A8 Centre Daily Times, Sunday, September 20, 2015

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OPINION

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S I N C E 1 8 9 8
Debra Leithauser
President/Publisher
dleithauser@centredaily.com

John Boogert
Executive Editor
jboogert@centredaily.com

Members of the editorial board are responsible for the editorial content of this page

THEIR VIEW

More action
needed on
health reform
The numbers are in: Obamacare reduced the share of Americans without
health insurance last year to 10.4 percent, down from 13.3 percent the year
before. That represents 8.8 million fewer
people who risked financial ruin if they
needed significant medical care. Most of
the improvement came from people
getting coverage through Medicaid or
the state insurance exchanges.
The figures put to rest the notion that
Obamacare would cause more people to
lose coverage than gain it. But U.S. health
care is by no means fixed. Three substantial
improvements are still needed.
First, the uninsured rate needs to be
pushed even lower. The people whove
signed up for Medicaid or exchange coverage are those who have most wanted
insurance; the challenge remains to persuade those who are less motivated or dont
understand their options. That includes the
parents of the 4.8 million children who were
uninsured last year, as well as the 30.6
percent of high-school dropouts and the
19.9 percent of Hispanics who went without.
At the same time, all 50 states need to be
persuaded to expand Medicaid.
The administration and Congress also
have to make sure that people can afford to
use their insurance. Copayments and deductibles continue to rise, with almost one
in four people saying such costs have led
them to put off treatment for a serious
condition. Solutions include lower caps on
cost-sharing, extending subsidies and even
reforming the Cadillac tax on high-quality
employer-sponsored insurance policies, a
tax that encourages companies to shift costs
to patients. Perhaps most important is the
need to find ways to deliver care more
efficiently higher quality for lower cost.
Obamacare includes pilot projects to experiment with coordinating treatments, and
although the results have been mixed so
far, thats only reason to try harder. Theres
also room to bring down drug costs by
letting Medicare negotiate prices.
These are hard problems that require
clever solutions from both political parties. Successful health care reform begins with shrinking the share of Americans without insurance, but that doesnt
finish the job.
The above editorial was written by
Bloomberg View editors.

Fear is our own worst enemy

America is not a brave nation.
Yes, thats a heretical thing to
say. Yes, our military is the
worlds finest and our servicewomen and men provide daily
examples of incontestable courage. Yes, police officers brave
bullets, firefighters rush into
burning buildings and ordinary
Janes stand in harms way to
save complete strangers on a
routine basis. Yes, there are
brave people all over this country, people
who put self
second every
day.
But courage is not
only about
putting self
second.
Courage is
Leonard also about
who you are
Pitts Jr. in
stressful
times, about the ability to not
be rattled, to act with sound
judgment, to keep your head
when those about you are, as
Rudyard Kipling put it, losing
theirs and blaming it on you.
And by that standard, no.
There are many words you
might use to describe the character of this country, but brave
isnt one of them. Rather, we
are fraidy-cats and cowards.
Weve proven this many
times since that Tuesday morning in September 2001 when
Islamic extremists kidnapped
four planeloads of our fellow
citizens and turned them into
guided missiles in an attack
that ripped away our illusions of
security.
We proved it by bungling into
a needless war chasing terrorists who were not there, by
burning mosques and criminalizing Islam, by compromising basic civil rights for the
Great Pumpkin of security.
And we proved it again last
Monday when Ahmed was
arrested for bringing a clock to

AP photo/Eyman Mohamed

Ahmed Mohamed, 14, stands in handcuffs Monday at the police

department in Irving, Texas, after he was arrested when he
brought a homemade clock to school that was mistaken for a
possible bomb.

school.
Ahmed Mohamed, a
14-year-old ninth-grader from
MacArthur High in Irving,
Texas, had built the digital
clock at home and was eager to
show it to his engineering
teacher, who liked it. When his
English teacher saw it, however, she thought it looked like a
bomb. Next thing he knew, the
teenage tinkerer, who wants to
be an engineer when he grows
up, was under arrest.
Theres a picture of him

online thats heartbreaking: It

shows a slight, brown-skinned
boy in glasses, looking frightened and confused. Hes wearing a NASA T-shirt. He is also
wearing handcuffs.
Ahmed said police told him
he was being charged with
building a hoax bomb. James
McLellan, a spokesman for the
Irving police, told local station
WFAA, We attempted to question the juvenile about what it
was and he would simply only
tell us that it was a clock.

That, of course, is because it

was a clock.
Eventually, whoever has
custody of the brain at the
Irving PD must have recognized this for the Islamophobic
idiocy it was. Ahmed was released. No charges will be filed.
Word of all this set Twitter
ablaze. Ahmed has received
supportive tweets from Arianna
Huffington and Hillary Clinton.
Mark Zuckerberg invited him
to Facebook. President Obama
invited him to the White House.
And his ordeal inspired a trending hashtag: #IStandWithAhmed.
Which is good. But one
hopes it will also inspire a little
soul-searching for this country,
which would be better.
Because once again, fear has
made us our own worst enemy,
has made us stupid. The fact
that a bright kid a kid with
initiative, a kid who only wanted
to make his teacher proud, a
kid who, by all appearances, is
precisely what we wish more
kids would be was hauled
away in handcuffs for those
very attributes ought to make
us sober and reflective about
the nation we have become in
the years since Sept. 11.
One is reminded of the time
President Bush strode out on
an aircraft carrier beneath a
celebratory banner proclaiming
Mission Accomplished. But
given that the primary goal of
terrorism is to make people
afraid, maybe somebody should
find that banner and ship it to
al-Qaida.
Judging from what happened
to Ahmed, they deserve it more
than we ever did.
Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the
2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the
Miami Herald, 3511 NW 91st
Ave., Doral, FL 33172. Readers
may write to him via email at
lpitts@miamiherald.com.

U.S. must step up and lead on Syria refugee crisis

The desperate refugees setting
sail on rickety boats and scaling
barbed-wire fences to enter the
European Union come predominantly from Syria. This crisis
wont end soon, because the Syrian conflict isnt going to end
soon.
The Europeans cant solve it on
their own. So its time for the
United States to provide leadership by pressing our rich
Gulf Arab allies to do much more
for the refugees and by doing
more ourselves.
That is not just
a moral imperative. It makes
national security
sense.
The refugee
crisis has been
primed to explode
for the past three
Trudy years. It took the
of the lifeRubin photo
less body of
3-year-old Aylan Kurdi to galvanize global sympathy in a disaster
that aid agencies have long
warned about.
The image of sea water lapping
against Kurdis tiny corpse impelled Chancellor Angela Merkel
to open Germanys gates further
and agree to accept 800,000 refugees and migrants this year.
But Merkels generosity cant
cope with the enormity of the
problem. What Germany has
done is extraordinary, but clearly
one is going to be overwhelmed if
one does this, said the University
of Oklahomas Joshua Landis, a
leading expert on Syria. Many
other European nations are refusing to endorse a plan to require all
EU members to resettle a fair
share of asylum seekers.
Right-wing parties in Europe
are whipping up opposition to a
Muslim invasion, although this
wave of Syrians is mainly professionals, artisans, students and

Miami Herald/Jim Morin

small-business people, often secular in their lifestyles. They have

much to offer European states
where birthrates are low.
These are ideal immigrants, said
Landis, middle-class people who
still have enough money to pay
smugglers. Many come from government-controlled areas where
they were spared the worst of the
war but are now trying to flee as the
Syrian state is collapsing.
Yet with anti-immigrant sentiment rising, Germany has reintroduced border controls, followed by other European countries. America is building a giant
wall with Mexico, said Landis,
and we built a much better Coast
Guard in order to keep Haitian
boat people out. I presume thats
what Europe will do.
Clearly Europe cant absorb all
those fleeing Afghanistan or failed
states in Africa. But keeping refu-

gees from war-torn Syria out may

create bigger problems than letting them in.
Over the past four years, the
Syrian exodus has created a lost
generation of youths without
education or prospects. In May, I
visited the desolate Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, where
100,000 Syrians live in trailers on
terrain that looks like a moonscape. The men have no work,
and thousands of teenage boys no
schooling or hope.
Their anger may well drive
many to return home and join
jihadi militias.
Millions of Syrian refugees
threaten to destabilize neighboring countries. Tiny Lebanon
has taken in 1.13 million Syrians,
who now make up a fourth of its
population. Jordan, where unemployment is high and services
strained, has accepted 629,000.

Turkey, although wealthier, is

straining to cope with 1.8 million.
As Syria crumbles further,
additional millions may flee.
The best solution would be a
negotiated end to the conflict. Some
hope the nuclear deal with Iran will
enable Washington to work out a
solution with Tehran and Moscow,
the main supporters of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. For the foreseeable future, that is a pipe dream.
So is the fantasy of creating safe
zones for refugees along the SyrianTurkish border. No one has explained whose troops would protect
those zones from Syrian shelling or
provide safe haven for civilians amid
wrecked towns and villages.
Which leaves this question: If
Europe is overwhelmed by the
Syrian refugee challenge, who
else can step up?
Here is where President Barack
Obama (finally) has to get active.

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The United States leads the world

in humanitarian aid to Syrian
refugees over the past four years
(around $4 billion) but has admitted only 1,200 refugees. The
president has now pledged to
allow in a paltry 10,000 more over
the next year, but our dysfunctional system of security checks will
take at least two years to clear
them.
This is nuts.
Obama bears substantial responsibility for the Syria mess, having
failed to help Syrian moderates
when they still existed. He subcontracted the job of helping Syrian
rebels to Gulf Arab states that preferred Islamist militias. Those same
Gulf Arabs with the exception of
the United Arab Emirates have
done far too little to assist the refugees they helped create.
So the president must press
Gulf Arab leaders to ramp up
humanitarian aid (so far only a
fourth of what Washington has
provided). If the Saudis offered to
pay refugee resettlement costs in
Europe, more countries might
allow Syrians to enter.
And Obama should urge Gulf
states to invite many more Syrians
in, not to sit in desert refugee
camps, but to work and live. After
all, 25 years ago, hundreds of thousands of Kuwaitis were given refuge
in the Gulf after the invasion of their
country by Saddam Hussein.
To set an example, Obama
should invite 100,000 Syrians to
settle here, just as Cubans were
welcomed, or Vietnamese after
the end of the Vietnam War. It
would be shameful and shortsighted to do any less.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist and
editorial board member for The
Philadelphia Inquirer. Readers may
write to her at: Philadelphia Inquirer, P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia, PA 19101, or by email at
trubin@phillynews.com.

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