Five things Gov. Hickenlooper did to put oil & gas industry ahead of Colorado’s health and water

Governor Hickenlooper likes to paint himself as an outsider, unfamiliar with the political process. But his recent actions to undermine public health, water safety – and basic common sense – have proven that Gov. Hickenlooper has become the ultimate insider – adept at helping his billion dollar oil and gas industry boosters cheat the rules, while playing the role of concerned official.

While Governor Hickenlooper has said the he’ll increase fines and hold polluters accountable, behind closed doors he’s actually been working hard to kill or weaken legislation aimed at doing just that.

Case in point: Governor Hickenlooper announces both his campaign for Colorado to be the healthiest state and safe drinking water week, then days later he successfully killed legislation to help protect water from toxic oil and gas spills.

Here’s are the FIVE THINGS Gov. Hickenlooper did to put the public health and water of Coloradans at risk and to make it easier for oil and gas companies to pollute.

Issued the weakest water testing rules for oil and gas operations in the nation…with huge carve out for Anadarko and Noble.
In January, Governor Hickenlooper’s oil and gas commission put forth weakest in the nation water testing rules –which included the Anadarko-Noble loophole for two of the biggest oil and gas operators in Colorado and Weld County – and two of the state’s biggest oil and gas polluters.
The Anadarko-Noble loophole makes it easier for billion dollar oil and gas companies to pollute water in an area in Northern Colorado that’s home to more than 25 percent of  Colorado’s oil and gas wells and more than half of the most recent spills reported.
The result is that it’ll be harder to detect water contamination and to figure out which well(s) are the source of contamination in the region that needs these public safety standards the most. In 2012, industry reported 402 spills in state, of which 20 percent resulted in water contamination, and just last month, a huge spill near Parachute creek contaminated nearby soil and water with cancer causing benzene.Lobbied against efforts to hold oil and gas companies responsible when they pollute Colorado communities and water with toxins, waste.
Governor Hickenlooper sent his lobbyists to the Capitol to weaken fines for oil and gas companies who pollute, despite the fact that Colorado has the lowest in the nation fines and a well-documented problem of spills and water contamination.  In 2012, 20 percent of all reported oil and gas spills resulted in water contamination and just six companies were responsible for more than 85 percent of all spills. And the Parachute spill – which has contaminated nearby water and soil with cancer causing benzene is now being investigated by the EPA’s criminal investigations division.Turned down money to increase the number of state oil and gas inspectors.
Governor Hickenlooper’s Department of Natural Resources agency joined up with the oil and gas industry in opposition to additional resources to help making oil and gas drilling safer by turning down money to increase the number of inspectors, from sixteen to twenty-four, for the state’s more than 52,000 wells. That’s despite the state already being short-staffed on inspectors.Successfully blocked reform efforts to make the actions of the Colorado oil and gas commission more transparent.
Governor Hickenlooper, along with the oil and gas industry, opposed legislation that would have made important systemic changes to Colorado’s oil and gas commission – the Natural Resources Department testified against the bill. Oil and gas companies currently serve on the commission, which regulates their activities, a direct conflict of interest.Worked to defeat public health study to see if fracking is making Coloradans sick.
Governor Hickenlooper’s chief of public health and the environment, Dr. Chris Urbina, testified against a health study – supported by local residents and medical professionals – that would help figure out if Coloradans who live near fracking are getting sicker than those who don’t live near fracking.

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Colorado school-based health centers receive $1 million in grants

Font ResizeThe Denver Postdenverpost.comPosted: 12/19/2012 09:23:30 PM MSTDecember 20, 2012 4:25 AM GMTUpdated: 12/19/2012 09:23:35 PM MST

Three Colorado school-based health centers received more than $1 million in competitive grant funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday.

Sen. Mark Udall congratulated the Durango School District 9-R, Denver Health Medical Center and Commerce City Community Health Services for receiving the funds.

The grants are issued under the School-Based Health Center Capital Program, and are designed to help schools and other entities improve and expand its school-based health centers.

Denver Health Medical Center received $500,000, Durango School District 9-R received $485,265 and the Commerce City Community Health Services received $36,985.

"These competitive grants will help improve school-based clinics in Denver, Durango and Commerce City, giving students more access to preventive and primary health care services," Udall said in a statement. "Keeping our children healthy from day one is an important way to ensure students are productive in the classroom and that we catch health problems early when they are most affordable and easiest to treat."

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius awarded more than $80 million to 197 school-based health center programs across the country, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' website. The funding is expected to help health centers serve an additional 384,000 students and continue the expansion of preventive and primary health care services.

School-based health centers are designed to help children with acute or chronic illnesses attend school and improve screenings and disease prevention activities. They typically combine primary care, mental health care, substance abuse counseling, dental health and other treatments.

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Hickenlooper to unveil mental health changes after Aurora shootings

Font ResizeColorado NewsBy Tim Hoover
The Denver Postdenverpost.comPosted: 12/17/2012 05:22:57 PM MSTDecember 18, 2012 12:28 AM GMTUpdated: 12/17/2012 05:28:24 PM MST


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Unreason On Health Care

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By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

WASHINGTON—The human capacity to put passion and intense feeling over cool rationality does not surprise us when it comes to love, sex, family, friendship, certain kinds of religious commitment and even devotion to sports teams.
   
But emotional approaches can be quite dangerous in public policy, and on no subject is irrationality as pronounced as it is in health care.
   
Here’s the difficulty: Conservatives who were once genuinely interested in finding market-based alternatives to government-provided health insurance have, since the rise of Obamacare, continued to make choices that are dysfunctional, even from their own point of view.
   
Start with the decision of the vast majority of Republican governors to refuse to set up the state insurance exchanges required under the law. The mechanisms would allow more than 20 million Americans to buy coverage. They were originally a conservative idea for large, trustworthy marketplaces where individuals and families could buy plans of their choice.
   
Many liberals preferred a national exchange in which the federal government could institute strong rules to protect consumers and offer broader options. This was the path the House took, but the final Senate-passed law went with state-level exchanges in deference to Republican sensibilities.

To ensure that governors could not just prevent their citizens from having access to the new marketplaces, the bill required the federal government to run them if states defaulted. So, irony of ironies, in declining to set up state exchanges, conservative governors are undermining states’ rights and giving liberals something far closer to the national system they hoped for. As Robert Laszewski, an industry critic of Obamacare, told The Washington Post’s N.C. Aizenman, conservative governors are engaging in “cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face” behavior.
   
This is one of many forms of conservative health care unreason. The fiscal cliff debate has been distorted because the problems confronting federal finances are consistently misdescribed. We do not have “an entitlement problem.” We have a giant health care cost problem.
   
Our major non-military fiscal challenges lie in Medicare and Medicaid. In principle, conservatives should seek to find ways of holding down health care inflation in both the private and public sectors. In practice, they see most efforts to take on this issue system-wide as examples of big government run wild. They seem to have a vague idea that markets can yet solve a problem that markets have not been very good at solving.
   
The result is that conservatives would either let government get bigger, or they’d save money by throwing ever more risk onto individuals by undercutting core government guarantees.
   
Their most outrageous move was the big lie that the original health care bill included “death panels.” This would have been laughable if it had not been so pernicious. The provision in question would simply have paid for consultations by terminally ill patients—(BEG ITAL)if they wanted them(END ITAL)—with their physicians on their best options for their care. Few things are more important to the future of health care than thinking straight about the costs and benefits (to patients and not just the system) of end-of-life treatments. For those of us who oppose physician-assisted suicide, it’s urgent to promote rather than block serious, moral and compassionate discussions of the difficult issues raised by high-tech medicine.
   
Or take the health care law’s creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, known as IPAB. It’s a 15-member body charged with finding ways of cutting the costs of treatment under Medicare. Congress would have the final say, but through a fast-track process. Yet the ink was barely dry on Obama’s signature of the Affordable Care Act when a group of Republican senators introduced what they called the Health Care Bureaucrats Elimination Act, to get rid of IPAB. Thus did an innovative effort to save money meet with a slap in the face. And, conservatives barely acknowledge other cost-saving experiments in the ACA.
   
Is it any wonder that our fiscal politics are so dysfunctional? Yes, we liberals are very reluctant to cut access to various government health insurance programs. With so many Americans still uninsured, we are wary of depriving more people of coverage. But we fully accept the need to contain government health spending.
   
Yet given the conservatives’ habit of walking away even from their own ideas (the exchanges, for example) and of rejecting progressive efforts to save money, is it any wonder that liberals suspect them of greater interest in dismantling programs than in making them more efficient? We won’t find genuine common ground on deficits until we resolve this dilemma.

E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
   
© 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

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