Health care with little debate

March 22--A health care bill -- one that didn't have anything approaching the hot-button political energy of the other years-long debates surrounding that complex topic -- won final and overwhelming passage in the Georgia General Assembly last week. As well it should have.

With relatively little publicity or fanfare, the Georgia House of Representatives voted 166-1 to provide insurance coverage to firefighters diagnosed with certain kinds of cancer to which their work makes them especially prone. The bill originated in the House, was tweaked and approved in the Senate, and then sent back to for final and thoroughly bipartisan approval.

The term "risk pool" has become an increasingly familiar one in the actuarial and political language of health care. It is an especially appropriate one when applied to firefighters, who statistically face higher cancer risks as a result of the smoke, fumes and other chemical substances they regularly encounter as part of their jobs.

A 2016 bill along the same lines didn't survive Gov. Nathan Deal's veto pen because it implicitly covered all types of cancer. Organizations such as the Georgia Municipal Association and the Association County Commissioners of Georgia said such coverage, without restrictions, would be prohibitively expensive for local governments to carry. The bill was recrafted this year in consultation with city and county government lobbyists; it specifies coverage for 19 kinds of cancer with which firefighters are most often diagnosed.

Like law enforcement officers, firefighters are public safety workers who face specific and sometimes life-threatening risks in protecting the rest of us. Taking care of those who have paid a price for exposing themselves to those risks should be an obligation of the public they serve.

New-old front?

Sometimes it seems the so-called water war isn't one long continuous fight so much as periodic rehashing of old ones. Whether one of those is about to start up again this weekend is the subject of an intriguing preview in the Gainesville Times.

At this Saturday's annual meeting of the Lake Lanier Association, the featured speaker will be Atlanta attorney Brad Carver. In case that name doesn't ring any bells, he's the lawyer directed by the state Senate four years ago to open a new water battle front -- not against Alabama or Florida, but against Tennessee.

Specifically, Georgia invoked an ages-old border dispute with our neighbor to the north that, if resolved in Georgia's favor, would give the state lawful access to the Tennessee River. Given that the Chattahoochee is the smallest river in the United States to serve as the sole water source for a major American city, a pipeline to the big Tennessee, a tributary of the even bigger Ohio, which is a tributary of the very, very big Mississippi, is no trivial consideration.

That's not likely to happen. And it's possible Carver won't even bring it up. But it probably wouldn't be wise to bet against it.

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