With the district in a financial crisis and hundreds of its members facing layoffs, the Milwaukee teachers union is taking a peculiar stand: fighting to get its taxpayer-funded Viagra back.
The union has asked a judge to order the school board to again include Pfizer Inc.’s erectile dysfunction drug and similar pills in its health insurance plans.
The filing is the latest in a two-year legal campaign in which the union has argued, so far unsuccessfully, that the board’s policy of excluding erectile dysfunction drugs discriminates against male employees. The union says Viagra, Cialis, Levitra and others are necessary treatment for “an exclusively gender-related condition.”
But lawyers for the school board say the drugs were excluded in 2005 to save money, and there is no discrimination because they are used primarily for recreational sex and not out of medical necessity.
Teacher unions are overwhelmingly Democrat.
My previous story on Viagra was about how Democrats voted in favor of subsidizing Viagra for child molesters and rapists. Democrats think that abortions and drugs to provide recreational sex are “health care”. In Canada, the government provides taxpayer-funded sex changes and in vitro fertilization because they are “human rights”. Is that the direction that the Democrats want to take us in? Who is supposed to pay for all these unnecessary goodies?
A damning report, the “South African Child Gauge for 2009/2010”, released by the University of Cape Town’s Children’s Institute, blames the crumbling public health system for much of our children’s woes.
South Africa holds the dishonorable distinction of being one of only 12 countries – including war-torn Afghanistan – to have failed to reduce child mortality since 1990.
It ranks in the company of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi.
South African child deaths have risen from 56 deaths per 1000 births in 1990 to 67 deaths per 1000 births in 2008, according to Unicef.
This is despite South Africa’s high GDP and the billions of rands pumped into providing public health services.
Just imagine that it was your child. Or a the child of someone you care about.
When will things get bad enough for people to try something different? How about trying consumer choice and competition? How about consumer-driven health care?
In this paper, published in Economic Policy Journal, economists Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andre Zylberberg looked at the impact of public employment on overall labor-market performance. The authors use data for a sample of OECD countries from 1960 to 2000, and they find that, on average, the creation of 100 public jobs eliminated about 150 private-sector jobs, decreased overall labor-market participation slightly, and increased by about 33 the number of unemployed workers.
Their explanation is that public employment crowds out private employment and increases overall unemployment by offering comparatively attractive working conditions. Basically, public jobs that offer higher wages, require low effort, and offer attractive fringe benefits attract many workers and crowd out private jobs. This is especially true when the public jobs exist in the private sector (transportation and education, for instance). The impact is bigger when these new employees are paid with new taxes.
The bottom line is that it is possible that, by increasing public employment, the stimulus money is further hurting private jobs.
And that’s why the unemployment rate is so high after a government spending-spree. The money for non-productive public sector jobs come from the productive private sector.
WINTERY KNIGHT 