OF NOTE

Joe Chybowski

Bridgewater Bancshares, St. Louis Park-based parent company of Bridgewater Bank, announced the promotion of Joe Chybowski to president; Chybowski also will continue in his role as chief financial officer. The company also announced the transitions of Mary Jayne Crocker to executive vice president and chief strategy officer from EVP and chief operating officer, and Laura Espeseth, who moves from senior vice president controller to chief accounting officer.

ARCHITECTURE/ENGINEERING

Mohagen Hansen Architecture | Interiors, Wayzata, announced the following promotions: Bob Bailey and Cris Johnson to senior associate; Cleo Dale and Jeremiah Johnson to associate.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Bremer Financial Corp., St. Paul, announced the following additions to its board of directors: MayKao Y. Hang, University of Saint Thomas; Anthony Heredia, Target Corp., and Liwanag Q. Ojala, American Public Media Group/Minnesota Public Radio. … Piper Sandler Cos., a Minneapolis-based investment bank, announced the additions of Rob Freiman and Kegan Greene as managing directors on the technology investment banking team.

FOOD

Iterro, formerly The trū Shrimp Cos. Inc., a Balaton, Minn.-based producer of medical-grade chitosan, restaurant-quality shrimp and pet food ingredients, announced the addition of Dr. Kevin Croston to its board of directors. Croston most recently was chief executive officer at North Memorial Health in Robbinsdale.

HEALTH CARE

Life Time, a Chanhassen-based international operator of fitness centers and health-focused lifestyle living and working spaces, announced the appointment of clinical pharmacist James LaValle as chief science officer. LaValle will help oversee development of MIORA, a Life Time longevity and performance program, including the first dedicated MIORA clinic at Life Time Target Center, Minneapolis.

LABOR

AFSCME Council 5, South St. Paul, announced the appointment of Bart Andersen as executive director; Andersen has served in an interim role since August 2023. AFSCME Council 5 represents workers in state and local government and nonprofit service.

LAW

Maslon, Minneapolis, announced the additions of attorneys RJ Shea and Haley-Rose Severson. Shea is an associate in the firm’s Corporate & Securities Group; Severson an associate in the Litigation Group.

MARKETING

CAMP Digital, an Edina-based marketing agency serving the home services industry, announced Megan Bedford as the chief revenue officer. Bedford previously worked at at Scorpion and her own consultancy, Mugyver Consulting. … Leadpages, a Minneapolis-based online lead generator for business, announced the appointment of Michael Sacca as chief executive officer. Sacca has held leadership positions at several technology organizations, including Crew and Dribbble.

MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY

Bio-Techne Corp., a Minneapolis-based provider of genetic materials for medical research and diagnostics, announced the appointment of Dr. Judith Klimovsky as an independent director on the board of directors. Klimovsky is executive vice president and chief development officer at Genmab.

ORGANIZATIONS

The Minnesota Credit Union Network, a trade association, announced the following results of its board of directors election: Jay Gostonczik, SouthPoint Financial Credit Union; Dave Larson, Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union, and Mary Matheson, Wakota Federal Credit Union, were elected to three-year terms; Dana Garrett, North Memorial Federal Credit Union, named chair; Steve Ewers, Member’s Cooperative Credit Union, vice chair, and Larson, secretary/treasurer.

TECHNOLOGY

Digi International, a Hopkins-based provider of Internet of Things connectivity products and services, announced the appointment of Tony Puopolo as senior vice president, general manager of Digi Managed Solutions, moving the company’s evolution from a hardware-centric enterprise to comprehensive solutions provider. … The Argir Group, a St. Paul-based technology consulting firm for business, announced its recently established Advisory Board: Thomas Ellis, founder of Maven Ventures; Ted Mondale, Atomic Data, and Bernardine Wu, partner in Fez Ventures and principal in Iron Monkey Ventures. … Dayforce, a Minneapolis-based provider of human resources software for business, announced Amy Cappellanti-Wolf as executive vice president and chief people officer. Cappellanti-Wolf most recently served in similar executive role at Cohesity.

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Edward Lotterman

The North Star Promise Scholarship Program, passed by the Minnesota Legislature in 2023, goes into effect for the fall 2024 semester at all state colleges and universities and our four tribal colleges.

The program picks up all residual tuition and fees for students from households with under $80,000 income as calculated on federal student aid applications.

It is a “last dollar” program that picks up whatever remains after all other scholarships and grants from whatever other sources are used.

The DFL already is touting the program in its campaign advertising. Public reaction is generally positive. But there are the economic points to be raised. What are the ins and outs of a program that adds a first-year taxpayer cost of nearly $120 million to a $55 billion budget?

The “spillover benefits” of public education are a starting point. Education is a “mixed good” that has benefits not only for the individual “consuming” it, but also for society as a whole.

Let’s understand our terms: A hamburger or T-shirt is a private good. It benefits only the person eating or wearing the product. Tornado warning sirens and aircraft carriers are “public goods;” These benefit large swaths of the population, or the entire nation, as a whole without being tied to any individual. Education has aspects of both.

Pure public goods like tornado warning sirens are “non-rival.” If I hear the warning, it does not “use up” anything. Everyone within earshot can hear it too, whether they number 100 or 1,000 or 10,000. The warning is also “non-excludable.” I cannot stop anyone from benefiting from it even if, for example, they don’t pay a fee.

Education is different. A student taking up one place in a physical classroom means there is one less place for someone else. However, this is much less true for virtual or other on-line courses. So there is some level of “rivalry.” And it is possible to exclude students from the benefits of both physical or virtual participation in a course, even if only by the power to not grant degrees to those who were not admitted as students or who did not pay fees or tuition.

Students benefit from education. It makes it easier for them to cope with many aspects of life and participate more productively in social and economic activities. It also prepares people to make more money. Others generally benefit too, if only because education provides more doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and other professions that contribute to the public good.

Before governments provided schools, people of means hired tutors for their children and banded together to open local schools. Religious denominations did so also, in part to produce educated clergy. In the colonies that became the 13 original U.S. states, schools organized by local governments eventually were broadly available. Founding father John Adams years spent teaching in rural western Massachusetts.

In the 1800s, state governments began requiring local governments to establish schools. Then some mandated attendance up to a certain age. Public high schools joined private ones and denominational “academies” in providing secondary education. Private colleges, many denominational, sprang up across our nation. Eventually, the 1862 Morrill Act, perhaps the most economically momentous legislation in our history, required states to establish land grant colleges.

All this was driven by the understanding that there were great spillover benefits to society and the economy as a whole from education. The public in general should fund education to a certain level and mandate attendance, not just for the benefit of individual students, but for the entire society. The investment had a tangible return.

Except for Black students before 1954’s Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, we otherwise have had a standard of free K-12 public education coupled with mandatory attendance until age 16 in all states for nearly a century.

In post-secondary education, the G.I. Bill, passed a year before World War II ended, gave nearly 16 million veterans the right to college or vocational schooling. Many additional millions have benefited since then. In the 1960s, fear of the Soviets led to widespread consensus on benefits of further education, which led to federal funding for students and colleges alike via grants and loans or subsidized loans for dormitory construction.

In the context of this history, Minnesota’s North Star Promise program is just an incremental step. In 1971, I could attend a year at the University of Minnesota for $366 in tuition and fees, including heath service, equivalent to $2,688 today. Now those costs will be zero for many. Technology and our economy in general have become more complex and the spillover benefits of post-secondary programs have risen. Spending more to foster these programs is justified.

Yet someone has to come up with the money — a bit over $20 for each Minnesotan per year. Apparently that will end up being added to taxes that many already think are too high.

There are other economic factors, however, that may not be obvious.

First, higher education involves a lot of “fixed costs” that don’t vary directly with the number of students. Enrollments have been dropping but a college still needs a library director, dean of students, head of physical plant and so on. A college still must pay utility bills whether each chair holds a student or not.

To the extent that North Star Promise brings in additional students whose payments are funded in part by federal student grants and scholarships, state and tribal campuses will have additional income without commensurate additional expense. Fixed costs will be spread over more students.

On the negative side, the new program further tilts the playing field against private institutions. Our myriad private universities, many still church-related, provide excellent educations, but they will now be marginally more expensive, on average, than state schools.

Our nation has long had an incongruous mental and emotional split on government funding of religious schools. There is a strong majority view that tax money should not go to religious schools, and this has roots in the U.S. Constitution. This is true for K-12 levels. But the G.I. Bill pragmatically let veterans use benefits to study at Concordia, Calvin, Southern Methodist and Notre Dame. There just were not enough state schools to accommodate 15 million vets.

So the G.I. Bill and subsequent 1960s student grant and loan programs effectively became vouchers. There was no violation of First Amendment taboos against establishment of religion since it was money given to an individual rather than an institution.

Non-public schools may clamor for the program to benefit their students as well. But the Promise is open-ended, picking up the balance after everything else. That may work out well in a system where institutions’ budgets are state-controlled. But enormous “moral hazard” or perverse incentives would be created by trying to stretch the program to cover all private colleges.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

Having depended on hearing aids for nearly three decades, I’m astounded by the lack of Medicare coverage for devices that can solve a problem afflicting tens of millions of older Americans.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans over age 70 have some degree of hearing loss, and over half of those 75 and older experience impairment serious enough to be considered disabling. But most don’t wear hearing aids.

Because the legislation that created Medicare nearly 60 years ago specifically excluded hearing aids, those who rely on the program’s traditional coverage must pay for them out of pocket. That expense is among the chief barriers to wider use of the devices.

Age-related hearing loss impedes basic communication and the relationships that depend on it. Expanded access to hearing aids could therefore do no less than enable more older Americans to establish and maintain the social connections that are essential to a meaningful life.

Hearing loss is like an invisible, muffling curtain that falls in front of anyone speaking. Asking people to repeat themselves can yield irritated and hurtful responses. And it’s hopeless to ask a soft-spoken person to speak up. Sometimes it’s easier just to nod and smile.

Many older people I know choose to avoid social gatherings altogether because they can’t hear well. Without hearing aids, I’d stay home too.

Hearing loss can harm one’s health in other ways. For example, I’ve written about the need for a comprehensive approach to reducing cancer risk at older ages, including preventive services such as colorectal cancer screening. But these services rely on conversations between patients and their health care providers. An older patient’s ability to hear and understand such conversations shouldn’t be taken for granted or ignored.

The Food and Drug Administration did improve access to hearing aids by making some of them available without a prescription in 2022, but the over-the-counter devices are inadequate for serious hearing loss like mine. My private health insurance, meanwhile, started covering hearing aids a few years ago, providing up to $2,500 for them every five years. One hearing aid alone can cost that much or more, however.

Despite its limitations, my private coverage for hearing aids is better than nothing, which is what traditional Medicare provides.

Hearing loss is more common among lower-income people and those without advanced education. The toll from noisy workplaces compounds age-related hearing loss for some. One analysis found that most Americans with a serious hearing disability can’t afford the typical price of hearing aids.

Many of the older adults who can’t come up with these significant out-of-pocket expenses spent their working years in low-wage jobs that our country depends on. Denying them treatment for their hearing loss is a lousy way to treat people who gave years of service to our society.

Although some older adults with hearing loss won’t benefit from hearing aids, Medicare coverage for the devices might encourage more beneficiaries to get their hearing tested so they can get the treatment that’s right for them. And while Medicare coverage alone won’t address the stigma some people associate with hearing aids, the availability of newer, more comfortable and less obvious technology might win over some refuseniks.

Legislation reintroduced with bipartisan support last year would finally correct this glaring gap in Medicare coverage by removing the hearing aid exclusion from the law. There’s no reason to delay action on this any longer. Are our representatives listening?

Mary C. White is an adjunct professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, a Public Voices fellow at AcademyHealth in partnership with the OpEd Project and a former federal epidemiologist. She wrote this piece for the Los Angeles Times.

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