A recent survey of American physicians conducted by the non-partisan Doctor Patient Medical Association found that ObamaCare has made a whopping 83 percent of doctors consider leaving their practices.
It is a standard bit of Alinskyite strategy: couch your demands in moral terms. It makes your opponents seem small and puts them on the defensive. But while it sounds simple – replace “we want” with “we deserve” – it’s not foolproof. As AFSCME spokesman Anders Lindall demonstrated earlier this week, sometimes the moralizing wears thin, and the...
The City of Chicago recently released its Annual Financial Analysis 2012: 85 pages detailing the city’s awkward financial position. There are two sections worth highlighting. The first deal with public employees in general, the second has to do with pensions. The city’s workforce is getting small but more expensive: dropping from almost 42,400 full-time-equivalent positions in...
Illinois survey of 500 likely voters Who should fund the employer share of teacher pensions: the state or local school districts? Will local pension accountability lead to higher property taxes? Last month, these questions prompted legislative talks over pension reform to come to a standstill. The results of a new poll commissioned by the Institute finds that public...
“In 1990, Lyons police officers Donald Kroft and William Tweeter pleaded guilty to having sex with prostitutes in return for overlooking crimes at a suburban strip joint.” “Lyons Village President Kenneth Getty was convicted in 1998 of theft and money laundering for his role in a bid-rigging scheme involving two public works projects. 53 Prosecutors...
Last week, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, or GASB, finalized new rules to make pension funding more transparent. These new rules require governments to use more appropriate discount rates than most public pension plans have been using. Pension plans with sufficient funds set aside to pay future benefits can continue to discount future liabilities by current investment...
To see how local pension accountability will affect your district, click here. For decades, the state has subsidized the costs of pensions awarded to teachers who work at locally-run school districts. How? The state pays the “employer” share of pension benefits that teachers accrue each year, even though teachers are not state employees. That arrangement...
We've previously explained why Illinois should not create a new bureaucracy that it will have virtually no control over. But there's another reason to reject a state-run exchange: doing so blocks new taxes on job creators.
by Anthony Glosson “They understand that we don’t need to re-fight this battle over healthcare. It’s the right thing to do, that we got 3 million young people who are on their parents’ health insurance. It’s the right thing to do to give seniors discounts on prescription drugs. It’s the right thing to do give...
While four of the justices would have thrown out the law in its entirety, Roberts joined with the liberal wing of the Court to uphold the mandate as a tax.
The federal government can't force states like Illinois to expand their Medicaid programs. Lawmakers should refuse to implement the massive expansion of Medicaid in 2014 and halt plans to implement the expansion early in the Chicago area.
CHICAGO (June 26, 2012) – With the click of a mouse, residents in Kane County can find out when is the next county board meeting or what tax rates they pay. But in many counties across northern Illinois, this type of information is not readily available to the public. In the Illinois Policy Institute’s latest...
There are close to 400,000 government employees in Illinois, and millions more across the country, who are forced to pay union dues or agency fees in order to keep their jobs. But now a majority of the United States Supreme Court has signaled that they are ready to rethink the entire thing. The millions of...
Early this morning, Gov. Quinn signed Senate Bill 1313. That bill turns over authority of setting health insurance premiums for retired state and university workers to the Governor’s office. It’s still unclear what Quinn plans to do with that power or how much he intends to save. But one thing is certain: Gov. Quinn needs to be bold....