greenjobs_gw_03

A $500 million green jobs program at the Department of Labor has so far provided only 15 percent of current participants with jobs, leading the agency’s inspector general to recommend that the bulk of the money be returned to the Treasury.

The program, which was funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aims to find employment for almost 80,000 people by providing grants for labor exchange and job training projects. With those grants expiring over the next 15 months, IG officials concluded that the program would fail to come close to that target.

More than $300 million remains unspent, according to the report (pdf). Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who requested the Labor audit when he was ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said the findings show that Congress should focus on creating jobs in all sectors of the economy.

“This report paints a pretty bleak picture of the program’s effectiveness in job creation,” he said in a statement. “It’s hard to see how leaving $300 million in unused funding for the program in the hands of the Labor Department benefits either the taxpayers or the unemployed.”

The report comes as the bankrupty of solar manufacturer Solyndra has reinvigorated GOP criticism of the Obama administration’s green jobs initiative. Congress is now investigating the Department of Energy’s half-million-dollar loan guarantee to the company, and the controversy has become a political issue (E&E Daily, Oct. 3, 2010).

Read the whole thing here.

Dr. Benjamin Carson receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Yet one of the nation’s top surgeons, with credibility and acclaim the world over for the pioneering surgeries he has and his personal story of overcoming hardship, recently ripped the dominant health care legislation before Congress in a critique similar to that of conservatives and libertarians. Benjamin Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, Md., and recipient of numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, criticized in a recent interview the approach of the current bills for their mandate, creation of a “public option,” and lack of malpractice liability reform. 

“My biggest problem is I feel it’s going in the wrong direction,” Carson told reporters at TV station WLOS in Asheville, N.C. (Video here.)“It’s giving us more government and less autonomy. And I think we should be going in exactly the opposite direction. We should be having more autonomy and less government. And that is the kind of thing that brings the prices down.” 

Considered one of the best neurosurgeons in the world, Carson gained acclaim in the ’80s and ‘90s for his pioneering operations separating conjoined twins joined at the head and other procedures that have saved children from epilepsy and brain cancer.  But Carson is also celebrated for his personal story of overcoming poverty and prejudice. An African-American, Carson grew up in a single-parent home Detroit ghetto, but his mother pushed him and his brother to achieve excellence. He is the author of the popular autobiography “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story,” which was made into a TV movie this year with Cuba Gooding Jr. portraying Carson. And he does much philanthropic work through charities such as his “Carson Scholars” fund.

Over the past few years, Carson has been writing and speaking more about public policy, including health care reform. He has railed against excessive litigation, pointing out how much malpractice insurance and other forms of “defensive medicine” to protect against lawsuits add to medical costs. In the interview with WLOS, Carson insisted that tort reform must go “hand in hand” as part of any true health care reform.

“We have to bring a rational approach to medical litigation,” he said. “We’re the only nation in the world that really has this problem. Why is it that everybody else has been able to solve this problem but us? Simple. Special interest groups like the trial lawyers’ association. They don’t want a solution.”

Carson also blasted proposals backed by Obama and most Democrats that would create a government-backed “public option,” saying it would inevitably lead to a “single payer” system like that of Canada, in which the government as the sole insurer would end up calling all the shots for patients. He pointed to how the Canadian government itself crowded out private insurance.  “What happened to the private insurance companies in Canada? Just like that, they were gone, because they couldn’t compete with it (the government). Now, why would it be any different here? That’s one of the things that disappoints me about the lack of honesty … We can’t really debate when there’s all this subterfuge.”

Carson said that despite the problems with American health care, Canada and European countries were not models to emulate in their health insurance financing systems. “All we have to do is go to other places and see what’s going on. See how long people have to wait. Very, very long waiting periods. Why do you think so many people from Canada come here when they have a problem? I know a young man in England who has a problem with his knee. He needs an operation, and the waiting list is so long. … These are the kind of things that people in this country are not used to. But more importantly, it’s something that we don’t have to get used to. We can fix this without going to that kind of system that causes those kinds of long waits.” 

As his main “fix”, Carson proposes a system of patient empowerment in which “individuals and families can own their own insurance; it doesn’t have to be through their employer.”  Not all of Carson’s ideas expressed in the interview were free-market, though. He did propose that the government set insurance rates, and cover patients’ catastrophic costs above $250,000

Above all, Carson was adamant that there transparency and deliberation, rather than a rush to force through a health care bill that no one had read. In fact, he proposed bringing health care to a national vote of the American people “I would say we should have a national referendum on it. People should be able to vote.  That would really work, because now, people would have to explain it. They would have to know what was in it. When we do these big sweeping national things and just sort of jam them through and nobody even knows what’s in it, that’s not democracy. At some point, someone has lost their ideal of what democracy is.”

Carson’s colleagues at Hopkins – ranked by U.S. News and World Report for 19 years as the nation’s best overall hospital and lauded for the millions it spends on charity care for the poor –have also voiced concerns about the direction that health care legislation is going. Citing the cuts to hospitals to pay for the goal of universal coverage – cuts of more than $150 billion in Medicare and Medicaid payments to hospitals, according to the Congressional Budget office “preliminary analysis” of the Max Baucus’ Senate Finance Committee bill –  the Hopkins officials have been warning about severe stress on Hopkins and other hospitals that Hopkins and other hospitals would face.

At a Sept. 18 “town meeting” on the campus of the main hospital in Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins Institutions Director of Federal Relations Beth Felder was blunt about the cuts in reimbursements. “That is going to come out of hospitals and health systems,” she said. “I think that’s not a good thing for us.” Similarly, Johns Hopkins Medicine health system CEO Edward Miller told C-Span on Sept. 16 that cuts in the reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid, “There are going to be less physicians that will care for these patients.”

(Research Assistant Jonathan Moore contributed to this article.)

 Senate Democrats are pushing a vote on the 1,000-page bill now because the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the bill cost “only” $829 billion over the next 10 years. In truth, the bill raises taxes immediately, but the benefits do not kick in for another four years, so the 10-year numbers are distorted. This is an expensive experiment that cuts Medicare, and exacerbates state government budget problems by dramatically expanding Medicaid without providing additional funding.

How do the Democrats propose to pay for the rest of the new spending? There are a massive amount of tax increases in the bill, including over $200 billion in tax increases on insurance premiums, new taxes on individuals and employers, and over $120 billion in new taxes on medical device makers and other health care businesses.  All of these tax increases concern me, but the latter category does so especially: My state is the home of Medtronic, Boston Scientific, 3M, St. Jude Medical and other medical technology makers that employ 60,000 Minnesotans and save and improve countless lives. Increasing taxes on these businesses would not only be an unwise burden on these employers, but would siphon money otherwise spent on research and development.  It would also risk the cost of increased taxes being passed on, directly or indirectly, to those who rely on such devices or who cover their cost.

The Democrats are proposing these tax increases to offset the costs of mandating and subsidizing the purchase of health care by every American. Expanding health care access to all Americans is an admirable goal and one that I share – but one that also cannot be accomplished without addressing the root cause of America’s health care crisis, something the Baucus bill fails to do.

Expanding access is important, but achieving that goal, and doing so in a fiscally sound manner, requires that we focus on the forces driving up health care costs. Otherwise costs will continue to grow in an unsustainable way, and, as we’ve seen in other states, government mandates will only shift the burden of exploding costs onto the shoulders of taxpayers and ordinary Americans unable to cover them.

There are many bipartisan ideas that would actually cut health care costs, like medical liability reform, allowing employees to keep their insurance when they switch jobs, standardizing health information technology, and allowing consumers to purchase insurance across state lines.  In Minnesota, we’ve passed reforms that made price and quality more transparent for patients, moving the health care system towards paying for and achieving better health care outcomes, and empowering patients themselves to help drive down costs.

Congress should look at what we are doing in Minnesota, among the healthiest states in the nation, where we have the highest concentration of health savings accounts in the country and other market-based reforms that are containing costs. A vote for the Baucus bill today is a move in the opposite direction – towards higher premiums, higher taxes, and more government.

UPDATE: Today I rolled out a plan in Minnesota to combat the high cost of health care in a way that improves quality and costs for patients and taxpayers. You can read more about it here.

Bertha Lewis, the head of ACORN, is one tough nut.

She came to the National Press Club on Tuesday, ostensibly to report on the community group’s “internal probe” into the ACORN workers who were caught on tape advising people posing as a pimp and a prostitute. But Lewis made it clear that, far from apologizing, she was on a “set-the-record-straight tour” — and a tour de force it was.

The internal review by ACORN’s board, disclosed this week by the Louisiana attorney general, that $5 million had been embezzled from the group rather than the $1 million previously alleged? “This is speculation, completely false and not based on any documentation or any audit or anything other than two disgruntled former board members,” Lewis reported.

Accusations of voter fraud after ACORN workers filled out voter registrations for Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys? “An utter fabrication and a work of fiction that was created by the people who wrote it.”

The report by Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee that ACORN created a “shell game that funneled charitable funds to for-profit organizations”? “Another stretch of allegations of how to pound on ACORN. . . . It’s just false.”

And, of course, the secretly recorded videos of ACORN workers providing help to people claiming they wished to set up an underage-prostitution business? “These highly edited tapes,” Lewis said, “don’t tell the whole story.” ACORN’s accusers “have to stoop to break the law in order to create something sensational,” she added.

In creativity, the ACORN boss’s denials were matched only by her assignments of blame. She blamed her predecessor: “I don’t think it’s fair to judge me, as I’m cleaning up a previous administration.” She blamed the powerful: “We’ve seen this play before, whether it was the civil rights movement or whatever, when you organize poor people to have real power, what you do is often turned against you.” And most of all, she blamed Republicans: “The RNC . . . because we’ve been inflated as the boogeyman, raises almost $2 million a day, every day, and this form of modern-day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop.”

Assigned only a minor role in this orgy of blame were ACORN and Lewis herself. “My biggest weakness is a certain naivete about folks coming after you,” she said in a moment of self-interested introspection. “I guess maybe others might have known and could have set up some other barriers and could’ve been better with media and PR.”

Read the whole story here. But, first savor this quote. Perhaps one of the best Big Media comments during this breaking saga:

But Lewis, in playing the victim, is her own worst enemy. Forget the film of the pimp and prostitute: Watching a film of Lewis’s performance yesterday would probably be enough to cause lawmakers to cut off ACORN’s federal funding.

Today, the Committee voted on an amendment from Sen. Cornyn which would have delayed expansions in Medicaid until steps had been taken to get its error/fraud rate down to 3.9%, the average of all government programs. Details below:

Cornyn Amendment #C30 to America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009

Short Title: Reducing waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicaid program.

Description of Amendment: Prior to implementing the mandatory Medicaid program expansions in the Chairman’s Mark, the Secretary of Health and Human Services must certify that states have implemented program integrity and quality improvement measures specified in the Chairman’s Mark and that the Medicaid program’s average Payment Error Rate Measurement is less than 3.9 percent.

Offset: No offset needed.

 Republicans

CHUCK GRASSLEY -yes, ORRIN G. HATCH -yes, OLYMPIA J. SNOWE -yes, JON KYL -yes, JIM BUNNING -yes, MIKE CRAPO -yes, PAT ROBERTS -yes, JOHN ENSIGN -yes, MIKE ENZI -yes, JOHN CORNYN -yes

Democrats

MAX BAUCUS -no, JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER -no, KENT CONRAD -no, JEFF BINGAMAN -no, JOHN F. KERRY -no, BLANCHE L. LINCOLN -no, RON WYDEN -no, CHARLES E. SCHUMER – no, DEBBIE STABENOW -no, MARIA CANTWELL -no, BILL NELSON -no, ROBERT MENENDEZ – no, THOMAS CARPER -no

Not Agreed to (10-13)

The senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), asked the IRS to probe ACORN – and asked that ACORN be dropped from the Combined Federal Campaign, a charitable program for government workers.

Grassley, long known as Capitol Hill’s foremost policeman of the nonprofit community, is expected to make his formal announcement this evening. In a letter the senator indicated he has been concerned about ACORN since at least 2006.

Grassley sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman earlier today and a separate, shorter letter to John Berry, Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Both letters are available here.

In the letter to Berry, he asks that the ACORN Institute “and any other ACORN affiliates, particularly any of those reviewed by my staff, be prohibited from participating in the CFC. The acts perpetrated by ACORN employees were impermissible and should not be supported with CFC dollars.”

CFC refers to the Combined Federal Campaign, which bills itself as “the world’s largest and most successful annual workplace charity campaign.” CFC is a federally administered program that channels donations from federal civilian, postal and military employees into causes deemed worthwhile. It is unclear how much money the ACORN network receives through CFC.

In his letter to Shulman at the IRS, Grassley wrote that he was “encouraged” that IRS “severed all ties” with ACORN. “Aside from the pervasive issues pertaining to several allegations of voter fraud, the recently released investigative videos are very troubling. These videos reveal ACORN employees and/or volunteers offering tax advice specifically to further clearly illegal activities such as prostitution and human trafficking.”

Grassley wrote to the IRS in 2006 asking questions about the tax-exempt status of affiliates within the ACORN network. The IRS responded on Dec. 19, 2006, but ACORN did not, he said. ACORN’s failure to cooperate led him to have him staff investigate ACORN’s organizational structure.

In today’s letter to the IRS, Grassley asks several questions:

Please provide the number of returns prepared at ACORN tax clinics for the last five years. Does the IRS intend to review these returns for accuracy? Please confirm that IRS will terminate its relationship with all organizations in the ACORN family, particularly those reviewed by my staff. Does the IRS intend to renew its relationship with ACORN after ACORN completes its internal review?

Grassley is referring to the IRS announcement yesterday that it dropped ACORN from its Volunteer Income Tax Preparation (VITA) program, a volunteer tax assistance program through which around 3 million low- and moderate-income tax filers received free advice this year. ACORN provided help on approximately 25,000 returns, the IRS said yesterday.

Grassley also wrote “[i]t is disturbing that many of the organizations in the ACORN “family” may not actually meet the definition of related for 990 reporting purposes, even though ACORN deems them to be part of the ‘family.’” A “990” is an IRS Form 990 which is a nonprofit organization’s annual tax return.

In what may foreshadow a future demand for a forensic audit of ACORN, the senator also asks what procedures the IRS follows when “auditing organizations like this where the movement of money appears to be a shell game.” He asks, “Do IRS audit procedures require auditors to follow the money trail to or from a charitable organization to determine whether that money is being used for impermissible activities, including electioneering and promoting illegal acts?”

Finally, Grassley suggests ACORN might be a massive criminal conspiracy. He wrote:

Given what looks like a shell game perpetrated by the ACORN tax-exempt entities appears to be no different than that conducted by the charities involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal, how have IRS rules, regulations, reporting requirements and enforcement actions changed in response to the Abramoff abuses?

Grassley set an Oct. 9 deadline for the IRS to respond.

This breaking story was updated twice.