Letters to the Editor: Oct. 31, 2024

Vote ‘yes’ on library proposition

On November 5, a ballot proposition seeks to increase taxpayer support for operating expenses for the NorthEast-Millerton Library from $125,000 to $175,000.
I urge you to vote YES.
Seventeen years ago, in 2007, voters first decided to direct the Town Board to raise $125,000 each year to support the operating expenses of the Library. The proposition carried by a 2 to 1 margin.
This year’s request represents an annual increase of 2% per year since 2007. During the years 2007 and 2024, the average annual rate of inflation is estimated to have been 2.8% which makes the Library’s request both prudent and reasonable.
For the last five years, the Town Board has voluntarily given $50,000 more each year to support the library’s operating budget and so this will not represent an increase from recent funding. It will, however, secure that funding going forward.
It’s also important to realize these funds support operating expenses. To undertake capital improvements, the Library must find funds from other sources.
In a small rural community, a library is a vital center for the education of all its residents. Our first library was established in the late 19th century as the Millerton Reading Association. With the benefit of committed volunteer board members and talented directors and staff, the library has evolved to the vibrant institution it is today.
A YES vote will enable it to continue to effectively serve our community.
Edward Downey
Millerton

A Vote for Kamala Harris

You can help chart a course for a better, safer, more just, inclusive and tolerant world by voting for Kamala Harris. If you’ve noticed the increasingly grave signs from nature in more forest fires, floods, droughts, increasingly intense hurricanes, and in declining biodiversity, then vote for the person who acknowledges these threats and agrees that we must do more to stabilize our climate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You can say yes to protection of our environment and progress toward averting a looming climate disaster. Vote for Kamala Harris. If you acknowledge the right of women to make their own health and reproductive choices, vote for the candidate who will restore and safeguard reproductive rights to all women, in all states. Stop the disgrace and horror of women suffering and dying because of the loss of essential medical reproductive care. Vote for Kamala Harris. If you want to see a brighter economic future which is built on the strengths and promise of the middle and working classes and gives a helping hand to those in need, vote for the candidate who will directly support the most people in our society. Vote for Kamala Harris. If you want to be proud of a country that upholds, strengthens, and cherishes its democratic government and traditions based on fair and non-violent elections, then vote for the candidate who understands and values the centrality of justice, the rule of law, and our established constitutional processes. Vote for Kamala Harris. Finally, vote for the person who wants to work effectively with other nations to maintain international security and promote peace. Vote for the candidate who understands that we must be part of and help lead a sustaining global community. Do you want a better and more secure future for your children, grandchildren and for those in your local, national and world-wide communities? Vote for Kamala Harris.
Jane H. Meigs
Millerton

Millbrook Library deserves a ‘yes’ vote on Tuesday

Millbrook Library is the heartbeat of the Town of Washington. It is more than a house of books, it is where the town’s people, young and old, come to read, to study and do research, attend classes, art exhibits, concerts, movies, and play.
Millbrook Library is an essential institution in our community. As a member of the Mid Hudson Library System, it enables everyone in our community to have access locally to free books, periodicals, videos, audiobooks and reference materials.
Its programs are designed to serve toddlers and kids, teens and adults of all ages. Among these are story time for babies, playtime for preschoolers, all ages game night and movie nights, creative workshops for teens, chair yoga and movement classes, tech assistance and Defensive Driving classes for elders.
In addition, Millbrook Library offers copying, faxing and laminating services, notary services, digital resources, hot spots, local history archives and access to NYS Talking Books and Braille Library. The Library also hosts various events in association with Millbrook Arts group and Millbrook Historical Society.
This vital institution is funded by private donations, the interest from a trust established in 1929, various grants and tax dollars. It has been nine years since the Board of the Library has sought additional public support. In this time operating and utility costs have increased exponentially due to inflation and the increases in minimum wages.
As co-chair of Friends of Millbrook Library, I urge voters to vote yes on November 5 to Proposition 414 to increase annual funding from the current $184,000 to $349,000. To determine how this increase will affect your annual payment, multiply the assessed value of your property by the multiplier 0.00029596. If, for example, your home is valued at $250,000, this would result in $73.99 of funding over a 12 month period.
Without additional municipal funding, our Millbrook Library will be compelled to reduce staffing, hours, programming and the purchase of new library materials. Facility maintenance and other projects will be deferred. Please vote yes to Proposition 414.
Cathy Morrell
Millbrook

Considering irony of Netflix crime drama on eve of national election

Last night, I watched the new Netflix film “Woman of the Hour” a stranger-than-fiction true-crime thriller about a 70s serial killer who, in the midst of a murder spree that tallied a suspected body count of 100+ women, enjoyed 15 minutes of fame as a bachelor contender on “The Dating Game.” I was struck by the irony and appropriateness that this film has shot to the number one spot in the final lead-up to a national election which has a female vice president in a dead heat with a convicted sexual predator who rose to fame on the back of his uber-macho pose on a popular reality TV show.
Just to be clear, Donald Trump may be many things but he could not be called a mass murderer even by his biggest detractors, even though one would be hard pressed to think of a former president who has done more to kill the soul of our democracy and our regard for the institutional structures that support it. If the tight poll results of the coming election and the ratings of this Netflix ode to sexism, American-style have any bearing on one another, it is because they both point up a yawning gender gap and latent misogyny in the national character that was operative 50 years ago and will probably determine who is the next resident of the White House.
Nearly a half century post-“Dating Game,” hosted in the Netflix movie by a game-show emcee whose ludicrous head of hair competes for attention with his flamboyant vulgarity, we witnessed the breathtaking spectacle of the ex-“Apprentice” star renewing his virility credentials at a Pennsylvania campaign rally by extolling the genitalia of a fellow celebrity golfer. Trump’s leering wisecrack about Arnold Palmer was sadly par-for-the-course, targeted to a base that leans into a disconcertingly expanding cadre of young men who would appear blithely unconcerned that their sisters and girlfriends have had their bodily autonomy eviscerated by their hero’s Supreme Court appointees, as if they somehow had no personal stake in women’s reproductive rights.
To be fair to these young men, they are not the only voting bloc who suffer from selective myopia. Given the polling numbers, they can’t be the only ones who cheered Trump on as he flipped the bird at his sexual assault conviction and his accuser, E. Jean Carroll, and who embraced his spin that the survivor was just another one of those gold-digging vixens looking to profit off of his fame. Among the campaign posters that line the entry to my village is a small placard that reads “Women for Trump,” a sign whose modest proportions belie the full measure of defiant self-loathing implicit in its message. As with the ill-fated women whose bodies pile up in Netflix crime dramas, there will always be people who don’t recognize the monster in their midst until it’s too late to do anything about it.
Jan Stuart
Millbrook

Focusing on some Medicare enrollment questions

Fall is the time-constrained window offered by Medicare to lock-in or to change your choice of Medicare coverage for yourself or your partner. Alternatively, enrollment in the insurance industry’s “Medicare Advantage” is year-round and appears as an option during the Medicare choice period coming up.
Americans know little about how doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals rely upon and block low-end (the sickest) customers to cut the costs of their care. And certainly very little about health insurance. One thing that remains true and reliable is that Medicare pays 80% of the cost of any provider and any hospital services you use. Medicare is a reliable and true government-based health care for those eligible. It is a good system and honored since 1965 by most health care providers. Importantly, it is guaranteed by federal law and benefits apply to equally to everyone eligible.
On November 1, besides Medicare, you will have the choice of Medicare Advantage (MA) which is not a part of Medicare. It is a portal to for-profit insurance and appears each year to compete with Medicare customers during the regular Medicare enrollment period. With Medicare Advantage, insurers (UHC, Humana, CVS, etc.) negotiate the payments with the providers so that everyone (doctors, clinics, hospitals) essentially takes a margin for profit.
If you decide to choose MA and before you decide to enroll, ask an agent explicitly if your current doctor is in “network” and if your hospital is in “network.” If the answer is “yes,” ask the person what your co-pay will be and what those costs would be with Medicare.
Medicare Advantage continues to be advertised under the Medicare umbrella (It looks like an offer from the government but it’s not.) And it offers ever more large promises over government- based plans (eyeglasses, dental care, cash back) while having multiple hidden and systematic barriers to services and care. This year, MA has actually received numerous prominent condemnations from watch dogs like the Commonwealth Fund, the US Government Accounting Office, as well as from the US Department of Justice. And there is rising general acknowledgment that our health care system is increasingly predatory on the most vulnerable: “Less Care at Higher Cost –(see) The Medicare Advantage Paradox” JAMA June,10,2024. According to the government run Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC, March 2024), upcoding and favorable selection (agreements between providers and insurers) paid MA plans $83 billion (22 percent) more (!!!) than what Medicare would have paid if MA enrollees were in Medicare.
Even with these public reports from their own federal watchdogs, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has yet to pull the plug on the Medicare Advantage misplacement on the government site. But, it’s coming soon.
Nancy F. Mckenzie, PhD
Retired Professor,
CUNY School of Public Health
Amenia