Sunday, January 13, 2008
Who needs solutions when we have Menino?
While we can all still disagree on whether RomneyCare is enough, too much, or not enough to solve the nation's ongoing healthcare crisis, you'd think people would by now be open to trying anything that promised to provide better access to basic services to everyone and reduce the load on ERs, all without sucking one dime from the public treasury.
Well, everyone except Tom Menino, that is.
Responding to a decision by the Boston Public Health Commission to allow CVS to open limited-service, low-cost clinics in their Boston stores, hizzoner sez,
Leaving aside the quality of writing that recalls the sort of things a third grader would write in purple crayon on pink construction paper underneath a barely-discernible but charming tableau of a unicorn prancing in a field of daisies, shouldn't we, by the same logic, declare a fatwa on grocers for demanding that hungry people pay them for food?
I've been struggling to explain in concrete terms why Menino's time, if it ever was, now needs desperately to come to an end. Leaving aside a few problems with snowplows and ballots, Mumbles has avoided the sort of bid-rigging or ballot-stuffing shenanigans that doom many a mayor, but other than avoiding own goals for a surprisingly long period of time, it's hard to name a signature achievement. Menino had the good fortune to enter office just as violent crime was disappearing from the daily news, and demographic changes (i.e. dinks and poofs) were heralding the renaissance of big-city life, and has been in office nearly fifteen years, having won most of his elections with margins that Hugo Chavez would kill for. No one can say he hasn't had the time or the mandate.
Sure, he has the seven dwarfs of the city council to contend with (though as the heirs apparent, they've probably done more than anyone to encourage people to vote for Menino), the Pike and Massport are as they have always been, and the BRA still manages to meld the competence of FEMA with the transparency of the Federal Reserve Bank, but look--Mitt Romney (remember him?) managed to get a major health care bill passed and to put Billy Bulger out to pasture, all while infected with political leprosy, and he was only here four years.
It's fine for the mayor to jabber about "knuckleheads" when the subject is drunk Huskies or Southie parking spaces, but when we start talking about affordable healthcare and his office responds with some boilerplate about hygiene and damn-those-top-hatted-bankers, you begin to get the sense that we're living on a chess board, but Menino's still playing checkers. The plan to move City Hall might have been good had he started five or eight years ago, when the residential real estate bubble was at its start rather than its end, and a thousand-foot downtown tower is the sort of thing you expect from a bunch of noveau-riche third-world capitols (excuse me, "emerging economies"), kind of like a kid right out of school leasing the cheapest sled BMW offers to show off his entry-level job in the purchasing department at Fidelity. ¶ 12:38 PM
While we can all still disagree on whether RomneyCare is enough, too much, or not enough to solve the nation's ongoing healthcare crisis, you'd think people would by now be open to trying anything that promised to provide better access to basic services to everyone and reduce the load on ERs, all without sucking one dime from the public treasury.
Well, everyone except Tom Menino, that is.
Responding to a decision by the Boston Public Health Commission to allow CVS to open limited-service, low-cost clinics in their Boston stores, hizzoner sez,
Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit corporations will
seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene. Allowing retailers to make
money off of sick people is wrong.
Leaving aside the quality of writing that recalls the sort of things a third grader would write in purple crayon on pink construction paper underneath a barely-discernible but charming tableau of a unicorn prancing in a field of daisies, shouldn't we, by the same logic, declare a fatwa on grocers for demanding that hungry people pay them for food?
I've been struggling to explain in concrete terms why Menino's time, if it ever was, now needs desperately to come to an end. Leaving aside a few problems with snowplows and ballots, Mumbles has avoided the sort of bid-rigging or ballot-stuffing shenanigans that doom many a mayor, but other than avoiding own goals for a surprisingly long period of time, it's hard to name a signature achievement. Menino had the good fortune to enter office just as violent crime was disappearing from the daily news, and demographic changes (i.e. dinks and poofs) were heralding the renaissance of big-city life, and has been in office nearly fifteen years, having won most of his elections with margins that Hugo Chavez would kill for. No one can say he hasn't had the time or the mandate.
Sure, he has the seven dwarfs of the city council to contend with (though as the heirs apparent, they've probably done more than anyone to encourage people to vote for Menino), the Pike and Massport are as they have always been, and the BRA still manages to meld the competence of FEMA with the transparency of the Federal Reserve Bank, but look--Mitt Romney (remember him?) managed to get a major health care bill passed and to put Billy Bulger out to pasture, all while infected with political leprosy, and he was only here four years.
It's fine for the mayor to jabber about "knuckleheads" when the subject is drunk Huskies or Southie parking spaces, but when we start talking about affordable healthcare and his office responds with some boilerplate about hygiene and damn-those-top-hatted-bankers, you begin to get the sense that we're living on a chess board, but Menino's still playing checkers. The plan to move City Hall might have been good had he started five or eight years ago, when the residential real estate bubble was at its start rather than its end, and a thousand-foot downtown tower is the sort of thing you expect from a bunch of noveau-riche third-world capitols (excuse me, "emerging economies"), kind of like a kid right out of school leasing the cheapest sled BMW offers to show off his entry-level job in the purchasing department at Fidelity. ¶ 12:38 PM
