Tonight’s news: equality for same-sex couples in hospital visits.
For all hospitals that accept Medicare or Medicaid. In other words, for almost every hospital in the United States.
“So what?” you say? He’s just responding to pressure?
Well, that’s our job, isn’t it?
McCain sure wouldn’t have done it.
Cross-posted from Rational Resistance.
Notice anything different?
I did. I got done with preparing my taxes kind of late, and I filed them electronically. (Just the feds. For some reason that's free but it costs $19.95 to electronically file my state taxes.)
For years I've been doing my taxes electronically using a commercial program. I'm not convinced that it does a better job than I would do by myself, but it seems to be faster, and it gives me a chance to spend some quality time with my computer, so that's how I do it.
One of the things that my tax program had this year is a two-year summary. It gives me the chance to compare all the pertinent facts about this year's tax return with last year's, and I learned some interesting facts.
Pretty much as long as Obama has been president, we've been hearing the wingers complaining about how Obama is raising our taxes. It's gotten even worse since they started working on health care, and since they passed it it's been pretty extreme. So I thought I'd be interested to see what happened to my taxes. We're making more money than I ever thought we'd make; as a friend used to observe, sometimes our checking balance threatens to skyrocket into the three figures. I think it's a good thing that two people working in the public sector, and doing socially beneficial work can make a living, but we're far from rich.
But wait, what happened to our taxes this year? Did they go up, the way the teabaggers have been telling us?
Actually, now that you ask, they did not. In fact, our income went down a little bit and our taxes went down by a lot. I can tell exactly why this is, and it is due in large part to changes in the law pushed through by resident Obama. So even though we're squarely in the middle class, and we work hard for everything we have, the result of over a year of Obama's presidency has not been that he's been in our pockets, taken everything we have, and left us wearing barrels to work.
What about you? Did your taxes go up this year? Down? Stay the same?
UPDATE–Oh, that slavery thing?
Elections have consequences. We can celebrate that at the national level when we have a president who ends torture, prevents a depression, and makes the first steps toward health care reform.
We can also see it at the state level, and it isn't always pretty.
Take Virginia, for instance. Just last month we saw Virginia's new attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, order all of Virginia's colleges to start discriminating against gay people, reasoning that there is no basis in Virginia law to treat them as equal human beings.
After health care reform passed Cuccinelli announced that he'll join the groundless federal case challenging the health care reform law.
The latest move is right at the top, though. In addition to a new Republican AG, Virginia has a new Republican Governor. You know what he's into? Supporting slavery and treason.
The last Republican governor, George “Macaca” Allen, also signed on in favor of the Confederacy back in 2002.
The next time you hear some conservative attacking liberals as being anti-American and unpatriotic, just remind him about this.
Cross posted from Beyond VSH
It's almost a week now that we've known about the latest denial of certification for the Vermont State Hospital, but we just got the actual report from CMS, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, earlier this week.
The way the state tells it, CMS is picking on them, and they really haven't been doing anything wrong.
If you dig into the report, though, the facts are something very different.
Take this tidbit. One of the problems they identified was in incident in which a patient barricaded herself in her room with her bed, and used the time she was in there to reopen a self-inflicted wound on her arm. It apparently didn't last long, but it could have resulted in a serious injury. It was kind of a mystery, though, how a patient could do this.
From the report:
During a group interview with facility Administration and staff at 2:10 PM on 3/10/10, in response to the surveyors's question regarding the above event, the facility's Executive Director and Staff Educator #1 both stated that the beds in patient rooms were not movable.
Per observation, while accompanied by Staff Educator #1, at 3:30 PM on 3/10/10, of rooms #11 and #19 (the room Patient #20 had occupied
at the time of the event) on the Brooks 2 Unit, there were wooden framed beds in each room that could be easily moved about the room and
pushed up against the door. Upon observation of the beds Staff Educator #1 stated; “they do move….am I embarrassed.”
We'd provide the link, but it seems to be kind of a challenge to find the report at the Department of Mental Health web page. Maybe that's what they mean by “Challenges for Change”.
Not too many secrets stay secret for very long.
For instance, it didn't take long for us to find out that the Douglas administration sat on the news that the State Hospital hadn't gotten its certification back for twenty-four hours, even though they were counting on $8 million of federal money going to the State Hospital to help close the budget gap.
That didn't go over well, and we understand that House Approps Chair Martha Heath was visibly upset with the Douglas camp.
Now there's more. GMD has learned that the attempted coverup by the Douglas administration has caused open hostiltities between House Republicans and the governor. In fact, our sources relayed that a senior member of the Republican caucus was seen angrily dressing down two members of the Douglas administration, complaining that Douglas is out of touch, he's given up, and that it made them look bad to have to vote for the budget after learning of the $8 million hole the continued decertification created for the budget.
This isn't a good position for the Administration to be in coming into the closing weeks of the session.
UPDATED: See below.
Friday afternoon the blog Beyond VSH published the story that once again the feds have denied certification of Vermont State Hospital. The details are that the hospital has been decertified by CMS, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, almost continuously since 1993, which means that the state isn't eligible to get Medicare or Medicaid payment for the patients there. In cash terms for the budget, this decision blows an $8 million hole in the budget out of the VSH operating costs of about $23 million a year.
This is kind of a big problem, because budget writers – both in the administration of Gov. James Douglas and in the Legislature – assumed that the hospital would regain certification and be eligible for Medicaid and Medicare money in fiscal year 2011 which begins in July. Yes, we were banking on that money to make our budget next year.
It should also be a political problem for the Douglas administration because of the way they slow-walked the news to the Legislature.
The administration got the news late Thursday afternoon. Early Friday afternoon, in the course of his testimony in Senate Approps, Mental Health Commisioner Michael Hartman mentioned the loss of certification, but made no broader announcement of the decision from CMS.
A little later, around 3:00, the House was debating final passage of the budget, still with no announcement of the denial of certification until it came out on the floor.
So in other words, the Douglas Administration had the information for twenty-four hours and said nothing to the House, or to the Appropriations Committee, even though they knew this news would affect the budget that was going to be on the floor the very next day.
UPDATE: It's even worse than it sounds.
Hard to believe, but GMD has heard from Rep. Anne Donohue that the Administration's tactics went beyond just being dilatory on releasing the information. Thursday evening, after the state had the letter from CMS denying recertification, the House Democratic Caucus met to talk about voting on the budget.
Douglas's Administration Secretary Neale Lundeville and Finance Commissioner Jim Reardon came to the Democratic caucus to support Shap Smith on not delaying the budget vote. Did the caucus hear a word from Lunderville and Reardon about the decertification? Nope. They left that for the chance to sandbag Martha Heath on the floor Friday.
There's other coverage of the certification news, and why they didn't get certified, and it's definitely worth reading, but today I have a couple of other questions.
First, what the hell were they thinking? They knew they had a decision from the feds that was going to add $8 million to the state budget shortfall and they didn't go to the House, which was debating the budget, or to the House Appropriations Committee, which was presenting the budget on the floor of the House. Did they think that it just wouldn't come up? Did they really think they could slide this one by? They had to know that it woud come up before the Senate got the bill, so they'd have to deal with it anyway. Can't anybody here play this game?
Second, when is this going to start costing Douglas? The Hospital has been decertified almost continuously since 2003, or almost the entire time that Douglas has been governor, and his administration has essentially done nothing about it. At least, nothing but waste time, come up with unrealistic and unfeasible plans, and we're no closer to a replacement for VSH than we were seven years ago. You walk around the State House and legislators of all parties are openly scornful of the idea that the administration has any kind of plan to do anything, anytime.
And the cost to Vermont's taxpayers? It's hard to say, but a rough estimate of $50-80 million is probably in the ballpark. Any ideas what else we could be doing with that money if we hadn't had to take it out of the General Fund to patch the State Hospital budget?
If the total lack of leadership isn't entirely the responsibility of Douglas and his appointees, whose fault is it? As much as any other issue, Douglas owns this one. yet as far as I can tell, Douglas has been able to get away with treating this whole disaster as though he is as much a spectator as anyone else. Could the truth really be as simple as what I heard a Democratic representative say recently? People just don't care enough about VSH and the people it serves for it to make a difference?
And my last question: What are the Democratic candidates for governor going to do about it? They all spoke at a debate on mental health and substance abuse issues last Monday night (not sure if an empty chair was provided for Dubie), but we didn't have this news then. I wasn't at the debate, but I understand that nobody had a particularly compelling proposal for how they'll deal with the crisis that will still be sitting on their desk next January. It seems that this is an opportunity to demonstrate a reality-based understanding of our situation, compassion for the people who are locked up in the current facility, and a vision for the future. Those all seem like good things for a Democratic governor, don't they?
The R's did what they could to stall the inevitable, but Congress has completed its work on the health care package.
Talking Points Memo reports at 9:06 that the House passed the amended reconciliation bill and the next step is Obama's signature, which could come as soon as tomorrow.
Somehow, Republicans who spent last week and all day Sunday squealing like stuck pigs about special deals for Nebraska and Louisiana spent most of this week fighting like hell to keep them in the law.
Too bad, guys. Thanks for playing.
Did you see what McCain said today?
“There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year,” McCain said during an interview Monday on an Arizona radio affiliate. “They have poisoned the well in what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.”
Can anyone else think of any bipartisanship or cooperation the Republicans have shown in this Congress?
Anyone?
Bueller?
We're all familiar with the fight over what the Democrats were “required” to do to distance themselves from the Move On “Betray Us” ad a couple of years ago, right?
And a little over a week ago we raised the question here again on the issue of condemnation of the Mary Cheney “Department of Jihad” screed.
I would have to say that far worse than either of these is what we were treated to by the Republican teabaggers yesterday.
To this moment I haven't heard of a single Republican criticizing these racist, homophobic attacks. Have you?
Great story in today's Times Argus/Rutland Herald about the Vermont Low Income Advocacy Council, the state's foremost anti-poverty advocacy organization.
But the 77-year-old Hubbardton widow is poor. That's why, as president of the Vermont Low Income Advocacy Council, she's driving her tank of a used car to the state capital to defend herself.
“I haven't ever seen things so bad, except years and years ago when I first went on welfare and you had to wait six months,” she says. “That was a long six months. Of course, I was young then and could survive.
I've worked closely with VLIAC, and Edna Fairbanks-Williams, for many years, on issues ranging from housing and evictions to electric industry restructuring, low income energy programs, unemployment compensation, and many other issues. These advocates not only live the life, they also deeply analyze and understand the issues and technicalities.