Miami Hurricane, March 09, 1993

              ► MEDICINE
BRIEF
LIBRARY THREATENED IN COMPUTER MESSAGE
An unknown person left a threatening message March 2 on an Otto G. Richter Library terminal designed to take student and faculty suggestions, according to a Public Safety report.
A printout from the computer showed the unknown person logged onto the terminal at 4:47 p.m., and typed in a message that said the library should be destroyed.
"Learning and reading are wrong and promote thought,” said the message. "I think this place should be shut down and the books burned. Would it be possible to start a movement who’s ultimate goal is the destruction of the library?"
Thomas Rogero, assistant director of Public Service at the library, who reported the incident to the Public Safety, said “off-the-wall" suggestions are common, but that this one seemed more threatening.
FRATERNITY SPONSORS REGISTRATION DRIVE
Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity is sponsoring a student voter registration drive from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Friday in the University Center Breeseway in time for the upcoming local and county elections.
Students will be required to give basic information in a registration form and then take a short oath. The completed forms will be sent to the Department of Voter Registration for processing.
Junior Paul Saluzzi, who is the head of the registration drive, said that college students tend to be apathetic when it comes to voting on the county and local level.
"In a local election, there isn’t a lot of voter turnout from students at UM.” Saluzzi said. “And what’s sad is that the biggest concentra-i Coral G
tion of voters in this campus.
I Gables is on
NORTH-SOUTH SPONSORS FREE TRUE CONFERENCE
A conference sponsored by the North-South Center on free trade between the United States and Colombia will be from 9 a.m. to 5:30p.m. on March 23 and 24 at the Coconut Grove Doubletree Hotel, 2649 South Bayshore Drive.
The conference will be the first public reporting of a one-year study conducted by UM and the Instituto Colombiano de Estudios Superiores de INCOLDA in Cali, Colombia.
The implications of a free trade agreement between the two countries will be discussed. The conference will be conducted in English and Spanish with simultaneous translations.
The cost for attending both days of the conference is $60. It is $120 for the conference and lunch.
FACE THE FACTS
This Is the (all '92 breakdown of staff in the UM School of Medicine:
Roseare h/Tralnlng
329
doctors facing 10 percent pay cut in June
Hurricane Andrew, medical reform blamed for salary reductions
■V ED PORTER Assistant News Editor
Doctors at the University of Miami School of Medicine will be facing a 10 percent pay cut on June 1.
Two reasons for the pay cuts are the expected implementation of managed medical care by President Clinton and the damage inflicted by Hurricane Andrew, according to Dr. Bernard Fogel, dean of the school.
Nurses and other School of Medicine employees will have their salaries frozen. These cuts have been made to prevent the need for layoffs in the future, according to Fogel.
With managed care quickly approaching, we have to look into next year,” Fogel said.
“The revenues just aren’t going to appear. We have to prepare for the effects now. One of the major reasons for this cut is to avoid job cuts.”
Fred Kam, a University of Miami
"The Med school will survive and bounce back. It will have to learn to become more efficient."
Dr associate director
of clinical medicine and the Student Health Center, said
he thinks the economic and governmental circumstances that necessitated the pay cuts will adversely affect the School of Medicine in the future.
“The unfortunate thing is that if you look ahead and try to find a light at the end of the tunnel, I don’t think there is one,” said Kam. “The med school will survive and bounce back. It will have to learn to become more efficient. We’re going to have to be less charitable. We’re going to have to be like the rest of the business world and demand money up front.”
Kam said he thinks the pay cuts are necessary for the med school to cany on without laying off employees or raising tuition.
“If our costs are going to go up we’re not
FRED KAM, Director UM Health Center
going to raise tuition in exorbitant percentages," Kam said. Tuition at the medical school for the 1993-94 school year is $19,900.
Kam said he thinks there are several reasons why the med school was forced to cut pay.
The school is receiving “low reimbursement from all sources — Medicaid, Medicare, private insurance. Hurricane Andrew hurt us. It was something that was necessary,” he said.
The national health care system will be seeing changes as soon as the national health care task force decides where to make them. According to Fogel, this will lower the price of health care and increase competition in
the industry.
“I think it’s going to be phased in gradually. This is just part of the realities of state and federal government. We’re going to have to be price-competitive. That is why we’re making the pay cuts now,” Fogel said.
In addition to the upcoming changes in national health care, the current condition of the economy has kept some patients away from the doctor’s office. Also, Hurricane Andrew required many members of the School of Medicine’s staff to take some time off from work, thus decreasing the amount of patients that could be seen, according to Fogel.
Looking ahead to the upcoming reforms in the health care system, Kam said he anticipates another increase in costs.
"The Clinton plan is going to lead to lower reimbursement,” he said. "It will, according to [Clinton], increase the access to cures, but it will increase costs.
"Obviously the faculty are going to be upset and dissatisfied,” Kam said.
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► AFTER ANDREW
Some faculty still feeling effects of hurricane
BY USA J. HURIA8H Hurricane Staff Writer
For some UM faculty, the devastating effects of Hurricane Andrew are still being felt even seven months later. Insurance payments are slow in coining, trees are missing and, for some, homes are still being repaired.
For faculty and staff members who are still recovering from the destruction of their homes, UM is offering through the Plan Bank loans of up to $20,000 at the prime rate until March 31, said UM Vice President and Treasurer Diane Cook.
Cook said the program is available so that faculty members who have difficulty with their insurance claims have an alternate method of financing the rebuilding of their home.
“I’m seeing people helped by this program," Cook said. "People are able to put their lives back together.”
Several faculty members said they and their families are still trying to do just that.
Rhonda DuBord, associate director of Campus Sports and Recreation, said she and her family should be ready to move back to their Cutler Ridge home by next week.
DuBord said winds ripped half the roof off her two-story home and destroyed her patio. Water damaged the rest of the house.
“I cried a week after the storm,” she said. “But now I have accepted it. Compared to many others, I am very, very lucky. I have neighbors who have not even been able to start rebuilding their house because they iust got their insurance money which won’t even cover the cost.”
She said she has been living in a Coral Gables apartment with her husband and two children, ages 8 and 10, since the storm. She has1 learned that “life is too short to let little things bother you.
"Everything in my closet is wrinkled but I make do with what I have,” Dubord said.
Dade County condemned Bob Wyner’s home in Kings Grant three weeks after the storm. Wyner, associate director of Campus Sports and Recreation, Mid his home was declared “unhvable but repairable.”
"In the rebuilding I^ve^med how to deal, how to cope, Wvner uid TU look b»ck at this and say
£ was the most in^tmgr—
rience I have ever been
► A CLOSER LOOK: CRIME
BY MARIBEL PEREZ
Hurricane Staff Writer
Universities across the country reported a high number of crimes last year, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Duke University was the national leader in reported burglaries with 1,030. UCLA was second with 598. San Diego State University had the most motor vehicle thefts — 214. Eighteen rapes, more than any other school, were reported at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Last year, of the 167 crimes reported at UM, 112 of those were burglaries and 42 were motor-vehicle thefts.
Sixty crimes were reported at Florida International University and 35 at Barry University. There were 265 crimes reported at all four Miami-Dade Community College campuses. More than half of those were reported at North Campus.
This is the first year colleges and universities have been required to publish crime statistics according to the Student Right To Know and Campus Security Act of 1990.
See page 2!CRIME
JOY BROCKMAN / The Hurricane
M TO PROTECT AND SERVE: Officer Armando Planas takes a call at the UM Department of Public Safety. Public Safety officers are sworn members of the Coral Gables Police Department.
► WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
NOW leader: Congress guilty of child care double talk
BY ANNETTE J. GALLAGHER
Opinion Editor
In Congress today, “a double standard, double burden and double talk” exists regarding women’s roles as care givers, Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women and a 1975 graduate of the University of Miami Law School said during a March 5 breakfast hosted by the Women’s Commission.
Double talk is the attitude which says "children are so important. It’s so good for you women to do this work, so we’re going to punish you for it,” Ireland said. This is evident in social security penalties for women who leave work to raise children and in the classification of child care as unskilled labor, according to Ireland.
"We have to reform the system that causes these problems,” she said.
Ireland encouraged women to take an active role in influencing policy making in the United States.
“Through a grass-roots effort, we actively recruited women to run for public office in 1992,” Ireland said.
“We tripled the number of women in the Senate,” she said, “which sounds so much better than saying we went from two to six.”
Efforts of women for women in Congress must focus on the family leave bill, welfare reform, women’s health, domestic violence, the wage gap between men and women and “a real freedom of choice act, one that does not exclude women under 18 and poor women,” Ireland said
“We need to be at the table as role models and to influence policy changes," she said.
Ireland told of chasing Iron Arrow off campus with squirt guns while attending law School because the group did not admit women.
“I’ve known [Ireland] since the days we used to stand on South Dixie Highway and picket 13 or 14 years ago,” said Rita Deutsch, assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and long-term member of the Women’s Commission. “
“She was articulate and powerful. She talked to people as human beings and was exceedingly well-received,” Deutsch said.
“I had never heard her speak before,” said Jo Vazquez, Student Life staff associate and membership chair for the Women’s Commission. “I was impressed with how softly she spoke, but she did carry a big stick. What she had to say was very important."
M IRELAND: “[Women] need to b*> at the table as role models and to Influence policy changes.”