Paul Bass Photo
When Tom Foley considers serving as governor for cities like New Haven, he sees new choices for nursing home patients and public-school parents, and a death penalty that works.
Foley hasn’t spoken much about cities yet. And New Haven hasn’t seen much of him. That’s because he spent most of this year running for the Republican nomination for governor. Republicans are as scarce as alligators in cities like New Haven, so Republican primary campaigns take place in the ‘burbs.
Now that he has won his party’s nomination and the general election campaign season approaches, Foley stopped by New Haven and offered his take on urban issues.
It turns out the Greenwich businessman has a starkly different take on some of those issues from that of his Democratic opponent, former Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy.
Just talking with the two candidates one-on-one can feel like taking a trip to different planets.
An interview with Malloy over coffee at New Haven’s Bru Cafe is a sprint. You’d think the one-time prosecutor has already mainlined his daily caffeine take before taking his first sip, ready to pounce into action. Before a question is completed, Malloy leaps into a bulleted five-point policy response, adorned with digs at his opponent and proactive spin to counter anticipated attacks. At times you have to wrestle to move to another question.
A chat with Foley the other day felt more like a stroll, or after-work G&Ts, than a campaign interview squeezed into a hectic schedule over coffee overlooking bustling Pitkin Plaza outside Bru’s window. Foley took maybe three sips of his brew in the course of an hour. He slipped his blue blazer off his white dress shirt with presidential-seal cuff links. The former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland listened to questions, shook them in his mind like ice cubes in a cocktail glass, offered calm, considered, confident responses, pausing to field feedback.
What he had to say about some of New Haven’s issues offered just as much of a contrast with Malloy, too.
About the death penalty, for instance.
A New Haven state legislator is hoping to revive a bill to abolish the state’s death penalty next year; the last time he got it passed, a Republican governor vetoed it. Malloy said Friday that if elected governor he’d sign the bill. He offered arguments similar to those of bill sponsor State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield.
“I tried four homicide cases a prosecutor. I tried one as a defense attorney,” Malloy said. “I don’t support the death penalty because there is no data that indicates that it has anything to do with the homicide rate. If it did, Texas would have one of the lowest homicide rates as opposed to one of the highest homicide rates. My heart goes out to family members and friends of victims of homicides. But I also know it has been disparate in its application on racial lines, cultural lines, income lines. We put individuals to death wrongly.”
Foley said he’d veto the bill.
“The death penalty in Connecticut is very rarely imposed,” he argued, and has proved to affect people who were clearly guilty. “In some cases the death penalty is warranted. It does act as a deterrent.”
He said the penalty is especially important in prisons. Without it, prison guards have less protection against violence by life inmates who have no further consequences to fear.
New Haven has struggled lately to keep nursing homes open. Foley said the crisis in urban nursing care reflects the need for a dramatic change to programs that keep elders at home longer and in community-based alternative programs. Those programs cost less — and keep seniors alive longer through better care, he said.
Fewer than 50 percent of elderly Medicaid patients in Connecticut are in community-based alternatives rather than nursing homes, he said; in Oregon the figure is 75 percent. Foley said he’d aim to add 25 percent to Connecticut’s figure and save $600 million in the process.
Some of that money would go toward increasing state Medicaid reimbursements for those frail elderly patients who need to remain in homes. Right now Medicaid patients account for upwards of 80 to 90 percent of the patients in urban homes; the homes lose an estimated $18 or more per day on them because of low state reimbursements.
In a rare jab at Malloy, Foley argued that his Democratic opponent doesn’t share his determination because of his union support. “Guess what? Most of the nursing homes have unionized nursing home workers. The day of the [Democratic] primary, Dan Malloy was on the picket line with nursing home workers. No surprise,” Foley said.
“You can’t do both” boosting nursing homes and boosting community care, Foley said. “It’s one or the other.”
Paul Bass File Photo
Malloy (pictured) countered that the state has to work on both, because the population is turning older and sicker. He said he supports continued efforts to move as many patients as possible into alternative care, which he said has been happening in the state. But especially in cities, nursing homes need more support to continue caring for a growing population that has nowhere else to turn. Otherwise, he said, the state will “destroy” nursing homes and eventually have to build them back up at higher cost.
“There is an aging tsunami. It is coming at us down the track,” he predicted. “We have downsized the number of nursing homes in our state over the last 16 years. We have closed a majority of the urban nursing homes so the people who rely on nursing homes who come from urban areas are unlikely to receive that treatment near where their families are.” Click here for more of Malloy’s thoughts on the topic at a recent visit to a city nursing home.
The two candidates split even more on SustiNet, the new state program created (over a gubernatorial veto) to insure more people, more fully, and to integrate President Obama’s new federal health care law into state programs.
Foley has little regard for Obamacare or for SustiNet. He said the law fails to address the core problem with the health care system: rising costs. It just adds new costs and mandates, he argued. He called SustiNet a costly program searching for a mission. It originally sought to provide universal health care coverage, he said. With 94 percent of the state covered, and many of the uninsured being young people uninterested in coverage, universal coverage is a moot concern, he claimed. He said he sees little reason to work with SustiNet as governor.
Malloy called SustiNet an important “vehicle” for making sure Connecticut benefits from “complicated” new federal health care programs and meet its obligations; SustiNet focuses in part on cutting costs through electronic records and reform of how people receive care (through concepts like “medical homes”). Malloy noted that much of its mission has been on helping the “underinsured” — small business people, middle-class families with inadequate coverage — as much as the uninsured. And he said it’s important to make sure all children eligible for Medicaid/HUSKY coverage receive it.
Foley said his concern is more with state government tracking down ineligible people who receive benefits. “I understand there are a lot of people who don’t technically qualify,” he said. The state government already focuses on making sure qualified people get benefits, but not enough on weeding out fraud, he argued.
Malloy agreed that the state needs to work harder to slim down a “bloated bureaucracy” and root out “dishonest practices by dishonest clinics or doctors or individuals.” But he argued that it’s costing the state more money when eligible children don’t receive Medicaid, the costs of which are reimbursed in part by the federal government. When those kids end up in hospital emergency rooms instead, the bill is higher, and entirely paid by the state, Malloy said.
Foley said he could also cut more than $100 million a year from the state budget by privatizing two psychiatric facilities, Riverview Hospital and the Southbury Training School.
Riverview spends over $900,000 a year per patient, compared to $400,000 spent in the private sector, he claimed. The training school spends $450,000 per resident compared to what Foley said is a private-industry norm of $350,000.
“Some people say the same services” can be had for as little as $140,000 to $150,000.
Malloy dismissed Foley’s math as dangerous “apples and oranges” comparisons. He said state mental facilities receive harder cases, people failed by the private sector. As it is, “the state has not kept its promise with respect to people who are mentally ill,” Malloy said. “They are not receiving appropriate services. This headlong drive into privatization would lead to a sicker population” — and more prison inmates, since inadequately treated patients are accounting for a growing percentage of the jail population.
On the number-one policy issue in New Haven these days, school reform, the candidates do share some ideas, but still speak differently.
Both oppose giving parents vouchers to send their children to private or parochial schools. Both emphasized the need to work with teachers on school reform rather than demonizing their unions.
Foley said the chance to improve urban schools ranks among “the most exciting” opportunities he sees in serving as governor. “It’s absolutely terrible we have the largest achievement gap in the country,” he said.
He emphasized offering parents more choices for their children — more magnet and charter schools, as well as in-district choice of which public schools in which to enroll. (He stopped short of embracing allowing urban students to attend suburban schools a la Hartford’s Project Choice.)
Foley spoke of his visits to the Amistad Academy charter school. It proves that alternate approaches to traditional public schooling can work, he said. He also praised New Haven Mayor John DeStefano’s embrace of an ambitious school reform plan, including a contract struck with teachers to allow for increased training for failing teachers and an easier route to dismissal if the training doesn’t take. He also emphasized performance pay for teachers and a longer school day.
Asked how he’d pay for that, he said the solutions don’t necessarily cost more money. He said he target administrative costs; he called public schools “top heavy.”
Malloy called Foley’s schools position “ideologically driven.” He too decried the achievement gap and said he’d too focus on how money’s spent, creating a “matrix” to track what percentage of district spending goes toward administration, what percentage to the classroom.
The centerpiece of his program does involve money: Guaranteeing universal pre-kindergarten education for all Connecticut kids within eight years. Malloy did that in Stamford. Advocates emphasize pre‑K in cities because of the rapid development of children’s brains at that age, determining in part how well they can fare later on in school. Click here to read the rest of Malloy’s education plan.