Banner Graphic, Volume 9, Number 284, Greencastle, Putnam County, 7 August 1979 — Page 7
opinion
LARRY GIBBS Publisher
Letter to the Editor Kids day disappointing
To the Editor: Concerning kids’ day at the fair: Being a fond grandmother, I took the children to the fair for this day. I was told to find a parking place and enjoy the fair. Well, there were many people just like me, who came especially to give the children this treat. There was no where to park. I plowed through mud and mire and finally got to park over by the horse barn. It was beginning to rain. When we got in line to buy the tickets, we stood in the pouring rain. It steadily worsened but, thinking it would clear, people were buying the tickets in hopes it was just a sudden downpour. The papery had printed twice that tickets were's2.oo for all afternoon. When I finally got there, they were $2.50 from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. I asked the ticket people if the rain continued if they would give a rain check. A man nastily informed me that he had no control over that up there, pointing upward. So, I told him, I guessed the children wouldn’t mind riding in the rain if the rides were running. He informed me that this was up to the operators. We waited for two and one-half hours and gave up and left. It was
Puerto Rico near a showdown over statehood or independence
By TOM WICKER c. 1979 N. Y. Times News Service SAN JUAN, PR. Committees of the House and the Senate approved last week a resolution that would commit Congress to support self-determination for the 3.2 million people of Puerto Rico. Gov. Carlos Romero-Barcelo says passage of the resolution would be a commitment to statehood for Puerto Rico, if its people should choose that course. The congressional resolution is a response to the expected approval later this month by the United Nations Decolonization Committee of a declaration describing Puerto Rico as a colony of the United States and endorsing either “free association” with the United States or independence. Such a declaration, sponsored by Cuba, was approved for the first time last year by the Decolonization Committee. This maneuvering reflects a striking
Reconstructive or cosmetic? Landmark case could affect thousands of women in U. S.
By JUDY KLEMESRUD c. 1979 N.Y. Times News Service RAPID CITY, S.D. Patricia Koppmann, a 37-year-old housewife and mother of two, was taking a shower four years ago when her hand brushed across a lump that felt like an olive pit in her right breast. “It was like being kicked in the stomach,” she said in her modest light-green bungalow here, describing her reaction to finding the lump. The lump turned out to be malignant, and Mrs. Koppmann underwent a radical mastectomy. She was no stranger to the procedure: Her mother, Irene Patterson, now 61, had undergone the same operation 12 years earlier. Today, Mrs. Koppmann has had her right breast restored through reconstructive surgery, a relatively new procedure that has gained increased acceptance in the medical community and is recognized by the American Cancer Society. The surgical and hospital fees came to $12,000, and when Blue Cross and Blue Shield rejected her claims on the ground that her breast reconstruction was “cosmetic surgery,” Mrs. Koppmann filed suit against them. Subsequently, Blue Cross reconsidered its decision and paid the hospital claims, but when Blue Shield offered only a partial payment for the surgical claims, Mrs. Koppmann refused. As a result, the landmark case, Koppmann v. South Dakota Medical Service Inc. and Blue Cross of Western lowa and South Dakota, which is to go to trial here in October, could affect thousands of women in the United States who have had or will have mastectomies. According to a spokesman for Blue Cross and Blue Shield Associations in Chicago, about 75 percent of the 115 Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in the country, as well as Medicare, do cover breast reconstruction after surgery. But some regional Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, as well as many private insurers, continue to list this operation as “cosmetic surgery” and refuse to pay claims for it. A few others have indicated they plan to drop coverage of the operation. “Money is not the issue here,” Mrs. Koppmann said
ERICBERNSEE Managing Editor
3:30 p.m. and no rides were running. I was told that when they did open, which was much later in the afternoon, there was such a crowd of people waiting that they still did not get an opportunity to ride. I spent $6 for nothing, only to wade the mud and water and earn the ill will of the little ones who got nothing. I wonder why the Fair Board doesn’t get amusements that will be good to our childrensomeone who would not sell tickets in the downpour of rain, knowing that the rides would not be running and who had no intention of issuing any rain checks or refunds. Maybe the money is all the amusements care about, but there were hundreds of disappointed children who will not be as anxious to venture to the fair next year. Please remember, our children are the fair supporters of the future. Mrs. H.Z. Greencastle Publisher’s Note: The BannerGraphic’s daily listing of fair events was taken from information in the 1979 Putnam County Fair catalogue, which listed kids’ day ride tickets at $2 each. We were never advised of any change in price.
political development in Puerto Rico a virtual consensus among the island’s warring political forces that change in its status is now necessary. Statehood sentiment, at least on the surface, seems to have made the biggest gain, but there is more open interest in independence, too. And even those who back the American commonwealth status that has existed here since 1952, like former Gov. Rafael Hemandes Colon, are calling for the island’s political powers to be significantly increased to give it more autonomy. This raises hard questions for mainland Americans no doubt including many members of Congress comfortable in the belief that Puerto Ricans overwhelmingly support commonwealth status. Sooner than they think, the nation may be faced with the question whether to admit this Spanish-speaking island as the 51st state and the 27th largest, with seven congressmen and nine electoral votes. And
irately, as she sat in her living room with her husband, Douglas, who owns a moving and storage warehouse. “I just don’t want other women to have to go through all the trouble I did. This is not cosmetic surgery. In my estimation, mastectomy is an amputation, a very disfiguring operation, like losing an arm or a leg, and if a woman doesn’t have to look like that the rest of her life, why should she?” Mrs. Koppmann said she became so depressed after her mastectomy that she didn’t want to see her friends or go on trips with her husband anymore. She would frequently break into tears, she said, and she undressed in the dark in her bathroom. “You look at yourself,” she said, “and you feel so disfigured to yourself that you think, ‘How can I possibly show myself to someone else? ’ ” Although Mrs. Koppmann made several inquiries to Rapid City doctors to see if anything could be done, she said she was always told something like, “No, just be happy you’re alive.” Then one day, while reading a Sunday supplement magazine in her local newspaper, she saw an article on breast reconstruction by Dr. James 0. Stallings of Des Moines, lowa. “I never knew such a thing existed until then,” she said. “Out here in South Dakota, we’re kind of isolated. I wrote to Dr. Stallings, without telling Doug, and he wrote back and said he thought he could help me, even though I had a deep indentation and very little skin left where I had had the radical mastectomy.” A few months later, in November 1976, Mrs. Koppmann entered Mercy Hospital in Des Moines for what would be the first of three operations necessary to restore her right breast. During the first, Dr. Stallings made an incision in her abdomen and moved a layer of fatty tissue called the greater omentum up to her chest cavity, to provide a cushiony padding for a breast implant. He also made an incision in her right arm and took a portion of her biceps and reattached it to the chest cage for support, and also to fill in an indentation caused when lymph nodes were removed from her armpit during the radical mastecomy. Stallings also removed three strips of skin from Mrs. Koppmann’s left thigh and grafted them to her chest wall, to act as a pocket and covering for the
William F. Buckley Kissinger's advice on Salt II is simple: delay
As expected, Henry Kissinger said some extremely interesting things when testifying to Congress on SALT 11. The most interesting was the least remarked. “If the administration is unable to put forward such a (rearmament) program to this session of Congress, I recommend that the Senate delay its advice and consent until a new military program has been submitted to and authorized by the next session of Congress.” *** The following idiomatic version of the above does not (repeat not) come to me from the mouth of Henry Kissinger. I venture it nonetheless: LOOK, GANG, the foreign policy of the United States suffers from the accretions of the last few years. During that period, Congress took over substantial respon-
independence sentiment, in the Island and at the U.N., may well keep going unless headed off by improvements in Puerto Rico’s status that Congress may not want to make. The trend toward change with statehood sentiment, at least on the surface, rising most swiftly is reasonably clear. Romero-Barcelo is an avowed statehooder, and his party won control of both houses of the Island Legislature in 1976. In 1968, the governor’s New Progressive Party, succeeding the old Statehood Republican Party, got 43.6 percent of the vote; but eight years later Romero-Barcelo won by 48.3 percent. Meanwhile, the Popular Democratic Party, led for many years by Luis Munoz Marin, the founder of the commonwealth, has slipped steadily from 59.2 percent in 1964 to 45.3 percent in 1976, when Hernandes Colon lost a bid for re-election. These percentages in gubernatorial elec-
sibility for foreign policy. It was Congress that kept us from enforcing the Paris Agreement on Indochina, Congress that forced us to give up on Angola, Congress that prevented us from helping out in Cambodia and that gutted the CIA. Specific legislation (e g. the CaseChurch and the War Powers Acts) limited presidential power in such a way as substantially to remove from the executive the flexibility it once had. The other accretion is Jimmy Carter. The original SALT treaty, for w'hich I take principal responsibility, was forged on the understanding that it would proceed hand in hand with complementary action by the chief executive and by Congress. The opportunities we had under SALT I under Carter I we simply failed to avail ourselves of.
tions are not directly comparable to statehood and commonwealth sentiment. But Popular Democrats, observing the trend, are newly militant in demanding improved commonwealth status. The independence parties, though still small, have made large percentage gains. From a low of 2.8 percent in 1964, they rose to 6.4 percent in 1976 (in the combined vote of the Democratic Independence Party and the much smaller Socialist Party). And P I P (Independence Party) officials insist that actual independence sentiment is much higher, since many closet independentistas vote with the Popular Democratic Party in order to have a voice in other island political and economic issues. Romero-Barcelo thinks statehood has just received a big lift from the mainland Democratic Party, which recently awarded 41 delegates to its island branch (a different organization from the Popular
implant. In January 1977, Mrs. Koppmann returned to Des Moines for the second operation, during which Stallings inserted the Klein inflatable implant, which is made of plastic and filled with a saline solution. He also reconstructed an areola and nipple on the new breast, using skin taken from Mrs. Koppmann’s vagina. The third operation was performed later that month, after the nipple portion of the breast sloughed off. “A few weeks later, it sloughed off again,” Mrs. Koppmann said, “and I said, ‘That’s it.’ If I were 17 or 18, maybe I would have gone back a fourth time, but I can get along fine without a nipple.” Today, Mrs. Koppmann bears slight but noticeable scars on her thigh, her right arm and on her chest where the skin was grafted and where the incision for the implant was made. But she says these scars do not bother her “in the least” compared to the way she felt before the surgery., . , “I swim, I go water skiing, I sit on the beach, things I felt I couldn’t do with a mastectomy,” she said. “Sometimes little kids will say, ‘What happened to your leg?’ but that doesn’t bother me. I just feel so good about myself and so put back together again.” She said Stallings told her that her new breast was a 75 percent reconstruction. “But as far as I’m concerned, it’s a 98 percent reconstruction,” she said. “It sure beats getting up in the morning and putting on a prosthesis which is a constant reminder that you had cancer.” Stallings, 41 years old, who has performed about 40 breast reconstructions and who trained with Dr. John Converse, the well-known New York plastic surgeon, said he thought the fact that some insurance companies refused to cover breast reconstruction was “discrimination against women.” “This is not cosmetic surgery, it’s reconstructive surgery,” he said. “These women don’t ask to have cancer; it just happens, whereas cosmetic surgery is an attempt by the plastic surgeon to supersede the normal like operating on an aging face.” He added that he thought more women would go to doctors to have lumps in their breast checked, if they knew that breast reconstruction was available to them in case they did
WE COULD HAVE gone right into the B1, into the deployment of the neutron bomb, into the stretched-out cruise missile, into a sophisticated Trident, into an MAPS system. What we have got, instead, is unilateral constraint by the U.S. and all-out exploitation by the Soviet Union of all allowable possibilities, on land, on sea and in the air. Now SALT II is basically objectionable for technical reasons, but what matters is not the language of the treaty but the question whether the United States will take advantage of such opportunities as we have whether or not we ratify SALT 11. My own feeling is that this Congress, under this president, isn’t going to take the action necessary to persuade the Soviet Union that SALT II is not a waystation to
Democrats). For the first time next year, the mainland Democratic and Republican Parties will hold primaries here (Puerto Rican Republicans are entitled to 17 delegates), and all presidential candidates in both parties are expected to campaign. The governor believes these primaries will draw Puerto Rican voters further than ever into mainland politics, and mainland politicians further into Puerto Rican affairs. Inevitably, he thinks, presidential candidates here will promise island voters to support self-determination, including statehood. President Carter already has made such a pledge, and former President Gerald Ford came out flatly for statehood. In the complexity of island politics, moreover, Romero-Barcelo and the prostatehood New Progressive Party will have strong influence on the makeup of the Puerto Rican delegations to both the democratic and republican conventions next year. Franklin Delano Lopes, for
have to have a mastectomy. Mrs. Koppmann is quick to point out that she was never a high school beauty queen or anything else that would make her more vain about her appearance than the average woman. The daughter of a manager of a J.C. Penney store in Sturgis, S.D., she studied sociology at the University of South Dakota for three years before dropping out to get married. Koppmann is her second husband. She has two sons, Jason, 15, by her first marriage, and Jerred, 7. Was her lawsuit in any way inspired by feminist sympathies? “I’m not sure I know what a feminist is,” she replied, smiling. “My husband says I’m one, but I know I like having a car door opened for me, or a chair pulled out in a restaurant. I am an independent person, which is sometimes good and sometimes isn’t. I’m pretty strong-willed hardheaded is the way my husband puts it. If I wasn’t, I probably would have given up after the first doctor said nothing could be done to help me.” Mrs. Koppmann said she had decided on the lawsuit one night while sitting with her husband at the dinner table. “I guess I was on my high horse again,” she said. “We had been getting these letters from Blue Cross and Blue Shield denying our claims on the grounds that it was cosmetic surgery. One of the letters mentioned ‘beautification of the body,’ and I was furious. I said, ‘What the hell! ’ I was livid.” She said that her lawyer, Glen H. Johnson, of Rapid City, had taken the case on a contingency basis, in which he will be paid only if Mrs. Koppmann wins. The case will be brought before a jury in the Seventh Judicial Circuit Court here. Koppmann, who so far has used $6,000 from his savings to pay his wife’s medical bills, said he totally supported her decision to have the surgery and to file the lawsuit. “After the mastectomy, Patty really changed,” he recalled. “She wasn’t the old Patty, who was fun to go out with and fun to live with. She wouldn’t go on trips with me anymore, because our trips used to include bathing suits. Well, we have the good times back now.” Officials of South Dakota Medical Service Inc. in Sioux Falls and the company’s lawyers refused to comment on the case, because it is in litigation.
August 7,1979, The Putnam County Banner Graphic
unilateral American disarmament. If I’m wrong about that, nothing would please me more: Let Carter seriously propose such rearmament as is required, let Congress pass the legislation and the relevant point will be made. BUT YOU AND I know this isn’t going to happen. So that the real question is: Will there be a Carter II? It is highly unlikely, which is good news for the United States, and bad news for the Soviet Union. It follows that the line to take is: delav. That won’t be hard to do. You people have enough senators who are lacking enthusiasm for SALT II as a discrete operation. SALT II accompanied by a vigorous exploitation of all the technological possibilities open to us is one thing. SALT II plus Carter is indigestible SALT II plus Carter II and we may as well import Finns and ask them to teach us Finlandization. So: You don’t find me saying I’m against SALT 11. Though it should have been improved, it isn’t suicidal. If the United States is going down, it won’t go down because of the language of a single treaty. It will go down because there isn’t a will to survive. WHO THE PEOPLE send to the Senate and to the House, and how they handle themselves while there, is more relevant to the country’s future than the language of SALT. Who they send to the White House is critical. Take care of these problems, then SALT II and-of critical importanceSALT 111 come into proper focus.
Their opinions are their own All columns appearing on the Opinion Page reflect the views of their authors and are not necessarily the opinions of the Banner-Graphic or its individual employees.
example, is the democratic chairman (and a Carter supporter) but also a member of the local New Progressive Party. RomeroBarcelo believes both delegations will be pro statehood. The governor who is ahead in the polls has promised, if re-elected next year, to conduct a plebiscite in 1981, with voters choosing among the three historic political positions commonwealth, statehood, independence. If a majority for statehood results, he says, he will quickly present a statehood application to Congress. But many Puerto Ricans doubt that statehood can get or ever command such a majority, despite its apparent gains. And they believe that, anyway, a Puerto Rican statehood application would present Congress with unprecedented difficulties. With independence at best far in the future, they say, improved commonwealth status, if Congress will grant it, is still the island’s best bet.
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