ICYMI: Judge’s rantings about ethics caught on video by TV station

From WXYZ.com

Warren District Judge John Chmura may have thought news coverage of the ethically questionable $1,500 birthday gift he received last November for a Las Vegas vacation -- first reported by The Macomb Daily -- was over once he relented and donated the money to the nonprofit Macomb County Bar Association Foundation.

But a local TV station last week picked up a new wrinkle (though months old) in the story. The Warren City Council, by a 6-1 vote, had quietly picked up the $8,100 tab for Chmura’s legal bills when he thought he may face a reprimand from the state’s watchdog group known as the Judicial Tenure Commission.

Chmura reportedly hired the same high-profile law firm chosen by former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Hathaway and Wayne County Judge Wade McCree when they got into legal trouble. The firm apparently put three lawyers on the Chmura case—each at $225 an hour.

When the TV station caught up with Chmura outside his home, a confrontational interview ensued that put the judge in a bad light. You can watch it here.

Instead of answering the reporter’s questions, Chmura kept repeating, “Who decides which stories you should run?” As if a public official in this predicament, using tax dollars in this way, is not worthy of a news story.

The Nov. 29 birthday party, attended by about 200 people at the American Polish Century Club one month before Chmura's actual 50th birthday, resulted from the sale of $30 tickets by the 37^th District Court staff. The tickets resembled typical campaign fundraising tickets and indicated that the price would pay for food, musical entertainment and a "present" for the judge.

Attendees included attorneys who appear before the judge.

In Michigan, the judicial rules of ethics limit the gifts that judges can accept, even if they’re not from lawyers who argue in their court. Once the $1,500 became public knowledge, pressure mounted on Chmura to return it.

At the time, Chmura said that the vacation was planned for himself, his wife, his secretary and a friend, and his court officer.

When he eventually opted to give away the money, he told The Macomb Daily: “I still think there was nothing improper about it.”

Washington in a spending frenzy with just hours left in fiscal year

 While Congress frets over a government shutdown, federal bureaucrats are engaged in a spending frenzy as the clock ticks toward the end of the fiscal year.

The Washington Post reports that the annual tradition of “use it or lose” spending is in its final hours, and it appears the buying frenzy by federal agencies will meet or exceed the end-of- September spike experienced over the past three years.

The Post’s David A. Fahrenthold found that in fiscal years 2010-12, each time the feds spent more than $40 billion in the final week. In 2012, for example, the departments spent 9 percent of the entire years’ worth of expenditures in the last week leading up to the Sept. 30 end to the fiscal year.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), one of Congress’ leading watchdogs of wasteful federal spending, said that agencies are always concerned that they will create a new, lower benchmark for their budget if they don’t spend it all. Coburn told Fahrenthold: “… Instead of being praised for not spending all your money, you get cut for not spending all your money. And so we’ve got a perverse incentive in there.”

Here’s a portion of the Post report:

“This past week, the Department of Veterans Affairs bought $562,000 worth of artwork.

“In a single day, the Agriculture Department spent $144,000 on toner cartridges.

 “And in a single purchase, the Coast Guard spent $178,000 on ‘Cubicle Furniture Rehab,’” which apparently amounted to nothing more than replacing a bunch of office cubicles with a more modern version.

The graphs below, created by the Post, show these spending patterns in detail:

Granholm barely gets a word in on ABC's "This Week"

 

On this morning’s “This Week” broadcast on ABC former governor Jennifer Granholm barely got a word in as Bill Kristol tried to dominate the panel discussion by using an old cable TV trick: When someone tries to interrupt you to make a contrary point, just keep talking louder and louder so you drown the others out.

On the subject of Obamacare taking effect, a possible government shutdown and lifting the debt ceiling, host George Stephanopoulos gave Kristol free reign to sink the discussion into a near-shouting match. It’s increasingly irritating that Stephanopolous allows these panel discussions to sink to cable’s level. Worse yet, he long ago broke with “This Week” tradition by inviting the participation of fringe commentators such as Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Kristol, whose initial claim to fame was as an aide to Dan Quayle.

David Brinkley must be rolling over in his grave.

As for Granholm, when the discussion turned to whether Obama’s inability to deal with Congress and negotiate compromises contributes to a possible shutdown, Stephanopolous missed the obvious question for the ex-governor: “You’re the only person at this table who has actually dealt with government shutdowns, what lessons did you learn from your budget battles with the Republicans in the Michigan Legislature?”

Obamacare the myth, becomes Obamacare the reality

 

After more than three years of myths and misinformation, the reality of Obamacare dawns on Tuesday.

Despite one last gasp on Capitol Hill, the political fighting is over and the centerpiece of the new health care system will debut with the introduction of the “exchanges,” the online marketplaces where the uninsured can shop for coverage.

To clear your mind of all the hyperbole swirling around the Affordable Care Act, just remember these three metrics: 2 percent, 4 percent and 60 percent.

 

The 2 percent figure represents the portion of Americans who will be affected by the ACA in the first year. Those are the estimated 7 million uninsured who will choose to take part in the exchanges in 2014. That number will gradually grow to 27 million by 2018.

 

The 4 percent figure — as hard as this is to believe — signifies the small slice of businesses that might be impacted by Obamacare. Employers with less than 50 employees are exempt from the insurance requirements and that group represents 96 percent of all U.S. companies, including the self-employed. Of that 4 percent, according to the Small Business Administration most already provide insurance for their workforce and the number of employers forced to decide between offering benefits or paying a fine may be less than 1 percent. That provision has been delayed for one year.

 

The 60 percent defines the amount of uninsured Americans who will have a policy available to them on their state’s exchange that costs less than $100 a month. That percentage would be higher if certain states were not obstructing — some would say sabotaging — the implementation of the ACA.

 

Glitches likely

 

Will it work? I suspect we will see some computer glitches on Tuesday. The separate SHOP exchange for small businesses has already announced that it will be a month behind in going online, though hard-copy applications will be accepted in the meantime.

The ACA could become plagued by a series of problems. It could flop. We shall see.

The biggest barrier to success may be ignorance. Many polls show that a significant portion of the public is still unsure what Obamacare is all about. A disturbing number of Americans, bombarded with news about the dozens of attempts by the House to wipe out health care reform, actually believe that Obamacare was repealed. Confusion reigns as Day One approaches.

 

The bottom line is that the 2 percent, 4 percent and 60 percent parameters do not sound at all like the Obamacare that’s been described and demonized by critics since 2009.

President Obama deserves a large share of the blame for doing a terrible job of selling his signature political issue to the public. The media, particularly the cable TV news networks, have preferred partisan shouting matches rather than supplying substantive information.

I suspect Obama avoided citing that 2 percent figure, which would have calmed many naysayers, because it makes Obamacare sound rather small and insignificant.

But I also suspect that the ACA critics wanted to steer clear of debating a plan that addresses the nation’s embarrassing number of uninsured by providing a competitive, private sector marketplace that offers tax breaks to make health care affordable.

The reality is that Obamacare will launch on Tuesday, with the start of the enrollment period, and over the following days millions of Americans may take a look around, bewildered, and ask: What was all the shouting about?

 

Dire predictions wrong

 

The vast majority of Americans receive their health insurance from their employer or from Medicare. The Obamacare exchanges have virtually nothing to do with that bloc of 200 million people. For those who have no coverage, the ACA offers a place to shop online that is based on web-based marketing innovations such as Travelocity.com.

There are no “death panels.” This is not a “government takeover.” It’s not a “job killer.” The latest canard to arise is that members of Congress exempted themselves from the Obamacare exchanges. The fact-checking websites have been stunned by the amount of blatant distortions and false information surrounding this one issue.

As the president said the other day, one Capitol Hill lawmaker called the ACA the worst piece of legislation in U.S. history, and another said the reforms would result in the deaths of women, children and senior citizens.

 

The more rational dire predictions also have been proved wrong. Insurers are vitally interested in participating on the exchanges. In Macomb County and surrounding metro Detroit communities, 50 plans will be available for the exchange shoppers, which is 49 more choices than most of us are ever offered by our employers.

The exchange prices offered, in state after state, have fallen below even the optimistic projections by the White House. And once-skeptical governors, perhaps influenced by Rick Snyder, have embraced the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid to cover the “working poor.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the new mandates placed on insurers to weed out the junk policies that actually don’t “insure” much of anything has not resulted in a price spike for employer-based coverage.

 

Health care cost increases for families dipped below 4 percent for the fifth straight year, according to the latest study published in the October issue of Health Affairs. That has never happened before in the 50 years that these stats have been compiled. 

As the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation reported, the reasons for this flattening of the cost curve is still up for debate but, historically, big annual increases tend to subside when Washington starts talking about a health care overhaul.

Another overlooked factor in this dwindling debate is that the coverage offered through the exchanges, due to 10 mandates from the Obama administration, such as required maternity care, mental health services and pediatric dental and vision care, is extraordinarily good.

Obviously, deductibles and co-pays will come into play as the area’s uninsured sort through those 50 plans. But one Lansing-based health care expert said last week that the amount of coverage on the exchange plans in Michigan is beyond anything offered on the individual market — at any price.

 

Obstinate employers hurt implementation

 

One obvious downside to the way Obamacare is playing out is that a small sliver of employers who offer little or no health benefits are attempting to dodge the system by reducing their workers’ hours to 30 per week. That puts these employees in part-time status and allows the company to avoid the ACA mandates.

But I suspect this charade will eventually end as employers face up to the realities of the new system, and either they will bow to public pressure or Washington will fix this loophole.

One survey found that the number of employers considering elimination of their health care benefits, which would send their workers to the exchanges, has plummeted from 28 percent in 2011 to 9 percent now. Two other business surveys placed the number of companies thinking about ending their benefits at 2 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.

 

The opposition to Obamacare is fading where it matters most— in the workplace and across the nation’s economic landscape. In terms of pure politics, many in Congress who are still attempting to derail the ACA have seized on the president’s dipping popularity as he stumbles his way through the first nine months of his second term in office.

But Obama sounded confident in a speech last week about the fate of what critics call Obamacare, a label that he has embraced.

 

“Once it’s working really well, I guarantee you they will not call it Obamacare,” he said, drawing laughter from the supportive crowd. “… A few years from now, when people are using this to get coverage and everybody is feeling pretty good about all the choices and competition that they’ve got, there are going to be a whole bunch of folks (in Congress) who say, yes, I always thought this provision was excellent. I voted for that thing. You watch …. It will not be called Obamacare.”

 

Whatever it’s called, it’s here to stay. And if it works well, Obama will have earned the right to shout out the biggest I-Told-You-So in the history of I-Told-You-Sos.

This smells like real reform: ranked voting

Krist Novoselic, the former bass player for Nirvana, is now chairman of the board at FairVote, a national organization focused on fundamental structural reform of American elections. Seriously.

He has written a piece for Salon.com that makes a good case for ranked voting – a system in which primary voters don’t vote solely for their favorite candidate, they rank the candidates. Those rankings, cumulatively, then eliminate the need for a run-off election – something that doesn’t exist in Michigan but is common across the nation.

The “ranked choice voting” system, already used in many cities (including Ferndale), has proven to be cheaper and some say it reduces the rancor in campaigns.

Here’s taste of Novoselic’s argument:

“Ranked choice voting accomplishes the goals of runoff elections in a single election. A candidate wins when reaching a threshold of votes (generally 50 percent). Rather than requiring voters to come back to the polls to either vote for their first choice candidates again or vote for a second or later choice who made the runoff, RCV simply asks voters to indicate both their first-choice and their second and later choices on the same ballot.
“Used for nearly all elections in nations like Australia and Ireland — and for mayoral elections in London — RCV has a history of extensive use in the United States, where it was invented in 1870. With the rise of optical voting equipment, RCV has become an increasingly popular election reform. Voters in more than a dozen cities have approved ranked choice voting, typically by landslide margins, for elections for citywide offices, including Memphis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, Portland (Maine), Sarasota, Santa Fe, Ferndale (Michigan), and Takoma Park (Maryland).

“Arkansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina use ranked choice voting for military and overseas voters to guarantee their ability to participate in their runoff elections. Recently, a federal court order declared that Alabama must use ranked choice ballots for overseas voters to ensure that they can participate fully in the upcoming congressional district one special election Republican primary runoffs.
“Voters have to get used to understanding the results of a close RCV election, but exit surveys show they like to rank candidates. And there’s no doubt that RCV has a powerful impact. Mike Brennan, the mayor of Portland (ME) is a veteran politician who had run many times before winning Portland’s first RCV election in 2011. A recent interview he gave is fascinating for his insights about how RCV changed his campaign. Mayor Brennan reached out to far more voters, cut back on negative attacks and turnout ultimately soared. Of the 18 offices elected by RCV in Oakland (CA), 16 had more votes than their predecessor.”

Companies will save billions by switching from COBRA to Obamacare

One largely overlooked and unforeseen benefit of Obamacare is that it will save companies billions of dollars by replacing COBRA health care coverage for ex-employees with insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.

The Associated Press ran a story the other day that suggested COBRA, a very expensive means of continuing health insurance coverage when a worker leaves, may nearly cease to exist once the online exchanges open on Oct. 1.

“As soon as the law was passed, the question among employers and benefits people was: Is there still going to be a reason for COBRA?” said Steve Wojcik, vice president of public policy for the National Business Group on Health, an employer group. Offered a choice between heavily subsidized coverage in the health act’sinsurance exchanges or paying full price under COBRA, he said, “most people are going to choose the exchange.”

The story, written by Jay Hancock of Kaiser Health News, concluded that those families relying upon COBRA could save hundreds of dollars per month by switching to a policy offered on the exchanges.

Because company cost sharing usually ceases when workers depart, COBRA members pay premiums exceeding $5,000 per year for single-person coverage and more for families. But because it’s so expensive, only people who know they’ll use the insurance are likely to sign up.

That means participants are typically sicker than average and use half again as much in benefits as they pay in premiums, causing losses for large corporations that pay their own medical claim, according to Hancock.

The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality estimated there were 2.6 million COBRA beneficiaries in 2011, the most recent year available. The COBRA option was created by a 1985 federal law.

The average COBRA member cost his former employer 54 percent more -- $3,800 -- than the average active worker, continuing a long-term trend, according to a 2009 survey by newsletter Spencer’s Benefits Reports. At one company in five, COBRA participants cost more than twice as much as active workers.

The downside to the decline of COBRA is that the insurance companies will be hit with an influx of sick people that was not anticipated.

“I've been preaching for two years that large, self-funded employers were going to get a dramatic COBRA windfall from the act at the expense of the carriers who participate” in the health exchanges, said Michael Bertaut, senior economist at BlueCross BlueShield of Louisiana, which will sell plans on the Louisiana exchange.