About Me 0110: February 2011

Monday, February 21, 2011

Making Money Without

“With just one impressive speech, Chris Christie put three full days of CPAC speakers to shame.

“That’s the bottom line from a bipartisan panel of experts, who watched the New Jersey governor’s address on Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute for POLITICO – and drew a sharp contrast between Christie and the cattle call of potential GOP hopefuls at the just-concluded conservative gathering…

“‘He hit precisely the right notes people are looking for,’ Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said of the Republican, citing the governor’s focus on getting the states and nation’s fiscal house in order…

“‘He looked presidential in the kind of Hollywood sense,’ Simmons said. ‘The Bulworth, straight-talking politician. John Goodman on The West Wing. Republican guy from the heartland. He looked that part but it’s a long way to go from there to the White House.’”

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“The way to understand Christie, says Ben Dworkin, director of the Institute for New Jersey politics at Rider University, ‘is he has the leadership skills of a powerful prosecutor who happens to be governor. He argues his case in the press, and he stays on the attack constantly.’ As a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Christie never lost a corruption case, and there were plenty in a state best known for The Sopranos. His favorite phrase: ‘Heads I win, tails you lose.’ Yet he’s declined to join other Republican governors and attorneys general in challenging Obama’s health care reform. He says he doesn’t have the money to fool around with that stuff right now, and if the law is found unconstitutional, New Jersey will benefit without having to kick in legal fees.

“His refusal to join in suggests a degree of pragmatism that is attractive to non-true believers. This is a guy who has focused his message of change, and is clear about what he stands for. This is distinct from Obama’s message of change, which meant different things to different people in 2008 and left almost everybody disappointed…

“Christie’s tough-guy approach is working, making him a national figure after just 13 months in office. ‘He commands the bully pulpit more effectively than any other governor we have seen in modern history,’ says Dworkin, who predicts Christie will deliver the keynote address at the GOP convention in 2012.”

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DYLAN RATIGAN, HOST: Go ahead, Jonathan. Set all of that aside, just your evaluation of [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie, period, as a politician and his rhetoric.

JONATHAN CAPEHART, WASHINGTON POST: I think Chris Christie is terrific. Here’s a guy whose tough talk is matched up by tough action. All those things he’s talking about, he talked about at AEI today, those are all things he’s done with the exception of dealing with entitlements and things like that which he doesn’t really have to deal with because he’s a governor. But because he’s a governor in a state with deep financial problems and is forced every day, day in and day out, to make decisions, you know, he’s, he’s making them and he’s not sugar-coating them. He’s not trying to be anybody’s friend. He, you know, President Obama talks about adult conversations. Speaker Boehner talks about adult conversations surrounding the big, tough issues that face the country. Chris Christie is the one who’s actually having the adult conversation and making the tough decisions. And when people get in his face and try to yell back at him, he yells back. He actually yells back, which is why I think is driving his popularity.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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It goes without saying that having a heavy right foot while driving tends to waste fuel while creating more carbon emissions than desired, but altering driving habits can be a pretty tricky process. Good thing the Eco-Navigator device is here to help, where it will let you know how to get to your destination courtesy of Navteq maps of the U.S., Canada, Europe and China – but its goodness doesn’t end there. The Eco-Navigator will also deliver high-speed Internet access into your vehicle’s cabin, while making sure you arrive at your intended appointment in the greenest method possible. Plugged into your car’s diagnostic port, it will then monitor and display a number of vehicle parameters. Selecting Eco-Drive will show your current miles-per-gallon, throttle position (as a 0-100 percentage), and pounds of CO2 emitted per mile. This helps you figure out and adjust your driving style accordingly, and it is definitely not something to look at when you’re in a mad rush. The Eco-Navigator will retail for $249 a pop if you’re interested.

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Thursday, February 17, 2011

personal finance budgets

Last night in the State of the Union address, President Obama stated that “the only way to tackle our deficit is to cut excessive spending wherever we find it—in domestic spending, defense spending, health care spending, and spending through tax breaks and loopholes. This means further reducing health care costs, including programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which are the single biggest contributor to our long-term deficit. Health insurance reform will slow these rising costs.”

Is it possible that the President has already forgotten that the health care law included a massive expansion of the broken Medicaid entitlement? According to projected national health expenditures from the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicaid spending in 2019 will be $896.2 billion. Without the health care law, CMS projects that the amount would have been $802.4 billion.

This means that the President’s health care law will increase Medicaid spending by 12 percent or about $100 billion annually. The extra spending comes from the additional 18 million or so individuals—mostly non-disabled and non-elderly adults without children—who will now have taxpayers paying their health care bills through the Medicaid program.

Two central components of the law expand eligibility to the government-run Medicaid program and offer costly subsidies to an estimated 20 million individuals to purchase health insurance. With an increasing amount of health care subsidization, taxes will increase, but so will the demand for health care services. This problem is exacerbated because there is very limited out-of-pocket payment for Medicaid. The subsidies and the increased third-party payment will cause health spending to grow, not slow.

Medicaid is a broken program for many reasons. First, national spending on Medicaid has more than quintupled over the past two decades, and about 16 percent of the population is currently enrolled. A primary reason state budgets are out of whack is this explosive Medicaid growth and states’ responsibility to finance a portion of its programs costs.

Despite the massive increase in spending, many physicians fail to participate in the program because of low payment rates and a frustrating amount of paperwork. This causes many Medicaid beneficiaries to receive basic care services in the emergency room.

There is evidence that Medicaid provides beneficiaries with a low quality of care. A recent study from the University of Virginia found that Medicaid patients have worse surgical outcomes than individuals without insurance, even controlling for a multitude of personal characteristics.

Instead of doubling down on Medicaid and its existing structure, Washington should consider major structural reform for this troubled program. To start, the open-ended federal reimbursement of state Medicaid spending, which creates perverse incentives for states to grow their programs unsustainably, must be reformed. Then, taxpayer-financed assistance should be targeted to truly deserving individuals using market-based principles that better align incentives of providers, recipients, states, and taxpayers. This is the path to put Medicaid spending on a more sustainable course.

The President should re-read his law if he believes its passage either improved Medicaid for those on it or reduced Medicaid spending growth.

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