Private option still splits GOP despite decrease in uninsured

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansas got some news last week regarding its uninsured population. Whether you think it was good news or just news depends on what you think about the “private option.”

The Gallup organization released a survey finding that the state led the nation in reducing its uninsured adult population. In 2013, 22.5 percent of the state’s adults were uninsured – the second worst rate after Texas. In 2014, only 12.4 percent were uninsured. Nearly half of all adult Arkansans who didn’t have insurance last year have it this year. Arkansas rose to 22nd, tied with New Hampshire. Texas is still last.

The increase in the number of insured Arkansans can be credited mostly to the private option, which is the state program that uses federal Medicaid dollars through Obamacare to purchase private insurance.

Under Obamacare, those residents were supposed to become Medicaid recipients, but the Supreme Court gave states the option of saying yes or no. Instead, some Arkansas Republican legislators said “yes, but” and fashioned the private option with Gov. Mike Beebe’s administration. The result is that about 200,000 Arkansans now have health insurance. According to Gallup, the top 10 states that showed the most improvement all took the federal money. Texas didn’t, and 24 percent of its residents still don’t have health insurance.

So that’s a slam-dunk case for the private option, right? Not exactly.

The private option barely passed in 2013 and barely survived in 2014. Like other state programs, it requires the support of three-fourths of the Legislature before any money can be spent on it. All the Democrats support it. Republicans are split between three groups – the yeses, the no’s, and the “heck, no’s.” There are enough no’s and heck no’s to kill it. For it to survive, the yeses must pull a few no’s to their side.

How could anyone be against something providing health insurance to 200,000 people? Cost, uncertainty, and concerns about the growth of government. The cost to the federal government is expected to be $1.59 billion in fiscal year 2015 and $2.35 billion in fiscal year 2020. Those may be federal dollars, but they come from actual taxpayers, including Arkansans. While the feds are paying for everything initially, in 2017 Arkansas will be responsible for 5 percent – a number that rises to 10 percent by 2020. Because the federal government is paying for most of it, the state supposedly gains $670 million over a decade. But that’s assuming Uncle Sam holds up his end of the bargain.

The Republican Party divide is illustrated in the state Senate. The soon-to-be top dog, incoming Senate Pro Tempore Jonathan Dismang, R-Searcy, is a private option architect. Last week, Republicans nominated Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Gravette, as their Senate majority leader, their number two. He’s part of the “no caucus.” Their new number three, Sen. Jimmy Hickey, R-Texarkana, the majority whip, is a private option supporter.

Hendren told me that while he’s glad that 200,000 Arkansans now have insurance, he remains opposed. He’s a chemical engineer who deals with numbers, and to him, the numbers just don’t add up. However, he said the facts have changed since he first started voting no in 2013.

“We have this program, and I’m one who believes you’ve got to be fair with people,” he said. “So anything that’s done, we have to take into account the fact that we’ve got a lot of people in Arkansas who are playing by the rules and who are working hard, and to just yank that away from them without any consideration is not something that I think is the right thing to do. So we’re going to have to look at how we can find some middle ground, or find some sort of process that gets us to a program that’s more sustainable.”

The private option debate dominated the 2013 and 2014 sessions, which Hendren doesn’t want to repeat this year. He wants Republicans to fashion a compromise or simply vote on the issue and move on. He said his goal will be to “not let that define us as a caucus.”

He wants there to be one Senate Republican caucus. Currently, on this issue, there are three: the yeses, the no’s, and the heck no’s.

Note: Here’s the Gallup survey.

Real Americans tackle ‘Big Bad Budget’ in film

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

If you and seven other Americans with different backgrounds and beliefs were given a weekend to balance the federal budget together, could you do it?

That’s the premise behind “Big Bad Budget,” a film that producer and host Tom Carroll calls a “high-brow reality show.”

Carroll, who owns an Albuquerque, N.M.-based marketing and PR firm, rounded up four local Republicans, three Democrats, and a Democrat-leaning independent. They were given information about the federal budget to digest for a week and then were brought together over two days in June 2013. Their mission was to balance the budget by finding $750 billion in spending cuts and/or tax revenue increases. The negotiations were filmed and then edited down to an hour.

Like other reality shows, there’s some conflict, though there’s no yelling or tearful confessionals. The two tribes – I mean, parties – were separated at times to strategize, and Carroll pulled individuals aside for brief interviews.

The show gave differing viewpoints a chance to be aired. Republican Seth Heath said this about food stamps: “Poverty isn’t supposed to be comfortable. It’s supposed to be painful. Otherwise you have no desire to achieve and to become a successful person.” Wanda Small, a human resources consultant and a Democrat, said most people are trying to succeed. While arguing against cutting unemployment benefits, she said one temporary position she tried to fill paying $10 an hour drew more than 150 applicants. “Nobody wants to be in a situation where they have to get a handout,” she said.

I’ll spoil the ending: They balanced the budget by raising tax revenues by $250 billion and cutting spending by $500 billion, including $200 billion from defense, or about a third of the defense budget. The vote was 7-0, with one abstention. Heath accepted higher taxes along with smaller spending cuts than he preferred. Small agreed to reduce unemployment benefits from 99 weeks to 18 months and to cut Social Security by $75 billion.

It’s hard to miss the point.

“Congress needs to see that it needs to put its own personal interest behind the national interest, and if regular Americans can get together and over a short period of time with the information make the hard decisions, then why can’t Congress?” Carroll told me.

Granted, the comparison with Congress is imperfect. The participants had only one task – make the numbers add up. Members of Congress must balance many competing interests, and not just personal ones. Quickly cutting $200 billion from the defense budget would send shock waves through the economy, for example.

Still, the show demonstrates that, when Americans are given the facts and a reason to work with people with whom they disagree, a consensus can emerge. The first thing that happened was the Democrats proposed cutting $10 billion from the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans, annoyed at government intrusion in general, quickly agreed. Both sides proposed spending cuts and tax increases early in the process because they knew compromise would be required. There was some venting, and then it was just a matter of giving and taking and finding common ground.

“Big Bad Budget” has aired in Albuquerque and is being shopped around public television stations. AETN has recorded the show but hasn’t decided if it will run it. Carroll hopes it will be available on Netflix. It’s available on DVD at bigbadbudget.com.

Something like this needs to happen in cities across America and include more than eight Americans. Congress reflects the will of the people, and we the people don’t understand the national debt very well. According to the polls, we don’t want to cut spending or raise taxes. You can’t balance the budget without doing one, the other or both.

On the other hand, the show demonstrates the inadequacy of polling. Questions are usually asked over the phone and in isolation, such as, “Do you favor raising the such-and-such tax?” By itself? Of course not. In this case, Americans made difficult choices because they had an opportunity to make thoughtful decisions in the context of the big picture. They raised taxes, but they cut spending twice as much and balanced the budget.

Failure to compromise meant failure, period. They didn’t want to fail. So even though this wasn’t exactly like Congress, much applies. In Albuquerque and in Washington, people are more likely to succeed when given the right incentives. If it really had to, Congress could balance the budget. As Carroll said, “Right now they’re stuck in their positions, but if you told them that they had to do it or they’d all be thrown out of office, they’d do it in a weekend.”

Here’s the trailer.

Why did Rep. Crawford, a veteran, vote against VA funding? Here is his reasoning.

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

In 1988, U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford was an Army bomb technician serving in Pakistan. It was his job to keep things from exploding. On July 30, he played with a little fire.

Crawford, a Republican who represents eastern Arkansas’ 1st District, was one of only five U.S. House members voting against a bill providing $10 billion for private providers to serve veterans when the VA system is overloaded. The bill also will provide money to the VA to hire additional medical staff and lease 27 new medical centers, and it made it possible for senior executives to be fired at will by the secretary of veterans affairs. Because some of the spending is offset by cuts elsewhere in the department, it will add $10 billion to the national debt over 10 years. Only three in the Senate voted no.

The bill was passed remarkably quickly for a Congress that doesn’t accomplish much even slowly. No one wanted to be seen as voting against veterans, especially not amidst the current scandal over long wait times, poor care, and records manipulation. The department reported in July that about 636,000 veterans have been waiting at least a month for medical appointments. Crawford’s Democratic opponent, Heber Springs Mayor Jackie McPherson, quickly held a press conference with veterans denouncing the vote.

Why did Crawford, a veteran and the son and grandson of veterans, vote no? In a phone interview, he said he opposed adding $10 billion to the national debt by giving it to a bureaucracy that has misused what it had. He said management, not money, is the big issue at the VA, where funding has increased 57 percent since 2008 at the same time the patient load has increased 14 percent. He said the VA already had the statutory authority to send patients to private providers when it’s backlogged.

Crawford said Congress should have given incoming Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald time to assess the situation at the agency and then make recommendations. Instead, he said, Congress reacted to the problem by writing a blank check.

“These veterans have sacrificed a heck of a lot more than to have to go on borrowed money to get their health care,” he said.

The rest of Arkansas’ congressional delegation voted for the bill, including its three House members who also are veterans.

Was Crawford’s vote the right one? Your answer to that probably depends on whether you think it addressed the problem or merely threw money at it. If there’s any area where the government should deficit spend – even be willing to waste a little – it’s this one.

Whether or not it was the right vote, it certainly was a courageous one, especially during an election year. Of course, Crawford did once defuse bombs for a living.

***

It wasn’t Congress’ best week from a fiscal responsibility standpoint. Congress voted to replenish the Highway Trust Fund so that it will remain solvent through May. Had it not acted, the fund, which pays for 70 percent of Arkansas highway construction, would have been empty, and states would have been reimbursed only as money became available. It’s hard to plan mutli-year highway projects that way.

The main additional funding mechanism is pension smoothing, which lets companies delay contributing to their employees’ retirement plans. Doing so increases the companies’ taxable incomes in the short term, though they will have to make up the difference later, which will lower their taxable incomes then. The measure will increase highway revenues for six years and then start reducing them as companies replenish their pension funds. So once again, Congress has borrowed from the future to pay for present needs.

There were options. The Senate voted for a bill that would have funded highways into December without the pension smoothing provision. The House didn’t budge.

Arkansas’ four House members voted for the pension smoothing bill. Its senators voted for the gimmick-free Senate version and then voted for the final version. Sen. John Boozman also voted for an amendment that would make states responsible for most highway funding. It did not pass.

Some say Congress should stop the games and just raise the gas tax, which hasn’t changed since 1993. Of course, there’s a reason for that. According to an Associated Press-GfK poll released Tuesday, only 14 percent of Americans support a gas tax increase, while 58 percent oppose it. Other proposals that would increase revenues drew little support. So Congress is reflecting the will of the people.

Something has to give. The country’s infrastructure is decaying and congested. Congress isn’t willing to buck popular opinion or create a different set of funding priorities. Maybe it’s time to rethink our transportation system, but into what?

I don’t know, but this governing by crisis while relying on accounting gimmicks is no way to run a railroad. Or fund highways.

Could third parties affect Senate race?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Let’s start with an apology: I’m sorry for using the word “poll” in this first paragraph. There have been many polls in this year’s U.S. Senate race, and there will be many more. In one poll released this week, however, two numbers stood out.

It’s not the 44 percent of likely voters picking Tom Cotton or the 42 percent supporting Mark Pryor in the latest Talk Business & Politics-Hendrix College poll. Those two candidates consistently poll at about those levels. Their focus henceforth will be on ensuring those base levels show up on Election Day – mostly by scaring them – and on fighting over the other 14 percent.

The question is, how much of that 14 percent is available, and to whom? And that’s why the other poll numbers might matter: 4 and 3.

Unlike many polls, this one also included the minor party candidates. Mark Swaney of the Green Party polled at 4 percent, while Libertarian Nathan LaFrance attracted 3 percent.

I’m a word guy, not a math whiz, but 4+3=7, and in an election this close, that’s a factor.

Granted, many of those respondents are just sick of all the negative ads and picked one of the other two names, despite there also being an “undecided” option. But let’s spend a few paragraphs focusing on those respondents who purposely chose Swaney and LaFrance. They might have an effect on the election, maybe an important one, because they are probably taking a bigger bite out of Pryor’s support than Cotton’s.

The Green Party’s main issues are climate change and nationalized health care. They are unapologetically liberal. It’s safe to assume that most of the informed respondents who said they were voting for Swaney would be Pryor voters if there were only two choices. Few are playing “eenie meenie miney moe” between the Green Party and Cotton.

Libertarians, on the other hand, are for smaller government in every way. They would cut taxes and government spending significantly, so on economic issues, they are to the right of Republicans. However, on social issues, they generally support gay marriage, legalizing marijuana, and keeping abortion legal. They’d slash defense spending, too. In many ways, they’re to the left of Democrats.

So the 4 percent (the informed ones, anyway) who said they would vote for Swaney would have picked Pryor if there were only two choices. But the informed portion of LaFrance’s 3 percent would have gone either way – probably more for Cotton, but not exclusively.

I’m not saying this necessarily will change the outcome, but Pryor is being hurt more than Cotton.

The numbers won’t stay this way. Swaney and LaFrance are poorly funded candidates who don’t have money to advertise and probably have reached their ceilings of support. A percentage of those who do vote will gravitate toward Pryor or Cotton because of the so-called “spoiler effect.” In our winner-take-all system, voters have an incentive to choose the least objectionable of only two parties, lest the more objectionable candidate win.

Here’s where you might say this is why we need just two parties, and that people shouldn’t “waste their votes” on candidates who can’t win. You might say those liberal Green Party supporters should just choose Pryor, the less conservative of the two major party candidates.

Green Party voters don’t see it that way. They would say both Pryor and Cotton are the conservative candidates, and that Swaney is the only one who represents their values. If you really believe both Republicans and Democrats are ruining the planet, must you vote for the one you think is less ruinous? Libertarians say Democrats and Republicans both are the parties of big government – the same party, in fact, just two sides of the same coin.

This is the land of many choices, except in elections. But there are ways our democracy could be more open but still efficient. One is instant runoff voting, where voters rank their candidates top to bottom, and a numerical process determines the winner. Green Party voters could make their statement by picking Swaney first and then Pryor (or LaFrance) as their number two.

But we don’t have instant runoff voting. We have winner-take-all voting, in a very close race, where a few percentage points matter.

Note: Here’s a link to the Talk Business & Politics-Henderix College poll.

Above is an excellent video by C.G.P. Grey explaining why the spoiler effect makes it so hard for third parties and independents to break through. Below, C.G.P. Grey explains instant runoff voting, or what he calls the alternative vote.

Welcome to America, kids – eventually

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The question of what to do with these 50,000 Central American children sent to America alone by their parents to escape violence and poverty in their homelands – that’s a tough one. What do we do? Let some of them stay? Send them all home?

Eventually, we’ll be asking young immigrants to come.

We will do that because the decisions we have made, politically and personally, will leave us with no better choice. Let’s look at some statistics to see why.

In 1946, the World War II generation returned home from overseas and made a bunch of babies. From that year until 1964, 80 million baby boomers were born, and now they are beginning to retire in massive numbers and living longer than previous generations. Social Security’s framers did not plan for this influx of long-living beneficiaries when it was created. Life expectancy was 64 for a program that started paying benefits at age 65. There was one beneficiary for every 16 workers paying into the system.

Now there are three workers supporting each beneficiary. By 2025, the ratio will be 2.3 to one. The baby boomers themselves did not make enough babies, and then Congress messed it all up by raiding Social Security to pay for other programs.

This isn’t just a problem for the Social Security system. Entire sectors of the economy will be looking for workers. For example, the trucking industry, which pays pretty well, is expecting a deficit of 300,000 drivers over the next decade.

Could we just wait for people to make more babies who will grow up and fill the void? Not really. According to the Census Bureau, the median age for American females in 2013 was 39. That means a lot of us are too old to make babies. We’d have a real problem if it weren’t for the Hispanics already here (average age: 27).

Let’s review. We’ve promised benefits to an entire generation of retiring senior citizens, but we don’t have enough young people working to pay for those benefits, fill jobs in certain sectors, or make babies themselves.

We need an influx of young people – fast. Where could we find them? Obviously, south of the border and across the ocean.

At some point, regardless of all the political yelling, the United States will loosen its immigration laws. Those already here will be given a path to citizenship, or at least a path to something. The door into America will open wider. It might be attached to a wall, but the door will be open.

Is this the right thing to do? It won’t matter, because no one will have a better idea.

We ultimately will do this because we will have no better alternative as a result of the choices we have already made. Politically, we could have raised the retirement age enough to compensate for our increased lifespans. We have chosen not to do that. Our society could have fostered the expectation that the care of the elderly would be primarily the responsibility of their children. We decided, for many good reasons, to also rely quite a bit on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. We could have had a sensible immigration policy. We chose to squabble about it. As individuals, we could have had more kids. We, including my wife and I, decided that two were enough.

The choices we have made over the past 50 years, when we have had lots of alternatives, will dictate the choices we will make in the future, when we will have far fewer alternatives. So welcome to America, kids – if not now, then eventually.