Chris Hoitash


Articles (105 total)

Sequester harms hospital funds, cancer patients

Who needs death panels when you can just cut medical funding? Thanks to the sequester, or budget cuts, continually butchering various government-funded operations, that option is now available. Along with cuts to air traffic control and other operations, subsidized medical research and treatments are also getting majorly cut back thanks to our government’s continued inability to balance a budget. According to an April 3 Washington Post article, “Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.


Detroit may have to sell the DIA’s art collection

Detroit may have to sell one of the few things that still lures people to the city: its art collection. A May 24 Detroit Free Press article states, “Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is considering whether the multibillion-dollar collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts should be considered city assets that potentially could be sold to cover about $15 billion in debt.” As Detroit continues to resemble a post-apocalyptic wasteland from the Fallout video game series, (but with less valuable salvage, because it was already taken) the idea to sell off the collection sounds like a desperate bid by a disgruntled city to once again eliminate the DIA from existence. There is also some question if the collection is worth the needed amount, but with several pieces valued at around $100 million, it’s certainly possible.


For-profit prison fails, is disgrace to humans

Private enterprise has fully entered the criminal justice system, and in the process, undermined and ruined it in the name of profit and at the expense of human rights. In 2011, Ohio, facing the usual problem of being Ohio, sold one of its state prisons to the private prison corporation Corrections Corporation of America. Within the year that prison, Lake Erie Correctional Institute, has gone down the tubes.


Kilpatrick was city scapegoat

There are a lot of words to describe Kwame Kilpatrick. Corrupt and infuriating are two that come to mind. Then there are a few words that can’t be placed in a newspaper. Still, as disdainful as the man and his actions may be, it seems to me he may have been made into a scapegoat.