•October 19, 2016•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

My sample election ballot offers me slim pickings in terms of votes I can cast that might make a difference. We can do better.

The presidential camps long ago conceded Illinois to Hillary. As you have probably noticed, there is little active campaigning in our state.

As most readers know, ours is not a popular election for president. Instead, it is a contest in which most states cast all their electoral votes based on the winner of the state’s overall popular vote. (Electors are apportioned to states somewhat proportionate to population.)

Thus the candidates ignore states where the popular vote outcome is, based on intensive polling, a foregone conclusion. The candidates instead focus their time and money on so-called “battleground states” such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and a few others where the outcome can go either way. Read More

DSPs: A Casualty of the State of Illinois Budget Crisis

Their full title is Direct Support Professional, and their work is challenging, rewarding, necessary and underappreciated. The Moultrie County Beacon currently employs 86 trained and certified DSP’s who provide supports ranging from daily personal care (eating, grooming and dressing) to teaching essential skills and attending to complex medical needs for adults with developmental disabilities. DSP’s complete 153 hours of classroom and on-the-job training, criminal background checks and pre-employment and ongoing drug testing. Read More

•October 5, 2016•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

This is another in a periodic series of columns on “politics and policy in Illinois.”

I tell my students that policy advocates appeal to any level or branch of government that might be responsive, including the courts.
The Illinois state judiciary has not, however, generally inserted itself into state government policy and management.

As John Marshall Law School professor Ann Lousin observes, “The Illinois Supreme Court has a good sensitivity about the separation of powers.”

“The Illinois Supreme Court is not, for example, going to touch school funding because the legislature won’t touch it,” Lousin notes, to illustrate. “The court avoids making decisions where the branch cannot enforce relief.”

On the other hand, policy advocates in Illinois have been highly successful in the federal district courts, which have approved 80 “consent decrees” since the 1970s, according to a recent count by the governor’s office. Read More

•September 28, 2016•

By Trudy Lieberman
Rural Health News Service

Recently I got a note from a reader of these columns who lives in Warren, Ohio. He had seen conflicting reports about next year’s insurance premiums. The man was skeptical of an article he had read, which reported that insurance premiums are cheaper than they were in 2010, and that the Affordable Care Act will cost $2.6 trillion less than estimated. Somehow that didn’t compute with what he had read about premiums going up.

He was right to be skeptical, and his comments are important because they zoom right in on the spin that’s been circulated by various interest groups that want to portray Obamacare’s upcoming fourth-year enrollment season as a gloom-and-doom disaster in the making or the federal government’s not-to-worry scenario insisting health insurance really is affordable.

There’s been much media speculation about high premium rates, and for the most part, the press has favored the not-to-worry scenario. Media have passed that message along with comments such as this from Anne Filipic, the head of Enroll America, a group that signs up people for Obamacare, who argued high premiums are a predictable course correction and a “one-time resetting.” Or this from Kathryn Martin, acting assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who told reporters, “Headline rate increases do not reflect what consumers actually pay. The vast majority would continue to have affordable options.”  Read More

•September 21, 2016•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

In the wake of the recent embarrassingly political, 4-3 partisan decision by the Illinois Supreme Court Democratic majority to reject a proposed voter initiative to reduce legislative district gerrymandering, savvy political observer Rich Miller has suggested the “nuclear option” of a voter initiative that would simply abolish the Illinois House altogether!

The idea is not so outlandish as one might think at first blush.

First, such a voter initiative would be constitutional, that is, it would meet the state high court’s wrong-headed requirement that initiatives be both “structural and procedural.”

Second, many democratic governments operate quite nicely with unicameral legislative bodies. Readers probably know that Nebraska has a one-house legislature, which they call the senate. [And that state appears to have avoided the dysfunction for which Illinois has become noted.]

Costa Rica is probably the healthiest democratic society in the Americas south of the U.S., other than maybe Uruguay. When I was that sunny clime some years ago, I visited their unicameral “assembly.” And the 30 states of Mexico also operate with unicameral legislatures. Read More