Copyright

(c) 2010-2026 Jon L Gelman, All Rights Reserved.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Election 2016: Leveling the Playing Field For The American Worker

Senator Elizabeth Warren
As the political battlefield heats up for the 2016 Presidential Election, the issues dividing the American worker and corporate America grow. The recent passage of the Federal Governmental funding bill of in excess of $1.1 Trillion Dollars gives us insight into the major political/economic issue of growing inequality.

Funding the $2 Billion Dollar, 2016 Presidential Campaign, will require major contributions. A huge portion of that money will come from Corporate America. Even so, people actually vote and not corporations.

"Wall Street is one of the Democratic party’s biggest contributors."
Robert Reich

 "[Hillary] Clinton is obviously tough, but she just can’t speak with a clear voice against Wall Street and Washington insiders. Warren’s wing shows increasing passion and strength, both in opposing certain Obama nominees and in last week’s budget fight."

Click here to read "Warren Can Win" authored by David Brooks in the NY Times 12/15/2014
….

Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author of NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson-Reuters) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson-Reuters). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman  1.973.696.7900  jon@gelmans.com  have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

Related articles
Posted by at
Labels: , ,

Moratorium on Infectious Disease Research - What's the US Doing?

"The Obama administration announced the moratorium on Oct 17 to assess the risks and benefits of federally funded GOF research involving influenza, MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) viruses and to develop federal policies. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) is playing a lead role in the review, which is expected to last almost a year. On Nov 25 the NSABB expressed concerns over the pause."

 Click here to read the entire article that is shared from cidrap.umn.edu/



See also:
Dec 12 mBio CDC commentary
Oct 17 CIDRAP News scan on GOF pause
Nov 25 CIDRAP News scan on NSABB meeting
Related articles
Posted by at

As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

A machine that administers sedatives recently began treating patients at a Seattle hospital. At a Silicon Valley hotel, a bellhop robot delivers items to people’s rooms. Last spring, a software algorithm wrote a breaking news article about an earthquake that The Los Angeles Times published.
Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work.
And over the same 15-year period that digital technology has inserted itself into nearly every aspect of life, the job market has fallen into a long malaise. Even with the economy’s recent improvement, the share of working-age adults who are working is substantially lower than a decade ago — and lower than any point in the 1990s.
Economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology would create as many jobs as it destroyed. Now many are not so sure.



Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, recently said that he no longer believed that automation would always create new jobs. “This isn’t some hypothetical future possibility,” he said. “This is something that’s emerging before us right now.”
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at M.I.T., said,...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

….

Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author of NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson-Reuters) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson-Reuters). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman  1.973.696.7900  jon@gelmans.com  have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

The devalued American worker

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.washingtonpost.com

The past three recessions sparked a chain reaction of layoffs and lower pay


Midway through the last game of the 2013 Carolina League season, after he’d swept peanut shells and mopped soda off the concourse, Ed Green lumbered upstairs to the box seats to dump the garbage.

Green was already 12 hours into his workday. He rose at dawn to lay tar on the highway. As the sun sank, he switched uniforms and drove to BB&T Ballpark, where he runs the custodial crew for a minor-league baseball team. Now it was dark and his radio was crackling. It was his boss, asking him to head back downstairs. Green walked onto the first-base line and into a surprise. In front of 6,000 fans, the Winston-Salem Dash honored him as the team’s employee of the year.

The crowd applauded. The game resumed. Green walked back upstairs. The trash wasn’t going to empty itself.

ABOUT THIS SERIES:

Liftoff & Letdown: The American middle class is floundering, and it has been for decades. The Post examines the mystery of what’s gone wrong and shows what the country must focus on to get the economy working for everyone again.

Green once held a middle-class job. Now, to make enough money to send his children to college, he works the equivalent of two full-time jobs: one maintaining highways for the state of North Carolina and one ushering fans and collecting trash for a variety of sports teams around Winston-Salem.

The American economy...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

Asbestos: The Silent Epidemic Continues

The asbestos epidemic continues and there remains no safe use for the asbestos, as exposure remains the cause of asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma. Yet the US has yet to ban asbestos. Today's post is shared from theglobeandmail.com/

For John Nolan, the first warning signs came mid-November of last year while he was leading a tour in the Peruvian Andes.

Mr. Nolan, 67, who lives in Fort Erie in southwestern Ontario, was guiding a group through the mountains near the storied Incan city of Cuzco.

He had criss-crossed the planet for years as a tour guide, and knew what higher altitudes typically felt like. But something terrifying happened while he was hauling his luggage up some steep stone steps to his cabin.

“I’ve never been out of breath in such a panicky, horrible way,” Mr. Nolan says in a raspy voice between laboured breaths. “Normally, when you run out of breath, you know you’re going to get it back. This was different. It was as if you were hitting a stone wall, with no hope of getting air. It was like suffocating.”

The diagnosis, back at home, was swift and cruel. It was mesothelioma — an incurable cancer caused almost exclusively by asbestos exposure. Mr. Nolan was initially given a few months to live.

Asbestos is the top on-the-job killer in Canada. But a Globe and Mail investigation has found that this stark fact has been obscured by the country’s longstanding economic interest in the onetime “miracle mineral.” Even though Canada’s own asbestos industry has dwindled from pre-eminence to insignificance — the country’s last two mines closed in 2011 — the federal government has dragged its feet as other nations have acknowledged asbestos’s deadly impact and moved to protect their populations from it.


….
Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author of NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson-Reuters) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson-Reuters). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman  1.973.696.7900  jon@gelmans.com  have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

Related articles
Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

Monday, December 15, 2014

Avoid the Pitfalls of Auto-Pay Agreements

Today's post comes from guest author Kit Case, from Causey Law Firm.

Many of my clients tell me, with fear in their voice, that they have one or more bills set to automatically pull from their bank accounts, but they have no money in the bank to cover the payment and will face overdraft charges if the payment pulls from their account.  Typically, these are car payments, as many auto loan lenders offer lower rates if the purchaser agrees to set up automatic payments.  Some businesses, like your local gym, may require auto-pay agreements. It seems like a good idea, when one is working.
Add an injury or disability into the mix, though, and it can become your worst nightmare.  Even under the best circumstances, an injured worker that is receiving their time loss compensation benefits - often 60 - 65% of pre-injury wages, or a much smaller percentage if they were a high wage earner and have hit the ceiling of compensation rates - will most certainly not be getting paid on the same schedule as their payroll department was using.  Juggling bills is hard enough with decreased income levels, but the forfeiture of control over the ebb and flow of funds in your bank account can put you in financial peril after an injury.
If you find yourself in the scenario I have described, try contacting your lender or service provider to inquire about making changes to the agreement you signed - or terminating the agreement, if needed - to at least make the drafts from your account occur on a better schedule but, preferably, to take back control of the payments.  You should maintain the ability to make payments to creditors on your own schedule when funds are available.  The auto-draft agreements are a contractual agreement, though, and you may need legal assistance to alter them.  In my experience, though, lenders are usually able to work with their clients to maintain the integrity of their loans.  In the long run, repayment is their goal and facilitating your ability to manage your payments is in their best interest, too.

Photo credit: 401(K) 2013 / Foter / CC BY-SA

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Government Funding Bill Rolls Back Trucker Rest Requirements



In June, the driver of this tractor-trailer reportedly fell asleep at the wheel, causing a wreck that dumped a cargo of beer cans into the median of Interstate 29 near Summit, S.D., according to the South Dakota Highway Patrol, which supplied this photo.
In June, the driver of this tractor-trailer reportedly fell asleep at the wheel, causing a wreck that dumped a cargo of beer cans into the median of Interstate 29 near Summit, S.D., according to the South Dakota Highway Patrol, which supplied this photo.

This post is shared from npr.org/

The spending bill in Congress is not just about money. Tucked inside the bill are provisions to change regulations affecting everything from banking to the environment. One regulatory rollback has those concerned about truck safety especially upset.
The regulation is part of a series of rules that spell out the number of hours that long-haul truck drivers, the ones behind the wheel of the big rigs on the interstates, can be on the road.
Last year, a rule took effect that required those drivers to take two consecutive nights off after every 70 hours they spend behind the wheel.
The trucking industry, which didn't like the requirement in the first place, said it had an unintended consequence: It forced more truckers to take to the road early in the morning, when commuters and school buses are out.
"Those hours are less safe statistically," says Dave Osiecki, vice president of the American Trucking Association. "They're trying to reduce nighttime crashes? They may be causing daytime crashes."
No one knows yet if that rule caused the number of crashes to increase; the Department of Transportation hasn't compiled accident data for the past year. But Osiecki says truck crashes had been declining before the rule...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

California Medical Review: STEVENS WRIT GRANTED

Containment of medical costs remain a major issue in all workers' compensation programs. The California process of "independent medical review" has turned into a nightmare for injured workers, their families and their advocates. The long awaited constitutional challenge to the process is slowly making its way through the California judicial system. Time will tell whether the judicial resolution will emerge as a solution to what was just terrible legislation.

 Today's post is authored by Julius Young and is shared from workerscompzone.com/

 Could the California courts finally be ready to rule on the constitutionality of Independent Medical Review?
We may be on the verge of seeing that issue decided.
On December 3, 2014, the California Court of Appeal First Appellate District Division One granted the petition for writ of review filed San Francisco attorney Joseph Waxman on behalf of Frances Stevens (the case is Frances Stevens, Petitioner, v. WCAB and Outspoken Enterprises/State Compensation Insurance Fund ADJ1526353).
In June 2014 the Court of Appeal had summarily denied a petition for a writ filed by Waxman in April 2014. At that time Waxman had not exhausted his administrative remedies. Waxman did so and then refiled for the writ, which was then granted.
The basis facts in the case are important.
Stevens had been found permanently and totally disabled (100%) by the workers’ comp judge. Her condition required use of a wheelchair and defendant had provided assistance by a home health aide....
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, December 13, 2014

UPDATED: House passes extension of terrorism insurance

Update 12-18-2014: Note: US Senate failed to pass companion legislation before adjournment. See subsequent post for more information. The TRICA has received more media attention in light of the hacking attack and threatened reprisals on Sony pictures and the alleged connection to North Korea.

Today's post is shared from thehill.com/

The House on Wednesday passed legislation to extend the terrorism risk insurance program through 2020 despite objections from Democrats over the inclusion of unrelated provisions to change the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul.
The measure passed overwhelmingly by a vote of 417-7. All of the seven votes in opposition were from Republicans.
Congress created the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) in 2002 as a temporary program following the Sept. 11 attacks. It allows for the federal government to recoup costs for businesses after a terror attack in which the damage exceeds $100 million.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) negotiated a six-year reauthorization and doubled the damage threshold to $200 million.
It's unclear if the bill will die in the Senate as Schumer has suggested, though the near-unanimous vote in the House could make it harder for the upper chamber to ignore.
Senate Democrats and the White House oppose an amendment that they say would weaken the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. The provision would no longer require non-financial institutions — dubbed "end users" — from following the same regulations as big banks.
The White House said it "strongly opposes" the Dodd-Frank reforms included in the measure, but stopped short of a veto threat.
Republicans — along with 181 House Democrats who supported a House version of the "end users"...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead

Today's post is shared from nytimes.com
At every age, the chances of not working have changed in the last 15 years. Teenagers are far more likely not to work. Older people are retiring later and working more. In the ages in between — the periods of life when most people work — the changes have been smaller, but they are still substantial.
In the late 1960s, almost all men between the ages of 25 and 54 went to work. Only about 5 out of every 100 did not have a job in any given week. By 2000, this figure had more than doubled, to 11 out of every 100 men. This year, it’s 16. (People in the military, prison and institutions are excluded from these figures.)
Of course, the economy was stronger in 2000 than it is today, with a lower official unemployment rate — the share of people not working and actively looking for work — than today. But for prime-age men, the rise in official unemployment explains only about one-third of the increase in not working.
The remaining two-thirds is made up of those who are not working and not looking for work. Every month, the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics ask these men who are not in the labor force to describe their situation. Are they disabled, ill, in school, taking care of house or family, in retirement, or something else? Here are the trends within some of the larger of those categories:
School
About 13 percent of the increase in prime-age nonworkers, including a substantial fraction of...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Posted by at

Elizabeth Warren is fighting Wall Street for the soul of the Democratic Party

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.washingtonpost.com



Bill Clinton changed the Democratic Party, and Elizabeth Warren is trying to change it back — at least when it comes to Wall Street.
The latest intra-party skirmish has come over the so-called "CRomnibus" (don't ask) spending bill that would have funded the government for the next year, as well as, among other pet projects, killed Dodd-Frank's prohibition on big banks using federally-insured money to make exotic bets. Now, that wouldn't gut financial reform by any means, but it would be the latest step in Wall Street's death-by-a-thousand-tweaks campaign against it. And that was too much for Warren, who led a liberal revolt against the bill that ultimately failed.
But what would this derivatives change even do? Well, swaps are just bets on everything from interest rates to currencies to whether a company is going to go under or not. The way they work is one side promises to pay a fixed amount of money every, say, six months, and the other agrees to pay an amount tied to whatever they're betting on. So, for example, if you wanted to hedge your risk against interest rates rising, you might decide to pay a bank $3 million every half-year, and in return they would pay you $100 million multiplied by an agreed-upon interest rate (usually Libor). This might sound complicated, but the idea is simple: you're locking in borrowing costs of 3 percent—that's your $3 million divided by the same $100 million—and the other side is betting that rates won't be that...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

Are Cities the Next Front in the Right’s War on Labor?

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.thenation.com


UFCW

A United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) Local 770 Union Shop sticker. (Reuters/ Jonathan Alcorn)
On August 28, a klatch of high-level representatives of some of the most anti-union groups in the country gathered on a stage at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. They had come together, on the eve of Labor Day, to discuss a new scheme for dismantling workers’ rights: turning one of the most potent weapons in the anti-labor arsenal—so-called right-to-work laws (RTW)—on cities and counties.
“The possibilities of rolling out a local RTW [campaign] in a non-RTW state deserves a full-court press by those of us who care about free market economics and allowing communities to make the best decisions for their people,” declared Jon Russell, a baby-faced partisan of the right who was sandwiched between Andrew Kloster of the Heritage Foundation and Patrick Gleason of Americans for Tax Reform. Flanking them were James Sherk, also of the Heritage Foundation, and William Messenger, the attorney from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation who argued Harris v. Quinn last year before the Supreme Court.
Russell is director of the American City County Exchange (ACCE), a new offshoot of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which seeks to replicate ALEC’s state-level successes at the local level. As such, he is well poised to help mobilize, and coordinate, any efforts to bring right-to-work laws to the local level....
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

Have Democrats Failed the White Working Class?

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com


Thomas B. Edsall

Why don’t white working-class voters recognize where their economic interests lie? Somewhat self-righteously, Democrats keep asking themselves that question.
A better question would be: What has the Democratic Party done for these voters lately?
At work and at home, their lives are worse than they were a generation ago. Their real incomes have fallen, their employment opportunities have diminished, their families have crumbled and their ties to society are fraying.
This is how daily life feels, to many in the white working class. Unlike blacks and Hispanics, whites are not the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs designed to open doors to higher education and better jobs for underrepresented minorities; if anything, these programs serve only to limit their horizons.
Liberal victories in the sexual and women’s rights revolutions – victories that have made the lives of many upscale Democrats more productive and satisfying — appear, from the vantage point of the white working class, to have left many women to struggle as single parents, forced to cope with both male defection from paternal responsibility and the fragmentation of a family structure that was crucial to upward mobility in the postwar period.
This bleak view emerges from two recently published works, “Labor’s Love Lost,” by Andrew Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins, and “Was Moynihan Right? What Happens to the Children of...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at
Labels: , ,

NLRB's Christmas gift to unions: Workers can use employer's email system for organizing communications

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.bizjournals.com

The National Labor Relations Board ruled Thursday that employees can use their employer's email systems for union organizing communications during nonwork hours.

The decision, in a case involving Purple Communications, applies to employees who already had been granted access to their employer's email systems. Also, the board said an employer could impose a total ban on nonwork use of email if they demonstrate such a ban is necessary for productivity or discipline.

The ruling overturns a 2007 decision by the NLRB, which Republicans controlled the NLRB. The current Democratic majority said that decision was "clearly incorrect" and focused "too much on employer's property rights and too little on the importance of email as a means of workplace communication."

The new ruling will have "a huge impact," said Charles Caulkins, a labor attorney who is a partner at Fisher & Phillips' Fort Lauderdale, Fla.., office. It gives unions another advantage in their organizing efforts, opens the door for employees to send emails criticizing their employers to clients and vendors, and generally clog up companies' email systems with messages that don't have anything to do with business, Caulkins said.

Many businesses may decide to adopt policies against nonwork use of company email, he said.

The ruling "could cause employers to really minimize the use of email communications in their business if this case doesn't get overturned" in...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

Friday, December 12, 2014

Christie conditionally vetoes bill banning microbeads

Today's post is shared from northjersey.com/
A ban on an environmentally harmful product found in beauty supplies, toothpaste and cleansers has been rejected by Governor Christie.
Christie on Thursday conditionally vetoed a bill to stop the manufacture and sale of microbeads which are used as exfoliants or volumizers in many beauty products.
Lawmakers in both the Senate and Assembly approved the bill unanimously earlier this year.
In his veto message to them, Christie said he was concerned about severe punishments contained in the bill.
“Under the bill, the retailer would be subject to draconian penalties of up to $10,000 per product, per day,” Christie said in his veto message to the Legislature. “A few tubes of out-of-date face wash combined with overzealous enforcement of this ban could easily drive a small business owner into bankruptcy.”
Microbeads can’t be filtered by wastewater treatment plants. And the beads contain toxic chemicals that are harmful to fish, proponents of the legislation said.
The legislation called for the manufacture of microbeads to be banned by 2018 and their sale to be banned by 2020.
Christie acknowledged that manufacturers supported the bill and planed to phase out microbeads.
“Nevertheless, although representatives of the affected industry expect that microbead-containing products will be off the market by the time the prohibitions in this bill would take effect, I can foresee a circumstance where a...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

Employees shouldn’t be treated like products

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.washingtonpost.com

Hail the lowly bar code. By enabling retailers to track sales and inventory, it allows them to order goods from warehouses and manufacturers only when needed, reducing overhead and costs. Just-in-time production is a signal achievement of our digitized age.

Just-in-time labor is not. Millions of retail workers are routinely summoned to their workplaces with little more advance warning than their employers accord the truckloads of goods or food those workers sell. Unlike those products, of course, workers have lives. They have kids to get to school or put in day care, families to cook for, courses to take, other gigs to report to, promises to keep. They can do all that if they have regular schedules, but such schedules are often hard to come by.

A recent study by the University of Chicago’s Susan Lambert reported that 41 percent of young (ages 26 to 32) hourly workers get their schedules a week or less in advance, and that “in the course of a single month, workers’ hours varied on average by 37 percent in comparison to what they considered their usual hours.”

Regular hours were once a cornerstone of Americans’ work lives. They were a feature of the union contracts that covered a third of the workforce in the decades following World War II. But as unions have vanished and workers suffered a loss of power, thousands of employers have taken to summoning their employees — or telling them to wait, unpaid, until they are either...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

The long history of GM’s ignition switch cover up

Today's post is shared from motleyrice.com/
GM’s ignition switch defect has now been linked to 38 deaths to date. The ignition switch problem was so obvious that customers, journalists and even GM employees were reporting the problem a decade before GM finally admitted the issue and recalled the cars.
Way back in 2005, one frightened customer wrote to both GM and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), stating that “This is a safety/recall issue if ever there was one . . . The problem is the ignition turn switch is poorly installed. Even with the slightest touch, the car will shut off while in motion. I don’t have to list for you the safety problems that may happen, besides an accident or death, a car turning off while doing a high speed must cause engine and other problems in the long haul . . . I firmly believe that this ignition switch needs to be recalled, reexamined and corrected.” Yet, GM did nothing.
That same year, New York Times journalist Jeff Sabatini commented on an odd issue with his Chevrolet Cobalt. His wife was driving on the freeway when she accidentally bumped her knee on the steering column and the car “just went dead.” On looking into the issue, he found another writer with the same problem. Journalist Gary Heller of Pennsylvania’s The Daily Item had also experienced “unplanned engine shutdowns [that] happened four times during a hard-driving test week” in his Cobalt. The...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

Consumer agency: Medical debt a surprise scourge for 43 million in US

Today's post is shared from aljazzera.america.com/
Nearly 20 percent of U.S. consumers with credit records — 42.9 million people — have unpaid medical debts, according to a report published Thursday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
The findings suggest that many Americans are being trapped by debt because they are confused by the notices they get from hospitals and insurance companies about the cost of treatment, the CFPB report said. As a result, millions of Americans may be surprised to find they are stuck with lower credit scores, making it harder for them to borrow the finances needed to buy a home or an automobile.
"When people fall ill and end up at the hospital with unexpected bills, far too often they have entered into a financial maze," CFPB director Richard Cordray said, according to the prepared text of a speech set to be delivered Thursday in Oklahoma City.
On average, a person with only overdue medical debt owes $1,766, the CFPB report said. It added that someone with unpaid medical bills and other sources of debt — possibly credit cards or back taxes — owes an average of $5,638. More than half of all debt on credit reports stems from medical expenses, according to the CFPB.
Cordray said collection agencies sometimes don’t inform debtors of their obligations in a timely manner — and when the debtors seek credit and learn of a problem with their score, they scramble to pay up and are...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at

Nursing Homes Rarely Penalized For Oversedating Patients

Today's post was shared by Take Justice Back and comes from www.npr.org


NPR's analysis of government data found that harsh penalties are almost never used when nursing home residents get unnecessary drugs of any kind.NPR's analysis of government data found that harsh penalties are almost never used when nursing home residents get unnecessary drugs of any kind.

Antipsychotic drugs have helped many people with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. But for older people with Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia, they can be deadly. The Food and Drug Administration has given these drugs a black box warning, saying they can increase the risk of heart failure, infections and death. Yet almost 300,000 nursing home residents still get them.
“ There are many near misses, whether it's hospitals or nursing homes, where medication might be given that's not needed and doesn't cause permanent harm. We view that as a learning opportunity.
- Dr. Patrick Conway, chief medical officer, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
So in 2012, the federal government started a campaign to get nursing homes to reduce their use of these drugs. But an NPR analysis of government data shows that the government rarely penalizes nursing homes when they don't get with the program.
Take Texas for example. More than a quarter of nursing home residents there still get antipsychotic drugs. Since the beginning of the federal initiative, the nationwide average has dropped below 20 percent. That puts Texas in last place compared with other states and the District of Columbia.
So Texas is playing catch-up. The state recently conducted a series of trainings to teach nursing home employees that...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on
Tembow
Related articles
Posted by at
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)