•November 2, 2016•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The strange 2016 presidential campaign prompts important questions about the roles of political parties and the media in American politics. Are these institutions today fulfilling generally constructive functions for a healthy democracy?

My premise is that even with generally thoughtful citizens like you and me included in the mix, the public is nevertheless a collective “beast,” largely uninformed, undisciplined.

This beast needs mediating institutions like parties and the media to help guide it along the democratic process.

I fear that parties and the media, at least as critical mediating institutions, are being overwhelmed by an untethered tangle of 24/7 television news, digital social media, and smart phones.

George Washington decried “factions” (nascent political parties), yet parties became irresistible as a way of nominating candidates and organizing support from voters, especially as the franchise expanded rapidly in the early days from propertied white males only to everyone age 18 and over today.

Nominations by parties proceeded from caucuses of a few party leaders, in the early days, to conventions of appointed, then elected, delegates, and on to primary elections in which all party registrants could vote. Read More

•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