Incomplete Medicaid Discussion (Re: Texas Gov. Perry rejected Medicaid Expansion)

Recent Texas politics commentary by Shamina Dhuka reads like an unbiased news story at first: "Texas Gov. Perry rejected Medicaid Expansion". Ultimately though, I think my classmate goes on to finish off her piece with rather strong yet unsubstantiated claims on the topic of Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

Dhuka spends the bulk of her post recalling Governor Perry's decision to deny Medicaid expansion, but then she leans toward supporting move by pointing out that Perry seems to be in good company - Perry joins "South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Florida’s Rick Scott in rejecting to implement the [medicaid expansion]." It was disappointing to see Dhuka's post end right when it started getting interesting.

Dhuka went so far as to claim that the federal government had fabricated data that shows Texas has a higher percentage of uninsured residents than any other state in the country. Dhuka says that the federal government does this because it does not like Texas and that she is sure that the data is wrong because "According to Gov. Perry, Texas has some of the finest health care system in the nation." While I doubt that the independent Kaiser Foundation analysis has any major holes (it literally relies on Census Bureau data collected from self-reporting respondents), I think Dhuka's argument could have been seriously strengthened if she'd cited strong counter-analyses.

Dhuka could have also chosen to address some of the issues most Medicaid expansionists have raised: Texas already limits its Medicaid program compared to other states, Texan employers simply do not sponsor health coverage, Texas insurance rates are unregulated to the point that coverage is prohibitively expensive, and Texas has a larger immigrant population that needs insurance coverage. Additionally, I think Dhuka should have addressed the costs of choosing to reject rather than accept Medicaid expansion: the Affordable Care Act reduces federal funding for states' uncompensated care costs in order to account for Medicaid expansion which means that Texas will actually be forced to have to substantially increase spending anyway.

In short, I think my classmate's opinions on Perry's decision to reject Medicaid expansion are interesting, but I think her arguments leave a lot to be desired.

Texas Pretext Stops: Reform Legislation You Didn’t Know You Needed

Earlier this month, I asked my younger brother, “Could a policeman pull you over for not wearing your seatbelt and then decide to arrest you instead of just giving you a ticket?” Without hesitation, the kid replied, “I guess so, but it would be an illegal arrest or something.” — of course, he was absolutely wrong.

I’m confident that most Texans would agree with me that it simply does not make much sense to allow police officers to place drivers under arrests for minor traffic offenses like speeding or not wearing a seatbelt. Rather than spending too many words arguing the obvious and trying to convince any outliers to also agree with me, let me first explain how it even became possible for Texas police officers to wield such ridiculously extreme power.

Whren, Caballes, Atwater: A Toxic Concoction of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

Texas law enforcement power was actually expanded by an interesting concoction of U.S. Supreme Court decisions. First, in 1996, Whren v. United States declared “that any traffic offense committed by a driver was a legitimate legal basis for a stop”. While this case involves your Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable detainment, the outcome actually seems obviously reasonable. Of course, it has one interesting implication: the police can use a legally justified stop as an opportunity to get a better look at the driver and possibly observe any signs of additional illegal activity.

Considering this, you could argue that traffic law is so complex that the police could find an excuse to pull anybody over if they simply followed the driver long enough until they saw him or her commit a traffic offense — but that is an argument that deserves its own post. Regardless, things start becoming stickier when we consider Illinois v. Caballes, a 2005 decision in which the court decided the Fourth Amendment also does not protect you from a drug dog sniff conducted during a legally justified traffic stop.Combining the implications behind Whren and Caballes together, law enforcement officials are empowered to use traffic violations as pretexts to set drug dogs on any driver they suspect of concealing contraband. 

However, the right to privacy was truly eliminated for Texans since the Whren and Caballes could interact with a 2001 decision: in Atwater v. Lago Vista, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not protect you from warrantless arrests if you commit misdemeanor offenses. This means that even if driving without a seatbelt is only punishable by fine in Texas, police may arrest you for the offense. This is troubling not only because research has consistently found that pretextual stops disproportionately target minorities, but more importantly because Atwater opens the door for broad civil rights violations against all citizens.

How a Common Sense Texas Senate Bill Died in 2001

It’s not too difficult to imagine Texas police officers using this dangerous concoction to exert unfair authority over the drivers they stop. For example, if they suspect somebody is driving with drugs concealed in the car, they can tell the driver to wait until drug dogs arrive. Normally, Caballes would ensure that a prolonged traffic stop is illegal, but almost any driver will consent when the police informs him or her that, under Atwater, it is legal for the police to simply arrest traffic violators. Once the driver is arrested, it is completely legal for police to perform a full search of the impounded vehicle anyway.

Back in 2001, the arrest of a Texas soccer mom who forgot to wear her seatbelt entertained the nation as it played perfectly into stereotypes of Texas-style justice. Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the arrest at the heart of Atwater v. Lago Vista had been Constitutional, it still pointed out that the arrest was nothing more than “gratuitous humiliations imposed by a police officer who was (at best) exercising extremely poor judgment” and explicitly invited the Texas Legislature to balance out the Court ruling with a state law that would address the obvious civil rights problem.

Within just a few weeks, Texas had responded appropriately to the invitation: Senate Bill 730, sponsored by Republican Senator Chris Harris, was passed by both chambers of the Texas legislature only about a month after the Atwater decision. The bill was simply meant to limit Texas police officers to writing a ticket rather than issuing an arrest in the case of misdemeanor traffic offenses. Nevertheless the bill met fierce opposition from law enforcement interest groups.

Obviously, these lobbyists were perfectly happy that Atwater had seriously expanded police powers by essentially enabling officers to issue an arrest whenever they felt annoyed by a traffic violator or felt like searching a car without meeting the legal standards of “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause” that guarded Texans’ civil liberties. Ultimately, when the two-month anniversary of the Atwater decision came around, Rick Perry killed a bill that was simply meant to return basic civil rights to Texans — I can only hope that the future Governor of Texas will consider righting rather than repeating his predecessor’s wrongs.

Texas HB 2 Anything But Moderate (Re: Let’s Meet in the Middle)

In a recent blog post, one of my classmates argues that Texas’ recent abortion legislation is actually rather moderate and that pro-choice protests are largely unwarranted: “Let’s Meet in the Middle” [from Everything’s Bigger in Texas: Texas Government Issues].

The blogger clearly communicates her views in a remarkably succinct and level-headed manner, though I believe that her overall argument is weakened or perhaps negatively influenced by a lack of research. I would advise her and my other classmates to refer to Jordan Smith’s recent piece in The Austin Chronicle for an example of high quality journalism on the real impact of Texas HB 2.  

My classmate first considers the provision on a 20 week time limit for legal abortions and decides that this provision calls for “an extremely generous period of time” and implies that it may even be too generous – she asks, “If anyone should be angry about this piece of the legislation, shouldn't it be pro-life supporters, not pro-choice supporters?”

To this, I have to point out that the time limit really does very little to affect Texas abortions: most estimates agree that even before the bill passed, less than 1 percent of abortions took place after the 20 week period. However, my real issue is with my classmate’s stance on the new safety regulations being imposed on abortion clinics rather than her stance on the new time limit.

The blogger concedes that the upgrade costs the regulations impose on clinics that want to stay in business are absurd, but then argues that the regulations are still “somewhat moderate” rather than “very drastic. She blogs, HB 2 “could cost us a lot of money, and therefore I guess make getting an abortion a tiny bit harder” before saying that it is still moderate because of the time limit.

I completely disagree with my classmate’s suggestion that Texas abortion clinics are dirty or unprofessional back-alley places when she says, “if abortions are going to be legal, they should be done in clean, hospital like areas.”

Physicians from such relevant groups as the College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the American Medical Association (AMA), and even the Texas Hospital Association (THA) all point out several things: it is absurd to hold abortion clinics to the standards of surgical standards because abortion is not a surgical operation, it is misleading to suggest that the new safety standards increase safety for a clinical procedure that’s usually done in less than 10 minutes and results in complications in less than 3 percent of cases, and abortion doctors are unlikely to obtain hospital-admitting privileges since the procedure is almost never done in a hospital.

As I argue, with citations, in my own post on the topic, the real impact of the abortion clinic safety regulations is to eliminate the operability of most abortion clinics in the state. Feel free to check out my post on the topic, and check out Austin Chronicle article mentioned earlier for a description of how HB 2 is affecting clinics already, and check out this Dallas Morning News article for a description of how HB 2 may be dismantled in court.