Tag: Florida

Florida House Committee, Speaker Reject ObamaCare’s Medicaid Expansion

By
Michael F. Cannon

On Monday, a select committee of the Florida House of Representatives rejected ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion. Shortly thereafter, the speaker of the Florida House announced his opposition:

I am proud of the thoughtful, thorough and deliberative approach that our Select Committee took on the important issues related to Medicaid expansion and health exchanges. I received their recommendations and agree that expanding Medicaid and setting up a state exchange is not in the best interest of our state. We simply cannot count on the federal government to pay 100 percent of the cost for expansion. The facts show that healthcare costs will go up for many Floridians, while access to and quality of healthcare will go down. The ‘all or nothing’ approach that the Obama administration is offering will not work for our state. I know there will be continued discussion about this matter, and I look forward to exploring better policies for our state.

It looks like Medicaid expansion in Florida may not be the foregone conclusion that some people thought.

Topics: 
General, Health Care

Yes, Florida Voters Oppose ObamaCare’s Medicaid Expansion

By
Michael F. Cannon

Bloomberg’s Josh Barro criticizes the James Madison Institute’s poll showing that 65 percent of Florida voters oppose implementing ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion. Barro is mostly wrong. But even when he’s right, he’s still wrong. Disclosure: I helped JMI formulate their poll questions.

Barro complains that JMI conducted a “push poll.” His first complaint is:

It starts by priming respondents with questions about the national debt and the size of Florida’s existing Medicaid budget.

Then it gives an inaccurate description of the terms of the expansion. Poll respondents were told that Medicaid currently covers people earning up to 100 percent of the federal poverty line. That’s not true: In Florida, the limit for adults is 56 percent of FPL, and you must have dependent children to qualify.

Though Barro slightly mischaracterizes the poll question, he is basically correct, and the inaccuracy is my fault.

The folks who originally drafted JMI’s poll questions aren’t health care wonks, so they ran their questions by me. This question was originally worded the way Barro claims the final question was: “Medicaid coverage is currently available for those with incomes up to 100% of the poverty line.” I hurriedly emailed the JMI folks, “Florida does not offer Medicaid coverage to everyone below 100 percent of poverty. See page 2 and table 3 of this report. You might replace ‘currently’ with ‘generally.’” So that’s what JMI did. In retrospect, Barro is right. “Generally” gives the impression that Medicaid is available to more Floridians below the poverty line than is actually the case, and I should have offered a better edit. Mea culpa.

His next complaint is not accurate:

Respondents also heard that after three years, the state would be on the hook for “more than 10 percent” of the cost of newly eligible adults. That’s not true, either: The state’s share would be exactly 10 percent.

Under current law, for the first three years the feds pay for 100 percent of the cost of claims for newly eligible adults. They do not pay 100 percent of the administrative costs of covering those adults. States have to pick up much of that cost (as well as other costs related to other parts of the expansion). So the question is accurate and Barro is wrong. He’s not a health care wonk, though, so he can be forgiven for this one.

But Barro’s third complaint is the real doozy:

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care

Market Structure & Barriers to Entry in Education Tax Credit Programs

By
Adam B. Schaeffer

I want to thank John Kirtley for his gracious reply to my criticism of his policy guidelines. He has spilled a tremendous amount of blood, sweat, and tears on the ground fighting to establish, protect, and expand the largest private school choice program in the country, and I, quite simply, have not. I think this kind of policy debate is good for the health of the school choice movement, however, so on it goes …

Andrew Coulson posted a response to many of John’s points, but I think some areas deserve an expanded treatment. One of the primary issues in our discussion is centralization vs. diversification of scholarship organizations. I did not claim there was a “mandated” monopoly, which I take to mean government-mandated. Step Up for Students is, however, the only active scholarship organization in the state. It became the sole scholarship organization through hard work and good performance. John mentions Microsoft in his defense of market dominance, but Microsoft never fully monopolized any product or service. There is, however, a literal monopoly of the education tax credit system that was produced and is maintained by problematic provisions in the credit program that create a very high barrier to entry. The structure of the education tax credit in Florida all but ensures a monopoly in the education tax credit program.

For the first six years of the program, scholarship organizations were required to spend 100 percent of the credit funds they raised on scholarships. In other words, they had no money for overhead, which made establishing and running a scholarship organization difficult and expensive … a non-profit would need to seriously cannibalize its established charitable funding, likely already committed, and/or fundraise along two separate tracks for administrative and scholarship funding.

To put this in context, Charity Navigator, which rates non-profits, considers it acceptable for a charity to spend close to one-third of its revenue on non-program expenses. Even the 4-star rated Inner-City Scholarship Fund spends over 13 percent of its revenue on overhead expenses.

Scholarship programs, especially ones with relatively high compliance costs such as requiring detailed checks on a family’s income, require significant but entirely normal overhead spending. Furthermore, local scholarship organizations in a decentralized system act as more than a high-volume processor of financial applications. They act as community organizations that consider the needs and struggles of individual families and children, which requires spending more time and resources on each family. A 10 percent overhead allowance is eminently reasonable, indeed, within the bounds of best practices for such charities. Denying any overhead to non-profits ensured that few charitable organizations would be capable of fundraising and processing scholarships under the law.

Exacerbating this problem, scholarship organizations are not allowed to target the use of scholarship funds they raised to particular kinds of educational environments. What this means is that a non-profit would have to a) cannibalize money raised from other sources and for other purposes, and b) possibly fund educational environments that directly conflict with their conscience, mission, or best judgment. For instance, a Catholic charity would be required to fund an atheist, Wiccan, Protestant fundamentalist, Lutheran, Islamic, or any other school which met the basic requirements of the legislation. Even a non-sectarian scholarship organization is required to issue scholarships to any school, regardless of quality, as long as it meets the basic legal requirements.

In addition, the Florida tax credit applies only to corporate taxes, the vast majority of which are paid by large corporations based outside of the state of Florida. This means that fundraising is relatively difficult and time-consuming, not to mention extremely volatile, as large corporations shift revenue and expenses to minimize their tax burden year to year. It can take two years for a large corporation to begin disbursing funds after first being solicited. And fundraising requires expensive out-of-state traveling.

The corporate-only credit acts as an additional barrier to entry that grows over time and with centralization. Step Up for Students entered this constrained market efficient and well-capitalized, and spent the next decade bringing on the biggest corporate taxpayers in Florida as donors. A new entry into the credit scholarship realm would need to raise very substantial funds for fundraising for years before they saw a return in credit donations. Even should the very high quality of Step Up decline in the future, its relationships with the biggest donors, scale, and general dominance would pose a very formidable wall to climb for any non-profit. Indeed, it is far more likely that the state government would intervene long before any non-profits entered the market to impose the discipline of competition.

With extremely high start-up costs, low return for many non-profit missions, a fully established monopoly, and no profit motive or access to investment funding, the Florida education tax credit scholarship organization opportunities are all but nonexistent under current law.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

And the Other Washington Is Messed Up, Too

By
Andrew J. Coulson

In a new op-ed, I have the regrettable task of pointing out to my fellow Washingtonians (of the PNW rather than D.C. variety) that we have increased public school spending in the past decade by $1.6 billion and gotten _________ in return. Nothing. Nada. Rien du tout, mes concitoyens.

NAEP scores are pretty much flat at the end of high school, as are SAT scores. It is hard to argue that we really care about children’s education when we’re willing to waste $1.6 billion that is purportedly meant for that purpose. If politicians and voters in the Evergreen State do decide, at some point, to do something for children, the first step would be to stop wasting that $1.6 billion. The next step would be to follow the lead of other states, like Florida, that have found ways to improve student achievement while _lowering_ taxes.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Tax and Budget Policy

More on the Constitution’s Lack of a Drug-War Exception

By
Ilya Shapiro

Challenges to Florida’s unconstitutional drug laws continue to gain momentum. Following a successful federal district court challenge to the constitutionality of state statutes lacking a mens rea requirement (mental culpability, rather than, for example, incidental possession), people convicted under them have come forward en masse to ask Florida courts to reexamine their convictions.

As described in the background to a previous brief in the case of Florida Dept. of Corrections v. Shelton, the district court held that these sorts of laws offend the constitutional guarantee of due process. Florida’s Supreme Court has now consolidated over 40 appeals resulting from that federal court decision (which itself is now on appeal). Cato has once again joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Calvert Institute for Policy Research, Libertarian Law Council, and 38 law professors on a brief supporting the rights of persons convicted under the “strict liability” statutes.

We urge the Florida Supreme Court to follow the federal district court’s lead and strike down laws prohibiting the sale, possession, or delivery of illicit substances without requiring mental culpability. That court now has the opportunity to reverse these unwarranted convictions and purge a nationally singular stain on civil liberties.

The name of the case is Florida v. Adkins.

Thanks to legal associate Paul Jossey for his assistance with this brief and blogpost.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

There’s No Drug War Exception to the Constitution

By
Ilya Shapiro

Florida is so zealous in pursuing the war on drugs that its laws classify the possession, sale, and delivery of controlled substances as crimes not requiring the state to prove that the defendant knew he had possessed, sold, or delivered those substances.

In Florida Dept. of Corrections v. Shelton, state prosecutors convicted Mackie Shelton of transporting cocaine under one of these “strict liability” statutes, the trial judge having instructed the jury that the state only needed to prove that Shelton delivered a substance and that the substance was cocaine. Shelton successfully challenged the constitutionality of that state law in federal court, where the district judge overturned the conviction and noted that “Florida stands alone in its express elimination of mens rea as an element of a drug offense.”

Florida appealed that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Cato has joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Calvert Institute for Policy Research, and 38 law professors on an amicus brief supporting Shelton’s position.

The Supreme Court has recognized only limited exceptions to the general rule that criminal culpability requires mens rea (a guilty mind). These “strict liability” crimes fall under the rubric of “public welfare offenses” and are typically what most people would not consider “serious,” such as traffic violations and selling alcohol to minors. Policymakers justify dispensing with mens rea requirements in such contexts by citing the need to deter businesses from imposing costs on society at large, or the burden that having to prove mens rea in these sorts of cases would overwhelm courts, or that the penalties are relatively small and carry little social stigma.

Florida’s legislature, however, went well beyond the normal boundaries of public welfare offenses in imposing strict liability for drug crimes that can carry significant prison terms — and thus violated the due process of law and traditional notions of fundamental fairness. As an alternative argument purporting to save its drug laws, Florida points to the availability of affirmative defenses, that these defenses (e.g., “I didn’t know it was cocaine”) to a presumption of guilty intent take the statute out of the (constitutionally dubious) strict liability category.

But a state may not simply presume the mens rea element of a crime: In Patterson v. New York (1977), for example, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors cannot reallocate the burden of proof by forcing a defendant to prove an affirmative defense. In requiring defendants to prove that they are “blameless” in these sorts of drug crimes, Florida’s statutes fail constitutional muster.

We urge the Eleventh Circuit to affirm the district court’s ruling that the offending state law unconstitutional.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Cato’s Latest Obamacare Brief

By
Ilya Shapiro

As I noted yesterday, Obamacare is moving towards its inevitable date with the Supreme Court.  Although the pace may be aggravating, attorneys on both sides are strengthening their arguments and clarifying the issues presented.

Cato’s latest brief, filed today in the Eleventh Circuit in support of 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business, sharpens the position we already expressed in briefs filed in the Fourth Circuit and the Sixth Circuit.  Our focus remains the question of whether the Constitution authorizes Congress to mandate that individuals purchase health insurance or suffer a fine.

The government has subtly shifted its thinking at this stage, however, to argue that the individual mandate does not so much compel “inactive” citizens to act but merely regulates when and how health care is purchased. Everyone will eventually purchase health care, the argument goes, and the mandate requires that people pre-pay for that care so they don’t shift the costs onto others.

We point out how this argument is a spurious misdirection, an attempt to recharacterize the individual mandate in terms that are directly contrary to the purpose and function of the overall statute.  Obamacare explicitly regulates the status of being uninsured—and not just those who seek to shift health care costs to the future or slough them onto taxpayers (indeed, the politically uncomfortable truth is that those most likely to incur health care expenses they cannot pay, the poor, are exempt from the mandate).

We argue that, regardless of the spin that the government places on it, the individual mandate “regulates” inactivity, something that not even modern constitutional doctrine allows.  The status of being uninsured cannot be transformed into economic activity via semantic prestidigitation; no matter how artfully articulated, a decision not to purchase insurance, or to do nothing, or to self-insure, is not a federally regulable action.  The outermost bounds of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause, as exercised via the Necessary and Proper Clause, reach certain classes of intrastate economic activity that substantially affects interstate commerce.  But Congress cannot reach inactivity even if it purports to act pursuant to a broader regulatory scheme.

Allowing Congress to conscript citizens into economic transactions would not only be unprecedented—as government-friendly the precedent is—but would fundamentally alter the relationship between the sovereign people and their supposed “public servants.”  The individual mandate “commandeers the people” into the federal government’s brave new health care world.

The Eleventh Circuit will hear Florida v. U.S. Dep’t of Health & Human Services in Atlanta on June 8.

Topics: 
Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

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