The Contrarian

My Observer colleague Forrest Wilder has launched a new blog about the environment and energy. He’s calling it Forrest for the Trees.

I know what you’re thinking: Texas Observer, environmental blog….this is going to be a bunch of tree-hugger ranting.

Well, not really. I know for a fact that Forrest drives to work every day in a Hummer H1 with the air conditioning on full blast and the windows rolled down. He spends weekends picking small, fury animals out of his grill.

OK, I’m exaggerating. He’s not really that wasteful: he actually drives his Hummer with the windows rolled up.

But it’s not an exaggeration to say that Forrest brings a unique perspective, years of reporting experience and an affinity for graphs (but in a good way.) So I encourage you to check out his blog.

In one of his first posts, he writes about the oppressive drought we’re enduring in Central and South Texas. Apparently, July was the hottest month in Austin. Ever.

In his column in this morning’s New York Times, Paul Krugman tries to dispel some of the misinformation out there about the proposed health-care reform.

He opens with this hilarious anecdote:

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to ‘keep your government hands off my Medicare.’ The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, ‘wasn’t having any of it.’

The governor is going all state’s rights on us again.

This afternoon, Rick Perry’s office released a letter the governor has sent to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. In the letter, Perry once again threatens to invoke the “state’s rights” protections in the 10th Amendment to resist any health care reform passed by Democrats in Washington. (Perry first hit on that rather seditious idea last week.)

Instead of Obama-care, Perry wants the feds to approve a free-market-based plan that Texas officials pitched about 18 months ago.

Under the Perry plan, Texas would divert Medicaid money to allow uninsured Texans to shop for, and buy, health coverage from private insurers.

So, let’s say I’m a poorly paid worker whose not covered by my employer and can’t afford health insurance on my own. (This is totally hypothetical. Honest.) Under Perry’s plan, I would receive taxpayer money (in the form of subsidies) to buy my own plan on the private market.

To institute this plan, Texas first needs permission from the feds — what’s known in policy circles as a Medicaid waiver.

Perry writes to Sebelius that his plan “presents a strategic alternative to continued reliance on government-run health care programs and our already overburdened safety net systems of care.”

I have just one question: Does Perry not realize that Medicaid is a “government-run health care program”? Or that using Medicaid money to fund his plan isn’t reducing our reliance on government-funded health care at all? 

(Here’s a pdf of Perry’s letter to Sebelius. And, for all the policy geeks out there, here’s a pdf of the original Texas proposal from December 2007.)

His plan would accomplish one thing, however: It would shift taxpayer money from Medicaid into insurance company coffers.

And maybe that’s the idea.

Recent polls are showing Americans have their doubts about the health care reform bills under construction in Congress. (The poll numbers don’t look as bad for proponents of the reform bills as some news reports would have you believe, but that’s a story for another day.)I suspect many Americans simply don’t understand the current proposals. The folks at Politico apparently think you and I and most Americans are too stupid to understand the details of the health care debate.

(That’s no joke. The Politico reporters write: “[T]he reality is that the outcome will probably be shaped less by the intelligence of advocates on any side than by the ignorance of most Americans.”)That’s not only insulting, it’s wrong. If there’s confusion about a health care overhaul — perhaps the biggest domestic policy reform in decades — the culprits are, in large part, the reporters covering it.

The AP is reporting that Otty Sanchez — the San Antonio mother who allegedly murdered her infant son — was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare but severe affliction that can result in hallucinations, extreme paranoia, and thoughts of suicide and infanticide.

Here’s yesterday’s post on this horrific case.

Members of Sanchez’s family have said she had a history of institutionalizations for mental illness.

These revelations raise the question of whether Sanchez was receiving any emergency mental-health services. And if not, how did she fall through the cracks?

The Legislature slightly increased funding for emergency mental-health services in 2007. But before that, the Legislature had historically short-changed them, along with much of Texas’ feeble mental health system.

So far we know that Sanchez had evidently been diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. The in-patient facility that had once housed Sanchez had reportedly called to check on her. And her erratic behavior had resulted in a call to police the day before the tragedy.

Did the system in San Antonio function as it should? There are some indications it might not have.