From the February 17 edition of the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (available for a fee):
[Open full post]Remember that three-day mass transit strike that paralyzed New York City over the Christmas holidays? Apparently the drama isn’t over. Since then, transit workers have narrowly rejected the contract their leadership accepted to end the strike. The union is now hoping to start new talks in a desperate effort to avoid binding arbitration that would probably result in a less generous contract being imposed on them.
But an even more important fight for the union leadership now concerns the threatened loss of its ability to automatically collect dues from members. Unions that violate New York state law barring public-employee unions from striking face losing the right to require these automatic paycheck deductions. “Dues checkoff is absolutely indispensable,” labor law professor David Gregory told the New York Times. “If dues are suspended, frozen or sequestered, that’s a radical move. It would fundamentally cripple the union.” He noted that dues account for 87% of the union’s $23 million in annual revenue.
A very similar issue explains why California public-employee unions spent over $120 million last year to defeat Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s set of voter initiatives to reform California politics. A centerpiece of the governor’s effort was a proposal to require the unions to seek written permission from their members before spending a portion of their dues on politics. “At the heart of the union’s ability to extract concessions from government employers is their unlimited ability to spend union dues money on political retribution against elected officials,” notes former teacher union official Myron Lieberman. “That issue is at the heart of most failures to improve the performance of government.”
New York’s transit union was once before denied the right to automatically collect dues money from its members after a bitter 1980 transit strike. But the courts restored its privileges after it presented evidence that it would be bankrupt without the cash infusions that automatic payroll deductions brought in. Given the chaos and costs last December’s strike caused New York, here’s hoping the courts view any such appeal for sympathy this time with a more jaundiced eye.
…Continued from the previous post.
Health insurers saw in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) an incentive to sell as much insurance through employers as possible, because ERISA insulated them from any liability greater than the actual costs of treatments.
This aspect of the law was the key factor in making employer-based insurance the only health insurance product sold in America at reasonable prices. Under the protection of ERISA, insurers could include pre-care utilization review in employee sponsored health-plans as a way to control their costs. Pre-ERISA, pre-care utilization review was a risky proposition for an insurer. An insurer could be held responsible for complications (like death) following from a refusal to provide treatment.
ERISA changed this. Insurance companies working through employers could be held responsible for nothing more than the cost of a treatment denied. If an HMO improperly denied someone a $1,000 treatment, that individual could sue to obtain the $1,000, but not for consequences and complications caused by failure to have received treatment in a timely fashion. And because of the strict preemption rules, individual states could not pass laws that held insurers operating within their jurisdictions to any higher standard; this principle was most recently reaffirmed in the case of Aetna Health v. Davila (2004).
Given the risk-reducing advantages it provided to healthcare plans provided through an employer, ERISA motivated health insurance companies to get out of the business of selling insurance directly to individuals, and to sell health insurance only through employers.
ERISA may be the single most enervating factor in America’s healthcare debate. More than any other single factor, through its removal of personal healthcare decisions to a remote court system, the weak remedies it mandates for major harm caused, and its general incomprehensibility, ERISA creates the perception that problems with healthcare delivery in this country are the result of intractable, impersonal forces that can only be solved with big-government solutions.
But ERISA is not an uncontrollable, unstoppable force of nature. It is just a badly written and poorly interpreted 30-year old law. The reasonable first step in fixing healthcare delivery in this country is not creating more bureaucracy and regulation to support the problems created by ERISA, but to remove health insurance from ERISA enitrely.
Senator Lincoln Chafee’s campaign responds on National Review Online to the National Review’s endorsement of Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey’s campaign to replace Chafee, as reported earlier by Marc.
[Open full post]I stand behind my original solution to the problem posed by Providence residents like Maria Hernandez who send their children to school in Cranston. Instead of focusing on action against Ms. Hernandez, Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey should take the battle directly to the real source of the problem — the Providence school system. Mayor Laffey should find a case involving a Providence resident currently attending school in Cranston and send Providence a bill for $4,000 — the approximate amount of state-aid per-student in Rhode Island — to cover the partial cost of that student.
The deal will be that Cranston will keep the student if Providence is willing to spend its state education aid in Cranston to help a Providence resident. If Providence is unwilling to help its own in this way, then the student will be returned to the Providence school system; then let Providence make the argument that children should be forced to go to bad schools even when other options are available.
Yes, I know that $4,000 doesn’t cover the full cost of educating a student in Cranston, so this ad-hoc arrangement may not be sustainable indefintiely into the future. To make sure that proper precedents are set, Cranston would announce that this is a one-year deal only unless Rhode Island lays the foundation for a statewide school choice program by the beginning of the next school year.
WASHINGTON D.C. — “Conservatives are the ones who favor the real constitution and not the director’s cut favored by the Democrats”.
Coulter’s message boils down to warning Republicans that it would be folly for them to abandon their principles and run a pro-choice Republican because they believe it’s the only way to beat Hilary Clinton.
WASHINGTON D.C. — I had a quick opportunity to talk to Jessie Jane Duff, who is leading the movement to draft Condoleezza Rice to run for President of the United States. I asked if she believed that Dr. Rice could win in Rhode Island. She answered that Dr. Rice could defeat any Democrat.
I asked if Dr. Rice could beat Rudy Guiliani in a primary in Rhode Island. Ms. Duff answered that it would be a piece of cake, but that Mr. Guiliani would be a fine vice-presidential nominee.
WASHINGTON D.C. — The debate I atteneded on whether the U.S. should either reform or just withdraw from the UN was disappointing. Jeff Gayner of “Americans for Sovereignty” made the usual (and compelling) arguments for full US withdrawal — the UN is corrupt, the UN tries to impose rules that go beyond what our government would allow itself to do, the UN takes hypocrisy to new heights by putting countries like Sudan on the human rights commission etc. He said the UN should be replaced with a comunity of democracies (he didn’t use that exact phrase, but that was the general idea) and went as far as to endorse Congressman Ron Paul’s bill that has the US withdrawing from the UN and telling the UN to move their offices somewhere else.
Unfortunately, the person representing the other position in the debate, Jon Utley of “Conservatives for Peace”, made very superficial arguments in defense of the UN — the UN gives the US legitimacy and legality — without elaborating or offering that any reform was needed at all. He tried to explain that the oil-for-food corruption was the fault of the Clinton administration for want to keep sanctions in place against Iraq.
Tell me, are there UNiks out there that the UN itself must absolutely be saved, or would a brand new organization, without the UN’s historical baggage, be sufficient?
WASHINGTON D.C. — 4. The Vice-President was unapologetic about the NSA warrantless surveillance program. And he was very clear on one factual point. Only calls where one end was outside of the United States were monitored. This, I believe, is the substantive fact that will make this a non-issue.
The fourth amendment bars “unreasonable searches and seizures”. A different standard of reasonableness — in the law and in people’s minds — applies to what crosses national borders than to what stays within the borders. A reasonable search of person who is crossing the border from Mexico or Canada would not be considered a reasonable search of someone traveling between Warwick and East Greenwich. The same distinction can be applied to electronic communication.
If the Democrats stick with their “the war in Iraq was a mistake” line, but aggressively push the idea that warrantless surveillance of parties outside of the United States should be forbidden, then they are arguing that the United States shouldn’t be active in promoting the rights of average people trapped under totalitarian governments trying to go about normal lives, but should actively apply the protections of the American Constitution to non-citizens outside of the United who may be plotting terrorists acts.
Isn’t this an example of the famed Democratic incoherence on foreign policy?
WASHINGTON D.C. — 3. The good news is that energy policy occupied a prominent place in the Vice-President’s remarks. The bad news is that the supposition from earlier in the week seemed to be borne out; solar and wind were not presented as significant alternatives.
The components of energy policy mentioned by Vice-President Cheney were expanding refining capacity, increasing production from domestic oil sources (including ANWR) and certain alternative forms of energy — hydrogen fuel cells, clean coal and — brace yourself, Bountyhunter, and take heart, John_b — ethanol.
