Health Care
·
House Republicans lead effort to
enable Illinoisans to keep their health care coverage. HR 702, sponsored by Rep. David McSweeney (R-Cary), responds to
news of widespread health insurance cancellations and the catastrophic
breakdown of HealthCare.gov, the federal health insurance marketplace website. The bipartisan resolution, introduced on Friday,
November 15, calls on the U.S. Senate to enact the Keep Your Care Act, a law approved
by the federal House.
The
Keep Your Care Act would freeze and reverse the current tidal wave of insurance
cancellations and replace them with a new law that will enable Americans with
health insurance to renew their policies.
Their policies, if they keep them, will be valid under the “Obamacare”
mandate, and people in this status will be able to have insurance of their choosing
without paying a federal income tax penalty.
·
Illinoisans sign up for
taxpayer-funded Medicaid as result of Obamacare. More than 205,000 separate applications have been filed by new
patients and patient households through three separate programs affiliated with
the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as “Obamacare.” The 115,000 Cook County pre-applications
through a special “window,” aimed at previously ineligible adults without
dependent children, have been supplemented by 46,000 applications-by-mail from
food stamp recipients and 44,000 online applications.
While most of the new ACA-related Medicaid patients will have
their initial costs 100% covered by the federal government, some of the new
patients will not be eligible for full federal reimbursement and their care
will be paid for by State taxpayers.
Furthermore, even the fully eligible new Medicaid enrollees are
scheduled to start transitioning out of full federal reimbursement status after
three years.
·
Only 1,370 Illinoisans enroll in
private-sector side of Obamacare. In “opt-in” states such as Illinois,
the Affordable Care Act implements not one, but two separate groups of health
care services. Program A is a massive
expansion of Medicaid to bring in economically challenged Illinoisans who had
not previously been eligible; it is a public-sector program in which medical
service professionals see patients, provide a wide variety of medical services
to them, and then bill the State and federal governments for compensation. Program B, by contrast, is a program that
relies upon both the public and the private sector. While it is meant to be enforced by the U.S.
Internal Revenue Service, it includes a controversial private-sector
mandate. It places a new requirement on
a wide variety of Americans – mostly Americans with more means than the group
granted increased Medicaid eligibility – if they do not currently have health
insurance, or if their insurance has been cancelled. If they are in these categories, then the ACA
says that they must go to the private sector and try to buy one of the health
insurance policies that the heavily government-regulated marketplace, overseen
by “Obamacare” government agencies, will allow them to buy.
Figures released by the federal government on Wednesday, November
13 showed that only 1,370 Illinoisans had as of the end of October made their
way through the maze-like process and selected a mandatory private-sector
health care for purchase. This number
marked only a small fraction not only of the more than 12 million people of
Illinois who all need access to stable health care, but also of the more than
200,000 additional Medicaid patients added to the State’s Medicaid rolls as of mid-November 2013. However, this minimal number of successful
Illinois participants matched the numbers reported by many other U.S. states
which have been required to cooperate with the ACA.
While the current Affordable Care Act status of Illinois shows a
thriving Medicaid public-sector expansion picture, the private-sector ACA
health insurance picture is currently very different. President Obama admitted serious flaws in
rolling out the private-sector segment of the ACA in a Washington press
conference on Thursday, November 14. Meanwhile, HR 680, sponsored by Representative
Darlene Senger (R-Naperville) and 43 Republican colleagues, responds to these
problems by calling for a delay in implementation of the individual
health-insurance mandate.
Downstate
·
House Republicans point out sharp
change in U.S. coal policy. They have signed a letter to the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, pointing out the likely effect that recent
federal administrative rules changes will have on the coal industry in both
Illinois and other states. The rules
changes, which are described as responses to the external costs imposed on the
atmosphere and groundwater by burning coal and disposing of coal ashes, are
adding ongoing costs to the operations of coal-burning electric power
plants. Coal boiler owners are finding
it difficult to obtain financing to carry out major renovations or
improvements, and large coal burning-firms, such as Midwest Generation, have
been forced to file for bankruptcy.
Any federal moves to discourage coal burning could have a
significant impact upon troubled Downstate job markets, where all of Illinois’
coal production is mined. Approximately
4,000 Downstate Illinois miners dug 47.2 million tons of coal in calendar year
2012, and economists believe that more than 31,000 Illinois jobs are coal-related. The letters, signed by Representative C.D.
Davidsmeyer (R-Jacksonville), Jil Tracy (R-Quincy), and 17 other members of the
Illinois House, were described in the press on Tuesday, November 12.
Energy
·
Department of Natural Resources (DNR) says
it is working on schedule to start up oil and gas fracking within Illinois.
The State agency is working with energy production professionals and
environmentalists to draft administrative rules that will be used to govern the
multistage energy production activity.
Fracking has been acclaimed throughout the U.S. economy as the major
cause of a dramatic upswing in North American oil and gas production, with
American crude oil production up 50 percent since 2008. In October 2013, the United States produced
crude at a rate of 7.7 million barrels per day, and surpassed Russia as the
world’s number one oil-producing nation.
However, Illinois has not up until now been a participant in this trend
line.
DNR indicated on Thursday, November 14 that its fracking rules
were nearing completion. The Illinois
fracking law, enacted by the General Assembly in May 2013 as SB 1715, directs
DNR to closely supervise each fracking well under guidelines to be established
by rule with input from key stakeholders.
The actual drilling will not be allowed to start until the rules are in
place.
General Assembly
·
Illinois lawmakers could return for
December special session. The special session, which could be called by
either the Governor or the two majority leaders of the Illinois House and
Senate, would deal with outstanding business items left on the table when the
“veto session” adjourned in early November.
Issues that could be discussed include pension reform, job creation, changes
to the tax code, and extending the life of the State’s pilot “advance deposit
wagering” program that allows approved horseplayers to follow races and place
bets from mobile locations. Word of the
possible special session was distributed to Illinois House members on
Wednesday, November 13.
Pensions
·
Chicago Park District pension bill
sent to Governor. A bill to reform the separate pension system
that oversees benefits for 6,100 current and former employees of the Chicago
Park District was on the Governor’s desk this week. SB 1523, which was approved last week by
majorities of all four caucuses of the Legislature, adjusts the formula used to
calculate future changes in defined benefits going forward. Instead of a fixed escalator to provide for
increases in the cost of living (COLA), the SB 1523 formula is meant to ensure
that individual benefits will increase by either 3 percent per year or one-half
of the increase in the consumer price index, whichever is less. SB 1523 also adjusts the ages at which
current Park District employees will be eligible to retire and start collecting
their paychecks.
The Chicago Park District is a unit of local government. Although its operations are not directly
funded by the State, its operations are required to follow State law. Lawmakers became concerned when they found
that the unique pension system that covers the employees of this park district
is currently an estimated $550 million in the red. The unfunded liabilities of this one pension
fund thus account for more than $200 per Chicago resident. Actuaries have stated that COLA changes like
this can be used to sharply reduce the unfunded liabilities of a pension
system. In the case of the Chicago Park
District, the new law could possibly reduce future Chicago property tax
increases which would otherwise be necessary to maintain the solvency of the
system.
Nothing in SB 1523 affects the formulas used to calculate pension
benefits for persons with vested “Tier 1” status in the four non-judicial
State-managed pensions systems, but continued discussion of the SB 1523 formula
could indicate how these systems, too, may be adjusted in the future.
Revenue
·
Governor Quinn refuses to pledge to
roll back State income tax rates starting January 1, 2015.
The temporary January 2011 tax hike, which increased State individual
income taxes from 3.0% of declared income to 5.0%, was enacted as a short-term
fix for plunging State general revenues.
Statutory language in the law will reduce the individual income tax rate
from 5.0% to 3.75% in 2015. However, Illinois’
ongoing budget crisis has led to fears that this promised tax cut will be repealed. The current 5.0% tax rate is not generating
sufficient general funds revenues to pay all of Illinois’ past-due bills.
With these facts in mind, reporters asked Gov. Pat Quinn on
Wednesday, November 13 whether he would pledge to uphold the income tax
rollback. The Governor failed to respond
to the question, calling instead for State pension reform.
Suburbs
·
Naperville-based
OfficeMax merges into Office Depot.
Key work in the merger was announced this week, with the selection on
Tuesday, November 12 by the merged firm’s board of directors of turnaround
expert Roland Smith to be the merged firm’s CEO. The new Office Depot will be a nationwide
retailer/distributor of office supplies, competing with industry leader Staples
Inc.
One of Smith’s first duties will be
the selection of a consolidated headquarters location for the merged firm. The two former CEOs of OfficeMax, based in
Naperville, and Office Depot, based in Boca Raton, Florida, have both resigned
and left the company. Both Florida and
Illinois are competing for the designation.
In Illinois, OfficeMax his historically maintained a non-retail
workforce of approximately 2,000 to maintain the operations of the corporation.