Cars and Parts Springfield Swap Meet
Carroll Commencement
Fairborn commencement
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > July > 21
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Editorial: Is redistricting victim of budget war?
One apparent casualty of the budget war in Columbus is election reform — asking voters this November to change how Ohio draws legislative districts.
Reformers — including people from both political parties — wanted to ask voters to amend the state constitution to create a nonpartisan system for drawing legislative districts, a long overdue idea.
The plan was to ask the question this year, before the parties get a good fix on which party is going to come out of the 2010 elections with control of the redistricting process, which one of them will under current law.
But getting the measure on the ballot would require getting 60 percent support in both houses of the Legislature, which has been a bit preoccupied. So now the reformers are looking at next spring.
That’s worrisome. To be approved by voters, the measure needs energetic support from the leaders of both parties. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, one of the reformers, says that’s realistic.
It will never happen in an election year.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Ohio politics
Editorial: 4 things Ohio is doing to help uninsured
Are you without health insurance? You might be better off as a result of the new state budget.
About 1.2 million Ohioans are uninsured. Some little publicized changes could help 100,000 individuals. It’s a small percentage, yes, but, if the reforms affect you, they’re not minor.
What’s interesting — and frustrating — is the changes shouldn’t be costly. It makes you wonder why, if they were so easy, they weren’t done before.
Basically there are four new developments:
Help for those with pre-existing conditions
People who have pre-existing conditions can get insurance at a better price.
Currently, if you have cancer or diabetes or are pregnant, for example, you can’t be denied insurance. But if you’re trying to buy a policy as an individual — not as part of a group — you can be charged four times what the company charges an individual of your age and gender.
Most people can’t afford the premiums. The new rule is the rate can only be 1.5 times the cost of what a similarly situated individual without a pre-existing condition pays. The insurance department says this rate reduction for hard-to-insure people will cause insurance rates to go up for all people who buy policies on their own. But they estimate the increase will be 5.5 percent.
About 52,000 people who can’t afford insurance now are expected to take advantage of this change.
Help for parents with 20-somethings
Parents will be allowed to put their children — up to age 28 — on their group plan that they get through their employer.
Twenty-somethings are among the largest group of uninsured. Many don’t think they need coverage because they’re young and healthy. It’s a bad decision.
Employers would not be required to pay the tab; the young person or his or her parents would be charged the added cost, which in some, but not all, cases would be cheaper than trying to buy an individual policy.
There is a big wrinkle, though. A spokesman for the insurance department says the department hasn’t decided precisely who will be eligible. If, for example, the department requires the young person to be a full-time student to be eligible, or for the parents to be providing half the person’s financial support, that will reduce the number who qualify.
One consumer advocate says there never was any discussion that something other than age would matter.
In the coming days, bureaucrats will have a lot of latitude to decide just how eager they are to get people in their 20s under a health care plan.
Attention parents of grad students, unemployed or under-employed kids: watch what happens next.
Help for workers at small companies
Companies will be required to offer employees the option of buying health insurance using pre-tax dollars.
This change will mainly benefit people working at small businesses that don’t offer health insurance.
The insurance department is creating an accounting template that will make this requirement hassle-free. Once the system is set up, though, there’s no cost to businesses — just a savings for their employees.
The change doesn’t literally lower the cost of insurance. But consumers effectively will get a significant discount on their premiums because they won’t be taxed on the money they’re using for this expense.
Essentially workers whose employers don’t provide them insurance are being given the same tax advantage that workers receive if their company does provide coverage.
The hitch here is that the IRS has rebuffed this strategy in other states. It’s not a done deal, according to an official for the Ohio office of the National Federation of Independent Businesses.
Help for some workers who’ve been laid off
Workers at small firms who had insurance, but were laid off, will have the choice of buying insurance through their employer for a year and having the bulk of the cost picked up with federal stimulus money.
Currently, employees who work at companies with fewer than 20 employees are not covered by COBRA, the federal law that allows them to, among other things, purchase insurance from their employer for 18 months if they get laid off. (The problem, though, is that the cost is prohibitive.)
Ohio has a “mini-COBRA” that applies to these small firms, but it only gives employees the option to stay on a company health plan for six months.
Under a one-time deal, federal stimulus money has been set aside to subsidize this cost. And the help will be available for a full year, not just six months.
Small businesses especially have doubts or objections pretty much about all of the changes. They fear insurance rates will go up beyond the projections and, for example, that parents will abuse the system and only insure their sick young adults.
By no means do these changes fix the health care problem — only the president and Congress can do that, and they’re fighting fiercely about it. But Ohio didn’t invent these tweaks; they’re things other states are doing — generally without the immense hardship critics complain about.
There’s no case against giving the reforms a chance to do some good.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
Editorial: Dayton needs its stimulus money now
If Dayton city officials could send one message to the federal government about the stimulus money, it would be: Get us the money now.
Dayton has put in for more than $125 million in stimulus aid from the $787 billion Congress allocated in February hoping to create, or save, jobs. The goal was to maintain services and keep consumer spending from completely crashing in the wake of a once-in-a-generation economic crisis.
The city has only been awarded $16.4 million so far — money to fund street repairs and airport improvements.
For Dayton, perhaps its most important request is for funds to help keep police on the street. As the city grapples with a $6 million deficit, the time is now for that stimulus money to make a difference.
The slow pace of disbursing the money is predictable. The mechanics of getting federal money always involves navigating a complex bureaucracy. In this case, money is being doled out in two ways — through federal departments, like energy and transportation, that have existing processes for project bidding; and by passing cash directly to states, which in turn use their usual methods to disburse it.
Both approaches take time. Still, it has been reported that the United States is well behind Europe in getting money moving. France, for example, expects to spend 75 percent of its stimulus money this year. Meanwhile, this country has spent somewhere around 10 percent of its stimulus money so far and won’t get close to doling out all the money until late 2010.
Of course, European economies are more tied to government, making some of their spending processes more streamlined.
Obama administration officials argue that they are right on schedule, disbursing the money as promised. That may be, but the simple fact is that’s not good enough. A big goal of the stimulus was to keep people working. But as the money has trickled out slowly, unemployment has jumped dramatically to 9.5 percent nationally, 11.1 percent in Ohio.
A good case about why the money matters is Dayton police. The city and the police union are in talks to try to find a way to make a significant cut in the department (perhaps through furloughs, a pay freeze or changes to holiday pay) without laying off police officers.
But the city has notified the union it will lay off 11 officers in early August if a deal is not struck.
Dayton has asked for stimulus funds specifically designated to help cities maintain and grow their police forces. City officials requested funds for 30 officers. That’s aiming pretty high, but if funding came through for even a half dozen positions, it would be a huge step toward resolving the crisis of the moment.
Sadly, City Manager Rashad Young said he has no hope he will hear anything before his August deadline. If it comes to layoffs, the best he could do is let officers go and then try to re-hire them later.
That’s a rotten way to have to do business, and it’s counter to the stimulus strategy. Those officers should stay on the street. It’s up to the Obama administration to find ways to knock down obstacles that are getting in the way of its own goals.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Scott Elliott
