A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Toll Road Plan looks to have support

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Theodore Kim has a story on yesterday’s second reading activity with respect to HB 1008 authorizing the sale of the Toll Road operating rights for the next 75 years. The amendment that appears to have most greased the skids is an amendment that would freeze toll rates for individuals who live near the toll road at their current level until 2016. It says, in pertinent part:

The user fees charged by the operator of the Indiana Toll Road under a public-private agreement for the use of the Indiana Toll Road by passenger motor vehicles that are owned or leased by individuals who reside in a county traversed by the Indiana Toll Road may not exceed the user fees for passenger motor vehicles that were in effect January 1, 2006.

I wonder if this somehow impairs the offer. Surely the calculations were based on being able to charge users at certain levels. Now you are holding those levels flat for a non-trivial number of toll road users. (Agreement documents here if anyone cares to check it out.) According to the article, Rep. Orentlicher questioned whether this would pose constitutional problems. My guess is not, but you are treating different citizens differently and treating Indiana residents differently than out-of-state residents on a major artery of interstate commerce, so there is at least an argument to be made.

8 conservative, good-for-business reasons for a single-payer healthcare system

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A column by Joe Flower in Hospitals and Health Networks Online laying out “eight solid, conservative, good-for-business reasons” for single-payer healthcare.

1. Transaction costs. 25-30% of healthcare dollars are spent paying keyboarders to parse out who owes what; meanwhile insurers randomly and routinely deny payments for legitimate covered services.

2. Employer funding. Why should employers pay for health care? There is no compelling, rational connection between employers and health care justifying putting the burden on employers.

3. The basic idea of insurance. The idea of insurance is to manage risk. The larger your pool, the more manageable the risk. With our current system, insurers can cherry-pick the healthiest and wealthiest, taking their premiums, leaving hospitals (and government) to pick up the tab for the sickest and poorest without much in the way of compensating premiums.

4. Value. “Costs and charges vary widely and
nonsensically, with no demonstrable connection to mortality rates or
other outcome measures. A single-payer system would at least be a
system, and might be able to get a handle on the wastelands of
profligacy hidden in those statistical variations.”

5. Risk cost of receivables. I don’t know what that phrase means, but the explanation makes sense. Trying to recover debts through liens, bankruptcy, and collection agencies is cruel, but more than that, it’s inefficient. Providing for everyone upfront is more cost effective.

6. Service quality. Service quality under our current system stinks. People think that “single payer” will lead to Soviet-style bureaucracy with obscure and arbitrary rules. Guess what? That’s what we have now. Mr. Flower suggests that single payer will lead to greater transparency, real competition, and better service quality.

7. Efficiency. Under the current system, we have people using emergency rooms to treat colds.

8. Patriotism. It’s hard to love a country that makes people choose between food, rent, and fuel oil versus cancer treatement, for example.

Toll Road Musings

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The Toll Road legislation is coming up for a vote soon, which prompted me to do some more general thinking about the Toll Road. Some thoughts.

First, tolls charged to travel the road are taxes. They may be called something else, but they are taxes just as surely as are income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. It is money given to the government by its citizens to fund government functions. This proposal by Governor Daniels ensures that the tax will endure, double initially, and increase at the rate of 2% per year for at least the next 75 years.

Second, the creation and maintenance of roads are a core government function. Privatization of government services is not so troubling where the service being privatized is a function the government ought not be involved with in the first place. But I’m philosophically opposed to privatizing something at the core of why government exists in the first place. In this case, providing a transportation infrastructure.

My third thought is related to the first two thoughts. A good system of roads tie us all together, and make the state as a whole function better. As a general rule, highways ought to be paid for on a statewide basis. Obviously, a corollary of this rule would be that highways ought to be built to benefit the state generally — if taxes are taken from the state as a whole, they shouldn’t be used to build highways in and around one or a handful of cities (and vice versa.) Now, I recognize that toll roads may be a necessary evil. In some instances, the road may not be able to be built if tolls aren’t charged. If that happens, I believe that the tolls ought to be used to retire the bonds used to build the road and then eliminated or at least reduced to the bare minimum necessary to maintain the road. Taxes in the form of tolls should not be perpetual and should not be a profit-center for the State.

Just my two cents.

Courier Press on Ellsworth/Hostettler race

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The Evansville Courier Press has a story on the Ellsworth/Hostettler race for Indiana’s 8th Congressional District. On the one hand, Ellsworth is probably Hostettler’s most formidable challenge to date, coming at a time when Republican fortunes are having troubles generally. On the other hand, Hostettler has a highly motivated, social-conservative issues oriented political machine that does not depend on a great deal of money and does not tie him into the sorts of lobbying involved in the Abramoff scandal.

Says Brian Howey of Hostettler’s political machine:

“It is perhaps the most dynamic, loyal and top-performing political organization at the congressional level in the state, if not in the Midwest,” Howey said.

Howey said Hostettler’s coalition of home-schooling advocates, pro-gun rights and anti-abortion activists and other conservatives is highly motivated and likely to respond to an all-out challenge with equal energy and enthusiasm.

“Hostettler always confounds the purveyors of conventional wisdom in Washington because he doesn’t raise (political action committee) money and he just never raises a lot of money, but he wins,” Howey said.

Let the fun begin.

Proposed Amendments to abortion bills

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HB 1080 and HB 1172 were up for second reading today. (Second reading is the stage at which floor amendments (as opposed to committee amendments) for a bill are proposed or considered.)

House Bill 1080 is a bill that provides meticulous specifications for any building used to perform abortions. This appears to be an attempt to make sure that few or no facilities are available to women who want to exercise their reproductive rights because it’s too difficult or too expensive to come up with a building that meets the standards. (Presumably, the legislature could change the building requirements year after year to make it that much harder.)

Representative Kuzman proposed an amendment that would give the State Department of Health the authority to regulate “pregnancy counseling centers.” My understanding is that this is the name given to places where the goal is to put pressure on a woman to keep the child and not to have an abortion.

Representative Orentlicher proposed an amendment that would have imposed the meticulous requirements of HB 1080 on all ambulatory outpatient surgical centers and not just on abortion clinics.

Both of these amendments failed on a voice vote. This goes to show that proponents of HB 1080 aren’t concerned about the quality of women’s reproductive choices generally or the health and safety of outpatient surgical centers generally, they just want the government to tell women that they aren’t allowed to make this decision for themselves.

And, most amusingly to me, Rep. Porter’s amendment which would have required that sex and education information (already mandated by state law) on abstinence and other issues be medically accurate. This insistence on medical accuracy was ruled “out of order.” (It probably was out of order, given that HB 1080 deals with building regulations whereas Rep. Porter’s amendment had to do with educational issues. However, given the recent ruling that the anti-gay rights amendment was germane to the eminent domain bill, I thought the bar had been lowered.)

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The House also considered amendments to HB 1172 which is a bill that tells physicians what to tell their patients with respect to abortion. A physician must tell his or her patient that human life begins at conception. He must also tell her that her fetus may feel pain. (More discussion of HB 1172 here.).

Rep. Kuzman proposed one amendment that would have omitted the requirement to advise women about potential fetal pain in the case of incest or rape, and another amendment that would have permitted the physician to additionally provide his or her patient with the physician’s own professional medical opinion concerning the capacity of a fetus to experience pain, the advisability of administering anesthetic to a woman or fetus, and when human life begins. Both amendments were defeated by a voice vote.

Rep. Troy “I’ll never vote for Daylight Saving Time” Woodruff withdrew his amendment which would have inserted a section stating simply “Human life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm.”

Van Haaften Student Loan Tax Credit Defeated

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I just noticed this because it was such a close vote. Rep. Van Haaften’s amendment to HB 1029 was defeated by a vote of 49 to 49. HB 1029 is a bill related to education finance and tax credits. Among other things, the bill provides for up to $2,000 in contributions to an Indiana college choice 529 investment plan to be deducted from adjusted gross income. The rest of the bill has to do with university bond issues.

Toll Road: Non-compete Provision

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In a prior post, Paul O’Malley posed a question about the non-compete provision in the proposed Toll Road lease. It was hard enough to find and is an important enough question, that I thought I’d make it the subject of a separate post.

One of the things that the State gives up in return for the $3.4 billion Toll Road payment is the right to improve US 20 such that it becomes a “comparable highway” or otherwise build a “competing highway.”

With respect to US 20, this means that the State cannot make that highway “a divided 4 or more controlled access interstate quality highway with interchanges, interstate quality bridges or combination or portion thereof.” With respect to other roads, the State cannot build any newly-constructed interstate quality, divided 4 lane roads, at least 20 continuous miles of which is within 10 miles of the highway.

The “non-compete” provision can be found at Section 14.1(e) of the Agreement, with the relevant definitions found at Section 1.1 (page 4).

Unless the construction constitutes a Competing Highway, development, redevelopment, construction, maintenance, modification or change in the operation of any existing or new mode of transportation (including a road street or highway) is not prohibited.

Eminent domain and the sanctity of real property

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I read and responded to an opinion column in the Evansville Courier Press concerning eminent domain by D. Eric Schansberg of the “Indiana Policy Review.” He discusses HB 1010 and says, among other things:

A philosophical and practical problem with eminent domain is that it arbitrarily violates the sanctity of private property. When is it ethical to take another person’s property? When is it ethical to use the government to take another person’s property? In most value systems, that would be ethical only when that person’s use of the property causes direct and significant harm to others.

At this point, I confess that I stopped reading. I have a question with this underlying premise that, left unanswered, prevents me from considering arguments founded on the premise.

What is sacred about real property? The government takes our private property in the form of taxes every day when it takes sales taxes, it takes our personal property twice per year in the form of property taxes, it takes our property every week in the form of payroll taxes. Often times, the government turns around and gives that money to other private entities in the form of subsidies and incentives.

Before I can buy into the rest of the argument, I would have to know why real property is inherently more sacred than personal property. If using eminent domain on real property can enhance the local economy, thereby lowering the percentage of my personal property the government needs to operate, then I’m at least willing to consider it.

I’m not saying that I’m necessarily convinced that real property and personal property are equivalent in the context of government taking, but neither do I think the sanctity of real property can be taken as given when government is permitted to take personal property every day.

U.S. Representatives scrubbing Wikipedia entries

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The Lowell Sun has a story on U.S. Representatives altering the Wikipedia entries for themselves and others. In particular, it focuses on Rep. Marty Meehan (D-MA). He or a member of his staff deleted, among other things, a reference to his 1992 promise to surrender his seat after 8 years, a promise he has broken.

He isn’t the only Representative to engage in such behavior. Apparently the problem was so bad that Wikipedia went so far as to block users of the House of Representative’s IP address from making edits.

Wikipedia certainly isn’t perfect. Relying on the public to input knowledge is going to cause problems given the inevitable existence of axes to grind, oxen to gore, and any number of other political metaphors. But U.S. Representatives and their staffs ought not be in the business of deleting factual information.

Violation of a campaign pledge made me think of Rep. Souder. His page didn’t show any evidence that his term limits campaign pledge had ever been on Wikipedia. However, I did see that the following statement was deleted:

He has come under widespread criticism from students, educators, and substance abuse recovery advocates for authoring and championing the [[Higher Education Act Drug Provision]], which denies federal financial aid eligibility to college students with drug convictions. The law has thus far afected (sic) more than 175,000 students.

Souder was originally elected in 1994 on a platform that included a 12 year term limit. 12 years later, Mr. Souder is apparently not going to honor that pledge.

Enron Telecomm

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I see that the trial of Enron magnates “Kenny Boy” Lay (as George W. liked to call him) and Jeff Skilling begins today. It occurs to me that with some luck, greedy corporate executives, and ineffectual government oversight, we could be hosting our own trial. Only, instead of a trial of post-deregulation energy company executives, it would be a trial of post-deregulation telecommunications company executives.

If the legislature passes SB 245 maybe we can grab some headlines with telecomm execs who engage in post-regulatory excesses. Instead of electric bills in California, we might be seeing Grandma Millie taken to the cleaners over her telephone bills.

(Just a refresher on the Enron-Grandma Millie angle — from some recorded conversations between two Enron employees concerning California’s deregulated energy market:

Employee 1: “All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

Employee 2: “Yeah, Grandma Millie man.

Employee 1: “Yeah, now she wants her f—–g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—for f—–g $250 a megawatt hour.”

Some other choice quotes in that story:

One trader is heard on tapes obtained by CBS News saying, “Just cut ’em off. They’re so f—-d. They should just bring back f—–g horses and carriages, f—–g lamps, f—–g kerosene lamps.”

And when describing his reaction when a business owner complained about high energy prices, another trader is heard on tape saying, “I just looked at him. I said, ‘Move.’ (laughter) The guy was like horrified. I go, ‘Look, don’t take it the wrong way. Move. It isn’t getting fixed anytime soon.”

Of course, I’m just speculating about potential abuses if Indiana’s telephone companies are deregulated. Like I said, corporate executives would have to be greedy and government oversight would have to be ineffective. What are the odds of that happening?