Secret ballot vs. ‘ballot selfie’
Secret ballot vs. ‘ballot selfie’
The secret ballot has never prevented citizens from telling their friends how they voted and urging them to do the same. But now the ubiquity of mobile phones with cameras allows voters the option of showing as well as telling how they exercised their franchise _ by snapping a photo of their completed ballot and posting the image online.
Traditionalists might regard such “ballot selfies” as undignified or even tacky, but last week a federal judge in New Hampshire ruled that they are protected by the 1st Amendment if the government can’t prove that banning them is necessary to prevent vote-buying or coercion. It was the right decision.
In 2014, New Hampshire made it a criminal offense to take a digital image or photograph of a marked ballot and share the image on social media. The supposed justification for the law was a fear that ballot selfies would make it easier to bribe or bully voters to back a particular candidate. (Some legislators also worried that parents might pressure their adult children to cast a vote that Mom and Dad could “like.”)
The law was challenged by several voters, including a state legislator who tweeted the contents of his ballot and a man who wrote in the name of his dog on a U.S. Senate ballot and posted the image on Facebook along with the explanation that “all of the candidates SUCK.”
In striking down the measure, U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro said that the ban on ballot selfies deprived citizens of “their most powerful means of letting the world know how they voted.” As for the danger of vote-buying or coercion, the judge said the record contained no evidence of such corruption “since the late 1800s.”
The decision is jarring reading for people accustomed to thinking of polling places as hushed, quasi-sacred precincts. If judges elsewhere in the country adopted a similar view, some practices would have to change. Blanket bans on photography at polling places would also be hard to justify.
But this isn’t the first time technological change has required a new interpretation of the 1st Amendment. At the same time, nothing in this decision prevents election officials from protecting the privacy of voters who don’t want to be pestered, proselytized or photographed at polling places. A voter may have the right to discreetly take a picture of his or her ballot, but that doesn’t translate into a right to photograph and post someone else’s.
— Los Angeles Times
Worn-out rule: Medicare should rethink its 3-day hospital stay
Fifty years ago hospital stays were longer, patient outcomes weren’t as good and health care in general was riskier business. So why does Medicare cling to a rule from 1965 that requires people to stay in the hospital for three days as an inpatient before being transferred to a skilled nursing care facility?
That’s the question being raised by a study that was published this month in the journal Health Affairs and led by Amal N. Trivedi, a professor at Brown University.
Trivedi’s team compared the average time that patients were hospitalized between 2006 and 2010 under privately administered Medicare Advantage insurance plans that observed the old rule or let patients move sooner to followup care at skilled nursing facilities. The hospital stays were about 10 percent shorter for people enrolled in plans that did not require the minimum three-day hospitalization.
Researchers estimated that elimination of the rule meant $1,500 in savings, to the Medicare Advantage plans involved in the study, for each admission that resulted in a move from a hospital to a skilled nursing location.
Howard Degenholtz, an associate professor in health policy at the University of Pittsburgh, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Adam Smeltz that patients nowadays “don’t have to sit around the hospital waiting for lab tests. You don’t have to sit around the hospital waiting for incisions to heal. We now have technology that is minimally invasive.”
At a time when everyone involved in health care should be trying to curb costs, why would Medicare, which covers more than 55 million Americans, continue to use a standard that is out of date and out of sync with modern medicine?
No one wants hospital inpatients to be discharged before their care warrants it, but a standard that dates to the Johnson administration deserves a hard look and, most likely, replacement.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette