Articles
A Billion Dollar Opportunity
by Colin Lee
The old adage goes, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Both party leaders of the Minnesota State Senate are making their best effort to make lemonade out of our state's largest-ever deficit, a $4.8 billion gaping hole in a $38 billion biennial budget amounting to over thirteen percent of revenue.
Although both party leaders acknowledge that the real problem is related to high unemployment, not taxation levels, both parties are using the event to push unpopular spending cuts or tax increases that the public would not accept in a normal year. They see a $4.8 billion disaster as a golden opportunity. Either way, these plans are profoundly undemocratic when they seek an excuse to work against the desires of most taxpayers.
While I ran as a candidate for state representitive last fall (as a Green Party candidate cross endorsed by the IP), I heard many candidates overuse a common idiom. My incumbent opponent, Rep. Mary Liz Holberg (R-Lakeville), argued repeatedly during debates that there were no more “low-hanging fruit” left to cut from our budget. In so doing, she laid the public relations groundwork to make painful cuts to core services like healthcare and education. Indeed, if we believe that the low-hanging fruit are gone, then we have to brace ourselves for cuts to critical programs. If we believe the opposite, then it is imperative that we seek every option within easy reach before we cut vital programs.
In debates, I made it clear that I believe we have not even begun to reach for some of the “low-hanging fruit.” I gave several examples of affordable, easy alternatives to existing programs. Unlike most reforms that the legislature wishes to shove down our throats as part of a $4.8 billion opportunity, the ideas which I proposed have majority support among the state's population.
We have a golden opportunity to seek cost savings in government. We are wasting millions of dollars every year on expensive correctional facilities by locking up non-violent drug addicts instead of sending them to mandatory treatment. In 2000, a few California residents realized the folly of this wasteful endeavor and passed a ballot resolution called Proposition 36. According to a UCLA study, it saved more than $200 million in the first year alone and at least $1.3 billion in the first six years.
The program achieved cost savings in many ways:
1.Treatment costs dramatically less than prison.
2.Prisoners are mostly not working or paying taxes while we also pay their medical bills.
3.Spending time in prison risks current and future employment.
4.Fewer prisoners requires fewer prisons and guards.
This bill is not just a good idea. It is a no-brainer with bipartisan appeal. However, we must learn from California's mistakes and write a better bill. Firstly, the bill needs teeth. California's program was very successful in the cases when the addicts chose to attend treatment. Attendance to a mandatory program requires some sort of punishment or incentive. Secondly, the program must keep patients in treatment long enough to achieve results. Drug users who spent eight weeks or more had the best outcomes. Thirdly, the program must easily connect into education and jobs programs, so that they can return to a normal life as working taxpayers.
Often, politicians seem to forget that a core role of government is not simply to spend money or avoid spending money, but to help taxpayers find a productive role in society and in so doing, increase the tax base without raising taxes. This reform clearly accomplishes that and its cost is far outweighed by the cost of its alternative.
I intend to promote this reform during the upcoming legislative session. I will use bipartisan connections that I made during the campaign debates this year to advance the bill as one solution to the budget deficit.
Another money-saving reform which I advanced during my nine months of campaigning was a new healthcare system for Minnesota. Anyone who cares about efficient public services must ask why Japan has the longest life expectancy (in spite of so many tobacco-related deaths and suicides), the lowest infant mortality, and one of the cheapest healthcare systems in the world. The answer is that Japan has a well-managed, single-payer healthcare system.
Health care costs are doubling every eight years in America, far faster than inflation. We currently have the most expensive medical system in the world as a percentage of GDP. While reforming how our prison system handles addiction might save a couple hundred million dollars, switching to a single, statewide medical system would save at least four to eight billion dollars per biennium due to savings from eliminating administrative waste and replacing less efficient programs. Minnesota's very costly government health programs today rely on paying HMOs and offer more coverage than most other states. Even after immense startup costs, the Universal Health Care Action Network estimates that Minnesota would still save money even in the first year.
These numbers aren't simply coming from organizations which support health care reform. Even the 2008 Colorado Blue Ribbon commission, after sixteen months of intense study, found that only one of four plans cost $1.4 billion less than their status quo and only that same plan would provide coverage for everyone. That plan was The Colorado Health Services Single Payer proposal.
Another advantage is that single payer systems have less fraud than ours. As a percentage of health care costs in America, the cost of prescription drugs adds up to about 13%. Billing fraud, on the other hand, totals almost 10%. That doesn't even count the cost of unneeded procedures. Private insurers have no fiscal incentive to prosecute fraud for the same reason that oil producers like OPEC-- higher costs mean they can get away with larger margins, adding up to more profit.
My prison reform idea is, without question, a good idea. However, reforming our health care system may be the only idea that can save America's economy. When you consider that our Big Three automakers paid as much as $1,500 per car in health care costs while Japan's automakers pay $300 per car and still have lower out-of-pocket costs, you understand exactly how badly our health system cripples American business and government.
