BuckeyeBlog

The Dayton Daily News reports that there are some folks in Ohio who are eligible for Medicaid but are waiting to get on the rolls:

A backlog has placed 16,000 Ohio residents in an administrative limbo while they fight to receive Medicaid benefits from the state.

Services for Ohio’s poor, disabled and blind are in short supply and the lines are long. Administrative processes take months — sometimes years — to navigate, leaving in-need residents frustrated or suffering.

Quite a few states have waiting lists for people with disabilities. I think a lot of us would probably agree that providing care for people with disabilities who live in poverty is a legitimate function of the Medicaid program. The fact that these folks can’t receive service in Ohio and other states indicates (to me, at least) that Medicaid should stop trying to provide care for the middle class and instead focus on the truly needy.

Of course, in Ohio the Democratic governor and the Republican General Assembly approved a plan to expand the program to middle class kids. Perhaps they should take care of the folks on the waiting list before they try and dilute the program’s resources any further.

Crossposted at State House Call.

National Review Online has posted an interview with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.  Since leaving office, he has remained involved in education reform through the Foundation for Excellence in Education.  One part of the Q&A caught my attention in particular: 

NRO: In your opening remarks at the conference, you said that our education system is like “an 8-track system living in an iPod world”? What changes do you think need to be made to bring our education system into the 21st century?

  

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Chances are fair that I agree with what’s written below the fold, but how would I know?

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Governor Strickland wants the state to review whether an agreement between DHL and UPS would violate anti-trust laws. It seems that his main issue is not whether the agreement would be good for consumers or whether it would really be anti-competitive, but instead is aimed at pressuring DHL to keep using facilities in the Wilmington area that employ around 6,000 people. And how does Strickland justify this move? “I think DHL has an obligation to the community and to the state, because we have tried to work in such a way as to be good partners,” he says.

He is referring to this:

The Dayton-Montgomery County Port Authority in March 2007 sold $270 million in bonds to support DHL’s expansion and upgrading of the Wilmington hub in recent years. That requires DHL to repay the bonds over 40 years, which would put pressure on the company to find a new use for the one-million-square-foot Wilmington sorting facility and airport if jobs are lost there and it generates less revenue, said Ron Parker, the port authority’s executive director.

So the port authority gave some welfare to DHL and now the Governor is using that to justify pressuring DHL into keeping a (possibly) unaffordable and inefficient cargo operation open? While I deplore the governor’s use of his office’s power to strong-arm DHL or any company, I have a little less sympathy for DHL because of its acceptance of a government handout to fund its expansion. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Companies that seek handouts from the government (financed using your tax dollars) should expect opportunistic government officials to meddle even more in their affairs than is normal.

Remember when they made fun of Ken Blackwell’s proposal to privatize the Ohio Turnpike?

Pennsylvania just raked in nearly $13 billion for its turnpike. Ohio probably wouldn’t bring as much, being a bit removed from the east coast, but then again, there’s quite a little bit of transport comin’ through the heartland.

What do you suppose, say, $8 billion or even $10 billion would do for the Ohio capital budget? Heck, let’s make it $4 billion. Think of all the Third Frontier money we could give to private companies!

As S.B. 57, passed by the Ohio Senate, gears up in the Ohio House, there’s little doubt that the teachers unions, Democrat party and Gov. Ted Strickland will be angling toward the veto. The bill would establish scholarships for students with disabilities.

Strickland’s view is, “Funding private schools with public tax dollars deprives the state and its taxpayers of proper oversight .”

Yep. Proper oversight.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, a few free individuals are allowed to do what actually works, rather than report to bureaucracies and do the happy dance when their ignorance ratios move from 56 percent to 55 percent. Teachers, students, parents and those who care about getting actual things done for actual children have opened a school that avoids patterns in the decoration, installs obscuring, movable screens over mirrors - all things that are important to autistic students.

Autistic students gained their ability to benefit from funds spent for them several years ago, thanks to efforts by many people, including state Rep. Jon Peterson, R-Delaware.

Too bad students with other disabilities won’t be able to do the same.

Up for a vote today in the Ohio Senate Education Committee is a bill giving families of children with disabilities new options for their education. The provisions of Senate Bill 57, also known as a special needs voucher, were passed by the General Assembly last year as part of the budget bill but were vetoed by Governor Strickland.

The Governor gave two reasons for his veto: first, school choice programs lack accountability; and, second, school choice programs harm public schools and the children who remain in them.

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In justifying his veto last year of a voucher program intended to help disabled children achieve better in their educations, Governor Strickland offered up two of the teacher unions’ tried and true critiques of school choice. One was the fallacy that regulatory accountability is both effective and the only tool for conforming public expenditures to public goals. We’ll explode this notion elsewhere on BuckeyeInstitute.org in a couple of days or so.

Strickland then offered the familiar assertion that school choice hurts the children who remain in public schools, through draining resources in a way that would harm “…the vast majority of students, including disabled students, who attend public schools.”

Unfortunately, the facts don’t back the Governor up on this assertion.

The Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Marcus Winters have looked at the Florida McKay Scholarship, the program model for Ohio’s special needs voucher, and found that:

Public school students with relatively mild disabilities made statistically significant test score improvements in both math and reading as more nearby private schools began participation in the McKay program. That is, contrary to the hypothesis that school choice harms students who remain in public schools, this study finds that students eligible for vouchers who remained in the public schools made greater academic improvements as their school choices increased.

Disabled public school students’ largest gains as exposure to McKay increased were made by those diagnosed as having the mildest learning disabilities. The largest category of students enjoying the greatest gains, known as Specific Learning Disability, accounts for 61.2% of disabled students and 8.5% of all students in Florida.

The academic proficiency of students diagnosed with relatively severe disabilities was neither helped nor harmed by increased exposure to the McKay program.

Strickland has threaten to veto SB 57, Sen. Coughlin’s and Rep. Peterson’s latest version of a statewide special needs scholarship.

If he follows through on his threat, we’re wondering exactly how the Governor will explain to the parents of disabled children across Ohio, both those who would have taken advantage of the voucher and those who wouldn’t have, why he chose to ignore the facts about a special needs voucher and favored the prerogatives of teacher unionists and other adults over the needs of their children.

For a fuller briefing on the special needs voucher, visit BuckeyeVoices.org where a podcast with report author Winters has just been posted.

While you’ll not often find me praising Governor Ted Strickland, it seems he has done something that is worth at least lukewarm praise. In light of calls to raise tobacco taxes, the Governor has indicated that he won’t be supporting any measures to increase taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products. As I wrote about here, there is no reason to increase tobacco taxes even further. Tobacco users already pay a disproportionate amount in taxes and it is simply bad policy to further target these users to pay for government services.

Of course, I can’t be too generous to the Governor because the current tobacco tax issue is tied in with his plan to raid the tobacco settlement fund to pay for his economic development boondoggle. There are so many issues involved here that should anger any fan of small government (the notion of a state foundation to battle tobacco use is ridiculous as is the idea that it is proper for the government to try and stimulate the economy through borrowing money) that no one involved in this issue has clean hands. But the Governor does deserve credit for resisting calls to increase tobacco taxes.

NBC4 reports Gov. Strickland defended the loss of taxpayer dollars in the Skybus failure thusly:

“We should not stop trying to move Ohio’s economy forward and take the risk necessary to do that. That’s a part of our free enterprise system,” said Ohio Governor Ted Strickland.

Actually, Governor, the phrase ‘free enterprise’ system refers to a system free from government interference such as the picking and choosing of winners and losers in the economy because of their political value to politicians instead of their economic value to citizens. Government entanglement in private enterprise to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars is state socialism, pure and simple, and not the ‘free enterprise’ you repeatedly pretend it to be.

Please stop giving the engine of our state’s and country’s prosperity today a bad name by confusing it with the failed policies better suited to the tastes of people living less free lives, more dependent on government, than do Ohioans and Americans.