A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Schools and publicly funded health care

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The South Bend Tribune has an editorial on the subject of providing health care to uninsured or underinsured Hoosiers, particularly children.

Indiana can’t afford for residents who don’t have health insurance to go without medical care. Neither can the state afford for uninsured residents to depend on emergency rooms to receive routine medical care. Most of all, Indiana cannot afford for Hoosier children from low-income families to go without either health insurance coverage or medical care.

They are right. Implicit in that statement is the fact that this isn’t a choice between paying for their healthcare or not paying for it. When someone who can’t afford health care really needs it, they don’t typically do without. Instead they wait until the problem is really bad, then they go to an emergency room, and the public pays for it, one way or another. Often times the emergency room is publicly funded. In addition, health care for those who can pay is more expensive to subsidize service provided to those who cannot pay. The subsidies can even take less obvious forms. For example, Perry County passed an almost certainly illegal Certificate of Need ordinance designed to prevent competition to its County Hospital, allegedly because competition to that hospital would take paying customers away and hurt its ability to serve the uninsured and underinsured.

I think we’d be hard pressed to design a system that was more expensive and less efficient if we tried.

The South Bend Tribune endorses efforts by FSSA, Hoosier Healthwise manged care providers, and school systems to work together to set up professionally staffed in-school clinics. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it makes sense. If you want to make sure kids are getting proper health care, you go to where the kids are: the schools. On the other hand, it seems like yet another function laid on the shoulders of already burdened schools which will be a further distraction from schools actually being able to educate children while they are at school.

U.S. rushed Britain to make recent terror bust

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The impression I got watching the Fox News Terror Porn coverage of the recent British terrorism bust at the gym, admittedly not paying full attention, was that they swept up the suspects as they were at the airport. That this wasn’t the case goes not to the propriety of the arrests, but rather to the emphasis in the way the story was reported: lead with the quotes about  “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” rather than with the fact that the threat was forming rather than imminent.

Now I see that NBC News is reporting that U.S. and British authorities had a “significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects in the alleged plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States.” The U.S. pressed for an immediate bust. The British wanted to run surveillance for at least another week to gather more evidence. A “senior British official knowledgeable about the case said:

The suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.

It looks like this was some good policework by the British coupled with a lot of hype about the severity of the threat coming from political sources and the cable news networks whose advertiser thrive when sensational stories are breaking.

The message I get from the Bush administration and the cable news networks: Be afraid.

If people are scared enough, it becomes easier to say all kinds of things about people who question the wisdom of the War in Iraq or the competence of the Bush administration to prosecute the War in Iraq or the even more complicated War on Terror(ism/ists). You can call them extremists. You can call them traitors. You can say that if folks with such questions win, then America loses. You can even say that rejecting Joe Lieberman in favor of Ned Lamont helps “break the will of the American people” to fight terrorists.

But that kind of nonsense, conflating the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with al-Qaeda terrorism among other things, only works if people are scared.

Property taxes due on Chocola’s Glass House

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Because there is nothing like a good petard hoisting, I’ll refer you to this story in the South Bend Tribune by James Wensits. Apparently Chris Chocola’s former company, CTB Inc. failed to pay its property taxes on time in 2000 while Chocola was chairman of the board.

That failure is just as relevant as Donnelly’s late property tax payments, which is to say not at all. But Chocola and the National Republican Congressional Committee have been hammering on Donnelly for late property tax payments and because a family company operated by Donnelly’s brother on which Donnelly was listed as an officer had a lien placed against it by the IRS in 2001 for unpaid payroll taxes. Glass houses, stones; beam in one’s eye; petard; hoist.

State Direct deposit requirement

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The Attorney General published an opinion on a question submitted by the Auditor of State with respect to IC 4-13-2-14.8 which requires a person who has a contract with the state or submits invoices to the state for payment to authorize the state to pay the contract or invoice through direct deposit to a financial institution. The statute provides for a waiver of the requirement for a person with no bank account and who can’t open one without being a charged a fee.

The AG responded to the Auditor’s questions by stating that the State is not responsible for interest or penalties if an invoice goes unpaid because the person failed to authorize direct deposit; a political subdivision is subject to the direct deposit provisions; and an employee requesting reimbursement for travel expenses is subject to the direct deposit provisions.

AG Opinion on Garnishee “Defendant” Fee

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An opinion of the Attorney General was published on the issue of whether a garnishee (defendant) qualifies as a “defendant” for the purposes of Indiana Code sections 33-37-4-6 and 33-37-5-28 which impose a $10 additional filing fee for each additional defendant. In the opinion of the Attorney General, it was not the intent of the General Assembly to impose an extra $10 fee each time a judgment creditor added a garnishee defendant to the case in an effort to try to collect on the judgment.

Given the garnishee’s neutral role as a third party in proceedings supplemental to the original cause of action between the plaintiff and the defendant, and based on the statutory references to the garnishee as a “person” or “garnishee defendant” under chapter 34-25-3 and in the Indiana Trial Rules, it is the opinion of this office that the legislature did not intend for clerks to collect a ten-dollar service fee from the plaintiff for each named garnishee defendant under Indiana Code section 33-37-4-6 or 33-37-5-28.

Ruth Holladay on renewable energy initiative

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Ruth’s Blog has an informative entry entitled “An energy plan we can all back.” There is a bi-partisan effort to encourage a “renewable electricity standard.” Don Lehe (R-Brookston) and Dale Grubb (D-Covington) introduced a bill that called for 10% of Indiana’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2016. (I believe this is referring to HB 1379-2006 introduced by Rep. Lehe, but I don’t see Rep. Grubb’s name on the bill or in the legislative action.) This was endorsed by Senator Lugar and Rep. Visclosky. That bill is set for review by the Regulatory Flexibility Committee.

The Indiana Coalition for Renewable Energy and Economic Development is urging Governor Daniels to include a Renewable Energy Standard in his energy plan which will apparently be released on Friday.

Lamont, Lieberman, Indiana Blogosphere

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So Joe Lieberman lost to Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary. Ned’s a businessman in the telecommunications industry and has served as a selectman in the town of Greenwich Connecticut. Joe, obviously, is currently a Senator from Connecticut and was formerly Al Gore’s vice-presidential running mate.

Advance Indiana put up a post along the lines of “If Lamont wins, America loses” on account of his opposition to the war in Iraq means he’s weak on terrorism or something. I may be paraphrasing AI unfairly, go read that post for the full argument. Suffice it to say that I agree with AI on a lot of issues, but not this one. stAllio! puts up a counter-post with which I’m more sympathetic.

Today Advance Indiana puts up another post discussing the Lamont primary victory and Lieberman’s plans to take a second bite at the apple by running as an independent. Along the way, AI characterizes Lamont as an “extremist.” I don’t know much about Lamont, but what I’ve heard doesn’t amount to extremism. So I asked which views of Lamont were “extreme.” The response I got from AI boiled down to, essentially, Lamont’s view that we should get our troops out of Iraq and the fact that he was supported by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who are, I am told, anti-Semites. I fail to find this convincing evidence of “extremism,” since I think desiring to bring the troops home is fairly mainstream, and I’d need more than just guilt by association to brand Lamont as an anti-Semite. (Incidentally, anti-Semitism seems to be a big political issue in the blogosphere lately; check out this thoughtful post on the subject at the Whiskey Bar.) No big story here – I respect AI generally, disagree with on this issue particularly, I asked a question, got a response, and it’s about a Connecticut political race anyway. No big deal, time to move on.

I wouldn’t have bothered with a blog post, except for an anonymous comment responding to my question that amused me by capturing succingtly a lot of what I dislike about what passes for political discourse these days:

Anonymous said…

If you have to ask what’s extreme about Ned Lamond, you might just be a little extreme yourself…

Unless that’s just someone having a little fun by pretending to be a caricature, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the person enjoys the fair and balanced reporting of Fox News.

More on McNews

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Doghouse Riley also has a piece that alludes to disparate news coverage. Instead of dead penguins versus murdered humans, he scrutinizes the coverage of “The First Little Columbine of Spring” wherein the pitchforks and torches were out for four Johnson County students, three of whom were special education students, one of the students’ fantasy about killing his principal and holding the school hostage. That story apparently got screaming headlines and press conferences.

Meanwhile, getting the back page treatment apparently, are allegations that members of the Center Grove High School football team held a freshman football player down while they struck and kicked him and one of the dropped his pants and rubbed his ass in the boy’s face before attempting to insert a metal rod into the boy’s rectum.

Mr. Riley concludes as follows:

We’ve had thirteen murders in Indianapolis in the last four days, and I didn’t expect this sort of thing to push that sort of thing off the front pages. What I do expect is that it be given the proper amount of attention given all the excitement last spring. Your kid and my kid are a lot more likely to be bullied at school than they are to be blown up by autistic pipe-bomb builders. But that’s not the way the newspapers think you see it.

This sort of media critique gets me to wondering how much more dangerous the world actually is than it was in years past. Are we afraid of the world as it is or are we afraid of the world as we read about it? Perception has a way of becoming reality, I suspect. As we become more afraid and surround ourselves with metal detectors and surveillance cameras, we become more distrustful of and isolated from each other. This distrust and isolation begets more antisocial behavior which begets more fear which begets more distrust and isolation.

That’s my theory anyway. FDR may have been on to something with that bit about fearing fear itself.

HAMB on Indy Crime

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Hoosiers Ate My Brain has a good post on the “Indianapolis Crime Wave.” (From my perspective here in the sticks, however, 91 looks a lot like 70 or whatever the “normal” number of murders is in Indianapolis.) I was amused by her complaint about the evening news leading with dead penguins in a truck accident over murders of, say, humans. That’s McNews for you.

HAMB offers up some bullet points on the situation, including some thoughts on poverty, race relations, gentrification, heat, the Marion County prosecutor’s race, inaction by just about everyone, and some recommended reading.