In what may have the potential for creating an ER/Law & Order cross over show, SB 582 authorizes the appointment of “hospital police” by the governing board of a hospital.

Other than the potential television appeal of combining a gritty cop drama with a gritty medical drama (“Careful Johnny, he’s got a bed pan. CODE BROWN! CODE BROWN!”), I’m not sure what particular need this one serves unless it’s addressing a fear that the regular police won’t feel comfortable doing the things the hospitals need done to collect on their chargemaster prices.

But, I suppose if Ohio has phone cops, we can have hospital police.

Mark Small has a funny post speculating on the drug screen questionnaire (e.g. “Did you attend Ball State University at any time?”) that would be imposed on welfare recipients under HB 1483.

Anyway, that reminded me to investigate the term used in the bill. It requires that TANF applicants “shall take a substance abuse subtle screening inventory test.” Having applicants complete this questionnaire is an effort by the General Assembly to get around the Fourth Amendment concerns that have worked to derail other states’ efforts to drug test people for being poor. I suspect the effort won’t be notably successful, but I think it’s the motivation behind this “subtle screen inventory” requirement.

The term “subtle screening inventory” looked like a term of art, and it is. Here is a Yahoo Health article entitled Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory.

The SASSI is intended for gathering information, organizing it, and using it to help make decisions about the likelihood of an individual having a substance dependence disorder, even if the individual does not acknowledge symptoms of the disorder or misuse of substances.

It reportedly has a 94% accuracy rate.

HB 1483 which requires drug testing of TANF recipients has passed the Indiana House by a vote of 78 to 17.

Only 17 representatives voted against this measure despite the experience of other states showing that it’s a waste of money. Welfare recipients are no more likely to be drug abusers than the general population and may well be less likely. They must not have read John Cheese’s Cracked article “Four Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People.” Number 2 is “Poor People Aren’t Rampant Drug Addicts.”

Drugs are a huge problem with the poor, and I most definitely don’t want to be handing my tax dollars to someone who’s just going to blow it on … well, blow.

That’s what all of these states thought, and some of them still think that. Then they did the testing and found out that, actually, the poor are pretty much as clean as the rest of us.

The Fiscal Impact statement estimates that this program will result in a net loss to Indiana of $1.1 million for the first year of operation.

But, hey, why worry about cost if it lets us hate on the poors a little bit?

Nice column by Arthur Foulkes in the Terre Haute TribStar entitled Closing the Skills Gap: The Issue: Matching employee job skills with job openings. He notes that, among the political class, there is little doubt that the skills gap exists and that it is a significant source of unemployment. In the academic community, however, the consensus seems to be that the skills gap is a myth.

High unemployment is mainly the result of a deficiency in aggregate demand and slow economic growth, not because workers lack the right education or skills. The skills of the labor force did not suddenly erode between 2007 and 2009, when the unemployment rate more than doubled, so it makes no sense to claim that high unemployment in 2009 and through today has been caused by a soaring number of “unqualified” workers.

Wages are another pretty significant tell. If there was unmet demand for skilled laborers, you’d see wages rising to attract the existing supply. That’s not happening.

Nevertheless, it’s a pretty good bet that Indiana is going to spend money based on legislators’ unfounded belief in this myth; creating the Indiana Career Council and handing out a contract for development of a “Workforce Intelligence System.”

My sense is that the love for the skills gap myth has to do with the underlying desire to view the economy as a morality play where the hard working and clever prosper while the only ones who suffer are those who are too lazy or stupid to make money. The idea of a skills mismatch gap allows lawmakers to “do something” without disrupting that narrative too much. After all, what else are we supposed to do? You can’t just stimulate demand by giving people money to spend or having the government hire them to build infrastructure because freedom and communism. Also too, immoral.

Maureen Hayden, writing for CNHI, has an article entitled Rewrite of criminal code goes forward with no funding for locals. I’d written before on HB 1006 which revamps the Indiana criminal code. Part of the effort is to keep small time offenders in local correctional programs instead of sending them off to DOC. No problem with that; most of the time that makes sense. In that past post, I wrote:

[I]f more offenders are going to be using those local programs, increased funding at that level will be necessary[.]

Maureen Hayden’s article does not allay my concerns. If the state is saving money by shifting its criminal justice responsibilities to local government; that money has to fund the local operations. Without that, the user fees are going to go through the roof. Community Corrections is funded through a combination of DOC grants and user fees. If the grants don’t get any larger, that leaves user fees. (The last thing local government wants to do is to raise taxes to subsidize a state government surplus and provide services to criminals.)

Philosophically, I’m not against criminals paying for the costs of their own punishment, but at a certain level, you’re just setting them up to fail. These are people – keep in mind – who couldn’t function properly under the ordinary burdens of life. Now you have all of those plus a criminal conviction plus a bunch of fees they have to pay. And if they don’t pay their fees, they get kicked off the program and end up back in the DOC anyway. Alternately, if you don’t kick them off the program for nonpayment, you have to charge the other offenders higher rates to subsidize the ones who aren’t paying; which in turn increases the chances that they won’t keep up with the payments. Rinse. Repeat.

SB 371 passed the Senate Health committee on a 7-5 vote.

One provision requires clinics supplying abortion-inducing pills to have the same facilities as those providing surgical procedures; e.g. surgery and resuscitation equipment and defibrillators. (The requirements go into some detail – including a reception desk, a waiting area, a lavatory, and a drinking fountain among other things.) This is widely seen as being directed at the Lafayette Planned Parenthood that provides RU-486.

According to one supporter of the measure, the requirement that these pill dispensaries have this stuff is justified because there might be complications and they’ll need follow up care. But why stop there? Having an abortion might prompt deep questions about the nature and meaning of the universe. So maybe the legislation ought to require that these clinics have particle colliders — just in case. Or a pizza oven – someone might get hungry. Or the tears of a virgin — just to screw with them.

The other measure getting a lot of attention is that it determines that ultrasounds are so nice a woman has to get them twice.

SB 371 also requires the physician providing such a prescription to provide the patient with materials–colors specified!–oversee ultrasound imaging, and document efforts to have the woman return in two weeks for a follow-up examination and ultrasound.

As Sheila Kennedy notes – “this bill has nothing to do with women’s safety. It has everything to do with limiting the availability of safe and legal abortion.”

Karen Celestino-Horseman noted some irony at the imaging requirements. This bill was introduced by Sen. Holdman who has also introduced SB 373 which makes it illegal to take video of agricultural operations with the intent to harass; the message apparently being: video tape lady parts – not livestock!

Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reports that HB 1006, which overhauls the Indiana Criminal Code has passed the House Ways & Means Committee and is headed to the full House. The introduced version of the bill was written by the criminal code evaluation committee; so this is not something being undertaken lightly.

It’s a large document, so I haven’t read it (in fact, my browser is only loading through Title 9 of the Indiana Code – when the meat of the bill presumably takes place in Title 35.) However, the digest reads as follows:

Makes various changes to the criminal code, including changes to the law concerning community corrections, probation, sentencing, probation funding, drug and alcohol program funding, involuntary manslaughter, communicable disease crimes, battery, hazing, obstruction of traffic crimes, interference with medical services crimes, kidnapping, confinement, criminal mischief, railroad mischief, computer crimes, theft, deception and fraud crimes, timber spiking, offenses against general public administration, criminal gang activity crimes, stalking, offenses against public health, child care provider crimes, weapon crimes, drug crimes, protection zones, rape and earned credit time. Repeals the law concerning criminal deviate conduct, and consolidates the crime of criminal deviate conduct into the crime of rape. Changes the phrase “deviate sexual conduct” to “other sexual conduct”.Repeals laws concerning carjacking, failure of a student athlete to disclose recruitment, and credit restricted felons. Removes the current four level felony penalty classification and replaces that classification with a six level felony penalty classification. Assigns new felony penalties to each crime. Urges the legislative council to require an existing study committee to evaluate the criminal law statutes in IC 7.1 and IC 9 and to make recommendations to the general assembly for the modification of the criminal law statutes in those titles. Makes technical corrections. Makes conforming amendments.

According to Kelly’s report, the goal of the legislation is to make sentencing more proportional to the crime – increasing penalties for serious offenses, reducing penalties for drug offenses; as well as diverting low level offenders from the Department of Corrections to local programs. It also changes the good time credit from a (nearly) automatic 50% to a requirement that offenders serve 75% of their sentence. In addition, it restructures the felony levels from the current 4 (A-D felonies) to 6.

As a person interested in local government, I’ll want to take a look at the proposed changes to the Community Corrections program — if more offenders are going to be using those local programs, increased funding at that level will be necessary; and hopefully some control designed to make sure that local government has some method of checking sentencing decisions if those decisions are sending more offenders to the local programs than the funding can serve.

Rep. Bosma’s HB 1002 creating the Indiana Career Council seems more aspirational than prescriptive. But, it passed the House 99 – 0, so maybe it actually does more than is apparent to me.

It creates the Career Council and populates it with various government officials, the President of Ivy Tech, and a few people representing labor, education, and the life sciences industry appointed by the Governor. It sets before the Council the broad tasks of coordinating the state’s education, job skills development, and career training system, and matching education and skills with the job market.

It also mandates the development of the “Indiana Workforce Intelligence System” “to improve the effect of the state’s educational delivery system on the economic opportunities of individuals and the state’s workforce, and to guide state and local decision makers.to improve the effect of the state’s educational delivery system on the economic opportunities of individuals and the state’s workforce, and to guide state and local decision makers.” The legislation mandates certain inputs into the data system and requires that it “effectively organize, manage, break down, and analyze educational and workforce data.” The Department of Workforce Development, the Department of Education, and the Commission for Higher Education to feed data into the system.

The bill gives the Career Council until July 1, 2018, to contract for the development of the system, and, after that, gives that authority to the Governor. The Career Council is charged with administering the system once created.

Having data that matches job market demands with job market supplies is not objectionable. But, I thought this was the sort of thing that the free market was supposed to take care of. Where supply is inadequate to demand, the market provides a signal about the mismatch in the form of rising price offered for the skill set needed; creating an incentive for suppliers to develop that skill for fun and profit. In other words, if employers need certain skills, the one offering the highest compensation will get the limited supply. Meanwhile, workers wanting to make more money will start learning the skill. If it’s true that the Skills Mismatch theory of Unemployment really is more myth than truth, then this Career Council and Intelligence System is likely to be little more than a boondoggle in favor of whoever gets the contract to develop it.