Billings Blog

Bowen Greenwood, an old friend of the Outpost and former PR man for the Yellowstone Art Museum, has been named executive director of the Montana Republican Party. As the news release says, “Greenwood is a long-time conservative activist who has worked for the campaigns of Congressmen Rick Hill and Denny Rehberg, Secretary of State Brad Johnson, and most recently the House Republican Caucus in the 2009 Legislative Session. He’s a former journalist who began his career at the Yellowstone County News in Huntley, Montana.”

Way to go, Bowen.

The best reason yet to support healthcare reform.

The right-wing warblers were beating up on Obamacare, arguing that the president is arrogant, out of touch and desperate, and the dream of universal health care is a sinking ship.

Then on Hannity, someone called in to agree with Obama’s demand for an up-or-down congressional vote on health care. He said his own health insurance rates were going up 39 percent this year. I think his point was going to be that private citizens can’t keep bearing that burden, but I never got to hear his point. Hannity immediately barged in, cut the man off, accused him of trying to get his health insurance at the expense of others and started asking the caller irrelevant questions about how much money in campaign donations top Democrats had gotten from medical and pharmaceutical interests.

So I wondered: If Hannity is so dang sure he is on the winning side of this fight, why was he afraid to let the man speak?

I took advantage of spring break to hear President Obama give his last-ditch speech arguing for an up-or-down vote on health care. The Republican response by Mike Pence was so predictable I doubt he had even heard Obama. Obama’s plan, he said, following a long and unvarying line of Republican talking points, amounts to a government takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

Pence wasn’t thinking, but he made me think. If we really did have a government takeover of health care, I wondered, what would that look like here in Billings? Let’s see: We have two hospitals, both nonprofit, one owned by a religious order. Because of their nonprofit status, they don’t pay property taxes that support public services like police and fire protection, street repair, and public parks. In return, they write off tens of thousands of dollars every year in bad debt from sick people who can’t pay their bills. They draw funding from an astonishing array of sources: tax deductible private donations, government grants, Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, CHIP, private insurance, government-provided insurance for public employees, etc. They provide emergency services to people who need them, whether those people can pay or not. Those costs are absorbed by the hospitals, or passed along to other patients through increased fees.

Besides the hospitals, we have the RiverStone Clinic, which is owned by the county and city governments. We have a Veterans Administration Clinic that is owned by the federal government. We have a state health department that conducts all sorts of inspections, gives out public health warnings, etc. We have an ambulance service that operates under a government-awarded contract. And we have doctors in private practice, many of them educated at publicly owned or tax-supported medical schools, who cobble together their own methods of payment from various public and private sources.

So here’s my question: If Obama marched into Billings and took over health care, would we be able to tell the difference?

The Outpost editor sneaks out from his lair long enough to fire off a potshot.

Thirty years in prison? Hope he serves every minute of it.

I just scanned through a list of Academy Award nominees and couldn’t find a single movie I have seen in any category. Man. And I like movies. But the combination of my crazy schedule and the growing unpleasantness of the movie-going experience keeps me away. The last time I went, I sat through something like a dozen commercials before the feature. I won’t even do that for free at home.

At home, I can afford popcorn, too.

Marvin Granger sends along a link to this new survey by the Pew Research Center. Most interesting results to me: Only a third of those surveyed knew that the Senate health bill drew zero Republican votes. Only a quarter knew that it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.

Here’s a new Billings-based cooking blog.

Rush Limbaugh referred to the U.S. president as “Barack Hussein Obama.” I don’t listen to Limbaugh enough to have a feel for often he does this,  but I was a little surprised to hear it. I thought that was the shtick of Bill Cunningham, who does it all the time.

Then this morning, Limbaugh noted that media references to the Austin aircrash pilot used all three of his names. Any time the media want you to think of someone as a deranged wacko, he said, they use all three names.

So now I get it.