Billionaires don’t always say the smartest things, but one of them has a smart idea. At the Forbes Reinventing America Summit, billionaire real estate developer Sam Zell said, “If you want to see the economy go wild just cut all the regulations in half.”
Zell is known for his contrarian views and more often than not has been a successful investor. Cutting regulations is certainly contrary to what generally takes place in Washington. Regulations, especially environmental regulations, just keep piling up and up.
“We’re in a society where we think all risk can be regulated out,” said Zell. “There are just unending interpretations, revisions, legal fees to the sky—when you’re focused on that, you’re not focused on growing and getting new customers.”
Farmers know that feeling all too well. When they should be focused on growing this season’s crops and tending livestock, their attention is diverted by the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Waters of the U.S.” proposed rule. The rule broadens federal jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act and could extend permit requirements to ditches, small ponds and even depressions in fields that are only wet during a heavy rain. Farms, ranches, businesses and new construction could be affected.
EPA claims the proposed rule is a clarification of which waters fall under its jurisdiction. But in tracing the history of major regulatory acts like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, the words that stand out on EPA’s own timeline are “expanded,” “increased,” “authorized” and “established.”
The Office of Management and Budget reviews pending federal regulations, and it comes as no surprise that EPA has the most regulatory activities under review at the present time.
It is only a natural tendency for federal regulatory agencies to extend their reach by adding more and more regulations to the laws that Congress writes. The last president who really tried to stop them and tackle regulatory overkill was Ronald Reagan. A reduction in regulations was one of the major policy objectives of his 1981 economic recovery program. Deregulation was applied primarily to regulations that restricted economic activity, like price controls on oil and natural gas.
Every administration since Reagan’s, including the Obama administration, has expressed a desire for regulatory reform, but the results have been slow to materialize. Cost-benefit analysis is done on only a fraction of new regulations.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates the annual cost of regulations to be about $1.8 trillion.
On a household basis, regulations cost more than every budget item except housing; that’s more than health care, food, transportation, etc. Cutting regulations in half, as Zell suggests, would indeed cause the economy to go wild.
There are alternatives to regulations that can get the same or better results. The American Farm Bureau Federation advocates market-based solutions and incentives as preferable to government mandates. Incentives have proved successful with conservation efforts. Regulation can also be accomplished without the government through competition, reputation, contracts, insurance and other means.
Sam Zell probably won’t get his wish, but he is correct about the need to throttle back government regulations. They are stifling innovation and economic growth.
Stewart Truelsen, a food and agriculture freelance writer, is a regular contributor to the Focus on Agriculture series.
John Bluford, left, retiring CEO of Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, Mo., reflected on his health care career in a conversation this week with R. Crosby Kemper III, executive director of the Kansas City Public Library.-Photo by Mike Sherry
By Mike Sherry
KHI News Service
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — After only two weeks as the new CEO of Kansas City’s safety-net hospital system, John Bluford called an emergency 6:30 a.m. meeting of the Truman Medical Centers board.
After assurances that he was not going to quit, Bluford told the board members: “I understood when I took this position that the system was broken. It’s not broken. It’s structurally defective.” And that, he said, “was the baseline we started from.”
Bluford recounted that story this week at the downtown branch of the Kansas City Public Library. An audience of about 130 people attended his conversation Tuesday with Library Executive Director R. Crosby Kemper III.
The hourlong retrospective of his career, which included a graduate business degree from Northwestern University and a first job as the evening/weekend administrator at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, came as Bluford prepares to retire next month after 15 years at the helm of Truman.
Succeeding Bluford is Charlie Shields, a former Missouri lawmaker who is currently chief operating officer at Truman’s Lakewood campus in eastern Jackson County.
Bluford leaves behind a system where net revenues have increased by about 160 percent since his arrival, to approximately $462.9 million, and revenue from commercial insurers has increased nearly nine-fold to about $72.8 million. (Commercial insurance generally indicates a higher-income patient as opposed to someone who is on Medicaid or is uninsured.)
During his tenure, Bluford also stressed the importance of preventing disease through healthy eating. Truman initiated a mobile market in 2012 to deliver fruits and vegetables to neighborhoods lacking supermarkets, and the system plans to open a grocery store at 27th Street and Troost Avenue.
Turnaround specialist
Born in Philadelphia and raised by grandparents in South Carolina, Bluford came to Truman in 1999 after serving for six years as the chief executive at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.
Bluford had engineered a financial turnaround at the facility in the Twin Cities, and in coming to Truman, he joined a system with a $12 million deficit.
Moreover, Truman was embroiled in litigation stemming from the tumultuous tenure of the system’s previous leader, Dr. E. Ratcliffe Anderson Jr., a retired Air Force general and former fighter pilot. Anderson had left in June 1998 to become head of the American Medical Association, leaving behind court action stemming from his attempt to oust from leadership posts three physicians who had called for his ouster.
Shortly after Bluford arrived, a Jackson County Circuit Court judge ruled against Truman in the dispute, finding substantial evidence that the hospital’s medical records department was in disarray, citing testimony of more than 31 feet of loose filings.
Meanwhile, Bluford recounted, “the unions were lurking, looking at our nurses, and our culture was bad.”
But that was only the half of it.
Having already paid $242,500 to settle a federal civil case alleging Medicare fraud in the month Bluford arrived, Truman also faced federal allegations of Medicaid fraud related to billing for pregnancy services.
As Bluford recalled it, Truman could’ve been on the hook for $30 million in damages, which he said probably would’ve forced it to close.
That, Bluford said, set the stage for another early morning meeting.
With the assistance of a board member and then-U.S. Rep. Karen McCarthy, a Kansas City Democrat, Bluford secured a 6 a.m. meeting with Steve Hill, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri.
Hill, who is now a partner in the Kansas City office of the Dentons law firm, said in an email that the meeting took place in neutral territory at the offices of the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation.
They engaged in some small talk, and then finally, according to Bluford, “I said, ‘Mr. Hill, Do you think Truman Medical Centers is a valuable community asset?’ He thought for a second and said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘Great. We have a lot to talk about.’”
Ultimately, the two sides agreed to a settlement that required Truman to pay $330,000 to the federal government, abide by terms of a Corporate Integrity Agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and to implement a Quality Improvement Plan that would be monitored by Hill’s office and the U.S. District Court.
Hill said that deal would never have happened without the forthrightness of Bluford.
“I have had few dealings with Truman or Bluford since I left,” Hill wrote, “but it is hard to say that any of the other things that he did during his tenure had a more lasting impact than the ones he took when his hospital’s financial survival and reputation for care was in doubt because of these very serious allegations.”
Culture change
Bluford, though, also pointed with pride to his efforts to change what he said was a culture of apathy among staff when he arrived.
Bluford said that before he took the job, he walked through the hospital and talked with employees, including one who had been with Truman for more than 30 years and was respected within the organization.
“Tell me about the culture at Truman Medical Centers?” Bluford asked the woman.
“Well, the exception is the rule,” she replied.
As an example, she said, if everyone was called to meet in the parking lot at noon the next day, half would not get the message. And of the half that did get the message, she said, half of them would not show up, and of the people that did come, half of them would be late.
“I said, ‘Wow, that is very interesting. What do you think would happen if I took that CEO job?’” Bluford said. “And she looked me in the eyes and said, ‘I have no idea.’ And I looked her in the eyes and said, ‘Wrong answer.’”
Among the attendees at Tuesday’s retrospective event was John Borden, who was chairman of the board that hired Bluford.
The board, he said, knew it needed to find the very best administrator around.
“It turned out we got the best one,” Borden said, “and good things have happened.”
CHADWICK (AP) – Southwest Missouri investigators are working to identify a man found dead on a rural road in what appears to be a homicide.
The Springfield News-Leader reports Christian County sheriff’s deputies were called to a road south of Chadwick around 11 a.m. Friday. The man, believed to be in his mid-30s, was not carrying any form of identification.
Sheriff Joey Kyle says deputies found shell casings and “other signs of trauma” on or near the body and believe he had been shot.
Kyle says the body was found on a small, dead-end gravel roadway by a resident who lives at the only home at the end of the road.
A coroner was scheduled to perform an autopsy to determine the cause of death.
SENECA, Mo. (AP) – A southwest Missouri school superintendent has resigned four months after being fined by the state for ethics violations.
The Joplin Globe reports the Seneca School Board accepted the resignation of Steve Wilmoth on Thursday. Wilmoth was hired in April 2011 at an annual salary of $110,000.
But the Missouri Ethics Commission fined him $55,000 in February for failing to report monthly earnings of $5,000 from Educational Services of America to generate business for its Ombudsman division. Ombudsman runs alternative programs for students at risk of dropping out.
Wilmoth didn’t tell the Seneca board about his outside ties when he persuaded it in November 2011 to contract with Ombudsman Educational Services. Missouri’s ethics commission says the district paid Educational Services of America nearly $109,000 for the 2011-2012 school year.
PASADENA-A newfound asteroid will safely pass Earth early Sunday morning from a distance of about 777,000 miles (1.25 million kilometers), more than three times farther away than our moon.
Designated 2014 HQ124, the asteroid was discovered April 23, 2014, by NASA’s NEOWISE mission, a space telescope adapted for scouting the skies for asteroids and comets. The telescope sees infrared light, which allows it to pick up the infrared glow of asteroids and obtain better estimates of their true sizes. The NEOWISE data estimate asteroid 2014 HQ124 to be between 800 and 1,300 feet (250 and 400 meters).
“There is zero chance of an impact,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “In fact, it’s fairly common for asteroids to pass near Earth. You’d expect an object about the size of 2014 HQ124 to pass this close every few years.”
More than one hundred follow-up observations from NASA-funded, ground-based telescopes and amateur astronomers were used to pin down the orbit of the asteroid out to the year 2200, during which time it poses no risk to Earth. Its trajectory will continue to be recalculated past that time frame as additional observations are received.
Yeomans said that 2014 HQ124 is a good target for radar observations using NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, shortly after the closest approach on June 8. Radar measurements of asteroid distances and velocities often enable computation of asteroid orbits much further into the future than otherwise known.
2014 HQ124 is designated a “potentially hazardous asteroid,” or PHA, which refers to those asteroids 460 feet (140 meters) in size or larger that pass within 4.6 million miles (7.4 million kilometers) of Earth’s orbit around the sun. There are currently 1,484 known PHAs, but none pose a significant near-term risk of impacting Earth.
“Because NEOWISE is a space telescope observing the dawn and twilight sky at infrared wavelengths, it is particularly good at finding large NEOs that make relatively close passes to Earth,” said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE at JPL. “Using infrared light, we can estimate the object’s size, and we can tell that it reflects a fair amount of light. That means it’s most likely a stony object.”
NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes. The Near-Earth Object Program, commonly called “Spaceguard,” discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them and identifies their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet. To date, U.S. assets have discovered more than 98 percent of the known near-Earth objects.
Along with the resources NASA puts into understanding asteroids, it also partners with other U.S. government agencies, university-based astronomers, and space science institutes across the country that are working to find, track and understand these objects better, often with grants, interagency transfers and other contracts from NASA. In addition, NASA values the work of numerous highly skilled amateur astronomers, whose accurate observational data helps improve asteroid orbits after they are found.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is using the college commencement season to get behind Senate Democratic legislation that would let college graduates with heavy debts refinance their loans.
The Senate is expected to debate the legislation next week, but it faces significant obstacles.
In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama notes the program would be paid for by closing tax loopholes for millionaires. He says the choice facing lawmakers is whether to, quote, “protect young people from crushing debt or protect tax breaks for millionaires.”
In the Republican weekly address, Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida, the chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, calls attention to recent findings of widespread problems with delayed or mishandled appointments at VA hospitals. He says Republicans intend to hold Obama accountable.
ALBANY-A teenage driver was injured in an accident just after 6:30 on Saturday morning in Harrison County.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2004 Chevy Malibu driven by Ronnee S. Wilson, 18, Ridgeway, was eastbound on U.S. 136 just east of Route D. The vehicle traveled off the road. The driver overcorrected, crossed the centerline, traveled off the road, and struck an embankment.
Wilson was transported by private vehicle to Northwest Medical Center in Albany.
The MSHP reported she was not wearing a seat belt.
WASHINGTON – Aiming to strengthen accountability over the National Security Agency (NSA), a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators today introduced legislation to bolster the independence of the agency’s watchdog.
U.S. Senators Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), and Dan Coats (R-Ind.), have introduced the NSA Internal Watchdog Act, which would make the position of the NSA Inspector General a Presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed position. Currently, the NSA IG is hired directly by the agency’s director. The legislation-available online HERE-would also:
Require the IG to conduct annual reviews of whistleblower protections for agency employees and contractors, and provide recommendations to improve those mechanisms,
Strengthen legal counsel in the office to help ensure effective audits,
Give the IG subpoena power over employees who have left the agency and NSA contractors,
Enhance oversight by requiring the IG to provide a description to Congress of any instances in which the Secretary of Defense prohibits an IG investigation from moving forward for reasons of protecting national security interests, and
Mandate that any IG audit or investigation include an assessment of a program’s impact on civil liberties and submit recommendations for improving protections for civil liberties.
“I don’t know how you can be an independent watchdog if you owe your job to the head of the agency,” said McCaskill, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Financial & Contracting Oversight, and champion of the work of federal Inspectors General. “This bipartisan legislation would inject real independent oversight into the agency and help strengthen accountability over its activities.”
“The NSA IG should enjoy the same independence the IGs of the Central Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies already exercise in performing oversight. This bill makes sure that happens,” said Collins, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
“We must strike the right balance between protecting our national security and protecting our civil liberties,” Tester said. “This bill will ensure those protections while increasing accountability and transparency at the NSA. I’m pleased to partner with this bipartisan group of Senators to move this bill forward.”
“This bipartisan bill is about common sense reform of the NSA to better protect U.S. national security as well as the privacy and civil liberties of American citizens as enshrined in the Constitution. It is vital that the NSA has an objective Inspector General to perform investigations and oversight with total independence. The smart reforms included in this legislation will strengthen oversight and accountability of the NSA while protecting its core mission which remains vital to keep America safe,” Mikulski said.
“Today, the inspector general of the National Security Agency is appointed by and works for the Director. While there is no evidence the current inspector general is beholden to the Director of the NSA, or overlooked abuse in any way, the lack of trust between the American people and the NSA requires the establishment of an independent actor to investigate, inspect, and audit without waiting for direction or approval from the NSA’s senior leadership. For over a year, Senator Mikulski and I worked to establish such an actor inside the NSA, and the last two bills passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee included such language. Today, we are glad to be joined by our colleagues to introduce a stand-alone bill because an independent inspector general is a force multiplier for oversight of the NSA’s collection programs,” Coats said.
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The winning bidder for a private lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett is from Singapore.
A spokeswoman for the group that benefits from the auction says the winning bid was more than $2.1 million. The winner was Andy Chua from Singapore.
The auction benefits the Glide Foundation, which provides meals, health care, job training, rehabilitation and housing support to the poor and homeless in San Francisco.
The winner gets to spend several hours at lunch with Buffett, who leads Berkshire Hathaway and is known for his investing prowess and philanthropy.
Four of the previous five winners each paid more than $2 million. Last year’s winning bid was a little more than $1 million.
All across our country, Americans are checking their automobiles, studying road maps and adding another item to their “to do” lists in preparation for long-awaited summer vacations.
John Schlageck writes for the Kansas Farm Bureau.
Anticipation will soar and expectations will rise as husband and wife teams take to this country’s highways and byways in search of rest, peace and tranquility. Children will ensure this dream remains only partially fulfilled with road questions like: “I’m hungry, I want a hamburger and fries.” “Mommy, Billy is teasing me.” “Are we there yet?” and “I don’t want to go on vacation, I want to go back home.”
Regardless of such comments, mom and dad will remain true to their plans – determined as the Griswold’s heading to “Walley World” – and push ahead. After all, the money spent for the family vacation usually represents cash left over after paying for the family’s food, clothing and other necessities. Oftentimes money to pay for vacations goes on plastic and is paid for later with interest.
Parents will think to themselves and comment, “We worked hard for this time off. We deserve it and we’re going to enjoy it.”
Americans remain the luckiest, most pampered people in the world. Try to imagine what it would be like if we had to be self-sufficient. What would happen to leisure time if others did not produce the many things families need?
Although we all work throughout the year, we should not forget those people who also work hard and help us free up time so we can vacation with loved ones. One such group is the Kansas farmer and rancher. They help meet our food, fuel and fiber needs. These needs are met without worry of availability.
The next time you walk into your local supermarket remember that milk comes from carefully cared for dairy cows on someone’s Kansas farm. Remember the butcher performs a service in cutting and packaging the hamburger, chops and steak you and your family eat. But, don’t forget the Kansas farmer and rancher cares for and produces that pork and beef. Styrofoam cartons only hold the eggs which are laid by hens on the farm.
No other nation of people on this planet enjoys the amount of free time we do. No other country can claim that so few people feed so many. Today less than 2 percent of our nation’s population is farmers. They are capable of supplying the other 98 percent with most of our food and fiber.
Remember as you plot your vacation course this summer, and as you motor through the state’s highways, notice the fields of corn, soybeans, milo and alfalfa. Take a look at the cattle, hogs and sheep grazing in the many pastures. Don’t forget Kansas farmers and ranchers help fulfill our food and fiber needs. These professionals also care for the livestock and crops you see as you drive by. They do so with as much care as they possibly can.
John Schlageck, a Hoxie native, is a leading commentator on agriculture and rural Kansas.
BY STEWART TRUELSEN
