Equal Opportunity

AN especially odd, ethically loathsome feature of health insurance coverage in America is the emerging practice of setting a monetary cap on the amount of coverage if you get sick.More and more insurance companies and private insurance plans are setting caps on what they will pay hospitals and nursing homes for treating particular diseases. The insurance plans are saying, in effect, that some diseases are worth paying more for than others.Allowing insurance plans to decide which diseases are worthy of care is about as absurd a place to put moral responsibility as can be imagined.

Maryland is attempting to renege on its obligation to provide sufficient funding to make its historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) comparable and competitive with other public universities in Maryland in terms of mission, academic program offerings, library services, information technology infrastructure, and other facets of their operations. For five years, the state has vigorously opposed a lawsuit by HBCU students and alumni that seeks to dismantle remnants of the formerly segregated higher education system.

On April 25, theU.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission(EEOC), for the first time in 25 years, updated its guidance on how employers may use criminal background checks in the hiring process. The new guidelines reaffirm that it is illegal under the Civil Rights Act for companies to exclude people from employment based on arrest or conviction records - unless the offense is directly related to the job at hand. The need for EEOC action was dire. More than 1 in 4 Americans - 65 million people - have an arrest or conviction record, leaving a significant segment of the population largely shut out of the job market.

It was on a ball field at Patterson Park that William Warfield and Moses Jackson Jr. began their unlikely friendship.Unlikely because Bill Warfield, 34, and Moe Jackson, 31, both Baltimoreans, live in different worlds.Mr. Warfield, a rigger at a Bethesda naval research center, lives in a nearly all-white neighborhood south of the park in East Baltimore. Mr. Jackson, a forklift operator at a Hampden bottling plant, resides in an almost all-black area off Frankford Avenue in Northeast Baltimore.

Interesting premise, awful execution. That's the shorthand version of what's wrong with "Kristin," an NBC midseason series starring Tony Award-winner Kristin Chenoweth as Kristin Yancey, a young woman from Oklahoma who comes to Manhattan to chase her show business dreams. When "Kristin" didn't get on the air this spring after being showcased for critics on press tour in January, I wasn't sure whether there was something seriously wrong with the show or if it was a victim of NBC's mania to air as many episodes as it could of its new reality/game show "Weakest Link."

One of the benefits of modern public health research is that we are able to correct mistaken assumptions about illnesses. As a result, people are more likely to seek help.Migraine headaches are an example. For years it has been assumed by the public and some researchers and physicians that migraine headaches are most common in affluent women. But Dr. Walter Stewart, a colleague at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, has new evidence that migraine is one of the most common illnesses in this country, and it crosses social, economic and gender lines.

I strongly agree with Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc. director Robert J. Strupp that all Marylanders should have an equal opportunity to live in decent, safe housing with "access to transportation, jobs and safe, academically achieving schools" ("State shouldn't let landlords discriminate," May 5). Having studied the bill, I can see that the provisions of the Home Act, with its source-of-income protection, would simply compel landlords to treat all tenant applicants fairly and would in no way prevent landlords from using criteria to ensure they are getting responsible, reliable tenants.

The men who play baseball and soccer at Towson University, run track at the University of Delaware and wrestle, swim or golf at any number of other colleges all heard the same reason when their teams were cut: Title IX. To meet the federal law's goal of providing equal opportunities for athletes of both genders, schools have eliminated men's teams to keep their overall rosters in line with the number of women playing sports. But a growing chorus is crying foul. "People are really upset that they're dragging Title IX through the mud to cut sports teams," said Towson University graduate Scott Hargest.

Dawn Hyde knows the key to business success is diversity. So when her company, Berkshire Associates Inc., consults with another about achieving diversity in the workplace, Berkshire offers a plethora of tools - from consulting help to proprietary computer software programs. The methods must be working. From 1999 to 2002, Hyde said, the human resources firm has grown revenue by 53 percent, even as other areas of the economy were sagging. And the company has plans to grow another 40 percent this year and hire another five people as it expands into even more areas of service.

IN SWEEPING away justifications for elite, state-supported, all male military education at Virginia Military Institute, the Supreme Court issued a ringing denunciation of sexual discrimination. By a 7-to-1 majority, the court rejected lower court rulings that accepted a state-funded, less-rigorous program devised for women as an adequate substitute for the exclusion of women at VMI.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who as a private lawyer successfully argued women's rights cases, wrote for the majority, noting that "estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description."