Notes From the Floor

Beer and Wine

When we get a phone call from a constituent to the Legislative information desk, someone sends us a little yellow piece of paper with the brief massage typed out and a return address where we can call or write back. Last week the yellow phone call slips started flowing, a constant stream of "Don't tax my beer and wine" messages rippling out from the alcohol distributors, to the bars and restaurants to the patrons, riled like colonists at a tea party.

I understand. No one likes to pay more for anything, especially in hard economic times. But I ask, would we rather pay more through some other part of state government to build more prisons, pay for more emergency care from car accidents, more child protection and domestic violence shelters — all because we do not offer nearly the treatment we should to prevent or end alcoholism and substance abuse in the state of Idaho?

I promise we will all just pay more if we don't someday create a dedicated funding source for treatment. And I'm talking about treatment, not about advertising or bill boards here. We will all watch people in our communities suffer year after year because we didn't help this year, because we didn't see the larger issue here.

I don't like the temperance argument. Moderation is what most people use in their approach to beer and wine. But if those of us who do drink beer and wine are not asked to pay for treatment, then who should pay? If we could tax Meth, believe me, we as a legislature would. We can't. Not Meth or Heroin or Cocaine or any of it. But when someone's family member is addicted and they can not afford an expensive treatment center, where will they go? Who will pay?

Let me say this, I don't know about you, but I would have paid. I would have stepped up and shelled out the seven cents a glass of wine or bottle of beer, and I would have paid so that finally the state of Idaho has a chance to fund real drug treatment as we never have before.

But here on the afternoon of this cloudy spring day, when the Senate floor is subdued and people file in and out on their way to and from committees, it is too late. The beer and wine tax went down, five to thirteen in the House Revenue and Taxation Committee this morning.

Risch and Crapo and Debt

Senator Jim Risch is speaking to us now about his experience in Washington DC. He is spending a very long time talking about his seniority. I suspect after so long in the executive branch here in Idaho, he is less accustomed to being somewhere near the bottom of a pecking order. His words suggest some tension with his more senior Senator Mike Crapo with whom he says votes on every bill and amendment.

Risch and Crapo both in speaking to this body, sternly remind us that the current borrowing is mortgaging our childrens' future and sending American dollars to China. Senator Crapo certainly has done a bit of that borrowing in his ten years in the Senate… let's say ten trillion in borrowing? But according to Senator Risch, this borrowing is different because a Democratic President is borrowing to help people afford health care, to make us less reliant on high cost oil and to keep states from raising taxes and or going bankrupt.

The real irony is in Risch's statement about how freeing up credit will fix our economic crisis.

Is not our problem in part that families and small businesses are too deep in debt already? Wages are so low and the cost of fuel, housing, daycare and insurance so high that people can not meet basic needs with out borrowing to fix the broken refrigerator, the car or to buy groceries or pay a doctor bill.

More lending good Senators? To really fix our economy, I think we have more fundamental issues to address.

Food on a Table

Sometimes a day unravels. Sometimes it just starts with a conversation you can not believe your committee is having. Fifty thousand Idahoans unemployed. A nation trying to keep states from going bankrupt. Laying off state employees. Hundreds of businesses folding up and blowing away.

I remember how former legislator and Joint Finance Committee member, Margaret Henbest looked in here in the statehouse hallways sometimes. It was a warning to anyone asking anything of her. I used to think she was just a bit high strung and should chill out a bit. I feel that look in myself somewhere now on days like this.

People's lives are affected by our actions so clearly in years like this. What we fund and what we cut. Who loses a job. What business closes because no one can afford to buy what they sell. There is weight to this year that is unusual. More gravity and uncertainty. What we thought could be a short session, may lengthen as forces between the Governor's office and Republican leadership debate whether and what of the stimulus to take. Their delay helps no one.

These dollars are dollars paid to and to be owed by Idahoans to the Federal Government, regardless whether we send the whole check back to Washington. Some of the money headed our way may not rescue us from ressession but will keep states like ours from raising taxes for roads or to keep schools open next year. Some will help insulate us from further crisis. It is not the recovery package I would have crafted but it is the one we have in front of us. The indecision and posturing does not help one single business stay open or one single family put food on the table.

State Employee Pay Cuts

It is not yet six am. I am dressed and ready to head to the Statehouse.
Yesterday we were told the early morning Joint Finance Committee
meetings will start. We will have a pre meeting to work out "motions"
or proposals for how much money we decide we will really have to spend
for state government in the last half of 2009 and the start of 2010.
That's medical care, prisons, drug treatment and water quality
protection and especially thousands and thousands of people who's job
it is to do this work of the state, from teaching our kids to guarding
our prisons, safeguarding social security numbers to making sure that
feed lots don't contaminate well water.

In a tiny room that is now a library but once was part of the county
jail, we will debate how deeply and in what way to cut state employee
pay. It is that bad.

Will we use furloughs (days off without pay) or base cuts as deep as 5%
or 7% in state employee pay? Some like governor Otter want to lay off
employees. I personally do not believe that is good for the economy or
for how well our state functions. This is the most Republican state in
the nation, the last problem we have is too many government workers or
people paid too well. Every new Republican governor finds places to
"reduce government." They eliminate departments, cut staff, rearrange
things. We are bare bones and state employees, especially those on the
front lines, the kindergarten and math teachers, the adjunct
professors, food stamp screeners, child protection workers and budget
analysts work hard for the pay they get. This won't be easy.

If we cut jobs, unemployment rises more than its current record rate.
If we pay families less, some will qualify for food stamps. They have
to eat and pay rent and child care and heat and gas and electricity.
Hopefully we will give some of them with families food stamps. Those
are federal funds we have been stingy with. Our state's laws are
different from any other state's. We make people lose everything before
we make sure they are able to eat. Its called an "asset test." You
can't own anything, just one car, not two, if you or your kids are
hungry and need help for a bit. That may be something we can change. I
know we need to.

How will our economy recover if families and businesses have to hit the
very bottom of crisis before they get help? The deeper they go into
crisis, the harder to recover.

Idahoans are rugged and independent. We also, especially in the small
towns and older neighborhoods know each other. We need to know each
other even in the suburbs. We need to watch out for our neighbors, make
sure they are OK. I have something to give still. I'm buying things at
locally owned stores and giving to the food bank and homeless shelter.
I know i could do more. It is that kind of time. Over fences and in
coffee shops, in senior centers and school yards, I think we better ask
how it is going. Maybe over a conversation we can help each other out
just a little bit and get through this.

Meanwhile, I have to head to the statehouse to vote on how to cut pay
for thousands of Idahoans. Not a vote I want to make. There are better
and worse ways to do this. May we do the least harm possible.

Deck Chairs

When the great boat was going down and an iceberg was ripping a hole
in its new metal skin, I imagine those deck chairs, the ones that would
have been wooden and heavy. Or perhaps there were none there on the
deck of the Titanic because this was the North Atlantic and there was
ice in the water and surely in the air.

In Health & Welfare
Committee last week, we were visited by Blue Cross, one of our state's
two largest insurers, in fact it is now the one the state now contracts
with to provide insurance to most of Idaho's 17,000 or so state
employees.

Blue Cross went to great lengths to show that
spending more money on health care did not produce better quality
health care. It is a point I would have appreciated coming from them
had they bothered to mention how a health care system run by insurance
companies creates a level of unpredictability and complexity never seen
in the history of medicine world-wide.

Daily, the cost of
American health increases because we as a nation and state government
allow insurance companies to set their own rates. We let them decide
what gets covered and what does not. We let these companies control and
then change randomly who may treat whom and how much will be paid to
those who provide care, based on who they are providing it to and
whether that person is newly sick or has been sick with this same
condition for a long time.

Imagine being a doctor and trying to
figure out who and how much to bill for a colonoscopy. If the patient
has insurance you get paid X. If they do not it is more. If the
condition was pre-existing the insurance company might not pay, so you
bill and work to get payment from the patient. Not only do you have to
know the rules for every insurer, but you have to know that the rules
can change at any time. So you may suddenly be designated as an
out-of-network doctor or the procedure may no longer be covered so the
company won't pay you and your patient, not knowing this, doesn't have
the money to pay, so you don't get paid at all. Maybe, just maybe if
you fight the insurance company you can get payment for the
colonoscopy, or, if you use a different code on the paperwork, you will
avoid the fight. In any case, before each procedure you need to make
sure that the company will let you do what your patient needs. They may
decide to pay for a lesser procedure or to make you wait until the
problem is more severe, or until the person has moved to someone else's
health plan.

Clearly you would never have time to see patients
if you had to do all this yourself, so you hire one or two people to
help with the paperwork. That is part of what makes what your
colonoscopy (and your patient's insurance) cost more because not only
do you have more staff to deal with the complexity, but all the
insurance companies hire more staff to manage the complexity too.

So the Titanic screams ahead.

In
the Senate Commerce Committee this week, Bill Deal, Director of the
Department of Insurance, brought a rule, which is kind of like a law,
to limit "discretionary clauses" in insurance plans. It is a modest
change that means more than you might think. Read your policy sometime,
if you have one (and I understand that one out of four of you have no
insurance policy.) You will find statements something like this:

We agree to cover these things, but at our discretion we actually might not.

We promise to pay for this, but at our discretion we might choose not to.

We will cover medical care that costs this much unless, at our discretion, we decide we won't.

Bill's
rule says you can't do this, at least not to ordinary people with
individual plans who have no way to negotiate those bombs out of their
policies. Small businesses beware you still have discretionary clauses
in your policies.

The rule is progress. It is one deck chair a few feet to the left as the metal tears and the ship pitches starboard.

Like
many, I've been spending a lot of time assessing what made our economy
collapse. You can look back at reasons why wages are low and why still
American companies could not survive manufacturing anything in the U.S.
The cost of health care is clearly a factor.  U.S. companies have to
pay for it while companies from countries with national health plans do
not. It still weighs heavily on businesses trying to hang on while, all
around them, businesses close and people lose incomes, buying slows and
the chill sets in.

The icy waters froth and lap. Brilliant blue ice glows in darkness.

I
plan this year to propose a bill to make companies tell small
businesses the details of their health plans BEFORE the business signs
on the dotted line. It says the insurance company can not change the
plan in the middle of the contract.

Wooden legs scrape on a painted metal deck.

I
look to President Obama to do this one thing for American business.
Simplify this mess. Make it so no American family ever goes bankrupt or
into deep debt to pay for needed medical care, ever again.

The Economy

I'm told I've been mighty accurate in my estimations of the economy over the last five years
I've served on tax and economic outlook committees in the Idaho legislature. These days we are doing a lot of urgent predicting. Predicting a volatile economy though is
not the sort of thing that lends itself to strict formulas. In my
humble opinion, the world is too complex for formula economics. That, I
think, is why a lot of economists sound sort of odd right now, like
they are describing a different world than the one we all live in. I
think many are having trouble fitting all the factors into one
calculator.

I might put it this way: we have created a hollow economy, one built on
fiction, on money none of us have, money that is promised against debt
large enough to consume more wages than we may ever earn in a life
time. And that is just the personal debt. Medical expenses, balloon
mortgages, loans for new more fuel efficient
cars, home equity loans, and everything from groceries to nick knacks
stacking up on credit cards. The average person owes more than $10,000
in personal debt. That's the average. That means most Americans own
nothing, or that someone else owns most or all of what we live in, eat
off of or sleep on. It is a disturbing thought. Who owns it and can
they take it back?

As a nation we have waged two wars on trillions borrowed from other
nations. Dollars that a President and previous Congress pretended we
had to spend.

We have allowed American companies to manufacture everything elsewhere
or to sell us nothing but goods entirely made by other countries. Our
dollars flow out to buy little plastic plug-in fans that make rooms
smell like lilacs, accent tables and CD holders made for pennies by
children using whole forests of foreign trees. We pay dollars and
companies owned by shareholders on several continents earn the rest.
Our wages flow out of our communities for insurance premiums and every daily necessity, staying only in tiny portions for the
hamburger flipper, the bus driver, the nurse, the teacher, the shop
keeper. Local stores are shuttered and dark and their owners who once
slaved for a decent wage, work now for people they don't know and will
never meet, in a chain store selling goods from far, far away.

Our factories still stand there, and people who know how to run them
are still alive because much of this has happened in the past eight
years. We could fix this. Not by outlawing or taxing foreign imports
but by recreating a sense of pride in what we make and a sense that our
very survival depends on our buying what our communities produce.

Even our food now finds us from far, far away. We may grow carrots and
produce milk or beans or flour, but it leaves the state so we can buy
someone else's, paying then the cost of packaging, shipping, cooling
and storing it all when we really don't need to.

We have grown soft and dependent because it was profitable for Texas to
watch oil prices scrape the stratosphere now and then. Alternative
energy research has been underfunded by Washington or bought wholesale
by Mobil and Shell. We were allowed to become dependent on oil made by
other countries which long have known exactly how to gouge us just long
enough to start and then quell revolutions in fuel efficiency and
electric vehicles. We all know oil prices will again be at $4 a gallon,
but, by design, we don't know when.

And then there is how we let banks play dice with debt. With bad debt.
How we let a loan become a Las Vegas game worth 50 times anything
material that was ever attached to it. We let insurance companies and
investment firms pretend that one dollar was worth $50 and created
fifty trillion in fake value or "derivatives" that inflated everything
like a giant stay-puff marsh-mellow.

You know how a marsh-mellow turns into a weightless crisp black shell when it hits a flame?

Well, our economy is a crisp black shell and we are all sitting on the
surface of it. This is just my opinion, but I think we'd better start
filling it with something, making something to fill it with. We can, as
a nation. Not that long ago we did. And whatever we make will form a
lattice-like scaffold inside the burnt shell and the dollars we spend
to buy the things we make will be like the bricks that turn that
lattice scaffold into a solid place.

We can't wait for government help to come because there isn't quite
enough real money in the world economy to bring back the whole sticky
stay-puff that was our economy.

Things will get worse before they get better. And the stimulus will
keep state governments from raising taxes and may help us prepare to be
a bit more independent. But more important than that is that we have
the ability, each of us, to choose to buy what we make. And those of us
who are still doing OK can maybe think about what we can make that we
or someone else made in our communities, one time, not so long ago.

And then we'd better start making that thing like our lives depended on it.