The REAL ID Revolt

Posted on by Timothy B. Lee

I’m not too worried about the coming of the antichrist, but I think the drive to opt Missouri out of the REAL ID Act is a great idea. Here’s a good YouTube clip of my co-blogger Jim Harper facing off against a national ID advocate on MSNBC last month:

It’s important to keep in mind that if Missouri refuses to implement REAL ID, there’s very little chance of negative repercussions for Missourians. In theory, we won’t be able to use our drivers’ licenses to board airplanes, but it’s extremely unlikely that the Department of Homeland Security would actually blacklist an entire state from air travel. More likely, if Missouri refused to implement REAL ID, it would provide a powerful signal to Congress that the American people don’t want a national ID card.

CON Job

Posted on by Timothy B. Lee

Over at our main website, Steve Bernstetter has a great article about the need to ditch monopolistic “certificate of need” laws. If you want to open a laundromat or a Chinese restaurant, you don’t have to fill out paperwork demonstrating that your services are “needed.” The decision of which businesses are “needed” is made by consumers in the marketplace, not government bureaucrats. But in Missouri’s dysfunctional health care marketplace, you can’t enter the market until you’ve gotten approval from the state. Check out Steve’s article to learn more.

Eric Mink’s Talkin ’bout Bridges

Posted on by David Stokes

Eric Mink has an excellent article in the Post-Dispatch today about the proposed Mississippi River bridge.  It is carefully researched and thorough and I agree with much of it, though not all of it.  He quotes from a study funded by East-West Gateway that concluded there will not be enough drivers willing to pay the toll to make a toll bridge a viable option.  On this blog I have previously mused as to whether we really needed the billion-dollar bridge with so many free bridges available and thought that the smaller, MLK-coupler idea could work well, as a toll or free bridge.  In the interest of brevity, I am not going to focus on the many parts I agree with, ’cause that’s boring, but on his comments about Public-Private Partnerships. 

Mink writes about P 3’s that have built other major roads around the US:

In March 2004, the Government Accountability Office issued a report examining six major P3 projects in the United States. (www.gao.gov/new.items/d04419.pdf) Overly optimistic traffic and revenue projections figured in three of the six. In its planning stages, the Dulles Greenway outside Washington, D.C., projected first-year traffic at 33,000 vehicles per day; it got 10,500. Today, after 12 years in operation, it has yet to turn a profit, and, according to a story last week in the Washington Post, "its debt has nearly tripled."

Another P3 project, the Southern Connector toll road in Greenville County, South Carolina, projected first-year traffic at 28,000 vehicles per day; it got about 14,000. Two years after it opened in 2001, Standard & Poor’s downgraded its rating on Connector bonds to "junk" status.

And using a slightly different measuring unit, the Pocahontas Parkway in Virginia, according to the GAO report, projected 840,000 transactions per month (one vehicle passing through one toll point) for 2003 but got only about 400,000; its bond ratings were downgraded. Both the Pocahontas and Dulles roads have since been bought out by Australian companies.

What Eric’s article is missing is why this is such a bad thing that some of these projects, and we should carefully note that 3 of the 6 measured projects are apparently doing very well, are not doing as well as projected?  To my, this is nothing but capitallism at work.  The roads are not going to disappear because the bonds have been lowered in status.  Who cares if the highway bond is junk if the road is in good condition, and I see nothing in this article or elsewhere that says the roads in question are in disrepair.  In fact, a new compnay just purchased two of the roads above, so someone thinks they are a good investment.  A P 3 is formed, it invests in roads, some of them dont’ generate as much traffic as expected, the P 3 needs to decide what to do now: lower the toll, etc.  This happens in capitalism and the communities still have the roads that private money financed.  So that is my main question about an overall great article from Mr. Mink.

IT + Healthcare = Money Saved

Posted on by Steven Bernstetter

Governor Blunt has been on tour recently, promoting a new system for cataloging and sharing patient information between doctors and hospitals. According to Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph:

"The amazing thing, if you listen to the hearing and the testimony," is that "there’s widespread agreement that we need to do this. This is about changing the health-care system to focus on patient needs, to focus on wellness, prevention and be patient-centric. That’s not a Republican issue. That’s not a Democratic issue. That’s a Missouri issue."

The idea is pretty simple: keep track electronically of a patient’s past medical history, current ongoing treatments, potential future problems, etc., and make those records accessible to any doctor in the state treating that patient. This will ensure a continuity and consistency in treatment, making it easier for doctors to anticipate and react to problems quicker, catching and preventing illness earlier while its easier to manage. 

The potential for savings is great, as most diseases, especially cancer, are most easily treated at their earliest stages, eliminating the need for more expensive and risky treatments later in the course of the illness. It will also enable doctors to more effectively collaborate in treating the same patient, avoiding problems with overlapping or conflicting treatments. As described by Sen. Shields:

"Every day you see the elderly person come in with a bag full of prescription drugs in a Ziplock. There may be 12 drugs in there, and three of them interact with each other, and then they wonder why they’re sick," he said.

Electronic records will be an excellent way of overcoming these difficulties, saving patients and taxpayers money by eliminating the need for treatment of side effects from prescription drug-related complications.

With the cost of healthcare in America spiraling out of control, and more and more Americans finding themselves without coverage, something must be done to bring costs down and make care more affordable for everyone. Keeping healthcare systems at the technological forefront by combining Information technologies with medical technologies will help achieve this.

More Choices 4 Parents

Posted on by Timothy B. Lee

The Post has a write up of one of the most entertaining Supreme Court cases in recent memory, which was argued on Monday. A high school kid in Alaska unfurled a banner that read “bong hits 4 Jesus” just as TV cameras covering the 2002 Olympic torch were passing by. A school administrator ripped down the banner and suspended the kid. He challenged his suspension, and won before the Ninth Circuit.

The case strikes me as a tricky one. Obviously, school officials need some ability to prohibit disruptive behavior by kids under their care. It presumably wouldn’t be constitutionally protected for a kid to run up and write “bong hits 4 Jesus” on the chalkboard in the middle of math class. But on the other hand, it is appropriate to place some restraints on school officials—who are, after all, agents of the state—to ensure that they don’t abuse their authority to quash the expression of views with which they disagree.

The fundamental problem here is that we’ve got government officials running school systems. There’s no good reason to organize our education system that way. If we had government-run grocery stores, we’d have First Amendment cases about whether grocery store employees could talk about politics in check-out lines. Luckily, we don’t do that. We give poor people food stamps and let them shop at the private grocery store of their choice.

Likewise, if we had widespread school choice, in which schools were run by private individuals and parents decided where to send their children with the help of state-funded vouchers or tax credits, the First Amendment issues in education would be far less acute. Schools would have a variety of policies with regard to political speech in school, and parents would be free to choose a school whose attitudes were in line with their own. Sure, there would still be occasional controversy within a given school about where to draw the line, but those controversies would no longer require the Supreme Court to step in and resolve them.

This is a point we’ve made before: the reason public schools invite so much controversy is that we’ve got a monolithic, one-size-fits-all education system. Decisions about how to run schools (whether the subject is evolution, sex education, prayer in schools, free speech in schools, or anything else) should be up to parents and teachers, not school district bureaucrats or the United States Supreme Court. We all have strong opinions about these subjects (personally, I wouldn’t want to send my kid to a school that taught “intelligent design” or abstinence-only education), but living in a free society means respecting the rights of parents to choose schools whose curricula are consistent with their beliefs and values, just as we allow parents to choose what their kids will eat and whether they go to church.

Mayoral Control in USA Today

Posted on by Timothy B. Lee

USA Today has a news story on mayoral control over urban schools that covers our study on mayoral control, although they unfortunately don’t mention that we commissioned the study. Still, it’s a good write-up of an important issue:

Education specialists continue to debate whether kids really get a better education under such arrangements, whether any academic gains will be permanent, and how much credit mayors should get for the successes.

Kenneth Wong, a Brown University education professor, examined test scores of the 100 largest school districts from 1999 to 2003. He found that students in mayor-controlled school systems often perform better than those in other urban systems. Test scores in mayor-run districts are rising “significantly,” he says.

However, Wong says in his study that “there is still a long way to go before (mayor-controlled) districts achieve acceptable levels of achievement.”

On the other hand, Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, says his review of previous studies finds that it’s “inconclusive” whether mayors can raise test scores more than elected school boards.

Solid data on student achievement have not been collected long enough, Hess says. And test scores also are up in Houston and other cities with elected school boards, he points out.

The story also highlights an important point about our study: some people have inaccurately described the study as a strong endorsement of mayoral control, but in fact, the study’s findings are more nuanced. Hess concludes that given the chaos now plaguing the school district, mayoral control is likely to be better than the alternatives. However, he makes it clear that how mayoral control is implemented is a lot more important than whether to implement it. Switching to mayoral control carelessly, or without the strong backing of the mayor and civic leadership, would be worse than not switching at all, as the examples of Washington DC and Los Angeles illustrate. The point of Hess’s study was not that we should switch to mayoral control at any cost, but rather that we should only switch to mayoral control if the city’s civic leadership are committed to expending the political capital required for it to be effective.

Show Me Healthy Women Needs Flexibility More Than Funds

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Governor Blunt wants to spend an additional $500,000 on the Show Me Healthy Women Program:

If approved by the General Assembly, the added funding for the Fiscal Year that begins July 1st would expand the program to an additional 1225 women next year. Women who are eligible for this program must meet specific residency, age, and income guidelines.

The current income limits by household size are here. The current limits are already very generous–women can qualify for this program even if their kids aren’t eligible for the Free and Reduced Lunch Program.

Most of the controversy over Governor Blunt’s proposal focuses on the politics of which clinics should provide the services. We should instead consider whether these services are the best target for public health spending. Mammograms are very inexpensive–usually only about $100–so they cost less than many other medical tests and treatments, such as twice-a-year dental cleaning. And mammograms are not equally important for all women, because genetic and lifestyle factors make some women more at risk for breast cancer than others.

A better way to improve the state’s health care programs would be to issue vouchers that poor families can spend on whatever services they need most. We should make state health care programs more flexible, rather than pay for a few specific services that most people can afford already.

This is one bitter commuter…

Posted on by David Stokes

Cheryl Fleming is one unhappy commuter:

Fleming said she won’t ride MetroLink partly because it consumes too much time. "I’m going to drive through other people’s neighborhoods and depreciate their roads," she said.

This quote is from a Post-Dispatch article on Rep. Scott Muschany’s town hall forum on the coming I-64/40 project.  It is always a good thing when public officials open listen to the taxpayers, so I commend Scott for holding this forum.  But Ms. Fleming’s comments jumped out at me.  As Ms. Fleming attempts to intentionally "depreciate" the roads around mid-county, she is going to quickly run into one very hard fact of transportation in St. Louis.  There are many east-west routes, but not a whole lot of north-south routes for her to choose from.  I have heard MoDOT discuss this in planning meetings.  There are enough east-west routes available that the commuter traffic during 64/40’s closure might not be as terrible as some think (no doubt it is going to be very bad.)  However, the north-south traffic situation might be far worse than people realize during construction.  Just take Downtown Clayton for instance.  There are only two ways to leave downtown Clayton going south without first traveling east or west: Hanley and Brentwood. (I am not counting I-170 as it ends just south of Clayton and will be partly closed anyway.)  Take one of these routes out for construction and the other one is going to be a nightmare.  If you move east or west to avoid it, you’ll be stuck in east-west commuter traffic before you even have the change to go south.  Ms. Fleming can drive through neighborhoods to "Depreciate" the roads all she wants, but sooner or later she is going to have to cross the closed I-64, and she can’t do that via neigborhood roads.  At that point MetroLink might look like a good option for her to get to work at her Church. 

SLPS Students Protest

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Students in the St. Louis Public Schools are protesting at Mayor Slay’s office. They’re worried that their diplomas won’t matter:

Among other items, they asked to review the mayor’s "educational plan" and wanted to know if their scholarships and admissions to colleges were in jeopardy under the cloud of the district possibly losing its accreditation. They also asked that Slay keep his promises regarding their educational futures[…]

A press release issued Thursday was rife with nebulous language. Officials "believe" students from an unaccredited district will have valid diplomas and "should" not be disqualified from admissions or financial aid. "However," the news release continued, "it is possible that students could encounter obstacles in some cases."

Whether or not the district’s unaccredited status causes bureaucratic problems for graduates, these students have been cheated out of an education. For years, the district has been unable to bring up test scores or prepare students for college.

This protest probably won’t have much effect on the district’s accreditation, just like a protest wouldn’t raise students’ reading scores or graduation rates. When a private school doesn’t meet parents’ expectations, they take their tuition dollars elsewhere. Tax credit scholarships would give St. Louis students that same level of empowerment–if the district didn’t address their concerns, they could vote with their feet.

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