Proposed Bill Would Avoid Damaging Cuts to BadgerCare by Closing Corporate Tax LoopholeAt a press conference in the Capitol today, Representative Jon Richards (D-Milwaukee) and Senator Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton) unveiled a bill that would stop the Department of Health Services (DHS) from implementing changes to BadgerCare that would...
AB 531 Would Strip the Executive Branch of Its Authority Relating to Health Care Reform We all learned in high school that American democracy succeeds by striking a balance between the power of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. However, in Wisconsin that balance was disrupted last year when almost all the...
The Annie E. Casey Foundation has released a Data Snapshot on High Poverty Communities, highlighting the growth in the number of children growing up in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty (defined by census tracts with poverty rates of 30 percent or more) around the country and in Wisconsin. As the Snapshot illustrates, the...
And DHS Schedules Town Hall Meetings on Long-term Care Cost-Savings The Assembly Aging and Long-Term Care Committee has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow, Feb. 23, on the bill to lift the cap on Family Care, SB 380 (and on the Assembly version of the same bill, AB 477). The hearing will be in Room 417-N and begins at 10:00 a.m. Read...
AJR 100 Would Make Wisconsin the Only State to Constitutionally Require GAAP AccountingTonight the Assembly voted by a sizeable margin, 69-25, to approve AJR 100, which would put key details of fiscal policy into the Wisconsin Constitution. An amended version of the resolution now moves on to the Senate. If it is approved there, AJR...
Too often our public policy and investments related to youth are informed not so much by fact as by myth, popular media, and catchy headlines. What we do know is that the vast majority of youth today are responsible, productive, pro-social, and engaged in the business of growing up to be contributing members of our communities. ...
The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data has recently released census information for 2010 of the number of juveniles placed in juvenile residential facilities in each state. The data can be reviewed through Easy Access to the Census Juveniles in Residential Placement 1997-2010, including data for both secure (juvenile corrections,...
Changes Would Affect Adults over 133% of Poverty Level, but Preserve Children's CoverageLetters recently exchanged between the Wisconsin Dept. of Health Services (DHS) and the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) shed additional light on the status of negotiations over federal waivers and plan amendments the state has proposed,...
The health care reform law is expected to create 326,000 more insured Wisconsinites. This will be a great accomplishment; however, it’s also important to think about whether the health care system will be ready to care for the increased number of patients seeking primary and preventative care because of the law. Fortunately, the...
Journal Sentinel and NY Times Editorials Argue against Diverting the Settlement FundingBoth the New York Times and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorialized over the weekend against the use of the new mortgage settlement dollars to help close state deficits. As the Journal Sentinel wrote: “With so many families in Milwaukee - and...
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