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Embracing expanded rail service

A great opportunity awaits industries and other business entities and interests in the six-county Southern Alleghenies region. If most embrace the opportunity, hopefully expanded Amtrak passenger train service will be the result. If they don’t, it is possible that such expanded service could be doomed for many years, perhaps forever. The latter should not be allowed to come to pass. Transportation resources are vital for any region to move forward; the counties of Blair, Cambria, Somerset, Bedford, Huntingdon and Fulton, which make up the Southern Alleghenies region, are no ...

Cricket Knoll: Staying open about plans

Anyone who did not read the entire Sept. 24 Mirror article “Altoona officials meet with Cricket Knoll residents” might have missed what possibly were the two most important paragraphs of that article. Parts of those paragraphs are as follows: — “When the plan is finished, there will be additional meetings with residents.” — “We’ll keep the conversation going.” It was Altoona City Manager Christopher McGuire who made those comments, spoken during a meeting with more than a dozen Cricket Knoll residents. Also attending that meeting was City Councilman Jesse ...

American history should never be whitewashed

A recent editorial was accompanied by a photo of a formerly enslaved man in Louisiana displaying whipping scars on his back during the Civil War. Made in May 1863 and widely published two months later, it presented gruesome evidence of slavery’s inhumanity for countless Americans who didn’t necessarily comprehend it before. It has been credited with helping coalesce support for the defeat of the Confederacy and ultimately ending slavery. More than 160 years later, the Trump administration doesn’t want you to see it. Bowing to President Donald Trump’s pernicious campaign to ...

Employers should be open to ‘fair chance’

It is reasonable to conclude that virtually all companies and all supervisory employees, at one time or another, have run into employees who wanted a job but didn’t really want to work — who wanted the pay but didn’t really want to put forth the effort to earn it. Such employees undermine their company’s overall performance and, thus, often erode the company’s bottom line. In this competitive business world, that truly must be characterized as unsustainable and must be addressed quickly. Enough of that, though, because this editorial will be focusing on a resource that ...

It’s a good idea to cut drug costs

The White House has proposed good and bad ideas to reduce drug costs. Among the better ones is a reform of the obscure 340B drug program, which enriches large hospitals at the expense of patients. Cue the protests from the hospital lobby. The 340B program is a classic example of a well-intended policy that has caused unintended harm. Congress established the program in 1992 to help hospitals that disproportionately serve Medicaid and low-income patients. Such hospitals are allowed to buy outpatient drugs at steeply discounted rates, on average about 45% of a drug’s list ...

No room for haste in trail plan

The future holds the answer of how the issue of a proposed trail network on Altoona Water Authority land in the Sugar Run Road area will shake out. The only thing certain at this time is that much discussion should be accorded the idea before a final decision is rendered. The threat of a lawsuit has been issued by a landowner in that area regarding the prospect of noise emanating from the trail, although there could be other concerns as well. Meanwhile, existing support for the trail idea includes the argument that the proposal would be for the best, but in what ways merits further ...