Travels

I will be out of the office through Monday, so blogging will be light over the next couple of days....

PPIC re health care

The PPIC poll that's out today has numbers on the presidential race in California and the public's view on term limits and redistricting reform. It's also got some interesting numbers on health care and how voters feel about the governor's proposals.

Among all adults, 71 percent say the health care system needs "major changes." That includes 70 percent of those who have insurance now. The party breakdown:

82 percent of Democrats
74 percent of independents
58 percent of Republicans

Given a general description of the governor's plan -- require everybody to have coverage with the costs shared by employers, providers and individuals -- 71 percent say they like it.

79 percent of Democrats
70 percent of independents
52 percent of Republicans

Breaking it down, 76 percent support the individual mandate, with subsidies for the poor.

83 percent of Democrats
77 percent of independents
54 percent of Republicans

75 percent of all adults support the employer mandate

82 percent of Democrats
75 percent of independents
56 percent of Republicans

As usual, people start to bail when the money talk gets specific. Just 41 percent say fees on doctors and hospitals are a good idea, with 53 percent saying they are a bad idea.

42 percent of Democrats support the fees
38 percent of independents
24 percent of Republicans

So there is broad support for the individual mandate and the employer requirement, even among independents and Republicans, but not for the fees that are a crucial part of the governor's plan.

I still think the only way to make this kind of reform happen in this political climate is to include a broad-based tax that won't draw opposition from interest groups and then put it on the ballot with the support of a diverse, bipartisan coalition.

New schools secretary

David Long, the Riverside County school superintendent named this morning as Schwarzenegger's latest education secretary, doesn't have the kind of paper trail that his predecessors had on education reform issues. Schwarzenegger's first ed secretary, former LA Mayor Dick Riordan, and his second, former San Diego superintendent Alan Bersin, had long records battling unions and pushing for higher standards in the public schools. Long seems to have led a quieter career. He is a Republican, and he was listed among Schwarzenegger's backers during the recall campaign in 2003. But he was also mentioned in some materials as an endorser of last year's Prop. 82, the proposal to raise taxes to pay for universal preschool. Schwarzenegger opposed the measure.

Bring back the paper ballot

If Debra Bowen's new regs end up killing electronic voting in California, would that be such a bad thing? It might be if the decisions comes too late to re-retool before the Feb. 5 2008 presidential primary. But in the long term, probably not.

There's nothing wrong with voting on paper. It worked for a couple of hundred years. Yes, some ballot boxes were stuffed. But for the most part elections were clean and people trusted the results. The problem with touchscreen voting has never really been the technology. They are probably safe, too. It's just that it is too easy to doubt something you can't see or hold. The losers in a close race (and even some races that are not so close) will always suspect that something funny happened inside that black box.

In fact, even if the machines could meet Bowen's new standard, a lot of people wouldn't trust them.

I am a tech hound, a gadget lover. But it's not worth all this trouble just to save a few hours counting votes a once or twice a year.

One pool

Lisa Girion peels back another layer of the health insurance industry onion in this piece in the Los Angeles Times. It's about the slow demise of association health plans, which used to be a safe haven for the self-employed and small business owners, from lawyers to real estate brokers. Increasingly, Girion reports, these folks are losing their coverage as health plans cherry pick the least risky cases and leave the association groups with those most likely to get sick, or those already sick. That drives rates up for the group, drives more (relatively) healthy people out of the plan, and the pattern repeats itself in a "death spiral."

Free-market advocates will note that Girion mentions in passing that some of this is due to laws that required association plans to offer coverage to anyone who applied. By preventing the insurance companies from excluding tough cases, this practice means the group will be left with higher and higher rates as people who can leave flee for cheaper plans. Without those laws, we'd still have a problem but it would be different: the healthy people would all be in the association plan while the sick would be denied coverage and left on their own. Either way, the result is similar.

One caveat: most of the anecdotes in the story are rather dated. She does not provide overwhelming evidence, except in the case of the real estate people, that this trend is accelerating. Still, it does appear that the health insurance industry is innovating itself out of a job, at least when it comes to helping people share risk. If they are only going to insure people who are least likely to need insurance, they are not going to be around for much longer. Health care is becoming like floods and earthquakes, where the risky cases are so plain that no private insurer will offer coverage. In those cases, the government stepped in and performed the pooling function. People at least have coverage if they need it or want it. Those programs, by offering coverage for building in risky areas, send a poor signal to potential homeowners. But health care, for the most part, is not like building in floodplain or on an earthquake fault.

As the Bee said in its editorial the other day, it appears that the government is going to have to step in and provide a pooling mechanism so that everyone can share the risk of needing expensive health care. Requre everyone to have coverage, require insurers to cover everyone who applies, and give a break to the working poor. Maybe create a state-run pool as an alternative to the private insurers. That's where we are headed, I think.

Mr. Big Stuff

Here is an interesting aside from Schwarzenegger during his q and a with the Fresno Rotary Club Monday. I do think there's evidence that this is what motivates him, more than left or right, big business or enviros. He wants to do big stuff. Always has. It's in his DNA.

The clip:

"I always said that when I go in and do my job as governor, I don't want to just solve little problems. I want to take those big problems that have been hidden under the rug and have not been addressed because they're politically risky. I don't care if it's politically risky. I think, I always said, that political courage is not political suicide. You've got to tackle those things head on, you've got to talk about it, you've got to put the spotlight on it, you've got to rally people around you, you've got to get everyone together. And this is why I said I need your help. I think the more pressure that all of you put on the legislature to make sure that they understand that above the ground water storage is important, and that we fix the Delta is important, that those things are important issues for the future of California, the more it will actually happen, because in California -- in Sacramento, I should say -- the squeaky wheels get the grease. So you'd better recognize that, and this is why it is important that you put the pressure on them.

CSU strike update

Faculty union reps at the CSU said they were "guardedly optimistic" Monday that they will be able to reach agreement with the administration on a new contract before April 6, but they will begin a strike then if the longstanding dispute is not settled.

A neutral fact-finder's report released Sunday suggested the system give the faculty a raise of between 21 percent and 24 percent over four years, with the increase being on the higher end if the Legislature and the governor agree to give the system more money. CSU officials have said they offered 25 percent, but the union says only about 15 percent of that is real.

Union officials with the California Faculty Association have pointed to a state commission's report that said CSU faculty salaries are 18 percent lower than comparable institutions nationwide. But other studies have shown that when health and retirement benefits are included, the gap is smaller.

Ed Purcell, the union's director of representation, said in a conference call with reporters that benefits shouldn't be part of the discussion because benefits are "not something we can control in our contract negotiations."

Still, it seems like something that would be helpful to know: Is the total pay and benefit package available to a CSU professor below or above what professors get elsewhere, or about the same?

Full-time, fully tenured professors average about $86,000 a year in salary alone, the union says. For all tenure and tenure track faculty the average salary is about $72,000. For lecturers, the full time equivalent average salary is about $43,000 but most don't work full time.

If the professors do strike, they say they will begin with a rolling two-day walk-out that will sweep through each of the system's 23 campuses. It will be limited to two days at each campus to avoid interferring with students' graduation timelines.

"This is meant to send a signal to the trustees and the chancellor that the faculty really are serious," said union president John Travis, a political science professor at Humboldt State.

Unemployment steady in February, jobs up

The latest employment report for California is out today. The state's employers added 27,000 new jobs, net, in February. The unemployment rate remained steady at 4.8 percent.

Here's the year-to-year change in each major sector:

construction: -4,400
manufacturing -3,300
trade, transportation +48,000
information: -1,600
professional and business services: +61,000
education and health services: +43,000
leisure and hospitality: +35,000
government: +39,000

More info here.

How to build California's clout

Now that he's moved California's presidential primary up to Feb. 5, 2008, the governor thinks the media should press the presidential candidates to explain why the state "gets back" only 79 cents on every dollar its taxpayers contribute to the federal treasury.

Short answer: We are a "donor state" because we are relatively wealthier and relatively younger than other states. Our wealthy taxpayers pay a lot of taxes, and our younger population uses fewer services than people in states where a lot of older folks are on Medicare and Social Security.

So if we want our balance of payments with the feds to change, we should get poorer, and older. Or stop taxing rich people. I doubt any presidential candidates are going to come out for any of those ideas.

Actually, the governor's health care plan, with its $4 billion or so in new federal money and several billion more in tax benefits, would do a lot to change those numbers, if he can get it through the Legislature. And he doesn't even need help from a president or a pledge from a presidential candidate to do that.

I don't think moving the primary is going to give California more clout in Washington. Bill Clinton paid close attention to the state because it had a history of voting Republican, went Democratic for him, and he wanted to keep it that way. George W. Bush has pretty much ignored the state because he lost in a landslide here in 2000 and figured there was not much he could do to change that in 2004. He was right.

California will be part of a big urban primary day in 2008, joined, apparently, by New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey, among others. So we're not going to get special attention. But we would get it in the general if the candidates thought the state was in play.

So in the end, the biggest thing Schwarzenegger could do to increase California's clout is persuade his fellow Republicans nationally to nominate a candidate who has a chance to win here. But he has already said he probably won't endorse anyone in the primaries.

CSU faculty strike

California State University professors have voted overwhelmingly to strike later this spring. The administration says it has offered a raise of nearly 25 percent over the next three years. Union reps say only about 15 percent of that would be guaranteed. The union has done a good job spotlighting problems within the CSU administration. And there are issues here besides wages. Still, it's difficult to believe that the professors are going to generate much public sympathy with a salary increase of 15 percent to 25 percent on the table.

'I am not an environmental fanatic'

Schwarzenegger talks global warming in an interview with Fortune Magazine.

'A culture of failure'

Robert Sillen, the court-appointed receiver over the state's prison health care system, issued his latest quarterly report this morning, and it’s no less scathing than his previous missives. In addition to the usual round-up of actions and goals, this one takes aim at employee accountability, and what Sillen says is “an almost total failure to hold health care staff to appropriate clinical, ethical and work standards.”

An excerpt:

“The Receiver remains committed to providing CDCR medical care employees with the appropriate compensation (a process which has already begun) and working conditions (a process which will take longer to implement but which is of no less importance). In addition, as explained above, improved training and organization will be provided, over time, to both clinicians and support personnel. However, hand in hand with these improvements will be the requirement for a higher level of employee accountability. The lives of prisoner/patients lies in the balance, and the Receiver will not tolerate the continuation of a long-standing culture of failure and irresponsibility from any member of the medical care team who serves under his direction.”

Read the whole thing here.

Revenues steady in February

The latest update from the Department of Finance suggests that the state has at least stopped the bleeding from its revenue forecasts. Tax dollars in February came in pretty much in line with expectations after a horrible December and January. They were $51 million above the forecast of $4.049 billion. Within that number, corporate tax revenues were down a bit, sales taxes were up a little and income taxes were pretty much on the mark. One piece of bright economic news in the report: revised job numbers for 2006 show that the state's employers created a net of 260,000 new jobs last year, up from an original estimate of 170,000. Here's a picture:

On the big ed research dump

The takeaway from today and tomorrow's barrage of research reports on California education is this: the state should set standards, assess student performance, help gather information about what works and hold schools accountable for their results. But it should largely get out of the way after that, and stop trying to dictate how schools are run and how they teach. Many of the 100-plus "categorical" programs that dictate these things from Sacramento serve no useful purpose and probably do more harm than good. Schools don't need to be told how much to spend on textbooks, security, 10th grade counseling and the like. They need to be set free to decide how to spend their money and then held accountable for the results.

The 23 studies did not produce a profile of the ideal school and suggest policies to get us there. Instead, taken as a group, they say, free professional educators to find those models, and then create incentives for others to copy what works.

"It's about creating system that thinks about how to innovate and how to learn from innovation," said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford researcher who helped lead the project.

This AP story notes that one of the studies suggested it would take "tens of billions of dollars a year" in additional funds to adequately educate all California students. But the project's leaders said Wednesday that no new money should be spent until serious reform of the system begins.

"If you more more money into the existing system it would probably be swallowed up," said Eric Hanushek, another Stanford researcher.

If the state could do one thing quickly to get the changes underway, they said, it would be to complete an information system that allows individual student performance to be tracked and matched with their teachers, schools and the money spent on them, and a culture that encourages information to be shared and studied across classrooms, schools and communities.

Cut their pay and...

Shane Goldmacher reports here that a friend of Howard Rich, the millionaire man behind last year's eminent domain initiative (Prop 90) has filed an initiative to strip lawmakers of their per diem, the tax-free $30,000-a-year reimbursement they get for maintaining one home in their district and another in the capital. Great fun, but doesn't California have more important things to debate right now than how much we pay state legislators? Maybe the condition of our schools, or health care, the implementation of AB 32. Then again, with pranks like Perata pulled Monday, locking three senators out of their offices for hanging out with some moderate Assembly members, maybe not.

The pension commission

The commission Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders appointed to look at pension and retiree health benefits had its first meeting today. It was mostly cordial with only a slight note of the obvious underlying tension present -- until Marcia Fritz arrived. Fritz is a Sacramento-area CPA and pension expert who has been dogging the issue for years. She is currently working with former Assemblyman Keith Richman on a proposal, perhaps to one day be a ballot measure, that would set 65 as the age at which future California public employee hires could retire with full benefits. Public safety workers would get full benefits at 55, and only the disabled would get health benefits if they retired early. According to Fritz, the idea is to model it off the rules that now govern Social Security and Medicare, although it sounds as if some of the details, especially on the health care side, are still in flux.

Richman, of course, was the author of the ill-fated pension proposal that Schwarzenegger endorsed and then abandoned in 2005 after opponents trotted out widows and orphans of dead cops to allege that it would eliminate their benefits. It wouldn't have touched their benefits, since it only applied to future hires, and it likely would have led to an increase in death and disability benefits when all the dust had settled. But the tactic was effective, Schwarzenegger caved and Richman, a moderate to liberal Republican, became the devil to public employee groups.

Fritz's appearance at the commission meeting Friday prompted sharp responses from a couple of organized labor folks on the panel, including Dave Low of the California School Employee Assn., who asserted that the new proposal would leave his sister, who is 58, worked 32 years as a teacher and has a serious case of cancer, with no health benefits. "This hits close to home," Low said.

Other commission members challenged her facts, and one demanded to know who belonged to her organization. Labor reps who followed Fritz to the mike asserted that the proposal was a solution in search of a problem. "There is no crisis," thundered one of them.

The idea of granting full benefits only to those who retire at age 65 hardly seems radical in this day and age. And the labor groups probably know that the notion would sound sensible to most voters. But then, ending guaranteed pensions for public employees and giving them individual retirement accounts instead also had the support of 60 percent of Californians -- until the widows and orphans showed up.

This commission probably has little chance of coming up with a consensus on what to do about public employee pensions and health care benefits. But if it can shed a little more light on the scope of the problem and offer an objective analysis of the alternative solutions, it might be worthwhile.

Unclear on the concept?

Asked about problems at the state Board of Chiropractic Examiners, Gov. Schwarzenegger today said that the board "represents the chiropractors."

Too true. But the board is supposed to represent consumers and regulate the chiropractors.

Parsky backs McCain

Gerry Parsky, the LA investor and Friend of Bush, is endorsing McCain for president. McCain picks up a savvy fundraiser who could help him cement ties with the business community. But, at least in California, the senator risks further alienating conservative activists already down on him for his role in campaign finance reform and his deal with Democrats over confirmation of Bush's judicial appointments. Parsky is unpopular on the right for his efforts to professionalize the California Republican Party structure and wrest its leadership away from conservative grass-roots activists.

Remap logic

California leaders who fear that an independent redistricting would endanger the Democratic majority in Congress have it backwards. An independent plan would provide more opportunities for Democratic pick-ups than the current incumbent protection plan, which packs as many Democrats as possible into each Democratic-leaning district. If California had had a fair plan in 2006 instead of the incumbent-protection gerrymander, several more seats probably would have flipped from Republican to Democrat. Of course, in a big Republican year, they might flip back again. But we can't have those pesky voters choosing their representatives. Better to keep it the other way around.

Senate Rules: 5-0 to confirm Linda Adams

Senate Leader Don Perata has been lobbing regular bombs at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger over the governor's implementation of AB 32, the global warming bill. But Wednesday's Rules Committee confirmation hearing for Cal-EPA Secretary Linda Adams, chaired by Perata, turned into a lovefest.

Perata started off by telling Adams that he thought she had a "very strong record," and things got more affectionate from there. All five members of the panel whispered sweet nothings and then voted to confirm her.

The questions consumed the better part of an hour but for the most part sounded like idle cocktail party chitchat with an environmental bent. The queries were general -- "What are we going to do about the water boards?" -- and the answers were hardly more specific.

At one point Perata asked Adams to report back "at the appropriate time" on the administration's implementation of AB 32. Later, he told her that while California might be leading the nation on climate change, he didn't want her to forget about more prosaic issues like the delta, or reducing childhood asthma.

"We can't always be swinging for the fences," he said. "We need to hit a few singles and doubles here."

The other members asked a mix of general and parochial questions about military bases, brownfields and permitting. Sen. Roy Ashburn complained about inconsistency among the state's regional air and water quality regulators, then asked Adams what she thought of research showing that newly planted trees absorb CO2 while older ones emit it. His question seemed to imply that he thought a good clear-cutting of California's forests and a quick replanting with seedlings would be the best way to fight global warming.

"I'm not a scientist," Adams replied, promising to look into it.

But Sen. Gil Cedillo, known around the Capitol as "one bill Gil" because of his obsession with granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, got the award for creativity.

He asked Adams if it didn't make sense to license illegals so that, with access to insurance, they could then buy better cars and get rid of their old junkers that are responsible for so much of the state's air pollution.

"God you're good," Perata said to his colleagues.

Adams didn't bite. She ignored the license issue and used the questions as an excuse to talk about loan financing, her own habit of co-signing for poor relatives and the need to find a way to give California's low-income residents better access to cheap credit.

On emission trading

Arnold Kling on carbon offsets and cap-and-trade emission trading schemes: Like eating salad to justify eating dessert. Like many economists, he says the best approach is a simple carbon tax.

The prison mess

With three federal judges breathing down their necks, lawmakers are beginning to realize they are running out of time to make progress alleviating overcrowding in the state's prisons. A joint session of the Assembly Public Safety Committee and the Budget subcommittee on state administration this morning delved into the problem, looking at the governor's latest proposal as well as an alternative offered by the LAO. But the comments were dividing along predictable lines: The Democrats want to reduce the number of people in prison. The Republicans in the Legislature want to build more prisons. Schwarzenegger, who was on the road today in SoCal bringing public attention to the issue, is somewhere in between.

The consequences of further delay could be huge. If one of the federal judges overseeing the issue decided to impose a cap on the number of inmates, the state could be forced to release inmates early or stop taking new inmates from the counties upon conviction, or both. Both results would likely trigger a backlash from the public. Such a backlash could lead to sentencing reforms, but just as likely it could produce demands for a prison building boom, which, despite the Democrats' reservations, will ultimately be the easiest political way out. Especially if the CCPOA puts some of its resources into convincing the public that new prisons are needed.

All in all, it's going to be a messy, and expensive, solution.

Bay State's minimum coverage

The governor of Massachusetts announced Sunday that insurers will offer plans as cheap as $175 a month to comply with the state's individual mandate for health insurance. The plans will have comprehensive benefits but relatively high deductibles -- $2000 for a single person. Essentially, they are protection to prevent financial ruin in case of a major illness or injury. Californians would probably be looking at something similar, maybe a little less expensive, under Schwarzenegger's plan.

More begging, please

Speaker Núñez says Schwarzenegger didn't grovel enough while he was in Washington. The governor, he says, should have done more begging and less lecturing:

"I certainly wouldn't come to Washington to tell people here how to do their job," Nunez told the AP. "If California can be an example for the rest of the country, well, that would be great. But I would not want to impose what we're doing in California on anybody. As it is, people think we're arrogant in California."

Nunez also commented skeptically about Schwarzenegger's newfound advocacy for what the governor calls "post-partisan" politics. While in Washington, Schwarzenegger repeated the phrase he coined earlier this year, referring to himself as a governor who accepts ideas from all sides.

"What he's talking about sounds good theoretically. I think in practical terms the way I read it is it's just semantics. Post-partisanship - what does that mean? I don't know. It's some word he made up," Nunez said.

"But I think he has a claim, in some ways, to that new term because last year we got a lot of things done. But you know we did it because we reached across the party aisle ... Remember, everything we got done were Democratic issues."

Stakeholder Society

The proposal by Sens. Darrell Steinberg and Bob Dutton to give every Californian a $500 savings account at birth would be a tiny step in the direction of the Stakeholder Society outlined in this book by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott. They proposed giving every American baby an $80,000 account to ensure that even the children who lost out in the parents lottery still had a chance to gain a foothold in the middle class.