September 2008

Sept. 25, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Sept. 22, 2008)

Work comp redux

It’s clear from the action by a summer study committee that the Kansas Legislature next session is going to be dealing with worker compensation, one of the toughest, most politically controversial topics that the Legislature faces maybe every 15 to 20 years.

It’s controversial because nobody wants to see workers injured on the job not get the medical care they need to return to work, nobody wants to see that medical care take any longer than necessary, and nobody wants to pay more than is necessary for those results to occur.

That’s the bird’s eye view of the issue, but it quickly becomes much more complicated.

It comes down to business generally being willing to pay insurance premiums to cover the injuries to workers who were legitimately hurt while performing their jobs. Hurt when a piece of machinery falls on them? Sure. Hurt while walking in the parking lot? Probably not.

And while the circumstances of an injury is a simple but still contentious issue, there’s a more complicated issue floating around…was the actual harm to an employee or the recuperation from those injuries impacted by the worker’s age?  Should there be a deduction, say a few percent of damages paid, because a worker is older and just heals more slowly or doesn’t heal entirely?

That might be the tricky part for the mostly baby-boomer-and -up Kansas Legislature which is going to face this issue next session. Employers know that their workers age every day but the employers keep them on the job because the aging worker knows what he/she is doing and has job skills that the employer needs. Often older workers are the most reliable worker than an employer has.

Worker representatives say it’s basically unfair to reduce benefits paid to an older worker just because that worker is older or has maybe had a previous injury that is complicated by a new injury.

Lots of us drink from a chipped coffee mug, but we kept the mug.

So, how does the Legislature deal with injuries to older workers? Is there a reduction in benefits to the people who are simply old? You wouldn’t expect a 60-year-old to sprint to the top of the roof to paint the steeple, but if your contract is to paint the steeple, how does an employer decide who to send? Because, at some point, if an injury to an older worker costs an employer—or the employer’s worker compensation insurance carrier—less money based on a calculation for age, well, you send the oldest employee you have to the steeple.

It’s not something you’d be proud of, but if the Legislature next year figures that an injured a worker near the end of that worker’s career should receive less compensation for an injury, well, what are you going to do?

At some point, do workers just become too old to fix or compensate for a disability fort the rest of their lives?  That’s a pretty cold-hearted decision to make, but if you’re paying the insurance premiums you can be sure that someone has a chart that shows the difference between payments to an older worker and a youthful worker.

You wonder why the Legislature infrequently deals with worker compensation insurance? The issue is both simple and complex; the decisions cost employers real money and impact the lives of injured workers.

Yes, an interesting issue is coming up…

 

Sept. 18, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Sept. 15, 2008)

Whose earmark?

If you never considered the difference between state-level government and federal government, the current rancor over “earmarks” by members of Congress is a good place to start.

Earmarks that we’ve been hearing about from presidential candidates are essentially dedicating a portion of a federal agency’s budget appropriation to something specific. It could be a “bridge to nowhere” or it could be a water storage project or dam repair or nearly anything that members of Congress believe is important to their districts and their constituents.

In Kansas, state agency chiefs request that members of Congress from Kansas support earmarks that would divert money to important projects in their departments.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius says she doesn’t track individual earmark requests made by her Cabinet secretaries. That doesn’t mean that cabinet-level secretaries don’t ask, for example, that senators try to scooch around money within federal agency budgets to assist in Kansas projects. But, Sebelius’ staff says, she isn’t making a list and checking it twice to see how those earmarks are doing in Congress.

Maybe that’s the break that we’re seeing between the federal government and state and local governments.

For local units of government and the state, whatever members of Congress can earmark for their district or state, well, that’s money that the state doesn’t have to come up with.

On a purely federal level, those earmarks amount to billions of dollars, some that would be spent anyway, some that is new money, but if you are a mayor or a governor and some project that needs doing gets funded with federal money, it’s tough to gripe too much about it.

Even Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who lamented the quarter billion dollar “bridge to nowhere” project, canceled the project but her state kept the money that was appropriated for it. That’s money that Alaska will presumably put to some sound public use without bothering its taxpayers or using its own budget.

So while the earmarks furor is rising and politicians are beating their breasts opposing earmarks, it really comes down to definition. There are “their” earmarks, and there are “our” earmarks. Ours, of course, are better.

Is there silly stuff in those earmarks?  Sure.

Maybe that’s the test…silliness.

But, if, say, Kansas’ Department of Wildlife and Parks can get some federal help with…studying ways to improve Kansas reservoirs so that they are more useful in providing water to Kansas farms and towns, well, are you against that?

And even the silly earmarks probably make sense to someone. If your town got federal assistance in building a museum of…say, milo, and the museum brought in tourists who also bought lunch, some milo T-shirts to take home, maybe even stretched the visit into an overnight hotel stay, isn’t that a good thing for that town?

Earmarks, easy to love, easy to hate, not always simple to sort out.

You choose yours, I’ll choose mine…

 

Sept. 11, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Sept. 8, 2008)

Change vs. patriotism?

After two back-to-back weeks of national political conventions up-close in Denver and Minneapolis/St. Paul, it is becoming clear to me that both political parties have different ideas about what it takes to attract enough votes to elect a president.

Democrats, from Denver, were all about change.

Republicans, from Minneapolis/St. Paul, were all about patriotism.

Oh, both Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., are Americans, patriotic and have backgrounds in public service of some sort.

Nobody seriously doubts either on that front.

But is that the primary issue on which voters should decide whom to vote for?

For many, it probably is, and McCain spends lots of his time talking about his military service and patriotism. Other issues?  They are added later, and not in much detail.

Obama, without military service, talks about the war in Iraq, of course, but he’s spending more time talking about the economy and how to ease financial challenges for many Americans.

So, which do you want?  It’s going to be one of those classic face-offs.

Life is complicated enough for most Kansans that the great difference between the candidates is just how much time we are willing to spend back-grounding ourselves on issues that are important to us.

That may be the real decider on this election.

The war is a constant issue, of course. Improved medical care means that while there have been more than 4,000 casualties in the Iraq war, there have been 10 times that number of wounded. There are few towns that don’t have a wounded veteran back among them, either walking on a metal leg or missing a limb or with other injuries. In the World War II era, those wounds would have been fatal. Now, those wounded are among us, a constant reminder of the war.

It’s not hard for the war and military service to be an almost constant concern because we’re seeing more wounded veterans, seeing more deployment ceremonies, seeing more return ceremonies…seeing more military funerals.

But more subtle but important issues, such as health care—reducing emergency room visits which are the most expensive health-care adventures in the nation—energy, taxes, the bureaucracy and education are more complicated.

Handling those issues is more complicated and it is harder to figure out which candidate proposes solutions that will work. And, they are “occasional” issues. The uninsured aren’t sick every day, the utility bill comes just once a month, the bureaucracy everyone rails against actually does things that we apparently believe need to be done. Education becomes important on grade card day, and it’s largely a state, not a national issue, anyway.

How much attention do we pay to a presidential candidate who probably has less effect on our everyday lives than the State Legislature, or maybe even city or county commissioner?

It’ll be interesting to see…

Sept. 4, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Sept. 7, 2008)


Change & the female voter

At the national political level, this has been an interesting week for the nation’s women.

We’re thinking the term is commodity. The majority of votes in recent elections has been cast by women, and there is constant pressure on candidates to appeal to all, or some, or maybe just enough women voters.

Here are the key events for women in the past couple weeks.

• Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential runningmate. That’s the “change” that may be the single galvanizing word in this year’s presidential election, and McCain—the old white guy—was the one who put “change” on the line with the choice of Palin.
• And at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last week, the biggest advocate of “change,” Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, accepted his party’s nomination for president, and introduced his vice-presidential runningmate, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. It’s an all-male ticket, and the limited chance for change evaporated when Obama didn’t choose Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., as his runningmate.
• Oh, Obama also didn’t choose Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his runningmate.

In the Pepsi Center in Denver, Clinton got her chance to show the support she had with a short-circuited rollcall vote of the states, which Clinton ended herself with a motion to stop the rollcall and cast a unanimous vote for Obama as the presidential nominee.

I don’t know how it looked on television, or whether much of the rollcall was on the nightly news, but from the press section of the Democratic convention, the 20-some states making their traditional rollcall vote announcements was withering for Clinton.  State after state went heavily for Obama, with a few votes here and there for Clinton. It was uncomfortable to watch, almost as if Clinton was turned down for a prom date more than a dozen times in the space of less than 40 minutes. Maybe you had to be there.

The McCain choice of Palin? For the limited purposes of gender, it represents “change” for Republicans that might appeal to voters. No telling how it is going to do on the talk show circuit, but very practically, many voters aren’t spending hours Googling presidential and vice presidential candidates, and for all the polling and learned discussions, many voters aren’t going to learn or care that Palin is pro-life. Those who follow the fashion world will remember the two governors in the February issue of Vogue magazine, Sebelius in a ball gown, Palin in a designer parka and Levis, dressed as one would imagine that a governor of Alaska would dress just in case she had to wrestle a bear or shoo off a timber wolf.

But the key here is that probably as in no recent election gender, “change” and what that means—if anything—to female voters will be front and center, both this week in Minneapolis and in hindsight in Denver, where two women didn’t make it onto the Democratic “change” ticket.