By David Gordon, associate editor
In recent weeks, you’ve seen several new and revived features and some new faces on the Chippewa Valley Post website.
These additions come as we continue our transition following the departure of our founding editor, Bob Brown. They are part of the continuing development of our website and of the operations that support it, as we get ready to move beyond the “soft launch” phase that we announced last February.
We believe we’re making progress, but the website is still only a prototype of what we expect it to be by the time we’re ready for a full-scale launch in 2016. It would be realistic to regard what’s here now as an illustration of what the CVPost website can become, and to realize that this will happen only with your support and, even more important, your participation.
Additions
One recent website addition is the first “Consumer Nation” column provided by the Washington News Service (http://washnews.com), a start-up operation headed by a pair of experienced journalists and focused heavily on consumer news stories. We’ll be running these columns when the topic is one that’s relevant to people in the Chippewa Valley.
A second addition is the result of renewing our arrangement with The Spectator, UW-Eau Claire’s student paper. This will give our audience access once again to Spectator stories of interest to the general community. The job of selecting and posting these stories will fall mainly to Courtney Kueppers, a UW-Eau Claire senior journalism major and a former editor of The Spectator, who will be part of the CVPost staff until she graduates in December.
By far the most prominent website addition in recent weeks is the series by Jack Pladziewicz that examines employee benefits in Wisconsin’s public and private sectors. Jack’s series presents some very original thinking about two major issues that we face both as individuals and as a society: the costs of healthcare insurance and funding of pensions.
Pensions and Healthcare Coverage
The first two instalments of this three-part series examined the disparities between pension plans for employees in the public and private sectors, and suggested that it’s worth considering the possibility of allowing private employees (and their employers) to participate in the state’s retirement system. There are, of course, many complex questions that require answers before this could happen, but Jack’s suggestion that it might be a mutually beneficial arrangement seems worthy of further thought and discussion.
The final part of the series, which will appear this coming week, deals with disparities in healthcare insurance between public and private sector employees. This is a much more complex topic to wrestle with, simply because there are so many variations in the coverage that’s available in both sectors. But – as Jack notes in his analysis – there are some major changes underway in both public and private employee coverage.
These stem from factors as diverse as the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) and the work of a consulting firm hired by the state’s Group Insurance Board (GIB), which oversees the health insurance provided for state and many other public employees. The consultant was asked to recommend ways to improve health outcomes and to lower the cost of both health insurance and medical treatment.
At first blush, this may seem like pure fantasy but in fact some of those recommendations are already being implemented. This is a topic that affects a substantial number of Chippewa Valley residents, and I urge you to read Jack’s series and react to it. We hope that this material will spark serious discussion of how pensions and healthcare coverage are currently being handled and how that handling might be improved.
Join the Discussion
One of the CVPost’s goals from the outset has been to promote reasoned discussion of issues of importance to people in the Chippewa Valley, on which people can and undoubtedly will disagree. You’ll help us fulfill this part of our mission if you share with us your (pro or con) responses to, or your puzzlements about, any part of the Pladziewicz series. Send them to cvpostwi@gmail.com and – as long as their tone is civil and you’re willing to sign your name to them – we’ll post them online either verbatim or summarized.
But be warned – if you have something new to add to the discussion, we’re likely to ask you to polish it as necessary so we can run it as a full-fledged “Commentary” article that will further inform and engage the community on this topic. That’s what the CVPost is really about, and we invite you to help make this happen.