Monthly Archives: September 2019

These Sheriffs Release Sick Inmates to Avoid Paying Their Hospital Bills — ProPublica

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Michael Tidwell’s blood sugar reading was at least 15 times his normal level when sheriff’s deputies took him to the hospital. But before they loaded the inmate into the back of a car, deputies propped up his slumping body and handed him a pen so he could sign a release from the Washington County Jail.“I could barely stand up or keep my eyes open,” he recalled.Tidwell said that he didn’t know what he was signing at the time, and that he lost consciousness a short time later. The consequences of his signature only became clear in the weeks that followed the 2013 medical emergency.By signing the document, which freed him on bond from the small jail in south Alabama, Tidwell had in essence agreed that the Washington County Sheriff’s Office would not be responsible for his medical costs, which included the two days he spent in a diabetic coma in intensive care at Springhill Medical Center in Mobile.It’s unclear whether Tidwell, who was uninsured at the time and in poor health afterward, was billed for his care or if the medical providers wrote it off. Neither Tidwell’s attorneys nor the hospital was able to say, and Tidwell was unable to get answers when he and a reporter called the hospital’s billing department.

Michael Tidwell at Springhill Medical Center in Mobile, Alabama. (Courtesy of Michelle Alford)

What is clear is that the sheriff’s office avoided paying Tidwell’s hospital bills.

Tidwell had been on the receiving end of a practice referred to by many in law enforcement as a “medical bond.” Sheriffs across Alabama are increasingly deploying the tactic to avoid having to pay when inmates face medical emergencies or require expensive procedures — even ones that are necessary only because an inmate received inadequate care while incarcerated.What’s more, once they recover, some inmates are quickly rearrested and booked back into the jail from which they were released.Local jails across the country have long been faulted for providing substandard medical care. In Alabama, for instance, a mentally ill man died from flesh-eating bacteria 15 days after being booked into the Mobile County Metro Jail in 2000. And in 2013, a 19-year-old man died of gangrene less than a month after he was booked into the Madison County Jail. In both cases, officials denied wrongdoing and surviving relatives settled lawsuits alleging that poor jail health care contributed to their loved ones’ deaths.But the use of medical bonds isn’t about inferior care. It’s about who pays for care.

Source: These Sheriffs Release Sick Inmates to Avoid Paying Their Hospital Bills — ProPublica

The Ghosts of Elaine, Arkansas, 1919 | by Jerome Karabel | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

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The Ghosts of Elaine, Arkansas, 1919

Jerome KarabelArkansas State Archives

The body of Frances Hall, one of the few victims of the massacre who can be identified by name, thanks to the journalists Robert Whitaker and Ida B. Wells, near Elaine, Arkansas, October 1919

In America’s bloody history of racial violence, the little-known Elaine Massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas, which took place in October 1919, a century ago this week, may rank as the deadliest. The reasons why the event has remained shrouded and obscure, despite a shocking toll of bloodshed inflicted on the African-American inhabitants of Phillips County, speak to a legacy of white supremacy in the US and ruthless suppression of labor activism that disfigures American society to this day.Phillips County, located deep in the Arkansas Delta, was largely rural and three-quarters African-American; in the small town of Elaine, there were ten times as many black residents as white. The African Americans of Phillips County, like those throughout the South, were subjected to segregation and disenfranchisement, those twin pillars of white supremacy. But the black sharecroppers and tenant farmers there were also the victims of a particularly harsh form of repression known as “debt peonage.”

Under this system, they were loaned money or rented land by plantation owners; they were then forced to sell their crops to the owners at below-market rates and to purchase their food and other supplies from over-priced plantation stores, trapping them in a cycle of perpetual debt, with the owners keeping—and often doctoring—the accounts.In the spring of 1919, a group of Phillips County African-American sharecroppers and tenant farmers, many of them veterans who had recently returned from service overseas in World War I, decided to challenge this system by joining a union called the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA), which had been founded the year before by army veteran Robert Lee Hill, a black tenant farmer in Winchester, Arkansas. The union’s goal was “to advance the interest of the Negro, morally and intellectually,” and its constitution ended with a proclamation: “WE BATTLE FOR THE RIGHTS OF OUR RACE; IN UNION IS STRENGTH.”

Source: The Ghosts of Elaine, Arkansas, 1919 | by Jerome Karabel | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

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Methodist Le Bonheur Makes Millions, Owns a Collection Agency and Relentlessly Sues the Poor

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In July 2007, Carrie Barrett went to the emergency room at Methodist University Hospital, complaining of shortness of breath and tightness in her chest. Her leg was swollen, she’d later recall, and her toes were turning black.Given her family history, high blood pressure and newly diagnosed congestive heart failure, doctors performed a heart catheterization, threading a long tube through her groin and into her heart.

Her share of the two-night stay: $12,019.Barrett, who has never made more than $12 an hour, doesn’t remember getting any notices to pay from the hospital. But in 2010, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare sued her for the unpaid medical bills, plus attorney’s fees and court costs.Since then, the nonprofit hospital system affiliated with the United Methodist Church has doggedly pursued her, adding interest to the debt seven times and garnishing money from her paycheck on 15 occasions.

Source: Methodist Le Bonheur Makes Millions, Owns a Collection Agency and Relentlessly Sues the Poor

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Report: More than 1600 Polling Places Have Closed Since the Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act – Mother Jones

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The consequences of the Shelby County decision were immediate: States that had previously fallen under the jurisdiction of the VRA immediately passed tough voter restriction laws and restructured election systems. But a new report released today by the civil rights coalition The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights adds another dimension to the picture of how this 2013 ruling has undermined voter access by analyzing the number of polling place that have been closed since the ruling. According to the report, entitled “Democracy Diverted: Polling Place Closures and the Right to Vote,” 1,688 polling places are now shuttered in those areas. The report, which is a follow-up to a 2016 analysis, looked at 757 counties and found that 298 of them, or 39 percent, reduced their number of polling places between 2012 and 2018.

“Next to the ballot itself, the most identifiable element of our democracy’s voting process is the polling place. It should—and it must—be accessible to all,” the report states. “When it is not, the barriers to participation can be high. Moving or closing a polling place— particularly without notice or input from communities—disrupts our democracy.”

Source: Report: More than 1600 Polling Places Have Closed Since the Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act – Mother Jones

Why America lost so many of its black teachers – Civil rights and wrongs

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Why America lost so many of its black teachers

Before 1964 nearly half of college-educated African-Americans in the South were teachers

The share of black teachers in government schools nationwide has continued to decline: from 8.1% in 1971 to 6.9% in 1986 and 6.7% today—this during a period during which the black share of the population as a whole has risen to nearly 13%. There are a number of reasons for the decline, including an increased range of professional opportunities for African-Americans in other fields. But it is also true that desegregation accelerated a trend towards ever-greater teacher accreditation requirements that continued to disproportionately affect African-Americans.

When North Carolina raised its cut-off scores for the National Teacher Exam in the late 1970s, for example, it was associated with a 73% drop in newly licenced black teachers in the state between 1975 and 1982.While higher teacher accreditation standards reduce the number of black teachers, they have done little for students of any ethnicity: teacher licencing test scores are weakly related to outcomes for students. That helps to explain why Mr Hanushek found no significant gains in average test scores for American 17-year-olds tested between 1987 and 2017, and no further progress in closing the black-white test gap since the 1980s. The legacy of a discriminatory response to desegregation continues a half-century on, with limited benefit to children.

Source: Why America lost so many of its black teachers – Civil rights and wrongs

Medicaid Debt Can Cost You Your House – The Atlantic

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She soon learned that the rumors held some truth. Medicaid, the government program that provides health care to more than 75 million low-income and disabled Americans, isn’t necessarily free. It’s the only major welfare program that can function like a loan. Medicaid recipients over the age of 55 are expected to repay the government for many medical expenses—and states will seize houses and other assets after those recipients die in order to satisfy the debt.

“The folded american flag from her father’s military funeral is displayed on the mantel in Tawanda Rhodes’s living room. Joseph Victorian, a descendant of Creole slaves, had enlisted in the Army 10 days after learning that the United States was going to war with Korea.To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.After he was wounded in combat, Joseph was stationed at a military base in Massachusetts. There he met and fell in love with Edna Smith-Rhodes, a young woman who had recently moved to Boston from North Carolina. The couple started a family and eventually settled in the brick towers of the Columbia Point housing project. Joseph took a welding job at a shipyard and pressed laundry on the side; later, Edna would put her southern cooking skills to use in a school cafeteria.

In 1979, Joseph and Edna bought a house in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood for $24,000. Just a few years after they moved in, Joseph died of blood-circulation problems. But by leaving that house to his wife and children, its mortgage satisfied by his life-insurance payout, he died believing that he had secured a legacy for his family, which, in just a few generations, had lifted itself out of slavery, segregation, and poverty to own a piece of the American dream.

Source: Medicaid Debt Can Cost You Your House – The Atlantic

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