The number of poor Rhode Islanders receiving federal welfare benefits dropped sharply during the Great Recession despite record-high unemployment and a weak recovery, according to a new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program’s total Rhode Island caseload fell from 10,929 in 2007 to 7,784 in 2009 and 6,668 in 2011, a drop of 39%, the Washington-based organization found. Rhode Island’s jobless rate jumped from 6% to 11% over the same period.

By contrast, the TANF caseload increased 10% nationwide from 2007 to 2011. The 39% drop in Rhode Island’s welfare rolls was the third-biggest in the nation, behind only Arizona’s (54%) and Indiana’s (51%). Nevada, which like Rhode Island has struggled to bring down its unemployment rate, said its TANF recipients increased by 37%.

That’s not the whole story, however – because Rhode Island went into the recession with the most far-reaching welfare program in the country.

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By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island officials say it’s “full speed ahead” for the state in implementing President Obama’s health care law locally after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional. More than 50,000 more residents are expected to sign up for Medicaid at a cost of $1.9 billion over five years.

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• Related: Q&A: Lt. Gov. Roberts on what’s next for health reform in RI (June 28)

Ferguson (r) with Costantino and Roberts

“Is this the happiest day of my life? Pretty much!”

That’s what a smiling Christine Ferguson told me at a press conference this morning when I asked how it felt Thursday to see the health policy she developed as a senior aide to the late U.S. Sen. John Chafee upheld as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ferguson, who started working for Chafee’s son on Monday as head of Rhode Island’s new health insurance exchange, said unequivocally that President Obama’s signature accomplishment is what she drafted for Republicans two decades ago. ”It is based on the John Chafee bill of 1993,” she said. “It is pretty much exactly how we envisioned it.” She added: “I think it’s a great day.”

Ferguson was a key architect of the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, introduced by the senior Chafee that year as the Republican alternative to the Clinton administration’s so-called “Hillarycare” proposal. (Oddly enough, Hillary Clinton’s 1993 proposal was crafted in partnership with a Rhode Islander, too – Ira Magaziner of Greenhouse Compact fame.)

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There’s some irony in Governor Chafee’s appointment on Thursday of Christine Ferguson as director of Rhode Island’s new Health Benefits Exchange, the agency that will run the state’s Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace.

In the 1990s, Ferguson worked for Chafee’s father, Republican U.S. Sen. John Chafee, as a health policy advisor. In that role, she was a key architect of the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, Chafee’s GOP alternative to President Clinton’s health reform legislation.

“Christine Ferguson of my staff and Sheila Burke of Senator [Bob] Dole’s staff have been absolutely essential in preparing this legislation,” Chafee said on the Senate floor when he introduced the bill in November 1993. “Without their knowledge and drive and energy, we would not have this bill today.”

At the center of Chafee’s 1993 bill was a provision requiring every American to purchase health insurance by January 2005 – an individual mandate. The same policy has now become anathema to conservatives, who are hopeful the U.S. Supreme Court will rule it unconstitutional before the end of this month.

Ferguson may be one of the few constants in the two-decade health care debate – someone who put forward an individual mandate as a Republican aide in the 1990s and will now run an insurance exchange reliant on the mandate, put into law by a Democratic president and implemented by a center-left independent governor.

• Related: Today marks the first anniversary of – ‘Chafeecare’ (March 23, 2011)

The late John Chafee makes a prominent cameo in this week’s New Yorker, as Ezra Klein writes about how the individual health-insurance mandate went from Republicans’ preferred policy to conservative heresy.

Klein notes the mandate made its first legislative appearance in the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, which Rhode Island’s Republican U.S. Senator proposed in November 1993, during the fight over President Clinton’s health care bill – and it’s been part of the debate ever since:

After the Clinton bill, which called for an employer mandate, failed, Democrats came to recognize the opportunity that the Chafee bill had presented. In “The System,” David Broder and Haynes Johnson’s history of the health-care wars of the nineties, Bill Clinton concedes that it was the best chance he had of reaching a bipartisan compromise. …

Ten years later, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, began picking his way back through the history — he read “The System” four times — and he, too, came to focus on the Chafee bill. …

What is notable about the conservative response to the individual mandate is not only the speed with which a legal argument that was considered fringe in 2010 had become mainstream by 2012; it’s the implication that the Republicans spent two decades pushing legislation that was in clear violation of the nation’s founding document. …

Senator Orrin Hatch, who had been a co-sponsor of the Chafee bill, emerged as one of the mandate’s most implacable opponents in 2010, writing in The Hill that to come to “any other conclusion” than that the mandate is unconstitutional “requires treating the Constitution as the servant, rather than the master, of Congress.”

Now, 19 years after John Chafee first proposed a federal individual mandate for health insurance, the country is waiting to find out whether the U.S. Supreme Court will declare his idea unconstitutional.

• Related: Today marks the first anniversary of – ‘Chafeecare’ (March 23)

Brian Daniels, who’s been Governor Chafee’s director of policy since he took office, is taking a new job across the street at the Department of Administration.

Chafee has tapped Daniels to lead the state’s new performance-management initiative, the governor told his cabinet Monday in an email obtained by WPRI.com. Kelly Mahoney will replace Daniels as Chafee’s policy director, keeping the title she currently has working for Department of Administration Director Richard Licht.

Daniels will be “working with departments and agencies to encourage data-driven decision-making” to “help them produce meaningful results,” the governor said. “These efforts will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of state government and ensure that we are careful stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

The changes won’t be a major surprise to those familiar with the state’s inner workings. Daniels, a former aide to Congressman Jim Langevin, studied the application of management theories to the public sector while earning an MBA at Yale, and Licht is a big fan of Mahoney, a former Rhode Island Senate staffer.

“The governor is a big believer in putting people where their passions and their interests lie, and this is a positive switch for both of them,” Chafee spokeswoman Christine Hunsinger told WPRI.com. The governor has also proposed creating a new Office of Management and Budget as part of the efficiency push.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein has a fascinating column about what psychologists find when they study how citizens evaluate different public policies. Here’s the crux of it (emphasis mine):

Both liberals and conservatives followed their parties, even when their parties disagreed with their preferences. So when Democrats were said to favor the stringent welfare reform, for example, liberals went right along. Three scary sentences from the piece: “When reference group information was available, participants gave no weight to objective policy content, and instead assumed the position of their group as their own. This effect was as strong among people who were knowledgeable about welfare as it was among people who were not. Finally, participants persisted in the belief that they had formed their attitude autonomously even in the two group information conditions where they had not.”

So basically, once people hear that a politician they agree with supports this or that, they go right along. I’d imagine this is especially true when the policy in question doesn’t affect the citizen directly; a diehard Democrat probably won’t back a pension overhaul that cuts his benefit even if his party votes for it, and many Republicans scoffed at President Bush’s plan to partially privatize Social Security in 2005.

This makes perfect sense to me. I’m often surprised by how often people will dismiss an innovative or unexpected policy proposal from a politician they dislike, even if the idea is one they would seem to love.

A year ago today, President Obama signed the late U.S. Sen. John Chafee’s health care reform plan into law.

Sure, most people know the legislation as the Affordable Care Act – or, in less supportive circles, “Obamacare.” But when you get away from all the partisan bickering over the law, its actual nuts and bolts bare a striking similarity to the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, which the Rhode Island Republican proposed during the heat of President Clinton’s fight over health policy.

Don’t believe me? Check out this Kaiser Health News chart comparing John Chafee bill’s with competing Republican and Democratic proposals from 2009. As Kaiser’s Maggie Mertens pointed out in a February 2010 interview with one of Chafee’s co-sponsors, former Sen. Dave Durenberger of Minnesota:

In fact, the key provisions in the Chafee bill may seem familiar, as they bear a strong resemblance to those in the current Democratic Senate bill, and now in President Barack Obama’s proposal. A mandate that individuals buy insurance, subsidies for the poor to buy insurance and the requirement that insurers offer a standard benefits package and refrain from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions were all in the 1993 GOP bill.

Durenberger says the reason many of these ideas have been shunned by today’s Republicans, even called unconstitutional by some, is that political times have changed. “The main thing that’s changed is the definition of a Republican,” he said.

The bill Chafee crafted wound up being Democrats’ last, best hope for passing something comprehensive by the summer of 1994. “I trust John Chafee,” Sen. Ted Kennedy told fellow Democrats even as the legislation’s prospects dimmed. In the end, though, his bill died along with every other effort to pass major health legislation during that Congress.

Chafee’s ideas didn’t die, though – his top health policy aide, Laurie Rubiner, went on to work for Hillary Clinton, helping shape the health plan that Clinton unveiled during her presidential campaign – which also influenced Obama’s.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein, an authority on all things congressional, emphasized the link between Chafee’s proposal and Obama’s amid the long legislative battle of 2009-10. “It is basically a marriage between Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts-care, and even more the John Chafee-David Durenberger-Chuck Grassley-Bob Dole alternative of 1993-’94 built around managed competition,” he told PBS’s Charlie Rose. (Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar were also Chafee co-sponsors, at least initially.)

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The Ocean State Policy Research Institute has taken a lot of heat since it released its “Leaving Rhode Island” report last month, not only from its ideological opponents but also ostensibly nonpartisan outlets like PolitiFact Rhode Island and The Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report.

This morning, OSPRI put out a newsletter defending its findings, which ended thus:

We stand firmly by our “Leaving Rhode Island” study. Today, OSPRI ISSUES A CHALLENGE to have a face-to-face public debate about the significance of our findings. We also wonder if there is anyone on the left brave enough to stand by their hit job.

Good idea – and you know they’re serious about it because THEY USED ALL-CAPS. In fact, it’s such a good idea that we already hosted exactly the debate OSPRI wants.

Last month, Tim White brought OSPRI founder Bill Felkner and Rhode Island Policy Reporter editor Tom Sgouros on “Newsmakers” to debate “Leaving Rhode Island.” And the debate was so interesting – and so heated – that we actually taped an extra Web-only segment of the show so the debate could continue.

Here’s the video with part one of the debate, from the second half of the actual “Newsmakers” broadcast:

And here’s part two of the debate, which only ran online:

a state EBT card for food stamps

The R.I. Department of Human Services is receiving a $501,701 bonus from the federal government as a reward for making major strides in getting eligible Rhode Islanders enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – better known as food stamps, though the name was changed in 2008. The state says it will use the extra money “to continue to improve technology and access.”

About 149,000 Rhode Islanders are receiving food stamps right now, more than double the number enrolled before the state began losing jobs at the start of 2007. I took a look at the reasons for the surge in enrollment in a WPRI.com story about a month ago – it’s much more than the economy:

Nearly one out of every seven Rhode Islanders gets food stamps now, as a combination of high unemployment, expanded eligibility and stepped-up outreach has doubled enrollment in the federally funded program. …

A series of technical changes made by federal and state policymakers over the past two years has expanded the number of people in Rhode Island who are eligible to get food stamps, which switched from actual stamps to plastic debit cards in 1998.

Among other changes, they raised the maximum pre-tax income people could have from 130 percent of the federal poverty level to 185 percent; increased the number of people classified as receiving other benefits, which makes them eligible for food stamps, too; and stopped excluding people for having assets such as 401(k)s and higher-value vehicles.

(image credit: URI Feinstein Center for a Hunger-Free America)

a food stamp EBT card

The number of Rhode Islanders signed up to get food stamps hit a record 146,338 in July. There are a few ways to look at that figure – it’s double the number enrolled at the start of 2007; almost 14% of Rhode Island’s 1 million residents; and one out of every seven people in the state. (Food stamps is a misnomer these days; the benefits have been provided on debit cards since 1998.)

It also marks quite a turnaround for a state that was under heavy criticism just a few years ago for failing to get people eligible for food stamps to actually enroll in the program and receive the benefits. Although the economy is a major force behind the surge in enrollment, there are a bunch of other factors in play. Find out more in my in-depth story just posted on the main site. Here’s a sample:

Nearly one out of every seven Rhode Islanders gets food stamps now, as a combination of high unemployment, expanded eligibility and stepped-up outreach has doubled enrollment in the federally funded program.

A record 146,338 Rhode Islanders received food stamps in July, or nearly 14 percent of the state’s 1 million residents, according to the R.I. Department of Human Services. That is twice the number of individuals who were enrolled in the program in January 2007, the month before Rhode Island began losing jobs. …

Compared with a few years ago, “we see a lot more working people – people with a job right now – as well as people who have lost jobs and are on unemployment,” Maria Cimini, who coordinates the state’s food stamp outreach program, told Eyewitness News. “We’ve seen a lot of changes like that.”

Read the whole thing.

(image credit: Feinstein Center)