Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker To Cut Medicaid Without Public Hearings

Republicans argue that states are the “laboratories of democracy” that should be charged with developing new, innovative ways for delivering quality health care more efficiently. But that point is far harder to make in the face of Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) effort to shut the public out of a debate about Medicaid cuts and shield legislators from having to weigh in on cutting benefits and services for the neediest Americans:

The new state budget bill grants broader power to Gov. Scott Walker’s administration to remake BadgerCare Plus and other state health programs with little legislative oversight, a situation that worries advocates for the roughly 1 million people covered by those programs.

The major question: how the governor’s Department of Health Services will use that authority as it cuts a projected $466 million in costs from the programs over the next two years.

“We don’t know exactly what will be coming down the pike,” said Bob Jacobson, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Council on Children & Families. “And we don’t know how we can have a voice in those decisions when the Legislature has been taken out of the picture.” [...]

The budget-repair bill passed earlier this year gave the Department of Health Services the authority to make changes in the programs without legislative approval but required the department to hold public hearings.

The budget bill passed last week dropped the public hearing requirement. The exemption would remain in effect throughout the governor’s term.

The pending changes in the programs could range from new rules on eligibility and cost sharing to managing care for people with severe mental illnesses.

This also doesn’t bode well for the GOP’s push to block grant the Medicaid program. After all, if states like Wisconsin — or any other Republican state that isn’t very invested in maintaining government-sponsored health care programs — are already demonstrating that they’re more interested in slashing enrollment rolls than developing any truly revolutionary health delivery models, you can easily predict how they would react to a block grant that does not keep up with projected health care costs.

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EFF Urges Supreme Court to Block Law That Erodes Public Domain

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a federal law that erodes the public domain and hurts libraries, artists, and others who want to exercise their First Amendment right to share and receive information in an amicus brief filed today on behalf a coalition of libraries and other digital repositories.

The law in question is Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, which takes potentially millions of works by foreign authors that were previously in the public domain and puts them back under copyright protection. Works affected by this law include Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, music by Stravinski, paintings by Picasso and drawings by M.C. Escher, and writings by George Orwell and J.R.R. Tolkien -- material that has been used and performed countless times. Now that the works are back under copyright protection, use of the works may require paying hefty license fees.

In the amicus brief, EFF argues that this law creates dangerous uncertainty about copyright policy, posing a significant threat to libraries, digital repositories, and others that promote access to knowledge.

"Libraries and digital repositories are using new technologies to make our cultural commons more accessible than ever, but they need a robust and stable public domain to be able to do that crucial work," said EFF Staff Attorney Julie Samuels. "Section 514 has up-ended a basic tenet of copyright law: once a work enters the public domain, it stays in the public domain."

"The public domain helps make sure the copyright monopoly serves its purpose: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "Congress should not have put a small potential benefit to some authors ahead of the public interest."

EFF represents the Internet Archive and the University of Michigan Dean of Libraries. Joining the brief are the Wikimedia Foundation, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries.

For the full amicus brief:

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/golan_v_holder/236590_Brief.pdf

For more on this case:

https://www.eff.org/cases/golan-v-holder

Contacts:

Corynne McSherry

Intellectual Property Director

Electronic Frontier Foundation

corynne@eff.org

Julie Samuels

Staff Attorney

Electronic Frontier Foundation

julie@eff.org

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