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By David Woo, HANC President

The Mayor and her YIMBY allies demand the city “build more housing” at any and all cost. Especially, they say, given the state mandated Housing Element goal of San Francisco producing 82,000 new housing units in the next eight years. The problem is that 46,000 of those state mandated units (more than half) have to be affordable, and the Mayor and the YIMBYs don’t have any affordable housing plan to build those units. What are the Mayor’s priorities? The police have been getting funding increases, and the Mayor is anti-homeless to the point of violating a federal injunction against sweeps. And while the Mayor readily supports efforts to deregulate private housing development, streamline private development and increase profits for developers, she withholds affordable housing funds and refuses to land-bank scarce land to build affordable housing. Will the Mayor ever have an affordable housing plan?

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By Allen Cooper, MD, Professor of Medicine, Emeritus

Medicare, created in 1965, revolutionized health care for the elderly and those with disabilities.    There has always been Republican opposition because it is “socialism.”  In 1997 what is now called Medicare Advantage paid private insurers per enrollee (capitation) for seniors who opted out of traditional Medicare, thus beginning privatization.

The Affordable Care Act established the Innovation center to new payment and service delivery models. Using this, the Trump administration created Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs). These provide capitation payments to groups of physicians and allow up to 40% for profit and administration compared to traditional Medicare’s 2-4% for administration!!! 

Private equity and insurers recruited medical groups to form DCE’s. The Biden administration rebranded the plans as Accountable Care Organizations Realizing Equity Access and Community Health (ACOREACH). Elizabeth Fowler who worked on the ACA and in the pharmaceutical industry was appointed to run this program. Her explicit goal is to privatize all of Medicare by 2030. 

When a patient’s physician becomes part of an ACOREACH capitation plan they must find a new primary care doctor who is not a member of the ACOREACH medical group if they want the flexibility of traditional Medicare. To increase profits the plans attempt to keep patient referrals in their network and minimize expense on medical care. 

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By Richard Ivanhoe, HANC Board

Although we’ve used this phrase before, 2022 was a year like no other.  We had four elections, Federal, State, and local redistricting, and the Covid pandemic entered its third year.  Still, HANC managed to have 11 monthly meetings, and we printed 12 issues of the Voice.

In January, with recall elections on the horizon, Tim Redmond provided a lesson on the history of recalls in California and Supervisor Aaron Peskin discussed his recall reform ballot measure for the June election.  Unfortunately, the measure was defeated in a low turnout election.  In February, we discussed the Mayor’s declaration of a second emergency (while the first emergency declaration was still in effect).  We also discussed other ways the Mayor’s Office has used and extended its powers.  February also saw the year’s first election, the release of UCSF’s draft EIR for its new Parnassus hospital and the Coalition for a Complete Community’s first one-day demonstration that interim uses for 730 Stanyan are both possible and popular.

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By Calvin Welch, HANC Board

This November’s election was the first held under the new Supervisor District boundaries which split the neighborhood into three Supervisorial Districts, with the North Panhandle (Fulton to Fell, Stanyan to Baker) having one precinct in Distract 1, and the remaining 3 joining four of the five “Flatland” precincts (Fell to Frederick, Stanyan to Baker) in  District 5.  The remaining Flatland precinct was moved, along with the 3 “Hill” precincts into District 8. (see map, hint, the second digit denotes the Supervisor District; precinct 9801, which is entirely west of Stanyan, was not included in the analysis).

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