Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Unhealthy Indiana

Yesterday, the IBJ reported the latest data on public health indicators, under a headline that telegraphed the results: “Indiana public health continues to slide.”

When the most recent data is compared to previous studies, it becomes quite clear that Hoosiers are moving in the wrong direction. We are fatter, more sedentary, more diabetic. Hoosiers smoke more than citizens elsewhere, and more of our babies die in infancy.

Not exactly a distinction we would choose.

Furthermore, since our policymakers seem to care a lot more about money than about Hoosier health and well-being, it may be useful to point out that poor health drives up costs. As the IBJ pointed out, Indiana employers spend more per worker on healthcare than employers elsewhere in the country. And that doesn’t include the costs of sick days or reduced productivity as a consequence of health issues. (Forgive me for an indelicate observation: Indiana legislators determined to keep business taxes low don’t seem to understand that the added costs incurred by reason of an unhealthy workforce are just as much a part of business overhead as state income or property taxes.)

No–true to our Hoosier Heritage, which is nothing if not shortsighted–State government is perfectly content to shift health costs to employers, and keep Indiana’s public health spending low. And it is low. In 2012, Indiana ranked 49th out of 50 states in per person spending on public health, despite the fact that preventative public health measures like immunization and screenings demonstrably and dramatically lower overall health costs.

To add insult to injury, Governor Pence has signaled that he will not expand Medicaid in order to participate in the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.” As I have previously noted, there is no rational basis for that decision; it rests entirely upon a perceived political need to pander to a rabid GOP base motivated solely by an unreasoning hatred of President Obama and anything he supports.

If Indiana opts to participate, an estimated 450,000 Hoosiers would benefit. And here’s the kicker: if Indiana does participate, the federal government will pay all the costs for the first three years. The state’s portion would then phase in gradually, topping out  at 10% in 2020.

And if we don’t participate? Well, poor people have this pesky habit of getting sick anyway. And we already pay to treat them–frequently, in the least cost-effective way, when they appear at hospital emergency rooms. When uninsured folks are treated there, the costs of their un-reimbursed care drives up the premiums of those with insurance. If the hospital is public, our taxes go up. If the hospitals still can’t recover their costs, they cut healthcare workers or reduce services. The 10% Indiana would eventually have to pay to cover far more people is unlikely to be more than we are actually paying now in a variety of ways–it would just be more visible and much more cost-effective.

Indiana certainly wouldn’t want to do something that was actually cost-effective.

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Dear Lord, Where Do They Find These People?

According to Rep. Tom McClintock, there simply is no such thing as white-collar crime.

At a town hall meeting in El Dorado Hills, California on Tuesday, a constituent asked McClintock for his “stance on Wall Street criminal practices.” The congressman responded, “Well first of all, for a criminal practice there has to be a gun. It’s pretty simple.”

I think we know what’s simple, and it isn’t the Congressman’s intriguing theory of what it takes to constitute criminal behavior.

Every day, it seems we meet a new officeholding whack-a-doodle.

This week it was Lee Bright calling Lindsey Graham a “community organizer for the Muslims.” Last week, Steve King explained that for every young immigrant who was a valedictorian, there were a hundred others with “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Before him, Paul Broun insisted that evolution and climate change were “lies from the mouth of hell.” Rand Paul insists that  black people have no trouble voting–and that despite his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and any and all measures to lift people from poverty, he’s all for equality. And of course, almost every week there’s some new insanity from Louie Gohmert, who Charles Pierce memorably called “perhaps the dumbest mammal to enter a legislative chamber since Caligula’s horse.”

There’s a new one just about every day. Michelle Bachmann hasn’t even taken her crazy eyes into retirement yet, and literally dozens of her fellow Republican Congresscritters are contending for her title of  “least securely tethered to reality.”

It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying.

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A Question of Trust

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has introduced a bill that would require the Supreme Court to develop a code of ethics. (Surprising at it may seem, the high court does not have such a code, although all other courts do.)

The bill was prompted by several recent controversies over judicial recusal, especially a number of cases in which Scalia–who has grown more voluble and intemperate over the years– has spoken publicly on the merits of cases that were highly likely to come before the Court (historically, and under existing codes of ethics, a judicial no-no) and then refused to recuse himself when the cases were argued.

There has also been considerable criticism of Justice Thomas, who has failed to recuse himself in cases where his wife has a clear interest in the result. Justice Kagan has been criticized for sitting on cases in which she was involved to some extent as Solicitor General.

As a scholar of constitutional courts noted on a listserv the other day, “the US is still rare in the world in making recusal of a judge a matter for the personal decision of that judge, without any way to contest it.  In the German Federal Constitutional Court, for example, the decision to remove a judge from a particular case is made by the rest of the judges in that Senate with the judge in question not participating.    We should have some comparable process here.”

Codes of ethics are about more than recusal, of course. They are centered on avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, in recognition that the legitimacy of public institutions and especially the Courts is dependent upon public trust.

Ethics codes typically limit the value of gifts that may be accepted, or forbid their acceptance at all. That includes junkets, generously paid speaking engagements, and other activities or favors that might produce bias. And most codes of ethics require a measure of disclosure significantly greater than is current Court practice.

In a government based on separation of powers, the legislature may lack the authority to tell the Court to clean up its act–and the Court gets the final word on that issue. In a Court as ideologically divided as this one, I suppose decisions about recusal could themselves become politicized. The GOP’s Tea Party wing will probably oppose Murphy’s bill, since most of the shenanigans these days are by conservative jurists. So passage of this measure is hardly a slam-dunk.

That said, it really is indefensible that the Supreme Court exempts itself from ethical principles that apply to other judicial and administrative entities. Even Congress has a Code of Ethics, however honored in the breach it may be.

When Justice Scalia goes duck hunting with a litigant (Dick Cheney) whose case is then pending before the Court; when Thomas sits on a case despite the fact that his wife’s organization is an interested party, I think skepticism about their ability to render a dispassionate verdict is understandable–and foreseeable.

Such behavior erodes the public trust, and it greatly diminishes the stature of the Court.

There is a reason Courts should be–and be seen to be–incorruptable. They are, after all, in the business of disappointing litigants; every time someone wins, someone else loses. If credible charges of favoritism or bias can be leveled, even if untrue, citizens ultimately lose respect for the rule of law.

Judges–especially Supreme Court Justices– used to take great pains to avoid the slightest appearance of impropriety; they used to aspire to be “as pure as the driven snow.” Lately (as Mae West memorably put it), they’ve drifted.

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A Challenge to the False Equivalency Folks

As the Republican party has become more and more irresponsible, it has become fashionable for its defenders to argue from equivalency: sure, there are some loony-tune legislators who are Republican, but there are equally demented Democrats. Both sides do it, so it’s not fair to single out the GOP examples.

Now, there is an element of truth to this. Certainly, there are rabid ideologues on both the left and right. But no fair-minded observer can deny that for sheer lunacy, the Republicans win in a walk. They have depth and breadth. (Lest you think it’s confined to Michelle Bachman and Louie Gohmert, let me assure you they have an absolutely formidable bench.)

For example, I’d never previously heard of Florida Congressman Ted Yoho.

Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) recently told a group of constituents that he backing a birther bill because he hoped that it would “get rid of everything” that President Barack Obama had done, and then added that the president’s “racist” health care law forced white people to pay more to use tanning beds.

The Florida Republican continued: “I had an Indian doctor in our office the other day, very dark skin, with two non-dark skin people, and I asked this to him, I said, ‘Have you ever been to a tanning booth?’ and he goes, ‘No, no need.’ So therefore it’s a racist tax and I thought I might need to get to a sun tanning booth so I can come out and say I’ve been disenfranchised because I got taxed because of the color of my skin.”

I defy anyone to find a Democrat who can match that for idiocy or racism. And this guy isn’t even one of the GOP’s usual subjects!

As Juanita Jean, who blogs from the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Parlor, accurately notes, if there wasn’t a tax on tanning beds, that would mean that President Obama is encouraging everybody to become dark skinned like him or the Muslims. Because he’d be trying to turn us all black!

These folks are just obsessed with the President’s skin color. Too bad they aren’t equally invested in stuff like–oh, I don’t know… logic. Or coherent thought. Or public policy, although asking  that they actually do the jobs they were elected to do and stop their single-minded obsession with preventing Obama from doing anything may be too great a stretch.

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Conspiracy Theories

I’m not much for conspiracy theories.

In my long-ago days in City Hall,   we often encountered folks–sometimes they were neighborhood activists, sometimes representatives of organizations aggrieved about some action–who were absolutely convinced that city officials had cleverly and surreptiously implemented a plan to screw them. What they didn’t understand was that we lacked the cunning and imagination needed to carry out the nefarious plots they attributed to us. As a former co-worker used to say,  incompetence explained so much more than conspiracy.

But just because most accusations of intentional conspiracies tend to come from paranoid folks doesn’t mean that  bad behavior is never intentional.  (As the old saying goes, even paranoids have enemies.)

Which brings me to an unsettling theory advanced by Robert Reich in a recent blog post.

Robert Reich, as most readers know,  was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration. He now teaches at Berkeley. His politics tend to be considerably to the left of mine; that said, however, his is a credible and very respectable voice, and he is not given to conspiracy theories.

Reich writes about persistently high unemployment, and the unwillingness of Congressional Republicans to do anything about it. These are facts. Unemployment remains high, and the House GOP remains stubbornly opposed to even the most reasonable measures to address that problem. The question is, why? Reich dismisses the notion that Republican obstinacy is entirely due to hatred of President Obama (aka the black guy in the White House).

First, high unemployment keeps wages down. Workers who are worried about losing their jobs settle for whatever they can get — which is why hourly earnings keep dropping. The median wage is now 4 percent lower than it was at the start of the recovery. Low wages help boost corporate profits, thereby keeping the regressives’ corporate sponsors happy.

Second, high unemployment fuels the bull market on Wall Street. That’s because the Fed is committed to buying long-term bonds as long as unemployment remains high. This keeps bond yields low and pushes investors into equities — which helps boosts executive pay and Wall Street commissions, thereby keeping regressives’ financial sponsors happy.

Third, high unemployment keeps most Americans economically fearful and financially insecure. This sets them up to believe regressive lies — that their biggest worry should be that “big government” will tax away the little they have and give it to “undeserving” minorities; that they should support low taxes on corporations and wealthy “job creators;” and that new immigrants threaten their jobs.

I suppose this theory doesn’t really amount to a conspiracy, but it does suggest that the GOPs blocking maneuvers are prompted by actual reasons, no matter how much their behavior resembles a two-year-old’s tantrum.

If Reich is correct–and I’m still dubious–members of the House GOP are both smarter and much more despicable than I had previously imagined.

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