the private sector as a reason to argue the city shouldn’t do it, why not have the argument run both ways.
The real truth though is that 32k a year is nothing in the grand scheme of the city’s health plan and we shouldn’t even be wasting time discussing whether or not to cover it. Adams is actually doing the committee a favor by removing this as a discussion topic in the future.
I can’t stand this attitude of “its’ so cheap so let’s not even worry / debate it”.
It is this attitude that has gotten us where we stand with our current fiscal woes.
@Another Libtard – That IS a much better example. Good point.
It does seem elective, like plastic surgery, to me. But if it’s preventing the city from hiring good people who would rather work for Nike or Multnomah County, it seems defensible.
Yeah, the City is losing all kinds of qualified workers and can’t find enough to man the work stations because they are all rushing to Mult. Co or Nike for sex changes!
The truly absurd thing is that when you read through those comments, you figure out pretty quickly that most of the commenters don’t understand HOW INSURANCE WORKS. Most of them think the city will foot the bill for the entire operation. They don’t get that the city pays a small amount to add this as a covered expense, and then once it is covered, the insurance company pays for the cost of it. (Excepting monthly premiums, co-pays, etc.) Kinda makes me realize why national coverage of health care is so ripe for misinformation: people don’t really understand how it works.
Comparing it to Mult. County is a much better option, though I’m guessing the county wouldn’t mind keeping that on the DL.
Having babies is elective too, and one pregnancy probably costs more than 5 sex change operations, so have it at city employees.
BTW, what’s so bad about those comments? The first is borderline, but the other two seem pretty much on par with comments you would see on any news site, including this one.
Here’s a tip: Most major health plans cover various kinds of elective surgery. The lists vary, but you can’t simply dismiss sex-change procedures because you consider them to be “elective”. “Elective” means you won’t die if you don’t choose to have a procedure, not that the procedure isn’t beneficial.
Chuck… I was almost about to post the same observation about those HORRIBLE posts to the O.
Dave J, Do YOU understand how ins coverage works?
Do you really think that they provide ANY service for less than the amount of any procedure?
These Insurance companies are run for-profit.
I’d like to know what ‘major’ health plans are covering what sorts of elective surgeries then, since I have never been part of one though have worked at major companies of the area.
Yes, I can easily dismiss this elective surgery – especially at a time when health care costs are spiraling out of control and also for yet another example of benefits paid by the public that the public itself in most cases cannot enjoy.
Unless you work at Nike.
“Do you really think that they provide ANY service for less than the amount of any procedure?”
Er…some people, let’s call them the “lucky ones,” receive medical care for medically necessary procedures (you’ll notice that Sam refers to a sex-change as medically necessary) that costs more than they (or their employers) pay. For example, people with cancer. Their treatment costs a shit ton, but they keep paying their $300 monthly premium, and their employer keeps paying its $800 or whatever monthly premium. Meanwhile, other people who pay the same amount each month don’t get sick, and thus cost the insurer far less. That is how insurance works. At the end of the day, they try to make sure that they insure more healthy people than sick ones, and thus they make $$$.
(If I could post graphics, I’d post a NBC “the more you know” image here.)
I get what you’re saying.
My understnding is this addition to the medical policy will cost the whole amount of coverage to go up the 32 grand.
Who foots it? The taxpayer.
Look up the cost of a sex change operation and all the extras that will surely go with it.
I would guess the ins agency believes it will only do 1 of these a year, at best. They certainly posess all the facts and statistics that surround this procedure.
The cancer example you site – everyone else in the policy is paying for the poor bloke who got the cancer.
Same here with a sex change, except WE are the ones paying for it.
I empathize with those who feel the only answer to their happiness is having a sex change, but I still think that this surgery is about the same as plastic surgery.
A whole lotta folks out there believe they’d be happier with a new nose or a liposuction treatment, or fake boobs.
All elective.
@frankieb: What you call “elective” can very easily be what Sam calls “medically necessary.” There are thousands of documented cases of people needing breast reduction surgery (the sad kind of boob job) as a result of severe back pain, psychological issues (especially in teen girls) and other medically necessary circumstances.
Likewise, the “medically necessary” component of this sort of operation can be found in severe depression, anxiety and other psychological traumas. I don’t pretend to understand what it must be like to live every day in the wrong body; the wrong persona. I do know that medical science backs up Sam’s claim.
Also, my “major” health insurance provider partially covers acupuncture. And I’m not going to have wild anxiety and long-term psychological damage if I don’t get acupuncture.
Accupuncture.
OK, it works for many people.
It isn’t surgery though, and comes nowhere near the cost.
Pain that requires breast reduction. Understood. No problem.
But you haven’t made the case that a sex change procedure is ‘medically necessary’.
Far from.
I would still bet there are all kind of people who suffer from not having big enough boobs. Are we to deny them their chance to rectify nature then? I couldn’t imagine the severe emotional distress they must endure.
This is not meant to belittle those whom wish for a sex change either.
(ever see that film “In a Year of Thirteen Moons”?)
But what about the ethics of providing city / county / government workers with better benefits than 90% of the private sector – those whom pay their bill?
If this passes will it enable the the police accountability programs or the city attorney to grow a pair?
Where’d you find the report that says Portland-area city/county/government workers have better benefits than 90% of the private sector? And even if some such study exists (my instincts say it doesn’t), that report would very likely be focused on or at least include retirement benefits. Which is not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about health insurance benefits.
If you read the article, you’d see it clearly states that it’s not a raise-your-hand-if-you’d-rather-have-a-vagina process, but that it requires extensive psychiatric evaluation to determine a medical need. Just like most insurance-covered procedures. You didn’t even respond to my discussion of breast-reduction surgery, which I think is a pretty good example of something you find elective but for many people is medically necessary.
Also, Number Six for COTW.
But what about the ethics of providing city / county / government workers with better benefits than 90% of the private sector
Simple: The government is run be “we the people”. We the people should be setting a higher standard for the way employees should be treated than the average private employer. We should raise the bar. That’s seems ethical to me.
“We the people”, via government, have the limited right to kill people, take property, make arrests, etc. These are rights that are not generally afforded to private entities, unless acting in some manner on behalf of “we the people”. Thus, “we the people”, having such incredible powers and the capability to do harm, should have the highest ethical standards and that includes the way we treat our employees.
“But what about the ethics of providing city / county / government workers with better benefits than 90% of the private sector – those whom pay their bill?”
I’d flip that around and ask why you’re accepting a private sector in this country that gives 90% of its employees pretty shitty health care?
The fact is not that government employees get some fancy schmancy gold-plated health plan–the fact is that everyone else has let private employers whittle away their health plans to just about nothing over the past 30 years. And so of course instead of complaining about THAT, people are pointing the fingers at government workers and crying about how crazy healthy they are.
KATU also has crazy weirdo commenters. I read the comments on the story about Mayor Adams shaving his head for a cancer benefit, and they were absolutely horrendous.
Or maybe I mean KGW… I can’t remember. One of those non-Mercury new sources.
I’m a little late back to this thread, but Bob and Dave…
if it was so simple to get better health care in the private sector don’t you think it would have been done already? Bob, your argument strikes me as idealistic but naive.
Especially in light of the poor economy.
“We the People” run our Country, not companies.
Dave, you sounded a similar note.
I’ll say here I’m all for Socialized Health Care. Health Care Reform did not go far enough, nor will it untill Ins Companies are not in the middle.
But we are talking about the here and now.
I have a friend who is a City Manager here who privately concedes his bennies are incredible.
I have a friend who works at Intel and his wife is a teacher. Guess whose Ins policy they use?
I had a co-worker at the paper-mill whose wife was a teacher. Guess whose Ins policy they use?
So, back to offering public workers better bennies than the private sector….