September 3, 2014
Sep 03 05:39 Everything's rosy in MNsureland? Sep 03 05:36 The 'Good Old Days'? Sep 03 06:28 AFT: Question Common Core Sep 03 16:46 Liberals still spinning Halbig
Prior Months: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug
Prior Years: 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Everything's rosy in MNsureland?
Mindy Greiling and Sarah Walker have become major DFL spinmeisters this summer. They've insisted that all's clear on the MNsure front. This fact-based article argues otherwise:
When a new baby arrives, parents want the infant quickly added to their health insurance. But for 78 new moms in Dakota County this year, the process bogged down for months because of a change to Minnesota's new MNsure health insurance exchange.
For five months, county workers said they couldn't use the new system to add babies to their mom's coverage in Medical Assistance, the state's primary safety net health insurance program.
Isn't that great? Thanks to the Dayton administration's incompetence, these mothers had to worry whether the state would eventually cover their children's health care expenses. That didn't happen prior to Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act. That didn't happen during the Pawlenty years, either. This didn't happen, either:
Then, when state officials unveiled in June a work-around process for adding babies, county workers found the process usually took an hour or more per baby. Before MNsure, the job usually took about five minutes.
If Ms. Greiling and Ms. Walker were a family's only source of information, people would think that everything's running smoothly. This proves things aren't running smoothly. What's worse is that this isn't isolated:
The trouble with babies points to a broader problem with the MNsure system. It remains a slow and difficult process for state, county and health exchange workers to record "life events" for people who have obtained coverage through the new online marketplace for insurance.
Moms need coverage for new babies. Husbands and wives sometimes need to add a spouse to their policy. People move, so they need to provide notice of a new address. Income can change in ways that impact eligibility for government programs.
The MNsure system needs to be able to record all of these life events and others. But the labor-intensive process for doing so has led to a backlog.
What was routine for insurance agents has turned into a nightmare for county workers. Thanks to Gov. Dayton, the DFL legislature and the incompetents in the Department of Human Services, mothers of newborn babies have the additional stress of worrying whether their children will be covered.
In emergency situations, MNsure and state officials have been getting life events into the system so that babies and adults have coverage for the care they need, said Chuck Johnson of the state Department of Human Services. Still, the situation is "unacceptable in terms of the service that we're able to provide consumers," said Johnson, whose department runs the state's public health insurance programs.
"I think we under-appreciated the amount of work it was going to take to get life changes up and running," said Katie Burns, the chief operating officer at MNsure. "I think the hope was we would be able to do this earlier in 2014, and we're still not there."
This is why Republicans at the state level should be telling voters that they'd challenge the Obama administration's health insurance exchange requirements. They should make the case that states with competent governors should have the flexibility to put effective policies in place.
They should argue that one-size-fits-all, top-down, run-from-Washington health care is a disaster.
I suspect that they'd find a receptive audience if they made this fact-based argument. People, especially mothers, know that this isn't working.
It's time to scrap this ill-conceived takeover of the health insurance industry. It's time to fix what President Obama, Gov. Dayton and DC- and St. Paul-based bureaucrats screwed up. It's time to end this nightmare.
Posted Wednesday, September 3, 2014 5:39 AM
Comment 1 by J. Ewing at 03-Sep-14 09:12 PM
Have you seen the consultants' $5 million report, saying that "2/3 (I think) of the essential functions" of the website won't be operational by October?
Comment 2 by Gary Gross at 04-Sep-14 01:09 AM
You mean the report I wrote about here?
The 'Good Old Days'?
You Might Start Calling Them The 'Good Old Days'
by Silence Dogood
The following figure shows the total New Entering Freshman (NEF) and New Entering Transfer (NET) headcount enrollments for SCSU from Fall'07 to Fall'14. The data for Fall'07 through Fall'13 comes from the website for the Office of Strategy, Planning and Effectiveness. The data for Fall'14 is current as of the fourth day of school.
While some might like to say that it looks like the rate of decline is decreasing, from Fall'07 to Fall'14, over this time period enrollment has dropped by 1,158 students and represents a drop of 30.0%! Let me say that again, the combined NEF and NET enrollments are down 30.0% from Fall'07 to Fall'14!
If you look at the NEF and NET data separately, you obtain the following figure:
The data for NET shows that for Fall'08 there was a substantial drop in transfers from the prior year. However, the number rebounded in Fall'09. Omitting Fall'08, the NET enrollment shows a nearly linear decline. From Fall'07 to Fall'14 the drop is 460 students and represents a drop of 31.1%. NEF show essentially a constant level from Fall'07 to Fall'09, which is then followed by a nearly stepwise decline. From Fall'08 to Fall'14, the drop is 719 students and represents a drop of 29.9%. The data shows that BOTH NET and NEF enrollments are down by almost the same percentage!
The Minnesota Legislature created the Post-Secondary Enrollment Option (PSEO) program in 1985, which allowed juniors and seniors still in high school to earn college credits. The following figure shows the fall enrollment of PSEO students at SCSU from Fall'05 through Fall'13.
The growth of the PSEO enrollments from Fall'05 to Fall'13 is nothing short of spectacular! The increase in enrollment is 2,396 and represents a growth of 265%! If the goal is to increase the number of students involved in the PSEO program, John Burgerson, Dean of Continuing Studies is nothing short of a miracle worker!
The PSEO data for Fall'14 will not be final until the end of the semester. However, even for Fall'13, it is clear that the headcount enrollment for PSEO is substantially larger than that for the sum of the NEF and NET headcounts (3,300 vs. 2,775). As a result, the decline in NEF and NET has been masked by the growth in the number of PSEO students. This is clearly evident in the following figure showing the combined NEF/NET enrollment, PSEO enrollment, and the sum of the two.
The figure clearly shows that the NEF/NET enrollments are dropping at the same time the PSEO enrollments are growing. In Fall'12, the PSEO enrollment and the combined NET and NEF enrollments are within four students of each other! As shown in the figure, when the two are added together, the growth in PSEO clearly swamps the drop in the NEF/NET numbers. In fact, it looks as if the enrollment is continuing to grow. From Fall'07 to Fall'13 the overall 'growth' in enrollment is 641 students and represents an increase of 11.9%. But a student is a student is a student. Right?
The only problem with this data is that headcount enrollment and FYE enrollments aren't the same thing. Furthermore, budgets are based on FYE enrollments. It takes almost six high school students to equal one full-time student. By mixing headcount enrollments with FYE enrollments, the administration has been able to hide a disturbing enrollment trend. The only thing I've learned over the years is that administrators like to talk about headcount enrollments because a) they're always bigger than FYE enrollments and b) the press doesn't know enough to ask about the FYE enrollment numbers so the true budget picture remains hidden.
When the final headcount enrollment number for FY15 is in next spring, compare it with the number for FY14. Don't be surprised if the two numbers are very close to each other or if, in fact, the FY15 headcount is still larger than the FY14 headcount. One might logically ask the question why is SCSU having to cut the budget by $8,000,000-$10,000,000 this year? The simple answer is that budgets aren't based on headcount. They are based on FYE.
In FY14, SCSU was originally planning for a 2.4% drop in FYE enrollment (later revised to 2.8%-3.2% and still later to 4.0%). At the beginning of Fall Semester, the administration again revised the drop to 5.0%. Yet despite an increase of over 100% in the projected enrollment decline, the university still had a balanced budget and did not need to make budget reductions during the year. For FY15, the administration is projecting that the enrollment will again be down in the range of 4-5% but now is proclaiming that the budget needs to be reduced by $8,000,000 - $10,000,000. Something doesn't make sense here. How can the university be down 5.0% in FYE one year and have a balanced budget without reductions and then the next year be down by the same percentage (or less) but run a deficit of $8,000,000 - $10,000,000? The only thing that I can surmise is that a) the administration is not telling us the truth about the budget or b) they have no clue what is going on with the budget. I can't tell you which one is worse - lying or incompetence - for me that is not much of a choice!
Posted Wednesday, September 3, 2014 10:50 AM
Comment 1 by Abacus at 03-Sep-14 09:28 AM
Houdini would have been proud of this administration. Its SO far past lipstick on the pig its criminal.
There "should" be some lively discussion at the Chamber of Commerce Roundtable today as to the net effect on the Business community...key word "should"
Narry a word will be uttered most likely as the Happy Talk bandwagon runs through, over and past the City of St Cloud. The worst is yet to come
AFT: Question Common Core
This LTE in the St. Cloud Times shows the growing discontent with Common Core from across the political spectrum:
Sandra Stotsky was a member of Common Core's Validation Committee from 2009-10. She is professor emerita at the University of Arkansas. She wrote that Common Core's K-12 standards, instead of emerging from a state-led process in which experts and educators were well represented, were written by people who did not represent the relevant stakeholders and included no English teachers.
Common Core is supported by lots of supposedly well-meaning politicians. Chief among those politicians is Jeb Bush, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2016. The Gates Foundation is the chief funder of CCSS.
That's one of the problems with CCSS.
"Because Common Core is run by private corporations and foundations, there can be no Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings or 'sunshine laws' to find out who got to choose the people who actually wrote the standards. It's completely non-transparent and rather shady."
That's just the tip of a rather disgusting iceberg. A significant part of CCSS, aka Common Core State Standards, is data collection on families. I spoke recently with a friend who has a 3-year-old. The school district sent her a questionnaire asking things like whether there were guns in the house, whether they planned on home-schooling their child and other questions totally unrelated to the education of her child.
I wrote this post last fall to alert people to the threat CCSS poses. Here's part of what I included in my post:
What did this Work Group look like? Focusing only on ELA, the make-up of the Work Group was quite astonishing: It included no English professors or high-school English teachers. How could legitimate ELA standards be created without the very two groups of educators who know the most about what students should and could be learning in secondary English classes? CCSSI also released the names of individuals in a larger 'Feedback Group.' This group included one English professor and one high-school English teacher. But it was made clear that these people would have only an advisory role - final decisions would be made by the English-teacher-bereft Work Group.
The woman that wrote that paragraph is Dr. Stotsky, the woman quoted in the Times LTE. The fact that the working group putting together the standards for English language arts didn't include any English professors or high school English teachers should automatically disqualify them as a serious working group. They certainly shouldn't be considered an authority on school standards on any subject.
The American Federation of Teachers is calling for a "moratorium on using Common Core test scores to determine whether students deserve to advance to the next grade - or teachers deserve to keep their jobs," according to Politico.
When conservatives and progressives agree that something is bad and they can list their substantive objections as to why they think it's bad, that's proof CCSS should be totally scrapped.
Posted Wednesday, September 3, 2014 6:28 AM
No comments.
Liberals still spinning Halbig
Jeffrey Toobin's article isn't factually accurate:
As Congress originally conceived it, the A.C.A. called for each state to set up its own exchange with a Web site, which most of the blue states and a few of the red ones did. But two dozen of them did not, so the Obama Administration established a federal counterpart, centered on the Web site healthcare.gov.
First, three dozen states didn't create state-run exchanges, not two. Next, HealthCare.gov was created in the same legislation that authorized states to build their exchanges. The Obama administration didn't create HealthCare.gov after they saw states refuse to create state-run exchanges.
Then there's this:
According to the D.C. Circuit majority, one line in the text of the A.C.A. makes the federal exchange invalid. The law says that subsidies are to be available through exchanges that are 'established by a State,' without an explicit authorization of federal exchanges. Thus, according to the judges in the majority, five million or so people who have used the federal exchange to buy health insurance must now lose it.
That's another inaccurate statement. It isn't just that judges said people who bought insurance through HealthCare.gov weren't eligible for subsidies. The US House, the US Senate and President Obama said it, too.
If the US House, the US Senate and President Obama wanted everyone to get these subsidies, they could've written it into the ACA's language. What's really at play here is that the US House, the US Senate and President Obama wanted everyone to be eligible for those subsidies but they also understood that they'd need a hammer to hold over red states to force them into creating state-run exchanges.
The US House, the US Senate and President Obama calculated that they could force red states into creating state-run exchanges by making it politically unpopular to not create state-run exchanges.
The problem with the Democrats' bluff is that red states called the Democrats' bluff. They essentially said that they weren't worried about not creating a state-run exchange in their states.
Next, Toobin constructs a strawman argument:
Katzmann writes that 'excluding legislative history is just as likely to expand a judge's discretion as reduce it: . When a statute is ambiguous, barring legislative history leaves a judge only with words that could be interpreted in a variety of ways without contextual guidance as to what legislators may have thought. Lacking such guidance increases the probability that a judge will construe a law in a manner that the legislators did not intend.'
There's nothing abiguous about the legislative language in this provision. It's exceptionally clear. When a statute says that subsidies are only through exchanges "established by a state", that means that subsidies aren't available to people who bought their insurance through HealthCare.gov.
The more important point is that this should be a shot across the legislators' bow to write clearly written statutes. If legislation can be "interpreted in a variety of ways", then legislators aren't doing their job. If the legislators who wrote the law can't write it clearly, then that's their problem. Period. The citizens who didn't qualify for subsidies should take it out on the people who wrote the bill and the people who voted for the legislation.
Further, people who don't qualify for these subsidies should take it out on Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. They're the people who brought the bill up for a vote before anyone could read the bill. They're the people who wrote the final bill in the privacy of their offices rather than marking it up in committees.
Here's a whopper:
When the Affordable Care Act was being debated, every member of Congress-supporters of the A.C.A. as well as opponents-understood that the federal government would have the right to establish exchanges in states that chose not to create them. As Judge Harry Edwards observed in his dissenting opinion in the A.C.A. case, 'The Act empowers HHS to establish exchanges on behalf of the States, because parallel provisions indicate that Congress thought that federal subsidies would be provided on HHS-created exchanges, and, more importantly, because Congress established a careful legislative scheme by which individual subsidies were essential to the basic viability of individual insurance markets.'
Judge Edwards is wrong. The clear language of the bill doesn't imply that "federal subsidies would be provided on HHS-created exchanges." It directly says the opposite.
What can be stated is that Congress wanted everyone who made less than 400% of the federal poverty level to be eligible for subsidies and that all 50 states establish state-run health insurance exchanges. Further, we can state that Congress wrote the bill the way they did to force states into creating their own health insurance exchanges.
Congress can't have it both ways. Either they write the law to make everyone below a certain income level eligible without conditions or they write it so that only people that met specific criteria were eligible.
As the Halbig case demonstrates, textualism is as politically fraught as any other approach to judging. The Halbig case is not an attempt to police unclear drafting but rather the latest effort to destroy a law that is despised by many conservatives.
Without question, Halbig is an attempt to destroy Obamacare. The thing is whether the Supreme Court will have the courage to say that specific language means specific things or whether they'll say that the executive branch can change a law after it's been written by Congress, voted on by Congress and signed by the president.
What Toobin is essentially asking for is a mulligan. He's asking for that because 36 states didn't do what Congress had hoped they'd do. Mulligans are for golfers, not major legislation that was passed without scrutiny in the dead of night the night before Christmas Eve.
Posted Wednesday, September 3, 2014 4:47 PM
No comments.
