Business

Column: Nikki Haley is as bad on abortion and health as any other Republican

Published

12 months ago

January 26, 2024

Column: Nikki Haley is as bad on abortion and health as any other Republican

Nikki Haley blocked the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act while she was governor of South Carolina. Her policies on abortion rights are execrable. Her home state has one of the nation’s worse records in the nation on maternal health — indeed, on health generally.

Since Haley says she’s staying in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, despite coming in second to Donald Trump in the New Hampshire primary, there’s no time like the present to examine her positions on the all-important issue of healthcare.

A thousand political takes have bloomed in newspapers and on the airwaves since Haley expressed her determination to keep running. Too many of them deal with whether she really has a chance to beat Trump and what Trump says or thinks about her or what she thinks of Trump.

It’s easy and lazy to expand Medicaid because all you’re doing is giving people money to buy them time.

— Nikki Haley

It’s much more important to contemplate what a Haley presidency would mean to Americans confronting those thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, especially among low-income Americans and women of childbearing age. The general answer is that it’s ugly.

South Carolina ranks 37th in healthcare performance among all states, a ranking by the Commonwealth Fund based on reproductive care and women’s health, access and affordability of healthcare, premature deaths from preventable and treatable causes, and other factors.

Let’s dive in.

We can start with the most important healthcare issue on the partisan landscape: abortion. South Carolina’s rules on abortion are among the most restrictive in the nation. The rules were implemented under a law passed after she left the governorship, but she never specifically disavowed them either.

The state bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, a time when many women don’t know they’re pregnant. Women seeking abortions must be offered antiabortion counseling and wait 24 hours afterward. Minors can’t receive abortions without the approval of a parent or legal guardian.

Abortions must be performed by physicians, which bars the involvement of midwifes and other healthcare professionals. Medication abortions — that is, via pills — must be administered by physicians in person, not via telehealth sessions or through the mail.

The state prohibits even private health insurance plans offered through Obamacare to include abortion coverage except in narrow circumstances. Haley signed that law as governor. Its Medicaid program doesn’t cover abortion.

During the GOP candidate debates, Haley has tried to dodge questions about her abortion policies, or at least shroud them in a miasma of verbiage. “We need to stop demonizing this issue,” she said during the Aug. 23 GOP debate in Milwaukee. “Unelected justices didn’t need to decide something this personal, because it’s personal for every woman and man.”

But she implicitly praised the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned the national right to abortion established in the 1973 ruling in Roe vs. Wade.

Dobbs placed abortion legislating in the hands of state lawmakers. “Now, it’s been put in the hands of the people,” Haley said during the debate. “That’s great.”

Nikki Haley’s legacy: South Carolina has one of the nation’s worst infant mortality rates, and the rate among Black children is nearly three times that of white children.

(South Carolina Dept. of Health and Environmental Control)

But that circumvented the reality that even in states where voters have backed abortion rights by wide margins at the ballot box, such as Ohio, legislators have been attempting to reimpose abortion restrictions despite the votes.

Haley has said that as president she would sign a national abortion ban if it reached her desk. She tries to leaven that determination by arguing that Congress would be unlikely to pass one.

It’s proper to note that abortion restrictions and indicators of maternal and infant health more generally tend to go hand in hand. That seems to be the case in South Carolina, which persistently has ranked low among states on maternal and infant health.

The state had the ninth-worst maternal death rate in the country in 2019-21, according to the Commonwealth Fund — 35.3 deaths per 100,000 live births. (California’s rate of 9.6 was the best in the country; the U.S. average was 32.9.) The state’s rate was lower while Haley was governor, running between about 26 and 28 per 100,000 births, but was consistently worse than the U.S. average by eight to nine percentage points throughout her tenure.

South Carolina also had the fifth-worst infant mortality rate in the country in 2021, at 7.26 deaths per 1,000 live births — better than only Mississippi, Arkansas, Alaska and Alabama — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate fluctuated between 6.4 and 7.5 while she was governor. Tellingly, the rate among Black infants, 12.7 per 1,000 live births, is nearly three times that of white children, 5.2.

Now let’s turn to the Affordable Care Act, which was enacted in 2010, just as Haley took office as governor. Haley opposed Obamacare virtually from the outset, and gleefully. In July 2014, when a federal appeals court blocked Obamacare premium subsidies in states, such as South Carolina, that had not created their own ACA exchanges but left that task to the federal government, she celebrated.

“This is a huge blow to Obamacare as we know it,” she wrote on Facebook. “The way I see it, this allows the Supreme Court a redo. We can only hope!” (Her reference was to the 2012 Supreme Court decision that ruled the ACA constitutional.) The Supreme Court overturned the appeals courts subsidy decision in 2015.

Haley flatly refused to expand Medicaid in South Carolina under the ACA. The state remains one of the 10, all Republican-controlled, that still haven’t expanded Medicaid. The consequences to its residents are marked. South Carolina’s health uninsured rate, 14.9%, was the 10th worst in the country, according to the Commonwealth Fund, below the national average of 12.1%. All the 10 worst states except Nevada are non-expansion states.

South Carolina also had the second-highest percentage of residents with medical debts recorded by credit bureaus in 2021, at 22.3%. Only West Virginia, with 24%, was worse. The failure to expand Medicaid undoubtedly plays a role in this record, for the program would relief lower-income households of many medical bills.

Asked at a New Hampshire town hall broadcast in May about her refusal to expand the program, Haley responded with a word salad about job-creation programs her state had sponsored, rather than on addressing the healthcare needs of lower-income residents.

“We focused on lifting up everybody, not just a certain amount,” she said. She said the job program she sponsored found work for 35,000 residents. What she didn’t say was that this figure was a fraction of the number of residents locked out of Medicaid eligibility. This “coverage gap,” as the independent healthcare research organization KFF defines it, is 166,000 in South Carolina. The Urban Institute placed the figure at 196,000 in a 2018 survey.

Haley doubled down on her opposition to Medicaid expansion during that New Hampshire town hall. “It’s easy and lazy to expand Medicaid,” she said, “because all you’re doing is giving people money to buy them time.”

How penny-wise and plain foolish was her Medicaid policy as governor? Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government paid 100% of the cost of expansion from 2014 through 2016. From 2017 on, the match was reduced bit by bit until it reached a permanent level of 90% in 2020. Even that is well above the federal match rate for traditional Medicaid, which is 69.67% for South Carolina.

In other words, Haley’s refusal to expand Medicaid was based not on empirical effects, for there is no disputing that Medicaid eligibility improves health outcomes for enrollees.

It was not based on state finances, for the residual state match even today is more than compensated by gains in the economic vitality of enrollees and the fiscal health of local hospitals that are economically dependent on Medicaid reimbursements. The only remaining rationale is ideological — Haley’s policy hewed close to the furthest-right position of the Republican Party.

In 2021, four years after Haley left office, her state was forced to come to terms with the consequences of its inattention to maternal health. A legislative panel detailed the toll on South Carolina mothers — finding that 62% of maternal deaths were pregnancy-related and 68% were preventable. The maternal mortality rate was 2.4 times higher for Black and other women of color than for white women (42.3 per 100,000 live births for Black and other women of color, compared with18.0 for white women).

The state enacted one of the most important recommendations of the study panel, which was for Medicaid to cover 12 postpartum months rather than the existing cutoff at 60 days. The change went into effect in 2022. In this respect, at least, South Carolina joined 46 other states in extending Medicaid coverage for new mothers.

But Haley’s legacy lives on, in wretched figures on infant and maternal mortality and uninsured rates. She may be representing herself on the stump as new blood with a fresh outlook in comparison to Donald Trump, but her policies impose the same old GOP-style cruelty on Americans whose lives could be improved by a government that cares.

Business

4 Takeaways From the Arguments Before the Supreme Court in the TikTok Case

Published

4 hours ago

January 12, 2025

Press Room

4 Takeaways From the Arguments Before the Supreme Court in the TikTok Case

The Supreme Court on Friday grappled over a law that could determine the fate of TikTok, an enormously popular social media platform that has about 170 million users.

Congress enacted the law out of concern that the app, whose owner is based in China, is susceptible to the influence of the Chinese government and posed a national risk. The measure would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it by Jan. 19.

Here are some key takeaways:

The court appeared likely to uphold the law.

While the justices across the ideological spectrum asked tough questions of both sides, the overall tone and thrust appeared to suggest greater skepticism toward the arguments by lawyers for TikTok and its users that the First Amendment barred Congress from enacting the law.

The questioning opened with two conservative members of the court, Justice Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., suggesting that it was not TikTok, an American company, but its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, that was directly affected by the law.

Another conservative, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, focused on the risk that the Chinese government could use information TikTok is gathering on tens of millions of American teenagers and twentysomethings to eventually “develop spies, turn people, blackmail people” when they grow older and go to work for national security agencies or the military.

Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, asked why TikTok could not just create or buy another algorithm rather than using ByteDance’s.

And another liberal, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said she believed the law was less about speech than about association. She suggested that barring TikTok from associating with a Chinese company was akin to barring Americans from associating with foreign terrorist groups for national security reasons. (The Supreme Court has upheld that as constitutional.)

Still, several justices were skeptical about a major part of the government’s justification for the law: the risk that China might “covertly” make TikTok manipulate the content shown to Americans or collect user data to achieve its geopolitical aims.

Both Justice Kagan and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a conservative, stressed that everybody now knows that China is behind TikTok. They appeared interested in whether the government’s interest in preventing “covert” leveraging of the platform by a foreign adversary could be achieved in a less heavy-handed manner, like appending a label warning users of that risk.

Lawyers for TikTok and for its users argued that the law is unconstitutional.

Two lawyers argued that the law violates the First Amendment: Noel Francisco, representing both TikTok and ByteDance, and Jeffrey Fisher, representing TikTok users. Both suggested that concerns about potential manipulation by the Chinese government of the information American users see on the platform were insufficient to justify the law.

Mr. Francisco contended that the government in a free country “has no valid interest in preventing foreign propaganda” and cannot constitutionally try to keep Americans from being “persuaded by Chinese misinformation.” That is targeting the content of speech, which the First Amendment does not permit, he said.

Mr. Fisher asserted that fears that China might use its control over the platform to promote posts sowing doubts about democracy or pushing pro-China and anti-American views were a weaker justification for interfering in free speech than concerns about foreign terrorism.

“The government just doesn’t get to say ‘national security’ and the case is over,” Mr. Fisher said, adding, “It’s not enough to say ‘national security’ — you have to say ‘what is the real harm?’”

The Biden administration defended Congress’s right to enact the law.

The solicitor general, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, argued that Congress had lawful authority to enact the statute and that it did not violate the First Amendment. She said it was important to recognize that the law leaves speech on TikTok unrestricted once the platform is freed from foreign control.

“All of the same speech that’s happening on TikTok could happen post-divestiture,” she said. “The act doesn’t regulate that at all. So it’s not saying you can’t have pro-China speech, you can’t have anti-American speech. It’s not regulating the algorithm.”

She added: “TikTok, if it were able to do so, could use precisely the same algorithm to display the same content by the same users. All the act is doing is trying to surgically remove the ability of a foreign adversary nation to get our data and to be able to exercise control over the platform.”

The court appears unlikely to wait for Trump.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has asked the Supreme Court to issue an injunction delaying the law from taking effect until after he assumes office on Jan. 20.

Mr. Trump once shared the view that Chinese control of TikTok was an intolerable national security risk, but reversed course around the time he met with a billionaire Republican donor with a stake in its parent company.

If the court does uphold the law, TikTok would effectively be banned in the United States on Jan. 19, Mr. Francisco said. He reiterated a request that the court temporarily pause the law from taking effect to push back that deadline, saying it would “simply buy everybody a little breathing space.” It might be a “different world” for TikTok after Jan. 20, he added.

But there was scant focus by the justices on that idea, suggesting that they did not take it seriously. Mr. Trump’s brief requesting that the court punt the issue past the end of President Biden’s term so he could handle it — signed by his pick to be the next solicitor general, D. John Sauer — was long on rhetoric extolling Mr. Trump, but short on substance.

Business

'We will not be closing.' Amid the fires, employers and employees walk a fine line between work and safety

Published

5 hours ago

January 12, 2025

Press Room

'We will not be closing.' Amid the fires, employers and employees walk a fine line between work and safety

When Brigitte Tran arrived Wednesday morning at the Rodeo Drive boutique where she works as a sales associate, she was on edge.

Smoke from multiple wildfires raging across Los Angeles County billowed overhead. The luxury shopping corridor usually bustling with tourists appeared a ghost town.

Tran’s co-worker texted their boss to let her know neighboring stores had closed, and described the acrid smoke in the air. But the woman, at home in Orange County, did not seem to grasp their concerns. “We will not be closing unless the mall instructs us to close,” she replied.

Tran, who, fearing professional repercussions, asked that her place of work not be named, grew more anxious as the hours ticked by. Around 3 p.m., she and the two other employees working that day mutinied. They packed up, told the security guard to head home, and locked the doors a few hours before closing time.

As the wildfires have raged across Los Angeles County, choking the air, closing schools and forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate, employers and employees alike have had to manage a difficult balancing act between work and well being. Some employers responded swiftly to the crisis, shutting down offices and shifting to remote work, providing outdoor workers with masks and other protective equipment, and offering support for employees forced to evacuate. Others have been less adept, clumsy in their communications or wholly unmoved by worker concerns — sparking anger among their ranks as a result.

The fires have underscored the need for companies to have a clear plan in place to respond to emergencies, said Jonathan Porter, a meteorologist at private weather forecaster AccuWeather. The obligation, he said, goes beyond monitoring whether an office is in an evacuation zone. For example, as the current devastation unfolds, businesses should be aware of the “copious amounts of dangerous smoke that’s wafting into the air” and be prepared to provide outdoor workers with quality respirators or move them away from polluted air.

Some employers gave employees flexibility. Snap, the Santa Monica-based creator of the photo messaging app Snapchat, for example, kept its offices open on Wednesday but encouraged employees to work remotely, said a company spokesperson.

Others changed course after fielding criticism.

An announcement by UCLA that the campus would remain open for classes and regular operations on Wednesday drew anger from some instructors and students on social media.

Victor Narro, project director for the UCLA Labor Center and a lecturer on campus, said in a post on X he would ignore UCLA’s mandate and hold an optional class online.

“Students have been up all night panicked about sleeping through evacuation orders, winds still high, branches falling all over Westwood, power outages across city, & our new chancellor (on his 2nd day) thought this should be his first bold call…” wrote Nour Joudah, an assistant professor in UCLA’s Asian American Studies Department, in another X post.

That evening, UCLA changed course as conditions worsened, announcing it would close campus.

On Saturday, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk released a statement saying classes would be held remotely for at least another week and campus operations would be curtailed. “We ask for continued flexibility and understanding as we all work through these difficult times,” Frenk wrote.

But for many workers, the chaos of the last few dayshas left them feeling like they are fending for themselves.

Tim Hernandez, a driver with Amazon Flex, an on-demand Uber-like program in which people use their own cars to deliver packages, was assigned a route Tuesday along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu, which was rife with closures.

When he questioned whether making the delivery was safe, he said dispatchers at a Amazon facility in Camarillo brushed him off, leaving him to choose between concerns for his safety and worries that his rating in the Flex app would be hurt if he refused to go. He decided to try to make the deliveries, battling gusts of wind that knocked him over at one point. He lost cell signal, however, and was forced to return to the warehouse without completing the vast majority.

And when he arrived for his shift Tuesday, Alfred Muñoz, 43, an Amazon delivery driver who works out of a warehouse in the City of Industry, said he was handed an N95 mask but given little other instruction.

“It was just kind of business as usual,” Muñoz said.

High package counts and the number of stops on his assigned routes this week have made work even more difficult. On Tuesday, with wind gusts whipping debris around making it difficult to see, he had about 180 stops and 290 packages to deliver. On Thursday, the air thick with smoke and ash, he had more than 300 packages.

He woke up Thursday morning with a bloody nose and a sooty black crust in the corners of his eyes.

In response to a request for comment, Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company was “closely monitoring the wildfires across Southern California and adjusting our operations to keep our employees and those delivering for us safe.”

“If a driver arrives at a delivery location and the conditions are not safe to make a delivery, they are not expected to do so and the driver’s performance will not be impacted,” she said.

At the Brentwood location of popular Italian eatery Jon & Vinny’s, staff complained of headaches and sore throats in a text message group chat. An employee, who asked not to be named fearing retaliation at work, said that on Tuesday, staff huddled around an iPad with a fire map pulled up to keep an eye on the expanding evacuation zone. From the front of the restaurant, they could see the glow of the Palisades fire.

The employee said they were frustrated management kept the restaurant open when the perimeter of the mandatory evacuation zone was just two blocks away. On Wednesday, every server scheduled to work called in to say they were not coming, the employee said.

A spokesperson for Joint Venture Restaurant Group, which owns Jon & Vinny’s, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During natural disasters and extreme weather, employers’ choices can sometimes mean life or death, said David Michaels, a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health and a former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

He pointed to recent floods from Hurricane Helene that killed several workers at a plastics manufacturer. The tragedy has drawn scrutiny from state investigators, and a wrongful death lawsuit accuses the company of requiring employees to stay on site amid flooding after they requested permission to leave.

“It’s incumbent on employers to ensure the safety of their workers,” Michaels said. “The safety of their employees must take precedence over business concerns.”

Yasha Timenovich, 48, a driver for rideshare app Lyft and food delivery platform DoorDash, is more worried about declining earnings than on-the-job safety. With many restaurants and other businesses closed and would-be customers fleeing the city, he said that rides and deliveries have been slow. Traffic patterns have been strange and unpredictable with families piling into vehicles to flee fires.

Timenovich, who faced an order to evacuate his Hollywood apartment with his fiance and 6-year-old daughter Wednesday night, said he planned to stay with relatives for a few days in San Luis Obispo, where he hopes business will be better.

“I’m going to get out of here because it’s too crazy with these fires,” Timenovich said.

Business

Scott Bessent, Trump’s Billionaire Treasury Pick, Will Shed Assets to Avoid Conflicts

Published

12 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Scott Bessent, Trump’s Billionaire Treasury Pick, Will Shed Assets to Avoid Conflicts

Scott Bessent, the billionaire hedge fund manager whom President-elect Donald J. Trump picked to be his Treasury secretary, plans to divest from dozens of funds, trusts and investments in preparation to become the nation’s top economic policymaker.

Those plans were released on Saturday along with the publication of an ethics agreement and financial disclosures that Mr. Bessent submitted ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing next Thursday.

The documents show the extent of the wealth of Mr. Bessent, whose assets and investments appear to be worth in excess of $700 million. Mr. Bessent was formerly the top investor for the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros and has been a major Republican donor and adviser to Mr. Trump.

If confirmed as Treasury secretary, Mr. Bessent, 62, will steer Mr. Trump’s economic agenda of cutting taxes, rolling back regulations and imposing tariffs as he seeks to renegotiate trade deals. He will also play a central role in the Trump administration’s expected embrace of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

Although Mr. Trump won the election by appealing to working-class voters who have been dogged by high prices, he has turned to wealthy Wall Street investors such as Mr. Bessent and Howard Lutnick, a billionaire banker whom he tapped to be commerce secretary, to lead his economic team. Linda McMahon, another billionaire, has been picked as education secretary, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is leading an unofficial agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

In a letter to the Treasury Department’s ethics office, Mr. Bessent outlined the steps he would take to “avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest in the event that I am confirmed for the position of secretary of the Department of Treasury.”

Mr. Bessent said he would shutter Key Square Capital Management, the investment firm that he founded, and resign from his Bessent-Freeman Family Foundation and from Rockefeller University, where he has been chairman of the investment committee.

The financial disclosure form, which provides ranges for the value of his assets, reveals that Mr. Bessent owns as much as $25 million of farmland in North Dakota, which earns an income from soybean and corn production. He also owns a property in the Bahamas that is worth as much as $25 million. Last November, Mr. Bessent put his historic pink mansion in Charleston, S.C., on the market for $22.5 million.

Mr. Bessent is selling several investments that could pose potential conflicts of interest including a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund; an account that trades the renminbi, China’s currency; and his stake in All Seasons, a conservative publisher. He also has a margin loan, or line of credit, with Goldman Sachs of more than $50 million.

As an investor, Mr. Bessent has long wagered on the rising strength of the dollar and has betted against, or “shorted,” the renminbi, according to a person familiar with Mr. Bessent’s strategy who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his portfolio. Mr. Bessent gained notoriety in the 1990s by betting against the British pound and earning his firm, Soros Fund Management, $1 billion. He also made a high-profile bet against the Japanese yen.

Mr. Bessent, who will be overseeing the U.S. Treasury market, holds over $100 million in Treasury bills.

Cabinet officials are required to divest certain holdings and investments to avoid the potential for conflicts of interest. Although this can be an onerous process, it has some potential tax benefits.

The tax code contains a provision that allows securities to be sold and the capital gains tax on such sales deferred if the full proceeds are used to buy Treasury securities and certain money-market funds. The tax continues to be deferred until the securities or money-market funds are sold.

Even while adhering to the ethics guidelines, questions about conflicts of interest can still emerge.

Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary during his first term, Steven Mnuchin, divested from his Hollywood film production company after joining the administration. However, as he was negotiating a trade deal in 2018 with China — an important market for the U.S. film industry — ethics watchdogs raised questions about whether Mr. Mnuchin had conflicts because he had sold his interest in the company to his wife.

Mr. Bessent was chosen for the Treasury after an internal tussle among Mr. Trump’s aides over the job. Mr. Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s transition team co-chair and the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, made a late pitch to secure the Treasury secretary role for himself before Mr. Trump picked him to be Commerce secretary.

During that fight, which spilled into view, critics of Mr. Bessent circulated documents disparaging his performance as a hedge fund manager.

Mr. Bessent’s most recent hedge fund, Key Square Capital, launched to much fanfare in 2016, garnering $4.5 billion in investor money, including $2 billion from Mr. Soros, but manages much less now. A fund he ran in the early 2000s had a similarly unremarkable performance.