QUOTE OF THE DAY
Chicago Tribune: North Riverside tests union contract in court
After several fruitless months of union bargaining, the village of North Riverside has taken a dramatic step to protect its taxpayers.
The village filed suit Friday in Cook County Circuit Court to seek permission to contract fire protection services with a private company.
The village’s contract with its firefighters union has expired. The village sees a contract with a private service provider — a contract that would keep its firefighters employed — as its best chance to save the village from a financial disaster.
WSJ: Doctoring in the Age of ObamaCare
It has been four years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, so I thought it may be useful to provide the perspective of a physician providing daily medical care. I am an endocrinologist in Washington, D.C., and have been in solo private practice for 17 years after seven years at an academic institution. Since 1990, the practice of medicine has changed significantly, seldom for the better.
In the 1990s insurance companies developed managed-care plans that greatly increased their profits at the expense of the physician. With the Affordable Care Act, we are seeing new groups profiting from changes to the health-care system. Entrepreneurs and hospital executives are capitalizing on organizing physicians into groups called Accountable Care Organizations from which they will take a very substantial percentage of collected income. Now that physicians are being required to use electronic medical records, the companies that develop them are harvesting money from physicians’ practices and from hospitals.
The push to use electronic medical records has had more than financial costs. Although it is convenient to have patient records accessible on the Internet, the data processing involved has been extremely time consuming—a sentiment echoed by most of my colleagues. To save time, I was advised by a consultant to enter data into the electronic record during the office visit. When I tried this I found that typing in the data was disruptive to the patient visit. My eyes were focused on the keyboard and the lack of direct contact kept patients from opening up and discussing their medical and personal problems. I soon returned to my old method of dictating notes and pasting a print-out of the dictation into the electronic record.
State Data Lab: IL, CA, NJ, TX and PA Worst at Keeping Pension Promises
IL, CA, NJ, TX and PA are the five worst states at keeping their pension promises. These states continue to increase their pension debt instead of setting aside enough money to pay retired employees.
These States promise their employees pensions but do not set enough money aside to pay them
Pensions should be fully funded yearly, since they are part of employee compensation.
Future taxpayers will be responsible for paying for these debts – for services they never received
Chicago Sun Times: Emanuel socks city retirees with 40 percent health insurance hike
Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Friday dropped another financial bombshell on Chicago’s 25,000 retired city workers and their dependents: their monthly health insurance premiums will be going up by a whopping 40 percent — in spite of a pending lawsuit and a precedent-setting Illinois Supreme Court ruling.
Last year, Emanuel announced plans to save $108.7 million a year by phasing out the city’s 55 percent subsidy for retiree health care and forcing retirees to make the switch to Obamacare.
For the city, the Year One savings was $25 million. For retirees, that translated into an increase in monthly health insurance premiums in the 20 percent and 30 percent-range.
Chicago Tribune: Teamsters file lawsuit to halt Quinn layoffs
The Teamsters filed a lawsuit today to block the layoffs of dozens of workers Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration decided to let go following a state watchdog’s report that hiring rules were abused at the state’s transportation agency.
The lawsuit infuses another element into the Democratic governor’s efforts to fend off Republican challenger Bruce Rauner’s allegations of cronyism in state hiring.
The lawsuit takes issue with the Illinois Department of Transportation’s position that 55 Teamsters holding the position of “staff assistant” should lose their jobs Sept. 30 because the agency is undergoing a major reorganization.
Huffington Post: How Obamacare Could Be A Huge Boon To ‘Alt-Labor’ Groups
Officials at Working America, the AFL-CIO’s non-union affiliate, believe they may have found a path toward long-term financial viability — and it runs through the Affordable Care Act.
The big question for so-called alt-labor groups like Working America — which have been sprouting up as the ranks of traditional unions dwindle — is how they can become self-sustaining outside the framework of collective bargaining. Unlike a traditional union, this labor group for people who aren’t union members doesn’t have a large base of dues-paying members to fund its programs and politics.
What it does have now is a deal with GoHealth, a private insurance exchange, to guide its members and would-be members into health plans available under the law better known as Obamacare. Working America, in turn, will receive a piece of the commission paid out by insurance carriers for each plan issued.
Washington Post: What’s at stake in San Francisco’s fight over how to legalize Airbnb
Airbnb rentals in the company’s home city of San Francisco have never exactly been legal. Local law — as is the case in many cities — technically bans residents from renting out private homes for less than 30 days, a time window where the practice starts to look less like subletting and a lot more like running a hotel.
The regulation is seldom enforced, leaving local Airbnb hosts in the same legal netherworld where much of the “sharing economy” thrives. This year, though, San Francisco has been wrangling over what would be one of the first big-city laws in the country to explicitly legalize homeshares (Portland, Ore., reached a less testy detente with Airbnb this summer). And the drawn-out, contentious public battle of what the law should look like captures many of the pinch points that will be at play in other cities.
On Monday, the city’s Board of Supervisors is scheduled to hold the next big public hearing on what’s often called the “Airbnb law” (its provisions, though, would extend to similar platforms like VRBO). The previous hearing lasted more than six hours. Now there’s a petition. Andopposing coalitions. In the mix — and often at odds — are landlords, the hotel lobby, worker unions, housing activists, neighborhood groups, libertarians, individual Airbnb hosts, their unhappy neighbors, sharing-economy enthusiasts and disability advocates.
WSJ: Liberating Indianapolis Schools From District Control
One of the biggest challenges facing America today is the lackluster state of the K-12 education system. More than half of American workers are not prepared for today’s jobs and therefore are condemned to declining wages, with dire implications for the economy and for individuals’ ability to thrive in a 21st century workforce.
The wages of male high-school dropouts, for example, adjusted for inflation, have contracted an alarming 33% between 1980 and 2013, according to data from the Digest of Education Statistics. Those with only a high-school diploma saw their wages drop 26%, and those with some college but no degree saw a decline of 17%. This is especially worrying because noncollege graduates make up the majority of the population—64%.
Without dramatic action to reform K-12 education, this is unlikely to change soon. The good news is that change is possible. We’re seeing it first-hand here in Indianapolis, because of bold action by the state legislature this spring, and at schools like H.L. Harshman Magnet Middle School. In 2009, thanks in large part to Robert Guffin, Harshman’s principal at the time, the school was granted autonomy from the school district’s central office and given the power to make changes, including staffing changes. The results have been impressive. Harshman has increased the percentage of its students passing math to 93% in 2013 from 39% in 2009. This occurred even as the percentage of students in poverty at Harshman grew to 92% from 72%.
Chicago Tribune: IDOT to retain 103 hired despite anti-patronage rules
Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration said Friday that 103 workers at the state transportation agency who were hired over the last decade through a process the state’s top watchdog determined was tied to politics will keep their jobs.
In keeping the workers on the state payroll, Quinn is refusing to bow to the demand made by Republican challenger Bruce Rauner that the he get rid of all workers who got hired without being subject to the state’s routine hiring regulations.
“We have no plans to fire or lay off these employees, nor do we feel that would be necessary,” said Guy Tridgell, an Illinois Department of Transportation spokesman.
On Friday, IDOT released a list of 245 people hired as “staff assistants” at the agency since December 2002, the last full month of the administration of Republican Gov. George Ryan. About 60 percent of the hires were made during Quinn’s administration, the rest mostly under Democrat Rod Blagojevich.
SJR: Fired IDOT workers sue, say they are ‘political cover’ for Quinn
Dozens of unionized workers at the Illinois Department of Transportation facing loss of their jobs at the end of the month said in a lawsuit Friday that they are being made “political cover” for Gov. Pat Quinn in an election year.
The lawsuit also alleges the state is withholding information in violation of open-records laws that the employees can use to argue they are being unfairly terminated.
The plaintiffs ask that the state be compelled to release the information and that the layoffs be delayed until the workers have a chance to dispute the terminations.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
