James van Luik
Publisher & Editor & Compiler
Index 2 Signature:
http://www.geocities.com/channujames/index2.htm
[By clicking on this signature one has
access to all articles of the JvL Bi-Weekly.]
[Also, I can be most easily reached
through the following email address:
Please forward the Bi-Weekly to any who
might be interested
Saturday, January 31st, 2005
Volume 4, No. 2
6 Articles, 12
Pages
Editor's
Note: "The different objects used in the chemical
laboratory [Marie Curie wrote in her thesis] … soon acquire
radioactivity. Dust particles, the air of the room, clothing, all
become radioactive. The air of the room becomes a conductor. In
our laboratory the evil has become acute, and we no longer have
any apparatus properly insulated." (Marie Curie's own
laboratory notebooks, a century later, are still considered too
dangerous to handle and are kept in lead-line boxes.)
1. 55,000 Dead: The Role of US Criminal Negligence on
a Global Scale
2. Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home
3. Why I'm Willing to Defend Hussein
5. New Entry Requirements into the USA
6. Uncharitable Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and
Even Arresting the Uninsured
1. 55,000 DEAD: THE ROLE OF
US CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE ON A GLOBAL SCALE
BY
SARA
FLOUNDERS & DUSTIN LANGLEY
(casualties
of a policy of war, negligence, and corporate greed)
While earthquakes and tsunamis are natural disasters, the decision to spend billions of dollars on wars of conquest while ignoring simple measures that can save human lives is not.
At least 55,000 people were killed by the
tsunami that devastated coastlines from Indonesia to Somalia.
Almost a third of the dead are children. Thousands are still
missing and millions are homeless in 11 countries. Hundreds of
thousands have lost everything, and millions face a bleak future
because of polluted drinking water, a lack of sanitation and of
health services, according to UN undersecretary Jan Egeland, who
is in charge of emergency relief coordination.
Egeland said," We cannot fathom the
cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and
fishing villages and so on that have just been wiped out.
Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone."
No money for early warning system:
Much of this death and destruction could
have been prevented with a simple and inexpensive system of
buoys. Officials in Thailand and Indonesia have said that an
immediate public warning could have saved lives, but that they
could not know of the danger because there is no international
system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.
Such a system is not difficult or expensive
to install. In fact, the detector buoys that monitor tsunamis
have been available for decades and the US has had a monitoring
system in place for more than half a century. More than 50
seismometers are scattered across the Northwest to detect and
measure earthquakes that might spawn tsunamis. In the middle of
the Pacific are six buoys equipped with sensors called
"tsunameters" that measure small changes in water
pressure and programmed to automatically alert the country's two
tsunami-warning centers in Hawaii and Alaska.
Dr. Eddie Bernard, director of the NOAA
Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, says just a
few buoys could do the job. Scientists wanted to place two more
tsunami meters in the Indian Ocean, including one near Indonesia,
but the plan had not been funded, said Bernard. The tsunameters
each cost only $250,000. A mere half million dollars could have
provided an early warning system that could have saved thousands
of lives. This should be compared to the $1,500,000,000 the US
spends every day to fund the Pentagon war machine. Lack of
funding for an inexpensive, low-tech early warning system is
simple criminal negligence.
Indian Minister of State for Science and
Technology Kapil Sibal said, "If the country had such an
alert system in place, we could have warned the coastal areas of
the imminent danger and avoided the loss of life." But there
is no room in the Bush budget for such life-saving measures; the
US government's priorities are corporate profit and endless war.
At a meeting of the UN Intergovernmental Oceanographic commission
in June, experts concluded that the " Indian Ocean has a
significant threat from both local and distant tsunamis" and
should have a warning network. But no action was agreed upon.
Geologist Brian Atwater of the US Geological Survey said,
"Sumatra has an ample history of great earthquakes, which
makes the lack of a tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean
all the more tragic. Everyone knew Sumatra was a loaded
gun."
US government failed to warn region:
Although the local governments had no real
warning, the US government did, and it failed to pass along the
information. Within minutes of the massive 9.0 magnitude
earthquake off the coast of Indonesia, US scientists working with
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
suspected that a deadly wave was spreading through the Indian
Ocean. They did not call anyone in the governments in the area.
Jeff LaDouce, an official in the NOAA, said that they e-mailed
Indonesia officials, but said that he wasn't aware what happened
after they sent the e-mails.
In this day of instant communications,
controlled in a large part by the US, it is possible to
communicate within minutes to every part of the globe. It is
beyond belief that the officials at the NOAA could not find any
method to directly and immediately contact civilian authorities
in the area. Their decision not to do so may have cost thousands
of lives. Even a few minutes warning would have given the
inhabitants a chance to seek higher ground. The NOAA had several
hours notice before the first waves hit shore. Tim Walsh
geological-hazards program manager for the Washington State
Department of Natural Resources, said, "Fifty feet of
elevation would be enough to escape the worst of the waves. In
most places, 25 feet would be sufficient. If you go uphill or
inland, the effect of the tsunami will be diminished." But
the inhabitants of the area weren't given the warning – as a
result, television and radio alerts were not issued in Thailand
until nearly an hour after waves had hit and thousands were
already dead. The failure to make any real effort to warn the
people of the region, knowing that tens of thousands of lives
were at stake, is part of a pattern of imperial contempt and
racism that has become the cornerstone of US policies worldwide.
The NOAA immediately warned the US Naval
Station at Diego Garcia, which suffered very little damage from
the tsunami. It is telling that the NOAA was able to get the
warning to the US Navy base in the area, but wouldn't pick up the
phone and call the civil authorities in the region to warn them.
They made sure that a US military base was notified and did
almost nothing to issue a warning to the civilian inhabitants who
were in the direct path of the wave—a warning that might
have saved thousands of lives. This is criminal negligence.
Disease may kill tens of thousands more:
The 55,000 deaths directly resulting from
the tsunami are just the beginning of the tragedy. Disease could
claim as many victims as have been killed in the weekend's
earthquake-sparked tsunami, according to the World Health
Organization (WHO). Medical experts warn that malaria, cholera
and dengue fever are expected to pose serious health threats to
survivors in the area, where waves spoiled drinking-water
supplies, polluted streets and homes with raw sewage, swept away
medical clinics, ruined food stocks and left acres of stagnant
ponds where malaria-carrying mosquitoes can breed.
"The biggest threat to survivors is
from the spread of infection through contamination of drinking
water and putrefying bodies left by the receding waters,"
said Jamie McGoldrick, a senior UN health official.
The response of the US government to this
emergency is to offer a paltry $15 million (originally) "aid
package." To put this in perspective, this is one tenth of
one percent of what Washington has spent thus far on the war
against the people of Iraq.
Money for human needs, not for war:
The US and British governments owe billions
of dollars in reparations to the countries of this region and to
all other formerly colonized countries. The poverty and lack of
infrastructure that contribute to and exacerbate the scope of
this disaster are the direct result of colonial rule and
neo-colonial policies. Although economic and political policies
cannot control the weather, they can determine how a nation is
impacted by natural disasters.
We must hold the US government accountable
for their role in tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of deaths.
We must demand that it stop spending $1.5 billion each day for
war and occupation and instead provide health care for the
victims of this tragedy, build an early warning system, and
rebuild the homes and infrastructure destroyed by the tsunami.
2. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS: BRING THEM HOME
BY
HOWARD
ZINN
We must withdraw our military from Iraq, the sooner the better. The reason is simple: Our presence there is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people.
It is a strange logic to declare, as so many
in Washington do, that it was wrong for us to invade Iraq but
right for us to remain. A recent New York Times editorial sums up
the situation accurately: "Some 21 months after the American
invasion, US military forces remain essentially alone in battling
what seems to be a growing insurgency, with no clear prospect of
decisive success any time in the foreseeable future."
And then, in an extraordinary non
sequitur: "Given the lack of other countries willing to
put up their hands as volunteers, the only answer seems to be
more American troops, and not just through the spring, as
currently planned….Forces need to be expanded through
stepped–up recruitment."
Here is the flawed logic: We are alone in
the world in this invasion. The insurgency is growing. There is
no visible prospect of success. Therefore, let's send more
troops? The definition of fanaticism is that when you discover
that you are going in the wrong direction, you redouble your
speed.
In all of this, there is an unexamined
premise: that military victory would constitute
"success."
Conceivably, the US , possessed of enormous
weaponry, might finally crush the resistance in Iraq. The cost
would be great. Already, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of
thousands, have lost their lives (and we must not differentiate
between "their" casualties and "ours" if we
believe that all human beings have an equal right to life.) Would
that be a "success"?
In 1967, the same arguments that we are
hearing now were being made against withdrawal in Vietnam. The US
did not pull out its troops for six more years. During that time,
the war killed at least one million more Vietnamese and perhaps
30,000 US military personnel.
We must stay in Iraq, it is said again and
again, so that we can bring stability and democracy to that
country. Isn't it clear that after almost two years of war and
occupation we have brought only chaos, violence and death to that
country, and not any recognizable democracy?
Can democracy be nurtured by destroying
cities, by bombing, by driving people from their homes?
There is no certainty as to what would
happen in our absence. But there is absolute certainty about the
result of our presence – escalating deaths on both sides.
The loss of life among Iraqi civilians is
especially startling. The British medical journal Lancet
reports that 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the war,
many of them children. The casualty toll on the American side
includes more than 1,350 deaths and thousands of maimed soldiers,
some losing limbs, others blinded. And tens of thousands more are
facing psychological damage in the aftermath.
Have we learned nothing from the history of
imperial occupations, all pretending to help the people being
occupied?
The US, the latest of the great empires, is
perhaps the most self-deluded, having forgotten that history,
including our own: our 50 year occupation of the Philippines, or
our long occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) or of the Dominican
Republic (1916-1924), our military intervention in Southeast Asia
and our repeated interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and
Guatemala.
Our military presence in Iraq is making us
less safe, not more so. It is inflaming people in the Middle
east, and thereby magnifying the danger of terrorism. Far form
fighting "there rather than here, " as President Bush
as claimed, the occupation increases the chance that enraged
infiltrators will strike us here at home.
In leaving, we can improve the odds of peace
and stability by encouraging an international team of
negotiators, largely Arab, to mediate among the Sunnis, Shiites
and Kurds and work out a federalist compromise to give some
autonomy to each group. We must not underestimate the capacity of
the Iraqis, once free of both Saddam Hussein and the US occupying
army, to forge their own future.
But the first step is to support our troops
in the only way that word support can have real meaning – by
saving their lives, their limbs, their sanity, by bringing them
home.
3. WHY I'M WILLING TO DEFEND HUSSEIN
BY
RAMSEY
CLARK
Late last month, I traveled to Amman, Jordan, and met with the family and lawyers of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. I told them that I would help in his defense in any way I could.
The news, when it found it s way back to the
US, caused something of a stir. A few news reports were
inquisitive—and some where skeptical—but most were
simply dismissive or derogatory. "There goes Ramsey Clark
again " they seemed to say. "Isn't it a shame? He used
to be attorney general of the US and now look at what he's
doing."
So let me explain why defending Saddam
Hussein is in line with what I've stood for all my life and why I
think it's the right thing to do now.
That Hussein and other former Iraqi
officials must have lawyers of their choice to assist them in
defending against the criminal charges brought against them ought
to be self-evident among a people committed to truth, justice and
the rule of law.
Both international law and the Constitution
of the US guarantee the right to effective legal representation
to any person accused of a crime. This is especially important in
a highly politicized situation, where truth and justice can
become even harder to achieve. That's certainly the situation
today in Iraq. The war has caused the deaths of tens of thousands
of Iraqis and the widespread destruction of civilian properties
essential to life. President Bush, who initiated and oversees the
war, has manifested his hatred for Hussein, publicly proclaiming
that the death penalty would be appropriate.
The US, and the Bush administration in
particular, engineered the demonization of Hussein, and it has a
clear political interest in his conviction. Obviously, a fair
trial of Hussein will be difficult to ensure – and
critically important to the future of democracy in Iraq. This
trial will write history, affect the course of violence around
the world and have an impact on hopes for reconciliation within
Iraq.
Hussein has been held illegally for more
than year without once meeting a family member, friend or lawyer
of his choice. Though the world has seen him time and again on
television –disheveled, apparently disoriented with someone
prying deep into his mouth and later alone before some unseen
judge – he has been cut off from all communications with the
outside world and surrounded by the same US military that
mistreated prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Preparation of Hussein's defense cannot
begin until lawyers chosen by him obtain immediate, full and
confidential access to him so they can review with him events of
the last year, the circumstances of his seizure and the details
of his treatment. They must then have time to thoroughly discuss
the nature and composition of the prosecution and the court, the
charges that may be brought against him, and his knowledge,
thoughts and instructions concerning the facts of the case. And
finally, they must have the time for the enormous task of
preparing his defense.
The legal team, its assistants and
investigators must be able to perform their work safely, without
interference, and be assured that their client's condition and
the conditions of his confinement enable him to fully participate
in every aspect of his defense.
International law requires that every
criminal court be competent, independent and impartial. The Iraqi
Special Tribunal lacks all of these essential qualities. It was
illegitimate in its conception – the creation of an illegal
occupying power that demonized Saddam Hussein and destroyed the
government it now intends to condemn by law.
The US has already destroyed any hope of
legitimacy, fairness or even decency by its treatment and
isolation of the former president and its creation of the Iraqi
Special Tribunal to try him.
Among the earliest photographs it released
is one showing Hussein sitting submissively on the floor of an
empty room with Ahmad Chalabi, the principal US surrogate at that
moment, looming over him and a picture of Bush looking down from
an otherwise bare wall.
The intention of the US to convict the
former leader in an unfair trial was made starkly clear by the
appointment of Chalabi's nephew to organize and lead the court.
He had just returned to Iraq to open a law office with a former
law partner of Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith, who had
urged the US overthrow of the Iraqi government and was a
principal architect of US postwar planning.
The concept, personnel, funding and
functions f the court were chosen and are still controlled by the
US, dependent on its will and partial to its wishes. Reform is
impossible. Proceedings before the Iraqi Special tribunal would
corrupt justice both in face and in appearance and create more
hatred and rage in Iraq against the American occupation. Only
another court – one that is actually competent, independent
and impartial – can lawfully sit in judgment.
In a trial of Hussein and other former Iraqi
officials, affirmative measures must be taken to prevent
prejudice from affecting the conduct of the case and the final
judgment of the court. This will be a major challenge. But
nothing less is acceptable.
Finally, any court that considers criminal
charges against Saddam Hussein must have the power and the
mandate to consider charges against leaders and military
personnel of the US, Britain and the other nations that
participated it the aggression against Iraq, if equal justice
under law is to have meaning.
No power, or person, can be above the law.
For there to be peace, the days of victor's justice must end.
The defense of such a case is a
challenge of great importance to truth, the rule of law and
peace. A lawyer qualified for the task and able to undertake it,
if chosen, should accept such service as his highest duty.
BY
RALPH
NADER
President George W. Bush's Inaugural Address was perched high on the abstraction ladder. Worlds like "freedom," "liberty" and "democracy" poured forth not just for Americans but for everyone in the world. Let's bring his rhetoric down to the concrete level of his record-that is, down the ladder of abstraction where regular people live.
He spoke in the District of Columbia—a
place of gross contrasts between wealth and poverty beneath one
unity. D.C. residents—all 600,000 of them—have no
voting representatives in the US Congress. They, unlike all other
federal districts in all other democracies, are disenfranchised.
Some freedom, some liberty, some democracy.
Mr. Bush likes it this way. He has refused
to support either D.C. statehood, which would provide two
Senators and one Representative, or simply voting rights without
statehood.
In his first term, one of his signal prides
of authorship was the Patriot Act—considered in its
intrusiveness and abandonment of safeguards to be the broadest
encroachment on civil liberties and the judiciary in our
history--whether in war or peace--by leading civil liberties
scholars and practitioners. Under Bush and John Ashcroft, Bush's
Attorney General, there were many arrests without charges,
imprisonment without attorneys and indefinite, anonymous
detention of alleged witnesses. There now can be perfunctory
court approval for searching your most personal financial,
medical and e-mail records without probable cause or due process
of law and for searching your homes and business without
pre-notifying you.
How does this square the assertion in his
speech: "We are determined to show the meaning and promise
of liberty?"
Mr. Bush made no reference to the "Four
Freedoms" speech in January 1941 by one of his political
heroes-Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One was the "freedom from
want." For good reason. The comparisons would not be
flattering. Unlike Roosevelt, Bush went out of his way to enact
policies that increased poverty among both children and adults in
the last four years. He opposed an increase in the minimum wage,
now frozen in the past at $5.15 and hour. In inflation adjusted
terms this is the lowest minimum wage in over 50 years. One out
of every three workers in this country earns wages ranging from
$5.15 to under $10.00 an hour. In the late nineteenth century,
this penury was called "wage slavery."
Within Mr. Bush's address, there were these
words: "In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the
dignity and security of economic independence, instead of
laboring on the edge of subsistence." Tell that to 47
million Americans working today at or below the edge of
subsistence, while the rich, whom Mr. Bush has called "my
base," receive trillions of dollars in new tax reductions
over the next decade.
Another key pillar of liberty is the freedom
of assembly-built into our Constitution alongside freedom of
speech. Personally, Mr. Bush has secured new restraints. At his
campaign rallies last year, the crowds were selected with
remarkable detail from partisan ranks. Once in awhile, a lonely
figure would be there with an anti-Bush T-shirt or holding
silently an anti-Bush sign. They were thrown out, sometimes quite
roughly. And at the Inaugural, protesters were kept so far away
that their speech was put on remote, causing commentators to
decry the use of excessive security as a pretext to exile
dissent.
This inaugural address has a global sweep.
Bush declared that "it is the policy of the US to seek and
support he growth of democratic movements and institutions in
every nation and culture." It would take you awhile to
count the number of dictatorial and oligarchic regimes that his
Administration supports with military and diplomatic assistance.
His Department of Commerce is facilitating the export from
America of whole industries, companies and jobs to the communist
dictatorship known as China fully condoned by George W. Bush.
Supporting the antidemocratic trade
agreements known as NAFTA and the World Trade Organization
subordinates our democratic processes-our courts and regulatory
agencies-to the concentrated decisional authority of these
international systems of quite secret autocratic governance and
tribunals.
The billionaire financier, George Soros, has
called multinational corporations the major post-Soviet Union
threat to democracy in the world. Mr. Bush, their cheerleader,
throws the might of the US government behind them and with
substantial military cover and subsidies.
The Bush record proliferates its
contradictions of Bush's words. Our founding fathers fought for
the people's right to sue wrongdoers and be judged by a jury of
their peers in a court of law. Mr. Bush is fanatically pushing
congress to pass federal laws handcuffing state judges and jurors
in ways that restrict the freedom of wrongfully injured and
defrauded Americans to have their full day in court against
corporate defendants.
Mr. Bush has set new records in raising
money from corporate interests for his Presidential campaigns,
avoiding public financing allowances and worsening the role of
"dirty money" in politics. The freedom to have clean
elections on the merits, not on the money, has been further
eroded under his reign.
Editor's note: More information can
be found at www.nader.org
5. NEW ENTRY REQUIREMENTS INTO THE USA
FINGERPRINT
AND DIGITAL PHOTO REQUIREMENTS AFTER JANUARY 4TH, 2004
BY
AUTHOR(S)
UNKNOWN
On January 4th, 2004 a new US
system went into effect requiring all foreign visitors with visas
who enter the US through seaports and airports to be
fingerprinted, photographed, and have their travel documentation
scanned by customs officials.
The program also entails checking visitors'
identities against databases and watch lists, and verifying
compliance with visa and immigration policies. When departing
from the US, procedures include verification of identities with
similar "biometric identifiers," and the creation of a
departure record. American citizens and others, such as green
card holders, who are not required to have visas are not required
to enter through this system.
In the future, this system will be upgraded
to possibly include eye and facial scans, using biometric
technology to further increase security.
The goals of "the US Visitor and
Immigrant Status Indicator Technology" (US-VISIT) program is
detailed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as follows:
Enhance the security of US citizens and visitors; expedite
legitimate travel and trade; ensure the integrity of the
immigration system; and safeguard the personal privacy of the
visitors.
Once the entry data is gathered, it is to be
"securely stored as part of the visitor's travel record…made
available only to authorized officials and selected law
enforcement agencies responsible for ensuring the safety and
security of US citizens and foreign visitors."
Exit confirmation data will also be added to
the visitors' travel records in the Arrival/Departure Information
/System (ADIS).
The system may have its deficiencies at
first. It is believed that it will be unlikely that the VISIT
system will have merged with another system to identify when a
visitor has applied for an extension.
Unless extension applications are stored in
the VISIT system, a non-immigrant who stays past the period of
his visa but has applied for an extension may be held as a visa
overstay when visa status is truly pending an extension.
The time to conduct interviews will not
doubt further delay arrivals and departures at already congested
international airports.
In light of the above, it is highly
recommended that travelers to the US who have previously filed
extension of stay applications and departed from the US before
USCIS (INS) action carry with them to the US filing receipts and
copies of such applications to demonstrate their prior
maintenance of legal status in the US. Failure to do may cause
delays or at worst prevent admission to the US.
6. UNCHARITABLE CARE: HOW
HOSPITALS ARE GOUGING AND EVEN ARRESTING THE UNINSURED
BY
The
Staff of 'Democracy Now'
What do the Emir of Kuwait and the working poor of the US have in common? Not much, except when it comes to paying for health care in the US. They all pay the highest price: up to 500% more than the hospital receives from insured patients.
That's because hospitals negotiate discounts
with big institutions like insurance companies, HMOs or the
government that require payment of only a fraction of the listed
charges. Those institutions have substantial bargaining power and
can guarantee hospitals a certain number of patients. Uninsured
people, on the other hand, have no bargaining power and are left
to fend for themselves once they get their bills.
Jennifer Kankiewicz was rushed to New York's
Beth Israel Hospital in July 2002 for an emergency appendectomy
and was hospitalized for two days. "I waited through a day's
worth of not being able to get out of bed because I didn't have
health insurance," recalls Kankiewicz. "The next day, a
friend drove me to the hospital in an emergency and we went to
the closest hospital we know of."
Kankiewicz had an emergency appendectomy.
"They provided great service," she says. The hospital
"reassured me that I could apply for Medicaid assistance. So
I thought, maybe Medicaid would help me with the $24, 000 that it
cost me."
Though Kankiewicz is poor, she is not poor
enough. She was denied Medicaid assistance because she makes
$19,000 a year. In order to qualify for Medicaid, Kankiewicz
either needed to be pregnant, disabled or earn less than $350 a
week. Though she was able to convince her surgeon to slightly
reduce the charges, she still faces over $19,000 in hospital
bills, more than her annual salary. She says she is being billed
by six separate billing groups and, unlike the big insurance
companies Kankiewicz has no negotiating power with the hospital
or its collection agencies.
"It's like sending a guppy out to the
sharks," says Elisabeth Benjamin, the supervising attorney
of the Health Law Unit at the Legal Aid Society in New York.
"It's just not fair."
Several states operate a funding pool for
hospitals to offset the money they spend on charity care as well
as bad debt. In New York, these funds total almost $1 billion a
year.
Benjamin is the author of a new Legal Aid
report called "State Secret: How Government Fails To Ensure
That Uninsured And Underinsured Patients Have Access to State
Charity Funds." The report alleges that none of the 22
hospitals surveyed in NYC have a process that would let poor or
uninsured patients apply for the hundred of millions of dollars
in state government funds intended to help pay for hospital care
for the needy, despite the fact that they are all receiving
between $4-$60 million annually in charity care funds from the
state. As a result, patients who are uninsured and have limited
financial resources are forced to pay inflated prices for their
care.
"An average consumer that might want to
call a hospital and find out what the charity care policy is,
forget it," says Benjamin. "What we found was at all 22
[hospitals],no one had a way to actually get the state money
applied to your case."
In Kankiewicz's case, according to Benjamin,
Beth Israel receives $28 million a year for charity or bad debt
cases. But rather than establishing a process to inform patients
about applying for this money, Beth Israel made Kankiewicz go
through the process of applying for Medicaid.
I could have told Jennifer in 30 seconds,
she wasn't going to be eligible for Medicaid," says
Benjamin. "For her to have gone to a fair hearing (on
Medicaid eligibility] on her own was a waste of time."
Kankiewicz says that when she initially
spoke to the collections department at Beth Israel, they asked
her why she chose the most expensive hospital if she was
uninsured. "Honestly, I didn't understand that I was a
consumer, that I had to shop," Kankiewicz says. "I
wasn't making a decision at the time. I rushed to the hospital
that I knew where it was."
Like Kankiewicz, many uninsured patients end
up with huge medical bills and no way of paying them. Hospitals
then hound them for payment using collection agencies and
lawyers, who employ such methods as filing lawsuits, slapping
liens on homes, seizing bank accounts and garnishing wages to
extract payments. Some hospital now rank among America's most
aggressive debt collectors.
"[Patients] don't know they have been
sued because the collection attorneys and the collection agent
hired by the hospitals are voracious," says Benjamin.
"They claim to serve people, but in fact they have never
served anybody with court papers. The next thing my clients know,
their bank accounts have been taken."
But for some people, it can get worse than
that.
A Return to Debtors Prisons
Hospitals ins several states have actually
had patients arrested and jailed if they are unable to pay their
debts. This legal tactic is chillingly known as body attachment.
"Body attachment is basically a warrant
for arrest," says Claudia Lennhoff, executive director of
Champaign County Health Care Consumers in Illinois. She says that
if a patient misses a court date, that they may not even know
they have, the attorneys for the hospitals or collection agencies
can ask the judge to issue a warrant for the patients arrest.
"They can go out immediately and find
that person or it can just kind of be out there and then if the
person gets pulled over, for example, for having a tail light out
or speeding or something, it pops up, and then shows a warrant
for arrest and the person gets brought in, and then they get
incarcerated," says Lennhoff.
Take the case of Jim Bean, a musician in
Urbana, Illinois. More than decade ago, he received treatment of
the Carle Foundation Hospital, the primary teaching hospital of
the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, for a gunshot
wound after a failed suicide attempt. He attend 13 court dates to
answer to his $7,718 hospital bill. But then Bean missed a
hearing, which he says he did not know was scheduled. The
hospital asked the court for an arrest warrant.
"They put out this body attachment that
I found out about the next day. I went and turned myself
in," recalls Bean. " I went to find out what was
going on, and they told me to go across the street to the county
sheriff's office where I turned myself in. I was jailed,
and I was put into general population at the satellite facility
where until my brother could come up with 10% of $3,500 to bail
me out of jail."
Bean says the next time he went to court,
the attorneys for Carle Hospital asked that Bean's bail money be
applied toward his debt to the hospital. The judge approved the
request. "It was just a really quick way for them to collect
$350," he says. "I had no say in that."
In an interview with Democracy Now!
Robert Tonkinson, chief financial officer for Carle Foundation
Hospital, said the hospital would not end its practice of having
patients arrested.
"We are exercising more review, and
more care and more direction over that practice," says
Tonkinson. But he says, "The reason we're not willing to say
that we'll never, never use that practice again is because we do
feel a very strong obligation to be a good steward of the
resources we have." He adds that sometimes having people
arrested is "the only option left in order to get the
information we need to see if these people qualify for our
charity programs or in assistance in other ways is to pursue that
process."
Bean has been dealing with his debt to Carle
Hospital for more than 12 years. He says he has made payments
totaling $1340. "When I started making those payments, my
bill was $7,718.23," he says. "My bill today is
$10,620.46. None of the money that I have paid has been applied
to the debt whatsoever, it's all in interest charges."
Legal Aid's Benjamin says that Bean's case
is part of a national trend. "In New York State, for
example, the collection agents charge 9% interest," she
says. "So, even though the federal interest is 1%, and most
people can get mortgages for 6%, the hospital industry is
charging 9%, at least, on average."
Lennhoff of the Champaign County Health Care
Consumers says that practices like arresting people who can't
afford to pay the exorbitant costs of health could have far
reaching implications. "It creates a bad dynamic in our
community, where people become very afraid of getting healthcare
because they fear that they will be jailed if they cannot pay the
bill," she says. "The are treated as a criminal and
that's outrageous."