Oops! I Appointed A Special Interest
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Schwarzenegger pledged to stand up to special interests in Sacramento. He must have missed a few key bullet points on the resumes of some of his chief appointments. If big business holds the keys to the governor's office, all legislation will be filtered through the lens of corporate interests. Here are some Schwarzenegger appointees the public should be concerned about - we'll be keeping an eye on them at ArnoldWatch.
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Garrett Ashley, Deputy Chief of Staff
Ashley was previously executive director of Tech Net - Orange County. TechNet is a network of high-powered corporate executives (think Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, NASDAQ and AOL Time Warner) that lobbies in Sacramento and Washington D.C. for high tech interests. In recent years, TechNet's lobbying has focused on limiting consumer rights, including: fighting against court settlement reforms to let the public know about harmful products; pushing to restrict injured consumers' right to bring class action lawsuits against crooked corporations; and resisting post-Enron corporate accountability proposals to require companies to report the cost of executive stock options to shareholders.
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Cassandra Pye, Deputy Chief of Staff, External Affairs
The External Affairs post serves as a liason to the public, "a job that is the unofficial in-house slot responsible for tending to the governor's political connections in the community, especially among ethnic groups," according to SacBee columnist Dan Weintraub.
For the past 12 years, Cassandra Pye has worked at the Chamber of Commerce, where she was most recently vice president of corporate affairs. In that capacity, Pye was responsible for the Chamber's political activities and running its Political Action Committees (PACs), which means that she spent time soliciting money from big businesses for the Chamber and its campaigns. In other words, the special political connections that Cassandra Pye brings to the administration are with big businesses. Pye's knowledge of the donors in the big business community will doubtless help Arnold raise money from the Chamber community.
Before her time at the Chamber, Pye worked with a variety of big business trade associations, including the California Retailers Association, the Food Marketing Institute, and the California Grocers Association.
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A.G. Kawamura, Food and Agriculture Secretary
Kawamura donated $21,200 to Arnold. He is a past chairman of the Western Growers Association, which has been a vocal opponent of legislation protecting farmworkers and the environment enacted over the past several years.
The Food and Agriculture Department is responsible for environmental, public safety and other regulations governing agricultural interests. Kawamura's appointment is incongruous - it places a man who ran an anti-regulation organization in charge of development and implementation of regulatory safeguards. Farmworkers, and the environment in farming communities, are bound to suffer when agribusiness interests take the forefront at the department.
Among the legislation opposed by the Western Growers was last year's SB 700, which required farmers to obtain pollution permits for certain diesel powered field machinery. Previously, agricultural interests were exempt from the emission rules that require permits for other industries and Central Valley air quality was greatly compromised as a result.
Agricultural interests gave Arnold's campaign committees more than half a million dollars.
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James Branham, undersecretary at California Environmental Protection Agency
Branham was previously director of external relations for the Pacific Lumber Company. His appointment to a critical environmental post state raises eyebrows, as his company has a reputation for being environmentally unfriendly.
The Pacific Lumber company has been repeatedly cited for environmental violations, including poor forest practices and water quality problems. The company's logging license was suspended several times in the late 1990s for forest violations, including: illegal logging, the cover-up of illegal practices, and operations which disregarded procedures meant to preserve environmentally sensitive areas.
His position in the upper echelons of CalEPA will cause greater tension between the lumber interests he represented and the values of the vast majority of Californians - a clean, protected and healthy environment.
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Richard Costigan, Legislative Secretary
Costigan joins the governor from his prior position as Vice President of Governmental Relations and Chief Lobbyist for the California Chamber of Commerce, putting the governor-elect's top legislative post in the hands of big business's biggest lobbyist.
Costigan's appointment could give big corporations unprecedented access to policy decisions in the Governor's office. The Chamber of Commerce is at the forefront of efforts to curb criticism and reform of corporations in California. The Chamber's opposition to major consumer protections over the last decade has included: HMO patients' rights, insurance reforms, expanding healthcare coverage to the uninsured, corporate accountability measures, and protection of consumer privacy.
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Patricia Clarey, Chief-of-Staff
Clarey was most recently a Vice President for the HMO Health Net, Inc. The appointment puts the key to the governor's office in the hands of a big business exec, and bodes poorly for increased public interest access to the governor.
The state's HMOs have a long history of opposing patient protections in Sacramento, including, most recently, legislation which would have extended California's auto insurance regulatory rules to now-skyrocketing health insurance premiums.
HMO interests may quickly find expression in Schwarzenegger's healthcare policies. A key test will be whether Schwarzenegger stands up to insurers (and against Clarey's former boss) to control rapidly skyrocketing healthcare costs by regulating insurance premiums, capping hospital and physician rates, and bulk purchasing benefits and prescription drugs.
Ms. Clarey was also a lobbyist for Chevron.
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pickledpepperRN
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How many nurses, how many patients?
Deferring nurse-to-patient ratios a dangerous gamble
Deborah Burger
Sunday, December 12, 2004
With his decree to roll back legislatively mandated registered-nurse- to-patient ratios in hospitals and emergency rooms, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has compromised public-safety standards to please the corporate special interests he told Californians he was sent to Sacramento to fight.
To thank the governor, the hospital industry has spent millions on TV and radio ads, featuring a nurse hospital administrator to deceive the public into believing that nurses support the governor's decision. In fact, thousands of registered nurses have protested across the state, prompting the governor to reveal his true feelings with the crude declaration that RNs are "special interests" who "don't like me because I am always kicking their butt" -- a belligerence he does not extend to the corporations who have contributed more than $26 million to the governor in his first year in office, according to the records of Schwarzenegger's political team.
California enacted a law in 1999 requiring minimum RN-to-patient ratios to halt a serious decline in care conditions. The law went through four years of study before the ratios were implemented last January with the state Department of Health Services declaring "the public health depends on the availability of adequately staffed acute-care hospitals."
Unfortunately, Californians' health was never the top priority for top executives of the hospital corporations, who have long campaigned to overturn the 1999 state law that they believe cuts into their profits. With the election of Schwarzenegger, the industry anticipated that it had a governor who would champion corporate interests over public safety.
Arguments cited for eroding the safety law included: hospitals couldn't find enough RNs because of the nursing shortage; hospitals were closing because of the law; financial troubles in the industry; and the claim that nursing homes could not compete because RNs now preferred to work in more safely staffed hospitals. But let's examine these issues:
-- Nursing shortage: In the 1990s, hospitals helped create a shortage of nurses by systematically understaffing, which precipitated an exodus of RNs unwilling to work in unsafe hospitals. The ratios were part of the solution to keep RNs at the bedside and attract new nurses. Since the law was signed, the number of actively licensed RNs in California, according to the Board of Registered Nursing, has grown by more than 48,000 -- seven times the number the state said would be needed for the ratios. For the first time in a decade, more RNs are coming into the state than are leaving. The governor's order will reverse this progress.
-- Hospital closures: Fifty hospitals were closed between 1990 and 2000, predating the ratio law. Notably, Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill to help local communities that want to maintain a hospital facing closure, as in San Jose, where the city's only downtown hospital was closed by a giant chain, Hospital Corporation of America, which made $1.3 billion in profits last year and is spending lavishly on hospital construction in more wealthy neighborhoods in the region. Cutting the nursing-care safety net will not stop closures; it will only make hospitals more dangerous.
-- Financially ailing hospitals: While some hospitals lose money, most don't. From 2001 through 2003, California hospitals reported a total of $11.7 billion in profits, according to data reported to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, hardly a sign of economic distress.
-- Nursing homes can't compete: Because they aren't subject to the same nursing-staff ratios as in hospitals, the nursing home contention shows the absurd reach of the order. The governor apparently wants hospitals to match the shoddy safety record of the nursing home industry, regardless of the consequences for patients.
Patients seem to be the governor's last consideration. His order gives hospitals a green light to suspend safe staffing in emergency rooms. The inevitable result will be longer waits, patients leaving without receiving needed medical attention and reduced standards of care. In general medical units, the governor has decreed patients must wait three years for more "study" before the original minimum ratios the state Department of Health Services deemed were needed for patient safety are enacted.
You could fill a library with the studies already done. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organizations, for example, states that inadequate staffing causes one-fourth of all preventable deaths and permanent injuries.
By using an executive order, one not based on facts, to rescind patient protections, the governor has set a dangerous precedent. If the decision is not reversed, the governor can vacate any health and safety regulations corporations do not like through emergency decrees without legislative or public support. If this governor will not stand up to the hospital corporations, be assured that nurses will.
At issue
-- In 1999, Gov. Gray Davis signed AB394, making California the first state in the nation to mandate nurse-to-patient ratios for hospitals.
-- The first phase of the legislation took effect Jan. 1, 2004, requiring hospitals to have at least one nurse on duty for every six patients.
-- Phase two was to have taken effect Jan. 1, 2005, lowering the nurse- patient ratio to 1 to 5.
-- Responding to hospitals' complaints that the targets for 2005 would be impossible to meet in the face of a shortage of nurses, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently ordered the deferral of the 1-to-5 requirement until Jan. 1, 2008. The ratio will remain at 1 to 6 until then. He also loosened the regulations to give hospitals more leeway when faced with surges of patients in emergency rooms.
Deborah Burger, is a registered nurse and president of the 58,000-member California Nurses Association (http://www.calnurse.org), the union that sponsored the patient-ratio law.