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Monday, September 15, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Opinions
Too poor to pay
A crisis is spreading across the nation and the state of Kansas. Each year, more and more people are unable to afford needed medical care.
According to a report issued by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, more than 500,000 Kansans, or about a quarter of the state's population, are too poor to pay for their medical expenses. They can't afford to get sick.
So what are the hospitals supposed to do when these people need treatment?
The report said that about 60 percent of the hospitals in Kansas are significantly affected by this problem. Some hospitals even go so far as to refuse to treat patients unless the situation is an emergency.
The University of Kansas Medical Center refuses to treat medically indigent persons who live outside the state, except, of course, in emergency situations. If the situation is not an emergency, the patients are sent to other clinics. And the Med Center received $10
million last year to help cover the costs of the medically indigent persons it did treat.
Medical costs have gotten out of hand, and insurance is sometimes hard to obtain. But doesn't everyone have the basic right of receiving the best health care possible? Costs have soared so much that health care is becoming a commodity that only the rich can afford.
Perhaps it's time for Congress to reconsider socialized medicine. England has been serving its citizens with such a system for years - to the benefit of both doctors and patients.
Maybe insurance companies need to lower their prices and make health insurance easier to get. Maybe the health care industry should take a cut in profits and lower their prices too.
It's time to make health care more available to the people who need it, instead of turning it into a luxury that many can ill afford.
NCAA plays by old rules
In recent days, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has been a shining example of authority run amuck.
The most flamboyant flexing of the organization's muscles came last week with the suspensions of 60 Nebraska football players who apparently turned themselves in for the misuse of complimentary game tickets.
It seems that the players violated an NCAA rule that said athletes could not give complimentary tickets to anyone except relatives and fellow students. Coach Tom Osborne urged the football players to be honest with investigators and turn in any offenses.
The NCAA then turned around and slapped a one-game suspension on 53 players and a two-game suspension on seven more players.
So much for honesty being the best rolicv.
Upon further consideration, the NCAA instead decided to force Nebraska to revoke one complimentary ticket for the entire 1986 season for every ticket violation found for the 1985 season.
The subcommittee handling
the incident also will recommend that all other Division I schools audit their programs and report similar problems
While the final punishment came closer to fitting the crime, it was surprising that the NCAA found the need to be so harsh in the first place.
But even more surprising is the fact that the NCAA is trying to determine whether Alabama football players broke NCAA regulations by flying on a team charter to the funeral of their teammate.
The NCAA has established itself as a watchdog of college athletic programs, and that is all well and good. Recruiting violations and academic standards are consistent problems that could do with a little policing.
But some element of common sense has to be worked into the system and its archaic set of rules and regulations.
The NCAA waffles back and forth between being a "good ol' boy" organization and a hardline disciplinarian.
College athletics would do better as a whole if the NCAA could find — and stick with— an intelligent, well-constructed medium.
FBI victory almost hollow
According to 5558-TE, Gotti was described as "young, charismatic, and utterly ruthless" $^2$ a throwback to the days of Al Capone, whose power came from his violent reputation.
It is unprecended for a "made" member of the mafia, sworn to an oath of silence, to become an informant for the FBI. But that is what Wilfred "Willie Boy" Johnson, formerly a high-ranking member of the Gambino crime family, has done.
Last April, Gotti's trial began on racketeering charges. His indictment was the result of a five-year investigation and nine months of wire taps.
Johnson, otherwise known as Top Echelon Criminal Informant 5558-TE, spent more than two years surreptitiously recording the dealings of John Gotti, the alleged boss of the Gambino organization who has been described as the Mikhail Gorbachev of an aging mafia leadership.
But despite the recent successes, the most realistic assessment is that as soon as Gotti is shipped off to jail, there will be another to take his place.
News staff
News staff
Lauretta McMillen . Editor
Kady McMaster . Managing editor
Tad Clarke . News editor
David Silverman . Editorial editor
John Hanna . Campus editor
Frank Hansel . Sports editor
Jack Kelly . Photo editor
Tom Eblen . General manager, news adviser
Business staff
David Nixon . Business manager
Gregory Kaul . Retail sales manager
Denise Stephens . Campus sales manager
Clastie Dapen . Classified manager
Lisa Weems . Production manager
Dufuan Calhoun . National sales manager
Beverly Kastens . Traffic manager
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Hunt brothers can't spare a dime
One of the strangest people ever I've met as part of my job was H.L. Hunt, the oil tycoon who was once considered the world's wealthiest man.
In his twilight years, Hunt, who seldmoke spoke to reporters, would call me when he visited Chicago and volunteer to be interviewed.
It wasn't clear why he wanted to talk to me, although I wondered whether he planned to convert me to his way of thinking, which was so far right that he made Barry Goldwater sound like a pinko.
For example, one of his pet political theories was that a person should cast as many votes as he had dollars.
That, of course, would put the selection of presidents and Congress in the hands of a few billionaires like Hunt, which he thought was only fair. He didn't see any logic in a guy who was broke casting a vote.
We'd sit in his hotel suite, sipping cokes — he shunned liquor — while he reminisced about how he had started as a young poker-shark in southern Illinois, bought Texas oil leases, and wheeled and dealed his way to billions.
Sometimes he sang. That's right, sang. He had written and published an awful novel about his ideal society — where the rich had the votes — and he composed a song to go with it.
He would sing in an off-key, reedy voice, bobbing his head to achieve a tremolo. An audience of one, I'd listen to one of the world's richest men tweeting like a plump-faced bird.
I even took him on a radio news show I used to do in the morning. Dan
Mike Royko
Chicago Tribune
And Hunt did. About a dozen listeners promptly phoned to ask whether their radios were malfunctioning or whether we had zone nuts.
Price, the co-host, said: "Who's this?" I said: "H.L. Hunt, the richest man in America. He is going to sing for our audience."
I never was sure what to write about Hunt after our interviews, other than that he was quite an oddball. This didn't bother him, but he took offense when I wrote that he wore a cheap suit. He mailed me a tailor's receipt for $800. I wrote back that I might become a tailor.
Hunt is now gone. He died in 1974, leaving most of his billions to a horde of children he sired by four wives. He
And today I can't help but laugh when I think about Hunt and his political theories, and the plight that his three most famous sons are in.
was, incidentally, a bigamist. When you have that kind of money, who bothers with minor legal details.
As you probably have read, a bunch of banks are suing the Hunt brothers Lamar, Nelson and Herbert for more than $770 million in unpaid loans.
They got into hock for this incredible sum because their greed boiled over a few years ago. Already billionaires, they secretly tried to corner the world silver market, figuring they could drive up the price, sell and pick up a few billion more.
But before they could complete the scheme, silver prices slumped and they lost a few billion instead.
So they had to go to several banks to ask for a billion-dollar loan to cover their losses.
If you have dealt with banks, you might think that would be an impossible request. Some working stiffs cannot persuade banks to lend them the price of a new siding job for their three-flat.
But the banks are eager to please customers like the Hunt brothers. What is the problem boys? You tried to corner the world silver supply and
got caught? Hey, no problem.
many hundreds million do you need?
Now the banks are upset because the Hunts are not keeping up with the payments. And they are trying to grab some of the Hunt oil companies.
Being labeled as deadbeats might embarrass some people. But the Hunts were indignant. They turned around and sued the banks for suing them and asked for billions in damages. The rest of us might think about that route — not making the mortgage payments, then suing the bank for being pesty.
The Hunts have also tried to avoid losing their main stash by placing much of it under bankruptcy and court protection.
But if the Hunts are wiped out, as some financial experts predict, it might cause me to rethink my opinion of H.L.'s political ideas.
The high priced lawyers and federal judges will have to thrash out who owes what to whom. And the nice thing about this drama is that no matter who loses — the Hunts or the banks — they probably deserve it.
In the old man's perfect society, anybody without assets who showed up to vote would be given the bum's rush. If they go broke, that would be the fate of Lamar, Nelson and Herbert.
Maybe the old man had something after all.
Moore's art legacy transcends all time
Henry Moore looked at the world as though he were about to cast it in bronze, and he regularly succeeded in doing just that. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to put the appeal of his work into words, just as it is hard, perhaps impossible, to pass a Henry Moore without being arrested almost physically.
First there is the irresistible pull, then the shock of recognition or maybe of wonderness, or mirth, or undifferentiated fascination. Then
Paul Greenberg Columnist
the hand reaches out almost instinctively to touch, confirm and be surprised again. The pressures of time and routine, so accepted a moment ago, shatter as the eyes open and the touch recognizes. Like all great artists, Henry Moore was able to sanctify the mundane; even more impressive than his works was the stillness he could create in the minds of those his works ensnared or enchanted, or perhaps ensnared and awakened.
Henry Moore was not only an artist but an impresario; the presentation of the figure was part of his work. He understood that size had an appeal and significance of its own in sculpture. He brought out the shapes within, setting his free yet restraining their mystery. He did more. He worked with the air around his pieces and chiseled holes through them; he was a sculptor of space as well as substance.
His futuristic works seem to loom back, back toward his childhood and the world's, a world of simple shapes wonderfully made, so they flow into one another — knife's edges and rounded surfaces, cavities that are revelations of solidness, stone that speaks yet conveys enormous
silences. It is no surprise to learn that his art drew on lasting childhood impressions — the slagheaps of his native Yorkshire; the hillsides, cliffs and caves; the sense of flesh, bone and muscle that became his from rubbing his mother's rheumatic back as a child.
Transcending the classical forms of the Greeks, the young sculptor delved into Mayan, Aztec and African forms. Like Picasso, Moore was constantly stunning the world with his profligate talent, expressing modernity's longing for a past that was both simpler and more complex than the neatly engineered present.
It was as if the artist took his materials — earth, fire, wind, space and time — and fashioned them into a perfect asymmetry. His work reached wordlessly out for the future and deep into the primitive past; it was anything but of this present, with its neat, articulate, almost industrialized designs. Instead of titles such as "Standing Figure: Knife Edge," Moore's work could bear the names of biblical books, such as Lamentations and Revelation, Ruth and Jeremiah. But his sculpture reduces the portentous titles to excess decoration. The artist served his silent muse well, letting it prophesy without words.
Henry Moore's art may be the best of arguments against the thesis that the world consists of words, and art must be literature of one sort or another. His work justifies faith in a world of shape, form and feeling. It has been said that Moore's work inspires respect but not love.
On the death of Henry Moore at 88, much of his work seems to be just coming into its own, still stirring for the future and evoking the past. "So we beat on," as Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Henry Moore leaves behind sculpture to comfort, startle, entrance and awaken an ever encroaching future. His work doesn't seem to express the spirit of his age but the spirit of the ages.
Congress waits looks to elections
The administration and Congress still have a lot of work left to do this year, but most of the pivotal battles have been fought. Governmental Washington has become a city-in-waiting for judgment day in November.
The assumptions in the capital are that Congress will pass a tax reform bill, give President Reagan funds to aid the Nicaraguan contra rebels, confirm his Supreme Court nominees, defy him with stiff
ARNOLD
SAWISLAK
Some of those expectations could be upset, but the real interest in Washington as Congress returns for a scheduled four-week cleanup session is the off-year political campaign and its payoff in the Nov. 4 elections of 34 senators and 435 House members.
economic sanctions against South Africa and lash together a federal budget that still leaves the Treasury deen in red ink.
UPI Commentary
Right now, the 99th Congress has 252 Democrats and 180 Republicans with three vacancies in the House and 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats in the Senate.
Five years ago, the Republicans were talking confidently about taking over the House during this decade. They are far less coyk now about the electoral rewards of the shift toward conservatism that was heralded by Reagan's 1980 election and 1984 landslide.
In order to win control of the House in the 100th Congress, the GOP would have to increase its strength by only 38 seats, which would be a big turnover but nothing like the shifts of 50 to 75 that have occurred in the past.
the party that lost the presidential election in the last national election. Publicly, both parties seem to expect not much change in the makeup of the House when it returns to work in January.
The Democrats are not showing a lot of excitement about the traditional swing of House seats toward
What suspense there is involves the Senate, where the Democrats need only four more seats to regain control. They have the advantage of only 12 seats at risk this fall, giving them 22 GOP seats to shoot at.
There are some observers who think the Democrats have a good shot at Senate control, but there have been no suggestions that the Republicans are going to have a big loss. Most who see the Democrats taking over are talking about a narrow victory, perhaps as close as the minimum 51-49 outcome they would need.
None of that suggests a very exciting election, except for the history of midterm elections. Some of them have yielded sensational results.
For example, in 1938, two years after the Democrats behind Franklin D. Roosevelt left the GOP with only 89 seats in the House and 16 in the Senate, the Republicans roared back with a gain of 75 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.
The GOP staged a comparable victory in 1946, when it gained 65 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate and took control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928.
On the other side of the partisan ledger, the Democrats gained 50 seats in the House and 15 in the Senate in the second midterm of the Republicans' last highly popular president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Most of these midterm big-change elections came as a surprise to the experts. Maybe we're getting set up for another one of those Novembers when we pundits have to send out for napkins to wipe the egg off their faces.
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