St. John’s Nurse Deserves Better
I was aghast to read about the critical-care registered nurse at St. John’s whose insurance--a self-funded PPO plan offered by the hospital--did not cover the critical care her premature twins required at birth. To me, this illustrates perfectly why PPOs and HMOs are not the model on which we should base our health care reforms.
There’s another issue at stake in the case of that RN at St. John’s: decency. In the 1920s, Henry Ford was blasted by his fellow industrialists after he raised his employees’ wage to the point where they could reasonably afford to buy what they produced--Model Ts. This can hardly be seen as an extravagant concept by today’s standards, but it was revolutionary at the time.
Seventy years later, St. John’s would be advised to follow Ford’s lead.
STEVE MABRY, Oxnard
Ojai Should Ban Controversial Book
For 13 years of my 28 1/2-year career with the California Highway Patrol, I worked as the Ventura area’s public affairs officer. In this capacity I worked closely with elementary schools and high schools in Ventura County.
Having four grandchildren in school in the Ojai Valley and still having an interest in the public school system, I attended the Ojai School District Board meeting at Chaparral High School on October 19. The main topic at this meeting was the use by Nordhoff High School of a controversial literature book. Having read excerpts from this book, I was truly amazed as to the change in direction of the values practiced by the school system.
It is the responsibility of our educators to build healthier and stronger minds in our children, instead of the reverse.
Parts of this book were indeed filled with filthy words, stories and verses. To my way of thinking, no high school student should be exposed to this, especially at school. It is my strong belief that this book should have been banned from the curriculum.
DALE E. FLETCHER, Ojai
Sprawl Is Here, ‘50s Retail Is Gone
As we continue along our relentless march into the 21st Century, two facts about life in Ventura loom ever more ominously on the horizon. The first is that urban sprawl is clearly upon us, and the second is that the retail life of Ventura of the 1950s is gone.
It is worthy of note that these two facts are related. Urban sprawl has created an entirely new marketplace to complement the turn away from a central city. Gone are the mom-and-pop businesses that were the cornerstone of the neighborhood, to be replaced by the Wal-Marts and K marts of the urban sprawl. These are the responses to our ever-expanding development process.
As we gobble up greenbelts for housing tracts, we create the need for more shopping centers which gobble up yet more greenbelt. When there aren’t enough consumers to satisfy the shopping malls, we gobble up more greenbelt for housing development. Like the vicious cycle that it has become, it will continue to grow unless the trend is reversed.
So how do we interrupt this cycle? To begin with, this letter is not a diatribe against development, so much as it is a reaction to misplaced development. There is no need to develop our greenbelt when there is a large pool of undeveloped and underdeveloped land available to us right now. We need only look at our downtown and midtown areas to find the answer. Development in the underdeveloped downtown will create several positive responses: return of small businesses to the central city, and preservation of our precious greenbelts.
EDWARD T. BUCKLE, Ventura
