An editorial in today's New York Times about campaign finance "reform" asserts, "The Shays-Meehan bill would ban campaign donations of unregulated soft money from corporations, unions and rich individuals."
Never mind that these donations are already regulated; there are regulations that require disclosure. And never mind that Shays-Meehan, in some versions, would go far beyond limiting these already-disclosed campaign donations to also impose limits on independent expenditures. How about that reference to "rich individuals"? The fact about the limits on political speech that the Times is backing is that there is no income test or assets test. They would apply just as equally to a rich person who wants to donate $25,000 to the Democratic Party as to a non-rich person who wants to donate $25,000 to the Republican Party. The only "individuals," rich or otherwise, that the law would not apply to would be those who own newspapers, which, under the law, would be able to print candidate endorsements in editorials and would be able to print an unlimited number of unregulated news articles bashing or boosting political candidates. So maybe it would be more accurate, in the Times editorial, to say that "the Shays-Meehan bill would limit the political speech rights of corporations, unions and the non-Sulzberger rich."
Medicaid Bailout: A news article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports, "New York is helping to lead states in a nationwide effort effort to persuade the federal government to provide billions of dollars in additional aid to help the states cover the cost of Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor." To judge by the Times report, there is not a single person who thinks that such a bailout is a bad idea. It's a one-sided story.
In fact, there are serious doubts about whether federal dollars should be used to prop up New York's health care system. The Times article acknowledges that New York "has long had among the most expensive Medicaid programs of any state." But it attributes this fact, to the extent that it explains it at all, to the fact that the program in New York "recently broadened its eligibility requirements to allow even more people to qualify."
But the high cost of Medicaid in New York isn't merely on a total basis -- it is on a per-patient basis. Steven Malanga reported in the Summer 2001 issue of City Journal that "a recent study by the Data Advantage consulting group found that New York's hospitals collectively ring up the second-highest average bills of any state in the nation -- $6,204 per hospitalization, or 30 percent above the national mean, even after adjusting for the severity of cases New York hospitals treat. Meanwhile, the state spent $7.4 billion in 1999 on hospitalized Medicaid patients, or $4,180 per patient, compared with $9.2 billion, or just $2,377 per patient, in Texas and California combined." Mr. Malanga also reported that "The average cost of training a resident in New York State is now about four times as high as at major medical centers in California or Massachusetts."
That context is missing from this morning's Times article. Also missing is a comment from anyone who might question why the taxpayers of California, Massachusetts and Texas should prop up New York's expensive hospitals. One reason might be that New York's teaching hospitals train many of the doctors who go on to practice in other states. But that's a reason to shift doctor-training costs to the doctors themselves, many of whom go on to make quite a nice living, rather than a reason to ask non-New York taxpayers to help the New York taxpayers in subsidizing the doctors-in-training.
Not in the Times: No mention in today's New York Times of the reports from Israel that one of the suicide bombs that went off earlier this month in Jerusalem was laced with a chemical weapon -- rat poison. If this ends up being confirmed, it is big news.