New Report: Medicare Accountable Care Organizations

OLR Report 2015-R-0033 discusses Medicare Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs).

Medicare ACOs are voluntary networks of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers that coordinate care for Medicare patients (excluding those enrolled in Medicare Advantage (Part C) private plans). The Affordable Care Act (P.L. 111-148, § 3022) authorized the use of ACOs as a way to improve patient care and reduce health care costs in the Medicare program. Providers may participate in a Medicare ACO and commercial payer ACO at the same time.

ACOs assume medical and financial responsibility for their Medicare patients’ care. While they still use Medicare’s traditional fee-for-service payment system, ACOs are eligible for additional payments or bonuses when providers coordinate care, reduce Medicare spending, and meet specified quality of care benchmarks.


Medicare currently offers three ACO programs: the Medicare Shared Savings Program, the Advanced Payment ACO Model, and the Pioneer ACO Model. Click here to read more about these programs in the full report.

Connecticut Mattresses Recycling Program Set to Begin

The Hartford Courant reports that beginning May 1, 2015, retailers will charge a $9 fee on every mattress and box spring, pursuant to a state law that mandates a mattress recycling program.


Connecticut’s Public Act 13-42 established the state’s program to manage discarded mattresses. It requires mattress producers, or their designees, to join a nonprofit mattress recycling council that they, or a trade association representing them, establish. It prohibits producers who fail to participate in the program from selling mattresses in Connecticut. The act allows the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to enforce the program’s requirements.


Rhode Island and California also passed mattress recycling laws in 2013. The Mattress Recycling Council, a nonprofit group the mattress industry formed, will manage the programs in each of the three states.


For more information about the Mattress Recycling Council, visit their website here.

New Report: States Authorizing Rent Control

OLR Report 2015-R-0020 discusses (1) which states have laws authorizing local governments to adopt rent control ordinances and (2) the type of parameters these laws place on local governments.


Four states and the District of Columbia have laws authorizing rent control ordinances (California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York). At least 32 others have laws prohibiting local jurisdictions from adopting these ordinances. In states where the statutes are silent, local governments may enact rent control ordinances pursuant to their general police powers, or they may be prohibited from doing so pursuant to case law, which is the case in Connecticut.


Generally, the rent control enabling laws set a framework under which municipal or county governments may adopt rent control ordinances. They commonly address (1) jurisdictions in which rent control may be established, (2) the method for calculating maximum rent, and (3) exempt properties. The laws leave it to local governments to implement rent control through ordinances that fall within the parameters established by statute. Thus, approaches vary considerably.


Click here to read the full report.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Launches Homeownership Website

The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently launched a website for prospective homeowners.  CFPB was established by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 to promote financial education and enforce federal consumer financial protection laws.


While CFPB is still adding content to its website, it already:

• explains and compares the most common mortgage types;
• provides an interactive tool for checking local interest rates;
• explains closing forms and provides a closing checklist; and
• links to other information, such as where one can find a HUD-approved housing counselor or file a mortgage complaint.

Example of information provided by CFPB rate checker

Protecting Student Privacy Presents Policy Challenges

How can we preserve our own and our children’s privacy now that so much information about us is submitted on line? Even well-informed and tech-savvy students and parents are hard-pressed to keep up with all the ways privacy can be breached.  An app called ClassDojo, for example, is widely used by teachers to track and manage students’ classroom behavior.  But where and for how long that often sensitive information is stored, and to whom it is disseminated were unknown until ClassDojo signed a voluntary pledge started by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) to protect student privacy. 


According to a Washington Post article, 91 companies, including Google and Khan Academy, have now signed the pledge. The SIIA, however, is a trade association that represents the software and digital content industry, and the pledge provides no legal protection. 


On January 12th of this year, as reported in the New York Times, President Obama called for federal legislation that would restrain companies operating websites, apps, and cloud services from collecting information on and marketing to K-12 students. The proposal is modeled on a California law that legally restricts companies from targeting students with advertising, creating profiles using collected data, or selling student information. The Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (California SB 1177) will become effective on Jan 1, 2016. How far privacy should extend is surely an open question that will continue to be debated. 


For more information about student privacy initiatives, click here for the website of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and here for a 2014 OLR report on “data mining” by educational technology providers. 

New Report: Town Clerks’ Selection and Term Lengths Methods

OLR Report 2015-R-0009 provides information on (1) which municipalities elect their town clerk, (2) which ones appoint the clerk, and (3) the clerks’ term lengths.


According to information provided by the Office of the Secretary of the State and a review of selected municipal charters, 121 municipalities elect their town clerk, and 48 appoint the clerk. Seventy-seven town clerks serve four-year terms, 51 serve two-year terms, 38 serve for an indefinite period, two serve terms coterminous with the town’s mayor, and one serves a six-year term.


Clerks who serve for an indefinite period do not have specified term lengths. Such clerks include those who (1) serve at the pleasure of the appointing authority or (2) may be removed only for cause.


Click here to read the full report including a table that indicates, for each municipality, (1) whether the town clerk is elected or appointed and (2) the clerk’s term length, if applicable.

New Report: Veterans’ Benefits

OLR Report 2015-R-0012 describes the benefits the state provides to veterans.
State law defines a “veteran” in different ways for purposes of eligibility for different benefit programs.  In addition, some benefits are only available to wartime veterans.  For example, wartime veterans are eligible for:

1. local property tax exemptions (a reduction of the property’s assessed value for tax purposes);
2. education benefits, including tuition waivers at the state’s public colleges and universities;
3. financial aid from the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Marines’ Fund and the veterans’ affairs commissioner;
4. employment benefits, including bonus points on initial civil service examinations;
5. retirement credits (for those who were state or municipal employees); and
6. motor vehicle registration and license fee exemptions.

A veteran’s surviving spouse or dependent children are eligible for some benefits to which the deceased veteran was eligible.


Click here to read the full report.

Plainfield’s Earthquake Swarms Bring Scientists to Connecticut

According to a New York Times article, scientists from the Weston Observatory at Boston College visited Plainfield last month after 11 small earthquakes were measured in and around the town. The earthquake swarms in Plainfield have been small, with the strongest measuring only 3.3 magnitude. Many questions cannot be answered because of the infrequency of earthquakes in the area and lack of data about them.


The article contrasts the earthquake swarms in Connecticut to California’s earthquakes, which occur from the friction between tectonic plates and are characterized by a big event followed by smaller aftershocks. Earthquake swarms, however, are several small events that build up to a large event and then taper off. The small quakes have caused pictures on the walls to rattle and fall but no major damage. Town residents have raised concerns and questions, which scientists have attempted to answer.


A geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey explained that the earthquakes are too small to produce a surface rupture, so they cannot determine the epicenter of the quakes or what is causing the rumblings. Scientists from the Weston Observatory placed four temporary seismometers in private homes in the area to more accurately pinpoint the locations and details of each temblor. They have kept the sites of the temporary seismometers a secret because the equipment is costly and may attract curious people. For more information about the earthquake swarms and seismometers, read the New York Times article.

New Report: Connecticut's Business Tax Credits

OLR Report 2015-R-0049 describes Connecticut’s various business tax credits.




Connecticut offers over 30 business tax credits for actions ranging from purchasing machinery and equipment to investing in start-up technology businesses. Some of the credits apply to money or assets businesses donate for public or charitable purposes, such as the Neighborhood Assistance tax credit. Most apply to one or more business taxes; a few apply to the personal income tax.




This report, which updates a 2013 OLR report, groups the credits by purpose and summarizes each group.





Click here to read the full report.

Colleges Increase Use of Armed Officers on Campus

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics recently released a report showing that college campuses are employing more sworn, armed police officers.  The bureau surveyed more than 900 four-year colleges and universities with 2,500 or more students during the 2011-12 school year.  The survey was last conducted in 2004-05.

Survey findings show the following increases since the 2004-05 survey: the percentages of campuses using (1) sworn officers increased from 75% to 77% and (2) armed officers increased from 68% to 75%. 

Results also compared public and private institutions.  In the 2011-12 survey, the percentage of public institutions using sworn officers (92%) was more than double that of private institutions (38%).  Similarly, the percentage of public campuses using armed officers (91%) was more than double that of private institutions (36%).


The full report also addresses campus officers’ arrest and patrol jurisdictions, community policing activities, safety escort services, range of weaponry, and technological devices, among other things.

Avoiding the "Failure Loop"

In previous blogs, we discussed what the experts were saying about how to nurture and sustain people and groups that concentrate on inventing new products, processes, and services. Some mentioned unique cultural factors. Others focused on how universities like Stanford encourage professors and students to interact with people in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. Still others attributed innovation to concentrations of diverse people living in relatively small areas, like Boulder, Colorado. One theme running through these observations is that quitting isn’t an option, despite what W.C. Fields had to say about trying and failing.

Source:

http://www.gypsynester.com/fields.jpg

And that’s a good thing, because innovation and failure go hand-in-hand, according to NPR’s “Planet Money” founder Adam Davidson. People and organizations that innovate risk failure. Their ideas may not work or, if they do, others may come along and exploit them to their advantage. Davidson calls the time between innovation and failure the “failure loop,” and the loop is getting shorter and shorter as innovation keeps accelerating. The loop’s fallout can be seen in the buildings that dot Silicon Valley.  “These squat buildings have thick outer walls that allow for a minimal number of internal support beams, creating versatile open-floor plans for any kind of company,” Davidson wrote. The companies that occupy these buildings “expand quickly or go out of business, and the office has to be ready for the next tenant.”

The failure loop started to shrink in the late 1800s when innovative people developed the legal, financial, and organizational means to spread the risk involved with innovating. The business corporation, for example, “acts as a giant risk-sharing machine, amassing millions of investors’ capital and spreading it among large number of projects, then sharing the returns broadly too,” Davidson stated. But new organizational forms are nipping at the corporations’ heels.  Thanks to computers, the iconic corporate pyramid is giving way to loose, decentralized networks of individuals and small groups.


The shrinking failure loop also disrupts how we live and work. “Rather than undertake one career for our entire working lives, with minimal failure allowed, many of us will be forced to experiment with several careers, frequently changing course as the market demands—and not always succeeding in our efforts.” How do we cope with these seismic disruptions? By building “a new set of institutions, something like the societal equivalent of those office parks in Sunnyvale (California), that help us stay flexible in the midst of turbulent lives,” according to MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, whom Davidson discusses in his article. Specifically, “we’ll need modern insurance and financial products that encourage us to pursue entrepreneurial ideas or the education needed for a career change. And we’ll need incentives that encourage us to take these risks; we won’t take them if we fear paying the full cost of failure.”


Click here to read more in a New York Times Magazine article. 

New Report: Massachusetts Health Reform Legislation 2008-2012

OLR Report 2015-R-0006 briefly summarizes certain aspects of Massachusetts’ health reform legislation in recent years and briefly compares it to Connecticut law.


The report looks at Massachusetts’ legislation enacting comprehensive health reform in 2006 as well as changes to a variety of health care topics in 2008, 2010, and 2012. The report focuses on major provisions affecting:

1. price transparency;
2. electronic health records and information sharing among providers;
3. administrative efficiencies (such as uniform billing and coding requirements);
4. insurance product and contracting reforms;
5. oversight and regulation of provider mergers and consolidation;
6. certification of accountable care organizations;
7. state agencies involved in overseeing and implementing these provisions; and
8. state investments in these areas such as investments in community hospitals and other small providers, state support for e-health implementation, workforce investments, and tax credits.


Click here to read the report.

New Report: Taxes on Soft Drinks and Candy

Four states levy an excise tax on soft drinks, but no state levies one on candy, according to a recent OLR report.  The four states—Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia—allocate some or all of the revenue to a specific purpose: litter programs in Tennessee and Virginia and Medicaid and university programs in Arkansas and West Virginia, respectively.

While most states do not impose excise taxes on soft drinks or candy, many impose sales taxes on these items, but tax them at higher rates than other grocery food. Of the 46 jurisdictions (45 states and the District of Columbia) that impose a sales tax, 23 tax soft drinks and 18 tax candy at higher rates than groceries.

The report also identifies states that recently considered bills taxing soft drinks and candy and describes federal legislation proposed in 2014 to tax soft drinks.