Legislative Gazette Show 1334, 2013 August 23

From WAMC in Albany, this is the Legislative Gazette.
A weekly magazine about New York State government and politics, your host is David Castina, with
Political Commentary by Dr. Alan Shartock, Political Scientist and Professor Emeritus
at the University at Albany.
Statewide distribution for the Legislative Gazette is made possible by New York State United
Teachers, representing professionals in education and healthcare, online at nysut.org.
And NISCASA, the New York State Coalition against Sexual Assault, working to support men and
their decisions to end sexual violence with the My Strength is not for hurting campaign
online at nyscasa.org.
Coming up this week, President Obama comes to upstate New York.
Our political observer Alan Shartock will share his thoughts on the president's visit and
will take a look at the coming implementation of the Affordable Care Act in New York.
Those stories and more on the Legislative Gazette.
President Obama, to our state New York this week, advocating a three point plan he believes
could make college more affordable for the middle class.
At his speech at Syracuse High School, Obama said the first prong would make colleges
and universities more accountable for the product they put out.
I'm directing my administration to come up with a new rating system for colleges that
will score colleges on opportunity, whether they're helping students from all kinds of backgrounds succeed.
And on outcomes, whether students are graduating with manageable debt, whether they're actually
graduating in the first place.
Obama is also proposing that colleges embrace more innovation to offer a better education
and to help students manage debt.
The average college student now graduates with $26,000 of debt.
The president says that creates a drag on the economy.
And he said it's time students and families had a tool to help them decide which college
can provide the best value for them.
Whether students are graduating with manageable debt, whether they're actually graduating in the first place,
whether they have strong career potential when they graduate, that's the kind of information
that will help students and parents figure out how much value a particular college truly
offers.
Having at-henager high school in Syracuse this week, he highlighted a set of initiatives
that would see colleges ranked on affordability and educational outcomes.
He also proposed an expansion of his existing pay-as-you-earn program that would allow students
to cap their college debt payments at 10 percent of their monthly incomes, a move that would
require congressional approval.
High school student, Kushe Eilin, says the expansion of the pay-as-you-earn program could
make the idea of college loans less frightening for many students.
It was very encouraging to me because I'm just becoming a senior and it gave me ideas
to what I really want to do with college and what I really want to take out loans.
And if it's helpful for me to take out loans.
Obama continued his tour to Binghamton in New York and then to Scranton, Pennsylvania,
where he was met by Vice President Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, your governor Cuomo skipped most of the president's upstate swing this week,
preferring to greet the president in Buffalo and then attending the state fair in Syracuse
on his own.
The story from the legislative gazettes Karen DeWitt.
Cuomo initially said he would only be able to greet the president when Mr. Obama arrived
in Buffalo because he had to get his daughters ready for college.
But after meeting the president on the tarmac and listening to his speech at the state university
at Buffalo, the governor found time to stop by the state fair in Syracuse, where he toured
the sights with his three daughters and ate the obligatory sausage.
Cuomo says he discussed the president's plan to make higher education more affordable
and he briefly met with Mr. Obama.
You always love to have the president here and this is a vitally important topic.
Everyone knows they need college education.
They just don't know how they're going to pay for it.
It's an issue the governor with twins off to Brown and Harvard says he can relate to.
You're telling me I was good enough for the sausage.
Cuomo will also not be joining President Obama in Binghamton on the second day of the president's
upstate New York tour.
In Albany, I'm Karen DeWitt.
I'm just going to be joining us now legislative Gazette political observer Alan Chartac.
Alan, well, the president came and it was an interesting visit.
He toured upstate New York and some of Pennsylvania had to do mostly with college costs.
But sort of surrounding this whole thing is the governor of New York and the issue of hydro
fracking.
They greeted in Buffalo and then parted ways.
Well, that's right.
Andrew Cuomo, as I have noted before, has a 63% approval rating quite high and the president
doesn't.
He's got about 40.
So if I know the way in which this governor thinks he says, well, it would be disrespectful
for me not to show up to greet the president.
And I have my own political ambitions.
And if I try to undercut him, somebody's going to undercut me later on.
So he shows up.
He greets him.
But the one thing Andrew Cuomo now knows is that the hydro fracking is a monster.
He never expected it to be.
He never expected it to be something that would help his reputation upstate.
It would create jobs, he thought.
And then all of a sudden, out came Natalie Merchant and all of the people who were so
effective at all of this and Josh Fox and all of these people created an atmosphere in
which we began to doubt.
We say, well, does it really cause earthquakes?
Does it really pollute our water?
What are some of the other anti-issues that come to it?
And do it until you know more about it.
The governor retreated first to the Department of Environmental Conservation.
Had to do a report.
They got tens of thousands of negative comments.
Then they laid it all off on the Department of Health.
We still really have an Irving Department of Health on it.
I have a feeling we're not going to hear much from Andrew Cuomo about hydro fracking.
That's for sure.
However, the president comes in and it's so fascinating because people like this president
in New York.
And they don't want to be disrespectful.
So I think that while the protestors were out, they weren't out with the same vehemence.
They were out with Andrew.
Go explain it.
I can't.
I can only tell you that there are times when people you like do things you don't like and
you ignore them.
Finally, Alan, an interesting story appeared in the Albany Times Union this week, Rick
Carle of the Reporter.
The headline auditor is audited in battle of audits.
David, this has gotten to be personal.
Here's what.
The controller's job is to audit the agencies of state government.
The controller has been doing it and doing it well.
Tom D'Ampoli was elected by the legislature and then elected by the people to be the
controller.
His predecessor was Alan Heversy got himself into a lot of trouble.
In fact, went to prison.
As a result, the legislature passed a bill which allows the governors, people to go in
and basically audit the controller every once in a while.
But we know that this governor never liked Tom D'Ampoli.
We don't really know why.
There have been a lot of things advanced.
The Napoli is at a very good job.
Maybe it's that the Napoli was favored by Speaker Silver.
Maybe it's that Governor Cuomo was interested in sort of ethnic balancing the political
ticket and having different kinds of people on it.
The Napoli is Italian as he is.
And has been suggested I don't know if any of that is true.
I'm just saying what is true is that it's clear that this governor has been after
the Napoli.
Now one of the things that's very interesting here is that there's a great deal of money
involved.
The governor of New York knows that the Napoli is the sole trustee of the multi-multi-multi-billion
dollar pension fund.
And there are those in and around the controller's office who suspect that part of what
all of this is.
That the governor comes in and they do an audit on the controller and the controller
answers all the questions, answers them well.
And they come up with what can only be seen as a rather silly thing about the computers
that the controller has being too old.
Well, the controller has requests in for better computers.
They're going to get better computers.
There's no question about it.
But this is hardly the stuff that should lead to the governor somehow getting his hands
on the voting of those stock shares and the control of that.
And I think that when the smoke clears, we're going to see that this is really a battle
over who gets to run the various pension money in New York State and to handle it.
You are listening to the Legislative Gazette, a program about New York State government
and politics.
I'm David Gissteen.
With some uncertainty and much anticipation, New Yorkers join all Americans in preparing
for a monumental change in the nation's health care.
As the Legislative Gazette's Dave Lucas reports, proponents of the Affordable Care Act
believe it should not be feared but embraced.
And they aim to set the course of public perception in a friendly direction.
Public health exchanges are scheduled to begin operations October 1st.
They were created by federal mandate to make affordable health insurance available to
everyone.
Predictions are that most consumers will see changes in their coverage.
Elizabeth Benjamin, Vice President of Health Initiatives for the Community Service Society
of New York, contends that New York is the state that benefits the most under Obamacare.
In New York, the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare will result in a decline in individual
market health insurance prices by a magnitude of an average 53%.
Starting January 1st, New Yorkers will see incredible savings if they were, you know,
had to buy health insurance out on the open market on their own.
People with job-based coverage will see some increases but not the sort of exponential
double digit increases we were seeing three, four years ago before the passage of the
act.
For New Yorkers, Obamacare is really, you know, we hit the jackpot.
Recent news that United Parcel Service plans to remove thousands of spouses from its medical
plan so they can find coverage via the health exchanges has caused much concern.
The health law requires large employers to cover employees and dependent children, but
not spouses or domestic partners.
New Yorkers expect the move to save about $60 million annually.
On top of that, USA Today reports workers can expect more of this sort of sudden loss
of spousal coverage under their employer's health insurance plans.
New York leads the pack in spending money on navigators, $27 million so far, seen as
crucial to the success of the Affordable Care Act.
New Yorkers have been designated to quell confusion and address the fears associated
with the new health insurance markets.
Kevin Jobin Davis, executive director of the Not for Profit Healthy Capital District Initiative,
concedes people have many questions about the Affordable Care Act.
It's particularly beneficial to people who have income is between, say, 200 percent and
400 percent of the poverty line.
For those individuals and families, they will get a subsidy that will help them to
free the cost of their insurance that was never available to them in the past.
And they'll have coverage that will be complete and people with pre-existing conditions will
also be able to get into those plans.
Nationwide there is a monumental effort being launched to enroll racial, ethnic and other
minority communities.
Nancy Hernandez-Kancio is director of health equity at Families USA.
While 13 percent of white, roughly 1 in 8, lack insurance, 18 percent of Asian and
Pacific Islanders and American Indians, over 1 in 5 African Americans, and nearly 1 out
of every 3 Latinos are uninsured.
These extraordinarily high levels of uninsurance have historically been significant barriers for
our communities to get the care they need.
But the Affordable Care Act is truly a game changer.
New, more transparent, reliable and affordable coverage options are going to be available
for millions of people, along with significant financial assistance for hard working families
well into middle-class level incomes.
I asked Elizabeth Benjamin to give me a concrete example of a financial advantage of Obamacare.
If your health insurance was costing $250 a month out of your paycheck and your paycheck
was only $2000, clearly you would be eligible to drop your employer coverage and go on
to the health insurance market place and be able to do an apples-to-apples comparison
of health insurance plans.
You'll be able to seek and receive federal financial aid to help you buy health insurance.
Financial aid will be available on the health insurance marketplace here in New York
State for families of 4 who earn $94,200 a year.
Even middle-income people will be able to get financial aid to help them offset the cost
of their coverage.
With a January 1 deadline approaching, when most Americans will be required to have health
coverage or pay a fine, the New York health benefits change, known as New York State
of Health, has posted interactive tools and information on its website to help people
calculate premiums and benefits.
The link can be found at wamc.org.
For the Legislative Gazette, I'm Dave Lucas.
A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looks at whether spraying
yard with pesticides reduces the risk of contracting a tick-borne disease.
In New York State, the study focused on Duchess County.
Legislative Gazette's Allison Dunn has more.
The CDC studied 2,500 households in Fairfield, Litchfield and New Haven counties in Connecticut,
Duchess County in New York, and four counties in Maryland.
Half of the yards were sprayed with by Fenthrin, a widely used commercial pesticide.
The other half was sprayed with a placebo water.
The result was a 60% reduction in ticks on the property sprayed with the pesticide.
However, tick-borne illness and tick encounters among those residing at the properties
treated with the pesticide were not reduced.
Tick encounters signify ticks crawling or ticks attaching.
Dr. Allison Hinkley is an epidemiologist with the CDC's Division of Vector-Born Diseases.
This is the first study of its kind.
We generally don't like to make policy decisions on a single study.
However, it is very large and it was done to the best of our abilities.
So we feel fairly confident.
We feel very confident in the results.
However, prior to this, people recommended spring and there were no studies done to evaluate
human disease.
So I think it's important for us to evaluate as many prevention methodologies as possible
so that we can utilize resources that will be into the best of their ability.
Dr. Richard Ostfeld is a disease ecologist with the Millbrook-based Carri Institute of
Ecosystem Studies in Duchess County.
So one interpretation is that 60% reduction in ticks just isn't good enough that we need
to do better.
Maybe we need to reduce tick abundance by 90% or 95%.
And that's a very sobering interpretation of this study because I don't know that we're
going to ever be very good at reducing tick populations by 90 or 95%.
We're not going to do it with pesticides, certainly controlling deer isn't going to do it.
Here's his second interpretation.
What it could mean is that people simply aren't encountering line bearing ticks on their
own properties.
They're encountering them somewhere else.
So maybe people are getting exposed while they're out walking the dog, they're out
picnicking or hiking or otherwise recreating.
And so what this study tells me is that we really need to figure out where are people
getting exposed.
And that's where we should apply tick control.
The CDC's Hinkley, who delivered the presentation at the International Conference on Line Borelliosis
and other tick-borne diseases in Boston, says more studies are needed.
Next we'd like to evaluate other options for prevention.
We also would like to be able to better understand where people are picking up ticks and acquiring
disease so that we can target our prevention methods in the right environments.
The study on pesticides followed one released a few days earlier in which the CDC found
that preliminary estimates indicating the number of Americans diagnosed with Lyme disease
each year is around 300,000.
That's a figure roughly 10 times higher than the annual number of cases reported to CDC.
Here's the Carri Institute's OSTFeld.
You know, other work, very good work, it's being done by the CDC demonstrates that we
have been underestimating the number of people in the U.S. that are exposed to and suffering
from tick-borne illness.
If an even bigger problem than we already suspected that it was.
And now we're finding that, you know, that if it's tough not to crack, that just spring
some pesticide on your lawn isn't going to do the trick.
Democratic State Senator Terry Gibson, whose district, most of Dutch's county and part
of Putnam, is a Lyme disease hotspot, says the CDC study should help his legislation
concerning tick-borne diseases.
I hope that it sends a message to my colleagues in the state Senate and the assembly that it
really is time for us to step up and take this issue seriously.
I am, as you know, pushing a bill called the Tick-Bit Act, which would hold in turn
to companies accountable to covering the cost of long-term illnesses associated with Lyme
disease.
And also a Dr. Protection Act, which would help cover doctors that are treating patients
of Lyme disease.
This is a big issue.
It's not going away.
And it's time that we, as Lyme official, step up and take care of our constituents and
do what needs to be done to make sure that they can live healthy and productive lives.
Democrat Kevin K. Hill is sponsoring the Tick-Bit Act in the assembly.
For the Legislative Gazette, I'm Allison Dunn.
You are listening to the Legislative Gazette program about New York State government, politics.
I'm David Gissteena.
In acknowledgement of the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights march in Washington,
the innovation trail has been gathering voices from African-American business-owners across
New York.
Vicki Brakens has been involved in the business and financial community in Syracuse for 30
years.
The innovation trail is Ryan Delaney spoke with her about being a minority entrepreneur.
Are there enough minority or, you know, underprivileged parts of this community getting the
chances to get involved or being reached to get involved in startups and innovations?
No.
I probably should just stop right there, but the answer is no.
And I'm not sure totally what the ultimate answer will be.
But I think parts of the answer may be that we need to spend more time in communicating.
And we also need to spend more time trusting each other.
I do believe that if everyone will take at least one or two steps toward each other, that
we could break down some tremendous barriers here in Syracuse.
Are we going in the right direction?
We're going in the right direction, okay?
We're going in the right direction, but we have to work on the perception that it is
not for me.
And some of the perception is possibly true because there may have been some missteps
early on.
Those missteps, can you elaborate on that at all?
Here's what I mean by missteps.
Possibly initially, let's just say it that way, there wasn't as much collaboration from
all communities and some of the decisions that were made.
And that misstep may have created an environment that still lingers that my voice doesn't count.
Looking back 50 years and what's happened and what's changed, how much easier it is now
as an African American woman to be doing all of the things, you know, this lengthy resume
that you have?
I'm an African American woman who is in a technology business and in financial services which is
probably 98% male.
So I'm not sure if easy is a good way of describing it.
What I would say is that there is more recognition of the fact that we need to expand the base
of individuals who are participating if we're going to solve some of these problems.
What I would say is easier though is the information is more accessible.
There is a realization that all of us have to pull together, but we still have some barriers.
Hypothetical situation here.
Say you're wandering the halls of the South Side Innovation Center and you bump into
20 something African American woman who's got a big cardboard box in her hands and just
moving into office space down there about to start her business.
What would you tell her?
I think the first thing I would say is to understand that dreams do come true but not overnight.
Work is involved in making instant successes.
There's a lot of things that are happening in the background.
So understand that dreams do come true but they don't come true overnight.
That you are going to have to face constant challenges and adapting to your environment
is important.
And finally, if you don't succeed the first time, doesn't mean you were a failure, it
may just mean it wasn't the right product or it wasn't the right time.
Vicki Brackens and entrepreneur and financial mentor.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
Thank you.
That was the Innovation Trail's Ryan Delaney.
And that about does it for this week's show.
We had help from the New York State Public Radio Network.
These are available.
Call 1-800-323-9262.
That's 1-800-323-9262.
Ask for program number 1334 or just listen or podcast on the web at wamc.org.
And join us again next week at the same time for more news on New York State government
and politics.
For the legislative gizette, I'm David Gistina.
Statewide distribution for the legislative gizette is made possible by New York State United
teachers representing professionals in education and health care online at nysut.org.
And Nisqaasa, the New York State Coalition against Sexual Assault, working to support men
and their decisions to end sexual violence with the My Strength is not for hurting campaign
online at nyscasa.org.