“EVERYONE ELSE ABOUT TO START SUBSIDIZING MANSION PAYOUTS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“EVERYONE ELSE ABOUT TO START SUBSIDIZING MANSION PAYOUTS”

 

Here’s the likely outcome of the April 8 hearing set to follow the California insurance commissioner’s tentative mid-March approval of a 22 percent average rate increase for customers of State Farm General Insurance Co., this state’s largest carrier of home insurance policies:

 

All other Californians will soon be subsidizing the rebuilding of myriad mansions burned down in the January firestorm that ravaged much of Los Angeles County. Plus a good number of less luxurious homes, too.

 

Commissioner Ricardo Lara tentatively approved the average 22 percent rate hike for State Farm customers, with similar increases sure to come also for customers of other insurance companies like Mercury, Safeco, Travelers, Allstate and more.

 

These increases will hit virtually everyone: They include a 38 percent hike for rental properties, with a 15 percent raise for renters’ insurance on contents and for condominium owners.

 

The hearing will see opposition from several consumer groups, most prominently the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group. The eventual outcome may end with some increases dropping a percentage point or two. As it stands, what Lara tentatively approved amounts to an average of about $600 per year for every policyholder in the state.

 

Make no mistake, this is a pure subsidy for State Farm and the folks it insures. Perhaps the archetype claim from the January fires was for a destroyed home on two contiguous ocean-front lots in Malibu that sold three years ago for $85 million.

 

Trying to put up a show of looking after customers’ interests, Lara said he will expect State Farm to stop canceling homeowner policies, a practice that led to intense distress for some victims of the latest crop of large wildfires because many were forced after cancellations to turn to the state’s expensive and not very comprehensive last-resort insurer, the California Fair Plan.

 

Lara also said he will expect State Farm General’s parent company, Illinois-based State Farm Mutual, to contribute hundreds of millions, perhaps as much as $500 million, from reserves long held by the parent company. That would be a tiny fraction of the company’s actual reserves, which in January stood at a minimum of $134 billion, with some estimates as high as $192 billion.

 

So people who live in areas that have never seen a wildfire and are not likely ever to experience one will soon contribute to payouts for owners of large homes in Malibu and Pacific Palisades.

 

What’s more, State Farm and other insurance companies stand to get much of their money back via the current spate of lawsuits blaming Southern California Edison Co. transmission lines for sparking the Eaton fire that incinerated much of Altadena, about 40 miles east of Pacific Palisades. Once insurance companies pay their policyholders off in that area, they will inherit any customer claims against the big utility.

 

Then there’s re-insurance, routinely bought by insurance companies to insure themselves against big losses. That will cover more billions of dollars for them.

 

None of that will much mitigate what Lara likely will allow the insurance companies to add to customer premiums starting in May. These other factors making life easier for the insurance industry have played little or no role in price increases assessed after previous wildfires hit other parts of California through the last eight years.

 

Meanwhile, the closest customers have heard to the truth about all this came from a since-fired State Farm executive who was secretly recorded saying his company uses policy cancellations as a ploy to drive prices up in California and other disaster-prone states.

 

Haden Kirkpatrick, until recently State Farm’s vice president for innovation and venture capital, was fired immediately after he became the first completely truthful insurance executive this nation had seen in decades.

 

But Lara showed no sign of paying the slightest heed to anything Kirkpatrick admitted. Which should come as no surprise from a state official who promised never to accept campaign donations from the companies he regulates and then took large sums, only to be shamed into returning the money later.

 

The entire exercise is shameful and demonstrates why, when Lara leaves office after next year, his replacement must be far more consumer friendly.

 

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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

THE LOOMING THREAT TO MANY AMERICAN RIGHTS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “THE LOOMING THREAT TO MANY AMERICAN RIGHTS”

 

        Every day, major pundits and others – mostly on the liberal Democratic side of the ledger – bewail the threat to democracy in new laws adopted by several Republican-controlled states that appear to restrict minority voting rights.

 

        They’re mostly correct. With no proof, backers of those new laws assume every person living in this country legally has the government documents the new laws require before many voters can vote by mail, vote early or even go to an ordinary polling place.

 

        But there’s a far bigger threat waiting in the weeds, one that could threaten not only voting rights, but many others assured by the federal and state constitutions, from abortion on demand to emergency room health care and much more.

       
        This threat goes by the name of “Convention of the States Action.” It is the work of far-right activists who claim they mean no harm to anyone, but want a new constitutional convention similar to the one conducted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, several years after the Revolutionary War.

 

        This putative new convention is authorized by Article V of the existing Constitution and would have the authority to change almost everything in that most hallowed blueprint of American democracy, so long as 38 state legislatures agree.

 

        Right now, that seems like an impossible number. But only 34 legislatures need to vote for a convention for it to happen, and 18 have already approved, most recently West Virginia, whose state House and Senate okayed the convention on just one day in February. One legislative chamber in each of eight other states has also approved.

 

        So a new constitutional convention is now more than halfway to reality, with no time limit on when other states can join the effort and no time limit on when the other halves of partially-approving states can vote.

 

        So far, the effort looks like a purely GOP thing, with approving states including Florida, Texas, Alabama and more than a dozen other GOP-controlled states. No Democratically-run state is on the list.

 

        Individual backers include Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Donald Trump cabinet member Ben Carson, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and ex-Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. That’s essentially a list of conservative Republican luminaries.

 

        Sponsors of the potential convention say it would be strictly limited to discussing Constitutional amendments that “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, impose fiscal restraints and place term limits on federal officials.”

 

        But there is nothing in Article V limiting what a new convention could pass.

 

        How many Americans today believe the current Bill of Rights, with its freedoms of speech, press and assembly, plus its ban on formal connections between church and state would survive in a convention dominated by Republicans loyal to ex-President Trump?

 

        Even if the convention were to observe the limits its sponsors suggest, it’s plain that health care, freedom of movement between states, allowing states to make almost all land use decisions within their borders and the basic rights guaranteed today have fiscal implications. A convention could pass an amendment banning abortions that would supersede state laws like those assuring the procedures would continue in California even if the Supreme Court negates the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

 

        It could also end birthright citizenship, under which anyone born here is automatically a citizen, wherever their parents hailed from. That could be done in the name of ending immigration by pregnant women, the rationale being that schooling their children here is a public expense.

 

        So in reality, there would be no limits on such a convention and its products, if 38 states ratify them. Article V sets no time limit for ratification, so these things could be voted on in various states years or decades down the line, when political leanings in many places may have changed.

 

        There’s a reason why no constitutional convention has been held since the original one: A general sense of the danger in letting anyone tinker with or reverse basic American principles. That’s exactly what a convention of the states could bring, and that’s why it’s such a dangerous possibility.

       

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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

LIGHT RAIL DOING FINE; NOT SO FOR BIGGER TRAINS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 8,  2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “LIGHT RAIL DOING FINE; NOT SO FOR BIGGER TRAINS”

          A little more than one month from now, the Metro Expo Line’s final portion will open for business, making it possible to take trains from the far eastern portions of Los Angeles County to the often-crowded beach in Santa Monica. This will come barely two months after a new section of Metro’s Gold Line opened, allowing a simple, cheap 31-mile jaunt from downtown Los Angeles to Azusa.

          Meanwhile, in Sonoma and Marin counties, test trains are running on another light rail line, between Santa Rosa and San Rafael, with high hopes of relieving some of the heavy traffic on parallel route U.S. 101.

          Barely any protests have afflicted any of these projects, which together will have cost many billions of dollars.

          Meanwhile, protests are vocal and persistent wherever the state’s High Speed Rail Authority plans to build bullet train tracks, bridges or stations, even where it plans to share rights of way with other trains, as on its planned course on the San Francisco Peninsula.

          There’s also massive resistance to a plan for running up to five freight trains weekly through the East Bay area and Monterey County to a Phillips 66 oil refinery in Santa Maria, which supplies much of the Central Coast.

          These trains would bring crude oil to the refinery, something Houston-based ConocoPhillips insists is needed because of declines in production of California crude oil. Oil trains would run from the Carquinez Strait near Benicia through much of the East Bay, raising fears of derailments and hazardous waste problems in populous areas. So far this year, there have been at least three derailments of oil trains in other parts of the nation, with hundreds of temporary evacuations resulting. Another train derailed only last month in the East Bay.

          Loud as those protests are, they lack the potency of the opposition to the plans of the High Speed Rail Authority, headed by former Pacific Gas & Electric executive Dan Richard, who also spent years as an aide to Gov. Jerry Brown.

          The most prominent current anti-HSR push is a proposed November ballot initiative sponsored by Republican state Sen. Bob Huff of San Dimas and state Board of Equalization member George Runner, which seeks to switch almost $10 billion in remaining, unsold, bonds from the bullet train to water projects, including new reservoirs and desalination plants.

          That initiative, which appears likely to make the ballot, is in large part the result of the High Speed Rail Authority’s insistence on a route that makes no sense – meandering north from Los Angeles through the Antelope Valley, then west through the Mojave Desert to Bakersfield before turning north again for a run past and through farms and towns in the Central Valley. When it’s done with all that, the bullet train’s projected path would turn west again over the Pacheco Pass to Gilroy and then veer north to San Jose before heading up the Peninsula along existing CalTrain routes to San Francisco.

          It’s a convoluted route that – if built out – will add at least half an hour of travel time to a much simpler route that was available: Heading almost straight north from the Bakersfield area along the existing Interstate 5 right of way, where plenty of median land is available for most of the run. Rather than cutting over the Pacheco Pass, it would be far simpler to continue a little farther north to the windswept Altamont Pass, where a turn west could quickly lead to a link with the Bay Area Rapid Transit System and special BART express trains to San Francisco.

          That route would cost untold billions of dollars less and be far more direct and faster. But the illogical High Speed Rail Authority opted for the least sensible, most costly route, inviting the lawsuits and public outcries that have now set its timetable back by at least three years. The Huff-Runner measure might just make it extinct.

          The difference between the fates of the light rail projects and this ultra-heavy rail couldn’t be clearer: Because the light rail systems heeded where potential passengers want to go and chose direct, non-controversial routes, they are being completed on time, or close.

          Meanwhile, the bullet train and the old train plans might just pay the price for making little or no sense and/or wasting money: Extinction.

         
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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

WILL MANSON FAMILY KILLER EVENTUALLY GO FREE?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2014 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “WILL MANSON FAMILY KILLER EVENTUALLY GO FREE?”

          If it seemed like déjà vu all over again the other day when the state’s parole board issued a decision that could free a leading disciple of perhaps the most vicious killer California has ever seen, that’s because it was.

    The order marked the third time in the last five years that the Board of Parole Hearings has tried to release convicted Manson Family murderer Bruce Davis. The previous two attempts were reversed, first by ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and then by current Gov. Jerry Brown.

          This being an election year, it’s almost inconceivable Brown would allow Davis to be released this time, either. Going along with the parole board now would open Brown to Republican charges of being soft on crime, something he’s never been.

          It’s been more than 44 years since a cadre of young followers of the racist guru Charles Manson loosed a campaign of terror upon Southern California, their avowed purpose to get a race war raging across the state and nation. He called the scheme “helter skelter,” taking the term from a Beatles song.

          Their most notorious slayings were those of actress Sharon Tate and four others at her home in leafy Benedict Canyon on the northern edge of Beverly Hills and the killings of wholesale grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their home a few miles away one day later. Manson’s henchmen (and women) covered the walls of the LaBianca residence in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles with racist slogans scrawled in their victims’ blood.

          Davis didn’t go on either of those expeditions, remaining at the (now built over) Spahn Movie Ranch in the Chatsworth area of the suburban San Fernando Valley on those humid August nights.

          But he did participate in the murders of movie stuntman Donald (Shorty) Shea, whose body was carved up and buried piecemeal around the ranch in the summer of 1969, and aspiring musician Gary Hinman, also cut to pieces with knives and a sword by Manson and friends.

          It’s difficult for those not involved in investigating, prosecuting or covering the Manson Family crimes to comprehend their gruesome nature. Trial testimony by one former Manson minion revealed that Davis held a gun on Hinman while Manson slashed his face with a sword, trying to extort money from him. Shea was killed allegedly because Manson feared he was a police informant.

          When Brown last year refused to allow Davis to be paroled, his six-page decision included this salient point: “In rare circumstances, a murder is so heinous that it provides evidence of current dangerousness by itself.”

          In short, Brown, who at that point had signed off on 81 percent of the parole board’s recommendations for releasing murderers serving life sentences, remembered the crimes well.

          To Brown and to most who still recall the Manson spree, the fact that Davis has claimed for more than 40 years he had little to do with Shea’s death, saying he inflicted only a “token” stab wound on the stuntman’s shoulder, matters little. The same for the fact he has been well-behaved in prison and has earned a Ph.D. while incarcerated.

          All of which raises the question of what might happen when California gets a governor who not only doesn’t remember the Manson Family, but has little heard about it. If Brown is reelected this fall, that question will be delayed. But the leading candidates to succeed him in 2018 might include Democrats like Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, two years old at the time the Mansons ran amok, and state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, five at the time. Brown’s current Republican opponents, Assemblyman Tim Donnelly and former financier Neel Kashkari, were respectively three years old and not born until about four years afterward.

          Might their lack of sentience at the time lead one of them to let Davis go? If so, that would be just plain wrong, for some crimes are just too horrible ever to be forgiven, no matter how old or intellectual the perpetrators may become.

         
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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

NON-REGULATION BOOSTS HEALTH INSURANCE COSTS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“NON-REGULATION BOOSTS HEALTH INSURANCE COSTS”

If taxes are defined as money that citizens must pay in order to avoid serious difficulties, then surely health insurance premiums are a kind of de facto tax.

That’s certainly the view of Dave Jones, California’s new insurance commissioner, who has been frustrated since entering office by his inability to overrule proposed rate increases by the state’s largest health insurance companies for their individual and family policies.

When Blue Shield on Jan. 1 announced an increase that would hike rates to levels 59 percent higher than what they were last October, it drew a loud protest from Jones, a former Democratic state assemblyman who earlier served as a Legal Aid lawyer. Blue Shield eventually delayed its increase until next January at the earliest because of the outcry from Jones and outraged customers.

But Jones couldn’t simply order Blue Shield to desist. He can stymie sudden increases in car insurance rates and in the price of homeowners insurance and other property policies, but not health insurance.

Interestingly, Republican state legislators who have taken their party’s standard “no-new-taxes” pledge rarely say anything about health insurance rate increases, which are effectively taxes on those who pay them.

Things were the same when Anthem Blue Cross in early March announced it would raise its individual rates by about 20 percent for most of its 700,000 non-group policy holders, making a total increase for them of about 40 percent in the last year. When the same company tried to raise rates by 39 percent in May 2010, it drew so much animosity the company scaled back the increase – for awhile. Now Blue Cross has backed off again, but only for a few months.

Jones’ Republican predecessor, Steve Poizner, jawboned last year’s Blue Cross increase down, but only by using the bully pulpit his office provided. Like Jones, he lacked the power to simply stop the raise.

Even while in the Legislature, Jones sought to change that. “I’m trying to get this office the authority to reject excessive health insurance rate hikes, just like I now have the ability to turn down absurdly high rate increases on auto, property and even medical malpractice insurance,” Jones said in an interview. “In the Legislature, the insurance lobby prevented my bill doing this from passing.” It was mostly Republican votes in the state Senate that killed his bill last year.

The bill is back again this year, with Jones’ 14 percentage-point election win of last fall adding clout to the effort to push it through. If the Blue Shield and Blue Cross rate hike efforts don’t help it along, it’s hard to see what might.

Not that Jones wants to clamp down excessively on insurance companies. He says he just wants to keep their rates in line with expenses. His main aim in office, he adds, is to protect consumers while making sure California has “healthy and viable” insurance markets. Those are the same goals Poizner espoused, but in the reverse order. Where Poizner often saw himself as an arbiter between insurance companies and their customers, Jones might approach his new office more as a consumer advocate.

He’ll also do what he can to bring President Obama’s health care program into California reality. His first act as commissioner, taken the night he took office in early January, was to create a new regulation giving him power to enforce the federal law’s mandate that at least 80 percent of health insurance premium dollars go to patient care and 20 percent or less for administration and profit.

“We are carrying that out, too,” Jones said. “Right now, we’re reviewing a number of rate filings from insurers.”

Where most past insurance commissioners have made car insurance their top priority, Jones indicates he may focus more on health insurance.

He also has reestablished a branch of his department that tries to get insurance companies to invest cash reserves in California, where they can get tax credits for it. “I think we’ll see some movement here,” Jones said. “I’m already requiring insurers to report all their investments in the state’s more underserved communities – the poorest Census tracts. I’m aiming to get at least $10 million invested there.”

But talk to Jones and you get the feeling he’ll make his top priority the drive for the ability to regulate health insurance rates just like other insurance prices. If he can do it, he’ll have established a permanent new brake on the profligate profit-seeking of the big health insurers who have lately raised the tax-like premiums they collect from hundreds of thousands of Californians.

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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