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THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE OF THE MADISON TIMES WEEKLY NEWSPAPER |
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Doyle Meets The Black Press: Quality Jobs and Education by Jonathan Gramling Part 2 of 3
On December 19, Governor James E. Doyle met with Wisconsin’s Black press at the governor’s office in Milwaukee to look back at the accomplishments of his administration. In the first part of this three part series, Doyle talked about educational issues, his political appointments, and the state budget deficit. In this second installment, Doyle talks about affordable health care and efforts to reduce Wisconsin’s prison population. Efforts to preserve existing health care initiatives – During the Tommy Thompson administration, the State of Wisconsin instituted BadgerCare, which made health care affordable for working families whose annual income is within 185 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. SeniorCare assists individuals who are 65 years and above with purchasing prescription drugs for chronic health problems. “I’m very proud we are one of the few states in this country that came through the budget process without cutting our Medicaid program, our BadgerCare program, or our SeniorCare program. We are still going to have a huge challenge over the next two years in being able to fund Medicaid because it’s under tremendous stress. Many more people are on it now due to the economic downturn and medical costs have gone up.” We need to continue to protect and expand BadgerCare. It says to people ‘Look, when you go to work, you don’t lose your Medicaid benefits.’ Under the old system, it was a great disincentive to go to work given what health care costs are like now. BadgerCare says you can go to work and keep your health care coverage. We really have to work to continue to expand that. This isn’t only an urban issue. This is really a rural issue too. There are a lot of poor people, farm families, living out there without any health care insurance. With low-income, hard-working people doing everything anyone could ask of them, when their insurance bill is $2-3,000 per month and their family income is less than that, there isn’t much they can do.” On the use of Canadian prescription drugs – During the last several years, increasing attention has been given to the disparate prices charged for the same prescription drugs in Canada and the United States with the Canadian price being as low as 50 percent of its American counterpart. Increasingly, individual Americans are buying U.S. produced prescription drugs in Canada through the Internet or bus trips over the border. Some states have expressed the desire to reimport U.S. prescription drugs from Canada for their Medicaid and other affordable health care programs. However, American drug companies are fighting these practices and policies. “I would like to bring Canadian drugs into Wisconsin. I have an elderly member of my family and this person takes a prescription drug every day and will take it for the rest of their life. Every 30 days, they renew their prescription. I said ‘Let’s look at the Canadian pharmacy. How much are you paying for this?’ We went on the computer and went to a Canadian website. They had a 40 percent reduction in the cost of that prescription drug. It’s one thing if you just get sick for a while and they give you a drug, you take 10 of them, and then you’re better. But for many people with chronic conditions, these are things they take forever. The FDA and the Health and Human Service Department are running around saying they are going to crack down on states that do this. Just yesterday, we got a letter from a Canadian pharmacy we had been working with. They told us they would be unable to sell pharmaceuticals in bulk to state governments because the American pharmaceutical companies said they were going to quit shipping drugs to Canada if they did that. I’ve asked the Attorney General of the United States to investigate anti-trust violations over that because if the drug companies are getting together and saying ‘Don’t ship any drugs to Canada if the Canadians are shipping them back to the U.S.,’ — I’m no longer the Attorney General — but I hope the U.S. Dept. of Justice will do something about this. Here’s a case where the federal government is working at direct odds with the people of the state. It would be helpful to have a whole new delivery system of health care, but if we could get Canadian pharmaceuticals next month, it could decrease people’s medical bills significantly, more than anything else we could do. Through the state, we’re looking to help individual citizens go and buy the drug. The vision we’re moving toward is having a website where the State of Wisconsin says ‘Look, if you go to these four Canadian pharmacies on-line, we will tell you we have dealt with them. They’re legitimate. They’re reputable. The drugs they are selling are made in the U.S. under American standards.’ The Governor of Minnesota, a Republican, who has really been working on this, had a great line because the drug companies and the federal government keep saying 'Oh, Canadian drugs are counterfeit’ and all of that stuff. He said ‘Show me the dead Canadians.’ I’m sure many feel the way I do. If I became ill in Canada and I was taken to the hospital, I wouldn’t have any doubts about the quality of the health care. We could enormously save on the cost of Senior Care if we could buy all the drugs people receive under the program in bulk from Canada. If the State of Wisconsin could save 40-50 percent on the drug costs for SeniorCare, Medicaid, BadgerCare, state employees, institutionalized people, we’re talking real money. I hope the federal government will get on our side on this. On the creation of a drug and alcohol treatment prison – Due to “Truth in Sentencing” laws and other trends, Wisconsin’s prison population has increased dramatically in the last decade. While only 5 percent of the state’s population, African Americans comprise 48 percent of the prison population. Many of these convictions have been for drug-related offenses. “It won’t be the experience of being in prison and then going to a session on drugs every now and then. It will be being in a treatment facility and will be one of the ways people can earn their way out of prison. The other good thing about it is Matt has created it in a way that people can go there if they have violated probation without being sentenced to prison. Here’s the problem. Someone is on probation. The judge says they have to do things and the person doesn’t do any of it. The judge has to send them to prison. Now, if it’s drug related, instead of sentencing them to prison, they’ll be committed for six months to the alcohol and drug treatment center. I would like to see us continue that. That’s a major step forward.” On housing Wisconsin prisoners in state – Due to Wisconsin’s exploding prison population, some Wisconsin inmates are housed in private and public prisons located in other states. “I don’t want to build more prisons. I want to bring them back as we decrease the overall number of people who are incarcerated. Our goal should be to imprison our prisoners in Wisconsin and not in other states.” – Due to “Truth in Sentencing” laws and other trends, Wisconsin’s prison population has increased dramatically in the last decade. While only 5 percent of the state’s population, African Americans comprise 48 percent of the prison population. Due to the dramatic increase, the Division of Corrections was made into a department, a number of prisons have been built in rural parts of the state, and some inmates are housed in other states. Governor James Doyle – I just wanted to have an opportunity to talk a little bit about what has happened in the last year. When I came into office a year ago, it was a $3.2 billion deficit. It was an economy that was, at best, stagnant. There are going to be some major job projects in this state and the Milwaukee area, particularly the Marquette Interchange, and the power plant construction. We’re working with private companies in how we are going to let out the bids and do other things to ensure there is broad participation by minority contractors and there is great diversity in the workforce that is going to be involved in those enormous projects. There were some incredible challenges the legislature threw down in this last that would have hurt the city of Milwaukee a great deal. I had to stand up and veto them to make sure we protected Milwaukee. They had a shared revenue plan that would have cost Milwaukee about $15 million. There would have been drastic consequences for the city of Milwaukee. I vetoed that. Their so-called property tax freeze would have cut the Milwaukee Public Schools by about $37 million. Their proposal for everyone to carry concealed weapons would have presented enormous risks to the people of Wisconsin. I vetoed that. Their attempt to define marriage for a second and third time was meaningless. The definition of marriage under Wisconsin law is very clear. Their only purpose in doing it was to be divisive and divide people up. I thought it was mean-spirited and I vetoed that. There have been a number of times I had to stand up to the legislature and just say ‘We’re not going there. It’s not good for the people of Wisconsin.’ A proposal that would have hurt some of the major progress going on in Milwaukee and other places was their attempt to eliminate 4-year-old kindergarten. We are now seeing real progress in the test scores of second and third graders and a decrease in the so-called achievement gap in those years. I think you can give much of the credit to 4-year-old kindergarten and getting kids off to a good start. Credit can also go to the SAGE program, the small class size program which the Republicans sought to eliminate. To me, this is pretty basic stuff. I want kids to get off to good early childhood education and I want them to be in small classes. That’s the way we are going to make our biggest improvements in education. We’ve made a lot of progress, but I hope that in the coming year we’re going to be really focused on several very important things. Clearly number one is continued economic growth, particularly directed at good paying jobs. We’re going to really focus on reforming the way we finance our public schools. Each year, school districts go into the budgeting process not knowing what they are going to have. I want to get that on a much more stable footing and much more directed at making sure that we have an excellent education for every child. Education funding, jobs, and more affordable health care have to be the great challenges. If I could just work to get Canadian drugs in this state, I could help save people a lot of money. We’re going to work on this on a number of different fronts. That’s how I see the first year and where I see us going in the second one. Frankly, state government isn’t going to be hiring much in the next few years. That’s just a fact of life. A lot of our focus has been on the private sector. High-tech is going to determine a lot of the future here for African American people. I believe we have to reach out through our technical college system making sure they are really focused on getting African Americans and others into those technical training programs that are focused on bio-tech, information tech, and so on. That’s very true in Milwaukee and increasingly in Madison when you talk about production, it isn’t about heavy-duty manufacturing. It’s going to be highly-skilled technicians in laboratories. We can do that, but we have to reach into the high schools and technical colleges and show that career path is open. We really have to work to get African Americans into those career paths that are almost certain of employment. Medical technicians are almost automatically hired when they come out of the technical college; the need is so great. Wisconsin — I’m going to give one of my predecessors real credit here — the BadgerCare program is one of the best lower-income working persons programs in the United States. While many states provide children’s health care, as they must, Wisconsin operates under a very broad waiver from the federal government to provide family health care. Those programs across the country were cut dramatically as states faced these huge budget crises. You have to provide Medicaid, but you don’t have to provide these optional medical care services. I’m very proud — and feel it’s one of the accomplishments of my first year — that we protected Badger Care and Senior Care, which is a senior drug prescription program. My goal this year with a $3.2 billion deficit was to keep those programs intact. I’m proud that we did. The benchmarks are to see what kind of improvement there is in the development of minority business in Wisconsin. Not only are we doing some of the things I talked about earlier, part of Grow Wisconsin is to come up with a single minority business certification so people don’t have to go to Commerce and Transportation and get recertified with these big stacks of paper. I would hope also that we may be able to set up a system where that certification applies to municipal and local governments as well. We want to make it a lot easier if you are a small minority business not to have to fill out extra forms whereever you go. We ought to be able to streamline that. One of the measures should be what is the increase of business start-ups in the minority community. I hope one of the measures will be improved homeownership. One of my real goals here that I believe is absolutely essential in the African American community is more wealth. People should be able to build wealth like people do in other communities, and increasingly is in the African American community. We need to expedite that. Most people’s wealth is in homeownership. We’ve done some real innovative things. People with bad credit, for example, they are 30 years old, working hard, but when they were 19-21 years old, they had bad credit, and now they can’t get a mortgage. Antonio Riley has a program by which they can over a 3-year period, rent the home, create good credit, and get the mortgage after the three year period. Homeownership is a legitimate measure. Pure employment is a good measure. For example, on the Marquette Interchange, I’m not going to get into what the percentage should be, but people should be able to look and see how many contractors got jobs for how many dollars and how much of that went to minority firms. How many people actually worked there in jobs and what was the percentage? We’re very, very focused on that. Transportation Secretary Frank Busilocci was the head of the Stadium Board. Most people in this area would say the stadium was one of the big successes as far as minority hiring, contracting, and people on the job. We’re looking with some of the Milwaukee trade unions who have done some incredible work to make sure that not only on the Marquette project, but also on the power plant construction that they are moving people into the trades. Look at the dollar figures. Look at the number of companies. Look at the number of people. I also hope we are going to be able to improve the number of homeowners. We’re really focused on how you have that one big project and it’s done and you got the benefit from it and then you never get the next job, the real key to a contractor in the building area is to make sure that you’re going from that job to another job to another job. If what happens with the Marquette, it’s better than nothing if we have a lot of businesses get the contracts, but when that project is done, then they are done, that’s not where we are trying to head. Part of this is there is a concerted effort to first make sure people get the training to get into trades on the Marquette project. Then they can move on to the power plant or other kinds of jobs. The same is true with business. One of the ways we’re going to be doing this is have some of the big-boy construction companies that are out there all the time to work to develop on-going relationships with the smaller contractors, so as the big guys move on to the next job, they have that relationship with the smaller contractor and the smaller contractor comes along with them. We’re going to be focused on making sure minority businesses are a part of this job, but we also have to make sure they are a part of this job in a way that it transfers to other jobs in the future. Unlike the Stadium and Midwest Airlines Center projects, which I wasn’t involved in, there’s going to be a succession of big projects. That’s one of the reasons it is important to make sure we have minority contractors and workers involved in the Port Washington power plant. That’s ready to go. After that, we’re going to have two in Oak Creek. That’s probably 15 years of construction work that’s ahead of us in this area right now. The same is true of Marquette. There’s this huge Southeast Wisconsin — there’s debate about how big it is going to be and what the full expansion is and what all of the needs are in the Southeast Wisconsin freeway corridor — but there is no doubt, there’s going to be a lot of roadwork that is going to continue to be done. I hope we see people who are involved in the Marquette Interchange move on into the Southeast freeway project. I hope to see people involved in Port Washington move on to Oak Creek. We really do have a good 10-15 years of major construction that’s going to be going on in this community. We want people to move from one to another and build up value and capital and wealth. How do we reduce the number of people going to prison? There are many complicated issues here. However, we got some things done the first year to change the velocity. In the second year of the budget, Corrections, for the first time in I don’t know how many years, was held to an even budget in the second year. We are forcing ourselves to reduce the cost of Corrections. Matt Frank has some serious reform ideas. The key is to get more supervision on people who have early violations. About half of the people who go into our state prison system go in for a violation of probation or parole. That’s kind of a false number because some of those violations are serious crimes in and of themselves. However, generally, if we could get focused on making sure that a young person who has come into our system and gets put on probation for a minor kind of offense, really gets the intense supervision at that early stage, we could seriously slow the number of people who kind of inevitably move to the next offense and the next offense and ultimately into the prison system. We’ll now have in Wisconsin an alcohol and drug treatment prison, one where a person doing their prison time will actually be in a facility that we’re creating at High View up in Chippewa Falls that will be a treatment facility run as a treatment facility. The overall big issue here is how we keep kids from ever getting caught in the system in the first place. I wasn’t able to do much of this with a $3.2 billion deficit, but I hope as we get some resources, what I want to see is that every kid who comes into our juvenile system, at the very first time kids come in for some pretty minor things. What happens is they get used to the system and it doesn’t become a big deal anymore. They walk into court with the ‘attitude.’ What they have is a scared 14-year-old kid, but the way he is presenting himself in court is with an ‘attitude.’ They present themselves to the court as a tough gang banger. My dream is when that kid comes in the first time, we give him some real punishment, and we really do an evaluation of what that kid’s needs are right there at the earliest stage. Is this an alcohol or drug problem? Does the kid come from an abusive family? Is it due to a lack of education? Is it all of those things? Then, right then, we need to bring the resources to bear. If we put the resources into the kid right then, we’ll slow this movement into Corrections by 50-70 percent.
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