A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

HB 1678 – Requiring hospitals to have emergency rooms

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HB 1678 – Regulation of hospitals. Provides that a hospital must contain an emergency medical service facility. Provides an exemption from the emergency medical service requirement hospitals that provide only long term care services. Rep. Brown. Passed the House by a vote of 60 to 37.

I don’t have any direct knowledge of the problem here, but I’m going to guess that emergency rooms tend to be money losers for hospitals. A lot of the people who go to emergency rooms are poor and need expensive treatment. So, perhaps hospitals think that maybe they’ll make more money if they can just treat the non-emergency cases. On the other hand, if I am even correct that this is the problem the legislature is seeking to address, it’s only a band-aid. Emergency room treatment is a really expensive and inefficient way to provide medical care to the poor.

The vote was mostly, but not entirely, along party lines with Republicans mostly voting “no.” So, it will be interesting to see if the bill will be dead on arrival in the Senate. Senators Miller and Simpson are the sponsors, so it should at least get a hearing.

[tags]HB1678-2007, health care[/tags]

SB1237-2007: Seat belt bill passes out of committee

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House Bill 1237 Motor vehicle restraint systems. Rep. Welch. This is the bill that requires all occupants of a motor vehicle (with certain exceptions) to wear a seat belt. In practical terms, this means that all occupants rather than just the front seat occupants are required to buckle up. Also, occupants of pickup trucks and SUVs are no longer exempt.

Whatever you might think of the seat belt requirement generally, I don’t think a good argument can be made that the distinction between SUVs and pickup trucks on the one hand and other automobiles on the other hand made much sense. I don’t know what the safety studies say, but there was probably a better argument to be made for the distinction between front seat occupants and back seat occupants.

[tags]SB1237-2007, motor vehicles[/tags]

Buyer back to work after skiing accident

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The Indy Star has an article entitled Rep. Buyer hobbles back to work. He suffered a knee injury while skiing in December and has now returned to D.C. after undergoing physical therapy in Lafayette. I would have liked more detail on the nature of his injury just so I could compare his experience with my own. Back in January 2004, I suffered a knee injury of my own while skiing — it was a tibial plateau fracture. I believe I missed work for about a week.

It’s altogether possible his knee injury was more severe and actually necessitated him missing work for 5 or 6 weeks. The cynical side of me says that he was happy enough to miss votes on some of the popular but non-conservative bills the House Democrats moved forward in their “first 100 hours.”

It occurs to me that Mark Souder and Mike Pence must have been awfully lonely in Congress this past January. Their former colleagues, Chris Chocola, Mike Sodrel, and John Hostettler were voted out of office. Steve Buyer was laid up with a knee injury. And Dan Burton, aside from showing up to cast the lone vote against ethics reform and criticize investigation of the disappearance of billions of dollars, was out on the golf course. Their merry group of 7 had been reduced to 2.

SB 94 – Disability semantics

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Senate Bill 94 Individuals with disabilities. Sen. Landske. Changes terms used to describe individuals with disabilities.

Perhaps I’m not sensitive enough, but this one strikes me as a waste of paper. It changes: “hearing, deaf, and hard of hearing individuals” to “individuals who hear, individuals who are deaf, and individuals who are hard of hearing.”

It changes “participant who was permanently disabled” to “participant who had a permanent disability.”

It changes “children who are mentally retarded” to “children who have mental retardation”.

It changes “developmentally disabled adults” to “adults with a developmental disability.”

And it goes on like this for 177 pages. I mean, I get the point. “My disability doesn’t define me!” But, if you’re picking through the Indiana Code making changes at this level of subtlety, perhaps it does. In any event, it passed the Senate 47 to 0.

[tags]SB94-2007[/tags]

Sending giant pallets of currency into a war zone

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The U.S. Federal Reserve send 363 tons of currency (bills, not coins), totalling $5.5 billion into Baghdad according to an AP story.

“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that’s exactly what our government did,” [Rep. Henry Waxman] said during a hearing reviewing possible waste, fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq.

The story goes on to note that $8.8 billion out of $12 billion disbursed by Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority was unaccounted for.

Indiana Representative Dan Burton, apparently able to drag himself out of the 19th Hole, bothered to show up to comment, “We are in a war against terrorists, to have a blame meeting isn’t, in my opinion, constructive[.]”

All that sun on the golf course must be baking Rep. Burton’s brains. Otherwise, he would surely realize that, if we weren’t pumping billions of dollars into an Iraqi black hole, we might not have to borrow so much money from our grandchildren to try to fight the terrorists, some of whom have probably now made their way to Iraq now that it’s been destabilized. (Nevermind the very real possibility that those recent Iraqi immigrant/terrorists could be funding themselves with the dollars that are unaccounted for.)

Property Tax Plan

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Mary Beth Schneider, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article entitled “Business tax load could rise in new bill”.

It’s a Democratic property tax relief plan that would, in turn, give local governments the power to impose higher personal income taxes and to impose corporate income taxes. There is initially a sense of bipartisanship with respect to the bill. Both Sen. Kenley and Gov. Daniels think there are positive aspects to the bill, not least of which is the political courage to provide for a revenue mechanism to replace lost property taxes. But, that’s outside of the House. House Republicans and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce are apparently opposed to the bill.

Sweet gig

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The Indianapolis Star has an editorial excoriating Congressman Dan Burton (the candidate they endorsed for Indiana’s 5th Congressional District). The editorial is a follow up to a Maureen Groppe story on how Burton has been playing hookie from his job as a Congressman, missing votes to go play golf.

The editorial concludes:

So here’s the score: Burton would rather play golf than attend a hearing on Iraq. He shows up for work less often than a 20-year-old slacker who refuses to move out of his parents’ basement. He has little shame when it comes to accepting expensive gifts. And he feels immune from voters’ wrath because he’s been handed a heavily gerrymandered district that might as well hang up “Democrats need not apply” signs.
Sweet gig, Dan.

Pulaski County moving back to Eastern Time

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I certainly missed the boat on the Notice of Proposed Rule Making for moving Pulaski County back to Eastern Time, though searching my blog, I see that several commenters were on it. The NPRM for moving Pulaski back was opened on November 22, 2006.

The final rule was filed today. A turn around time of 76 days, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and Super Bowl Sunday. Pretty efficient.

Effective March 11, 2007, Pulaski County will jump two hours from Central Standard Time to Eastern Daylight Time.