“First, do no harm” a good rule of thumb for Congress looking at addressing surprise medical billing
Healthcare costs can be ridiculous. This time of year, every time I see a piece of mail from my insurance company, I know what to expect before I even open it. It’s going to be my annual rate increase. I’m a self-employed, single mother, who carries private insurance for me and my three kids and insurance is my second highest bill each month (only a little lower than my mortgage). I take great care to keep our costs to a minimum choosing in-network doctors and seeking pre-approval for anything out of the ordinary, but life happens and occasionally something isn’t covered. When I had my son last year, I thought I knew what my costs were going to be but somehow, I ended up with a surprise bill a couple months later anyway. The amount was around $400 which is nothing to sneeze at. That’s more than I owe on my two student loan payments combined. Still that amount is low compared to the surprise bills that people get when they don’t have the opportunity to pre-plan. Once this issue was brought to my attention, I started researching and found families facing crippling debt for cost there was no way, short of being clairvoyant, they could have planned for. This includes emergency care including ambulance rides, out-of-network costs they incurred at in-network facilities and bills that came from care they thought was covered but wasn’t. It happens all the time. All the time. Good news and bad news though. Good news, it looks like Congress is poised to do something to curb this billing nightmare. Bad news, as usual there’s a chance in trying to fix this issue Congress makes things worse. There are competing pieces of legislation one the STOP Surprise Medical Billing Act (SB 1531) uses a tried and true practice of allowing providers and insurance companies to negotiate prices guaranteeing that the patient isn’t stuck with an ungodly bill and that neither the doctor or the insurance company are alone in dictating or setting prices. The wonky name for this practice is Independent Dispute Resolution (IDR). Basically, IDR brings the physicians and the insurance companies to the table with an incentive for both to negotiate in good faith to come to a compromise that doesn’t leave either party hosed. This concept isn’t a new one about a dozen states already use it and it works. The other piece of legislation floating out there relies on the government deciding which rates are best and puts what seems to be a completely arbirtary number at the threashold that doctors or hospitals could start negotiations with insurance companies. This practice, which uses a one-size-fits all approach, experts say would likely lead to doctors deserting rural hospitals and rural areas where the rates would be lowest. As if the residents our rural areas, especially here in Alabama, need additional burdens to finding adequate healthcare. Never in the history of government has the government price-set and gotten the prices right. If government had the ability to use good business sense the US Postal Service and Amtrak wouldn’t be such hot messes. I prefer to leave medical billing decisions to those in the medical field with the cavat that the system isn’t rigged towards either party the doctors or the insurers. Any system the government creates will surely benefit one over the other at the cost of patient quality care or access to care. So where are we on getting these bills through? Well for the senate version the STOP bill there are 27 co-sponsors, 14 democrats and 13 republicans, Senator Doug Jones has signed on (score) but Senator Richard Shelby hasn’t (let’s hope he gets on that). For the House version neither of the current pills have any Alabama support which given the rural nature of our state is just bizarre. Representatives accross the board should be looking to protect those being stuck with surprise bills but if I had to guess this would be an issue straight up the alley of Representatives Martha Roby and Terri Sewell who are known to champion consumer protection bills. Here’s to hoping the new year brings renewed attention to this issue and that the members remember when looking for a solution the Hippocratic Oath nails it when it ask doctors to “First, do no harm,” lawmakers should use that same rule of thumb and leave the playing field level for all the parties involved.
Joe Biden’s new endorsement reflects battle for latino support
Joe Biden’s presidential bid got a boost Monday from one of the leading Latinos in Congress, with the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus’ political arm endorsing the former vice president as Democrats’ best hope to defeat President Donald Trump. “People realize it’s a matter of life and death for certain communities,” Rep. Tony Cárdenas, Democrat-California, told The Associated Press in an interview, explaining the necessity of halting Trump’s populist nationalism, hard-line immigration policies and xenophobic rhetoric that the California congressman called cruel. Cárdenas’ is the chairman of Bold PAC, the political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. His announcement follows presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ weekend of mass rallies with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman congresswoman from New York who has become a face of the progressive movement and a key supporter for the Vermont senator’s second White House bid. The dueling surrogates highlight a fierce battle for the Hispanic vote between Sanders and Biden, whose campaigns each see the two candidates as the leading contenders. Biden leads the field among Democratic voters who are non-white, a group that includes Democratic voters who are Hispanic, with Sanders not far behind, according to national polling. Another top national contender, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, draws less support from non-white voters. There are few recent national polls with a sufficient sample of Hispanic Democratic voters to analyze them independently. The dynamics also demonstrate the starkly different approaches that Biden and Sanders take to the larger campaign. Biden is capitalizing on his 36-year Senate career and two terms as Barack Obama’s vice president to corral Democratic power players across the party’s various demographic slices. Cárdenas joins four other Hispanic caucus members who’ve already backed Biden, a show of establishment support in contrast to some Latino activists who’ve battered Biden over the Obama administration’s deportation record. Sanders, true to his long Capitol Hill tenure as an outsider and democratic socialist, eschews the establishment with promises of a political revolution, just as he did when he finished as runner-up for Democrats’ 2016 nomination. Together, it’s an argument on politics and policy at the crux of Democrats’ 2020 nominating fight. Sanders and his supporters like Ocasio-Cortez argue that existing political structures cannot help working-class Americans, immigrants or anyone else. That argument, they insist, can draw enough new, irregular voters to defeat Trump in November. “We need to be honest here,” retorted Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Biden supporter whose congressional district includes part of the U.S.-Mexico border. “If Joe Biden loses the primary, Democrats will lose in 2020.” It’s impossible for polling almost a year ahead of a general election to affirm that view, but the contention echoes Biden’s consistent arguments about Electoral College math. Texas Rep. Filemon Vela, also a border-district congressman who backs Biden, was not so absolute. But he said Biden is best positioned for a general election on immigration because of his plans to roll back Trump’s immigration restrictions and boost the asylum process, while stopping short of decriminalizing all border crossings. Sanders supports making all border crossings civil offenses, rather than criminal, a position first pushed by the lone Hispanic presidential candidate and former Obama housing secretary Julian Castro. “In some swing states, that might not go over well,” Vela said, even as he, Gonzalez and Cárdenas said the distinction is more important to political pundits than to Hispanic voters. Said Cárdenas: “There is activist language and there are litmus tests; and there are hard-working people around the country who just want fairness.” He added another key plank of Biden’s case: that meaningful change, from reversing Trump’s migrant family separation policy to expanding health care coverage, requires not only winning in November but then achieving some semblance of consensus in Congress. Hispanic voters are a rapidly growing portion of the U.S. population and electorate, though they have consistently had lower election-participation rates than African Americans and non-Hispanic whites. At the least, Hispanics will play key roles in the Nevada caucus (third in the Democratic nominating process) and the Texas and California primaries, the two largest sources of delegates on the March 3 Super Tuesday slate. Sanders leads Biden among younger voters generally, according to national polling, and Biden aides say that could carry over to Hispanics. The variable is seemingly on display when comparing Biden’s campaign crowds with those like Ocasio-Cortez drew this weekend in California and Nevada. Immigrants-rights advocates picketed outside Biden’s Philadelphia campaign headquarters shortly after its opening. Castro used Democratic debates to challenge Biden on why he didn’t stop more deportations when he was vice president. Last month, members of the Movimiento Cosecha, which describes itself as an immigrant-led group pushing for “permanent, protection and respect” for immigrants, confronted Biden during a campaign event in South Carolina. One of them, Carlos Rojas, asked Biden to answer for deportations under Obama and to commit to an outright moratorium on all deportations — a position Sanders supports. Biden declined. After Rojas pressed him, Biden said, “You should vote for Trump.” Gonzalez called it “ridiculous” to question Biden’s commitment to immigrants, but said the skepticism demonstrates that the Latino community vote is not monolithic, with a range of national origins and philosophical differences. Vela agreed, adding that Sanders’ rallies and Ocasio-Cortez’s social media following shouldn’t obscure Biden’s standing among the “traditionalist Democrats” he said constitute the majority of Hispanic voters. Vela recalled an unplanned campaign stop he made recently with Biden at Mi Tierra, an iconic restaurant in San Antonio, Texas, after a campaign event with several hundred people. “He went table to table,” Vela said, “people getting up, ‘Joe Biden is here’ and ‘There’s Joe Biden.’ The response was overwhelming.” By Bill Barrow Associated Press Republished with the Permission of the Associated Press.
Charges announced against 2 ex-officials in Creola
Two former city officials are accused of stealing almost $70,000 total from a south Alabama town, a prosecutor said Monday. Mobile County District Attorney Ashley Rich announced charges against Jerry Taylor, a former police chief in Creola, and Kim Green, a former city clerk, WKRG-TV reported. Taylor was charged with taking almost $29,000 from the city, she said, and Green was accused of taking almost $39,000 from the city. Both face ethics and theft charges. Court records were not available to show whether either person had a lawyer, but a statement from Taylor asked the public to withhold judgment. The city of about 2,000 people is located near Mobile. Republished with the Permission of the Associated Press.
Alabama school system prepares to sue over 3M contamination
A north Alabama school system has taken the first step to sue 3M Co. over claims that chemicals are leaking from a closed landfill that is on school system property. News outlets reported that Decatur’s school system has filed notice saying it plans to sue over industrial toxins leaking from the one-time landfill beneath the former Brookhaven Middle School. Chemicals are leaking into a creek, groundwater and the Tennessee River, the system contends. An investigation conducted by a contractor for 3M and filed with the state environmental agency showed a 40-acre site was operated as a landfill from the 1940s until 1963. Aside from the former school, a playground, sports fields and a recreational center are located there. The Minnesota-based company, which agreed to pay millions in a lawsuit over contamination in the Decatur area earlier this year, said materials were disposed of properly based on laws at the time the landfill operated decades ago. A letter from the school system said it didn’t know the land was contaminated by materials from a 3M operation when it purchased it, The Decatur Daily reported. The system said it will ask a court to make the company clean up wastes and remove chemicals known as PFOA and PFOS. Once used by 3M’s Decatur plant in the manufacture of scotchgard and other nonstick products and coatings, the substances are in a family known as “forever chemicals” because they do not degrade in the environment. The letter was from the same lawyers who represented West Morgan-East Lawrence Water Authority in a lawsuit against 3M and Daikin America LLC over drinking water contamination. Daikin settled for $4 million last year, and 3M settled in March for $35 million. While the notice was required before any lawsuit is filed, the school system said it still hoped to avoid a court fight. Billy Jackson, a City Council member whose district includes the old landfill, said the city should also consider action since it owns 25 acres of land at the old landfill site. “We’re in no different situation than Decatur City Schools. We have to look at the safety and well-being of our citizens. We need to get it cleaned up,” Jackson said. Republished with the Permission of the Associated Press.
Evangelical tussling over anti-Donald Trump editorial escalates
As the political clamor caused by a top Christian magazine’s call to remove President Donald Trump from office continues to reverberate, more than 100 conservative evangelicals closed ranks further around Trump on Sunday. In a letter to the president of Christianity Today magazine, the group of evangelicals chided Editor-in-Chief Mark Galli for penning an anti-Trump editorial, published Thursday, that they portrayed as a dig at their characters as well as the president’s. “Your editorial offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations,” the evangelicals wrote to the magazine’s president, Timothy Dalrymple. The new offensive from the group of prominent evangelicals, including multiple members of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, signals a lingering awareness by the president’s backers that any meaningful crack in his longtime support from that segment of the Christian community could prove perilous for his reelection hopes. Though no groundswell of new anti-Trump sentiment emerged among evangelicals in the wake of Christianity Today’s editorial, the president fired off scathing tweets Friday accusing the establishment magazine – founded by the late Rev. Billy Graham in 1956 — of becoming a captive of the left. The letter to the magazine’s president sent on Sunday also included a veiled warning that Christianity Today could lose readership or advertising revenue as a result of the editorial, which cites Trump’s impeachment last week. Citing Galli’s past characterization of himself as an “elite” evangelical, the letter’s authors told Dalrymple that “it’s up to your publication to decide whether or not your magazine intends to be a voice of evangelicals like those represented by the signatories below, and it is up to us and those Evangelicals like us to decide if we should subscribe to, advertise in and read your publication online and in print, but historically, we have been your readers.” Among the signatories of the letter are George Wood, chairman of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship; Rev. Tim Hill of the Church of God; former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee; and former Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann. Galli told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he views the chances of Trump leaving office, either through a reelection loss or post-impeachment conviction by the Senate, as “probably fairly slim at this point.” The editor-in-chief defended his editorial as less of a “political judgment” than a call for fellow evangelicals to examine their tolerance of Trump’s “moral character” in exchange for his embrace of conservative policies high on their agenda. “We’re not looking for saints. We do have private sins, ongoing patterns of behavior that reveal themselves in our private life that we’re all trying to work on,” Galli said Sunday. “But a president has certain responsibilities as a public figure to display a certain level of public character and public morality.” Galli referred comment on Sunday’s evangelical letter to Dalrymple, who on Sunday published his own strongly worded defense of the magazine’s anti-Trump commentary. Countering Trump’s suggestion that the magazine had shifted to favor liberals, Dalrymple wrote that the publication is in fact “theologically conservative” and “does not endorse candidates.” “Out of love for Jesus and his church, not for political partisanship or intellectual elitism, this is why we feel compelled to say that the alliance of American evangelicalism with this presidency has wrought enormous damage to Christian witness,” Dalrymple wrote. Asked about the editorial’s indictment of Trump by “Fox News Sunday,” Marc Short – chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, himself a prominent evangelical Christian – cited some of the policy positions that have helped endear the president to many in that voting bloc. “For a lot of us who are celebrating the birth of our Savior this week, the way that we look at it is that this president has helped to save thousands of similar unplanned pregnancies,” Short said Sunday, adding that “no president has been a greater ally to Israel than this president.” Roughly 8 in 10 white evangelical Protestants say they approve of the way Trump is handling his job, according to a December poll from The AP-NORC Center. The Trump campaign is planning a Jan. 3 event in Miami called “Evangelicals for Trump.” Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through the Religion News Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for this content. This story has been corrected by deleting a reference to Samuel Rodriguez as among those who signed a letter Sunday, which he was not. By Elana Schor Associated Press Republished with the Permission of the Associated Press.
