March 17, 1959: Eisenhower Signs Hawaii Statehood Bill
Hawaii Congressional Delegation How They Voted March 17, 2014
Hawaii Unions Resist Reforming Benefits for Public Retirees
CB: Hawaii’s most powerful unions are fighting legislation that would cut the retirement benefits of future public employees.
Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s administration maintains that the state must take steps to reduce the pension system’s $8.4 billion unfunded liability.
Hawaii Government Employees Association Executive Director Randy Perreira understands the need to ensure the system’s solvency, but said the legislative proposal further deteriorates the already scaled-back benefits package and creates another lower tier of employees.
House Bill 2263 would cut in half the amount of retirement service credited for accumulated sick leave for employees who join the system after June 30, 2014. They currently get one month of service for every 20 days of unused sick leave.
Employees’ Retirement System Executive Director Wes Machida said at the current rate, it’ll take 28 years for the system to become fully funded. If the bill passes in its current form the system would be fully funded 12 to 18 months sooner and it would reduce the state and counties’ future contributions by $581 million.
read ... Resist
Health Connector Fixes 79% of Glitches, But Nobody Wants Obamacare
SA: Officials of the state-based insurance exchange, created as part of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, are urging the 16,348 Hawaii applicants who didn't complete their applications to finish the process before the March 31 deadline. (Dream on) The organization has received 21,317 applications but only enrolled 4,969 since going live Oct. 15....
Roughly 79 percent of the 395 Hawaii Health Connector defects that had been reported from Oct. 15 through March 7 are now resolved, including those that were most impactful on consumers, said Anjali Kataria, a Washington, D.C.-based former senior technology adviser in the Obama administration who was brought in by the Connector Dec. 1 to help fix the system. There were 74 defects still unresolved as of this week, she said.
read ... Health Connector promises fewer glitches, faster system
Waitlist problem needs action now
SA: But sometimes patients improve enough to leave the hospital, but also require continuing treatment, intravenous antibiotics, say, or wound care. The necessary treatment doesn't require the highest, most expensive, level of care, but is too complicated for the patient to manage on one's own at home. Or, in the worst-case scenario, the patient has no home.
Hospitals try to place these patients in less expensive facilities to complete their recoveries, but too often these transfers are rebuffed — not necessarily for lack of beds, but because the patients are on Medicaid or Medicare and insurance reimbursements won't cover the actual cost of their care.
Add in the fact that half of these patients suffer mental health problems along with whatever put them in the hospital in the first place, and it's easy to understand why this problem — known as waitlisting — remains persistent, affecting more than 7,000 patients a year, or about 7.3 percent of all those hospitalized in Hawaii in 2011.
The need for solutions is urgent, including higher reimbursements for health care providers, more community-based health and social services for the mentally ill, and better training for unpaid family caregivers.
On average in 2011, wait-listed patients spent a week longer in the hospital than they needed to, and acute-care facilities took the financial hit — to the tune of nearly $63 million. These net losses reflect the fact that hospitals kept the patients but were not fully reimbursed for the level of care delivered, says a new report by the Hawaii Health Information Corp., which reviewed hospital discharge data from 2006 to 2011....
Patients with mental-health problems account for 49 percent of all wait-listed patients in Hawaii and remain hospitalized longer than any other class of patient, other than newborns with serious health problems....
Background:
read ... Waitlist problem needs action now
City sidewalk squad to Push Homeless to Accept Shelter
SA: Mayor Kirk Caldwell's administration is creating a new city team devoted strictly to enforcing the controversial laws used to remove the property of the homeless and others that is placed illegally on city sidewalks and in Oahu parks.
Ross Sasamura, the city's facility maintenance director, said the intent is to create a section devoted to enforcement of the city's Stored Property Ordinance and Sidewalk Nuisance Ordinance, which make it illegal to leave objects on the sidewalk, as well as park closure rules....
The activist group (de)Occupy Honolulu has taken the city to court over the Stored Property and Sidewalk Nuisance ordinances.
Sugar Russell, a (de)Occupy Honolulu member who has monitored the city budget deliberations, said the city "still intends to violate the Fourth and 14th amendments of the houseless population, opening itself up to more lawsuits and more wasted resources."
U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi has allowed the Sidewalk Nuisance Ordinance to remain in force, but she also ruled that the due-process rights of Russell and her colleagues were violated because they were each charged a $200 fee to get their property back without proper notice about the process.
read ... Occupy Tries to Keep the Homeless Homeless
State to lose more than $200 million for military construction
SA: More than half of the $449.5 million in projected military construction for Hawaii was axed from the Defense Department's 2015 budget request, and some other programs are being reduced or eliminated as the Pentagon starts to roll out the latest round of cuts.
Marine Corps Base Hawaii, which is in a period of growth, would be particularly hard hit by the cutbacks, with $104.5 million for a headquarters/operations center, $65.4 million for a bachelor enlisted quarters, $62.9 million for airfield electrical system upgrades and $5.4 million for MV-22 tilt-rotor Osprey landing zone improvements all reduced to zero for 2015.
read ... $200M
Former Rep. Meyer Pulls Papers to Run for Sen. Hee’s Seat
CB: Meyer lost to Hee 51-44 percent in 2012. If Meyer runs in the Republican primary, she may face state Rep. Richard Fale, who has also indicated he wants to challenge Hee
read ... Former Rep. Meyer Pulls Papers to Run for Sen. Hee’s Seat
Mililani Trask Files to Run for OHA Seat
CB: Trask is running in what may be a large primary field. Nine candidates have pulled papers (including sitting trustee Rowena Akana); five have already filed like Trask, a former OHA trustee.
read ... One of Several Geothermal Schemers Running for OHA (Again)
How Deep Is Your Wallet?
IM: On Saturday, Faith Action for Community Equity (FACE) held their annual Equity Summit.
read ... How Deep Is Your Wallet?
BLNR makes Dairy farmer Wait 5 Years for Lease Approval
HTH: Kees Kea said he moved to the Big Island in the early 2000s, when he became a partner at Island Dairies, which has since been renamed to Big Island Dairy.
He said the family had planned to open the dairy years ago, but had to wait for approval from the state Board of Land and Natural Resources to lease 1,395 acres of former sugar cane land for the dairy.
Recently the state approved the lease, a process that took five years.
“Finally,” Kees Kea said of the long-awaited approval.
The lease will be for 35 years at an annual rent of $20,500 for the first 10 years. Kees Kea said the cost of the dairy farm is “roughly” about $2 million, and the cheesery costs about $1 million.
The dairy will be one of only a few in the state.
read ... Promoting Agriculture, Eh?
Homeless Shelters Must Spring for Commercial Kitchens
SA: In a move to help shelters feed the homeless, Gov. Linda Lingle's administration issued an emergency exemption in 2007 allowing groups to prepare food for the needy without having to do it in state-certified kitchens.
Now that exemption is coming to an end, and some advocates are saying the new, tougher rules could have some unintended negative consequences for the homeless and those who prepare meals for them.
"It's going to make it a lot more difficult to serve the homeless," said En Young, executive director of The Food Basket Inc., Hawaii island's food bank....
In 2007 it was thought that such requirements were a deterrent to groups wanting to serve the homeless, prompting the exemption.
Young said he believes the tougher rules will act as a deterrent again, and especially on the neighbor islands, where there are fewer state-certified kitchens available to churches, transitional shelters, domestic violence shelters, clean-and-sober houses and other organizations serving homeless individuals.
Young said only 10 percent of the 35 soup kitchens and pantries on Hawaii island now have full-service kitchens. Few groups will be able to afford to upgrade their cooking facilities, he said, and a number of rural groups will find it difficult to travel the long distances required to reach certified kitchens and maintain the proper food temperatures on the way back home.
"I wish the Department of Health did a little more digging into the realities of serving the less fortunate," he said.
Oshiro, however, said groups without full-service kitchens will be allowed to cook hot meals for the homeless under the law. With a single hand sink, he said, groups can prepare soups and other canned foods, saimin, hot dogs, sandwiches and salads.
read ... Money
DHHL construction leaves neighbors rattled
SA: Residents of Waimanalo lodge complaints over the damage their homes sustain from work on Native Hawaiians' housing....
read ... Construction
Guard Charged with Jail Rape
CN: A Hawaii prison guard sexually assaulted an inmate twice, and was criminally charged for it, the woman claims in state court.
read ... rape
Hawaii Ranks 2nd to Wyoming in Electing Women to US House
WaPo: Since 1989, the state has held 13 elections for its single House seat, and the last 10 have all put a woman in office. The state’s current representative, Cynthia Lummis (R), was first elected in 2008, taking the seat over from Barbara Cubin, who had been first elected in 1994 and decided not to run in 2008. In 1869, Wyoming women became the first in the nation to get the right to vote, earning the state its nickname.
The finding that Wyoming is unique in its gender parity over the past quarter-century is the result of a study of the 5,325 U.S. House general and special elections held since 1989. The study was conducted by Smart Politics, a nonpartisan political news site authored by Eric Ostermeier, a research associate at the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
While no other state has matched Wyoming’s parity over that time span, the total 79 women in the U.S. House today is three times as large as 25 years ago. Wyoming’s rate of electing women is more than 30 percentage points ahead of any other state, according to Ostermeier’s analysis. South Dakota has elected a woman to its single House seat in six of its 13 elections since 1989.
Grading on a curve, only three other states earned A’s from Ostermeier: Hawaii, with a 42.9 percent rate of electing women; Connecticut, with a 37.9 percent rate; and Nevada, with a 37.5 percent rate. California got an A-, although it is responsible for nearly a fourth of all seats won by a woman over the past 25 years.
read ... Number 2
Legislative Motion:
QUICK HITS: