By DR. LARRY MOSES
No one asked me but…Let me update you on my quest to read the Patient Protection and Health Care Act. I have now read 100 pages. In the same time period I have also read Great Expectations by Dickens and The Tragedy of Pudd’n Head Wilson, by Twain. I took eight days off for company from Utah. I can now get back to reading the law; it beats a sleeping pill in the evening.
I am now one tenth of the way through the document and I have yet to find anything that would suggest this is a health care reform law. The only provision dealing with health care is the payment of 30 to 50 percent of a gym membership as preventive medicine. There is an emphasis on forcing insurance companies to clearly state what their policies cover and do not cover.
While that is clear in the bill, little else is. Most provisions of this law reference other laws with no explanation as to what those laws require. To understand the law, one must be familiar with or look up a myriad of previously passed laws.
I believe that any Senator or Congressman who claims to understand this law is not to be trusted about any other statement they make. I see there are a number of books available now that will explain what the law does. After I read the law, I will turn to a couple of these for an explanation of what I have read.
One good thing about the law is that it may solve the nation’s unemployment problem. In these first one hundred pages, there is a call for report after report. It will take a task force of clerks to maintain the reports required.
The appropriations to cover the costs of the provisions in the first 10 percent of the law is $11,250,000,000.
I wonder if anyone has thought of taking the more than a trillion dollars this program will cost us and use that money to educate doctors who would then served seven years in government clinics administering medicine to the uninsured. I do not know, but it would seem better than giving insurance companies the money.
No one asked me but… State law requires the State of Nevada to have a balance budget. Too bad the federal government does not have the same requirement. Thirty-seven percent of federal budget is covered by borrowing money; the state cannot do the same.
The new Governor has not let us in on his plans to balance the state budget. It is projected that Nevada will have about a billion dollars less in 2010-2012 than it had in 2008-2010. The Governor must now figure out how to provide services to the state with a billion less dollars or he must figure out how he can find a billion more.
Cutting will be difficult because all state departments cut last year. The Governor has pledged there will be no increase in taxes. How will he make up the difference?
It is rumored the Governor plans to take money from local governments to balance the state budget. Since 2008, the state has already taken $283 million from local governments leaving the local government leaders scrabbling to balance their budgets.
The Governor thinks he has found a large chunk of his deficiet in the Clark County School District. This robbing of the South to give to the North has been going on for years. A northern Governor is more than willing to continue this tradition.
During prosperous times, this presented little problem in the South; however, now it is a case of robbing from the poor to give to the poorer.
The Clark County School District has quietly been sitting on $900 million from a bond issue passed by the residents of Clark County to build and renovate schools. This money cannot be used in the general operating budget of the school district because it was raised specifically to alleviate the overcrowding that would be caused by the population growth within the county. With the recession and the drop in growth, the demand on that money is not as great as it once was and a northern Governor sees a pocket of southern money he can take and spread around the state.
The district drew attention to this honey pot in February when they voluntarily gave the state $25 million of this money to help cover the short fall last year. This was done in hopes of stemming cuts in State education funds to Clark County.
This was really a kind of money laundering scheme. The district needed general operational funds and could not use the money as such. However, they could turn it over to the State, which in turn used it to cover its commitment to the general operating funds for the Clark County School District.
According to Joyce Haldeman, Clark County Associate Superintendent, the district has committed all but $300 million of the construction fund money. Voters in Clark County approved these bonds for schools in Clark County and were willing to pay taxes to cover the cost of the bonds to improve the education facilities in the county. To use the money in any other way would be a violation of the trust of the people who bonded themselves.
Clark County residence have never failed to pass a bond issue for education, but if this money is taken, good luck to the district in passing another bond issue.
If the state takes this bond money to spread across the state, they should take responsibility for the cost of the bonds and spread it across the state as well. So much for the Governor’s pledge of no new taxes. The state has already built high schools in White Pine and Lincoln County using state funds. This took special legislation to allow Clark County residents to help pay for those schools as well as their own. However, to take our bond money and share it with other counties is a new concept.
When the School Board allowed the $25 million to go, a bad precedence was set, even if it did help stem the cuts within the district. If the Governor would guarantee all the bond money would be returned to Clark County School District’s general operating fund without cutting the districts allotment from the State, one might argue the switch and bait might have some merit, but it would still be wrong.
Thought of the week…When you become the majority leader, you have to take the party line.
Sig Rogich
Chair, Republicans for Reid
