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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1985
No one is pleased.
That is all that seems clear when one considers the state of malpractice insurance for the University of Kansas Medical Center's 350 residents.
It all started innocently enough during the 1985 session of the Kansas Legislature, when lawmakers wanted to find a way to save the state money on the Med Center's malpractice insurance.
But because of pressure from medical interests and some seemingly hasty work, legislators got a law no one seems pleased with and something the Med Center never asked for.
In fiscal year 1983, the University paid $257,000 for malpractice insurance for residents, who are licensed physicians returning to school for more training. The cost could jump to $1.7 million in fiscal 1986.
Expensive solutions
The Med Center, by law, now becomes an insurance company for its residents. It does
not have to pay premiums, but it must pay claims in case of a lawsuit.
It is as if the Med Center is operating a lottery without having anyone pay for the tickets — it does not raise money, but it must provide the jackpot.
The Kansas Board of Regents recently voted to recommend two solutions, to go back to the way things were, or keep the law and find some money from the State Health Care Stabilization Fund, which supplements malpractice insurance for Kansas doctors.
But these solutions still would leave the Med Center facing increasing insurance costs, or leave it begging for the funds to pay off possible claims. A better solution probably exists.
But finding that solution may be as difficult as trying to pin down a reason for rising malpractice insurance costs.
Farrakhan's racist rhetoric becomes more obvious with each speech he gives in a large city.
Drawing huge audiences in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and New York City in the past few months, Farrakhan has sharpened his anti-Semitic attacks.
Farrakhan's racism
When Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam spoke at the University of Kansas last semester, he managed to convince most of his audience that he was not a racist.
Jews are the enemies, Farrakhan tells his growing number of followers who stomp and scream agreement at his sneeches.
Farrakhan's greatest attraction seems to be the hope he offers to black America by preaching economic self-sufficiency. His descriptions of a strong black economic system are the words many blacks want to hear.
But since Farrakhan's visit to the University, he has made that assertion difficult to believe.
Although some of what Farrakhan says sounds good, his blatant anti-Semitism undermines the positive in his message.
Farrakhan has compared himself to Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr. Those over-extended comparisons ignore his message of hate.
"I am your last chance, America. You killed your last black leader when you killed Martin Luther King Jr," Farrakhan said at his Madison Square Garden speech this month. "I am your last chance, too. Jews!"
Farrakhan is a demagogue who feeds the climate of hate and suspicion while appealing to the legitimate needs of a struggling group.
These ravings prove that no group holds a monopoly on racism. Anyone can gain political heights by making scapegoats of members of ethnic or religious minorities.
There's no reason to tolerate his racist spoutings just because they come from the mouth of a black.
It's a case of too little and too late.
Italian prosecutors issued a warrant Sunday for the arrest of Mohammed Abbas, the Palestinian leader now charged with masterminding the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship. Abbas, unfortunately, is no longer in Italy.
Too little, too late
They remain in Italian custody. But Abbas, who U.S. officials wanted held until his role in the blacking could be determined, was released and allowed to fly to Yugoslavia.
In fact, Italian authorities haven't a clue as to where Abbas can be found. Swearing out a warrant for his arrest won't do much to bring him to justice.
Abbas was aboard the Egyptian airliner U.S. jets forced to land in Sicily. The airliner also carried the four hijackers who commandeered the Achille
Lauro and killed an American passenger.
Italy justified the release by saying Abbas had diplomatic immunity. More important, Bettino Craxi, the Italian premier, did not wish to jeopardize his government's close relations with his Arab neighbors across the Mediterranean.
Perhaps Italian prosecutors did not have enough evidence at the time to arrest Abbas. They do now — now that it is too late.
Rob Karwath
Editor
Duncan Calhoun Business manager
John Hanna Michael Totty
Managing editor Editorial editor
Lauretta McMillen
Campus editor
Susanne Shaw
General manager, news adviser
Brett McCabe Sue Johnson
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The low comedy in deregulation
This was a scene from a secondate adventure flick. The good guy eludes the bad guys in a big international airport. He slips to the darker reaches of the terminal and strolls up to the gate of a commuter carrier. He buys a ticket for Santa Barbara, Calif., just as the flight is to depart.
Aboard the aircraft, 10 passengers strap themselves into the little turboprop airplane and prepare for a bumpy ride down the Pacific coast. An instant before the hatch is to be shut, the airline counter clerk reappears.
"Ladies and gentlemen," says the clerk, "I am sorry, but we will have to ask you to leave the aircraft." Our man on the lam looks around in a panic, wondering has gone awry. The clerk goes on to explain: "It seems our aircraft today has been overdueed. We must either remove the extra fuel or reduce our passenger load."
With that, the passengers stumble off the Handley Page and back into the terminal.
From there, they witness the comedy of how a fledgling airline, struggling for a place in the new,
Robert C.
Maynard
Oakland Tribune
Oakland Tribune
deregulated marketplace, deals with a crisis.
If indeed our imaginary movie hero's fate had hung on how well this little airline did its job that day, his goose would have been cooked.
Small airlines are proliferating in our air corridors today, great news for the free market, but a mixed blessing for the traveling public. Indeed, given recent reports on the shaky condition of the inspection proxies at Federal Airways, there is much about which to be concerned.
Hered back into the terminal, we passengers watched the Laurel and Hardy routine unfold. For about the first 10 minutes, the airline personnel held a planeside conference on the crisis. It was clear no one had the
What happened to that flight to Santa Barbara helps illustrate some of the problems.
Soon an airport maintenance truck arrived and a senior janitor handed the airline people two 5-gallon mop buckets. One fellow placed the buckets dead center under the aircraft, about where you would put the pail if you were about to milk Bessie the cow.
Unfortunately, an airplane has a much less revealing anatomy than a cow where such matters are concerned. Not one of the airline personnel, cockpit crew included, had the first notion of how to milk an overfueled Handley Page.
vaguest idea of what to do.
One fellow marched to and fro with a flashlight. He poked the light half-heartedly at the underbelly to no particular avail. The airline staff members could come to no consensus as to how to proceed or where the relevant anatomy was.
Even if they found the right valve, the job of removing 2,500 pounds of excess fuel in 5-gallon increments figured to take a long time.
Finally reaching that conclusion, the airline staff shifted tactics and decided, after excruciating public deliberations, half of us would go on
that flight and the others on a later flight on a different airline.
This comedy of errors fits into a national picture. It would not be a true reflection of all young and struggling companies, but it is true of too many.
Last year, the FAA conducted intensive, "white glove" inspections of 327 airlines. It found inexperience and slipsoid practices to be common among the smaller carriers.
Although it is true one of the largest carriers — American Airlines, received the biggest fine in history from the investigation — the news was nonetheless most distressing among the smaller carriers.
U. S. News & World Report, in a summary of the agency's findings, said, "The fear is that smaller airlines are tempted to skimp on safety in their scramble to survive." The same report followed-up inspections by the FAA are the same ones that show up later in the accident reports."
Given the growth of the post-
deregulation industry, the FAA is
scrambling to keep pace. The good
news is that competition has come to
the airline industry. The bad news is
we're still not sure of the full price.
U.S. racism behind apartheid stance
There is a current debate about whether U.S. corporations should stop doing business in South Africa, Opponents of divestment say they agree that apartheid is wrong, but disagree about the solution for ending South Africa's racist system.
I am puzzled that divestment should be a controversial issue. The U.S. purports to stand for freedom, human rights and equality, yet we hink that diversity of diversity from the slavery of the South African people.
It disturbs me to read columns, such as the one by Victor Goodpasture in the Oct. 11 Kansas. These right-wing conservatives make flowery speeches about people struggling to be free in the Soviet Union and all over the world. In the same breath they say that Russia is behind the South African divestment movement.
Don't the South African blacks count as people who yearn and deserve to be free? Living in the U.S.S.R., no matter how harsh it may be, is still a picnic compared to being a black in South Africa.
Conservatives seem to believe that communism is the only evil. They distinguish between human rights abuses in communist countries such as China, the Soviet Union and Poland, and the atrocities in Chile, the Phillinines and South Africa.
Those atrocities are excused by the
U. S. government because the countries do not call themselves communists. What blatant hypocrisy! We are also hypocritical to put economic sanctions on Poland and Nicaragua, but continue to have U.S. businesses in South Africa.
I do concede that the Soviets support the South African blacks' struggle for freedom in South Africa. And I am not naive enough to think that they are motivated by a concern for human rights. They see South Africa as a strategic area.
But their stance on South Africa happens to be correct. If we don't follow suit, we can bet that South Africa will become a communist nation (not the blocs prevail against the racist apartheid regime.
Why then are we having such a difficult time making the right decision? Conservatives say that the United States is hypocritical to fight for blacks in South Africa when we still have racism in our own country. Without realizing it they've exposed themselves.
A black South African government will remember who its friends were during their struggle. Therefore it is prudent as well as morally right.
Americans are divided on divestment because those being oppressed are black. Look at what the Rengan administration has done to set back
Guest Shot
Kirstin Myers
civil rights for blacks in the last five years.
His economic policies have helped reduce white unemployment and infant mortality rates, while those of blacks remain high. We could say these are indirect and unintentional results of President Reagan's policies. But some of his other actions are harder to explain.
Reagan supports tax-exemption and federal funding for segregated colleges. But it is opposed to extending the Voting Rights Act, which removes barriers that kept minorities from exercising their right to vote.
Worse, Reagan has appointed people who are against civil rights and affirmative action to the positions responsible for enforcing this nation's civil rights laws.
If some still doubt that Reagan is racist, his actions and statements regarding South Africa should convince us. Ed Rollings, his former campaign manager, is a paid lobbyist for the South African government.
Reagan himself has made ludicrous statements, saying that segregation has been virtually eliminated in South Africa and that recent waves of police violence were provoked by blacks killing other blacks.
Reagan also backed Jerry Falwell after Falwell called Desmond Tutu, black South African leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, a phony. How are we supposed to act morally and responsibly as a nation when our own president uses virulent anticommunist rhetoric to distract us from the racist exploitation of the South African people by American business.
Finally we must ask ourselves why few have the courage to admit that our beloved president is an uninformed bigot. The reason is that he has brought out the prejudice that exists in all of us, and he has made discrimination acceptable. This is why many people feel comfortable defending our involvement in the worst, most oppressive regime on this earth.
We are all involved at this University, too, because of our ties to South Africa through the investments of the Kansas University Endowment Association. If whites were being oppressed by blacks in South Africa, wouldn't our attitudes be completely different?
Mailbox
Checking Uzi prices
Your "Verbatim" column in the Oct. 21 Kansan contained what appeared to be a gross distortion of reality. Professor Felix Moos was reported as saying, "An Uzi, a standard small arms weapon which you can buy in Lawrence, Kansas, for $150 to $200, is cheap and can cut an opponent in half."
I did some checking at one of the local gun shops. The retail price for a semi-automatic Uzi is $647. The public cannot buy automatic weapons in the United States — only people with special licenses, which are not easy to get.
But Moes obviously was referring to an automatic. Was he thinking of Lawrence's world-famous arms market? (Is the city getting desperate after Culture Farms?)
But seriously, an automatic would cost more than a semi-automatic, and anything sold on the black market could cost a lot more than in the stores.
Unless some very stupid gun thieves are pedaling stolen Uzi's for a fraction of what they're worth ($1,000 to $2,000) the only people who will sell you an automatic Uzi for $200 — in Lawrence or anywhere else — are the secret police. I think Moos and/or the Kansan are giving people the
Ed Stamm Lawrence resident
false impression that one can easily obtain automatic weapons at low cost.
This article was just another example of the creation, intentional or not, of anti-terrorist hysteria aimed at increasing the police powers of our government.
Not so. Only the well-established terrorists (the world's governments) can get automatic weapons easily and cheaply. They buy them in bulk, from factories using exploited labor, because they've extorted from their sublets.
Littering fans
I was appalled as I glanced toward stately M. Oread at the end of the K-State game Saturday and noted that the beautiful, grassy hillside was absolutely littered with debris.
As a paying spectator and supporter of KU football, it made me wonder about the "fans" who sit on the hill, watch the game without making any contribution toward the athletic program and then leave such a large portion of their grounds keepers to clean up. We don't need that kind of "fans."
Polly Bales Logan, Kansas.