very sloppy on their part indeed

Carla, I may not be rock solid on this fact, but I believe that Willamette is a name brought here from the Mid west, where they DO say WILL-uh-met.

Hey Kevin: the government progs are being administered by private entities.

I believe that Willamette is a name brought here from the Mid west...

Nope, the word Willamette comes from the Clackamas language (right here in Orygun). Thanks, wikipedia

It's important to note that the more egregious (and much more annoying) sin is articulated in the reams of bumper stickers that admonish people for mispronouncing Oregon.

You know which state truly has a beef in matters of this import? ILLINOIS. Piles of people call it "Illa-NOIZE," and that's simply unacceptable. The good people of the Land of Lincoln deserve better.

It's important to note that the more egregious (and much more annoying) sin is articulated in the reams of bumper stickers that admonish people for mispronouncing Oregon.

You know which state truly has a beef in matters of this import? ILLINOIS. Piles of people call it "Illa-NOIZE," and that's simply unacceptable. The good people of the Land of Lincoln deserve better.

@Kevin: Ha ha, nice... Well, when you're a Republican and the numbers don't back your argument up, don't quote the numbers, yell your point out, then end it with something along the lines of "It's obvious!" or start it with "Everyone knows". Or, if you're Karl Rove, hire a fake "research group" to run a fake poll or "conduct a study" and then pass those figures around to the media and important politicians behind the scenes.

I have sympathy for regular folks who move here and botch the name. It happens. Ever hear "Warshington"? I've heard some pretty strange pronunciations of Minnesota when I lived out there, too. I lived in Eastern Oregon for several years before I moved to Portland, and I used to get some mean glares when I couldn't pronounce Tigard or Aloha the way the locals do. But you don't push out a commercial without running it by your local political syndicate to QA first. That's just hacky and self-defeating. You'd think these people would have worked out the kinks by now, especially with an astroturf ad for an issue that has been churning around in Washington now for about 8 months.

When it comes to health care, it's "blue aura gone".

Correction, Kari, it's Ore-ee-gun.

Making fun of non-native Oregon speakers dialect isn't cool. I thought we were a diverse state above that kind of shit. It's one step away from being racist.

zull:

That's just hacky and self-defeating.

The whole ad is hacky. Sounds & looks like something a middle-aged man still living in his mother's basement threw together.

Hi Kari, grammar twist:

Either => Or Neither => Nor

Not: either/nor or neither/or

Posted by: Kevin | Jan 27, 2010 3:02:28 PM

I have sympathy for regular folks who move here and botch the name. It happens. Ever hear "Warshington"?

I think that's part of a greater disability called, "grew up in the midwest", and it is endemic there, distributed equitably across the lexicon. It was, as a child, my #1 pet peeve. My mother, from Indiana, was so bad with it, that she actually said "squorsh" for squash, and was consistent with all forms of "worsh" from the verb to the machine.

For her sins she contracted TMJ and had to moderate her accent. Call me heartless, but I say that was karma.

@Kari:

Before you get too cocky, you might want to read the letter that Governor Ted just fired off in support of Medicare Advantage. Oregon should be proud of how well Medicare Advantage plans are here in Oregon -- the governor is proud of them, why aren't YOU?

http://ikeonic.blogspot.com/2010/01/oregons-governor-defends-medicare.html

They need to bring back the old Standard Insurance radio advertisements, featuring a guy with a thick New Yawk accent talking about how OreGONE's best known commodity is beaver pelts.

Ahem, kids. My mother did not grow up in the Midwest. She inherited "Warshin[g]ton" from her mother and father. He was a logger, they lived in a logging camp, and later he was a truckdriver. They lived in Roseburg all their lives.

It may be underclass-related as well as regionally-related and, in the case of those who are sloppy, laziness-related.

This raises an interesting point, that I've always wanted to hear locals' take on, so maybe now. My point is, how do you know that Oregonians pronounce "Oregon" correctly? I am from Arkansas, and I have met people that I would have sworn were from the deep South. When I asked them they would say, "No. Lived in Oregon all my life." Then, nothing. I never once got a clue why they speak that way. Sometimes I wanted to say, "Oh, you just talk like a hick, then?" So, who is to say that the flat standard American English version isn't more correct than the way some say it here?

Posted by: joel dan walls | Jan 27, 2010 3:38:44 PM

They need to bring back the old Standard Insurance radio advertisements, featuring a guy with a thick New Yawk accent talking about how OreGONE's best known commodity is beaver pelts.

Back then, most advertising painted Oregon as a charicature. Can we ever forget Crazy Eddie and his "David Crocket Action Mattress", with "scenes of Davey Crocket in action, shooting beavers"?

But there are other ways for southern recipes to find their way here via more circuitous routes.

Yeah. Like they taste better.

Hmm. I like that this thread was rescued from some adolescent ranting about how terribly un-PC it is to want the state to be pronounced properly , especially by some political shill on the dime.

:)

@rw: Sorry, I'm not a political shill on anybody's dime except my employer. I have a regular, middle class job just as I presume the rest of you do. If anyone here is a political shill, it's people like Kari and Governor Ted, not me. Politics is a hobby, not how I make a living.

But calling me a "political shill" excuses you from addressing why Governor Kulongoski supports Medicare Advantage.

Instead of attacking me and calling me names, attack Ted. He's the one defending those evil villainous insurance companies you love to hate.

fyi.. I know a lot of folks from northern Iowa (where my mother grew up) who say "warsh" instead of "wash". It's cute and funny and I love to tease my aunt about it.

So as long as the discussion is about how funny that sounds, I'm cool with that. But any insinuation that someone is an ignorant redneck because they talk "different" does border on racism.

But to Kari's original point, it's really poor marketing to mispronounce the state's name in your political ad. Just as it was stupid for the No on 66/67 folks to film an ad at a California bakery. I don't have to share Kari's political views (I do not) to agree with some of his very valid points re: stupid political ads. On both points, he is correct.

This is not the first time Kurt Schrader has been the beneficiary of a poorly made attack ad. Mike Erickson ran an ad with misspellings last year and now we know these people really are really no-talent hacks.

We spend enough on health care. We just spend it in the wrong places...... like overhead. Some things are just too important to be left to the profit motive and healthcare is one of them. Single Payer, Mr. President please.

Kari Chisholm posted: ...these Medicare Advantage programs siphon off 17.7% of the funds for overhead and profit, as compared to 2-3% in traditional Medicare.

For-profit health plans may have somewhat higher administrative costs than Medicare (they're for-profit, after all...) - but the 2-3% overhead cost number for Medicare doesn't hold up very well under close scrutiny. Just Google 'medicare overhead' and see what comes up - and it's not all from right-wing conservative big government-hating websites...

Just some things to consider:

1) Medicare is devoted to serving a population that is elderly and therefore in need of greater levels of medical care. Medicare generates significantly higher expenditures than private insurance plans - thus making administrative costs smaller as a percentage of total costs. This creates the appearance that Medicare is a model of administrative efficiency.

2) When you compare administrative costs on a per-person basis, Medicare is dramatically less efficient than private insurance plans. As you can see here, between 2001-2005, Medicare’s administrative costs on a per-person basis were 24.8% higher, on average, than private insurers.

3) Proponents focus on the low administrative costs of Medicare, on the one hand, while denouncing the amount of fraud by hospitals and providers. This perhaps is because Medicare does not spend enough on administrative oversight of the program - which is exactly what the GAO and the National Academy of Social Insurance have said. So, if Medicare spent more on administration, the discrepancy would be decreased even further.

4) Proponents also fail to account that, for every regulation, costs are incurred by providers to comply. The 100,000 plus pages of Medicare regulations function as an 'unfunded mandate' on providers. The coding recently transitioned from ICD-9 (~24,000 codes) to ICD-10 - which has over 207,000 codes. Did the cost of upgrading to support this change count toward Medicare overhead? Of course not...

I don't know what the REAL Medicare overhead rate is - and I'm not sure anyone really does... but anyone who looks critically into this claim of 2 to 3% overhead immediately sees that that Medicare is shifting a helluva lot of costs to providers and taxpayers (as well as other public agencies) which private insurers cannot. Similarly, the cost of collecting Medicare taxes and lobbying for additional funding are not included in Medicare administrative expenses - whereas collecting premiums and marketing are included in the overhead of private insurers.

Oh thank you sooooo much albatross for that indepth regurgitation of "facts" from the Heritage Foundation, CAHI (a nonprofit dedicated to market-based healthcare solutions), the CATO Institute, and (my personal favorite) a random blog.

Wow. Impressive. Really.

But Kari's right on this one. Straight from the CBO website.

Ik, I am guilty of poor punctuation, and you are guilty of hoping someone will victimize you so you can be wounded, righteous and amazed.

I MEANT the turkey who made the stupid ad is the shill.

Sorry for not truly offending you as hoped by yourself and intended by some others... I actually meant to sling arrows and outrageous stuff at the dork who did not bother to learn the pronunciation of our state's name!

IK: I forgot to go ahead and say what I think of your "deeeeeeeeeeply offended, gasp!" post.

Dork. Heh.

I get no gas from these pissing matches. Just dumb, kid.

Posted by: Ikeonic | Jan 27, 2010 4:53:07 PM

fyi.. I know a lot of folks from northern Iowa ... insinuation that someone is an ignorant redneck because they talk "different" does border on racism

I always knew they were a different race! Perhaps australopithecus texana has migrated into the general population.

Alcatross,

Comparing Medicare to a private health insurance plan such as Anthem Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente and on is not a fair or even legitimate comparison at all.

Medicare was created via legislation with the intent to provide health care to the elderly and disabled. These folks have a "right" to Medicare and to secure that right, greater administrative costs are incurred such as more telephone reps and whatnot at the lower end.

Private health insurers are created with a for profit motive intending to generate the greatest return on investment for their shareholders. A greatest return would mean an absolute minimization of costs such as "administrative" costs.

Medicare cannot cherry pick for healthy insurance consumers and discriminate with applications requiring tests for pre-existing conditions that would kick you off if found. Private health insurers can, but Medicare cannot.

Medicare, by law, has to provide health coverage for every single American who is over the age of 65 and/or disabled. Private health insurers can offer elaborate testing and screenings during the application process, which weed out the sick consumer from the desired healthy consumer.

Please refrain from comparing apples to pineapples.

However, I will agree that the bennies and salaries given to public employees as negotiated by public employees unions, especially at the Federal level nowadays, make any government run program drastically more expensive than any private sector substitute.

You are right in bringing out the facts, but you are wrong in your comparisons.

Kari:

Um, Ikeonic, you're misreading the Governor's letter. He's saying that if you're going to reduce payments to Medicare Advantage programs, it's better to do it in such a way as to protect low-overhead states like Oregon.

Okay, then, why does Oregon have what you admit (and I agree) is low overhead for Medicare Advantage? Could it be perhaps that the private insurance plans in Oregon are doing a <gasp> good job of running Medicare Advantage in Oregon? I'll settle for you just explaining why Oregon has low overhead and why you completely neglected to mention this in your initial post. In the interest of a real discussion, I'd like to hear you elaborate on those points.

Bonus question: If you're right, then why isn't Ted advocating for the abolition of Medicare Advantage altogether. To read your post, there are no positives to be had at all from having private health plans administer Medicare so why doesn't Ted's letter leave you mad that he would dare to defend it all?

@rw:

Ik, I am guilty of poor punctuation, and you are guilty of hoping someone will victimize you so you can be wounded, righteous and amazed.

I MEANT the turkey who made the stupid ad is the shill.

My apologies. I assumed you meant me and I was wrong.

But if you would care to discuss the governor's letter that I posted in response to Kari's post, I'm all ears. That is, if you're interested in a substantive discussion.

@RyanLeo:

Private health insurers are created with a for profit motive intending to generate the greatest return on investment for their shareholders.

Really? What about non profit private health plans? How is a non profit private health plan much different from your local credit union? For sure, there isn't a lot of difference between Aetna and Cigna vs. Chase and Citibank. They are, as you say, out for maximum profit for shareholders. But not all health insurance companies are behemoths owned by shareholders. Are all the non profits evil too -- in need of replacing with single payer? And if so, then why not just nationalize all the banks, including your local credit union, and replace them all with the U.S. Bank -- conveniently located at each and every post office. Surely, you don't like banks making enormous profits any more than you like insurance companies making enormous profits for doing little more than holding and moving money around. Couldn't the government be far more efficient at banking too?

Not all private companies and corporations are out for maximum profit. Let's not lump everyone in with the giant Fortune 500 companies. There are many, many non profits that do great good for the community and have very low administrative costs. It would be better to have more effective and smarter regulation of those companies that have grown "too big to fail" than to throw out the baby with the bath water and kill off the many good private non profits that return a lot of value to their local communities.

IK, delivering more insult is not the way to make peace.

Zara, just so you know, MY family mulberry bush has antecedents dated back to gracilis...

Sapiently Yours,

r

Have you ever considered adding more video to your blog posts to keep the readers more entertained? I mean I just read through the entire article of yours and it was quite good but since I'm more of a visual learner,I found that to be more helpful well let me know how it turns out! I love what you guys are always up too. Such clever work and reporting! Keep up the great works guys I've added you guys to my blogroll. This is a great article thanks for sharing this informative information.. I will visit your blog regularly for some latest post.

IK, delivering more insult is not the way to make peace.

Whenever you want to have a substantive conversation about health care, I'm ready. Your move.

[Woman flicks thread off her cuff]: so, Kari, is it time to talk cap and trade? Fresh Air had our first C/T 101 tonight to refocus the nation.

Posted by: Ligne | Jan 28, 2010 1:51:43 PM

Have you ever considered adding more video to your blog posts to keep the readers more entertained? I mean I just read through the entire article of yours and it was quite good but since I'm more of a visual learner,I found that to be more helpful well let me know how it turns out! I love what you guys are always up too. Such clever work and reporting! Keep up the great works guys I've added you guys to my blogroll. This is a great article thanks for sharing this informative information.. I will visit your blog regularly for some latest post.

Posted by karichisholm on January 6, 2010 at 3:24 PM

In any case, we've been working on a whole new infrastructure for way too long - and we're just about ready to go live. And it should deal with the whole spam problem. That, and the anonymous asshole problem too.

Get on with it, already!

<h2>We're getting these same disgusting commercials here in Arizona. Fear-mongering and taking "advantage' of the insecurities of senior citizens. Reprehensible. The same crap we've been getting for years from the corporate oligarchy. Wake up people. It's a War. Let's start fighting it.</h2>