NH’s battle with feds over cash continues
The state’s battle with the federal government administration over claimed reimbursement payments has a long, complicated history.
It isn’t likely to end soon, but what’s known is that the Obama administration is retroactively disallowing $35 million in what has been called the disproportionate share payments. This is meant to compensate for the care of low-income residents.
Yes, the Gov. Lynch administration will continue to appeal the judgment of the U.S. Health and Human Services’ office of inspector general.
The feds’ decision against the state’s claim was made on several grounds, among them that the state’s tax on hospital revenues used to generate bonus state Medicaid payments is invalid.
Then, state Health and Human Services Commissioner John Stephen argued that the tax isn’t on income or profit, but on hospital revenues, and therefore, an appropriate expense to claim.
For years, the state’s argument has been that the federal government has changed the rules of the reimbursement game and tried to apply them retroactively to New Hampshire.
“The state’s current methodology has been in place for over 10 years,’’ Stephen wrote on April 2, 2007. “In all these years, the state has been completely forthright about the method it employs to calculate DSH payments, and CMS has never challenged the state’s approach.’’
The only silver lining about this bad news is if it’s anything like this dispute, the state is likely to have some extended period of time to have to make its payments.
Our own odd couple
They aren’t quite Felix and Oscar, but Jeb Bradley and Stephen still make a pretty good odd couple.
On Monday, the two will present the Republican alternatives for health care reform to the universal health plan that the state’s two Democratic congressmen had endorsed.
Bradley and Stephen both have career ambitions, and twice they collided in the 1st Congressional District. The echoes are still ringing from that race, which was by far the nastiest primary campaign of the 2008 cycle.
Stephen tagged Bradley as the faux conservative, an unreliable taxer and spender who shouldn’t be sent back to Washington after blowing his seat to Democrat Carol Shea-Porter.
Bradley’s response was to point out that Stephen requested large spending increases when he ran the Department of Health and Human Services, and that his version of Medicaid funding “reform’’ translated to several hundred million dollars in higher local property taxes.
By all accounts, those hatchets have been buried, and both men aren’t after the same prize – at least for now.
Stephen hasn’t ruled out seeking higher office next year, and party leaders are trying to press him to take on John Lynch for governor.
As expected, Bradley has been a quick study since winning the special election to the Senate. Another attempt by Bradley to move upward is likely, but not necessarily as soon as 2010.
Stepping down
Former Republican State Chairman Steve Duprey did the right thing last week in resigning from the Ballot Law Commission.
Duprey decided it wasn’t appropriate to be on the election tribunal while serving as a fundraiser and major supporter of GOP Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte.
In elections past, that decision wasn’t always made.
The departure gives Lynch a key appointment to the commission, who under state law has to be a Republican.
Election winnings
Unlike in some states, both parties had something to crow about in Tuesday’s municipal elections.
State Democrats won seven mayoral races and cleaned house on local board elections in Manchester.
The election of Republican Sen. Ted Gatsas is a heavyweight pickup for the GOP, along with support for the city’s spending cap.
Democratic groups figured prominently in the sound defeat of a spending cap in Claremont.
Make no mistake about it: The special election win in Concord ranks as a big-time upset.
Democrats hold a 56 percent to 44 percent edge over Republicans in the four city ward House seats. The only Republicans who’ve managed to win one of five seats in that House district were moderate ones such as ex-Mayor Jim McKay, the Democratic nominee, who lost by 20 votes to Lynne Blackenbeker.
McKay’s recount request will be taken up Friday, and a reversal of this outcome is very unlikely.
State Democrats propped up McKay when he made the party switch a few months before becoming a House candidate.
After the result, State Chairman Raymond Buckley dismissed it as one Republican losing to another Republican.
It’s true that establishment Democrats did little to help McKay financially. About 65 cents of every $1 MacKay spent on the campaign ($3,700 total) came out of the candidate’s pocket.
Several of McKay’s few donors were moderate Republicans, such as the wife of ex-GOP Gov. Walter Peterson ($100), Belmont GOP Rep. Jim Pilliod ($200) and former Merrimack County Attorney and Concord City Councilor Dan St. Hilaire ($150).
Indeed, both candidates had to dip into their own finances to underwrite most of the race. Blackenbeker had to kick in $1,265 of her campaign budget ($3,700), although she did attract checks from reliable GOP donors such as former congressman Chuck Douglas ($100), Londonderry state Rep. Al Baldasaro ($75), Deerfield state Rep. John Reagan ($50), Republican National Committeewoman Phyllis Woods ($100) and the New Hampshire Republican Liberty PAC ($100).
Both spent the lion’s share of their campaign on mailings. Blackenbeker’s was done by Spectrum Monthly ($1,000), while the N.H. Democratic Party ($2,000) did printing and telemarketing services for McKay.
Reimbursement dispute
The case of former Liquor Commission enforcement officer Timothy Copeland continues to drag on before the Executive Council.
Copeland was permanently disabled from injuries suffered in a car accident while on the job. The state’s insurance company covered about $270,000 in medical expenses, and now wants to collect from Copeland about $120,000, part of a settlement he had reached with the insurance company of the driver causing the accident.
Copeland seeks a waiver of that state claim, but Lynch is dug in opposing it. Since May, three of the five councilors have supported Copeland’s request – Hampton Democrat Beverly Hollingworth, Nelson Democrat John Shea and Bath Republican Raymond Burton.
Manchester Republican Raymond Wieczorek hardened his opposition to the proposal based on comments he made during a breakfast meeting of the council on Wednesday. Nashua Democrat Debora Pignatelli had also voted last May to deny the waiver.
Lynch has said his opposition stems from concern that this case would set a precedent to allow accident victims to double collect for their injuries while still leaving the state taxpayers on the hook.
Examining the cuts
Leaders in the state Legislature didn’t have to go deep into the sofa cushions to find the $840,000 in personnel cuts needed to satisfy the state budget mandate.
This is the legislative piece of the $25 million savings target placed on all of state government.
The cut didn’t result in any layoffs, but did convert three full-time positions into part-time jobs. Most of the “cuts’’ came from not filling eight positions for the next two years.
One of the part-time jobs is House Sergeant-at-Arms Walter Sword, of Hopkinton, who hasn’t worked full time for the House since taking the job last December.
Translation: Even though the job was downsized more than a year ago, it was paid for as a full-time position in the budget for the next two years.
The entire budget-saving exercise continues to reveal that this two-year spending plan, like all others before, it had some padding.
Meanwhile, the Legislature displayed how difficult it might have been to get guaranteed savings from a voluntary furlough program as the State Employees Association had lobbied months for.
In the wake of negotiations over furloughs last summer, legislative leaders had asked all 150 of their employees to consider taking unpaid days off during the slowest period of the year.
About 12 percent (18) of them did, each taking an average 12 days apiece.
The move saved the legislative budget $44,000, but it has to be cold comfort to those who took the unpaid vacations to now learn resolution of the personnel cut means none of their colleagues faces a single payless day.
Democratic leaders in the Legislature have managed to find and return to the state treasury a total of $3.5 million of unspent money from their budgets since June 30, 2008.
That’s a tidy sum.
Layoffs questioned
Clearly, the layoffs at the Sununu Youth Development Center aren’t going over well with the Executive Council.
Children, Youth and Families Division Director George Fenniman made it clear that while this personnel cut was a new, difficult exercise, he’d been working on plans for nearly two years to reorganize and right-size the agency with the youth offender population steeply dropping.
Health and Human Services Commissioner Nick Toumpas has been a big booster of Fenniman’s plan, and stressed to the council that the aim is to convert the program from one in which the emphasis has been punishment to one that stresses treatment.
But Wieczorek noted that Fenniman and his two top aides aren’t treatment types, but retired cops.
Toumpas pointed to the fact Fenniman hired a full-time child psychiatrist 18 months ago to lead this change in the paradigm.
Shea said that after having met twice with the employees, he has become convinced of a connection between Fenniman layoffs and those union workers who led a petition vote of no confidence against him two years ago.
“There’s something that doesn’t smell right here,’’ Shea said.
Sign of the Times
The council approved a state guarantee loan of up to $250,000 for the new publishers of the resurrected Claremont Eagle Times.
The loan is for working capital for Eagle Printing and Publishing, the company linked to the Pennsylvania media group that emerged as the suitor after its previous ownership sought bankruptcy protection four months ago.
The lenders will pay an interest rate of 5 percent for the first year and following that, the prime lending rate plus 1.25 percent.
For its part, the guarantee makes the state liable for up to 75 percent of any amount on which the group defaults.
In from the cold
The cold case bureau has been born.
The Department of Safety came through last week with the final federal stimulus grant money needed to hire the two state troopers who’ll lead what is to be a six-person cold case unit.
The $685,000 grant is to run through the middle of 2012.
The final action is the culmination of a few years of work led by Merrimack Republican state Rep. Peyton Hinkle, who moved ahead with the idea after becoming familiar with the specifics of a cold case homicide that had local ties.
Then-Attorney General Ayotte embraced the idea and Assistant Safety Commissioner Earl Sweeney set to work to find and secure the grant money to get the unit up and running.
The group will start by poring over the 100-plus unsolved murders in the state since 1970, and particularly the 80 of them in which the State Police Major Crime Unit is the lead agency.
Investigative Services Bureau Capt. Mark Myrdek made the case for the unit in his grant application.
“The need to have investigators assigned full time to a cold case unit is essential because they can devote their time towards following up on the leads and assessment of physical evidence to be analyzed by new technology in order to possibly bring these cases to a successful conclusion,’’ Myrdek said.
Interesting results
An electronic poll for the right-leaning Now New Hampshire blog showed strong support for expanding the death penalty.
The quickie automatic survey done by Cross Target found 61 percent said they supported expanded capital punishment to include a premeditated attempt or murder or a child. In the poll, 28 percent said they opposed it and the other 11 percent were unsure.
In the same poll, only 20 percent said they thought the federal stimulus was successful in creating jobs, while 64 percent thought it was unsuccessful.
The poll contained some other pro-GOP results that are well out of the findings from independent surveys.
Lynch’s job approval rating was only 44 percent, which is 20 points lower than the University of New Hampshire Survey Center found only a month ago.
When asked which party’s candidate they would lean to for Congress, a staggering 60 percent chose the Republican hopeful versus 40 percent for the Democrat.
The party identification of the sample was close to the state’s registered vote – 39 percent independent, 31 percent Republican, 30 percent Democrat.
The congressional preference question results mean that about three of every four independents responding picked the Republican over the Democratic candidate.
Rescue operation
Republican congressional candidate Frank Guinta had one unnerving election result to mull over.
Manchester Alderman Mike Garrity lost his seat to Democratic state Rep. Barbara Shaw.
Garrity is the one Guinta said he went into a Manchester social club bar to “rescue’’ when a fight broke out recently.
“This incident obviously was not helpful to Mike Garrity, so the question is how much more will it hurt Frank Guinta’s congressional campaign than it already has?’’ Democratic Party spokesman Derek Richer said.
Questionable salaries
In these tough economic times, some big salaries at a prominent nonprofit can stand out.
They sure did at the council table when three took the opportunity to speak out against the big wages at Easter Seals.
Every contracting group that seeks a state contract must list the salaries covered by the service. The grant was a simple amendment to the contract making Easter Seals the fiscal agent for the ServiceLink Resource Center of Hillsborough County.
The salaries at issue are:
• President-CEO: $325,000.
• Chief financial officer: $210,000.
• Senior vice president
program services: $200,000.
“Those are just, in a word, bizarre,’’ Hollingworth declared.
The council approved the contract.
Handbook for women
The Commission on the Status of Women recently completed the fourth edition of “A Legal Handbook for New Hampshire Women,” which contains information on education, employment, housing, domestic and sexual violence, stalking, and family and criminal law.
This updates a legal resource that has been available in the state since 1997.
Legal voice
Trial lawyer Andru Volinsky, a Democratic activist, recently loaned his legal voice to those appealing the death penalty conviction of Michael Addison for the killing of Manchester police officer Michael Briggs.
Volinsky’s clients for this friend-of-the-court brief are retired New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz and professor Carol S. Steiker of Harvard Law School.
This appeal calls on the New Hampshire court to do a special review to ensure the case wasn’t the result of arbitrary influences that include race and makes the argument there isn’t enough data available to the court to make that judgment.
“As the Legislature has directed, the Court’s charge is to go well beyond the correction of errors to ensure a sentence of death is not disproportionate or imposed under the influence of arbitrary factors,’’ they wrote.
Lack of support
Lynch won and held on his veto to legalize medical marijuana, but with almost no support from his party.
Any governor can readily count on the party faithful to go along with his or her vetoes; it’s one of the perks that go with the job, along with the car, State Police chauffeur and expense account.
But the longer governors are around, the more likely they meet up with an issue that tugs at their own party’s rank and file. Clearly, this proved to be the case with medical marijuana. Among the Democratic caucus, only 6 percent in the House and 7 percent in the Senate went with Lynch to oppose the bill.
Lynch hung on because 98 percent of House Republicans and 90 percent of Senate Republicans agreed with him.
Hall of Fame inductee
Congratulations to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Lou D’Allesandro for his induction into the Manchester Catholic High Schools Hall of Fame this weekend.
D’Allesandro was a successful football and baseball coach at Bishop Bradley. The nine inductees span five decades of Queen City sports.
Kevin Landrigan can be reached at 321-7040 or klandrigan@nashuatelegraph.com.
Quote of the week
Raymond Wieczorek, R-Manchester, executive councilor, lashing out at Health and Human Services Commissioner Nick Toumpas at last week’s council meeting
