Republicans Push Ahead on Medicaid Restrictions
The Trump administration on Friday approved Ohio’s request to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Starting in 2021, the state will require most able-bodied adults aged 19 to 49 to either work, go to school, be in job training or volunteer for 80 hours a month in order to receive Medicaid benefits. Those who fail to meet the requirements over 60 days will be removed from the system, although they can reapply immediately.
The new work requirements include exemptions for pregnant women, caretakers and those living in counties with high unemployment rates and will apply only to those covered through the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. There are currently about 540,000 people on Medicaid in Ohio who receive coverage through the expansion, according to Kaitlin Schroeder of The Dayton Daily News, compared to roughly 2.6 million Medicaid recipients in the state overall.
Once implemented, the work requirements are expected to result in 36,000 people losing their Medicaid eligibility, according to state officials, though critics say the reductions could be significantly larger. Similar work requirements in Arkansas pushed 18,000 people off the Medicaid rolls in six months.
A larger GOP project: The creation of new work requirements is part of a larger effort by Republicans to limit the expansion of Medicaid, says The Wall Street Journal’s Stephanie Armour. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, 36 states have expanded their Medicaid programs under the ACA and the number of people in the program has grown by 50 percent, from roughly 50 million to about 75 million. But many red-state governors have expressed concerns about the cost of Medicaid expansion and worries about a lack of self-sufficiency among the able-bodied poor, and are embracing new limitations on the program for both fiscal and political reasons.
In 2017, the White House in 2017 gave states the green light to explore ways to limit the reach and expense of their Medicaid programs. Governors have proposed a variety of new rules, which require waivers from the federal government to enact. Kentucky, for example, wants to drug-test Medicaid recipients, and Utah wants a partial expansion and a cap on payments. Kaiser Health News summarizes the variety of waivers states have requested, which are governed by Section 1115 of the Social Security Act, in the chart below.
Legal challenges: Efforts to restrict Medicaid have received legal challenges, and U.S. District Judge James Boasberg blocked work requirements in Kentucky last year. The same judge, who has expressed doubts about the administration’s approach to Medicaid, will rule on the legality of work requirements in both Kentucky and Arkansas by April 1.
The bottom line: The Trump administration is seeking fundamental changes in how Medicaid works. Even if Boasberg rules against work requirements, expect the White House and Republican governors to continue to push for new limitations on the program.
Behind the Housing Market’s Spring Surge
The housing market is emerging from its winter doldrums: Several different measures released this morning all point to a recent pickup in the real estate market.
Sales of existing homes jumped 6.1 percent in March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.19 million — well above expectations and the best month since September 2013. “The pickup in sales is echoed in stronger mortgage applications, new home sales, and faster rising prices—all suggesting a rebound in demand as the spring selling season approaches,” UBS economists wrote Wednesday.
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The median sale price last month was $212,100, up 7.8 percent from a year earlier (compared with a 7.2 percent annual gain as of February). “It looks like the combination of limited available inventory and a decline in the share of distressed sales in the market continue to put upward pressure on prices,” J.P. Morgan economist Daniel Silver wrote.
US Existing Home Sales data by YCharts
Mortgage purchase applications, meanwhile, rose 5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in the week ending April 17, suggesting that the increased activity from March has also continued into April.
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That trend may also reflect a policy change by the Federal Housing Administration in January. “Almost immediately after the mortgage insurance premium was cut by 50 basis points, purchase applications started to climb to highs not seen since the summer of 2013,” the IHS Global Insight economists Patrick Newport and Stephanie Karol wrote Wednesday. “We expect that the rule change will support market entry among younger buyers.” First-time homebuyers played an important part in the March increase, they suggest, as they increased their purchases by 10 percent year-over-year. Investors, meanwhile, bought 9 percent fewer properties than they had in March 2014, as the charts below from UBS detail.
The housing recovery had softened in recent months, even beyond the winter’s weather-related issues, so the new data — while not yet signaling a stronger trend — is an encouraging sign for increased activity in the spring and potentially beyond. “Home sales should pick up through the rest of 2015,” Gus Faucher, senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group, wrote Wednesday. “The fundamentals for housing are solid, with average job growth (200,000+ per month), good affordability, very low mortgage rates, increasing consumer confidence, expanding access to credit, and significant pent-up demand after years of depressed sales.”
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Christie for President? New Jersey Says ‘Fuhgetaboutit!’
If Governor Chris Christie is looking for a boost to his flagging presidential ambitions, he’s probably not going to get it from the folks back home.
A Quinnipiac University Poll released Monday shows that many New Jersey voters are turned off by Christie and his presidential ambitions, with 56 percent saying they disapprove of his job performance. More than half of those interviewed say that their shoot-from-the-hip Republican governor isn’t trustworthy and that he doesn’t care about their needs. Christie’s 38 percent approval rating is the lowest he has registered since becoming governor in January 2010.
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But it gets worse: 65 percent of Garden State voters say Christie would not make a good president (vs. 29 percent who think he would do a good job), and by similar margins voters say he shouldn’t run.
Meanwhile, more than a third of those interviewed said Christie should be removed from office if it is ultimately determined that he ordered or knew about the infamous closing of traffic lanes in Fort Lee, N.J., that led to massive traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge in early September 2013.
Recently, two reports, commissioned by the state legislature and Christie’s office, failed to turn up any evidence that Christie participated in the scheme – said to be political retaliation against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee – or knew about it as it happened. However, the U.S. attorney’s office is conducting a criminal investigation of the bridge scheme; there is no indication of when that will be concluded.
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The new telephone survey was conducted April 9 to 14 and involved 1,428 New Jersey voters. The findings have a margin of error of +/- 2.6 percentage points.
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The FBI’s Lies, Damned Lies
How many more government agencies will be branded as devious, unreliable or outright fraudulent before the penalties the Justice Department imposes has teeth? Oh, wait, the Justice Department is on the hook for targeting private phone records from Fox News and the Associated Press because of so-called “leaks.”
Then, there are the scandals at the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, HUD, the Secret Service, Veterans Affairs, the Patent and Trademark Office, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Labor Department and FEMA — to name just a few.
The FBI case tops all, however, because what they did actually killed people. The Washington Post broke the story on Saturday:
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
What’s interesting about all these violations of the public trust is that no one ever seems to go to jail for their crimes. Is the government too big to succeed? We complain about Wall Street execs getting off scott free for their roles in the Great Recession. Why is this different?
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100-Year-Old Coke Bottle Is About to Become a Movie Star
The Coca-Cola bottle, with its distinctive contoured glass, was created a century ago as a way for the soft drink company to give its product a competitive edge. As the company website explains, “In 1915, Coca-Cola attempted to fend off a host of copycat brands by strengthening its trademark. The company and its bottling partners issued a creative challenge to a handful of U.S. glass companies: To develop a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.”
The winning design, created by the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Ind., worked — so well, in fact, that a century later the company is still using that basic concept to market its signature brand. Coca-Cola this year is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the bottle — and its influence in pop art and other realms — through a global advertising campaign, art exhibitions and a photo book, among other avenues.
Now the bottle and its history will also be the subject of a new “authorized” documentary, according to The Hollywood Reporter. (Coke will help pay for the movie’s marketing.)
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“When I can hold up a Coca-Cola bottle and ask, ‘is this art or is this commerce?’ and most commonly hear ‘it’s both,’ that sets the stage for an intriguing narrative,” the movie’s producer and co-director, Matthew Miele, told THR.
That narrative could include how the Coke bottle became the first commercial product to make it to the cover of Time magazine in 1950, or how it provided fodder for artists like Andy Warhol — and, especially if the film touches on today’s backlash against soda, it might even mention that the 10- and 12-ounce bottles that made their debut in 1955 were called “King Size” and a 26-ounce bottle was marketed as “Family Size.”
Miele and his team reportedly hope their documentary will premiere in November to coincide with the Nov. 16, 1915 date that the bottle design first won a patent.
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