The Contrarian

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.

Texas cops are out for blood, literally.

The Houston Chronicle reports that police in Texas will soon be allowed to forcibly obtain blood samples — without judicial review — from some drunk-driving suspects.

For the past year, police in several Texas cities have been experimenting with forcing DWI suspects to give blood samples, mostly on major holidays such as July 4th. These programs have received too-little media attention.

A new law — passed by the Legislature this spring — would allow police to obtain blood samples from suspects, without a judge’s consent, in certain scenarios, including “repeat offender, a passenger died or in which a child under 15 was a passenger in the vehicle,” the Chronicle reports.

I’m not a constitutional scholar — and we all can agree that Texas needs to reduce drunk-driving fatalities (we’ve been No. 1 for years) — but forced blood draws seem to really stretch constitutional rights.

What do y’all think? Should the police be allowed to forcibly drag you from a traffic stop to submit a blood sample?

Details are leaking out about the horrific case of Otty Sanchez, a San Antonio woman who allegedly murdered her infant son on Sunday and then reportedly ate parts of the child’s mutilated body, included the brain.

The AP story is here (I warn you: the story is graphic and deeply disturbing, so click on that link with caution).

Sanchez told police that she had been hearing voices and that the devil told her to murder his son. She, quite obviously, isn’t of sound mind. The AP reports:

Otty Sanchez’s aunt, Gloria Sanchez, said her niece had been ‘in and out’ of a psychiatric ward, and that the hospital called several months ago looking to check up on her. She did not elaborate on the nature of her niece’s health problems.

Police haven’t yet released details of Sanchez’s history with mental illness. But you have to wonder why she wasn’t still in a psychiatric facility.

One thing to keep in mind: Texas has hardly any in-patient beds for adults with severe mental illness. State hospitals are always at capacity and can house adults with mental illness for only a few months at a time before patients must be released.

I wonder: Was this tragedy caused at least partly by Texas’ feeble and under-funded mental-health system?

State Sen. Glenn Hegar is mad as hell at the insurance industry. He’s outraged by how much Texans are paying for their homeowners insurance. And that’s all well and good.

Except for one tiny problem: He’s partly responsible for it.

Texas homeowners pay on average the highest premiums in the country. Hegar, a Republican from The Woodlands, wrote an op-ed recently published by Quorum Report in which the good senator writes:

Appalling and unethical are the words that best describe recent actions taken by several large insurance companies in Texas. At a time when millions of Texans are struggling to make ends meet, some insurance companies have chosen to saddle hardworking Texas homeowners with double-digit rate increases. This is simply unacceptable.

It’s amazing how quickly a politician who largely supported the insurance industry during the legislative session can turn into a raging populist after lawmakers adjourn and it’s too late to change anything. I’d say he’s being afterthoughtful.

Some background: In 2003, the Lege reformed the home insurance market and created a system in which insurance companies endure little regulation. They are free to institute rate hikes whenever they wish. They simply have to notify state regulators. This lax system is called “file and use.”

Consumer advocates have been pushing more stringent regulation — a so-called prior-approval system — in which, as the name implies, regulators would have to approve rate increases in advance.

Democrats and some Republicans hoped to create a prior-approval system this past legislative session. The insurance industry fought hard to maintain the status quo. And one of their most prominent allies was — you guessed it — Glenn Hegar. During a Senate debate on insurance reform in April, Hegar lead the Republican effort in rejecting a prior-approval amendment. He said at the time that the current file-and-use system just needed more time to work.

Hegar seems to have anticipated this criticism. In his recent op-ed, he writes:

Some argue that instituting a prior approval system will solve all of our problems. The facts show that this simply isn’t true. In fact, many of the states with the highest homeowners’ insurance rates in the country have systems where the insurance regulator approves rates before they are instituted. And, most states are moving away from these prior approval systems because they lead to sudden rate spikes, which make the recent increases in Texas seem mild in comparison. In sum, prior approval may sound good, but it simply doesn’t work.

Hegar provides scant evidence to back up his claim that prior approval “doesn’t work,” save for a vague reference to sudden price spikes in other states.

Do states with prior approval systems and stricter regulation have higher insurance rates?

To find out, I did a little research, with the help of Alex Winslow at the consumer-advocacy group Texas Watch, which supports prior approval.

Hegar’s assertion doesn’t hold up.

The three most expensive states in the country to insure a home in — Texas, Florida and Louisiana — all have some form of “file and use.” (Here’s a pdf with state premium data — for all the policy geeks out there.) And out of the five most expensive areas to insure a home, only the District of Columbia uses prior approval.

California and Mississippi have high home-insurance rates (both rate in the top 10) — and they both have prior approval. But it’s simplistic, Winslow argues, to link rates solely to the regulatory system of certain state. Weather and natural disasters also are factors in California (earthquakes, fires, mudslides) and in Mississippi (hurricanes). Likewise in Texas, where severe weather means the state will always have higher than average homeowners insurance rates. But Winslow argues that consumers would get a much fairer shake if the state actually regulated the industry. Prior approval isn’t a cure-all, he says, but it would provide more protection for consumers.

If Hegar wants to blame someone for high insurance rates, he need look no further than the Texas Legislature.

The 2008 election was supposed to break all the records. After a presidential primary season in which hordes of voters overwhelmed polling stations, some pundits predicted that voter turnout in the general election would be unlike anything we’d ever seen.

It didn’t turn out that way. At least not in Texas.

The U.S. Census Bureau just released a report on 2008 turnout. The numbers have been generating headlines in Texas.

Kuffner has a great run down of the coverage (and adds some interesting insights).

As most stories have mentioned, Texas’ voter turnout was once again dismal in 2008. All hype aside, the percentage of eligible Texans who ventured to the polls last year (56 percent) was actually slightly lower than 2004 (57 percent). That ranks Texas as one of the lowest-turnout states in the country and well below the national average.

Nationwide, voter turnout remained flat from 2004 to 2008 — holding steady at 64 percent of eligible voters. If you want to geek out, you can view detailed breakdowns of the voter data here.

I noticed a couple of trends in the data. None of the five states with the lowest voter turnout in the nation — Texas included — were swing states in the presidential election. It seems clear that states not in play in the presidential race will have sluggish turnout. Voters just aren’t as excited by Congressional, state and local races.

In Texas, that trend was especially stark. The state saw record turnout in the 2008 Democratic primary — fueled by the race between Obama and Hillary Clinton. That excitement didn’t last until November. By some estimates, more than a quarter of the people who voted in the Democratic primary didn’t show up for the general election

Now, you can blame that drop off on poor turnout operations by Texas Democrats, and some people have. But clearly a hot presidential race provides the ultimate voter motivation.

That leads to an interesting conundrum: Texas Democrats need higher voter turnout (especially among Latinos) to make the state competitive in presidential races. But the data seems to suggest that the easiest and fastest way to turnout more voters is with a competitive presidential race in the state. So which comes first? Will a future Democratic presidential candidate take a chance on Texas in hopes of motivating soft-Democratic voters or will Texas Dems first have to find a way to turnout more of their voters?

Perhaps they can take a hint from the state with the highest voter turnout — Minnesota.

Seventy-five percent of eligible Minnesotans voted in 2008. And if you’ve ever been to Minnesota in November, you know it’s not because of the weather. The state did have a high-profile Senate race last year between Norm Coleman and Al Franken, which probably helped.

But the far bigger factor was likely Minnesota’s same-day registration. (The state has boasted the nation’s highest voter turnout for seven election cycles in a row.)

In the Gopher State, voters need not register in advance, and no one is locked out of the election because they didn’t meet an arbitrary registration deadline. They can simply show up at the polls on Election Day, verify their eligibility and cast a ballot.

That’s an approach Texas lawmakers might consider if they ever want to boost voter turnout.