10/20/04

LC041020

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

The healthcare crisis hits the ballot box. Would a tax on cell
phones help keep emergency rooms open?

Dr. Dan Higgins>> It's a band-aid. We have a hemorrhaging,
critically ill patient right here and we have to do something
right now or a lot of people are going to get hurt.

Jim Lott>> We don't want people being misled thinking that, if
they vote for us, they've fixed the problem.

Val>> And then, local students on an ecological quest. Can
they find a way to hit the slopes on a snowboard made of paper?

It's all coming up next on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Los Angeles's emergency rooms are in trouble. Seven have
closed over the past year along with the hospitals that
supported them. But now doctors say they have a way of
stabilizing our ERs until policy makers can come up with a long-
term cure. It is Proposition 67, but as David Okarski tells us,
Proposition 67 also includes a tax on your phone bills.

David Okarski>> At the St. Francis Hospital emergency room,
gurneys are lining up to get in.

>> "But today you couldn't get up?"

David Okarski>> It's a full house and not on a weekend. This
is Monday afternoon and some people have been here all night.

Dr. Dan Higgins>> Patients have been waiting for seventeen
hours for a bed, for fifteen hours for a bed, fourteen, thirteen
hours. They've already been admitted, but there's no beds in
the hospital. We're full.

>> "Are you sat or you're close to sat?"

>> "Yeah, close to saturation."

David Okarski>> An emergency room operator is discouraging
ambulances from bringing new patients, but other hospitals
highlighted in red on the computer screen are already turning
ambulances away.

Dr. Dan Higgins>> You know, we have seventeen hospitals in our
area and only four are open. Seventeen, they're all closed
except for four.

David Okarski>> A growing number of people who need basic
healthcare are crowding hospital emergency rooms along with
those who are seriously injured or ill. There's nowhere else
they can go. Some have no insurance. Others are insured.

>> "Medi-cal."

>> "Medi-cal."

>> "Yeah."

David Okarski>> But their coverage doesn't come close to paying
the cost of treatment. Veteran emergency room doctor, Dr. Dan
Higgins, says the system is doomed to failure.

Dr. Dan Higgins>> We have the highest trained nurses, highest
trained doctors, the best equipment in the world, yet we have to
offer it to everyone who comes. Morally and legally we do that
because that's what we're here for, but there is no funding for
a great majority of those patients. As a consequence, hospitals
are in trouble.

David Okarski>> Higgins is a past President of the California
Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, one of
the groups that put Proposition 67 on the ballot.

Dr. Dan Higgins>> Well, it was either that or die. I mean, we
are in dire straits in California. We have a terrible problem,
I think as you're seeing here today.

David Okarski>> Proposition 67 would raise one of the taxes on
your phone bill, the one that pays for 911 emergency phone
equipment. The new tax would reimburse doctors and hospitals
for patients who can't pay their bills. If Proposition 67
passes, the tax would rise from .72 percent currently to 3.72
percent. That means on a fifty dollar phone bill, the tax would
go from $.36 to $1.86, but this only applies to cell phones and
business phones. The monthly tax on your residential phone bill
would be capped at $.50. Seniors with Lifeline service wouldn't
pay the tax at all. According to the Voter Information Guide,
Proposition 67 would raise about $450 million dollars a year to
reimburse doctors and hospitals for unpaid emergency care.

Dr. Dan Higgins>> This is like an average day. It's not that
busy right now, yet we can't handle the load right now and
that's the problem.

David Okarski>> At least a half dozen emergency rooms will
close permanently this year in Los Angeles County alone. The
biggest reason, Dr. Higgins says, is the growing number of
uninsured or under-insured patients. Groups representing
hospitals, emergency room doctors, nurses and paramedics are
campaigning for Proposition 67. Needless to say, telephone
companies are against it.

Michael Bagley>> Less than one percent of the revenues they
would generate would be for 911 purposes. Remember, they're
raising a 911 tax and less than one percent of the identified
use of the phones would go to 911.

David Okarski>> Verizon Wireless opposes any new taxes on its
customers. The Executive Director of Public Policy argues that,
unlike 911 emergency phone service, unpaid emergency medical
care has nothing to do with cell phones.

Michael Bagley>> This tax sets a bad precedent on two levels.
One is that it's not a tax for a cause that relates to your
wireless service. Second of all, it opens the door for other
non-related causes to use wireless service as a basis for paying
for it.

David Okarski>> He says there are already too many taxes piggy-
backing your telephone service. In some places in California,
they add up to almost twenty percent of the bill. But phone
companies aren't the only ones with serious reservations about
Proposition 67.

Glenn Melnick>> Basically, they say give us a half billion
dollars of new money and we'll make things better.

David Okarski>> Healthcare economist, Glenn Melnick, with the
University of Southern California and the Rand Corporation, is
unconvinced there's a crisis.

Glenn Melnick>> We found basically that, while the number of
emergency rooms went down, the total available beds, or
treatment bays as they're called in emergency departments,
actually went up and even grew faster than the population in
California which also went up.

David Okarski>> Melnick says when one hospital stops doing
business, others nearby expand services and facilities to
accommodate the new patients who are also new customers.
Hopefully, some of them can pay and Melnick says there are
already government subsidies to reimburse hospitals for those
who can't. The Healthcare Association of Southern California
initially supported Proposition 67, but Executive Vice
President, Jim Lott, says not now.

Jim Lott>> Proposition 67, unfortunately, gives the impression
that it's going to solve this problem and that's one of the
things that we have concerns about. We don't want people being
misled thinking that, if they vote for this, they've fixed the
problem.

David Okarski>> But the Los Angeles County Health Department
warns a perfect storm is brewing.

Carol Meyer>> It's not just an issue of the uninsured any
longer because this crisis is affecting those of us who are
insured.

David Okarski>> Carol Meyer, Director of Los Angeles County
Emergency Medical Services, says a combination of financial
problems threatens to sink even more hospitals.

Carol Meyer>> The problem is, if you don't pay your light bill,
the lights turn off. If you don't pay your phone bill, the
phone turns off. When a hospital doesn't get paid, it has to
continue to provide care. The physician has to continue to
provide care until there comes a point where the bottom line is
in the red.

Glenn Melnick>> The concern by policy makers which I think is a
legitimate one is that, if one major hospital closes with a
large uninsured population and that's added to an existing
population of uninsured in a nearby hospital, it would sink that
hospital and you could have a domino effect there.

Carol Meyer>> We have an ever-growing population and an ever-
aging population. In addition to that, we have physicians who
no longer are willing to take call on call panels.

Dr. Dan Higgins>> And we're down to one orthopedic surgeon. I
just looked on our monitor over there by the Redi-Net.

Carol Meyer>> You have to have the orthopedists and the
neurosurgeons and all of these specialties in order to handle a
patient that comes in to the emergency room. Physicians don't
want to do that any longer because of the increasing numbers of
uninsured and under-insured.

David Okarski>> And non-funded state mandates now require more
nurses per patient and costly earthquake safety standards for
hospitals.

Jim Lott>> In fact, we estimate that the total price tag in
California will be about $24 billion dollars.

David Okarski>> These add even more pressure to a hospital's
bottom line, but everyone we talked to agrees that this
initiative fails to address the underlying problem, that
America's healthcare system needs fundamental reform.

Jim Lott>> We don't need more money coming to hospitals and
physicians. We need more money backing up the insurance needs
of uninsured patients in this country, in this state and in this
county. That's the solution that has to ultimately be
implemented. This doesn't do it.

Glenn Melnick>> The answer in the long run is that we've got to
get everybody covered. You know, then we have a steady source
of revenue and we don't have to do, you know, very inefficient
kind of Rube Goldberg type fixes to our healthcare system.

Dr. Dan Higgins>> If somebody came in to the emergency
department door right now hemorrhaging to death and somebody
said, gosh, you know, if we wait a week, we could really fix
this problem, and I said that's a good idea, let's let him
hemorrhage and die, what would you think of me? The same thing
is here. It's a band-aid. We have a hemorrhaging, critically
ill patient right here and we have to do something right now or
a lot of people are going to get hurt.

David Okarski>> Whether or not Proposition 67 passes, more Los
Angeles hospitals are expected to announce soon that they'll
close. And as the flu season looms with too little vaccine to
go around, remaining emergency rooms will divert more
ambulances, more patients will crowed into fewer ER waiting
rooms and wait even longer to see a doctor. David Okarski for
Life and Times.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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Val>> Religion has played an especially large role in this
year's election, so knowing what people believe and why is of
particular interest to the candidates and, as it turns out, how
religious you are depends very much on whether you are male or
female. I talked with Steve Slon, editor of AARP Magazine. The
American Association of Retired Persons conducted a survey on
seniors in spirituality where the gender differences came
through loud and clear.

Steve Slon, as editor of the AARP, you've looked at all sorts of
issues and the latest one looks at beliefs about religion and
spirituality. You've discovered some really interesting
differences between men and women.

Steve Slon>> That's right, Val.

Val>> Essentially, you say God gets all the girls? (Laughter)

Steve Slon>> (Laughter) Well, we did a survey and we found that
many more women than men define themselves as very religious.
The number starts at about thirty-eight percent of women in
their fifties and it goes up to forty-nine percent of women when
you reach the seventies that define themselves as very
religious. Men, about twenty-five to twenty-eight percent, say
they're very religious and that number doesn't change as you
grow up.

Val>> So by the time women and men are older as they are living
out their lives together, many more women are much more
religious?

Steve Slon>> Well, it would seem so, but there are other ways
to look at it and that is that there are two possibilities. One
is that men aren't religious as women and the other is that men
just don't like to talk about it, so they're much more likely to
define themselves as unreligious? No, not me. But then they go
to church. In fact, attendance at a house of worship is about
the same for men and women even as they get older, so that's
surprising. That says, again, two things, either that men go
because it's like, honey, we're going to church now, come with
me. Or on the other hand, it's that men just, again, don't like
to describe it that way, but they put their butts in the seats
when it comes time and that's how they vote.

Val>> You also found that prayer has a very different role in
the lives of women versus men. Women pray a lot more and it
means a lot more to them?

Steve Slon>> Right. Women describe prayer as being much more
important to them and much more likely to be a way that they
express their spirituality or their religious faith. Men, not
so much. In fact, when we asked about communing with nature,
was that one of the ways? Men were much more likely than women
to say that communing with nature was one of their spiritual
satisfying points.

Val>> And that's why you say women go to church and men go
camping (laughter).

Steve Slon>> (Laughter). Yes, that's right. Again, you know,
maybe it's just the way they like to talk about it. Another
thing that was very important and a very powerful, positive
message was that the highest spiritually satisfying activity
that both sexes described was helping others. So that mission
of taking care of others and stuff is very satisfying. Also on
the list further down were spending time with family, attending
services and, you know, doing good works.

Val>> And levels of religious belief also paralleled income.
Basically, those earning $25,000 or less, a larger percentage,
more than a third, described themselves as very religious, and
as you go up the income ladder, less so.

Steve Slon>> Right. I think that parallels teachings that
we've heard and, you know, stereotypes that we've heard over the
years which is that the poorer folks, you know, take to religion
more seriously than the wealthy. In fact, of course, there are
biblical teachings along the same lines. Why that is, one can
only speculate, but I do think that it bears out an aesthetic.

Val>> But it has implications. Because if you have elderly
people who are at a lower income, you're going to get a
different kind of culture than those who are wealthy, yes?

Steve Slon>> That's true. I think that you have to look at the
fact that, when people are in desperate and dire circumstances,
when they are very poor, where else are you going to turn? I
mean, this is some satisfaction and some solace for people who
don't have as much.

Val>> You also asked people why they don't go to church, if
they don't go to church, and they had all sorts of reasons.

Steve Slon>> Right. Well, in the context of the current
political race that's going on, it's a very interesting one.
Seventy percent say that they have arguments with some of the
teachings of their religious leaders. They also said that they
were angered by the hypocrisy of other members and some of them
were just plain annoyed that there's so much emphasis on
collecting money. That was one of the factors.

Val>> And, of course, the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic
church. They're angry at the leaders.

Steve Slon>> Yeah, there have been many problems with religious
authority and I think Americans in general, while they still
consider themselves, say, good Catholics, they don't necessarily
follow to the letter the Catholic teachings or, you know, the
Jewish teachings, etc.

Val>> And the fear of hell doesn't have that much clout?

Steve Slon>> No. You know, we asked people what makes them go
and one of the reasons they gave was, you know, because family,
because tradition, because one just simply goes to come closer
to God in one's religion. We also asked if fear of going to
hell was one of the reasons and absolutely that was not. Only
three percent said that was a factor in their decision. So in
the modern world, hell has just lost some of its fire, I think
it's fair to say (laughter).

Val>> Now as the baby boomers get older and supposedly more
religious, will they approach their spirituality differently?

Steve Slon>> Well, I do think they will. I think that there's
going to be more of a Chinese menu approach to religion. The
baby boomers have always taken pride in doing things their own
way and what does that mean? Well, it means that I say I'm a
Catholic, but I go to a Zen meditation center on Thursday nights
and I have this meditation group. Or I'm Jewish and I do the
same. Or I take this theological point of view, but I don't
accept some of the political teachings that go along with that.
So, in other words, it's a very much mix and match, you know,
make my religion my own.

Val>> It doesn't portend well for institutionalized religion,
does it?

Steve Slon>> Well, you know, the numbers of the attendance at
institutional religions has been on a kind of straight downward
trend for the last fifty years. But the one positive note there
for them is that it has leveled off in the last few years. It
hasn't risen, but it has leveled off which suggests that maybe
as the baby boomers come back to the fold as they age, they may
be going back to their childhood religions.

Val>> Steve Slon, editor of AARP Magazine, thank you very much.

Steve Slon>> Thank you, Val. It was really good talking with
you.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
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Val>> Four students from Pasadena City College took on a big
challenge: build a snowboard out of nothing but recycled paper
and race it down an icy slope in competition with other teams
from across the country. The Pasadena City College team was the
only one from a community college. All the other teams were
from four-year universities. So how did they do? Producer
Sherine Adeli brings us the story of these ambitious underdogs.

Stan King>> The 2004 Energy Challenge was co-sponsored by the
U.S. Department of Energy and the Institute of Paper Science and
Technology. The premise of the project was to design a
snowboard that took in the heaviest consideration the reduction
of energy consumption in the manufacturing process.

Fabian Lacey>> We had to submit what idea we were creating. We
had to do it in writing, do it in drawing and we had to give the
judges a sense of what direction we would take.

Craig Shoji>> It needed to be stiff, like pops back into its
original shape, have memory, you know. So if I'm bending it, it
has to go back to its original shape. It had to have a
preloaded spring in it so it's conforming on the snow because
the terrain is always changing and it takes the rider's weight
somewhat when the rider's standing on it.

Fabian Lacey>> What we were trying to do with the snowboard is
create a preloaded spring. When we used recycled paper to do
that, it was kind of hard to get the results we needed. The
bamboo is inherently a grass. It's not a wood with very strong
properties of a wood.

Craig Shoji>> We were like halfway through working on that and
then we got a call from Michael Shea at the Institute of Paper
Sciences. He's like, guys, we got your mid-term report. You
did a great job, but you can't use the bamboo in its raw form
because we're a Paper Science team. We really want you to force
the paper. We're like, wow, what are you talking about? We
have to redo this whole thing? He's like, I'm sorry, but you
can't do that. You're going to get docked for this.

Craig Shoji>> "This is like a covert operation. We're going to
get in. We're going to take the recycled paper, bring it back
to my car and make a snowboard. Go!"

Asami Tachikawa>> We used corrugated cardboard which is manmade
glazed. We're supposed to use corrugated cardboard because it's
already been processed and they already used recycled materials,
so we're not actually using new recycled materials.

Carlos Mendez>> We basically cut that up and laid it out in the
form of a honeycomb pattern as the core.

Fabian Lacey>> The honeycomb was actually suggested by Terry
Price over at Cerritos College. He suggested that we use a
structure that was lightweight and strong, similar to what they
use in aircraft products. So he showed us some samples of
traditional honeycomb patterns. We looked it up and we felt
that it was a really strong professional strength.

>> "How are you feeling right now, bud?"

>> "Feeling good."

Carlos Mendez>> We made paper with avaco, which is a close
relative to banana fiber.

Craig Shoji>> Fabian was taking a class at Cerritos in
composites and he worked with hemp to reinforce plaster molds.
He said you can't break it. The tensile strength is like
incredible. Okay, let's lay that in and emulate this negative
forty-five zero degree format that's similar to fiberglass. You
know, provides strength in all these directions and then, you
know, pretty much sandwich it between paper and just use the
water to bond it together. Then we'll have a sheet that, you
know, three or four layers thick with the hemp in between and we
can sandwich that on top of the cardboard.

Fabian Lacey>> When this project came about, it reminded me
again like, well, you know, we are trying to solve a problem.
Why not take it to the next level?

Asami Tachikawa>> Our uniforms, for example. We went to
Goodwill Stores and bought used clothes and then we greased it
instead of adding colors.

Carlos Mendez>> It got us to the cycle to think of
biodegradables to compost in the greens container, whatever it
is the city has, and it kind of opened our eyes to be conscious.

Stan King>> The interesting thing that was said about our team
was that PCC's kids really focused on the spirit of the
competition more than any other college.

Craig Shoji>> "One of the major themes that we adopted was
waste minimization and that became an important tie throughout
the entire competition. As it went on, we realized the
importance of it on the global level and the local level."

Stan King>> Some of the teams were really large and they'd
obviously spent money getting there. I mean, I even made the
comment, I forget to which school, because somebody had their
crate with their boards in it. I asked them about their board
and I got this, well, you'll see. I thought, oh (laughter).

Carlos Mendez>> We said when we left from here to Colorado that
we already won because we already had -- not in the sense that
we already won like the prize itself, but we already won the
trip.

Craig Shoji>> I told my team before we got there, if we could
make the snowboard, I'll win the race because I have
experiencing racing and I was pretty hard-headed about that. I
was like, okay, I'll take these guys down. So when I got there
and I started seeing some of the boards, half of me said, okay,
we're good and the other half said, oh, man.

[Film Clip]

Announcer>> "And the fastest time breaking the eighteen-minute
mark, the 18.7 mark, at 17.99, please come up here, the racer
from Pasadena."

[Film Clip]

Fabian Lacey>> As soon as he took off, he started picking up
speed and we were like, okay, our board works (laughter). It
wasn't just the rider, it wasn't just the board, it wasn't just,
you know, the course or something. Everything seemed to click.

Announcer>> "The race counts for twenty percent of the score
and the race, as it should be, is a very important factor in
determining who wins this competition. And the third place team
was Pasadena."

[Film Clip]

Announcer>> "This team took the concept of recycled material to
an extreme and actually went dumpster-diving to find the
materials."

Fabian Lacey>> The judges had told us several times that we
were the most creative team and I think that comes from the fact
that we weren't structured as engineers and we didn't have to
build our board based on the guidelines that they had set. They
had set guidelines and we tried to do everything we could to
meet them, however, keep our own creativity and our own concept
different than everybody else's.

Val>> The students credit their success with a lot of help from
the community and they all plan to continue their studies in
design. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone
at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next
time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

It was supposed to be temporary, but now it's sprouting trees.
Can neighbors make this mountain of earthquake rubble go away?

>> People have asthmatic conditions. They didn't think of
those. They thought of what they were going to put in there.
They never thought of us. That's a crime.

>> They didn't take into consideration the community that lived
there, you know. If they would have brought it up to Beverly
Hills or Palos Verdes in a community that there's more income or
more wealthy folks there, it would have been out in months.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.