The Show-Me Institute’s Chairman Crosby Kemper III appeared on KCPT's Ruckus on November 3 to discuss American Royal’s move to Kansas and Southwest Airlines' push for a single terminal at KCI. Click on the link to watch the entire show.
Diversity of Viewpoints? Not at Mizzou
Last week, Heterodox Academy released a ranking of the top 150 universities in America in terms of commitment to viewpoint diversity. Mizzou finished tied for dead last.
Heterodox Academy is a collection of university professors committed to supporting intellectual diversity and free speech on campus. Its ringleader is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at New York University. Haidt’s work focuses primarily on business ethics, but increasingly he has become known for his efforts to promote civil debate and ideological diversity in the academy.
Heterodox Academy’s ranking relies on four main metrics. First, it grades schools on whether they have endorsed the University of Chicago’s principles on free expression. Second, it adds the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s rating of the school’s speech code. Third, it uses the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s rating of openness to conservative and libertarian students from its guide Choosing the Right College. Finally, it notes any relevant events related to free speech on campus since 2014.
The top five schools in the ranking are the University of Chicago, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, William and Mary, and George Mason.
The bottom five are the University of Oregon, Mizzou, Rutgers, Northwestern, and (ironically, given Haidt’s employment there) NYU.
Mizzou was dinged for not adopting the University of Chicago’s speech code, for being rated red (the lowest possible distinction) by FIRE, and red (the lowest possible distinction from ISI). It also lost points for University of Missouri police asking individuals who witness incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech to call the campus police station (or 911), banning student protests, the censorship of students, and for efforts to limit press access on campus.
Debate on college campuses is healthy. As Haidt and his colleagues have demonstrated, ideological diversity leads to more interesting and useful research and helps guard against errors driven by groupthink. Mizzou's spot at the bottom of this list is an embarrassment. The university should take the criticism seriously and work to make campus a more welcoming place to people of different viewpoints.
And Now Anthem Floats Possibility of Leaving the Exchanges
In the last few months Americans found out that several insurers, including major players Aetna and United, would largely exit the Obamacare exchanges in the coming year. In most Missouri counties, that leaves only one insurer providing any kind of exchange coverage at all. As I pointed out in Forbes, Missouri has been more or less divvied up among Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers, with effective exchange monopolies for both in many regions of the state.
Well, it's not even 2017 yet, and one of the BCBS companies is giving Missouri health insurance customers something to dread in 2018.
Another insurance giant has signaled that it could exit state Obamacare exchanges if health plans don't become more profitable in the coming year.
Anthem Inc. executives said during an earnings call Wednesday that they will evaluate the company's performance in marketplaces across the U.S., including in Indiana, where it offers insurance under the Affordable Care Act. If conditions don't improve, executives said, Anthem could pull out of some or all states where the company offers insurance.
As I've noted, while there are technically four insurers in Missouri's exchange, the vast majority of counties have only one insurer. The insurance provider in most of those one-insurer counties: Anthem.
First tab shows where there's only one insurer; second tab shows where Anthem does business.
In other words, Missouri insurance customers are already at risk today… and may be at even greater risk in the very near future, especially if Anthem exits as it's contemplating.
There are ways to make health care in this country more affordable and accessible, but unfortunately, Obamacare isn't that solution. It's time to try something different.
Tesla: Let Buyers Decide
The Missouri Automobile Dealership Association has sued to force Tesla to sell their cars through independent dealerships instead of directly to customers. Why shouldn't Tesla be allowed to pursue the business model it believes will make it successful?
Millennials Love School Choice
Millennials often get a bad rap for selfishness and self-righteousness—Times Magazine labelled us the “Me Me Me Generation,” after all—but when it comes to school choice and education reform, we’re leading the way.
Earlier this month a polling report released by EdChoice demonstrated that support for school choice policies is stronger among millennials than among older generations. When surveyed about charter schools, voucher programs, education savings accounts, and tax-credit scholarships, millennials’ support for these programs was the strongest of any age group. The table below breaks down generational support for four different school choice policies.
| Charter Schools | Voucher Programs | ESAs | Tax-credit Scholarships | |
| Millennials | 63 | 61 | 57 | 63 |
| Generation X | 61 | 56 | 53 | 56 |
| Baby Boomers | 53 | 52 | 46 | 50 |
| National Average | 59 | 56 | 49 | 55 |
The margin of support for school choice grows even larger with millennial parents of school-age children. Over 70 percent of millennial parents support each of the four school choice programs.
It is not surprising that millennial parents support these policies so enthusiastically, considering that 61 percent of all millennial parents would choose a nontraditional public school for their child if they could.
Unfortunately, policy has not kept up with parental demand. Consider the following:
- 11 percent of parents would like to enroll their child in a charter school, but only 5 percent actually do so.
- 38 percent would like to enroll their children in private schools, but only 10 percent do so.
- 12 percent of families would like to homeschool their children, but only 3 percent of parents do so.
By contrast, even though traditional public schools are the first choice for only 30 percent of parents, 83 percent of parents send their children to public school.
Another interesting find in this report is the difference of opinion between white and nonwhite millennials. While both groups support school choice policies, nonwhite respondents held more favorable views of charter schools (69 percent compared to 60 percent of white millennials) and ESAs (65 percent versus 55 percent of whites). These results are especially relevant in light of the NAACP calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion recently, and the backlash from parents that followed.
Given that millennials are a growing portion of the adult population and make up most of the parents of school-age children, policymakers would be wise to listen to their opinions on education policy. Instead of limited educational opportunities, parents want to be empowered to provide their children with the best education possible through school choice.
ER Visits Spike With Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion
I’ve written at length about the negative effects of expanding a broken Medicaid program under Obamacare. Poor health outcomes and limited care access rank high among the reasons to be wary of throwing more money at the program, but consider also this broken promise of the law: that by expanding the program, supposedly wasteful emergency room visits would fall, because more people would be “covered” by a government health plan. But fresh research from the New England Journal of Medicine shows that those ER claims have not been justified: rather than decrease unnecessary ER visits, Medicaid expansion actually appears to increase them.
The new study resulted from the Oregon Medicaid experiment, in which Oregon expanded Medicaid to a limited number of lower-income, non-disabled adults using a lottery. The expansion’s design, which involved random assignment, allowed researchers to draw more reliable conclusions about the impact of Medicaid eligibility than observational studies.
. . . Of crucial importance, the study also found that “[a]cross a variety of alternative specifications, we consistently find that Medicaid’s value to recipients is lower than the government’s costs of the program, and usually substantially below.” They estimated that the “benefit to recipients from Medicaid per dollar of government spending range from about $.2 to $.4.”
Cato director of health policy studies Michael Cannon has said that the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (OHIE) “may be the most important study ever conducted on health insurance,” precisely because researchers were able to isolate the health effects of Medicaid coverage in ways that, under normal research circumstances, is very difficult to do. These findings, then, represent a gold standard by which claims about the Medicaid program can be fact checked in key respects, including emergency room usage.
In our direct primary care paper, published last year, we looked at emergency room usage and Medicaid as well, and we found plenty of evidence to support the OHIE research team’s findings.
Perhaps most startling is recent news from a survey of emergency room doctors, taken this year by the American College of Emergency Physicians [ACEP], suggesting that the expansion of Medicaid has actually increased—not decreased or kept flat—emergency room usage. As explained by Dr. Howard Mell of the ACEP in the Wall Street Journal, “Visits are going up despite the ACA, and in a lot of cases because of it.”
ACEP’s 2015 report was not the product of a once-off survey, either. In 2014, one-third of emergency departments reported seeing more Medicaid patients; in 2015, over half reported an increase.
With the failures of the Obamacare exchanges, it is more important than ever to ensure that Missourians are not exposed to more of the Obamacare disaster. That means continuing to reject a broken Medicaid expansion that doubles down on bad policy. Without reform, the Medicaid program will continue to imperil both the health of patients and the money of taxpayers, and unfortunately, expanding Medicaid would serve to aggravate the program’s long-standing problems.
Video: Opening Up Missouri’s Healthcare Market
The Affordable Care Act has transformed healthcare across the country. In Missouri and other states, there are steps that can be taken to open up healthcare to more market competition.
It Takes a Village to Raise a Subsidy
The Cardinals recently announced plans to move forward with a second phase of development at Ballpark Village, an entertainment district directly adjacent to Busch Stadium. This phase of development is seeking, just like the first phase sought and received, tens of millions of dollars in public subsidies.
The team is asking city officials to impose an additional 1% sales tax on Ballpark Village to help fund the second phase of development. This tax is estimated to generate $16 million. But why does a project like Ballpark Village, which by many accounts is doing quite well—albeit at the expense of other businesses—need yet another subsidy? Is there a good reason why ordinary Saint Louisans should cough up more of their cash just so a successful business can expand?
In short, no—there is no good reason. All the subsidy does is increase the profits of a hugely wealthy corporation. One of the biggest proponents of the subsidy, 7th Ward Alderman Jack Coatar, even admits the project would move forward (albeit on a “scaled-down” scale) without the subsidy. So why are city officials trying to put taxpayers on the hook for yet another development?
Proponents of the subsidy might object that the additional sales tax is self-imposed, and so only Ballpark Village costumers will actually pay the tax. While that’s true, we should ask ourselves why there should be an extra tax in the first place. That is, if the project is so great, why don’t the Cardinals just increase their prices by 1% instead of securing revenue via taxation?
And while the Cardinals promise the project will create 2,500 jobs, we shouldn’t get our hopes up (as the Business Journal cautions). Many of those jobs are temporary construction jobs, and the definition of a “new job” is somewhat slippery. New jobs could be jobs that moved in from just outside city limits, or jobs that a tenant at Ballpark Village claims would have left the city if not for the subsidies the project could receive. But moving jobs from, say, Clayton to downtown Saint Louis doesn’t help our regional economy, and there is so way to prove what a business tenant would have done if not for the subsidy. In short, the “Net New Jobs” clause touted by city officials as a way to protect taxpayers appears to be just a fig leaf that will not ensure that taxpayers actually get a return on their investment.
This project offers no real guarantees to the city or to taxpayers. The only guaranteed winner is a billion-dollar corporation. Does that sound fair to you?
Which Came First: the Investment Chicken or the Incentive Egg?
Saint Louis Mayor Francis Slay recently touted the amount of money—more than one billion dollars—that has been invested in the city this year. This investment, up 12% from last year, is good news. But here’s something the mayor isn’t touting: Nearly 80% of the investment has occurred in just 5 of the city’s 28 wards.
Comparing the two maps below shows that significant investments (top map) are clustered in areas where subsidies like tax increment financing (TIF—bottom map) are being granted to developers (primarily the central corridor).
(Note: The active TIF project map reflects only subsidy dollars that have been awarded to date, not the total amount of subsidy authorized. For example, the Northside Regeneration TIF, on which work has not yet begun, is not included in the map.)
So one might ask: Are development subsidies like TIF responsible for these investments? Initially, it might look that way. After all, TIF is designed to spur development.
But although it may sound counterintuitive, overall real-estate investment has likely driven the use of TIF and other incentives in the central corridor. That is, TIF and other taxpayer handouts tend to follow investments, not the other way around.
A recent report on incentives in St. Louis suggests that TIFs get doled out in neighborhoods that are already doing well or are on the rise. If there is a cause–effect relationship between TIF and development, then strong markets appear to attract TIFs.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that I and other researchers are wrong, and that TIFs cause strong real estate markets. If that were the case, the city’s current incentive practices would be open to serious questioning. So few incentives are being used in genuinely depressed and blighted neighborhoods, and so many are being handed out in neighborhoods that are already thriving, that it’s hard to imagine any result other than a widening of the gap between wealthy and struggling areas. That is, the city’s current practices would go exactly against the original intent of development subsidies. Can this possibly be the intent of city leaders? I certainly hope not.
