Category Archives: regulation

The Obama Administration and Education

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s just one example, via The Wall Street Journal. Last month,

Department of Education imposed a 21-day hold on Corinthian’s [Colleges, a for-profit college system with campuses across the USS] access to federal student aid because it “failed to address concerns about its practices, including falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students.” The funding freeze triggered a liquidity crisis, which has culminated in Corinthian’s decision to wind down or sell its 97 US campuses.

Never mind that, among other things, DoE itself can’t figure out how to measure job placement for college graduates. The National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the DoE, found itself tasked with generating just such a metric, but in 2011, it was forced to admit that the challenges of using institutional tracking of students, which include the reporting burden on institutions as well as the potential for inconsistent documentation and reporting, simply wasn’t feasible.

Then there’s the data the DoE demanded of Corinthian:

  • a list of all students placed by name and Social Security number
  • the students’ most recent telephone numbers and cell phone numbers
  • graduation dates and academic programs
  • job titles
  • start dates
  • employers’ names and contact information

Never mind the difficulty of collecting those data from folks who’ve already graduated and moved on with their lives. Think about the invasion of privacy this administration demanded Corinthian perpetrate on those graduated adult American citizens.

Corinthian couldn’t meet DoE’s data delivery deadline, despite having assigned an additional 100 employees the single full time task of collecting these personal data from its hundreds of thousands of students. As a result, it’s had to close its doors—that funding freeze.

This is this administration’s arrogance at its most powerful and its worst.

A…Misunderstanding…on the Supreme Court

Posted on by
Reply

The liberal wing of the Supreme Court is at it again. The three women of the wing are furthering their demand that women generally are entitled to get their contraceptives via OPM, rather than with the women’s own money—apparently, it seems, because these three female Justices think women generally are too helpless to have their own money. These three also are continuing their demand that access to contraceptives must take priority over the religious tenets of the ones they would require to make the provision.

Writing for the dissent to a Supreme Court order advising that Wheaton College, a Christian school in Illinois, need not continue to provide birth control coverage absent filing a form with its insurer asserting its religious objections, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the following:

Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today. After expressly relying on the availability of the religious-nonprofit accommodation [in Hobby Lobby to justify expanding exemptions from contraceptive coverage to closely held commercial businesses], the court now, as the dissent in Hobby Lobby feared it might, retreats from that position.

Of course, the Court’s opinion created no such reliance, as Justice Sotomayor knows full well. The “religious non-profit exemption” was one of a couple of possible alternatives proffered in the Court’s opinion that illustrated less restrictive means of facilitating women’s ability to obtain contraceptives. The Hobby Lobby ruling included this potential alternative in a part of its discussion of the requirement that a government-generated religious burden (or burden of any sort) be applied through the least restrictive means possible:

The least-restrictive-means standard is exceptionally demanding, see City of Boerne…and it is not satisfied here. HHS has not shown that it lacks other means of achieving its desired goal without imposing a substantial burden on the exercise of religion by the objecting parties in these cases. See §§2000bb–1(a), (b)(requiring the Government to “demonstrat[e] that application of [a substantial] burden to the person…is the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest” (emphasis added)).

The most straightforward way of doing this would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections. This would certainly be less restrictive of the plaintiffs’ religious liberty, and HHS has not shown, see §2000bb–1(b)(2), that this is not a viable alternative.

That the opinion went on at greater length about the “religious non-profit exemption” in no way alters its status as one of at least two hypothetically offered alternatives for satisfying the (hypothetically accepted) government interest in providing contraception free to the user. There plainly is no basis to any claim that filing for a “religious non-profit exemption” is the sole means of being…excused…from providing religiously proscribed contraception.

Another aspect that makes the Wheaton matter interesting here, though, is the question of the form itself that Sotomayor insists that Wheaton should be bound to file in order to get that “religious non-profit exemption.”

As Wheaton correctly notes, it’s not who pays for the provision that’s at issue, it’s that Wheaton would be required to sanction the provision by still being required to have contraception coverage done in their name.

“Wheaton believes that authorizing its [insurance administrator] to provide these drugs in Wheaton’s place makes it complicit in grave moral evil,” the college said in its injunction application filed Sunday with the court. “Wheaton can neither provide the mandated coverage nor execute and deliver” forms that prompt others to do so.

This is clear enough to all but the Progressive who cannot distinguish the pecuniary from the moral.

The Uselessness of Obamacare

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s another example of the ineffectiveness of the Obama administration—of government generally—as a business manager. HHS’ Office of the Inspector General conducted a review of ObamaMart’s performance last fall and early winter—from October through the end of December—although it didn’t include four ObamaMart centers that chose not to comply with the IG’s request for information.

As of the first quarter of 2014, the Federal marketplace [ObamaMart] was unable to resolve about 2.6 million of 2.9 million inconsistencies because the CMS eligibility system was not fully operational. It was unable to resolve inconsistencies even if applicants submitted appropriate documentation.

Moreover,

These inconsistencies pertained to citizenship, national status, and lawful presence; income; and employer-sponsored minimum essential coverage.

These are things that determine whether a citizen must buy a government-approved health plan, and if so whether that citizen is eligible for taxpayer subsidy for the premiums.

And there’s this [emphasis added]:

[ObamaMart] was capable of resolving more than 330,000 inconsistencies with Social Security number, non-employer minimum essential coverage, incarceration status, and whether the applicant is an Indian. However, during the same reporting period, the Federal marketplace reported that it had actually resolved only about 10,000 such inconsistencies, or less than 1 percent of the total.

The thing isn’t even capable of collecting quality control data.

[ObamaMart] could not determine the number of applicants who had at least one inconsistency. Rather, the Federal marketplace reported unique inconsistencies, and it could not determine the corresponding number of applicants because one applicant could have more than one inconsistency. As a result, it was not possible at the time of our evaluation to determine the extent to which inconsistencies are distributed across applicants in the Federal marketplace.

Marketplaces also reported that data on inconsistencies may be overstated. Some marketplaces reported that failures with eligibility systems allowed applicants to submit multiple applications. In these instances, each application could be processed and cause the same inconsistencies to occur and be counted.

There were a number of examples; I only excerpted the one.

Just wait until tax time next April when these failures will come home to roost. Who’s got the government-approved plan? Who’s (still) eligible for taxpayer subsidy? Who owes the government a refund because he wasn’t eligible for that taxpayer subsidy, or wasn’t eligible for so much? Not even the Shadow knows.

But the ones who’ll be hurt the most will be the little guy, barely making ends meet and forced to buy a plan he neither needed nor wanted, and the little guy who must pay back the subsidy for which he wasn’t actually eligible.

Organizational Failure?

Posted on by
Reply

Dr Roy Marokus, who currently serves in private practice…said veterans’ appointments were cancelled so VA medical providers could attend the two-day conference. Medical providers at the VA Medical Center in Oklahoma City, where Marokus briefly worked, and providers at all other VA medical centers in the Veterans Integrated Services Network [VISN 16, which includes VA facilities in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and parts of Missouri , Texas, Alabama, and Florida], attended the conference.

A review of the paperwork handed out during the conference showed topics included advice on how to plan a party and asked the medical staff to explore, “What Color is Your Personality?”

“Veterans waiting for appointments got pushed back for two days,” Marokus said. “In human costs, you have all these veterans. Why was that conference needed?”

And this, in VISN 22, which includes parts of California and Nevada:

Another veteran took issue with the filming of the TV show Grey’s Anatomy, which takes place at the Sepulveda VA Ambulatory Care Center. The filming encompasses the entire second floor of the facility.

Gary B, who asked for his last name to be withheld due to a pending 1151 claim [such a claim is for death or disability “as if service-connected”—including VA medical malpractice] with the VA, said aside from the limited care for veterans, the show’s trailers are an inconvenience for veterans.

“They take up the whole parking lot,” he said.

And there is this incident:

A Veterans Affairs nurse who spent 28 years at the embattled agency’s facility in Albany, NY, says when she came forward to report abuse including stolen drugs [including 5,000 vials of morphine from a locked drawer(!); the vials were refilled with saline solution and replaced] and mistreatment of patients, her supervisors turned on her instead of trying to fix things.

The patient abuse and the VA’s response to her calling it out include this:

…she reported that doctors had restrained a patient for seven hours in violation of VA rules. Now she has been banished to an office cubicle, stripped of her nursing duties and supervisory role and faces a 30-day suspension without pay.

Some Empirically Determined Pipeline Benefits

Posted on by
Reply

A study prepared by the SMU/Cox’ Maguire Energy Institute for the Consumer Energy Alliance has some interesting data from the Keystone XL leg that connects Cushing, OK, with Nederland, TX (built because it’s a purely domestic leg and so did not require President Barack Obama’s personal approval). The figure below presents a map of the pipeline and some proposed adjuncts to it. The Gulf Coast Project is the section of the Keystone XL pipeline project that connects the two towns, and it was open for business last January, so the empirical data are current.Keystone-System-Map

Here are some of the short-term benefits of the project’s work and a couple of longer term benefits:

  • $2.3 billion in private-sector investment
  • 11 million+ hours of labor completed by 4,844 American workers
  • 50+ contracts with US manufacturers and companies that built the pipeline and associated equipment, spread across the country: Arkansas, California, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas
  • manufacture of 485+ miles of high-strength, advanced oil pipeline (36-inch diameter) and associated equipment: thousands of pieces of equipment used to build transformers, meters, electric motors, cabling and electrical equipment; piping assembling and structural steel for supports; etc
  • 2.25 million barrels of new oil storage capacity at Cushing
  • 6 modern pump stations

Some broader results of the pipeline:

  • pumped $3.6 billion into the Texas economy, $2.1 billion into the Oklahoma economy
  • boosted local tax revenues by millions of dollars
  • Prague, OK: “doubled our city sales tax receipts”
  • full RV parks from the construction effort contributed as much as $8,000 a month in electricity fees alone to the municipal utility
  • tax revenue available—and used—to improve education, local infrastructure, and public services
  • Local restaurants, hotels, and businesses experience a significant boos

This table summarizes the overall economic impact of the project:

  Oklahoma Pipeline Impacts Texas Pipeline Impacts
Total Economic Activity $2,143,364,856 $3,638,561,905
Labor Income $1,041,174,418 $1,696,054,834
Employment (person years) 15,852 26,924
Total Taxes $72,384,852 $144,992,343
Indirect Business Taxes $50,339,639 $112,533,584
Direct Business Taxes $22,045,213 $32,458,759

Many will argue that most of these effects will disappear in a few years, even as soon as the pipeline builders leave. Since the results are temporary, why bother, especially given the risks of an oil pipeline? Leaving aside the fact that pipelines are safer than trains for transporting oil and natural gas, ask the folks who’ve gotten these “temporary” fiscal results whether they think any of it was “worth it.”