July 25 Follow-up Post: “Data-Theft Communication Follow-up”

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With the release of the Inspector General’s report (PDF) and the Governor’s reaction statement, we’re supposed to believe DataGate has been taken care of.

Mr. Ilovar, the intern whom the governor said wouldn’t be scapegoated, has nonetheless been fired, as have a few others. Governor Strickland has issued an Executive Order (PDF) mandating better controls and encryption. A program and procedures to protect those whose personal information is now “out there” is in place.

(I don’t have a problem with the Ilovar firing, because leaving the data device in the car instead of taking it inside where he lived probably was a firing offense. But the governor had to know that the data was not where it should have been from the very beginning, so his initial vote of confidence and subsequent about-face [without Old Media comment, naturally] are a bit hard to handle.)

So the underlying sentiment appears to be, “Let’s move on, shall we?”

Not so fast, people.

I have reviewed the three documents originally posted at Right Angle Blog. RAB has allowed me to post them at BizzyBlog, and I have done so in this separate post that contains all three docs (the letter from the state, the Debix Registration Form, and the Debix Agreement; 7/25 update — added two separate docs at the bottom, the Debix Activation Page and Debix’s Home Page). I do NOT have a scan of the envelope an affected person would receive; if anyone has one, I would appreciate it if they could e-mail it to me.

I think the documents raise at least these issues:

1. How likely is it that those who receive the letter from the state or visit Debix’s web site will think that the whole thing is just another clever phishing expedition designed to fool people into giving up their private and personal information?
2. Assuming those who receive the letter believe that the communication is legitimate, will they understand what needs to be done to become eligible for the year of protection?
3. In tone, has the State and Debix, its selected protection service vendor, been discouraging, encouraging, or neutral in describing the service and the importance of signing up for it? In other words, based on what has been conveyed, will those affected feel as if they should sign up for the protection, or that it’s either too much trouble to bother with or a waste of time?
4. Is Debix being allowed to capitalize unreasonably on the business the state has dropped in its lap to promote its consumer-paid protection services to those affected?

Though I don’t have the time at the moment to detail it out, I believe the answers to all four questions are less than satisfactory. I will get to those details later tonight or tomorrow morning. In the meantime, feel free to send e-mails or to comment (remember, comments are moderated, so they won’t appear until I’m back late this evening).

These documents relate to this post (”DataGate Post-Mortem: Protection Questions Linger”) and this post (”Data-Theft Communication Follow-up”).

Make any comments relating to these documents there.

Click “More” to see smallish versions of them. Click on each pic to see it in a separate window at a larger size.

(more…)

Star Parker hits a perfect SCHIP shot — “No to Medicaid for the middle class.” Giving in to start-up of SCHIP in 1997 was a very big GOP mistake, as it fed health-care inflation during the ensuing decade. It was one of the earliest signs that the Gingrich Revolution was over. Making the same mistake by expanding the program will solve nothing.

This might solve almost everything, but it’s almost a guarantee that government bureaucrats wouldn’t give it a chance.

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Woe Is Wisconsin, if Governor Jim Doyle and his merry band of statists prevail — From today’s OpinionJournal.com, we get another reason why SCHIP expansion should be stopped. It comes in the form of how much a state-run “universal” health system, the ultimate goal of SCHIPsters, would cost, courtesy of Wisconsin (bolds are mine):

Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is “free” health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.

This employment tax is on top of the $1 billion grab bag of other levies that Democratic Governor Jim Doyle proposed and the tax-happy Senate has also approved, including a $1.25 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, a 10% hike in the corporate tax, and new fees on cars, trucks, hospitals, real estate transactions, oil companies and dry cleaners. In all, the tax burden in the Badger State could rise to 20% of family income, which is slightly more than the average federal tax burden.

….. As if that’s not enough, the health plan includes a tax escalator clause allowing an additional 1.5 percentage point payroll tax to finance higher outlays in the future. This could bring the payroll tax to 16%.

To roughly estimate what the feds would charge for a nationalized system, you need to throw in a few layers of bureaucracy, a wider range of items that must be covered, and a lower level of efficiency. That’s worth at least a few percentage points above the Badger State’s mind-numbing figure.

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Nice T, Justin.

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“Oops” of the Day –

23 July 2007

BRUSSELS (AP)-Yves Leterme, the head of the Flemish Christian Democrat party trying to form a coalition government, broke into the French anthem “La Marseillaise” when television reporters asked him to sing Belgium’s ‘La Brabanconne’ on Saturday.

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Talk about impatient –

Cash incentives fail to trigger baby boom in Germany
20 July 2007

Wiesbaden, Germany (dpa) – Germany’s population is continuing to decline, despite financial incentives designed to encourage couples to have more children, according to figures released Friday.

The Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said deaths outstripped births by 57,200 in the first three months of 2007, causing the population to shrink by 0.5 per cent.

A total of 149,300 children were born in the first quarter of this year, only 0.4 per cent more than the corresponding period of 2006 – the year with the lowest birthrate in German history.

The figures indicated that measures introduced by the government last year had stopped a decline in the birthrate but had failed to trigger a baby boom.

The measures passed at the beginning of May 2006. I count nine months later as early February 2007. To have a baby boom in the first quarter of 2007 you’d have to assume that every couple interested in starting or expanding a family was paying close attention to the news, and that a significant number would change their plans within 60 days.

Someone needs to tell the story’s source, DPA Germany, that they should stop acting like a bunch of nagging in-laws and give the new policies a chance to come to be, uh, fruitful.

From Los Angeles — a two month-old story that should not be missed:

Kellie Lim, a triple amputee at 8, is now ready to graduate from medical school.
May 27, 2007

Kellie Lim knows all too well what it is like to be a very sick child.

Struck with a ravaging bacterial infection that destroys limbs, she became a triple amputee at age 8 and soon faced a life of prosthetics, wheelchairs and often-painful rehabilitation.

But from that suffering, Lim forged a life of achievement. On Friday, she will graduate from UCLA’s medical school and then will begin a residency program at the medical center there.

Her chosen specialty? Pediatrics, with a possible concentration later on childhood allergies and infectious diseases.

“Just having that experience of being someone so sick and how devastating that can be — not just for me but for my family too — gives me a perspective that other people don’t necessarily have,” the 26-year-old Michigan native said recently.

And of all the topics she sampled during medical school, only her work with children left her “smiling at the end of the day.”

Lim carried out her medical training with a determination that awed her professors and fellow students and won her the school’s top prize for excellence in pediatrics.

Opting not to use a prosthetic arm, she showed that she can perform most medical procedures with one hand, including taking blood and administering injections. She lives on her own in a Westwood apartment with no special features for the handicapped and drives a car with only one adaptation: a turning knob on the steering wheel. She is learning to swim, is trying horseback riding and even went tandem skydiving recently.

Lim, whose legs were amputated about 6 inches below her knees, gave up her wheelchair years ago and walks so well down the long and crowded hospital hallways — with a slightly bouncy stride — that new classmates and patients often don’t have a clue for weeks that artificial limbs fill her shoes and pant legs.

Go here for the rest of the story.