There's not going to be a contested convention

So I'm watching MSNBC and Rachel Maddow is discussing potential permutations of a contested Republican convention in which Trump doesn't win a majority of the delegates.

The one problem that I see with all this talk is that Trump appears to be easily on track to get a majority of delegates, unless things change drastically in the next two weeks, which they haven't in the last two months.

The "establishment" darling Marco Rubio seems to failing to hold up his end of the bargain by continuing to lose. In fact, he's failing to clear 20 percent thresholds necessary to gain delegates in major primaries and as a result is bleeding even more delegates Trump and Ted Cruz in places like Texas.

What/where/who is this GOP "establishment" of which everyone speaks?

With Bel Edwards win, Louisiana set to expand Medicaid

A quiet legislative maneuver from last Spring combined with an unexpected triumph of Democrat John Bel Edwards in the governor's race makes it nearly certain the Louisiana will become the 31st state -- and second in the former confederacy --  to expand Medicaid.

On Saturday, Edwards, who strongly favors expansion, easily defeated sitting U.S Sen. David Vitter in Louisiana's gubernatorial run-off election (after throwing this haymaker on the airwaves). Edwards' replacement of Bobby Jindal in itself removes a massive obstacle to the Medicaid expansion, as Jindal is an implacable (and inexplicable) foe of covering 242,000 uninsured Louisianans.

However, the state legislative majorities remain firmly in GOP hands in Louisiana. This phenomenon has stalled governors who have wanted to accept the expansion: just ask Jay Nixon in Missouri, Terry McAuliffe in Virginia and (until recently) Steve Bullock in Montana.

But the good news is that the legislature in Louisiana already has acted. Well, sort of. The legislature has rejected multiple bills expanding Medicaid in 2013, 2014 and 2015. However, in 2015 both houses passed a joint resolution laying out circumstances under which the state can expand Medicaid. The resolution creates a mechanism under which -- if a new governor assents -- the department of health and hospitals will set a fee on hospital systems to fund any state portion of the Medicaid expansion. Hospitals will likely be fine with this, as the bill exempts the smallest providers and in any case accepting federal Medicaid dollars will pump a much greater amount of funding back into the system.

In short, the legislature isn't exactly pushing for an expansion, but it is devolving its power to set up a mechanism under which a governor can chose to take it. That's exactly the opposite of what Texas did in 2013, when it took away the governor's power to accept the expansion in order to make it less likely that the state would take it.

So in any case, at least we're stumbling forward toward doing the right thing -- after we've tried everything else, of course, but I'll take it.  

Finally, note that this happening is further evidence of two important points.

First, Republican resistance to the Obamacare remains strong and widespread, but continues to slowly erode at the state level.

Second, quite simply is that elections still matter. Each of the four major contenders in the Louisiana gubernatorial race, including the three Republicans, expressed openness to expanding Medicaid. However, Edwards was the most consistent and strident supporter of expansion and is the least likely to impose conditions on expansion that would hurt recipients.

How much would expanding Medicaid help in states that haven’t accepted the expansion?

Perhaps the single biggest story about the implementation of the Affordable Care Act has been the battle in states deciding whether to accept the Medicaid Expansion. The expansion is perhaps the single most important tool in the ACA’s coverage expansion tool kit. It takes 50 state-based single payer systems and drastically expands eligibility for them, which is the single largest progressive victory in politics since the Great Society. Other important Medicaid reforms drastically streamline the application procedures and eliminated asset tests to draw out formerly eligible people who might have gotten tangled up in the system or not bothered applying because the state made you apply in person on Tuesday between the hours of 2:30 p.m. and 3:04 p.m.

However, the expansion is not some magical talisman that instantly enrolls all eligible individuals. Some people will remain ignorant of the program despite the best outreach efforts, while other will not enroll for any variety of reasons. And more to the point, 24 states hadn’t fully taken advantage of the Medicaid expansion by the beginning of 2015. Pennsylvania, Indiana, Montana and Alaska have all signed on this year, leaving 20 holdouts (half of whom were in the former Confederacy – but I digress).

The cool thing that we have some real data of how ACA has actually performed on the ground over the last two years, we make some interesting dynamic projections of what would have happened had some states accepted the Medicaid, instead of simply discussing the number of people who would be eligible for help under the expansion.

I mean, heck, this Charles Gaba fellow has been counting the people who actually signed up for coverage for two years, I might as well take one shot at figuring out who would have signed up if they could have. 

To accomplish that, follow me below the fold, where I build a simple interactive regression model to project the reduction in the uninsured population in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid. Don’t worry; I’ll label the scary part where I work through the model so you can skip the simple summary where I discuss the results in plain English (but you really should read the model section, it’s rather of important and it makes fun of Bobby Jindal).  

ACA reduces uninsured in Texas, but would do more if state expanded Medicaid

Shockingly (not really), failure to expand Medicaid continues to cost poor Texans access to health insurance.

The Baker Institute at Rice University the Episcopal Health Foundation have released their latest issue brief on the latest results of the Health Reform Monitoring Survey, a quarterly survey which tracks the effects of the Affordable Care Act on individuals.  The Institute and  the Foundation implement the survey for Texas.

This report contains absolutely no surprises for anyone with more than three functioning brain cells and who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last five years.

First, the good news: The percentage of uninsured working-age adults (ages 18-64) estimated by the survey declined by nearly one third, from nearly 25 percent to 17 percent between September 2013 and March 2015. Most encouragingly, Hispanics – though still the higher proportion of uninsured in Texas – had the largest decline, with a drop of 38 percent.

This indicates that the health exchange model, supported by federal subsidies, is helping a large number of uninsured individuals get coverage.

The bad news of course, is that poor people who fall into “Medicaid gap” – those who earn income less than 100 percent of the poverty line necessary to obtain subsidies on the exchange, but higher than current Texas cutoffs for Medicaid -- are still left out in the cold.  The memo notes that respondents under 138 percent of the poverty line have increased from roughly 63 percent to 67 percent of those uninsured in Texas. This change in the two surveys isn’t statistically distinct from zero, but almost surely understates the impact of the state’s failure to expand Medicaid, because individuals between 100-138 percent of the poverty line qualify for subsidies.

Two other nuggets in the report are of interest.  First, the potential tax penalty for health insurance, also known as the individual mandate -- appears to have some effect on driving the uninsured to seek insurance. More than half (53 percent) of uninsured respondents say that the prospect of a fine for not purchasing insurance is “somewhat” or “very” important to them. (Note that the IRS is waiving the fine for households that fall into the “Medicaid gap.”

Finally, uninsured respondents overwhelming say that they can’t purchase insurance because they can’t afford it (57 percent) instead of because they don’t want it (17 percent). That’s useful because it undermines (again) the talking point that uninsured people are satisfied in their current state and that the government should just butt out.

To sum up then: Texans generally want health insurance, the ACA is effective in helping them get insurance, and the ACA would help a lot more Texans get insurance if the state were to expand Medicaid. Absolutely all these things were predicted by proponents of Obamacare.

Texas needs an income tax

So Republican candidate for Governor Greg Abbott recently accused Democratic candidate Wendy Davis of wanting to raise Texans' taxes by $35 billion.

Ho hum.

Politifact then suggested that Abbott was full of it.

What else is new?

What Davis suggested that she wanted to do was put together a board of state officials to examine exemptions from current state taxes to see if they were still warranted, most notably the gas tax and the sales tax.  She said she she didn't want to raise current tax rates, but wanted to especially examine the $36 billion in sales tax exemptions.

This is good policy, and I'm supportive of the review (particularly of a several odd-looking exemptions, like those surrounding aircraft....)

But when it comes to taxes, I (as a naive carpetbagging Yankee) would like to see Texas adopt a personal income tax; it's currently one of nine states without one. That might be political suicide for Davis right now, so I don't blame her for not bringing it up. Over the long-term, however implementing an income tax will diversify and stabilize state revenues while redistributing the tax burden to the upper class and away from more vulnerable state residents.

Take the jump for more details.....

Texas voting #headdesk blogging II: Bring your concealed-carry permit to the polls

So, Texas has a Voter Photo ID law, which is spelled out in great detail on my new voter registration card -- it takes up the entire back of the card. (Maybe that's why they don't have room for extraneous information, like say, the location of my polling place. Sigh.)

Voter ID. OK, so what's acceptable ID, Texas?

"The following forms of voter identification ... may be accepted for voting: Driver's license; election identification certificate; personal identification card or concealed handgun license issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety; United States Military identification card that contains the person's photograph; United States citizenship certificate that contains person's photograph; or a United States Passport."

Right. A photo ID from a state college or university or state agency apparently isn't official enough. But boy, if you have a gun, that sends you right to the front of the line. 

Because it's getting old to detail all of the reasons why photo ID for voting is unnecessary and discriminatory, I'll link to a quick list here.

On the bright side though, at least they accept a passport for the present -- sometimes Texas officials don't really like to acknowledge the authority of the United States.  

May God help this state, 'cuz its political leaders sure won't.

And on a related note Godspeed to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Texas voting #headdesk blogging

So, I got my Texas voting registration card in the mail last week.  I'll be eligible to vote in November, which is great.  The card lists my address, my precinct number and all my district numbers for all my relevant office holders. It does so in English and Spanish.

But - unlike every other election card I've ever received, they don't tell me where my polling place is. And they don't even tell me where to go to find out where your polling place is.

Sure, I can probably do that online fairly easily, but it's an entirely unnecessary step and adds another cost to the voter.

It's like they don't want you to vote here or something....

GOP Stupid shutdown statement contest II: Red-River rivalry edition

So we’re back with our second edition of "stupid shutdown statements"

It’s a big football weekend in the south central states and Texas and Oklahoma face off in their annual rivalry game in Dallas. Frankly, as a Big-10 partisan, I don’t trust all these new-fangled things the Big-12 is using, like the spread offense and the forward pass, both of which I'm certain were inspired by Communists. I also resent Nebraska dragging down my favored conference's collective GPA since it joined in 2011.

Still, the Red River Rivalry is kind of important, so I thought it would be nice to showcase the verbal ineptitude of several of our fine congressional representatives from the great states of Texas and Oklahoma.

Follow me below the fold as the GOP statesmen bring the (economic) pain:

Stupid statement contest: Texas congressional delegation division

I like to write more about public policy and political science than politicians saying silly things. But living in Texas not only forces you to live with terrible public policy, but a lot of terrible officials saying terrible things to advocate for terrible public policy. To avoid going out of your mind, you just have to point derisively and mock them sometimes. One of the silver linings of having to move to Texas is that there are a lot of people to laugh at (Everything is bigger here, including the class of twit political representatives.)

Incidentally, Molly Ivins (rest her Lone-Star-swilling soul) parlayed that silver lining into a very successful career.

So follow me below the fold for this week’s six contestants for the stupidest thing said by a member of Texas’ GOP congressional delegation this week.