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Changing Hawaii
IT'S beginning to sound a lot like Christmas, especially last Friday night. The kiddo and I donned matching red holiday shirts and Santa caps to go caroling at Kuakini Medical Center's geriatric care home in Liliha. Don’t burden
community by legalizing
gamblingJoining a group of my daughter's 10th-grade classmates from the all-girl St. Andrew's Priory, we crooned some yuletide ditties for those who ventured out of their rooms.
The smiling seniors sang along, nodded in rhythm and clapped appreciatively. It was great fun and a successful service project, too.
'Twas an eye-opener as well. For, while enjoying the sweet soprano voices of the teens, I was hit by a bolt of enlightenment.
Suddenly, I realized how wrong it was for House Speaker Calvin Say to support the legalization of casino gambling to fund long-term care insurance for Hawaii residents (Star-Bulletin Insight section, Other Views, Dec. 16).
In his commentary, Say points out the worrisome concern of medical protection for our growing elderly population.
With the average cost of a skilled nursing facility at $213 per day, or $180 a day in an intermediate-care home, we're talking big bucks to care for a loved one.
That's why Say is advocating state income-tax refunds for those who do purchase adequate long-term care insurance.
BUT first, in order to finance the refunds -- earnings from a large pot of money -- local government needs to raise about $400 million or more.
This is where the situation gets dicey.
"Where can we find the new money for the trust fund?" Say asks rhetorically in his essay. "Well, if we allow four gaming licenses at $100 million each, that will provide the initial money.
"We can then take a percentage of the annual revenue of each licensee and place it in the trust fund to cover future increases in insurance premiums."
Yes, we could do that. But should we? The angelic singing of the Priory girls clearly conveyed that the answer is no.
The mostly Democratic leaders of this state are always too quick and eager to opt for the easy way out of difficult problems.
Need more moolah for worthy causes like long-term care or public education or social services? Then raise taxes or, more recently, dangle the lure of legalized gambling in front of Las Vegas-loving island residents.
AFTER all, it's for a good cause, right? It's the dreaded end-justifies-the-means rationalization.
There's not enough room on this page to list all the woes (like more crime, family violence, bankruptcies, addiction, sloth) that legalized gambling can bring to a community.
There's not enough time to argue why government must stop getting bigger. Enough already with egocentric lawmakers refusing to downsize the public payroll and believing that they know best how to spread our wealth around.
Suffice it to say that the dozens of senior citizens we sang to on Friday night at Kuakini would NOT have wanted, as a tradeoff for their own well-being, to inflict on the next generation of taxpayers -- like the young girls serenading them with Christmas carols -- the plentiful and thoroughly documented social ills connected with casinos.
Hawaii's future must not be damned for the failure of past and present leadership.
Diane Yukihiro Chang's column runs Monday and Friday.
She can be reached by phone at 525-8607, via e-mail at
dchang@starbulletin.com, or by fax at 523-7863.