DL Open Thread: Saturday, September 24, 2022
How Hospitals Pressured Those Entitled To Free Care To Pay. Utterly despicable, utterly predictable:
“Ask every patient, every time,” the materials said. Instead of using “weak” phrases — like “Would you mind paying?” — employees were told to ask how patients wanted to pay. Soliciting money “is part of your role. It’s not an option.”
If patients did not pay, Providence sent debt collectors to pursue them.
More than half the nation’s roughly 5,000 hospitals are nonprofits like Providence. They enjoy lucrative tax exemptions; Providence avoids more than $1 billion a year in taxes. In exchange, the Internal Revenue Service requires them to provide services, such as free care for the poor, that benefit the communities in which they operate.
But in recent decades, many of the hospitals have become virtually indistinguishable from for-profit companies, adopting an unrelenting focus on the bottom line and straying from their traditional charitable missions.
To understand the shift, The Times reviewed thousands of pages of court records, internal hospital financial records and memos, tax filings, and complaints filed with regulators, and interviewed dozens of patients, lawyers, current and former hospital executives, doctors, nurses and consultants.
The Times found that the consequences have been stark. Many nonprofit hospitals were ill equipped for a flood of critically sick Covid-19 patients because they had been operating with skeleton staffs in an effort to cut costs and boost profits. Others lacked intensive care units and other resources to weather a pandemic because the nonprofit chains that owned them had focused on investments in rich communities at the expense of poorer ones.
Award-worthy journalism, meaning that it will inform and make you angry.
Veterans Do The Right Thing: Demand That Law Enforcement Go After Far-Right Anti-Government Fanatics:
WASHINGTON — A military veterans organization is calling on prosecutors to get more aggressive with the Patriot Front, a far-right, white supremacist group that has been marching in cities across the country, arguing existing laws provide the authority needed to bring criminal charges against its members.
Task Force Butler, an organization founded by U.S. Army veteran Kristofer Goldsmith with the tagline “Veterans Fighting Fascism,” published a report this week that identifies members of the Patriot Front and specifies criminal statutes it says can be used against them.
The report, shared exclusively with NBC News, has been sent to various local and state law enforcement officials in an effort to “hold Patriot Front legally accountable for their politically and racially-motivated harassment of vulnerable minority communities, their terrorizing of local residents in cities and towns throughout the United States, their acts of violence, and their use of American cities as backdrops to showcase for the media and the nation the ethno-nationalist agenda.”
The Patriot Front, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist hate group, splintered off from the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America following the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. It gained notoriety over the past year, marching on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in December and being the target of a massive data leak that exposed information that can be used to identify its members, who typically wear masks at public events. The group does not provide contact information on its website.
Maybe, I dunno, police organizations could take some initiative here? Suxco excluded, of course. Those RWNJ’s from Coeur d’Alene would be right at home at a high school football game there. As opposed to Black football coaches from Hodgson Vo-Tech.
Arizona Goes Full-On Anti-Abortion. Thanks to a bunch’a right-wing judges–and, of course, the Supreme Court. Methinks Arizona won’t be a swing state much longer. Rethugs must pay!:
PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona can enforce a near-total ban on abortions that has been blocked for nearly 50 years, a judge ruled Friday, meaning clinics statewide will have to stop providing the procedures to avoid the filing of criminal charges against doctors and other medical workers.
The judge lifted a decades-old injunction that has long blocked enforcement of the law on the books since before Arizona became a state that bans nearly all abortions. The only exemption is if the woman’s life is in jeopardy.
Cali Strikes Another Blow Against Car Culture?:
Yesterday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 2097, which will ban parking requirements for new housing within a half-mile of public transit, effectively eliminating parking minimums in large swaths of California’s cities.
In a statement announcing the new law, Newsom linked the housing shortage to the climate crisis, noting that the farther people have to commute every day, the higher their greenhouse-gas emissions. Thanks to AB 2097, he said, “We’re making it cheaper and easier to build new housing near daily destinations like jobs and grocery stores and schools. This means more housing at lower prices, closer to walkable neighborhoods and public transit.”
This might seem inconsequential—after all, developers are still allowed to cater to car owners, and cities don’t become walkable overnight. But taken together with the state’s announcement last month that all new cars have to be emissions-free by 2035, it’s a monumental step toward a greener, cleaner California.
Useless Tradition Returns. As in Return Day, the Suxco tradition of ‘burying the hatchet’ after an election. Fewer candidates wish to bury the hatchet with their opponents, more candidates wish to bury the hatchet IN their opponents. Among those few who choose to participate. I’ve been to exactly one, had no desire to return. Almost passed out from all the exhaust from seemingly every fire company vehicle in Suxco. It might have some intrigue should it return to the days where leadership deals were cut there. The recently-emasculated Speaker Pete (Delaware’s Kop Kabal kastrato) and Our Pal Val had deep-sixed that tradition by calling a caucus for the day after the election, and by forcing their choices, meaning them, through. Remains to be seen what happens this year.
What do you want to talk about?
Should be interesting to watch the abortion game play out in Arizona, suspect the Evangelicals and the Republkicans have learned nothing from the abortion vote in deep red Kansas. Also expect assorted horror stories will be coming out as the law takes effect. As noted this may well tip Arizona into the blue column as an army of women seek revenge at the polls.
https://www.delawarepublic.org/education/2022-09-23/indian-river-school-district-board-president-under-investigation-for-confrontation-at-football-game
“The Indian River School District and Delaware State Police are investigating a confrontation involving school board president Rodney Layfield at a Sussex Central High School football game last weekend.”
We’ll see. He comes off like such a maniac in that audio, it’s just wild.