Riding to the hospital with your city employees: Bend over taxpayer ...

On Saturday (7/7/07) it was announced in The Advocate that Newark City Council's million-dollar plan to create free money got its first reality check.

The plan was to bill citizens' insurance companies when these taxpayers are transported to the hospital by city employees using city equipment all of which has been paid for by Newark citizens.

This Mayor/Council scam has repeatedly said and/or implied that only the insurance companies would have to pay and therefore would not cost citizens more money; those without insurance wouldn't be billed.

Oops! Bend over, taxpayer. This was wrong. Turns out they will be billed.

Moreover, it was repeatedly promised that, even if bills were sent to the uninsured, the billing would be "soft" billing, meaning that the bills wouldn't have to be paid; that three bills would be sent and but no collection effort would be made.

Oops! Please bend over again, citizen. This was a mistake. What's really going to happen is that there will be a genuine collection effort made unless the citizen reports to the Safety Director and proves he is impoverished.

Likely the poor folks who need this service most will never know about any of this. They'll just pay - through the nose - for an expensive service - which, for their entire working years in Newark, they've already paid.

How could such a terrible mistake occur only to be discovered after the plan was passed by council and billing had begun? Listen to Kathleen Barch, safety director: "We ... revisited the ordinance, as council has established how billing protocol was to be established. This basically addresses what council's wishes were."

But hey, this is played as a mystery to Bob Diebold, councilman-at-large and mayoral candidate. "That's what was passed by city council," Diebold said. "I didn't know how they made the change, when it was passed by council." You, Bob, the chief proponent of this plan, don't know how THEY made the change? If that's true, you're not a reliable councilman. If it's not true, you're not a trustworthy councilman.

And don't you just love it when Mayor Bain says, in the Advocate report, "he's not in favor of aggressively pursuing uninsured residents to pay the bill. 'They'll get billed, and then we'll decide what to do with it. We are not about stopping service to you if you don't have insurance or taking money from you if you can't afford it.'"

Yes, mayor. We can certainly trust you on this one too.

By the way, this concept of "soft billing" is completely over the edge and only double-talking politicians would consider such a scam in the first place. Either a bill is a bill or it's smoke and mirrors.

Well, that's one crock of crap that's already started to smell. Now, wait until these already-unaffordable health insurance bills reach the mailboxes of Newark taxpayers. City Hall scam artists have been ignoring the fact that insurance companies do not give money to cities, as has been their implication.

The bills to citizens reflecting the Bain/Council million-dollar bonanza probably won't arrive in the mail for several months. As any good politician in Newark knows, citizens aren't smart enough to make the connection or retentive enough to take it with them to the ballot box. Or are they?