State leaders must explain legal expenses

Republican majorities in both legislative houses and Gov. Tom Wolf don’t agree on much, but they are of one mind in refusing to tell the public why they spend large sums of the public’s money on private law firms.

The news organizations Spotlight PA and the Caucus have sued over the House and Senate majorities’ refusal to disclose their reasons for spending more than $3.5 million of public money on private lawyers. The chambers provided the names of the law firms and their total bills but blacked out the rest of their entire contracts. It’s possible that at least some of the money was paid to fight right-toknow requests on other matters.

The same news organizations have reported that the Wolf administration also has declined to say why it has spent $367,500 on six private law firms over the past three years. And that doesn’t include an array of administrative agencies, which typically spend up to $40 million a year on private counsel. According to the administration, revealing details could reveal and jeopardize legal strategy, thus making the contracts exempt from the Open Records Law.

That is a stretch. Simply revealing the subject for which a law firm has been retained betrays nothing about how it has counseled the executive branch or approaches the work.

The state Office of Open Records recommended mediation. That produced only descriptions of the work such as “complex litigation services.”

Ideally, the courts will force self-serving legislators to tell the public why they spend millions of public dollars on private law firms. The Wolf administration shouldn’t let it go that far before providing the relevant information.

—Scranton Times Tribune

Celebrating CHIP

Pennsylvania’s Child Health Insurance Program is 30 years old. Since 1992, it has been a pathway to healthy lives for children and a guardrail protecting families. It was a model for the national CHIP program that did the same for kids and parents in other states.

It isn’t a surprise that it did things like make sure babies had well-child visits, rescued toddlers with ear infections and made it possible for school kids to get glasses so they could see the chalkboard. That was the design. But it is worth looking at the larger impact, too.

One is economic. Even the little things in health care cost more than you would think.

Has CHIP changed that? That’s a complicated question. Correlation is not always causation. But maybe we can make a few leaps.

There has been a huge increase in the number of pediatricians. A 2020 Journal of the American Medical Association study found that from 2003 to 2019, the number of subspecialists — like pediatric cardiologists or endocrinologists — increased by 76.8%.

However, the number of children remained at a fairly consistent 73 million or so in the same period.

This isn’t just CHIP, of course. It’s just one piece of an insurance puzzle that encompassed more Americans, but CHIP is an important part.

The numbers suggest that more people were able to go into pediatric medicine because more people were able to access it. That means more people were getting paychecks, more offices were opened paying more rent or building more facilities in a spreading spiderweb of economic impact created by letting low-income families see doctors.

But there is another relief with that coverage — a more personal one. Having the safety net of medical insurance can relieve tension for parents. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed CHIP programs didn’t just improve children’s health. They also had an impact on moms, who had less stress and were less likely to smoke and drink. That can snowball because stable parents mean a more stable home life, which can have an impact on children’s health.

Do we need more work on these programs? Absolutely. They aren’t cure-alls. But they are a great start — a good place to look at what has worked and build from there.

And it’s kind of nice to realize that 30 years ago, Pennsylvania leaders were able to do something worth expanding to help kids across the country.