March 10, 2014

QUOTE OF THE DAY

thomas-sowell

Crain’s: Illinois employers warn state of more than 1,000 job cuts

Eight companies may shed a combined 1,061 jobs in Illinois in coming months, according to state filings.

The largest area losses forecast in the state’s December Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN, report come at three locations of Passages Hospice, which closed last month after a federal agency stopped paying the west suburban care provider. Passages’ Lisle location cut 118 positions, while its downstate Bloomington location lost 88 jobs. A third location in Rockford shed 74 jobs.

Prior to closing, Passages experienced difficulties meeting payroll after the co-founder was charged with fraud. Seth Gillman was accused of overbilling the government for care to seniors in order to claim higher Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements.

Read more…


BND: Report: ‘War on Poverty’ making little progress in Illinois

Given the circumstances, Jeremy Lincicum is doing the best he can.

He lives in Belleville and is unemployed, but not from a lack of trying. The 38-year-old Massachusetts native moved to the metro-east in 1985 and was attending Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 1996 when his mother died. He eventually dropped out. In 2007, he lost his home and his car.

He has since lived in homeless shelters but is currently living in an apartment. He has relied on Social Security and government housing assistance and he believes recent cuts to government programs and billions of dollars in cuts coming to the nation’s food stamp program hinder his climb out of poverty.

Read more…


Washington Post: CMS awarded $58M to Healthcare.gov firm it already fired

The Obama administration has awarded a contract extension to a Healthcare.gov vendor, months after federal health officials had selected another firm to replace it.

According to a posting on the main federal contracting Web site Thursday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Verizon Terremark signed a contract extension in late January for cloud computing services, even though the federal agency overseeing HealthCare.gov had already selected HP Enterprise Services last July to take over the work.

A Terremark data center infamously suffered a couple of outages in late October that knocked Healthcare.gov offline for hours, including once at the very moment Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was testifying before Congress about troubles with the enrollment Web site.

Read more…


WSJ: When moving is a heavy lift

Tara Darby loved everything about her life in Los Angeles—except for her rental apartment. “The most frustrating thing about L.A. was we were making really good money and could never break into the housing market. We were spending a fortune on rent,” says Ms. Darby, 31 years old.

So Ms. Darby and her partner, Dak Rasheta, who both work in the entertainment industry, moved to Dallas last month. They bought a three-bedroom house, and their mortgage payment is less than half of what they were paying in rent each month.

“We feel like we’re living large,” she says.

Read more…


Forbes: Hard Data On Trouble You’ll Have Finding Doctors In Obamacare

The graph below illustrates data we developed on the doctor networks found in the Obamacare health plans versus comparable private health plans.

The black text illustrates the average number of specialist doctors found in private health plans. The red text shows how many fewer doctors are found in the Obamacare plans being sold in the same markets, and by the same insurer. To assemble this data, we looked at the health plans sold in the most populous county within each of these different states.

The data is for Anthem BlueCross BlueShield. We chose this insurer because it is regarded to offer higher quality plans in both the commercial market and on the exchanges. Moreover, it operates in these markets nationally, in about a dozen states. This allows us to look across the experience in different states and regions.

Read more…


Governing: Chicago ‘Reinvents’ Community College

Gabriel Barrington is positioning a small piece of metal onto an engine lathe in the shop room at Richard J. Daley College on Chicago’s South Side. The room is the size of an airplane hangar, but with the raw industrial trappings of a place devoted to fashioning metal into useful things. After demonstrating how the engine lathe allows him to narrow the diameter of the metal bit, Barrington explains he’s back in school to rack up manufacturing certifications and credit hours for an eventual transfer to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he’d like to earn a bachelor’s degree in manufacturing technology.

A 27-year-old resident of the city’s mostly black Bronzeville neighborhood, Barrington had been working as an uncertified welder—not illegal, but not lucrative—when he read a newspaper story about major changes at Chicago’s seven city colleges (the local version of community colleges). The changes at City Colleges of Chicago are meant to tailor programs to the skills that employers demand. The story got Barrington’s attention because he wanted to learn complex machining in ways that his existing job didn’t permit. “As a welder,” he says, “you see the stuff that comes off the machines and think, ‘Wow, I’d rather be a part of that.’ There’s just such a wealth of materials and possibility.”

Barrington is a City Colleges dream student. The certifications he’d like to get under his belt—welding, blueprinting and the science of measurement—could offer him a better full-time job than he had when he entered, and if he completes that bachelor’s degree, he’s all but guaranteed higher lifetime earnings.

Read more…


Union report: ObamaCare will increase inequality

A national union that represents 300,000 low-wage hospitality workers charges in a new report that Obamacare will slam wages, cut hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very “income equality” President Obama says he is campaigning to fix.

Read more…


Bloomberg: Wisconsin to Sell Debt as Tax Take Produces $1 Billion Surplus

Wisconsin will sell $294.8 million in general-obligation refunding bonds this week in a negotiated sale as the state projects a budget surplus of almost $1 billion.

Surging tax revenue is driving improved fiscal performance in Wisconsin, with a population of 5.7 million. The improvement in the state’s tax collections ranked seventh in the nation during the 12 months ended in June, according to the Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States.

The state had originally projected a surplus of $130 million as of mid-2015.

CARTOON OF THE DAY

potholes