PRO-CORPORATE BIAS REARS UP IN KEY MENTAL HEALTH RULING

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2022, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “PRO-CORPORATE BIAS REARS UP IN KEY MENTAL HEALTH RULING”

 

        It’s well established that the state Public Utilities Commission has a major-league bias favoring the huge corporations it regulates over consumers they serve.

 

        Gov. Gavin Newsom’s leaning is also clear from his refusal to seriously penalize companies like Pacific Gas & Electric even after they're convicted multiple times of manslaughter – killing their own customers.

 

        And the state Legislature is so obviously in the pocket of large developers and Wall Street housing investors that it insists upon cities helping them build housing for which there are no assured buyers – housing that’s often likely to sit vacant or become short-term or corporate rentals.

 

        But until now, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal court that often gets to oversee California laws, appeared at least somewhat independent.

 

        Yet, its new ruling in a case involving mental health coverage by health insurance companies puts that supposition of integrity into serious doubt.

 

        This case ultimately stems from a 1999 state law called the Mental Health Parity Act, which requires that health insurers cover medically necessary treatment for most mental illness even when insurance policies written earlier explicitly exclude such coverage.

 

This law is particularly critical now, while Newsom is pushing a plan to let authorities force the unhoused mentally ill into treatment even if it’s against their will. No one is quite sure how that might be paid for or carried out.

 

Enter the Ninth Circuit, sowing extreme confusion on the issue. In a decision this spring, a panel there overturned lower court rulings that required a large insurer to reconsider its denials in tens of thousands of claims for mental health, drug and alcohol addiction care – just the kind of treatments Newsom calls for.

 

The lower court decision, from federal Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero of San Francisco, said United Behavioral Health, manager of mental health services for the giant United Healthcare, acted to “protect its bottom line” via restrictive criteria it set up to deny claims here and in several other states between 2011 and 2017.

 

He said the company’s policies did not provide sufficient coverage for treatments within generally accepted standards of care.

 

But the Ninth Circuit’s baffling, confused decision said group plans don’t have to comply with all generally accepted care standards, but only must not conflict with them. Huh?

 

The appeals court said United Behavioral Health’s policies met that standard and it followed them when denying coverage for both residential and outpatient treatment under plans written for self insured persons and fully insured employee groups.

 

        The appeals court ruling came despite unified support for the lower court decision from the American Medical Assn., the American Psychiatric Assn. and other medical groups.

 

        They entered the case because, they said, it could set a precedent for “all insurance companies that are providing employer-sponsored health benefits.”

 

        But no matter, the Ninth Circuit said in appearing to reverse its own 2011 decision in a case where Blue Shield of California tried to withhold mental health coverage. The court back then said  Blue Shield was required under the state law to provide medically necessary health insurance for mental illness on a par with treatment for physical problems.

 

        It cited findings by the state Legislature that mental health coverage limitations “result in inadequate treatment” and cause “relapse and untold suffering” for persons with treatable mental illness.

 

        The Ninth Circuit has now thrown out this previous work, giving insurance companies an apparent license to return to the bad old days when they refused to provide almost any mental health coverage.

 

        The court’s reasoning here leaves a lot of open questions about what kinds of mental health care the companies must provide in California. Clearly, these will not be as broad in the future as they have been for most of the last 20 years.

 

        The fact this comes at a time when Newsom’s planned remedy for homelessness includes a strong mental health treatment component lends a great irony to the picture, and involves especially bad timing.

 

        But it should hardly shock anyone, considering how long and how thoroughly the political and legal apparatus in this state has favored corporations over their customers.

       

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

SIGNATURE COSTS CUT DOWN STATE’S FALL BALLOT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2016, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “SIGNATURE COSTS CUT DOWN STATE’S FALL BALLOT”

          It now takes fewer valid signatures to qualify an initiative for a statewide vote than at any time in the last 20 years – 365,880, almost 150,000 less than just two years ago.

          This fact, caused by the extreme low turnout in the midterm election of 2014, led many so-called experts to assume voters would be dealing with blanket-length ballots this fall. The November ballot will in fact be long and filled with interesting issues – not to mention colorful candidates. But the list of propositions will set no records this year despite the seeming ease of qualifying them.

          One reason: the plethora of initiatives put forward over the last 18 months has created intense competition for signatures, driving prices paid to petition carriers to near-record levels.

          If there’s one thing this clearly demonstrates, it is that a process originally designed more than 100 years ago to allow grass-roots action has more than ever become the domain of big-money interests. That’s what it means when the bounties paid for valid voter signatures rise to the $4 and $5 range, where they are today. At five bucks per John Henry, it costs almost $2 million to put a measure on the ballot, even if the number of signatures needed is relatively low. Not everyone has that kind of money, even if it only costs $200 to submit a prospective measure for naming and authorization to circulate.

          So…There will be no vote this fall on whether to require parents to be notified if their under-18 daughter(s) seek to get an abortion. This plan has failed in two other statewide votes, but anti-abortion activists wanted to give it another shot until they ran out of money.

          The notion of California declaring itself a sovereign nation (or almost) also won’t make the ballot, even if the idea is fun to contemplate. Nor will the notion of calling the state’s chief executive a president rather than a mere governor.

          There will be no vote on raising the homeowner’s property tax exemption. Nor will voters get to decide whether or not to ban sales or consumption of shellfish like shrimp. And there will be no attempt to raise some property taxes, as opponents of the landmark 1978 Proposition 13 have long sought. The Legislature will not be expanded by 100-fold, either.

Neither will there be a vote on using bullet train bond money for water projects.

          It’s uncertain whether Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to give judges more discretion in sentencing convicts will make the ballot. His petition carriers are reportedly getting $5 for each valid name they submit, eating up chunks of the huge war chest Brown retained after his low-budget, low-profile 2014 reelection campaign. But it is almost certain that one or more proposals to legalize recreational marijuana growing and use will get to a vote. And that a proposed 12-year extension of the tax increases passed in 2012 as Proposition 30 will make the ballot.

          Already on that ballot are measures to require use of condoms in all pornographic films shot in California, an expansion of a Los Angeles County law, and $9 billion in planned school bonds, much to be used for increased programming and not merely for construction.

          There was to be a vote on a gradual increase to $15 in the minimum hourly wage, but sponsoring labor unions withdrew that one after they made a deal with Brown and key legislators. One reason lawmakers were so glad to reach that agreement: multiple millions earmarked for a campaign around the minimum wage will probably now flow to political candidates. But no one is abandoning the fight over a proposal forbidding Medi-Cal and other state agencies from paying more than the federal Veterans Administration for prescription drugs.

          Also on the ballot, but placed there by legislators, is a measure to modify and virtually eliminate the ban on bilingual education passed handily by voters in 1998 as Proposition 227.

          Some have called all this a perversion of the initiative process, but if it is, it’s a distortion that began when payments for petition signatures became common in the 1970s. Attempts to ban those payments have been ruled unconstitutional several times, so if there’s to be reform, it will have to take some other form.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

PLENTY OF REASONS NOT TO TRUST STATE GOVERNMENT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “PLENTY OF REASONS NOT TO TRUST STATE GOVERNMENT”

          Californians don’t trust their state government. That’s nothing really new, but right now there’s as much cause for distrust as ever before in modern times.

          There is, of course, the scandal that sees three indicted or convicted state senators under suspension after accusations of political corruption, gun-running and/or perjury, all refusing to resign. This leaves millions of Californians without Senate representation while the unconnected cases drag on and other senators refuse to expel their disgraced colleagues.

          Then there’s the behavior of the Senate’s top officer, President Pro-Tem Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat who has vocalized in favor of action to regain the public trust in his tainted house of the Legislature. But what he’s actually done so far is order his staff to delete the bulk of the official websites of the three troubled senators, wiping the Internet clean of their press releases, some records of their votes and the list of bills they’ve authored.

    This makes it harder for the average citizen without hours to spend at it to track connections between bribes and votes, giving rise to speculation that Senate leaders are trying to protect their disgraced pals.

          And there’s Steinberg’s designated successor, Los Angeles Democrat Kevin de Leon, due to assume the Senate’s top slot when Steinberg is termed out later this year. He is mentioned 47 times in the 124-page FBI affidavit (https://archive.org/stream/813027-sealed-fbi-affidavit-supporting-search-of/813027-sealed-fbi-affidavit-supporting-search-of_djvu.txt) in the case against suspended Sen. Ron Calderon of Montebello. De Leon reportedly also brokered a sequence seeing Calderon pull out of a run for chairman of the Legislature’s Latino Caucus, while $25,000 went from a caucus-aligned committee to a consulting firm owned by Calderon’s brother, Tom, himself a former state senator.

          In short, the Senate – specifically its big Democratic majority – wants the public’s trust but kills public information and doesn’t let questions about de Leon derail his progress toward its leadership. Not the usual way to earn trust.

          So who can be surprised that a new Gallup Poll of 600 Californians shows only 49 percent with either a fair amount or a great deal of trust for their state government. That makes this one of just seven states where more people distrust their government than trust it.

          Remarkably, even in New Jersey, home to the scandal-ridden Republican Gov. Chris Christie, a majority of the public trusts state government.

          And it’s not just charges of corruption that spur voters not to trust California government. There’s also performance. The Gallup survey came within days of a report that the Los Angeles area has seen no net increase in the number of jobs over the last 25 years. Zero. That’s despite a population increase of more than 10 percent and the emergence of hundreds of high-tech startups in the coastal area now known as “Silicon Beach.” Not much achievement there by either state or local government.

          There’s also the growing public disenchantment with the California High Speed Rail project, where hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent so far without construction of an inch of track. When voters approved the project six years ago via Proposition 1A, it was clear the only way to achieve the promised two hour, forty minute travel time between Los Angeles and San Francisco would be to follow the Interstate 5 corridor much of the way.

          But that route never got serious consideration, with state planners insisting they would buy up prime farmland in Kern, Kings, Fresno and Madera counties while building pricey railroad stations in Bakersfield, Fresno and Merced, where not many passengers figure to board or detrain. It’s a classic bait-and-switch that has turned off even some of the original promoters of bullet trains in California.

    And there’s the state Public Utilities Commission, consistently setting rates at levels designed to benefit big utility companies at the expense of their customers.

          Step back and look at the full picture and you see a government that hasn’t grown jobs, hasn’t kept its word on the biggest proposed project in two generations, doesn’t look out for consumers and works to protect its own.

          Does an outfit like this deserve much trust?

          -30-

        Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

U.S. CHAMBER’S MISGUIDED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“U.S. CHAMBER’S MISGUIDED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA”

Few documents have ever been more misleading than a 116-page U.S. Chamber of Commerce report this spring on how state employment laws affect job growth, a study that can be read as a direct attack on California and its employment laws.

For just one example: The Chamber ranks Mississippi high in its “good” category, while listing California dead last when it comes to the way state laws affect both hiring by private businesses and the creation of new businesses.

And yet…only 139 new businesses opened in 2009 (the most recent year the Chamber could study) in Mississippi, compared with 10,087 in California. This state contains a little over 12 percent of the national population, but 19.5 percent of all new businesses opened here, compared with Mississippi's .00026 percent. The California number, thus, far exceeds the state's proportion of the national populace, so some business people must believe things are not so bad here.

The full report can be read at http://www.uschamber.com/sites/default/files/reports/201103WFI_StateBook.pdf.

Why compare California and Mississippi? Because the Chamber chose Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to present its report and because that report ranks California at the bottom in many categories, while laughably putting Mississippi near the top.

It’s not surprising that Barbour, a jovial former national chairman of the GOP, likely 2012 presidential candidate and forever a vocal booster of his state, immediately seized on the report to defend the fact that Mississippi has no labor laws going beyond the most basic federal requirements. No laws regarding how much notice companies must give before laying off workers. No laws on how companies handle unused vacation time accrued by employees. No minimum wage above the federal level of $7.25 per hour (California’s has been $8 per hour since 2008).

It was just about the first time anyone has ever given Mississippi a positive rating in anything. That state, after all, has the lowest per-capita income in America, the lowest life-expectancy and ranks last in the category of child welfare, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Among other sad measures.

Barbour will surely use the Chamber’s high ratings for his state as part of his upcoming campaign. Don’t expect him to make much mention of the other realities.

The Chamber report doesn’t mention them, either, but some others are reading that report as a kind of reverse guide to how well-off citizens are in the many states. The lower the ranking in the Chamber’s employment-encouragement index, generally speaking, the higher the standard of living.

Where more than 25 percent of Mississippians live below the federal poverty line of $22,000 per year income for a family of four, that figure is barely 15 percent for California, despite its having by far the nation’s highest number of illegal immigrants, who are often paid below minimum wage. This suggests that many of the jobs that keep Mississippi’s unemployment rate right at the national average of about 9.7 percent (compared with 12.2 percent here) are extremely low-paid. That's despite the jobs in three new Mississippi factories Barbour loves to tout, plants opened by Toyota, General Electric and the Russian steel company Severstal.

One thing for sure: Regardless of how unfounded and unreliable the Chamber’s rankings of employment encouragement might be, this state’s Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbies will be using them for years in efforts to soften business-related regulations here.

But there is little or no evidence to back the claim that low minimum wages equal high employment. Washington state, for one, has America’s highest minimum hourly wage at $8.55 per hour, while Mississippi uses the federal minimum which is $1.30 lower. Yet Mississippi’s unemployment rate hovers around half a percent higher than Washington’s.

It’s interesting to note that keeping Mississippi company in the Chamber report’s “good” category are poverty-ridden states like Alabama, South Carolina and Texas (where more than 21 percent of the populace lives in poverty). Meanwhile, accompanying California in the “poor” employment encouragement category are states like New York, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Where would you rather live?

There are also plenty of economists critical of the Chamber study, saying many policies it claims are bad for job creation have little or no relation to creating jobs. One example might be laws protecting corporate whistle-blowers from firing. Another could be laws like the California measure that requires employees be given breaks for meals and rest.

There is, of course, another way to look at the entire report, to wit that it is intended as a tool for the Chamber’s member businesses to use when lobbying for lighter state regulations. In fact, that’s about the only sensible way to read it – which means anyone who takes this report to heart makes a big mistake.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net