Chewing Over the Issues

Man robs bank of $1 so he can get prison health care

A North Carolina man robbed a local bank for a dollar just so he could get health care in prison, he said.
 
James Verone, 59, handed the teller a note demanding $1 and claimed he had a gun, ABC News reported.
 
He then walked away and sat down, waiting for police.
 
“I started to walk away from the teller, then I went back and said, I’ll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police,” he said, according to local television station 9News. “I wanted to make it known that this wasn’t for monetary reasons, but for medical reasons.”
 
Verone, who committed the robbery on June 9, does not plan to pay his bail, which was recently reduced to $2,000.

With little money to his name and many medical problems, including a growth on his chest, two ruptured disks and an unidentified problem with his left foot, he said the “robbery” was his last resort.

“The pain was beyond the tolerance that I could accept,” he told the Gaston Gazette. “I kind of hit a brick wall with everything.”

He calculated that a non-violent crime like the bank hold-up would land him in jail, and even enable him to collect Social Security benefits upon his release.
 
“I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic, what I came up with,” he said.
 
On the day he committed the felony, Verone mailed a letter to the Gaston Gazette explaining his logic.
 
“When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me. This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar,” he wrote. “I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”

Another story about it here.

States move to bar workers’ compensation for undocumented workers, shoot selves in foot

From Business Insurance.

With conservative lawmakers in control in several states, more legislation is being introduced that would deny workers compensation benefits to illegal immigrants who are hurt on the job.

And while such efforts have failed in recent years, today’s changed political climate could result in some of that legislation becoming law this time around, some say.

Bills that would bar illegal immigrants from collecting workers comp benefits are pending in Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Of course, just as the anti-choicers’ efforts to make contraception difficult to obtain and abortion illegal actually wind up increasing the number of abortions, this would likely be bad for employers in the long run. One of the central tenets of most states’ workers’ compensation programs is the “exclusive remedy” protection, which says that “Except in narrow circumstances, such as where the employer actually intends to cause harm to the worker, no matter how egregious the employer’s conduct the worker’s sole remedy against the employer will be through the workers’ compensation system.” In other words, the workers’ compensation program will pay for your medical care and your lost wages, and in return you are prevented from suing your employer.

If you exclude certain people from the protection that workers’ compensation would give them, you’re also excluding their employers from the protection that workers’ compensation gives:

Previous efforts to bar illegal immigrants from collecting workers compensation have failed in part because of objections to their unintended consequences for employers, observers say. For example, such a change would deprive employers of workers compensation’s exclusive remedy protection, exposing employers to civil litigation over worker injuries.

“Most legislators (eventually) realize they are shooting themselves in the foot if they enact this kind of legislation,” said Rebecca Smith, a staff attorney who tracks workers compensation legislation affecting immigrants for the New York-based National Employment Law Project, a worker support organization.

…

Such legislation could expose employers to legal and insurance problems, said Alissa C. Atkins, a workers comp defense attorney at David & Rosetti L.L.P. in Atlanta. Illegal immigrants barred from accessing the workers comp system could take their claims into the tort system, where employers are exposed to awards that are capped under the workers comp system, Ms. Atkins and others said.

“That is the whole point of the Georgia workers comp act, that the employers get the benefit of the exclusive remedy argument,” Ms. Atkins said. “And if we are taking that away, that opens a can of worms of potential for pain and suffering (awards) which is not allowed under the Georgia workers comp act.”

Should that occur, employers could be pushed to tap their general liability policies rather than their workers comp coverage, Ms. Atkins said.

One solution could be to craft companion legislation that also would prohibit illegal immigrants from taking work injury claims before a civil court. But that could raise constitutional challenges, she said.

“It’s a tricky thing for drafters to try and do that, because they can’t deny people access to the courts,” Ms. Smith of NELP said.

It would also have the tendency to reward unethical behavior by employers:

There also is a public policy problem with stripping illegal immigrants of workers compensation benefits, said Bruce C. Wood, associate general counsel and director of workers comp for the American Insurance Assn. in Washington. Adopting such a measure could encourage some employers to hire illegal immigrants knowing they would get a free pass should an employee get injured, Mr. Wood said.

“We find that (potential) policy result to be troubling,” Mr. Wood said. The AIA opposes adoption of laws barring illegal immigrants from receiving workers comp benefits, he notes.

(Source: businessinsurance.com)

“In the US, we do not have a health care system at all”

Here in the US, we do not have a health care system at all; we have a medical-profits system which is driven by the health-insurance industry. Health insurance companies are publicly traded on the stock exchange, which means that their primary fiduciary duty is to provide dividends to the stockholders. In this business model, the company’s actual clients are liabilities — potential sources of money loss — and it becomes imperative to deny paying claims by any means possible, in many cases at the expense of ethics. Hence the refusal to insure anyone with a “pre-existing condition”, because that person is guaranteed to have claims to file; hence “out-of-pocket deductibles” that the average person will never exceed, combined with “lifetime caps” for catastrophic coverage, so that even people who are paying for coverage don’t actually get it; hence “recission”, the practice of summarily dropping clients as soon as they actually get hurt or sick. The purpose of the company is no longer to provide services to the clients; it’s to collect premiums and (insofar as possible) make NO payments, and dump that money into top-management salaries and stockholder dividends.

This is why we need a public health care system. The government doesn’t have to make a profit for stockholders, which removes a lot of the incentive for immoral and unethical behavior right there.

From Making Light: …or assuredly we will all hang separately.

Giving Alzheimer’s Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate

Providing care for people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia is very challenging. Now research — and hands-on practical experience — seems to be showing that when the orientation of the caregivers is “What’s best for the patient? How can we give them what they need and as much of what they want is possible without causing them harm?” instead of “What’s easiest for the staff? What’s the most consistent with the uniform care regimens they were trained to provide?”, everybody does better.

And while I wish it weren’t even necessary to discuss costs, the fact is that everything is effectively rationed because everything is finite. So when you get down towards the end of the article and learn that this program saves money… Sounds like this program, or programs like it, needs to be implemented out everywhere.

Giving Alzheimer’s Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate

Margaret Nance was, to put it mildly, a difficult case. Agitated, combative, often reluctant to eat, she would hit staff members and fellow residents at nursing homes, several of which kicked her out. But when Beatitudes nursing home agreed to an urgent plea to accept her, all that changed.

Disregarding typical nursing-home rules, Beatitudes allowed Ms. Nance, 96 and afflicted with Alzheimer’s, to sleep, be bathed and dine whenever she wanted, even at 2 a.m. She could eat anything, too, no matter how unhealthy, including unlimited chocolate.

And she was given a baby doll, a move that seemed so jarring that a supervisor initially objected until she saw how calm Ms. Nance became when she rocked, caressed and fed her “baby,” often agreeing to eat herself after the doll “ate” several spoonfuls.

Dementia patients at Beatitudes are allowed practically anything that brings comfort, even an alcoholic “nip at night,” said Tena Alonzo, director of research. “Whatever your vice is, we’re your folks,” she said.

Once, Ms. Alonzo said: “The state tried to cite us for having chocolate on the nursing chart. They were like, ‘It’s not a medication.’ Yes, it is. It’s better than Xanax.”

It is an unusual posture for a nursing home, but Beatitudes is actually following some of the latest science. Research suggests that creating positive emotional experiences for Alzheimer’s patients diminishes distress and behavior problems.

In fact, science is weighing in on many aspects of taking care of dementia patients, applying evidence-based research to what used to be considered subjective and ad hoc.

Read More

(Source: The New York Times)