A little religion humor for your Friday afternoon:

The Lafayette Journal & Courier has an editorial which ties into a conversation I was having a couple days ago about an eagerness I see in some quarters to attribute health problems to moral failings such as gluttony and sloth. I was thinking about that conversation yesterday after a Legal Aid meeting where the discussion turned to how stunningly poor decision making got families embroiled in the legal system.

One thing I have concluded is that I believe in the value of personal responsibility but I am suspicious when the need for personal responsibility is cited in policy discussions. When “personal responsibility” comes up in policy discussions, all too often it’s a sort of code for “let’s do nothing, ignore the structural problems, and maybe yell at people to work harder.” Among other problems, this approach simply doesn’t fix what’s broken.

The Journal & Courier editorial is entitled “Diet, exercise are solutions for obesity.” It isn’t wrong. It even gives a nod of the head to the need for pedestrian friendly infrastructure and parks and the like, but primarily it chalks up obesity to personal lifestyle choices to eat too much, smoke, and be sedentary. I agree that the fat person in the grocery line — or any person in the grocery line — should choose something other than the Cheetos and the soda.

But, blaming the individual gives you an excuse not to really think about the ways in which structural issues stack the deck against healthy choices and in favor of unhealthy choices. It seems to amplify this sense that every generation is in decline from the one that came before it back to some Golden Age. (I’m never really sure whether that Golden Age was Eden, the WWII generation, sometime before FDR, prior to the prohibition of child labor laws, or maybe sometime before the War of Northern Aggression. I’m pretty sure there hasn’t been a generation since the dawn of time where parents thought their kids were smarter, worked harder, and listened to better music.) If you can cast blame, you don’t have to address subsidies to corn producers and the resulting abundance of products with high fructose corn syrup. You don’t have to address the number of hours parents need to work sedentary jobs to keep a mortgage paid. You don’t have to address the lack of sidewalks or places to exercise. You don’t have to address the fact that messages encouraging people to eat and drink unhealthy crap far exceed the messages encouraging people to eat healthy. Instead, you can just feel superior to those stupid, lazy people; comfortable in the knowledge that they are getting what they deserve, perhaps while you wait for the Rapture to come and reward you for your righteousness and punish the wicked.

And, still, I raise an eyebrow when I see someone obviously suffering from their poor health lighting up a cigarette, eating the Twinkies, or sucking down the soda. I know they should be making different choices. They probably do too. But, in terms of public policy, knowing that and judging them for that doesn’t help the problem. The Journal & Courier editorial doesn’t make any effort to explain why Hoosiers are fatter, exercise less, and smoke more than other Americans. Is it because we are made of lesser moral fiber than our brothers and sisters in Colorado or other healthier states? Probably not. There are other variables that we should probably be working on.

The Urbanophile has a good post up as one part of his series on privatization. The Toll Road lease is one of the case studies he uses. The general observations are probably more important than the specific ones (my way of suggesting that you go over and read the whole thing), but on the subject of the Toll Road deal, he concludes that the state profited:

So let’s put it all together and look at how the Indiana Toll Road and Chicago Skyway leases generated almost $6 billion in value. It’s a combination of several factors:

* Tolls went up. That is, prices were raised significantly
* The hedge paid off – big time. I mentioned in the previous installment that by paying a fixed price up front for 75 years, the toll road concessionaire took on a huge amount of risk about future revenues and costs that the government used to have. In turned out that they are getting far less traffic than predicted and they are taking a bath on the deal. In short, they vastly over paid. You can’t hang your hat on this happening every time, but it is nice when it does.
* Some cost savings, but probably not a major amount
* Some customer improvements such as electronic toll collection

Principally, it was about raising prices and then getting lucky when the vendors radically overpaid. Indiana had one additional lever. Chicago had already leased the Skyway. The only way to get to the Skyway is via the Indiana Toll Road. Indiana could have jacked tolls through the roof and cut off the supply to traffic to the Skyway whenever it wanted. As a result, the same consortium that leased the Skyway almost had to pay whatever it took to win the Indiana Toll Road. Mitch Daniels had them over a barrel.

TPM Muckraker has two stories about how the health care industry benefits Hoosiers — two families anyway.

Yesterday, the site had an article about the Buyer family entitled PhRMA Gave Big To GOP Rep’s Iffy Foundation, Hired His Son, Kept On Giving (h/t Blue Indiana).

Drug industry umbrella group PhRMA, which has given $200,000 to given Rep. Steve Buyer’s Frontier Foundation, in June 2008 hired a director of the foundation as its federal affairs manager, TPMmuckraker has confirmed.

The name of that director? Ryan Buyer, son of the Indiana congressman.
. . .
With the revelation that Ryan Buyer was hired by PhRMA in what appears to be a lobbying position, the web of connections between the Indiana congressman, his foundation, and the drug industry grows still thicker.

Today, it has an article about the Bayh family entitled Report: Bayh’s Wife Made Millions As Board Member for Health Insurer.

Susan Bayh’s affiliation with Indianapolis-based WellPoint isn’t news. But a new report on TheStreet digs into the details. It also finds that last year, Susan Bayh sat on four other corporate boards, in addition to WellPoint’s. She received over $656,0000 in cash and stock for all her board work, around half of which came from WellPoint.

For his part, Sen. Bayh denies that Mrs. Bayh’s board memberships influence his judgment. But, at the least, the appearance is pretty bad.

In any case, I guess it’s wrong to vilify the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries when they are providing good jobs to ordinary Hoosiers like the Bayhs and the Buyers.

A Research 2000 Indiana poll was conducted on behalf of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America from Oct. 24 – Oct. 25, 2009. While there is strong opposition to a public options from those Hoosiers who identify as Republicans, independents and Democrats very much want Sen. Bayh to vote for and not filibuster a public insurance option to compete with private insurers.

Only 33% of independents oppose a government administered health insurance plan. (Along with 10% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans, and 44% of Hoosiers overall.) 59% of Independents, 85% of Democrats, and 20% of Republicans favor such a health insurance plan.

The sample size of the poll was 41% Republican, 36% Democrat and, by extension I suppose, 23% independent.

Another budget season, another judicial mandate. In this installment, St. Joseph County judge Peter Nemeth issued “a judicial mandate ordering the County Council and Board of Commissioners to appropriate $60,208 to pay raises to eight court employees and $295,950.98 to renovate the Juvenile Justice Center.”

I’ve covered this ground before. The axe I continue to grind is that it seems wrong to me that judges have special rights to county money not provided to other county department heads. Our judiciary is an odd hybrid of state and county. The judge is regarded as a state officer but his or her employees are generally county employees. The county is required to provide funding for the court facilities and staff. Judges have no responsibility to raise revenues but they can compel expenditure on behalf of court operations.

I don’t think judges are using their power capriciously or for particular gain; but there is an inequity when they don’t have the same constraints as other department heads. Perhaps making court funding entirely a state matter — a proposal that’s floating around since judges are state officers — would rationalize the use of the mandate power. I suspect the mandate power would get modified pretty quickly if the funds were coming out of the state general fund instead of a county general fund.

Via:

Sen. Bayh: I may filibuster health care bill too if it’s not “fiscally responsible.” The public option itself, however, doesn’t seem to be a sticking point for him.

At least he’s consistent. After all, he filibustered the Iraq War because it wasn’t fiscally responsible. . . . oh, wait. Blue Dogs who didn’t bat an eye over paying for the war in Iraq should, at a minimum, have to explain why helping people not die for lack of health care requires penny pinching where blowing up a toothless dictator half a world away did not.

DougJ at Balloon Juice, riffing off of another good post by Sardine at Eschaton with a reminder that this health care debate isn’t some abstract political game:

I realize that if you’re poor in this country, then everything is your fault. If you take out a loan you shouldn’t have taken out, it’s proof that you’re too much of an idiot to handle money, whereas when rich people are fleeced by Bernie Madoff it’s proof that Madoff is a super-genius monster. If you’re hit by a stray bullet, you were probably in a gang. If you’re sick, it’s because you smoke and you’re overweight. And whatever trouble you have getting a job, it’s all because of your genetically determined low IQ. And if you weren’t poor, overweight, genetically deficient and so on you wouldn’t have trouble getting disqualified because of preconditions and you’d never get scammed by bogus insurance outfits.

Our system is screwed up and people are dying as a result.

Speaker of the House, Pat Bauer (D-South Bend) announced a proposed package of ethics rules for next year’s legislative session, including a one year cooling off period for legislators who want to become lobbyists.

Near as I can tell, resistance to ethics reforms has been a bipartisan effort. Last year’s effort by Sen. Miller was throttled in the cradle, never getting a committee hearing in the Senate. In the past, various legislators have pretended to be offended that their honor was being impugned.

Past experience suggests that this latest ethics proposal will be so much sound and fury and disappear when it gets time to actually vote on things. But, I’ve certainly been wrong before. Other elements of Bauer’s proposal:

•Requiring lobbyists to report any gift to a legislator, legislative candidate or legislative employee of more than $50 – down from the current $100 – and changing the definition of what constitutes a gift.

•Prohibiting the governor or any candidate for that office from fundraising during the long budget session of the legislature. This rule already applies to the General Assembly.

•Requiring people appointed to a position in the executive branch to wait one year after they leave before they can lobby the legislature.

•Prohibiting people and businesses having contracts with state government or bidding on contracts from making political contributions to people who hold or run for state office.

•Prohibiting lobbyists or lobbying firms from representing multiple clients if there is a conflict of interest between those clients.

News came out yesterday that Harry Reid will merge the various Senate health care reform bills that were passed out of committee into a consolidated floor bill that contains a public option with a state “opt out” provision. This basically means that there would be a nation wide government insurance option competing with private insurers. However, states could opt out of allowing the plan to operate in their state. The mechanism for opting out will be one of the important issues — e.g., will it require a state law or just a governor’s executive order? When will the opt out be available? Immediately or only after the plan has been in place for a while. This gives the states the flexibility to do their own thing if they think they can do it better, but it also creates an insurance program that will hopefully have the leverage and scale to keep costs down.

The significance of having the option put into the floor bill is that now opponents will have to overcome a filibuster to get it out as opposed to proponents having to overcome a filibuster to get it in. I saw some news reports with vague indications that “unnamed Democrats” are indicating their “concern” as to whether such a bill can get the necessary Senate votes. One thing to keep in mind is that it does not take 60 votes in the Senate to pass a bill. It takes 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, there is a difference. While I can see, for example, Senator Bayh voting against a health care bill; I can’t really see him being one of a few Democratic Senators standing with Republicans to kill the bill with a filibuster. In any case, as for the Democratic Senators (and, like I said, I don’t think Bayh is one of these but I could be wrong) who would join a Republican filibuster to prevent a majority vote on a health care reform bill, I would like to see them publicly forced to take that stand rather than doing damage in the shadows while publicly saying something like, “Well, I would have liked to vote for the bill, but, see, there were these *other* Senators . . . .”

Meanwhile, in the House, the question will be whether to push through as strong a bill as they can so as to negotiate from a position of strength going into the conference process or whether to pass a bill that’s similar enough to the Senate bill to maybe make passage of the conference mark up a little easier.

Oh, and idle thought — if an opt out is passed, I wonder if Gov. Daniels’ IBM/ACS debacle with social services privatization will make it significantly harder for Indiana to opt out.