Poll: Things Looking Up for the GOP
Public Opinion Strategies just completed our own national poll, surveying 800 likely voters between September 6-8, 2008. It has a margin of error of +/- 3.5%.
This piece was primarily written by my Partners Neil Newhouse and Glen Bolger in our Virginia office. I have made some additions to reflect some of my thinking and have included numbers reflective of the Pacific Region of the Country, which, by our definition, is Washington, Oregon and California.
We wanted to share our thoughts on the data and its implications for GOP candidates in the Fall.
The MediCal Meltdown
The MediCal system, which provides health care for the uninsured, is about to implode. I have been a medical provider for 30 plus years in California, and have seen the meltdown of the system first hand.
Of course, money is a big problem, but it is only one issue in a long list of difficulties: lack of reimbursement for services; non-timely payments to medical providers that extend over 2 years; administrative bureaucratic hassles; paperwork nightmares; medical management by non-medical people; and medical management by medical professionals who have never examined the patient. It is no wonder that so many medical and allied health professionals are stampeding out of the system.
Here’s just one example of the bureaucratic hassles. I moved to a different medical suite in the same complex and had to change my MediCal paperwork. That required filling out a form consisting of 32 pages and, even though I’m already in the system, I was denied four times over the course of a year-and-a-half because it was claimed that I didn’t fill in answers to the bureaucracy’s satisfaction. But my information was already in the system, except for the new address.
New Homes are a Minnow in the Carbon Footprint Sea
Two important studies just released conclude that new homes already exceed the state’s ambitious 2020 greenhouse gas emission reductions requirements. The studies show that new homes are not part of the greenhouse gas problem, but rather are part of the solution.
The benchmark for the state’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) is the home built in 1990, and homes built today are far more energy-efficient. If AB 32’s ambitious goals are to be met, the focus must be on retrofitting the existing housing stock.
The residential sector accounts for only 14 per cent of the state’s total emissions, far behind transportation (41 per cent) and industrial (25 per cent). In a state with nearly 13.3 million housing units, new housing is adding less than one percent to the total housing stock each year, and because the new homes are so energy-efficient, emissions from those new homes make up just one-tenth of one percent of the state’s total annual GHG emissions.