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April 17th, 2013:

House discusses Medicaid expansion

Apr 17th, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

Sounds like a sincere effort, though whether it can get anywhere is an open question.

It's constitutional - deal with it

It’s constitutional – deal with it

Amid hours of testimony from advocates in support of Medicaid expansion on Tuesday, state Rep. John Zerwas, R-Simonton, described his proposal to create an alternative program that could draw down federal financing to provide health coverage for poor and uninsured Texans.

“I think it’s incredibly important that we do something that can be discussed and debated on the floor of the House,” Zerwas said before outlining House Bill 3791 during a meeting of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Budget Transparency and Reform. “I think the citizens of Texas expect us to have that conversation.”

“The bill is intended to not be an expansion of Medicaid,” he added.

HB 3791 would require the state’s health commissioner to craft a “Texas solution” to health care expansion by pursuing a waiver or authorization from the federal government to reform Medicaid while expanding coverage to poor adults. Under Zerwas’ proposal, the waiver must be cost-neutral and allow Texas to leverage tax revenue collected from premiums on health care plans to pay for the state’s portion of the program’s costs. It must also allow the state to save money by tailoring Medicaid recipients’ benefits, implementing “personal responsibility” cost-sharing measures, such as co-pays and deductibles, and prioritizing premium assistance for private market health plans.

If negotiations with the federal government were to fail, the bill would require Texas to set up the same program with state funds.

“This is intended to try to promote personal responsibility,” said Zerwas, explaining that the program would support many options for poor individuals to find health coverage through the private market. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all.”

The bill was left pending in committee.

State Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, a joint author on Zerwas’ bill, said it would allow the Legislature to weigh in on the best way to cover the poor and uninsured.

“Let’s take what we want up there and let’s advocate for what the majority of the people in this Legislature think,” he said. As an example, he said, the bill would allow the state to help people who want one to obtain a health savings account.

If Rep. Coleman is involved then you can be reassured the bill will be meritorious, if not ideal. At least it’s intended to be expansionary, unlike some other proposals that have been floated. But it’s still not the best we could do.

“This is not Medicaid expansion; this is Texas Plus or Medicaid Plus One,” said state Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, who laid out his House Bill 3376 at the House Appropriations Subcommittee on budget transparency and reform.

HB 3376 would expand Medicaid coverage to individuals below 133 percent of the federal poverty line. The bill includes a severance clause that requires the state to stop financing the program if the federal government reduces its share of financing below 90 percent and — “in the spirit of conservatism,” as Turner put it — also includes cost-sharing requirements such as co-payments.

“I don’t think anyone can dispute the numbers. We may dispute whether or not we want to do it,” said Turner, emphasizing that the state comptroller estimates expanding Medicaid coverage as proposed in HB 3376 would save the state $50.4 million in the 2014-15 biennium. “From a fiscal, financial, budgetary point of view, the numbers are overwhelming.”

Unfortunately, so are the odds against Rep. Turner’s bill passing. What’s best is not always politically doable, and though the opposition has no good argument, they have the numbers. What are you going to do? Let’s support Rep. Zerwas’ bill and hope for the best. Texas Well and Healthy has more.

A STEM vision for the Astrodome

Apr 17th, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Tory Gattis has an idea for what to do with the Astrodome.

Still cheaper to renovate than the real thing

Where can America’s kids go to be inspired toward careers in our country’s most crucial need: science, technology, engineering and math (aka STEM)? Something far beyond their little local science or children’s museum?

Houston could be that city, building not only on our energy, chemical, aerospace and biomedical industries, but also on our top-rated and very popular existing STEM museums like Space Center Houston, The Museum of Natural Science, The Health Museum, The Children’s Museum, Moody Gardens and The George Observatory. But we really need one additional anchor “mega-attraction” that will give us critical mass and undisputed STEM leadership. That flagship would be the National Museum of Technology and Innovation, the world’s largest engineering and technology museum – something in the class of D.C.’s National Air and Space Museum (the second-most popular museum in the world), Germany’s Deutsches Museum, San Francisco’s Exploratorium or Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. It could even be one of the Smithsonian’s network of national museums, which have started to move out beyond Washington, D.C., like Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York and the Smithsonian affiliate, National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, Penn.

Think of it as Houston’s version of Paris’ Louvre or London’s British Museum. And with the right design, it could attract STEM-related academic and commercial conferences from around the world to Houston (imagine a Davos of STEM).

By showing students stories of the great historical innovators who invented technology to address civilization’s problems, we can inspire America’s – and especially Houston’s – youth into STEM careers. They can see how they could become the next Edison, Bell, Ford, Gates, Jobs or Musk. But this institution would not just look backward at history. It would inspire kids into STEM fields by framing the great challenges of the present and future, such as the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering by the National Academy of Engineering, including limitless fusion energy, health informatics, better medicines, artificial intelligence, carbon sequestration, preventing nuclear terror, securing cyberspace, advancing personalized eLearning and more.

Where can Houston find a grand structure to house such a grand institution? Yes, the Astrodome.

The problem with most of the Astrodome proposals so far is their isolation from a bigger civic vision. If a purely for-profit enterprise were feasible, it would have happened by now. Houston’s philanthropic community needs to be inspired to invest in the future of the Astrodome (in partnership with Harris County).

[…]

County officials have already stated a STEM museum is one of the best ideas they’ve been presented for repurposing the Astrodome, but they want to see philanthropic backing. The Getty Trust stepped up to build the spectacular $1.3 billion Getty Center in Los Angeles. Ross Perot’s family donated $50 million to kick off a successful $185 million campaign to build the stunning new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas. Bernard Marcus, founder of Home Depot, donated $250 million to build the world’s largest aquarium in Atlanta. Does Houston have such a visionary leader?

We certainly have no shortage of people who could do this. The tricky part is getting one of them on board with a vision like what Tory outlines. It’s obviously a massive commitment, and you still have to find a way to bring that vision to reality. It’s also not certain that a for-profit enterprise isn’t feasible, since the discussion about the Dome’s fate didn’t really begin until after the economic downturn of 2008. However, if a commercial project is not worth doing now, it likely will never be. Any billionaires out there want to take a crack at this?

Meanwhile, today is the day that the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation votes on what it wants to recommend to Harris County to do about the Dome. Here are some more details about what they might have in mind.

Officials on Monday said it does not involve a specific project or proposal for what to do with the empty stadium, but rather a timeline for making a decision.

“This vote is not project specific or project related,” said Willie Loston, the agency’s executive director.

Loston said they have “established a timeline for within which any number of decisions could be made” and that “All the options are still there, but we’ve laid out a timeline for that to basically come to a head.”

What kind of timeline?

Loston declined to specify, saying only that “it’s probably a good time to try and bring this debate to an end” with the city bidding to host the Super Bowl in 2017 and the county receiving pressure from the Houston Texans and Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo to do something with the decaying structure well before then or risk losing out.

A spokesman for Harris County Judget Ed Emmett, noting that you never know what’s going to happen until it happens, said they are expecting a vote on a timetable that will result in the Sports Corps. essentially shoving the ticking clock into the hands of the Harris County Commissioners Court this summer.

Joe Stinebaker said the timetable is June, when the county adopts its capital projects plan, meaning the Sports Corps. would gather and analyze proposals on what to do with the dome and present the best ones to commissioners court late that month.

We’ll know soon enough what they have up their sleeves. Before we get to that, however, Hair Balls notes that the original report of forthcoming action by the HCSCC wasn’t quite accurate.

“[The Chronicle’s report] was just wrong,” Kevin Hoffman, HCSCC’s deputy executive director, told Hair Balls. “There’s a lot of speculation in the community regarding it, but we’ve been very careful and diligent in trying to get accurate information out.”

Joe Stinebaker, the director of communications in the Harris County judge’s office, was at least a bit softer in his judgment of the original story

“[They] got it kind of wrong,” Stinebaker told Hair Balls.

While we wait for a retraction — which, hey, might not come; that’s the blessing of anonymous sourcing — we’ll try to detail for you what’s actually going on with the HCSCC this week. The board will indeed meet this week, coming together to decide the next step on potential movement on the Dome. But there’s no “unspecified plan” that the public has thus far been kept in the dark about. Rather, according to Hoffman, the board will be looking for a resolution on a time-frame to have a set of plans to move to the Commissioners Court by June 25th, when the court will hold its annual Capital Improvements hearing.

“This is just the beginning of process — the process is going to be moving towards having something to present the Commissioners Court” by June 25th, Hoffman said. “We want to have the opportunity to put something before them, something well-thought-out that can either address a public purpose or have some private financing associated [with] the resolution.”

While Hoffman did say that there would be a vetting process involved with certain proposals — they’re not simply going to shunt every idea directly to the court — Stinebaker confirmed that he believed HCSCC would present both private and public proposals on June 25th.

“I think it’s a fairly legitimate expectation … that they’re going to evaluate and determine feasibility of privately financed proposals — to build hotels, to build indoor ski slopes — and they’ll say by June 25th, they’ll have everyone’s stuff on record,” Stinebaker said. “They’re also going to collate public use recommendations, how county taxpayers could pay to convert it into an open-air park, or an indoor festival venue. Or, No. 3 — they could say that it could be torn down.”

And the reason why it’s all happening now is so that there could be a ballot item this November to finalize the plan and have the community ratify it, whatever it may be. That’s faster than what we had heard before, which suggested HCSCC would make its recommendation by the end of this year, for a vote sometime in 2014. Maybe the county is taking the concerns about the Super Bowl bid more seriously. Speaking of which, and just because it amused me, I want to note that former Secretary of State James Baker has been told by the NFL that he can’t participate in the city’s presentation to the owners because he’s a celebrity and his presence might make them too starry-eyed to be able to objectively evaluate the city’s bid for Super Bowl LI. Or something like that. Good thing we weren’t planning to send Beyonce to make our case, I guess.

UPDATE: If you can get past the embarrassing typo in the headline, this Chron editorial calls for instant runoff voting to determine the Dome’s fate. I’m not sure that would provide more political cover for whatever gets decided than a “normal” vote would, but I do agree that this isn’t a straight-up yes or no question. It’s a choice between renovation (plan to be determined), demolition, and going back to the drawing board if neither the recommended renovation plan nor demolition is seen as acceptable. As such, a different approach to the referendum may be the best way to go about it.

What does Tesla Motors have in common with microbreweries?

Apr 17th, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
6 comments

Both are forbidden by archaic laws from selling their wares direct to the public.

Electric car maker Elon Musk wants to bet big on Texas – but he’s having trouble getting his chips on the table.

Musk, a South African-born entrepreneur and the CEO, chairman and co-founder of Tesla Motors, wants to sell Tesla’s electric cars directly to Texas consumers. But to do so, the company must win an exemption from state antitrust laws that regulate the relationship between car dealers and manufacturers.

State laws prevent car manufacturers from selling directly to Texas consumers and require that manufacturers operate through a tightly regulated franchise system. Texas’ protections for car dealers are among the strongest in the country. The Texas Automobile Dealers Association says the rules protect consumers, and ensure the livelihood of Texas auto dealerships. Tesla and its supporters say the laws are an antiquated legacy, and that the ability to sell directly to customers is crucial to the company’s livelihood.

“Everyone told us when we were getting into this that we’d get our ass kicked,” Musk told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday. “Well, I guess there’s a good chance that we will get our ass kicked. But we’ll try.”

Two bills — Senate Bill 1659, by state Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, and House Bill 3351, by state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D-Austin — would carve out narrowly tailored exemptions from state franchise law for Tesla. Under the measures, American manufacturers of electric cars that have never previously had franchised dealerships could sell cars directly to customers.

But the bills’ critics, including some legislators, ask why Tesla can’t conduct business like other, established car companies.

“There’s nothing prohibiting this company, in the future, from finding a dealership to represent them,” said state Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston. He argued that weakening the dealer model would hurt car owners.

“I would be wary, as a consumer, of buying a car from a manufacturer that may or may not be here in six months.”

I’m just curious – has anyone ever explained to Dan Patrick how capitalism works? What he said is true of any product or service on the market. Last I checked, auto dealerships can go belly-up, too.

Currently, Tesla has “galleries” in Austin and Houston. Employees there are legally prohibited from discussing the price or any logistical aspect of acquiring the car. Consumers who want to purchase the vehicle have to order the car from Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto.

The cars are then delivered in a truck with no company markings, per Texas law. Once delivered, Musk said, the customers even have to unwrap their new automobiles themselves, because under the law no representatives of Tesla’s in the state are allowed to do, say or touch anything related to selling or delivering cars.

To put it bluntly, this is nuts. Laws like these, in the automotive industry and the beer-making industry, do nothing for consumers, but do ensure a tidy piece of the action for a privileged set of middlemen. I can’t imagine too many people will want to buy a car direct from a manufacturer – most of us have at best a vague idea of what we want in a car, which is why we go to dealerships and take test drives and so on – but I can’t think of any reason why someone who does know what she wants should be prevented from doing business directly with the source. If Dan Patrick or anyone else is truly concerned about the risk such customers may be exposing themselves to, they can insist on including some strong consumer protections in the law that Tesla is seeking. Ideally, the exception Tesla is seeking to carve out really ought to be a general one for all automakers, but the bills are narrowly tailored to just them because everyone is already freaking out about it. The Lege can be a very weird place sometimes. As with the microbrewers, it will take Tesla more than one session to get enough buy-in on this to get a bill passed. I hope they’re in business long enough to see it happen, if only so Dan Patrick doesn’t get to say “I told you so”. See also this Trib interview with Elon Musk, and Texas Politics has more.

Don’t expect B-Cycle in the Heights anytime soon

Apr 17th, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

I know there are a lot of people in the Heights that would like to see some bike share kiosks here, but as The Leader News reports, it will be awhile before that happens.

Although running through arguably the most bike-conscious set of communities in Houston, the bike paths along White Oak Bayou and through the Heights into downtown now primarily sustain a ridership of weekend and evening recreational users, walkers and joggers. (It doesn’t help the White Oak trail that 610/290 construction is closing a big chunk of it from south of the North Loop along T.C. Jester to 34th Street for another year.)

The city of Houston’s B-cycle bike share program largely completed its second phase this week ahead of schedule and now boasts 21 stations and 175 bikes – but they’re all in downtown, midtown, Montrose, the East End and the Museum District-Hermann Park area.

And Will Rub, head of the B-cycle program, says when the third phase is funded, it’s likely to focus on the Medical Center area.

“We might start looking along sites along the Washington Avenue Corridor,” he said, “but that’s down the line.” Way down the line is the Heights, he said.

[…]

Blake Masters, president of the Greater Heights Super Neighborhood, seems strangely calm about the area being passed over so far for the B-cycle kiosks. But there’s a reason.

As part of a Leadership Houston class, Masters studied putting a bike share into Houston before the group learned that the B-cycle program was already on the drawing boards.

“You do have to start somewhere, and to make it succeed, you have to choose the areas with the heaviest pedestrian traffic and people who need to go short distances on congested streets. So far, they’re doing it right.”

He’s encouraged to hear that the Washington Avenue Corridor, which is in his Super Neighborhood, is on B-cycle’s radar. Parts of the Heights would also be “very logical” locations he said, naming the 19th-20th Street, White Oak and Studewood commercial areas. “We’d have to make sure the neighbors are on board with the plans, though,” he said.

This makes sense to me. Bike sharing is for places to which people travel without cars, or for whom it’s inconvenient to get their parked cars for a short trip. That describes places like downtown and the Medical Center, but not the Heights. The Heights is a destination, not a point of origin, for bike sharing; if you’re in the Heights and you want to get somewhere by bike, you probably already have your bike with you. The downtown bike share network, which is somewhat akin to a transit network, is beginning to build spokes out of downtown, with kiosks in Midtown and parts of Montrose. The Washington Avenue corridor, which is directly accessible from downtown, is a natural future spoke of this network. Once this extended network is robust enough to support spokes being built from other spokes and not from the hub, that’s when it will make sense to look at putting kiosks in the Heights, most likely in the locations suggested by Blake Masters. Alternately, as Metro’s re-architected bus route map gets built, or in the event of future streetcar/BRT/light rail construction along Washington, that may make Heights-area kiosks more attractive and useful. The kiosks are coming, I have no doubt about that, but the network isn’t ready for it yet. If you want it to hurry along, do what you can to make the existing B-Cycle network a success.