I recently went to a Butte-Siverbow city council meeting at the courthouse. There is a pretty high profile issue within our community right now concerning Butte-Silverbow county health departments contact with their Chemical Dependancy program. Let me enlighten you, in this county we have a very successful chemical dependancy program. It functions well and makes lots and lots of money for our city. Surrounding counties such as Anaconda, Deer Lodge, Dillion, Powell, and Granite county do not have any success at all and are in serious need of our help. For a long time the employee's of BSB chemical dependancy have been making "pro-bono" trips to these counties to help them out. Just recently in the last year or two our health department developed a program called the Tri-County Addictive Services. This created jobs, and this mildly resolved the problem. Before I go any further I should state that they did this without any contract, they did this because it is what needed to be done. However, other programs such as Family Planning, Cancer Awareness, WIC, and Prevention have been established in these counties for many of years under the supervision of our county with a contract and have been very successful.
Here is the problem, the county health department needs to develop a contract to secure this new bridge they have built with our neighbors. In order to do this the program needs to be proposed to our city council and approved. Our city council has motioned to deny the program; a complete denial of this program would put a stop to the jobs that were created, and more importantly a stop to helping these people in the midst of their recovery. This would open up our county to the possiblity of all sorts of lawsuits.They have motioned a denial of the program even though it would bring $91,796.00 into our community. My question is why?
After attending the meeting to hear an even level of argument I have come to the decision that this is entirely like the example in class concerning the kids that rewarded the ingroup more points than their outgroup. The cities bases for dening this contract is simply based on insurance. They claim that they do not want to be held responsible for insuring the clients that the program would provide for and they do not want to insure employee's from other counties. They claim that this would be to hard to oversee. Wow! I am amazed! Considering we already employ people in these counties for the five other contracts; that the health department already has insurance to cover those people in the other contracts. I do not understand.
"This is a complete ingroup/outgroup situation!" I thought to myself. I looked around the room and like never before the citizens of BSB were all piled into this tiny court room. They were all in favor of this motion. Then I look up and we have twelve elected officials claiming that they are the victims of slander because they have made their decision and they are sticking to it. "Victims? Who is really the victim here?"
Now, the confusing part is who is the ingroup and who is the outgroup. At first, you would think that BSB is the ingroup and these other counties are the outgroup and that is why we choose not to work through the details and not help them, but when you step back and really look it, that is not the case at all. The outgroup is the citizens, all of them from all the counties combined. The ones that need the jobs, the help, the support for their families. The ingroup here is the city council, the local goverment.
In conclusion the mayor, who sits on the city council decided to extend this issue until November 1, 2009 and has asked that the health department take this time to work through the insurance details and propose them to the council at that time. It is my bet that this city council has already made up their minds. They have turned this problem into an "us" against "them".
This is also like the robbers cave study. How do we unify our state like the young boys were unified in the robbers cave study? Do we send our city council members to do arts and crafts with the citizens of our surrounding counties? Do we have to plan a competition against North Dakota so that all of Montana becomes an ingroup? If there was a solution to ingroup/outgroup problems look at the extent the resolution would go. I think it is important to study this and know how it works and what is the resolution.
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I'm aware that this isn't a laughing matter but art and crafts? State competition against ND? That's funny. It's definitely a tough topic and obviously hard to resolve as there has yet to be a solid idea for resolution. I think it starts much higher than just our own City Council. I'm sure they understand things that "we the people" don't understand and that's a shame. We should all have some firm ideas about what is happening in our government and how things are weighed in order to reach a conclusion. The bigger problem, I think, lies in the current health care system of the United States. If it was easy to insure employees, I don't think it would even be a factor for the council to consider however, I think you've taken a major step in finding some resolution just by putting some information out there for our class to read. It takes time to be involved in understanding our government and how it runs. I just wish there was a way to get everybody to understand that it's worth the time. I think one way to change the minds of the council though is to present it in a way that shows how it would be more financially beneficial than harming. Did anybody bring in any insurance companies to propose some sort of an option plan for the employees?
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