Good call

It seems like a long time ago that WV Governor Tomblin made the decision to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. I was there in the crowd celebrating that victory when it went down, but none of us who worked for it dreamed WV would do such a great job of signing up folks. We're talking 150K in a year.

We know that this was good news to those who got covered. Now it looks like it's good news in the states that expand Medicaid for both taxpayers and other health care consumers. It turns out that it's also good news for people who get jobs in the health care and service sector. According to Fitch Ratings,

The states that expanded health insurance access under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have seen substantially faster growth in healthcare jobs than those that did not since the first expansions began last January. If this trend continues, Fitch Ratings says it could support a broader economic and tax base for state budgets and improve nonprofit hospital finances in those states....

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare and social assistance jobs grew over 30% faster between December 2013 and December 2014 for 24 states that implemented ACA expansion on Jan. 1, 2014 than those that did not. On average, those states saw jobs in the healthcare and the social-assistance sectors grow by 2.4% YOY. Twenty-four states that didn't expand grew at 1.8%. Data for Alaska (a non-expansion state) and New Mexico (an expansion state) was not available.

(In case you were wondering what the YOY abbreviation meant, like I was, it's "year over year.")

Three up, three down

THIS IS EXCITING. Fast food workers are on the move for higher wages. Read more here.

WHY DON'T WE TRY THIS IN WV? Here's a look at an innovative Colorado jobs program.

COMING SOON--An interesting discussion about WV's economic future.

An ugly little spud. Loud too.

If anyone was worrying that we had a shortage of critters at Goat Rope Farm, allow me to assure you that you can cross that one off your worry list. A case in point is little Cedro, a baby chimney swift that fell or was exiled from his home nest and was rescued by the Spousal Unit. Little Cedro apparently didn't get the memo that little creatures should be cute in order to ensure survival. He seems to rely on loudness instead when he calls out for food at very short intervals.  

And what, you may ask, do you feed such a creature? In his case, freeze dried mealworms seem to be a hit.

(But I wonder who on earth came up with the idea of freeze drying mealworms?)

JOB GROWTH is slow, thanks largely due to austerity imposed by the majority in Congress. But if there was a political will, there are plenty of ways to improve the employment situation.

TWO WV ISSUES that are in the news these days include bad cuts to child care for working people by the Tomblin administration and prison overcrowding.

SPEAKING OF CHILD CARE CUTS, click here to do something about it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Goats announce farm occupation

We should have expected this given the worldwide outbreak of protests inspired by Occupy Wall Street. The goats here have announced their official occupation of Goat Rope Farm after meeting in a general assembly to prepare their demands.

According to Arcadia S. Venus, duly elected spokesperson, who stressed that she was not the leader of the group, "We want grain at least twice a day, plus beet pulp, alfalfa cubes and decent hay. And we demand clean drinking water and a formal acknowledgement that whenever we poop in it it's your fault."

Since these demands have basically all been met, aside from the formal acknowledgement, we anticipate that the occupation will continue indefinitely.

SENSE IS TALKED HERE about the American Jobs Act.

ANOTHER TRILLION. Outstanding student loan debt has hit the magic number.

IN CASE THERE'S A BABY IN YOUR LIFE, they learn more from playing than from watching screens.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Don't bee a stranger

When I was a small child, our family lived next to the kind of people who probably don't exist anymore. They were an elderly couple, the Richmonds, and they were what I can only describe as bedrock Appalachians, real mountain people. They knew all the old ways and skills of survival.

The man, Hinton, knew where to find fish in the river. He hunted for ginseng in the hills. And he claimed--and I believed--that he could follow honeybees to their hives. Hinton attempted to educate me about the benefits of honeybees. I was a hard sell since these creatures seemed to have been designed specifically to sting my feet when I played barefoot outside.

It took me a while to get the memo, but eventually I became a bee fan. I was sad to learn of the recent unprecedented decline in the bee population due to a mysterious syndrome known as colony collapse disorder. This was bad news not just for bee-keepers but for the many plants and crops that the bees pollinate.

Eventually, this hit home. For the past two summers, I don't recall seeing a single honey bee at Goat Rope Farm. I am pleased to announce that they are back and were as welcome to me as the return of a long lost friend. I hope they stick around.

TALKING SENSE. Here is Paul Krugman doing battle with bad economic ideas.

FAUX NEWS. Here's a look at 14 propaganda techniques used by a certain "fair and balanced" news network.

FROM EVIL TO HEROISM. Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist of prison experiment fame, is trying to see whether heroism can be taught. (Search Goat Rope archives in upper left hand corner for several posts on Zimbardo's work.)

A SENSE OF FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE may be innate in humans. Too bad some people apparently didn't get the memo.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Happy birthday, health care reform!

West Virgina residents celebrate the first birth day of the Affordable Care Act. WV Senator Jay Rockefeller was guest of honor, but my picture of him didn't turn out so good.

I never really planned my life this way--not that I'm a huge believer in planning a life--but I've spent over 20 years working on health care issues. Not all the time, thank God, but here and there as threats or opportunities arose.

In several union struggles I tried to support, as far back as 1989, health care for active workers and retirees was a major factor. In the late 1990s, lots of folks here joined to support the state Children's Health Insurance Program, and we've worked to expand it ever since. Then there were efforts to improve or defend the state's Medicaid program.

All the while, though, in the back of my mind and the minds of many others the main goal was achieving universal health care. Yesterday, March 23 2011, marked the first anniversary of the passage of the Patient Protect and Affordable Care Act, referred to hereafter as the ACA. In Charleston, over 100 people gathered to celebrate this milestone.

Let me be the first to say that the act we got wasn't exactly the one I had in mind. The Gentle Reader may have noticed the sometimes vast difference between what one wants and what one gets. Of the different versions of reform kicked around since 2009, I liked the federal House version a bit better than the Senate's. I was disappointed that the public option was eventually dropped. But still, I worked as hard as I could to support the bill we had and would do it all again.

Of course, there was a price to pay in the form of a backlash and a well-funded campaign of misinformation. But one year later, the real benefits are starting to kick in for people in West Virginia and around the country. And West Virginia's senators, including the late great Robert C. Byrd and especially Jay Rockefeller, played a major role in its passage.

The West Virginia legislature, in a session that kind of drove me crazy, did at least take the major step this time around of creating a state insurance exchange, which will lay the basis for major reforms and expansions of care that will happen in 2014.

For all its warts, the Affordable Care Act is already reaching millions of Americans and will reach far more when fully implemented. If it survives, it will be a landmark piece of legislation. In fact, future generations may well wonder why it took so long for a country like the USA to get there.

In the meantime, we need to work to defend it and aid in its implementation.

BIG LIES. Robert Reich takes on deliberate misconceptions about job creation and job killing.

WOULD YOU BELIEVE dog therapy for law students?

URGENT AMAZONIAN FISH MANURE UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Brother, can you spare a book?

I don't usually complain about this, but I'm about to have too much time to read. I'm talking air travel, including two 14 hour flights. Usually I have a pile of books going at any given time, but it's not really practical given limited luggage weight and limited space.

This has created an interesting dilemma...what to take?

Here's what I've come up with so far:

1. It's about time to read Don Quixote again, especially since I'm going on a Quixotic trip. It really is a hilarious book. There's an old story that King Philip III of Spain once saw a man reading a book and laughing until he cried. The King said something like, "Either that man is crazy or he's reading Don Quixote."

2. Since I'm headed there, I'm going to try Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa, a gift from the in laws.

3. A friend loaned me a copy of Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Or maybe Jared Diamond's Collapse. I listened to it before but it deserves a real read. The jury's still out between those two.

4. We get The New Yorker at Goat Rope Farm. Man, do those things pile up. I never seem to get around to reading them, although the Spousal Unit manages to. I'm thinking about rounding up all the old ones I can find and taking them along. I can scatter them as offerings to other travelers as I go.

That's the plan anyhow.

WHAT HE SAID. NY Times columnist Bob Herbert talks sense about job creation here.

ALL DONE. The "final" piece of health care reform legislation, which also overhauled student loans, was signed yesterday.

BANKING ON REFORM. Here's TARP oversight committee chairperson Elizabeth Warren on the need for financial reform.

URGENT BAT UPDATE here.

CUTE LITTLE ROAD-RUNNER DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED