BIG CHANGES COMING TO CALIFORNIA’S CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 7, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “BIG CHANGES COMING TO CALIFORNIA’S CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION”

          California saw plenty of change to its congressional delegation last year, with the long-serving likes of Fortney “Pete” Stark (East Bay area), David Dreier (San Dimas), Jerry Lewis (Redlands), Joe Baca (San Bernardino County), Elton Gallegly (Simi Valley), Mary Bono Mack (Palm Springs) and more either retiring or getting turned out.

For most of their veteran colleagues remaining, reelection seems all but certain. Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House and current Democratic minority leader, hasn’t had a serious challenger since essentially inheriting her San Francisco-based seat in 1987 on the death of Sala Burton, who had taken it over from her husband, Phil Burton, a liberal lion and legendary master of gerrymandering.

          But Pelosi is now 73 and her age will probably see her out of Congress before another decade goes by.

          In that way,Pelosi is pretty typical of the state’s 53-member delegation, replete with sexagenarians and septuagenarians.

          Just look at the solidly Democratic districts stretching hundreds of miles south from Pelosi’s turf: Jackie Speier, 63, of San Mateo; Anna Eshoo, 70, of Palo Alto; Zoe Lofgren, 65, whose district reaches from San Jose to Gilroy; Mike Honda, 71, of San Jose, Sam Farr, 71, of Monterey County and Lois Capps, 75, of Santa Barbara County.

          Of that aging group, only Capps had a serious challenge last year, but still pretty easily fended off Republican Abel Maldonado, the former appointive lieutenant governor.

          Any of them could draw a challenge at any time, as did Stark, a 40-year congressional veteran from Alameda County who at 80 was the dean of California’s delegation until he was surprised by a primary challenge from 31-year-old Eric Swalwell, a Dublin city councilman who 10 years earlier was an intern for ex-Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher. Swalwell won the all-Democrat November runoff by a narrow 52-48 percent margin.

          Already, Honda is being challenged by a former deputy national trade representative, Rho Khanna, 37, who drew a crowd of major Silicon Valley players to one recent $2,600-per-person fund-raiser.

        No one can be sure what other upstarts may be lurking in the weeds to take on senior-citizen incumbents south of Pelosi or elsewhere, like Doris Matsui of Sacramento, 68, or Howard (Buck) McKeon, a 74-year-old Santa Clarita Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, or San Diego Democrat Susan Davis, 69, or 73-year-old Henry Waxman of West Los Angeles and the South Bay suburbs or 68-year-old former Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who won by only about eight percent last year over a previously-obscure Republican challenger.

          One thing all these folks should have learned last year is that the state’s three-year-old top-two primary election system makes seats that once could be considered safe for decades quite a bit shakier.

          Stark, for example, would most likely still be in Congress, but for that system, which puts the top two finishers in the primary election into the November runoff election, regardless of party. No Republican could have beaten him in his district, but a fellow Democrat did.

          If that didn’t put other incumbents on notice, what happened to Baca surely did. He also lost to a fellow Democrat, Gloria Negrete McLeod of Chino, herself 71.

          That race illustrated that state legislators subject to term limits won’t always be content to leave office and retire or look for a real-world job when they are termed out: Some will try for Congress. Which means few in Congress can be sanguine, almost all having to look over their shoulders as long as they serve.

          Which means the still-pretty-new primary system is achieving one unanticipated benefit: It is keeping incumbent politicians on their toes more than they ever before needed to be. It's too soon, of course, to know whether than means they’ll accomplish more than previously.

          Chances are congressional shakeups won’t be as striking in any one election year over the next decade as they were last year, when top-two’s debut combined with newly-drawn district lines to create unprecedented instability and 14 new members of Congress.

          But Democrats are already eyeing the districts of Republican Congressmen Jeff Denham of Modesto and Gary Miller of Rancho Cucamonga.

          “The party apparatus will begin to focus on these races in earnest very shortly,” said Eric Bauman, the Democrats’ state vice chairman.

          But the most change is likely to come from districts already occupied by Democratic veterans, none of whom has voiced any intentions of stepping down. Not to worry, when they do, plenty of younger folk will be waiting to replace them.

          And if the old-timers don’t get out of the way on their own, at least some of those ambitious potential replacements are sure not to simply wait their turns, but – like Swalwell – pounce on their own where they see an opening.

        

 

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Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

NEW QUESTIONS ON HYDROGEN HIGHWAY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“NEW QUESTIONS ON HYDROGEN HIGHWAY”

          Significant new questions are cropping up about a California Energy Commission (CEC) program designed to assure there will be enough hydrogen refueling stations to make buying hydrogen fuel cell cars practical when they debut commercially between 2015 and 2017.

          One year ago, the commission pulled back more than $28 million in grants it had tentatively awarded, mostly for installing service station hydrogen pumps in areas where previous innovative cars like gas-electric hybrids were initially most popular.

          Now it plans to give millions of state license plate dollars to a company which filed an application last year to put pumps in a station that never agreed to host them.

Last year’s grants were canceled and reforms promised just two weeks after this column disclosed that the commission required any site have approval from at least one large automaking company before it could get state grant money. Carmakers, then, were deciding who could get public money. That didn’t last long once the arrangement was disclosed, the commission promising new rules.

Most of the canceled grants were earmarked for two billion-dollar industrial fuel companies – the German-based Linde AG and Pennsylvania-based Air Products and Chemicals Corp. The eight carmakers and both fuel companies, along with the CEC, belonged to the California Fuel Cell Partnership. Membership runs $87,500 per year and CEC staffers and company executives gather at meetings, meals and other events. That led to charges of collusion and/or cronyism in the grant process.

          The CEC now demands any outfit applying for a hydrogen station grant show some form of agreement with owners of service stations where it proposes to use the money, but said in an emailed statement there was no such requirement in the rules for its 2012 funding.

          Among grants approved last year and then pulled back was one for $1.58 million to Air Products for use at a 76 station on busy Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Air Products had not pre-arranged to install pumps there, which was, remarkably, OK under the rules at the time. Previous CEC rules did demand such agreements and the CEC had not responded at this column's deadline to a request that it explain why the requirement was not in last year’s rules.

          “We never had any agreement with anyone to install anything here,” said Nick W. Miller, operator of the station.

          So commissioners approved at least one grant with no assurance hydrogen pumps could ever be installed. The CEC says no money would have been spent if no work was done at the site. “No one is paid for work that has not been performed,” its statement said.

          One industry expert maintains he informed CEC chairman Robert Weisenmiller of the lack of an agreement in the Wilshire Boulevard case 21 days before the commission in April released its latest list of grants, the first under the new rules. Air Products was then approved for two new grants totaling more than $2.99 million. The commission says the expert’s voicemails did not mention that firm’s lack of an agreement in its prior application, but the caller insists it was the focus of his messages.

          “Of course that was the message I left," the industry expert said. “Why else call? And if that’s what their system was, you could write down any gas station’s name and address, add some technical stuff and the state would say ‘We have a million bucks for you.’”

          Despite the commission’s strong denial in January that new rules taking automakers out of the decision process still favor grants to the same companies that were in line to get most of last year’s funding, the majority of newly-approved grant money in fact is earmarked for them. Besides the almost $3 million set aside for Air Products, Linde is to get $4.5 million of the $11.99 million awarded, with a smaller firm getting another $3 million to build on property owned by Hyundai Corp., a member of the Fuel Cell Partnership.

Weisenmiller declined to say anything about the hydrogen program.

          “The Energy Commission is not doing its due diligence,” said energy consultant Woodrow Clark, renewable energy advisor to former Gov. Gray Davis and a former longtime scientist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

          It adds up to highly questionable grant-giving practices that can only increase public skepticism of how California government passes out tax dollars.

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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

CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS COMING OVER PRISONS?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 31, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS COMING OVER PRISONS?”

          Rarely since the Civil War have state officials anywhere in America been as close to openly defying federal authority as Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature are today.

          Brown averted a constitutional crisis in mid-May, when he acceded to the demand of a three-judge federal court panel and submitted a plan to reduce the state prison population by 10,000 convicts on top of the approximately 24,000 already cut by the ongoing realignment program.

          That program sees many non-violent, supposedly non-serious offenders who previously would have gone to state prisons staying in county jails or getting released under supervision earlier than they previously could have been.

          Some sheriffs already complain local probation officers are overworked and their jails underfunded despite the state’s sending money their way to pay for additional county caseloads.

          But realignment and its unprecedented slashing of well over 10 percent of the prison population isn’t enough for the judges, whose previous orders have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. They insist prison health care is still substandard, despite Brown’s claim that California’s system is “one of the best in the nation.”

          The new plan Brown submitted under duress would move 1,600 inmates from state prisons to leased cells in county jails with extra space. It would send more people to private prisons, where about 8,000 California convicts sit today. And about 1,250 inmates with serious or violent convictions would move to firefighting camps now housing lesser offenders.

          It would still fall 2,570 inmates short of the court-demanded cuts.

          Brown will appeal the court order, but if it’s eventually upheld, his plan will require action by the Legislature for both funding and the authority to make moves like granting “medical paroles” to about 400 elderly or disabled inmates.

          Brown appointees call his partial plan “ugly,” admitting it might pose risks to public safety and suggesting it might cause state courts to release inmates from local jails. It’s still far short of what the federal judges demand. This could eventually cause the governor and some of his top aides to be held in contempt of court.

Meanwhile, former Republican Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado now makes the possible public safety danger the main early theme of his campaign for the GOP nomination to challenge Brown’s reelection next year.

          Both Democratic and Republican legislative leaders also express reluctance to go along with the court order.

          Democratic state Senate President Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento said he supports Brown’s appeal, as did Assembly Republican leader Connie Conway of Tulare, who told a reporter government “must do everything within (our) power to prevent the release of dangerous felons.”

          Maldonado started his campaign by announcing an initiative petition drive to overturn the entire realignment program Brown began because of the initial court order. Maldonado says he would satisfy federal courts by reopening shuttered prisons, building new ones and begging for more time. “The court said reduce, not release,” he said in an interview. But the judges have refused extensions before and most of Maldonado’s program would take years.

          There was a threat that Brown could be held in contempt if he did not file a plan this month, but no court order demands anything of the Legislature, except via the fact the governor cannot do all he reluctantly proposes without a legislative OK. This may leave lawmakers safe, no matter how they eventually vote.

          But Brown could find himself in a situation somewhat like former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who stood in the door of an auditorium at the University of Alabama in a symbolic attempt to keep it lily white. Brown won’t stand in a prison gate, blocking convict releases. Unlike Wallace or predecessor Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s not a grandstander; he created no photo-ops during this spring’s wildfires. But he could precipitate a crisis by failing to act if the Supreme Court backs the judges’ current order.

          What might happen if Brown became the first governor of this century held in contempt for defying a court order? Would he be arrested by federal marshals? Might his Highway Patrol bodyguards clash with federalized National Guard troops? Not likely. It’s also improbable President Obama would confront a Democratic governor who maintains he’s protecting public safety.

          But an unresolved standoff could undermine the authority of federal judges everywhere, which Brown the former state attorney general would not want.

          This makes it most likely that even if the Supreme Court backs the judges now jousting with Brown, some compromise will emerge before there’s a true constitutional crisis. But all bets are off if Maldonado’s initiative should make the 2014 ballot and pass.

          

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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

HOW MUCH SHOULD NON-DOCTORS DO?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 28, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “HOW MUCH SHOULD NON-DOCTORS DO?”

          One thing is certain as California heads for a new health insurance era under the Affordable Health Care Act, better known as Obamacare:

          Almost all parts of the state will need more medical professionals to serve the additional 2 million to 4 million newly-insured Californians. Should they, could they, mostly be physicians, or should other health care professionals like pharmacists, optometrists and nurse practitioners do some things now in the exclusive realm of MDs?

          An optometrist – Democratic state Sen. Ed Hernandez of West Covina – leads the effort to let non-doctors do more.

          Would that be good or bad? Try this real-life situation: You need care for distorted vision in one eye. You go first to the local optometrist, someone who now mostly does things like eye exams (sometimes without dilation) and fitting of contact lenses.

          You don’t know it, but a bleed in a small capillary atop the retina is causing the problem. It takes an advanced scan using a dye to determine this for sure and not even all MD ophthalmologists are equipped to perform that in their own offices.

          Will more people with this problem lose vision while seeking care from someone not fully equipped to deal with the situation? Or, since optometrists are easier to find than MD ophthalmologists, will more people get treatment faster by going to them first and then being sent to an MD? Also, since optometrists are fully capable of diagnosing eye problems stemming from diabetes, high blood pressure and strokes, should they be allowed to prescribe drugs for those conditions?

You could ask similar questions about other symptoms and problems from early indications of cancer to ear infections, now often diagnosed by nurse practitioners.

          Hernandez wants to let the state’s 16,000 licensed nurse practitioners (more highly trained than registered nurses) set up their own shops, not always supervised by MDs. But he says most would still be under the aegis of doctors via today's array of health care networks. No doubt this could make care more accessible, but might it cause sophisticated diagnoses to be missed? There’s that question again: Does increased access for hundreds of thousands outweigh potential risks?

          “Pharmacists are the most underused of all health professionals, considering their years of education and training,” Hernandez says. He would let them prescribe birth control pills and other types of medication, including vaccines. Would they know enough about patient medical histories to avoid errors? Would they, for instance, know which organ transplant recipients can receive vaccinations and what types? Pharmacists often give drug-related advice today, generally on over-the-counter products or after patients show up with a doctor’s scrip. Hernandez believes the majority could handle much more.

          He notes that only about one-third of medical school graduates go into family practice as primary, first-contact doctors. The rest become specialists. “I think we should let specialists handle the complex cases,” he said, noting that many doctors already have nurse practitioners performing routine tasks in their offices.

Behind this discussion lies that certainty of a coming doctor shortage. The California Medical Association (CMA) would like to see more medical schools added to University of California campuses, and that’s the long-term solution. But it would take years, and there would be more years for students to finish their studies and subsequent internships, residencies and fellowships.

          Plus, there has been no great upsurge of documented medical errors in states that have expanded the scope of nurse practitioners’ work. Of course, delayed diagnoses and treatments don’t show up as errors.

          Most doctors strongly oppose giving expanded privileges to any other health care professionals, even if Hernandez insists that no one would do anything they can’t do now. (For example, many pharmacies now give flu shots and the vast majority of patients with vision problems see optometrists first, anyway.)

          The CMA is adamant that non-doctors performing clinical services have direct supervision and the ability to consult a physician quickly for problems beyond their ken. But even MDs have long forwarded difficult cases to specialists.

          The bottom line is that something has to be done to make more professionals available to more patients, and do it in a way that fits the tight financial guidelines of Obamacare.

          Some officials suggest giving incentives for doctors to bring more other professionals into their offices, combining ophthalmology with optometry, for example. Or using more nurse practitioners in internal medicine practices.

          One thing for sure: Change is coming to health care because it’s coming to both health care pricing and health insurance. There’s already a battle to determine its shape.

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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, go to www.californiafocus.net