MORE ARTICLES

Stay Connected!

Receive the latest updates in your inbox.

LATEST ARTICLES

Defining Political Capital

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Thursday’s Globe relates that Mayor Tom Menino is considering a number of new initiatives. He states that there is a particular opportunity to get things done now: “I have the political capital to do it right now that I haven’t had in the past,’’ Menino said. So, winning 17 of 22 wards with 57% of the vote provides an opportunity that winning every single ward in the city with 76% (2001) of the vote and 67% (2005) of the vote does not?

More on the US DOE Inspector General's report

/0 Comments/in , , /by

I have been at a meeting in North Carolina with budget watchdog and fiscal conservative groups for the last two days. Lots of great ideas, but clearly being from Massachusetts sets you apart from other folks in some ways. One example is how Governors have used their stimulus money. When I discussed with them how we cut deep into our education budget and plugged the hole with stimulus dollars, they said, hey, your Governor’s being fiscally conservative. I disagree because I think you have to prioritize education. The Governor definitely does, as I have noted, if he wants to assert, as he did in a recent video (now pulled?), that he has made “extraordinary efforts to invest in… education.” I […]

Will He Make History?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Tom Menino already has by ensuring that he will be mayor of Boston for 20 years. 20 years. Boston has been an American city for only two and a quarter centuries. 20 years is a long time. Things have gotten better over those two decades, and there is a promise that the Mayor has made to use his “political capital”, as he put it, to make major changes. To make history. We are rooting for the mayor, and we hope that he can use the 15-part series that we did together with the Boston Municipal Research Bureau on the major issues facing our fair city as buoys as, in his final four years, he takes the ship of city government […]

Federal health care mandate and the Commerce Clause

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Robert Levy, chairman of the CATO Institute, is a brilliant guy. He was talking today in Asheville about the fact that conservatives and liberals both abuse the interstate commerce clause in the US Constitution, for their own purposes. Liberals have used it to clamp down on everything from growing your own produce (in FDR’s time) to promoting any number of regulations on businesses, even those that only operate within a single state’s boundaries. Conservatives have been pushing, and continue to push, tort reform through federal action. Levy’s argument is that both abuse the commerce clause. But then he noted something I hadn’t thought of: What allows the federal government to establish a mandate to purchase health care insurance? Even though […]

Rethinking EMTALA

/0 Comments/in , /by

On the drive in this morning I heard an interesting idea being tested in Fort Worth Texas (isn’t that one of the highest health cost cities in the country?).  See the link here http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local-beat/Call-An-Ambulance-Get-a-Taxi-66723887.html.     They are using EMTs as triage agents for patients who call 911 for an ambulance.  In many cases, the EMTs are telling patients, “you don’t need to go to the hospital.” If the patient insists on visiting the ER, and it is not an emergency, the EMT calls a cab.     Policymakers should re-think how EMTALA  (the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) gets operationalized and whether it needs some updating to encourage appropriate use of our scarce resources.   With the flu season upon […]