To everyone's surprise, Ari Fleischer manages to put in a late entry for most tone-deaf approach to criticizing anything but pure tax cuts.
And Boehner is reelected Speaker with 220 votes (214 needed). Cantor remains Majority Leader and Pelosi Minority Leader.
Why am I not surprised that Louis Gohmert voted for Allen West. Gohmert is, personified, why Congress is broken.
That's not an lmgtfy and you are bad at this game. Also, I'd like to point out that your article was published after my post. :)
So here's the current state of play: the tax issue is behind us, and sequestration and the debt ceiling loom. Republicans are furious and are insisting that there will be nothing in the way of new revenue to replace sequestration, and that massive spending cuts are the only way the debt ceiling gets raised. Oh, and let's not forget: the Democrats need to be the ones to come up with the cuts (so the GOP can reluctantly agree and then run against them later). The next two months are going to be just like the previous two months!
I really wish the president would invoke the Fourteenth amendment and take the debt ceiling off the table forever. Yeah, it would probably create a Constitutional crisis. But at this point that would be preferable to the ongoing trainwreck of manufactured crises every time the damn thing needs to be raised.
If you were President: what would you see as the most effective way to get the message out, in a way that every American sees it repeatedly, that the "debt ceiling" vote is Congress voting to pay the bills they have already agreed to by passing the bills they passed? That it is NOT about increasing spending, that was done by Congress when they passed the bills, which is the time to look at spending, but rather this is Congress saying we will pay the bills for things that we have already purchased? That to vote against this is to be the equivalent of theft, or being a deadbeat dad. The mere fact of the act being called "Raising the Debt Ceiling" is just too intuitively "bad" for most Americans that it is easy for the GOP to come out against it. Raising the Debt Ceiling sounds, to most Americans who think of things in personal terms, the same as a household agreeing to raise the limit on the credit cards so they can charge more at 20% interest. Somehow the term Raising the Debt Ceiling needs to be purged and replaced with "This is a vote to pay the bills we owe, bills Congress has already agreed to."
Can we get this thread retitled to "A Boring Sequester/Debt Ceiling Thread?" Anyway, Newt Gingrich maybe isn;t all that important to congressional thinking any more, but I thought that his comments on the debt ceiling provide a potentially gratifying insight into just how united the GOP will be on exploiting the debt ceiling to push for cuts. The short version seems to be that the GOP are genuinely concerned they'll get the blame for chaos caused by intransigence on this point. We can only hope Obama's team gets the message and remains committed not to negotiate.
It is going to be a real game of poker. Obama is sending what I consider the right message, with the right words: But the Republicans are saying they will not vote to raise the limit unless there are corresponding spending cuts. What Obama now needs to do, IMO, is two-fold: One - continue to pound out the message that Congress paying the bills that they passed is not a negotiable matter, that the GOP cannot become deadbeats who don't pay the bills they have already approved. Secondly, have someone (Biden? So that it does not sound like Obama is dealing for the debt ceiling vote) state that the Dems will discuss spending cuts that the GOP proposes, but the GOP has to propose very specific cuts and the burden is on them to do that since they are the ones pushing that.
Sounds like a plan. They have any campaign money left? Maybe get friends in Hollywood to produce commercials to run in every state about the debt ceiling, how it has to be passed and what's at stake. (if that's allowed)
This may have been mentioned, but I think Tyler Cowen has a good take on the trillion dollar coin. As amusing as it might be, it would very effectively insulate the GOP from political consequences of their madness. Ditto the 14th amendment option. The simple fact is that either would change the conversation from GOP madness to Presidential overreach. The only way to stop this madness is to make the GOP feel pain for it.
According to a piece on NPR this evening, the fiscal cliff nonsense has pushed Congress' approval ratings down into the single digits, making them less popular than head lice, cockroaches, and Donald Trump.
After years of enormous deficits, Gov. Jerry Brown announced that California's budget is on track for a projected $800 million surplus. Though the state had made some painful spending cuts to cope with reduced revenue during the recession, we managed to get through it without annihilating our safety net or public education. In fact, the current budget proposal is also due to restore much of the cut or delayed funding to California's public education. On the other side of the coin we've got Texas emerging from their own deficit with an estimated $8 billion surplus, a stripped-down education system in crisis, and a radicalized Republican party that sees the surplus as a sign that they didn't really need that money anyway so what else can they cut? However, just as Democrats have won a supermajority in the California legislature, Republicans have lost theirs in Texas. Texas will now get to enjoy the sideshow politics of gridlock as one side wants to resurrect public education and the other side wants to set piles of money on fire to keep the state from spending it. I am not gloating. Just smiling real hard.
Even Republican shill Ben Stein thinks raising taxes on households above 400K makes sense. http://mediamatters.org/video/2013/01/12/ben-stein-tells-an-angry-charlie-gasparino-ther/192206
Would it be accurate to say that CA's financial difficulties in the last decade are due primarily to reduced revenue, or were there structural issues that played a role in generating the shortfalls? I'm thinking specifically here of oft-"welfare mommed" theme of CA Worker's Comp, which was originally substantially cut by Schwarzenegger and is again a target of Jerry Brown's reforms (page nine). Looking at overall reviews of the costs (source), it seems like a substantial reduction in claims did occur; since no such reduction happens in a vacuum, were these spurious claims? Were the costs passed on elsewhere? Who originally bore the primary burden for workers comp? What did Schwarzenegger's reforms do to change that? Was this a significant variable in state costs? New York is sometimes cited as a place with a less burdensome workers comp system that nevertheless provides better than average protection. Would that be a middle ground between CA and comp wastelands like Texas?
Is there a more current, intelligible resource on the mythology surrounding the role of fraud and/or torts in hiking up those costs? When you look at any given month of fraud convictions, they seem pretty unimpressive but it's hard to get a big picture.
This one is mostly anecdata, but from someone who handles these cases for a living. The employer-level shenanigans described are pretty astonishing if you aren't already deeply cynical about these things.
That's really useful, yeah. My hunch was that at the systemic level, fraud was a problem when exploited by corporations and a manageable dull roar in terms of individuals.
This is my area so I'll do my best to tackle the massive complexities here. Disclaimer: I've been doing legal work in California workers' comp for 20 years. I spent a year before I got my law degree representing injured workers ("Applicants") as a non-attorney hearing representative and then a year representing Applicants as an attorney. The last 18 years I've been representing the employers and insurance carriers. I practiced in NorCal up to 2000, and since then in SoCal (by which I mean Los Angeles & Orange counties). I practiced in SoCal both before and after the 2004 reforms so I got a good look at the before and after. I may now represent the employer side but as a liberal I don't believe the hype of my own side: I believe there are plenty of fraud and shenanigans on multiple sides here. However, there is also a very special circle of Hell called SoCal workers' comp, which is a big part of the problem. One thing to mention: in CA, workers' comp is private, not a state program. There is a State Compensation Insurance Fund, which is the biggest insurer in the state (it's equivalent to the "public option" for workers' comp) but they are funded by premiums on various employers not by taxes. All workers' comp in the state is paid for by employers, not taxpayers (except when the employer is a public entity). Thus, workers' comp is not part of the CA budget fiasco. However, it does have a big impact on the economy. First off, to understand anything about CA workers' comp you have to realize that although it's one state with one set of laws, there are really two different comp systems. There is CA workers' comp as practiced in the state outside of LA/OC and then there is the different version of workers' comp as practiced in LA/OC. In the state as a whole, the system prior to 2004 was performing more or less as intended with premium costs per payroll on a rough par with national averages, and with benefits paid and recovery rates about what you would expect. In LA/OC prior to 2004 you had a much higher rate of claim filing and a HUGE increase in the value of claims compared to the rest of the state. The claims costs in LA/OC were so high it drove the entire state average up to triple the national average. So when people talk about the "California Comp Crisis" of the early 2000s, it was really an LA/OC crisis. When I came to LA in 2000 as a guy with 7 years experience, normally in a position to hit the ground running, I was absolutely shell shocked by how different things were. In short, the LA/OC Applicant Attorneys and Applicant Doctors were using 3 techniques to increase average claim value (and their fees/profits therefrom) by about an order of magnitude: I would say the rate of claim inflation as between LA/OC and the rest of the state from 2000 to 2003 was in the range of a multiplier of 8X to 10X (that's 800% to 1,000% higher). The Applicant side was using 3 techniques to blow the case value through the roof, and to a large degree, this was IMO illegitimate and/or fraudulent. The three techniques that they used were add-on claims, lien treatment and treating physician presumption. Add-on claims means that in SoCal before 2004 every single claim no matter how minor had an add-on tacked on, typically a psyche claim. Sprain an ankle? Blow out a knee? Strain your back? Your LA/OC attorney will file paperwork claiming you have permanent psychiatric disability as a result of that. Lien treatment means that the Applicant Attorneys would completely ignore the insurance company provider networks and send the Applicants to the doctors which the Applicant Attorneys traditionally used as legal experts for "treatment". These doctors were receiving all of their referrals from Attorneys and were thus beholden to those masters. This practice was massively lucrative for the doctors as they could ignore the network fee schedules and charge whatever they wanted, shifting the burden of proof onto people like me to prove their fees were outrageous. So in order to make the attorneys who referred these vast streams of money-hat-making cases happy, the doctors wrote reports that made the attorneys happy. Sprain an ankle? Blow out a knee? Strain your back? Well Dr. ApplicantWhore will write a report saying you have disability to all of the above, plus psyche disability and prophylactically to protect you from harm, you really are totally disabled (or at least life pension), which equals fat fees for everybody on that side. Dr. ApplicantWhore would then file his lien for his vast fees and make me pay him kicking and screaming. Meanwhile, Mr. Applicant Attorney would rely on the third technique, the Legislature's massive brain fart of unintended consequences called the "treating physician presumption" to win every case. They would get a report from Dr. ApplicantWhore which would be totally laughable and then win every time. It didn't matter if I went to Dr. DefenseWhore or to Dr. RealNeutralExpert, I would lose. The net result of this was that Applicant Attorneys and Applicant Doctors made absolutely ludicrous amounts of money up to 2004, and claims costs in the state tripled (after adjusting for inflation) in a decade, leading to massive premium increases infuriating employers, and also a wave of insurance company bankruptcies. There was a big business pushback in 2004 leading to major reform. The reform killed the treating physician presumption and also reduced the raw value of permanent disability benefits and also instituted Utilization Review which allowed carriers to massively delay network treatment. Sadly the Legislature had made massive statewide changes to address what was really a regional problem. This hit the Applicants outside of SoCal pretty hard: they had been playing by the rules, not claiming a bunch of add-ons, treating within the network and generally using the system as intended. The cut in benefits reduced payments to Applicants and their attorneys. The network UR rules caused significant delays in treatment. The death of the treating phsycian presumption did very little in NorCal as it had not been exploited up there like it had been in SoCal. By contrast in SoCal, the 2004 reforms had less impact. The loss of the treating phsycian presumption caused the Applicant side to tone down from laughably unbelievably exaggerated cases to a more "normal" level of exaggeration, and the overall reduction in disability payments had an impact, but the rest of the package just got loopholed by the Applicants in SoCal. The UR stuff only applied to network treatment so the Applicant just kept ignoring the networks and getting lien treatment. The Applicant's responded to the disability changes by doing a game theory breakdown of the new disability rules (AMA Guides 5th edition) and finding 3 additional add-on body parts to stack onto every claim. So in 2005, I started seeing this: Sprain an ankle? Blow out a knee? Strain your back? Your attorney will file paperwork saying you have permanent disability to your psyche, to sleep impairment, to sexual dysfunction, and to internal (gastro-intestinal)! Who knew that going passed a date (1/1/05) magically caused knee injuries to make your wiener shrink! But according to the Applicant Attorneys, it did. So after an initial decline in disability, it started to go back up in SoCal. And as the lien treaters began doing (largely unnecessary IMO) treatment for psyche, sex, sleep and internal on every case, the medical costs jacked back up through the roof. The net result of lower costs in NorCal, combined with an initial dip then a jump in SoCal caused the premium curves you guys see in the WCIRB report. Now in 2012 to address the new wave of cost increases, the leigislature passed a new bill, which IMO is more targeted on the SoCal mess.I am guardedly optimistic that this bill will help. More later. Must work.
[Been a busy day at work... I had most of this typed up before Sharpe's post but don't want to just waste bin it.] A lot of structural problems became particularly noticeable when stressed by the recession. As an example, here's an excerpt from the 2013-14 budget proposal regarding unemployment insurance: So we've been increasing the benefit payments over the decades to keep pace with the higher cost of living but haven't done a thing to adjust how those payments are funded. As a result we blew our UI wad after about the first full year of recession and have been borrowing from the Federal Gub'ment since Jan '09 to keep it working. Looks structural to me! On the one hand we kept things running until revenues rose again to allow us some breathing room, but the whole point of the UI reserve is to pay this cost when times get lean. The General Fund is already going to be a shrinking pie during recession. It's like putting kerosene in your fire sprinkler pipes. While I can't say for sure that state Democrats would have headed the problem off if they'd been unobstructed, the fact is California has spent most of the last two decades in a legislative gridlock like we now see on the national level. State Republicans' notion of compromise has been "You give us EVERYTHING we demand, and we'll vote for it." Add to that our Stupid Fucking Proposition system (SFP is my technical term for it) whereby any special interest can roll the dice to get a budget item added that the legislature CANNOT change... Our problems have been Structural with a capital S. This is probably where the limits of my Good Enough Diploma are going to shine especially brightly. :) My first instinct is to wonder what impact the recession itself would have on Worker's Comp claims given that less people were working and the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Program was paying the bills for a lot more people. The current WCIRB numbers only go up to 2009, but following your source link there is a report titled "Analysis of Changes in Indemnity Claim Frequency" which appears to indicate the largest jump in two decades for indemnity claims during 2010. Among the summary bullets are: So we've had less workers in an industry which typically submits a relatively high number of claims per worker, and yet we're still back at the pre-reform number of claims (as of 2010). With what we know about disability soaking up "welfare reform" coupled with the info above about shifting demographics and categorization I'm inclined to think any reduction to Worker Comp claims had little to do with a reduction in waste or fraud.
Great, thanks. That helps a great deal. Sharpe : what were the systemic differences between LA/OC and the rest of the state that created the difference between them prior to 2004? What are the key variables targeted in 2012 that will more closely address the specific LA/OC problems that weren't addressed before? Murgatroyd : thank you, that helps a great deal in terms of contextualizing the place of worker's comp in relation to the rest of CA's problems.
LK: The differences between LA/OC and the rest of CA fall into two broad categories. First off, you have the "custom and practice" differences: in LA, Applicant Attorneys were willing to refer Applicants to doctors selected by the attorneys, in NorCal, we were not. In LA/OC, Applicant Attorneys were willing to add "psyche, sex, sleep & internal" to nearly every single claim no matter how great or small, while in NorCal we were not. In LA/OC, doctors were willing to accept referrals to treat Applicants on a lien while in NorCal they were not, and so on and forth. Of course, this begs the questions as to WHY the custom and practice was different and also, why did the different custom and practice of LA/OC work, while the few attempts to mimic it in NorCal failed? That leads to the second category: demographic differences. I've talked a lot about the weakness of the low wage labor market and that first came to my attention when I moved to LA. LA over the last couple decades is just a disaster area for low wage workers. You had massive loss of light industrial jobs in the 90s during globalization (very few people realized that under the glamor of Tinseltown, LA is and has been for decades, primarily an industrial town) when that whole band of "industrial LA" from City of Industry in the east to Torrance in the west got jackhammered by outsourcing. On top of that you have the general trend of increased relative productivity of high tech labor and decreased relative value of low tech labor which is hitting the whole country. Then you have the massive influx of low wage workers as a result of LA's demographic niche as a center to receive immigrants legal and illegal. The upshot of all this is that LA has a ton of low skill, low-education workers, competing for a shrinking pool of low wage jobs, which makes their economic survival extremely tenuous. This pool of workers, faced with the very low relative value of their jobs, finds the value of a work comp claim to be relatively higher than a higher wage worker would, and thus there is more incentive to file, to exaggerate, and less fear of the consequences of losing a job that is crappy to begin. Also, just as with the low wage jobs, many of these jobs don't offer health coverage. This means Applicant's often do not have health care for their non-work problems like diabetes, internal problems, etc. This makes them very willing to along with adding the add-on claims to their work claims b/c it's the only way to get health care. This demographic aspect is similiar to the idea of the bad economy pushing the partially disabled onto total disability in order to get Medicare. Third, the weak labor market and large pool of vulnerable and/or less than well educated workers means that a lot of the judges down here are sympathetic to Applicants and are willing to cut Applicant's breaks on the issue of lack of knowledge of the correct procedures. This in turn lets Applicant Attorneys push things a lot further than would otherwise be possible.
Continued due to stupid forum software problems: My overall take on the underlying system issue is this: You have a weak labor market in LA/OC, with a huge number of workers in a vulnerable economic position, and also in many cases lacking education. This creates the demographic conditions which are then ripe for the Applicant Attorneys and Applicant Doctors to exploit, which they do by using a custom of practice which is different than the rest of the state. As to the specifics of the 2012 law, they did two good things. First, they are targeting the overcharging by medical providers issue by creating "independent bill review" a service regulated by the state that will determine the correct prices based on the state fee schedule. This is great for me as I will no longer have the burden of proof of showing that Dr. Whore is overcharging: all I need to do is get the independent bill review and pay that, then I'm done. Since Dr. Whore and his brethren have been overcharging by hundreds of percent for years, they will of course take a massive hit under independent bill review but I cry one very small tear for them. one single solitary tear. Second, the legislature specifically targetted the disability add-ons for sex, psyche and sleep which means that Applicant Attorneys will no longer be able to pump up settlement value by simply slapping those words on the filing documents. Applicants can still get treatment for these problems if they have them (which is rare, but sometimes true) but we won't be seeing people alleging sex, psyche and sleep on every single case anymore as there is no longer a stochastic advantage in doing so. Those two changes are targeted at the exploitative practices of medical overcharging and illegitimite add-on body parts so they will impact SoCal without hammering NorCal. I think its a reasonable reform effort which will partially help. There are better reform ideas out there but sadly either they have no lobbying constituency other than comp nerds like me, or they gore the oxen of too many powerful groups. In the short run, CA work comp would be vastly improved by doing away with both lien treatment and utilization review entirely. Just have a simple rule: the Applicant must treat within the insurance network but can choose any doctor in that network; and the carrier must pay for all treatment that doctor recommends, no delays or screwing around, backed up by meaningful penalties. If the Applicant Attorney (or any attorney) sends the Applicant to a doctor that must be considered an expert report for legal advocacy and not a treating report. And providers who overcharge should be subject to the exact same penalties on the overcharged amounts as the insurance companies face for underpaying. Those changes would speed up treatment, uncork a lot of the administrative hassle and improve the core problem of the system: delivering effective medical treatment in a reasonable time frame. In the long run, to really fix CA work comp we would need to restructure the system, particularly the financial incentives for Applicant Attorneys. Right now, the more disabled their client ends up, the more money they make. If an Applicant Attorney wins a case, gets medical treatment for their client, helps the client get a full recovery, with no disability, the Attorney earns a fee of... zero. On the other hand, if the Attorney send the Applicant to doctors who don't help the Applicant and then find massive levels of disability, the Attorney and the doctor both put on money hats and do the money dance. Oddly enough, my side has the right financial incentives: the better the Applicant recovers, the less we pay in disability so we actually *want* the Applicant to heal. The other side has reversed incentives which is a core flaw in the system. On top of that there are a bunch of other technical things that need fixing.
The medium term debt projection is now flat. Suck it, austerians; where's that US government debt and interest rate crisis you've been predicting for the last four years?
