Netlets for Tuesday, Dec. 2

A clearer look at charter schools The opening statement in your Nov. 29 editorial -- "a new report from the University of Minnesota Institute on Race and Poverty says that charter schools do more harm than good" -- is specious.

What the study really says is that, controlling for free and reduced price lunch status, kids in charter schools do worse than kids in conventional public schools, on standardized tests.

But can we really conclude anything from this study? Is free and reduced price lunch status enough to conclude that students who attend charter schools come from the same background as students who don't?

A better study was reported in Education Next. In that study, researchers followed poor kids who applied to three popular charter schools with waiting lists. They compared the kids who got into the charter schools with the kids who "lost" the lottery and had to go to their neighborhood public schools. In this truly randomized controlled study, the kids who attended the charter schools clearly outperformed the kids who went to their neighborhood schools.

Enrollment in charter schools has been growing at a rapid pace. Instead of paternalistically looking at standardized test scores, the Star Tribune might better ask what parents know that researchers don't.

KATHY ROGERS, MINNETONKA

Photo contradicted the headline Congratulations to the children of Harvest Prep Charter School in Minneapolis for meeting all state goals. The picture on your Nov. 26 front page was great but was mismatched with the headline "Charter schools fall short." You should have changed the headline or changed the picture. What were you thinking?

A better Rx: Bypass medical insurance intermediaries The National Health Care Summit 2008 hosted by U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar last Tuesday was an impressive demonstration of a concerted effort underway to improve the delivery of health care in the United States. It included experts from various perspectives who focused upon "bending the curve" -- the new buzzword for trying to decrease the rate of increase in spending for health care. A modest amount of evidence was cited (too quickly for the audience to assess it critically), but most of it based upon the belief that the various approaches would rein in the costs. (A better case could be made that it would improve the care provided, which is obviously a good thing anyway.)

My problem is that the forum did not even acknowledge -- much less address -- the argument that a much larger and more immediate improvement could be produced by bypassing the insurance intermediaries, which take about 30 percent "off the top" of the huge outlay (twice the average for other industrialized countries) for health care in the United States. That would lower the "baseline" tremendously, and we can then systematically test, evaluate, and adopt the best of the reforms that emerge from attempts to "bend the curve" to lower the rate of increase. There is already a bill (HR 676) to extend an improved Medicare to everyone. It should be the starting point for the discussion. Let me also point out that Medicare for everybody would be single-payer medical insurance, rather than single-payer health care, terminology that sometimes seems confusing to the public.

Dr. Denis Cortese did raise an important concern about extending Medicare. Some regions of the country are paid at much higher rates, and only a portion of that is justified by the higher cost of living there. This penalizes those who deliver health care more efficiently (such as the Mayo Clinic), and we should correct that. One mechanism that occurs to me is that rates should be the same all over the United States, except for an adjustment based upon the regional cost of living (excluding health care itself). I am assuming that data can be collected to allow that, and I suspect it already has been collected and simply needs to be used that way.

JOHN T. (JACK) GARLAND, MINNEAPOLIS; RETIRED ENDOCRINOLOGIST

Why waste any light on the bridge? I had just finished reading an article in National Geographic on light pollution when I saw in the Nov. 26 Star Tribune the article on whether we should light the new Interstate 35W bridge in blue or white light. How about no light?

JON BORMANN, ST. LOUIS PARK

Auto bailout alternative The Big Three automakers have made their request for an immediate emergency bailout. Meanwhile, cars sit on quiet lots and people who might be interested in buying them are worried about spending what little money they have left after the stock market plunge. Besides 1) a quick and temporary influx of bailout money and 2) the bankruptcy process, there is at least one other option to keep the automakers and their dealers in business.

This better option is to provide buyers of new and used vehicles a large discount -- say 40 or 50 percent off the MSRP or the used-vehicle asking price -- which the dealers could then recover from the government after submitting the proper paperwork, verified by the buyer. To make it more effective, the offer should expire, say at the end of February 2009, and the government would have to be quick in providing the reimbursement.

The taxpaying consumer would have a very nice incentive to buy immediately, and cars would move off the lots. The dealers would need to order more cars from the automakers who all the while would be making plans to restructure and retool (something they should have been working on already after decades of watching their market share shrink to the imports).

This option also keeps salesmen, service mechanics, bookkeepers, secretaries, advertising agencies and others working and contributing to the economy.