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The Weekly Wonk is a summary of Oklahoma Policy Institute’s events, publications, blog posts, and coverage. Numbers of the Day and Policy Notes are from our daily news briefing, In The Know. Click here to subscribe to In The Know.
This week on the OK Policy Blog, we examined the data and concluded that the popular assumption that Medicaid recipients make unnecessary trips to the ER is more based on myth and anecdote than fact. Now that the political dust has settled, we explored the impact of the third grade reading law on schools. In light of recent conversations on immigration, we took another look at the novel Kind of Kin, which explores the impact of immigration politics on a small Oklahoma town.
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In his Journal Record column, Executive Director David Blatt looks at long-withheld emails and wonders why the Governor’s office devoted so much attention to a perceived slight from OCPA and so little to the situation of 150,000 Oklahomans left without options for health insurance. In our Editorial of the Week, M. Scott Carter argues that lawmakers have instituted too many tax incentives without building in mechanisms to measure their impact.
Quote of the week:
“I wouldn’t label this an Obamacare grant. I think that classification is confusing to people and, in a sense, inaccurate.”
– Alex Weintz, Governor Fallin’s Communications Director, referring to a $3 million grant that the state applied for under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) (Source: http://bit.ly/1qrTQCS)
Numbers of the day:
- $23,330 – Average mortgage debt in Oklahoma in 2013.
- 4.6% – Oklahoma’s unemployment rate in July, up slightly from June’s unemployment rate (4.5%).
- 34.4 million – Acres of farmland in Oklahoma, comprising 77% of all land in the state.
- 3428,689 – Total number of motor vehicles registered in Oklahoma in 2011.
- $111.23 – The value of goods and services that can be purchased for $100 in Oklahoma, compared to the national average.
What we’re reading:
- The Crime Report discusses why ‘Shock and Awe’ policing with military hardware fails to protect public safety.
- The Washington Post examines how Oklahoma’s increase in immigration is connected to the state’s strong economy.
- Kaiser Health News reports that as more Americans gain insurance under the federal health law, hospitals are rethinking their charity programs, with some scaling back help for those who could have signed up for coverage but didn’t.
- FiveThirtyEight shares why there aren’t good statistics on the number of Americans killed by the police every year.
- The New York Times explains how the gender wage gap most significantly disadvantages mothers in low-wage jobs who need to take time off to care for children.
