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February 28th, 2015

2/28/2015

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I will finish for now on tax policy.  I tried to keep it local this time but what is happening in Baltimore may be the worst in the nation-----but it will be coming to your neck of the woods.

I testified before the Baltimore City committee this week in Annapolis on several issues telling them that my organization is preparing to go to court over such a high level of unconstitutional tax policy.  It is so egregious as to be unbelievable.  I am hoping my testimony stopped one bill but no doubt others will proceed.

House Bill 507-----Property Tax credit for Supermarkets in 'food deserts' needs to go but I am sure Baltimore pols will continue to push it.  It is yet another corporate tax break for NOTHING.  These pols intend to eliminate all corporate tax base and have in Baltimore and that is why the government coffers are empty and communities crumbling.  These public policies are deliberate-----and these new public policies are as bad for the citizens of Baltimore as the old ones.  The same pols from Baltimore are working as hard as they can for Johns Hopkins and corporate profit.

GET RID OF THESE MARYLAND CORPORATE POLS.  WHETHER REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT WE DO NOT WANT BIG CORPORATIONS CONTROLLING ALL OF OUR CITY AND STATE GOVERNMENT.


Food deserts exist in underserved communities because Baltimore City Hall and Maryland Assembly chose to defund these communities and allowed for these conditions to grow.  All that need be done is a little public subsidy given to people in these communities to be small business food store owners who then hire local employees and need to please consumers to keep their business.  So, they are going to provide the food needed for the prices that can be afforded.  The public subsidy can require a connection to local farm produce and organic products.

As the article below states-----and as I testified to the Maryland Assembly-----the bill 507 is written in just the right way as to allow only chain grocery stores to come into these communities and we know what that means....Giant, Shop Rite, and maybe Safeway.  I have written about the dangers of allowing yet another industry consolidate to national chain status and that is especially true of food sources.  That is what this bill is about.  It seeks to send yet another food chain into communities having no other choices and give tax subsidy to do it.  People who fight for a Shop Rite in underserved communities are not fighting for food justice----Shop Rite has some of the poorest quality of food there is.  As I stated in testimony------the Safeway close to my community surrounded by underserved communities is so understaffed and the workers are miserable.......with not enough staffing food theft grows and these chain stores simply raise prices on the food to cover theft losses.  Consequently, the food at that Safeway costs as much as what I pay at Whole Foods (Whole Paycheck).  So, low-income people are being soaked of their earnings just to frequent these chain grocery stores.  I spoke with a young lady on the Light Rail from Baltimore going to Glen Burnie Giant to shop because all of the chain grocery stores were too expensive in Baltimore.

This is what HB 507  perpetuates.  Think about a local politician Ulysses Currie who was found to be guilty of pay-to-play profiteering by pushing for Shop Right in his district.  Of course nothing happened to him for criminal behavior----but the same politics with grocery stores exist in Baltimore.  The only thing said by Baltimore pols was that a Shop Rite needed to be included in this 'food desert' tax credit.  The usual characters came out-----the Baltimore Health Department always comes down for bad health policy and testified that this tax credit was good for 'food deserts'.

PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW THESE POLS TO CONTINUE BAD FOOD POLICY.

This is a great article on Food Justice.  Notice it is the opposite of what Baltimore pols are doing.  This is the Baltimore City committee putting the bad policies forward.
  If your pol or justice organization is pushing chain grocery stores in your community----they are not doing what is best for that community!



[FOOD JUSTICE]

End the Corporate Exploitation of ‘Food Deserts’

03 April 2013


End the Corporate Exploitation of ‘Food Deserts’

FOOD JUSTICE ACTIVIST TANYA FIELDS SAYS BIG CORPORATIONS 'INTENTIONALLY CREATE' FOOD DESERTS IN POOR COMMUNITIES FOR PROFIT

By Tanya Fields
Read more at EBONY


If you have been following the conversation around the lack of fresh foods available in certain districts across the country, then you have probably heard the label "food desert."
More and more, this term is being used to justify the existence of large corporate grocery chains in poor communities
. Food activist LaDonna Redmond explains:

“The use of the phrase ‘food desert’ creates a set of problems. The first problem is the term suggests that economic development is at the expense of community development. 

[It’s] really nothing more than a marketing term. Food desert identifies for corporate America how to sell cheap, off brand food to our community.  When we know that cheap, highly processed food is at the crux of the rise in chronic diet related diseases.

In the end, the term masks the real harm of the U.S. corporate controlled food system by suppressing the ability of community entrepreneurs to develop and finance scalable community solutions. The danger of accepting the food desert philosophy is that it masks the real problem of the corporate controlled food system: poverty and hunger.” I couldn't agree more.

This term has been thrown around by the USDA, anti-hunger advocates and large supermarkets themselves like Wal-Mart to explain their existence in communities facing food hardship and ultimately those same corporate chains receive subsidies that aren’t available to smaller, local entrepreneurs. The arrival of these retailers that are supposed to help the community many times help to set the stage for gentrification, as well as not paying a living wage job to residents, if the jobs are even available to them at all.

There is no doubt that many impoverished communities need access to healthy, quality, culturally relevant food. But it ought to be fresh food that will support our local farmers who are also suffering from a broken food system and nourish the bellies of our babies while simultaneously stimulating economic and community development. We need food to go back to being a tool for change and culture. We must get beyond “food deserts” and eventually beyond food justice and get to food sovereignty.

What does that mean? It means that we not solely rely on large corporations to “fix” our current food predicament, a predicament that they intentionally created. It means that we analyze and utilize our current community resources to create innovative and just solutions. Take for example Melissa Danielle’s Bed-Stuy Bounty that utilizes an online platform to buy food at wholesale and then split amongst buyers in a club. She delivers by bike or you can pick up from her home in Bed-stuy. Solutions like The People’s Grocery in Oakland, CA which includes a mobile market and several urban gardens and headed by Oakland native Nikki Henderson, they have set the model for mobile markets. Or consider Growing Power started by former professional athlete Will Allen that boasts several farms including one inside the city limits of Milwaukee and Chicago. There are projects like K. Rashid Nuri’s Truly Living Well which boasts a large urban farm a block away from the eternal resting place of Coretta and Martin Luther King, Jr., a farmer’s market and Community Supported Agriculture, as well as trainings, rentals and a summer camp. All of these projects are in “food deserts”; but instead of wooing large corporate food retail chains, they instead created the solutions themselves.

There is no doubt that many of the poor communities need access to healthy, quality, culturally relevant food. We must get beyond “food deserts” and eventually beyond food justice and get to food sovereignty.

Sustaining these initiatives isn’t easy. Ms. Redmond opened a grocery store in Chicago which ultimately closed. She shared that her experience taught her that the industry is dominated by large chains beholden to large food companies. Any alternatives remain difficult to gain capital for. Growing Power itself has received major criticism for accepting $1 million from Wal-mart. In New York City, there are few, if any subsidies given to small food retailers, but corporate grocer Fresh Direct is receiving $130 million in subsidies with no community benefits and only promises to try and create jobs while adding increased truck presence in an already overburdened community.

If communities understand that corporations rarely, if ever, have our best interest at heart, and if we educate ourselves on the economics of food while seeking out, creating and supporting the positive initiatives of organizations like the ones above, we have a fighting chance of reclaiming a piece of the food system and changing the face of our communities.

Tanya Fields is a food justice activist, public speaker, educator, food enthusiast, sometimes blogger, fierce mama bear of four precocious children and the founder and executive director of the BLK Projek. She is currently raising funds to start a mobile market in the South Bronx. In her spare time she updates a food blog called Mama’s Kitchen From Scratch and does a cooking demo workshop called Fab Food on a Food Stamp


Read more at EBONY http://www.ebony.com/wellness-empowerment/food-justice-end-the-corporate-exploitation-of-food-deserts#ixzz3T2MLOVkh

________________________________________

HB 123 by Kurt Anderson is yet another surgical tax break aimed at favored communties with a specific socioeconomic target.  Now, I live in a middle-class lower Charles Village----and I know Baltimore working class neighborhoods feel the same....our property taxes are so high because corporations are paying no taxes and all of this gerrymandered tax policy is making this worse.  The citizens of Baltimore here the longest have been used as fodder for decades and we are going to court over Baltimore tax policy.  As I said yesterday----the Maryland Constitution does not allow for egregious taxation and it requires taxation to be uniform.

Baltimore has plenty of people living in the city----it simply has public policy deliberately written to keep them impoverished and unable to contribute to the welfare of the city.  This is not the fault of the residents----it is the fault of Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins and their pols in Baltimore City Hall.  They have sucked so much public money to themselves creating huge corporations =====taking over all of Baltimore's public sector to the detriment of the citizens of Baltimore====that people do not want to stay in this city.  People do not want this kind of governing either long-term residents or new residents.

This bill is an example of this bad public policy and I know Kurt Anderson is simply bringing it forward because it was written by Johns Hopkins.

It is important to know that Baltimore's tax scheme is not being taken all over Maryland.  Other counties would be aghast at the level of economic damage done with this subsidy favoritism that is completely unconstitutional.

Maggie McIntosh and Kurt Anderson as senior Maryland Assembly pols lead in these policies and they know they are unconstitutional and they do it simply to move wealth to a few.  If you think a Harbor East filled with global corporations and criminal financial corporations is good development----you are third world in your thinking.

STOP ALLOWING THESE POLS TO STAY IN OFFICE.  THEIR LEGACY IS HORRIBLE.

The key with these tax policies is that they are specific to Baltimore and within Baltimore the lack of uniformity is indeed harming individuals and communities.  I encourage people to pursue this in court.

'Currently, to bring suit against the state, a taxpayer must have standing; they must show harm, caused from the state action, and different from the generalized harm suffered by other taxpayers'.

It's important to know as stated below-----economists overwhelmingly have shown no benefit derived from these tax credits and as I stated in the Maryland Assembly----Legislative Services have said the same for Enterprise Zone tax credits.  THEY ARE NOT NEEDED.  We want small and regional businesses as our state and city economic driver not global and national corporations.

Economic Development Are Targeted Incentives Constitutional?

By Michael D. LaFaive and Jeffery Weeden, published on July 6, 2004

Recently in Greenville, Michigan, Federal Mogul employees approved a new contract that contained more than $5 million in pay and benefit concessions in order to ensure that their plant remains in Michigan. Management at Federal Mogul had threatened to move to Mexico where it costs less to do business. The state offered additional incentives to help prevent Federal Mogul from moving. To date, the size of the incentive package has not been announced.

Economists have argued that such targeted incentives are unnecessary for economic growth and unfair to those who do not receive them. Some people are using the courts to try to thwart targeted incentive programs. Late last year the Mackinac Center described a case in Ohio that could change the way all 50 states try to lure business. An expanded version of the article appears below.


Should states be able to offer businesses tax breaks and other subsidies in order to lure them into locating a new plant within their boundaries? A case currently before the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals will decide whether this practice — which favors some businesses at the expense of all the rest — is constitutional.

For decades now, policy-makers and state legislatures have been developing exotic schemes to lure businesses to their states, keep the ones they have, and “create” more jobs. Nationwide, these subsidies and tax breaks have reached an estimated annual value of nearly $50 billion.

The state of Michigan operates a number of such programs, including the Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA), which has the power to grant tax credits to businesses. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation, the state’s quasi-public “jobs” agency, also gives out millions of dollars-worth of property tax abatements and oversees the state’s “renaissance zone” program, which provides tax relief to geographical areas of the state. This department has been the subject of state Senate hearings considering whether Michigan’s government should be in the business of trying to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.

But a far more important development is Cuno, et.al. v. Daimler Chrysler, in which the plaintiffs argue that such incentives violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The case was filed by a number of parties, including two Michigan residents, and is aimed also at the state of Ohio and the city of Toledo.

The Cuno case is described as a “true test case” because it was brought largely to test the constitutionality of such programs. In March 2000, attorneys for the plaintiffs filed suit over a $300 million incentive package the state of Ohio offered to DaimlerChrysler in exchange for maintaining long-standing jeep production in Toledo, instead of opening a new plant in Michigan, just over the border.

The suit alleges that Ohio’s granting of property tax abatements and/or tax credits to DaimlerChrysler represents a violation of Commerce Clause restraints.


According to plaintiff counsel Peter Enrich, the Commerce Clause was designed to prohibit state regulation and tax policy from interfering with economic activity between the states. For example, one state may not raise barriers to competition with another state in order to protect its own interests.

But what about the power of a state being used to advance its own interests at the expense of another state? Does this not also constitute undue interference, on the part of that state, with interstate commerce? Enrich argues that the United States Supreme Court has “consistently struck down on Commerce Clause grounds, state tax breaks or benefits that discriminate against out-of-state economic activities or interstate enterprises.” In other words, when one state provides financial incentives to a business to build or expand a facility within its borders, and those incentives make the investment less costly than it would otherwise be if it were invested in another state, the incentive is unconstitutional.

On the other hand, in their brief before the court, defendant’s attorneys argue that the Commerce Clause “… does not require that all states maintain the same taxing system and rates.” In other words, incentives are just part of the states’ overall tax structures. Michigan may have a lower overall income tax burden, but the fact that a business locating in Michigan has lower taxes than one locating in Ohio doesn’t constitute discrimination against Ohio. Defendants argue that the Commerce Clause only prohibits states from erecting barriers to commerce. For instance, Ohio may not impose tariffs on Michigan-manufactured Cadillacs to protect Ohio-made Hondas.

At least one scholar thinks that judges may end up splitting the baby on tax incentives, declaring some actions unconstitutional but allowing others to remain. Robert D. Plattner, a correspondent for State Tax Notes, writes that “if the taxpayer’s liability in the ‘home’ state would be higher if it invests elsewhere than if it invests in-state, the incentive violates the requirement of tax neutrality and is unconstitutional.”

Plattner also argues that tax incentives that cause “spillover” tax relief are also unconstitutional. Spillover relief can occur when companies are given incentives to expand existing facilities rather than to build new ones. He argues that benefits from the tax relief may not be specific to the new part of the property (the expansion), but must abate the property tax on the older facility as well.

For example, in May of 2000, MEGA approved an incentive package valued at as much as $12.1 million for the Coca-Cola Company to expand its facility in Paw Paw. The company expanded an existing building and added a new one to house its wastewater treatment system. The tax credit portion of the deal was valued at over $5 million. But the company was also promised state and local abatements on its property, valued at $6.2 million.

According to Palmer, under this scenario, the tax credits would be unconstitutional if they made doing business in Michigan less expensive for Coca-Cola than it would be for the company to do the same business in a competing state. The property tax abatements would almost certainly be unconstitutional because the expansion won abatements for the entire property, not just for the new building and building expansion.

Establishing taxpayer standing to bring a lawsuit is a significant problem regarding challenging the Constitutionality of state tax incentives. Currently, to bring suit against the state, a taxpayer must have standing; they must show harm, caused from the state action, and different from the generalized harm suffered by other taxpayers. The requirement is designed to prevent abuse of the court system by limiting access to those with a specific and personal stake in the litigation. However, without taxpayer standing, citizens have almost no opportunity to challenge the Constitutionality of targeted tax incentives. In cases like Cuno, taxpayers lack standing because they can only show the kind of generalized harm suffered by fellow state taxpayers. With taxpayers shut out of court state tax incentives and their harmful side effects are insulated from judicial review.

One way to establish standing to challenge state tax incentives is to show a specific injury like the loss of income, job, or business, etc., caused by the state action. Also, Congress can grant standing through legislation. Targeted tax incentives can act as unconstitutional protectionism, harm the economic union of the states, and result in the kind of economic Balkanization that the Commerce Clause was intended to address. The Commerce Clause made unconstitutional the harmful “race to the bottom” effects of state protectionism that are analogous to the intent and effect of targeted state tax incentives. By establishing standing to bring suit either by showing either individual harm, or through a grant of Congress taxpayers could finally hold states accountable for targeted tax incentives.

As state lawmakers debate the merits of government-sponsored economic development in Michigan’s economic future, they would be wise to remember that the court may render many of their actions moot. The plain-English reason isn’t hard to fathom: because it’s fundamentally unfair for government to grant advantage to one business and not to others. And if the Constitution is found to condemn the practice, states may well follow suit.

# # #

Michael LaFaive is director of fiscal policy, and Jeffery Weeden is an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a nonprofit research and educational institute.


_________________________________________

Baltimore cannot do broad-based tax cuts because it has mortgaged so much of its corporate tax base already the city cannot function.  This is why mostly selected global corporations are getting tax relief as small businesses suffer the high rates that the public does.  So, now they are going with surgical cuts and all of this makes the city even more unstable than before.

Remember, all that was needed was to allow the Federal subsidy targeted at these low-income communities over several decades actually get to where they were meant to go.  Johns Hopkins circumvented this process and was allowed to control where all this Federal funding for low-income services and programs went and sent it all to grow its own global corporation and grow a few others into large corporations leaving this economic disaster.  This happened with the Baltimore City and Maryland Assembly pols still in office. 

NONE OF THIS NEEDED TO HAPPEN AND THEY ARE NOW SO HARD-PRESSED TO COVER THEIR TRACKS THEY ARE BECOMING MORE AND MORE CRIMINAL IN THEIR OPERATIONS.

Forget the Maryland and national Constitutions----we will do as we please because the public has no public justice access.  Well-----yes we do

PLEASE TAKE THESE TAX POLICIES TO COURT.


I have to listen to Maryland Assembly pols and Baltimore City Hall pols pretend there is not enough funding for Baltimore public schools even as everyone knows this tax policy is illegal.  I speak to Maryland ACLU tied to these tax policies through education policy and development policy and she knows all of this is unconstitutional yet she pretends to be fighting for funding by pushing Wall Street bond leverage just as the bond market is ready to crash.

If you are classist and do not like the poor---you should see that all these policies are soaking middle-class as much as they harm the poor.  Small businesses cannot compete with global corporate downtown anchors......and that is not free market
.


U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Finds Ohio’s Targeted Investment Tax Credit Unconstitutional


Michigan’s MEGA “Is Subject to Very Substantial Doubt,” Says Plaintiffs’ Attorney For Immediate Release
Contact: Michael LaFaive, Director of Fiscal Policy
Phone: (989) 430-8669

MIDLAND — The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled that the state of Ohio’s investment tax credit program violated the United States Constitution’s commerce clause. The decision in Charlotte Cuno, et al., v. DaimlerChryser, Inc., et al., will likely have far-reaching implications for Michigan and other states that fall under the 6th Circuit Court’s jurisdiction.


“Lawmakers should focus on legally sound economic policies like broad-based tax cuts now that the Michigan Economic Growth Authority might be found unconstitutional,” said Michael LaFaive, director of fiscal policy with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research institute in Midland, Mich. Professor Peter Enrich, one of the Ohio plaintiffs’ attorneys, told LaFaive today that given the decision, the MEGA program “is subject to very substantial doubt at this point.” Because Michigan is in the 6th Circuit, the MEGA program can be challenged by litigants citing the Cuno case.

The MEGA program is a 1995 creation of the Engler Administration. It was designed to offer targeted tax relief to a limited number of companies in the hope of retaining and creating new jobs. Through July 13 of this year, MEGA has offered over $1.7 billion in Single Business Tax relief for over 200 projects. This figure does not include the value of tax abatements, job-training subsidies and other incentives offered to firms in addition to their MEGA credits.

___________________________________________

Raise your hand if you know that Johns Hopkins is a great big global corporation!  EVERYONE.  Raise your hand if you know all of the private non-profits created by Hopkins to extend its personal wealth----real estate and community development around its own facilities is not non-profit---it is for-profit.  The number of private non-profits funneled money from Baltimore corporations allowed to pay no taxes is breath-taking.  We now see non-profit education and health businesses that are simply businesses.  Global corporations donate to them to grown them into viable businesses and then expand them out of the city----out of the state---and before you know it---out of the nation.

MedStar is a national hospital corporation that makes all kinds of profit.  Maryland works hard to show data that with all of its health reform-----these health systems are only making 2% profit.  Forget that they are using all profits to expand overseas for health tourism promotion and for global online access to health care.  That's not profit.  Actually, it is.  The Affordable Care Act was specifically written to increase health industry profit and profits are soaring yet, these health institutions are still categorized as non-profit.  Baltimore loses so much corporate taxation from this illegal categorization of corporations as non-profits.  I showed a few days ago that Community Development Network was simply a marketing arm for private investment development corporations for example.  Just because they do a few local events in underserved communities does not make them a non-profit.



STUDENT NOTE: HIDING BEHIND THE CORPORATE VEIL: A GUIDE FOR NON-PROFIT CORPORATIONS WITH FOR-PROFIT SUBSIDIARIES

Winter, 2009Hastings Business Law Journal5 Hastings Bus. L.J. 189AuthorSeong J. Kim*Excerpt I. INTRODUCTION

The non-profit industry holds a unique position in the economic and social functions of the United States. The countless varieties of non-profit organizations are often labeled as the "third," "charitable," "voluntary," "philanthropic," "civil society," and "tax-exempt" sector of the economy and receive favorable treatment. 1 Currently, federal tax law exempts charities, often referred to as 501(c)(3) organizations, from paying federal income tax and allows them to receive tax deductible contributions. 2 Although there is a general assumption that non-profit organizations exercise a position that is independent from the government and private sectors, this is assumption is misguided. 3 On the contrary, numerous non-profits exercise close governance and financial relationships with both the government and private sectors. 4 Often times non-profit organizations earn a profit and do not exclusively rely on volunteers, public, or private support. 5 In fact, many non-profits conduct their operations just like for-profit businesses, complete with large profits, handsome salaries, political lobbyists, and invest billions of dollars in stocks and bonds. 6

As the financial side of the non-profit industry is measured, it has become increasingly clear that both the public and the government must carefully monitor their activities. Independent Sector, an organization created to conduct research and advocate on behalf of non-profits, estimated that as of the late 1990's there were approximately 1.6 million non-profit organizations in the United States. 7 By the year 2000, charitable organizations, excluding churches, held an astounding $ 2.07-trillion in assets ...



Profit Made from "Related" Activities Like any business, a non-profit has to cover operating costs and pay its employees. To pay employee salaries, keep the lights on and expand, a non-profit needs to generate revenue. Sometimes the non-profit generates revenue that exceeds the amount of its expenses, resulting in a profit. How it generates that profit matters tremendously. To avoid having to pay taxes on any profits it creates, a non-profit must make money on activities "related" to its non-profit status.

For example, suppose there was a non-profit group called Clothes for Kids that went around collecting old clothing, cleaning and repairing the items, and then giving the refurbished clothes away to children in need. The non-profit generates income by conducting charity dinners, raffles and fundraisers. The non-profit could properly use the income it generates from these activities to pay operating expenses and employee salaries. The non-profit won't have to pay taxes on any profits it receives, because the activities that generated the profits were directly related to its mission: providing children in need with clothing.

Profit Made from "Unrelated" Activities Sometimes, however, non-profits earn money on activities unrelated to their tax exempt purpose. In that case, the non-profit must pay taxes on the profit earned, just like any other business. While a non-profit doesn't have to worry about losing its tax exempt status if it makes a little profit from unrelated activities, it's important that such profit remain a small part of the non-profit's operation. To avoid losing tax exempt status, a non-profit should:

  • Keep any unrelated activities that generate profit small
  • Avoid spending staff time on unrelated activities
  • Never hire someone dedicated to performing the unrelated activities
As an example of how a non-profit might earn profit from unrelated activities, imagine that Clothes for Kids has decided that, in order to reduce costs, it should own and operate its own facility for putting on charity events. When not in use by Clothes for Kids, the non-profit often rents out the space to other charities and businesses, earning rental income on the facility. Any profit generated from renting the facility would likely be taxed as normal business income.

Exempt "Unrelated" Activities The IRS realized that distinguishing related and unrelated activities might often be difficult, so it set out a list of activities that are likely not related to a non-profit's purpose, but nevertheless will not be taxed:

  • Sales of merchandise that has largely been donated to the non-profit
  • Distribution of items worth less than $5 in return for donations
  • Activities that primarily benefit members, patients, students, officers or employees of the non-profit
  • Activities where nearly all of the work is done by volunteers
  • The sale, rental or exchange of donor mailing lists



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I hear this from my Democratic lawmakers in Baltimore all the time.  It is the Republican policy stance that has corporate taxation as double-taxation.  The fact that corporate profits are taxed and then shareholder profits taxed has nothing to do with double-taxation.....not that shareholders are really paying those taxes anyway.

Property taxes and income taxes are paid to contribute to the maintenance of community infrastructure====for the funding of schools and health services that benefit corporations and their employees. 

WE HAVE ALWAYS SEEN CORPORATIONS RESPONSIBLE FOR THESE SUPPORTS AND CALL THIS---BEING A GOOD CORPORATE CITIZEN.

Corporate profit and shareholder payments are different from these requirements.  It is not double-taxation and to use this term is to seek to allow corporations escape their responsibilities in supporting the communities in which they are located.  Baltimore is ground zero for this ------


A DEMOCRATIC POL WOULD NEVER THINK CORPORATE TAXATION INVOLVES DOUBLE-TAXATION YET THAT IS ALL WE HEAR IN THE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY.


In Baltimore, the city resident taxes are paying all the support for these downtown global corporations and they offer no value.  But where would Baltimore be without Johns Hopkins as an employer?  IT WOULD BE FIRST WORLD AND NOT THIRD WORLD.  Hopkins is a small private university with a tremendous amount of public assets.  It created for itself the co-opting of the entire public sector of the city and if it left-----all of those assets would return to the city where they should always have been.  Public health, public education, development, public services are all under the domain of public sector and all are controlled by Hopkins and Hopkins profits from this.

Below you see a definition of double-taxation which acts as though a corporation has no obligation for municipal support outside what is paid by staff and shareholders.
 

So much corporate tax evasion happens in Baltimore that the small businesses that could really use these benefits are told there is no money for them.


Double Taxation



Taxes

C corporations have exposure to double taxation. In C corporations, the company pays taxes on corporate profits. Shareholders of C corporations pay taxes on dividends issued by the corporation; hence the term double taxation. S Corporations and LLCs appear as pass-through entities. Owners of S corporations and LLCs have the ability to pass their share of profits and losses to their tax return.



Double taxation is a situation that affects C corporations when business profits are taxed at both the corporate and personal levels.
The corporation must pay income tax at the corporate rate before any profits can be paid to shareholders. Then any profits that are distributed to shareholders through dividends are subject to income tax again at the recipient's individual rate. In this way, the corporate profits are subject to income taxes twice. Double taxation does not affect S corporations, which are able to "pass through" earnings directly to shareholders without the intermediate step of paying dividends. In addition, many smaller corporations are able to avoid double taxation by distributing earnings to employee/shareholders as wages. Still, double taxation has long been subject to criticism from accountants, lawyers, and economists.




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February 26th, 2015

2/26/2015

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More on tax policy locally and State of Maryland.

First, I wanted to qualify my discussion of cigarette taxes by Maryland Health Initiative as a smoking cessation tool.  Blended cigarettes are now the product people still smoking move to as cigarette corporations are moving cheaper brands into the US to replace the higher priced brands.  This will continue even as taxes go up.  Higher taxes did the job of keeping many groups from affording cigarettes and to go higher will not help----it is actually harming citizens as they are pushed to worse alternatives.

Blended cigarettes are simply the products global tobacco corporations like Phillip Morris sell all over the developing world and they never have met any health standards for the US.  It is well documented that these cigarettes are far worse in health hazards then regular US-made cigarettes because they have fillers that are cheap and more toxic.  When US tobacco corporations were limited in sales in the US they went global and with that standards for health disappeared----that is what lower cost blended cigarettes are and they are now being allowed sales in the US with no FDA regulation----Trans Pacific Trade Pact does not allow nations to have regulations that protect health and hinder profit and this is one example of GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS NOT CARING ABOUT HEALTH OUTCOMES.  When Maryland Assembly simply keeps raising these cigarette taxes without knowing cigarette policy-----they are not protecting the citizens of Maryland.

When Maryland Health Initiative tells me they do not know about blended cigarettes and have no interest in providing research to get rid of them or educate against them----but rather TAX TAX TAX -----we have failed policy that hurts the American people.  Even if you do not smoke---knowing the FDA no longer regulates and protects against product harm should make everyone ENGAGE IN POLITICS

THIS IS ONLY HAPPENING BECAUSE GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-CONS AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE CONTROLLING US POLITICAL PARTIES.




Johns Hopkins School of Public Health knows these tobacco facts and they know people are moving to these more dangerous brands and they know the state health policy THEY WROTE is excluding most people from accessing many kinds of cancer treatments including lung cancer. So, to claim success in policy because people needing access to lung health issues can no longer access the care-----is like claiming higher education scores because you have pushed the lower education achievers out of the school system----also a Johns Hopkins policy.


Global Flagship Brands The core of our brand portfolio
Brands


  • Global Flagship Brands
  • Products
Global Flagship Brands The core of our brand portfolio We have over 100 tobacco product brands in our portfolio but our core strength lies in our eight Global Flagship Brands These eight brands account for over 60% of our cigarette sales.

Each of our Global Flagship Brands has played a significant role in making JTI the fastest growing global company in the tobacco sector. In just over a decade we have achieved 11% market share and become the third largest tobacco company worldwide.

Winston This brand was launched in the United States in 1954 by R.J. Reynolds who named it after its hometown, Winston Salem. Within a year it was the country’s best selling filter cigarette. Today it is the number two cigarette in the world, available in over 100 countries.

Camel Camel has a history that stretches back more than 100 years. Launched in 1913, Camel was the first worldwide cigarette trademark. Today, it is JTI’s main international premium brand. It is sold in over 100 countries.

Mevius Mevius, previously called Mild Seven, was launched in 1977 and became the number one selling cigarette brand in Japan a year after its launch. It remains the most popular brand in Japan and the number one brand in Asia, and is growing in popularity around the world – already occupying the number four global spot. As part of its evolution, Mild Seven changed its name to Mevius in 2013 – reflecting its status as a global premium brand that adapts to meet consumers’ demands.

Benson & Hedges Established in 1873 in Old Bond Street, London, by Richard Benson and William Hedges, the company was dedicated to the craft of manufacturing high quality cigarettes, and was awarded a royal warrant as supplier to the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. Today, it remains a mark of distinction as an original, yet timeless, symbol of quality, and continues to be a leading brand around the world.

Silk Cut Launched in 1964, Silk Cut became internationally recognized by its surreal and innovative advertising campaigns that ran for more than two decades. Silk Cut has an established position as the leading lower-tar brand with a reputation for quality and innovation.

Sobranie Registered in London in 1879 by Albert Weinberg, Sobranie is one of the oldest cigarette brands in the world. The name is a Slavic word for an official meeting place of important people, reflecting Weinberg’s intention to create a luxury brand in the emerging tobacco market of the late 1800s. Weinberg invented the first modern-style cigarette packaging for Sobranie and this Global Flagship Brand continues to be one of the pioneers in the luxury cigarette market today.

Glamour Glamour is JTI’s leading Super Slims brand. Since its introduction in 2005, Glamour has achieved remarkable growth, consolidating its No.1 position as a Super Slims brand in several Eastern European and Asian markets, and it is constantly expanding its geographical presence.

LD LD was launched in Russia in 1999 as an international value brand at an attractive price. Originating from Russia’s Liggett-Ducat factory, LD has grown consistently and is now available in more than 36 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Since 2007, LD has continued to expand by providing value-segment consumers with access to the latest quality tobacco trends at a sensible price.

________________________________________


My favorite Baltimore Development/Johns Hopkins pols introduced the bills in Maryland Assembly this week that are tied to handing public housing over to private investment firms to manage and later own.  I've talked about the housing justice issues and how this violates Constitutional War on Poverty programs for low-income people----today I simply want to look at this as tax policy.

Senate Bill 356 and HB497 have to do with giving a tax credit to what will be a private investment ownership of public housing.  It allows for more public private partnerships where corporations control government/public functions....this time in public housing.

The Bill below is very boring but what it is doing is setting law that broadens the tax exemption categories for corporations taking more and more of our public real estate.  So, we have M and T Stadium as public land tax free to the Ravens------Hilton with the land public and tax free to Hilton-----and now they are doing the same with our public housing property-----tax-free.  Remember, Baltimore has sit public policy in motion that will do the same for the real estate tied to our public schools with the credit bond school building scheme.
  Each time a bill comes up that is most egregious to citizens and justice in the Maryland Assembly and targets just Baltimore-----the fellow committee members remind everyone that

BALTIMORE POLS REQUEST THESE KINDS OF LEGISLATION THAT ARE PARTICULAR JUST TO BALTIMORE.

ALL OF BALTIMORE'S MARYLAND ASSEMBLY POLS SPONSORED THIS HORRIBLE AND HURTFUL POLICY FOR BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND JOHNS HOPKINS.

McFadden in the Senate----and



HOUSE BILL 497Q15lr1391CF SB 356

By: Delegate Anderson (By Request –Baltimore City Administration) and Delegates Conaway, Glenn, Haynes, and B.Robinson


I'm not going into the justice issues----but this is yet another example of corporate tax subsidy in Baltimore that will carry on for years.  Again, no tax revenue from a policy that does not even need to exist.  Those public housing buildings could have been renovated as public housing for less than what the city will lose in tax base.
  This is designed to give an investment firm no doubt tied to Johns Hopkins claim to public real estate in sections of city center that are expected to be high-value-----getting this land for not only next to nothing, but subsidized.  If you do not know this kind of undermining of public asset wealth is illegal and public malfeasance----IT IS AND WE WILL BE GOING TO COURT.

THIS MAY BE HAPPENING IN YOUR NECK OF THE NATION----BUT I AM SURE BALTIMORE IS ONE OF A FEW PLACES THAT USE IT ILLEGALLY AND UNCONSTITUTIONALLY.


SENATE BILL 356Q15lr1839CF 5lr1391


By: Senator McFadden (By Request –Baltimore City Administration)Introduced and read first time: February 6, 2015

Assigned to: Budget and Taxation

A BILL ENTITLEDAN ACT concerning

Property Tax –Exemption –Low Income Housing –Ownership by Limited Liability Company FOR the purpose of providing an exemption, under certain circumstances, from property tax for certain real property if, under certain circumstances, the owner of the real property is a certain limited liability company or is a certain limited partnership whose managing general partner is a certain limited liability company; providing that the real property may be exempt from property tax only under certain circumstances; making conforming changes; providing for the application of this Act; and generally relating to a property tax exemption for certain housing for low income families.

BY repealing and reenacting, with amendments,12Article –Tax –Property Section 7–503 Annotated Code of Maryland (2012 Replacement Volume and 2014 Supplement) SECTION 1. BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF MARYLAND, That the Laws of Maryland read as follows:

Article –Tax –Property197–503.20(a)(1)In this subsection, “essential service facilities” includes dining halls, community rooms, and infirmaries.(2)Real property that meets the requirements of subsection (b) of this 23section is not subject to property tax if the owner of the real property is:


(i)1.A.a person who meets the ownership requirements of 1§ 7–202 of this title;2B.a nonprofit corporation that is exempt from income tax under § 10–104 of the Tax –General Article; [or]C.A LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY THAT IS WHOLLY OWNED BY A NONPROFITCORPORATION THAT IS EXEMPT FROM INCOME TAX UNDER §10–104(2)OF THE TAX –GENERAL ARTICLE;OR7D.a nonprofit housing corporation as defined in § 12–104(b) of the Housing and Community Development Article; and engaged solely in constructing, operating, or managing rental housing and other related essential service facilities that:are substantially completed or substantially rehabilitated on and after July 1, 1973, or, in Montgomery County, substantially completed or substantially rehabilitated on and after January 1, 1968;are partially or totally financed under a government program that provides housing for low income families; and are operated on a nonprofit basis with the revenues from the operation of the housing and facilities controlled under the government program in order not to produce any net income; or (ii)1.a limited partnership whose managing general partner is:a housing authority as defined in § 12–101 of the Housing and Community Development Article; [or] a nonprofit corporation that is exempt from income tax under § 10–104(2) of the Tax –General Article; A LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY THAT IS WHOLLY OWNED BY A NON PROFIT CORPORATION THAT IS EXEMPT FROM INCOME TAX UNDER §10–104(2)OF THE TAX –GENERAL ARTICLE;or a for profit corporation in which 100% of the stock is owned by a nonprofit corporation that is exempt from income tax under § 10–104(2) of the Tax –General Article; and302.engaged in the operation, construction, or management of 31a qualified low income housing project as defined in the Internal Revenue Code.

________________________________________
People still pretending that Obama is doing a great job and is moving left at the end of his time in office are either uninformed or working as Clinton Wall Street neo-liberals.  Obama is completely privatizing public housing and redesigned the Federal Housing and Urban Development to corporate and affluent development.  Keep in mind why HUD was created and it is tied to Constitutional equal opportunity and access housing and all the laws with it. 

THESE LAWS HAVE NOT CHANGED----OBAMA AND STATE POLITICIANS ARE SIMPLY IGNORING THESE LAWS.

Republican voters wanting an end to public housing may think this is fine-----they do care about the excessive corporate subsidy and the higher taxes it brings to working and middle-class Baltimore residents.  So, if you do not care about low-income people---you should care about this source of ever-higher taxes.


This article is great because it shows the hypocracy of Clinton Wall Street neo-liberals as they chant all of this is the Tea Party or Koch Brother's fault. 

IT IS BEING DONE BY CLINTON WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS.  TAG TEAM FOR GLOBAL CORPORATE WEALTH AND PROFIT.


I am going to venture a guess that these Baltimore City pols are tied to insider pay-to-play in these illegal real estate deals-----the same is well-documented in other cities.  Baltimore simply does not have the media or academic institutions holding power accountable.

You see below an article written in California highlighting Maxine Waters doing just as McFadden and Kurt Anderson et al are doing in Baltimore.  Waters was listed with Pelosi and Ben Cardin for Congressional Insider Trading with her husband's connection to the banks profiting from these deals.  Who interned with Maxine Waters?  Heather Mizeur----Clinton neo-liberal from Maryland running as the progressive for Governor of Maryland.


Privatizing public housing--Obama's "Shock Doctrine" march to the right of Bush


by: Paul Rosenberg Sat May 22, 2010 at 12:00
[Note]: This was not a diary I had planned for today The Bush Administration jumped on Katrina as an opportunity to advance their privatization agenda, with two major targets: public schools and public housing.  As Open Left's focus on education has shown (see Jeff's regular Sunday "Left Ed" diaries at 4 PM), Obama's education agenda has actually expanded Bush's attack on public education. Now, as David Kaib highlights in quick hits, Obama is attack public housing as well.

There is a need for money to invest in public housing, and it would have been a perfect fit within a decently-conceived stimulus package.
 But of course, there wasn't room for it because of all the tax cuts and its deliberate small size.  So now, privatization is the answer, as if the private housing market hadn't already done enough damage to last the rest of the century. David links to a Dkos diary by George Lakoff. "Below the Radar: HUD is Trying to Privatize and Mortgage Off All of America's Public Housing"  which begins thus:

The Obama Administration's move to the right is about to give conservatives a victory they could not have anticipated, even under Bush. HUD, under Obama, submitted legislation called PETRA to Congress that would result in the privatization of all public housing in America. The new owners would charge ten percent above market rates to impoverished tenants, money that would be mostly paid by the US government (you and me, the taxpayers). To maintain the property, the new owners would take out a mortgage for building repair and maintenance (like a home equity loan), with no cap on interest rates.


With rents set above market rates, the mortgage risk would be attractive to banks. Either they make a huge profit on the mortgages paid for by the government. Or if the government lowers what it will pay for rents, the property goes into foreclosure. The banks get it and can sell it off to developers.

Sooner or later, the housing budget will be cut back and such foreclosures will happen. The structure of the proposal and the realities of Washington make it a virtual certainty.

The banks and developers make a fortune, with the taxpayers paying for it. The public loses its public housing property. The impoverished tenants lose their apartments, or have their rents go way up if they are forced into the private market. Homelessness increases. Government gets smaller. The banks and developers win. It is a Bank Bonanza! The poor and the public lose.

And a precedent is set. The government can privatize any public property: Schools, libraries, national parks, federal buildings - just as has begun to happen in California, where the right-wing governor has started to auction off state property and has even suggested selling off the Supreme Court building.

The rich will get richer, the poor and public get poorer. And the very idea of the public good withers.

And Lakoff quotes from PETRA the statement that bill's intent is to:

provide the opportunity for public housing agencies and private owners to convert from current forms of rental assistance under a variety of programs to long-term,  property-based contracts that will enhance market-based discipline and enable owners to sustain operations and leverage private financing to address immediate and long-term capital needs and implement energy-efficiency improvements. Paul Rosenberg :: Privatizing public housing--Obama's "Shock Doctrine" march to the right of Bush The Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness (LACEHH) has a blog with a fact sheet, and a 2-part sign-on letter to Housing Secretary Donovan (Part 1,  Part 2).  In its "background" section, the fact sheet explains: -Public Housing is owned and operated by the government, namely the local Public Housing Authority (PHA) through a contract with HUD. - Public Housing Authorities have been lobbying for 100% disposition of Public Housing.  As a result, HUD approved requests for several cities to completely eliminate their Public Housing stock.  As a result, the City of Atlanta, GA and the City of San Diego, CA have completely eliminated their public housing stock.

- HUD estimates a $24 billion funding shortfall for capital improvements on Public Housing.  Although Congress did provide $4 billion in stimulus money in FY2010 for Public Housing capital improvements, this is just a small amount needed according to their estimates.

- Based on their powerpoint, HUD anticipates leveraging $7.5 billion in one year from private banks and other private funding under the Transforming Rental Assistance Program.

And in its "Solutions" section it says:

-  The obvious solution to fixing up Public Housing is to provide funding directly through appropriations.  It makes more sense for this to be a jobs program which would put contractors and skilled tenants to work through a direct appropriation, rather than paying interest to banks for decades and jeoporadizing our public housing stock. - Congress appropriated $4 billion in stimulus funds this year for Public Housing capital improvements.  If Congress committed to an additional $4 billion for 5 more years, we would have the funding necessary to make these improvements.

In addition to linking to LACEHH's blog, Lakoff's diary concludes with the following plea and contact information:

Stop PETRA. This is urgent. There is a hearing next Tuesday, May 25, before the House Financial Services Committee and the Subcommittee on Housing, organized by Rep. Maxine Waters.  Phone: 202-225-2201. Fax: 202-225-7854. To write to the committee:
http://financialservices.house.gov/...

Write to your Congressperson now.

If you want to sign a petition, go to:
http://www.gopetition.com/...

Here is a letter from the National Association of HUD Tenants:
http://www.saveourhomes.org/...

While Rand Paul, Glenn Beck and the Tea Baggers spread their loony-tune libertatian ideology that has never worked anywhere in the world, the Obama Administration is hard at work trying to implement the "pragmatic" version, with greater professionalism and a much lower profile than the Bush Administration could ever have managed.  It's our job to stop them dead in their tracks.

Maxine Waters is not a woman to be trifled with.  This is a fight we can win if we can draw enough attention to it. Please help spread the word.

_________________________________________

Who is doing the same real estate policies as we see in Baltimore-----OH, LOOK IT'S CHINA.

China is indeed a very Wall Street neo-liberal nation now and adopts all this Wall Street investment policy.  Who doesn't do this?  First world developed nations.

The fact that Baltimore seeks to pass laws unique to Baltimore and all of it deals with great public loss-----why are Maryland Assembly pols not from Baltimore voting for these policies?  To get Baltimore pols to back their policies.  China is already third world autocratic so they simply do what they want----like Baltimore. 

Immigrants from Asian nations think this is business as usual----


THE RICH DO WHAT THEY WANT IN THIRD WORLD NATIONS AFTER ALL.

SAT Releases Tax Exemptions for Public Housing



Posted on September 29, 2010 by China Briefing Sept. 29 – The State Administration of Taxation announced in a statement dated Monday that it was exempting taxes on the use of urban land where the land is developed for public housing.

The steps will be a boost for companies involved in the construction and management of public housing projects.


The tax authorities also said they would stop levying stamp duties for the construction of public housing and will waive both taxes and stamp duties in cases where a property-management company buys apartments for use as public housing.

The tax incentives are scheduled to remain in effect for three years, the statement said.

Earlier this month, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao called for an increase in low-income housing as the government stepped up its efforts to cool skyrocketing housing prices, fearing a bubble could destabilize the market, drag the economy down, and increase social instability.




_______________________________________

A regular fixture at the Maryland Assembly lobbying for funds is another Johns Hopkins development 'non-profit'.....you know, like all development corporations are not corporations and their promotion arms are not part of this corporation. They were trying to get people to volunteer to market what is development corporations and their housing projects. It is ridiculous how all of what are corporations operate not only without paying taxes, but receiving all of the public housing funding that would go to a functioning Baltimore HUD.

Not only is Baltimore HUD moving to Prince Georges with a new building paid for from the Wall Street subprime mortgage settlement from which victims of fraud received NOTHING.....but organizations like the one below are receiving not only subprime settlement money under the guise of promoting low-income housing, but they get all kinds of tax credits associated with the developments for which they work.

They organized a ballroom presentation for a network of developers and their low-income housing developments as a non-profit.  Baltimore uses groups like this as Baltimore HUD low-income housing.  Rather than simply abiding by Enterprise Zone Federal funding guidelines and include low-income housing right in Enterprise Zone developments-----they are using groups like Community Development Network of Maryland to steer people to these low-income developments somewhere else in Maryland.


The CDNM is simply an extension of Homewood Development Corporation that is now hawking real estate and developments across Maryland and getting all kinds of tax credits and state and city funding to do it.  Remember, if all of Baltimore's Enterprise Zones for two decades had actually included all the low-income housing required-----we would have nicely income-integrated communities coming along.  Rather, low-income are being sent out to surrounding suburbs around the state for low-income housing owned by big investment firms. CDNM may do small local events---but their modus operandus is marketing arm of a Homewood Development Corporation. 

Look who is there-----Maggie McIntosh, Mary Washington, and Odette Ramos----Johns Hopkins pols and staff.


JOHNS HOPKINS CONTROLS ALL ----AND THEIR POLS ARE DEVOTED! ALL OF THESE TAX BREAKS AND CREDITS WE ARE SEEING FROM MARYLAND ASSEMBLY AND BALTIMORE CITY HALL ALMOST ALL END UP WITH A HOPKINS BUSINESS.


Community Development Network of Maryland
CDN is a membership organization whose sole purpose is to promote, strengthen and advocate for Maryland's community development industry.

This is what community building looks like



Posted on October 21, 2014

When local leaders and elected officials gathered to kick-off Community Development Week at GHCC’s 29th Street Community Center on October 20, what they witnessed was community building in action. Delegates Maggie McIntosh and Mary Washington were among the group that toured the Center and met many of the young families who come every week to participate in a Sing-Along Playgroup for babies and toddlers.

“I think the center means a lot for young families and I hope all of them stay in the city because of it,” said Odette Ramos, who coordinates the playgroup as well as leads the Community Development Network of Maryland.

The event received some fantastic coverage in The Baltimore Sun, citing the 29th Street Community Center as an excellent example of how GHCC successfully strengthens neighborhoods. Take a look:

‘Not just buildings': Center helps develop community


Below you see an example of what developers hiring CDNM would get for simply building homes in Maryland.  Don't forget the green tax credits and property tax exclusions for simply building low-income homes.  Know who would build low-income homes with no incentives on the cheap?

BALTIMORE SMALL BUSINESSES.  Instead, they will be subcontractors to subcontractors.


So, when Larry Hogan and Clinton neo-liberals like O'Malley/Brown say we have to be 'business-friendly' with all of what corporations get already------watch out, somebody has to pay the taxes to support this corporate subsidy but in Baltimore who pays is gerry-mandered to the max and it is all illegal.


Low-Income Housing Tax Credit

From Wikipedia




The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC - often pronounced "lie-tech", Housing Credit) is a dollar-for-dollar tax credit in the United States for affordable housing investments. It was created under the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) that gives incentives for the utilization of private equity in the development of affordable housing aimed at low-income Americans. LIHTC accounts for the majority - approximately 90 percent - of all affordable rental housing created in the United States today.[1] As the maximum rent that can be charged is based upon the Area Median Income ("AMI"), LIHTC housing remains unaffordable to many low-income (<30% AMI) renters. The credits are also commonly called Section 42 credits in reference to the applicable section of the Internal Revenue Code. The tax credits are more attractive than tax deductions as they provide a dollar-for-dollar reduction in a taxpayer's federal income tax, whereas a tax deduction only provides a reduction in taxable income. The "passive loss rules" and similar tax changes made by TRA86 greatly reduced the value of tax credits and deductions to individual taxpayers. As a result, almost all investors in LIHTC projects are corporations.


___________________________________________

The Maryland Assembly Legislative policy services reported in committee briefings that Enterprise Zone tax credits do not achieve any of the goals for which these credits are meant.  Baltimore media and everyone shouts that Enterprise Zone tax credits do not meet their goals.  They have been shouting this for two decades in Baltimore -----it's all documented----and yet every year these hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits are handed out.  It is simply corporate subsidy for no reason and it is fraud and public malfeasance because everyone knows contracts are being ignored.

I whispered briefly to a young Delegate to the Assembly who by the way made some great attempts at getting rid of a few corporate tax credit---I didn't get his name----GET RID OF THE ENTERPRISE ZONE TAX CREDITS to which his eyes opened wide and said -----Nooooooo!

If a business will not locate to a city without these deals---you do not want that business.  If the risk is too great for that national or global corporation to come to Baltimore ----then we do not want them.  We want small and regional businesses that already really want to open and thrive in Baltimore.

These Enterprise Zone tax breaks are heading to court as we sue for misappropriation.


Business Tax Credits | Enterprise Zone Tax Credit | Maryland

...
business.maryland.gov/.../enterprise-zone-tax-credit

The Maryland business tax credit for Enterprise Zones provides a business incentive by offering income tax credits in return ... Programs for Economic Development ...


0 Comments

February 25th, 2015

2/25/2015

0 Comments

 
My blogs highlight labor and justice issues and the groups that I feel should be backing issues people-friendly.  The Democratic base of labor and justice is 80% of the Democratic Party but as I state, Clinton Wall Street neo-liberals of less than 20% control the Democratic Party.  This is the case in Maryland as the Democratic Party struggles with pols that serve as neo-conservatives as well.  Tax policy is one of the legs to economic stability and is key to labor and justice.  When I sit in Maryland Assembly meetings all I hear is how to make corporations want to move to Maryland and that is the only policy stance spoken of in the House of Delegates and Senate.  Black pols or women pols do not have to vote for labor and justice just because they are black or women-----they should do so because they are in voting districts heavily labor and justice.  The harshest critics of tax policy that benefits seniors and the poor are from Prince Georges and Baltimore whether black or white.

GLOBAL CORPORATE RULE WITH SUSPENDED US RULE OF LAW AND CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS WILL NOT LOOK PRETTY FOR ANY US CITIZEN----BUT WOMEN AND PEOPLE OF COLOR WILL BE HURT MOST.  IF YOU THINK YOU ARE RICH TODAY----YOU OR YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN MOST LIKELY WILL BE THE 90% OF AMERICANS IMPOVERISHED BY THESE THIRD WORLD POLICIES.


The tax policy conversations happening this week outside of the Maryland Tax Policy Commission geared strictly to reforming corporate taxes ranged from taxes on bottled water-----ever higher taxes on cigarettes----and taxes on seniors and their retirements.  Maryland has a 6% tax on bottled water----one of
a few states to do this.  This brings the $ few tens of millions of dollars to state Treasury not paid by the hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate tax credits and breaks.  When a testimony describing how Baltimore City residents need bottled water because Johns Hopkins moved all the city's money over these few decades to build a global corporation rather than rebuild the water and waste infrastructure------Baltimore City schools have to use bottled water because water pipes are leaded-----it was Mary Washington from Baltimore and two Prince Georges Delegates that questioned the need to reduce or remove this ridiculous tax on water.  The Prince Georges Delegate went so far to say -----'I am from Prince Georges not Baltimore'.  To support such a tax when no state is doing so and the need for cost savings is keen for Maryland's low-income is not to be understood.

WE NEED DEMOCRATIC VOTERS OF COLOR TO LOOK CLOSELY AT WHO THEY ARE SENDING TO THE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY----YOU ARE A HUGE VOTING BLOCK IN MARYLAND AND YOU ARE ELECTING POLS THAT ACT LIKE REPUBLICANS.

You may think this one issue is a small one----but it is a window at how regressive Maryland taxation has become and they plan to become more so.

Repeal water tax


Md. may not tax the rain, but it does tax the water. As Gov. Larry Hogan settles into office, he faces the impressive challenge of balancing Maryland's budget while making good on his pledge to cut taxes for residents. Sugar Free Kids Maryland, the state's leading voice in the fight against teen diabetes and childhood obesity, has a solution that may make this challenge a little easier and the rest of us a little healthier.

Our diverse coalition of groups is supporting legislation in this year's session of the Maryland General Assembly that would repeal the state's 6 percent sales tax on bottled water. Maryland is one of only four states that taxes bottled water at a higher rate than other essential food and drinks, like bread and milk. Water, in all its forms, is the most essential of them all.

While Sugar Free Kids recognizes that tap water is the safest and most affordable form of water, we also know that for a variety of reasons, many Marylanders choose bottled water as their primary source of drinking water. For families on the go, bottled water is the often the only form available.
There is no doubt that the rates of chronic diseases related to unhealthy lifestyles among both children and adults have grown so dramatically that they must be considered public health epidemics. Children as young as 10 years old are being diagnosed with high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and other diseases previously believed to be reserved for adulthood. At this rate, their generation will, for the first time in history, have shorter life spans than their parents. That's a bleak and frightening outlook for all Marylanders.

Drinking just one eight-ounce sugary drink a day increases a child's odds of becoming obese by 60 percent. Replacing that drink with water from the tap or bottle would not just reduce the risks of these diseases but add years to their lives.

Making bottled water more affordable for adults and children would not only save Marylanders money, it would also encourage consumption of water — a much healthier alternative to sodas, fruit juices, Gatorade and other sugary drinks, which are the main contributors to the epidemics of type 2 diabetes and childhood obesity.

We know from talking to Maryland families that price really does matter when it comes to the food and drinks that we consume. For instance, a woman on a fixed budget from Baltimore City shared with us how she calculates sales tax on all purchases and how removing the tax will help her make healthier choices for her family. She's not alone. This common sense, evidence-based measure will make the healthiest choice more affordable for all Maryland families.

Marylanders like this solution, too. A recent poll conducted by OpinionWorks found that nearly 80 percent of Marylanders from all parties, backgrounds and areas support making bottled water sales tax-free; 61 percent of Marylanders polled "strongly" support it.

Removing this broad-based tax would cost Maryland coffers $12 million to $15 million a year, which is less than 0.1 percent of the state's annual operating budget. The small investments we make today in the long-term health of our children will reap economic and health benefits for decades to come.

Parents responsible for supplying the soccer team with drinks at halftime will have a much easier decision making the healthier choice, and office managers responsible for supplying drinks for the big meeting will also be more apt to make the healthier choice.

We are asking Governor Hogan to take a strong long look at our bipartisan proposal — a tax cut with significant public support and benefits for the public health. It offers a win-win for all Marylanders, with benefits that would help both our pocketbooks and our waistlines.

Making healthy choices easier and more affordable is within our grasp. For Governor Hogan and members of the General Assembly who want to work together to promote healthier Maryland families, removing tax on bottled water is a proposition they can't afford to refuse.

Robi Rawl is the executive director of Sugar Free Kids Maryland, a statewide coalition working to educate Marylanders about childhood obesity and teen diabetes and the roles that sugary drinks play in these diseases. Her e-mail address is rrawl@medchi.org.

___________________________________________
People might think it odd for a progressive labor and justice activist to come out against YET ANOTHER RISE in taxation of tobacco----this time so broad and expensive as to seriously impede even casual use of tobacco.  Now, raising taxes on cigarettes has indeed made it too expensive for some groups to buy it and sales have no doubt dropped.  The question now as they go higher and higher with taxation-----WHAT ARE THESE TAXES GOING TOWARDS?

I tried to explain to Maryland Health Initiative head DeMarco that cigarette corporations have simply created a lower cost cigarette that studies show is MORE HARMFUL than regular cigarettes to the health of smokers.  Blended cigarettes are now where smokers who cannot afford cigarettes are going.  The stats that show a decline in the number of people coming for health issues regarding smoking could follow the health reform in Maryland that has denied Maryland citizens without the right insurance access to cancer and smoking disease vector health care.  Lung cancer is indeed one of the cancers taken off of Affordable Care Act funding and State health system funding.
So, if health reformers like Johns Hopkins for which Maryland Health Initiative works are denying health coverage for many people most likely to have smoking health issues----where are all of these ever-rising taxes going?

Both Medicare and Medicaid will no longer cover many cancer treatments.  They highlight that they will pay for preventative checkups for lung cancer-----but you will need private health coverage to access the care.  Most people smoking these days are going to fall into Bronze or Medicaid level coverage so will not have lung cancer coverage.  This is why the rate of people coming for lung ailments will fall----THEY CANNOT ACCESS CARE. 

This over-kill of taxation is simply a regressive tax at this point and we know these smoking taxes are not going where they are supposed to.  I thank one testimony for highlighting that the anti-lung cancer funds are being diverted......probably to Johns Hopkins' profit.



Will Medicare cover costs for lung cancer?

by kilian » Wed Apr 11, 2012 2:41 am

It depends on what kind of coverage he has. If his current insurance is through his employer it will pay first, then Medicare (if he has both Part A and Part B). If he just turned 65 and is buying his own individual insurance, he'll want to look into a Medicare supplement plan to go with his Medicare Part A and Part B. If he does not have employer insurance coverage he has a limited amount of time when he can sign up for a Medicare supplement plan (initial enrollment period) without consideration of previous conditions. Don't cancel any insurance know but he needs to find out for sure how his current coverage works with Medicare and make sure he doesn't miss an important sign up period to get a Medicare supplement plan without underwriting.
Medicare has a brochure on who pays first and explains how insurance plans work with Medicare - link can be found below.



When I asked DeMarco about what Johns Hopkins was doing to keep blended tobacco products off the shelves because they are more harmful than cigarettes-----no research against the cigarette corporations----just more and more taxation.

The idea of health reform giving health industry a bolus of money to do as they wish and then to have them dictating lifestyle for coverage is not what WE THE PEOPLE is about.  Everything we do causes a health problem-----we breath air from corporate pollution that these Maryland Assembly and Johns Hopkins advocates say nothing about.  Education is the key to healthy lifestyle-----making healthy food and water readily available is good policy----

TAXING PEOPLE TO DEATH AND USING THE MONEY ELSEWHERE IS PROFITEERING.


  Where Tobacco Settlement Funds Really Went July 22 ABC News

When the tobacco companies agreed to pay a $200 billion settlement to states for medical costs due to smoking, and to help prevent kids from starting, it was a legal victory against "Big Tobacco."

"We need to finish this job and move on with saving children's lives," Christine Gregoire, the Washington State Attorney General, said after the settlement was announced three years ago. "This is not about the money … We are getting this industry off the backs of our kids."

Gregoire was not alone in that declaration. At the time, attorneys general from around the nation vowed to use the funds to fight teen smoking. But once the settlement money landed in state coffers, that wasn't always the case. While some states have spent the money on programs to fight teen smoking, others went on a spending spree.

Today four major anti-smoking groups say states are squandering billions of dollars that was supposed to be used to keep children and teenagers away from cigarettes. Because of state budget shortfalls, states are cutting already under-funded tobacco prevention programs by $102.3 million, or 13 percent, according to a report issued today by the American Lung Association, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

The groups say that these budget reductions compound another problem: few states were keeping their promise to use tobacco settlement funds for tobacco prevention programs.

A Feeding Frenzy

In the state of New York, for example, Niagara County spent $700,000 in tobacco settlement funds for a sprinkler system at a public golf course. The county also spent $24 million for a county jail and office building.

In Wrangell, Alaska, $3.5 million of the tobacco settlement money was used to renovate shipping docks.

In Los Angeles, former Mayor Richard Riordan proposed using $100 million in tobacco money to defend cops who are accused of planting drugs and guns on suspects. He was turned down.

But these are just some examples of the feeding frenzy that has happened over the tobacco money. Now, anti-smoking groups are saying the public has been duped.

"The states' failure to use these funds to actually protect our children is unconscionable," said Matt Myers, executive vice president and general counsel of the National Center for Tobacco Free Kids, a Washington-based anti-tobacco lobbying group. States that have decided to divert those funds are already seeing increased smoking rates among children, he said.

N.C. Tobacco Farmers Benefit

North Carolina gave $200,000 in tobacco money to the Carolina Horse Park, an equestrian center near Pinehurst, N.C. The center defends the grant, saying it will boost economic development. But local taxpayer groups think the allocation was wasteful.

"It's pretty much people wear funny hats and drink and eat, [and] watch horses go around," said Don Carrington, a member of the John Locke Foundation, a nonprofit think tank based in Raleigh, N.C.

"It's amazing we would use the tobacco settlement to support an operation like that. It should not be publicly funded," Carrington said.

The strangest twist: Money that was pledged to keep kids from smoking even went to tobacco farmers.

North Carolina spent $42 million of the settlement funds to market tobacco and modernize the tobacco curing process.

___________________________________________

Tax relief for seniors is a common theme and as a senior I like this.  Maryland of course works hard to throw retirements and pensions under the bus for repeated Wall Street losses each economic crash and private sector pensions are feeling heavy losses as people are forced by poverty to cash them in with tax penalty.  Remember how I showed how people are being allowed to subprime Disability just for the sake of forcing them to cut their Social Security payments in half in many cases.  Now, because of the deliberate public policy to keep unemployment high and retirement fraud without justice-----seniors are having to take the next step and fight the early cash-in of pensions.  Remember, forcing public sector employees to retire is big right now and roll-overs are crazy.

The theme for testimony for seniors was that many retirees are leaving the state because of taxes and fees geared towards retirements and retirement communities.

The testimony for tax reduction on retirement focused squarely on rollovers which is indeed needed----but as was made clear-----all pensions are experiencing these hefty taxes and roll-overs are generally made by more affluent wage earners.  So, all seniors are experiencing a fleecing with taxes as they are forced to seek money from personal savings but the only solutions being brought forward are for individual kinds of pensions----

WE NEED BROAD INCLUSION IN ENDING THESE PENSION TAXES IN THE STATE.



Maryland is basically forcing its public sector employees into retirements and in other cases throwing public pensions into 401Ks and all of this comes with tax burden on citizens because of Maryland Assembly actions.  So far------Maryland Assembly will pass the laws to cut----but do not want to help protect Maryland citizens from tax losses.


RECOVER A BILLION DOLLARS IN STATE OUTSOURCING OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND WORKS PROJECT FRAUD AND PAY FOR IT WITH THAT REVENUE.


IRS SAFE HARBOR EXPLANATION

– Rev Dec 20121of 6 SPECIAL TAX NOTICE REGARDING YOUR ROLLOVER OPTIONS


You are receiving this notice because all or a portion of a payment you are receiving from the Maryland State Retirement and Pension System of Maryland (the "Plan") is eligible to be rolled over to an IRA or an employer plan. This notice is intended to help you decide whether to do such a rollover.


GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT ROLLOVERS How can a rollover affect my taxes? You will be taxed on a payment from the Plan if you do not roll it over. If you are under age 59 ½ and do not do a rollover, you will also have to pay a 10% additional income tax on early distributions (unless an exception applies). If you do a rollover to a traditional IRA or an eligible employer plan, you will not have to pay tax until you receive payments later from the IRA or plan, and the 10% additional income tax will not apply if those payments are made after you are age 59 ½ (or if an exception applies).

| IRS SAFE HARBOR EXPLANATION – Rev Dec 20122of 6 If you do a rollover to a Roth IRA, you will be taxed on the amount rolled over (reduced by any after-tax amount). However, if you are under age 59 ½ at the time of the rollover, the 10% additional income tax will not apply. See the section below titled "If you roll over your payment to a Roth IRA" for more details.

___________________________________

Teachers have been being furloughed now for several years especially in Baltimore.  Mary Pat Clarke famously told me-----they weren't fired, they chose to leave.  Well, with conditions getting more hostile in the workplace and wages dropping----Mary Pat needs to think what 'forced out' means.

O'Malley pretended to save public jobs while being the biggest public private privatizer of public sector jobs.  Each time workers are laid off or unions are busted and pensions are forced into turnover.  Well, most of those people do not find new jobs and they are forced to use their pensions-----ergo, they pay early cash-in taxes.

This is happening all over the country and it only has to do with small government and starving government coffers with fraud and government corruption.  The Federal government fleeced of tens of trillions of dollars it is not recovering----states fleeced of as much as $10 billion----a quarter of the state budget ------most likely lost to fraud and misappropriation.  So, these job cuts are not being done for lack of money----they are eliminating all efforts to rebuild Rule of Law and public justice by defunding the staff to do this.


If you are a small government person you may not care about government employees getting their pensions or wages---but remember, the same thing is happening to your Medicare and Social Security so if you allow one group to be fleeced of contracted benefits it will come back to you. 

STAND UP FOR ALL RETIREMENT INVESTMENTS AND SAVINGS NOW BEING FLEECED OFTEN ILLEGALLY!


As people point out----Maryland has a crisis of poverty----people are being made too poor to consume which is what creates the stagnant economy.  That's OK say Maryland's rich----we are going overseas for our consumers anyway!

CUTTING GOVERNMENT 2 GOP governors offer employee buyouts
 

Media Sources //
Sunday, 22 February 2015 00:36 //



Republican governors in two states -- Maryland and Tennessee -- are offering voluntary employee-buyout programs as a way to reduce government beyond furloughs and cutting programs.

In Maryland, newly elected Gov. Larry Hogan is offering state employees in agencies in the executive branch a lump sum payment of $15,000, according to a letter dated Wednesday. They also would receive an additional $200 for each year of service.



The program is part of Hogan's balanced budget plan that was released last month and closed a budget shortfall of about $750 million.

"The goal of the program is to reduce the size of the state workforce by allowing employees to elect to voluntarily leave state service," David Brinkley, Hogan's budget secretary, wrote in the letter.

He also said that closing the shortfall “required some very tough decisions” but that the budget still managed to be structurally balanced without eliminating agencies and programs, imposing furloughs or eliminating filled state positions.

___________________________________________

The citizens of Maryland need to wake up to the growing movement of all revenue sources coming from the working and middle-class and the end of Constitutionally guaranteed social programs.  We have protections in the Federal and State Constitutions to protect against egregious taxation and directing tax burden to individual groups.

Baltimore is the only county in Maryland with tax policy specifically violation this Maryland State Constitutional protection.  Its tax policy is so geared to protecting corporations and the rich ----so surgical to protect certain communities and kinds of citizens that it is clearly illegal.

Tax policy looking like an overly-gerrymandered election district SPELLS THIRD WORLD POLICY.  People may have been fine with it when it protected their community-----but tax policy is becoming so regressive that taxes, fines, and fees directed at the poor and middle-class now make up the bulk of any revenue collection and then all that goes to corporate subsidy to 'attract corporations to Maryland for jobs, jobs, jobs'.  The most common statement----and these Delegates and Senators say it on queue------

MARYLAND HAS TO BE MADE A COMPETITIVE STATE-----OUR STATE ECONOMIC ENGINE-----OUR ECONOMIC ZONES.

This is all global corporate tribunal speak------Maryland is a state the could have a healthy economy if it was domestic and supplied for the needs of fully employed Maryland citizens.  They are lying when they say all of this 'business-friendly' policy is about Maryland citizens.  Small businesses will not thrive with what is coming. 

STOP THE GROUP GLOBAL CORPORATE TALKING POINTS AND WORK FOR THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND!



Art. 15. That the levying of taxes by the poll is grievous and oppressive, and ought to be prohibited; that paupers ought not to be assessed for the support of the government; that the General Assembly shall, by uniform rules, provide for the separate assessment, classification and sub-classification of land, improvements on land and personal property, as it may deem proper; and all taxes thereafter provided to be levied by the State for the support of the general State Government, and by the Counties and by the City of Baltimore for their respective purposes, shall be uniform within each class or sub-class of land, improvements on land and personal property which the respective taxing powers may have directed to be subjected to the tax levy; yet fines, duties or taxes may properly and justly be imposed, or laid with a political view for the good government and benefit of the community (amended by Chapter 390, Acts of 1914, ratified Nov. 2, 1915; Chapter 64, Acts of 1960, ratified Nov. 8, 1960).



I showed the headline of how property taxes will be effected by leveraged bond deals-----today I show the FLUSH TAX, RAIN TAX, and the GAS TAX.  If you read headlines from national and state media they all call Maryland progressive for taxation because O'Malley is running for President in 2016 as a Democrat.  They tout the slight raise of income tax on higher level taxpayers who probably do not pay taxes anyway because tax collection is not audited in Maryland for the most part.

This kind of tax policy is not Democratic.  Try as they may----these tax increases are not protecting wages or social programs-----all of those are being fleeced with fraud.  This is purely a mechanism to move more wealth to the top and it is becoming worse and worse in Maryland.
 

Republicans work to make the rich richer------not Democrats!


In Baltimore fines and fees are now added to high property taxes and service fees to cover the amount of corporate subsidy and tax evasion that is breath-taking.  Hogan will pretend to lower some of these taxes on the public----but he is looking squarely at more corporate tax reduction and someone has to provide the revenue!



Friday, March 22, 2013


  Your 86 percent Gas-Tax Increase


By Blair Lee My Maryland ---The Gazette
Blair Lee



We almost made it. We almost got through a General Assembly session without another Martin O'Malley tax increase. But then, at the last moment, O'Malley came out with a new tax that's larger than any of the other 32 tax hikes he's put into law during his seven-year tenure.

O'Malley's bill, as amended by the House Ways and Means Committee, would hike the state's gas tax from 23.5 cents per gallon to 43.7 cents per gallon by July 2016, an 86 percent increase. It also ties our gas tax to inflation, so it will now automatically increase without any legislative action or blame.

Here's why O'Malley's gas tax stinks;

1. Regressive

Once again Maryland's “progressive” lawmakers slam the poor. A gas tax hits household budgets, immediately cutting into grocery and medical necessities while penalizing low-income motorists driving old gas guzzlers more than yuppies driving hybrid Priuses.

2. Hurts Retailers

Thanks to O'Malley's prior tax increases, the cost of tobacco, alcohol and many other items is greater in Maryland than in neighboring states. Now Maryland's gasoline tax will become the highest in the region and fifth highest in the nation.

Shoppers aren't stupid, especially during hard times. They'll compare Maryland's 43.7 cents of tax on gas to Virginia's (10.5 cents), Delaware's (23 cents), Washington, D.C.'s (23.5 cents), Pennsylvania's (32.3 cents) and West Virginia's (34.7 cents).

They're already crossing state lines to buy cigarettes and booze. Now, they'll fill up their tank, too, and buy their groceries and other household goods while they're there.

Maryland is a small state within easy reach of its neighbors. O'Malley's gas tax is going to kill retailers located near the state's borders.

3. No “Lockbox”

All our gas taxes, vehicle registration and license fees, etc., go into a special fund (the Transportation Trust Fund), not the state's general fund.

Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) revenues are dedicated to transportation spending only. But the dirty little secret of state budgeting is that, while the general fund is subject to the state constitution's balanced budget requirement, the TTF is not.

That's why state lawmakers raid the TTF to balance the general fund when revenues drop. Also, it's easier to swipe TTF money rather than actually cut state spending. O'Malley “borrowed” $1.3 billion from the TTF and now complains that the cupboard is bare.

He's promised to return $500 million to the TTF and never to raid it again. His gas-tax bill puts a “lockbox” on the TTF, but it should be called a “joke box” because it's no protection whatsoever: The governor can unlock the lockbox and swipe all the new gas-tax revenue if 60 percent of the legislature's two spending committees approve. Remember, committee membership is controlled by each chamber's presiding officer and, as we saw with the death penalty and offshore windmills, committee members can be quickly shifted until the desired vote is achieved.

In other words, the fox can't raid the chicken house, again, until the fox wants to.

The only joke bigger than the “lockbox” is the claim that Virginia's recent transportation funding increase forced Maryland lawmakers to pass a gas tax to be competitive.

If Maryland lawmakers gave a damn about business competitiveness, we'd copy Virginia's right-to-work, low-tax and business-friendly policies. Maryland's sudden concern about Virginia is just Maryland's excuse for raising another tax.

4. Spending Disparity

Currently only 28 percent of Maryland's transportation budget is spent on roads and bridges, while 46 percent is spent on mass transit, which is used by only 8.8 percent of Maryland's commuters.

Most of O'Malley's new gas tax will, likewise, go to mass transit, where riders only pay 28 percent of the operating cost in Baltimore and 58 percent in the D.C. suburbs. Also, instead of roads and bridges, we're going to build two new light-rail lines: Baltimore's Red Line ($2.5 billion) and the D.C. area's Purple Line ($2.2 billion), whose combined operating costs will be $120 million a year.

O'Malley's gas-tax bill further skews the spending disparity by eliminating the share of gas-tax revenues that's supposed to go to local governments for local roads and bridges.

According to public opinion polls, 73 percent of Maryland residents oppose a gas-tax increase. Perhaps that's because, according to Change Maryland, this will be O'Malley's 33rd tax or fee increase, adding another $800 million a year to the $2.3 billion a year we're already paying in new taxes under O'Malley.

So, will this huge, regressive, unpopular, inflation-indexed gas tax pass? Of course. You see, most of the gas-tax increase doesn't phase in until after next year's state elections; the gas tax can't be taken to voter referendum (because it's a money bill); and O'Malley and the legislative leaders are busy buying off Baltimore and Prince George's lawmakers with spending handouts.

Baltimore city is trading its gas-tax votes for $20 million a year for the next 30 years in state school construction funds. Prince George's is trading for a $1 billion state-funded hospital. And Montgomery's lawmakers are voting for the gas tax, which will hit their county hardest, because it's the right thing to do!

You see, the dummies from Montgomery honestly believe that the federal and Maryland governments will spend $4.7 billion building two light-rail projects, simultaneously. No way.

And which project do you guess will actually get built and which will get delayed, forever? Wanna make any bets?

Meanwhile, get ready to pay your 86 percent gas-tax increase.



0 Comments

February 24th, 2015

2/24/2015

0 Comments

 
For those who do not know what O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly did to the citizens of Maryland as regards taxes----and let me be clear----

NONE OF O'MALLEY'S TAX POLICY IS DEMOCRATIC----A DEMOCRAT WOULD NEVER USE TAXES LIKE THIS----IT IS NOT EVEN REPUBLICAN----IT IS SIMPLY A POL SENDING AS MUCH WEALTH TO THE TOP AS POSSIBLE.


Maryland is tops in wealth inequity in the nation because of two main factors-----massive fraud and government corruption move all wealth to the top and the tax policy allows corporations and the rich to pay nothing while the working and middle-class get taxed, feed, and fined to death.  The tax policy is not so much in law------Maryland simply does not enforce tax law and allows lots of corporate and rich tax evasion.  Well, now they want to place this dynamic in law by calling it 'business-friendly'.  They have another motive-----Trans Pacific Trade Pact seeks to allow global corporations to operate in the US as they do in the developed world and the developing world of course does not tax corporations and the rich.  America has always taxed everyone equally and corporations have always had their taxes so this move to tax repression and not progression does not meet this Constitutional rule of equal burden of taxation.



Constitutional text

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

We are not allowed to place a tax on only one corporate industry just as we cannot tax only people owning pit bulls.  Uniformity extends to people of all stripes paying to support the country.  This does not mean flat tax---progressive taxation
ties taxation to income EQUITY----it means that the rich and corporations will pay taxes to support the nation just as everyone else.  Where neo-cons and neo-liberals are taking the US is having corporations and the rich not only paying no taxes but getting the taxes we pay as corporate subsidy to profits. 

THIS DOES NOT MEET CONSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS.


GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS SAY 'WHAT CONSTITUTION'!  WE ARE WORKING WITH THE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNAL CONSTITUTION.


Below you see what O'Malley did for corporate profit-----he leveraged the bond debt in Maryland so high and tied it to property tax so that decades into the future the average Maryland citizen would foot the bill for ever rising property taxes to meet these bond payments.  Remember, the goal is to move all real estate to a few----that is what the subprime mortgage fraud was about and now this policy will supposedly 'force' the state to use property taxes to fund what will be an increasingly rising bond debt.  I will return to this bond debt goal ----for now we need to know this was done deliberately by O'Malley and Maryland Assembly and it was done strictly for corporate profit and control of real estate.

Posted at 7:17 PM ET, 01/28/2011


Maryland may need 56-percent property tax hike to cover state debt, report says

By Aaron C. Davis Washington Post

Maryland lawmakers will either have to raise property taxes by 56 percent over the next five years, or take away $1.1 billion from classrooms, police, and other core state services to cover record state borrowing, budget analysts said Friday.

The dire predictions come from a combination of bills coming due on Maryland's long-term debt, plus falling property tax revenues, which have traditionally covered the costs.

The approach Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) took to blunt years of recessionary budget problems is partly responsible, according to a report released Friday afternoon by the state's nonpartisan budget analysts.

In the last three years, O'Malley has accelerated a decade-long practice in Annapolis of shifting expenses once paid entirely with cash to the state's capital budget, which is funded with bond money repaid with interest over 15 years.

The approach allowed Maryland to increase spending on school construction, as well as to continue robust funding for Chesapeake Bay restoration, open-space and other environmental programs during the worst years of the downturn. But it will come at a cost, the report said.

Over the next five years, principal and interest payments on state debt will rise from $835 million annually to over $1.1 billion in 2016.

During the same time, state property taxes and other revenues set aside for debt are expected to shrink, from $954 million to $715 million annually, according to the report.

Save tax increases, the budget lawmakers are now preparing will be last in years in which existing property tax rates and other special revenues would cover Maryland's annual debt costs, the report said.

Beginning in 2013, $132 million from the state's general fund will be needed to cover the debt payments. The yearly cost would rise to $398 million by 2016.


Those costs would eat away at Maryland's $13-billion general fund, which pays for education, Medicaid, public safety and other costs, and is already projected to suffer from major shortfalls for most of the rest of the decade.

The report by the Department of Legislative Services said that to keep the state's operating budget whole, Maryland's current property tax rate of 11.2 cents would need to increase annually, to 17.5 cents by 2016. The rate is set on $100 of assessable base.

Maryland's increasing debt costs raise the specter that O'Malley, who in last fall's election railed against his predecessor, former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) for supporting a previous property tax increase, could be forced to make a similar move.

O'Malley spokesman Shaun Adamec said in an e-mail that he doubted the governor would go in that direction.

"Funds are allocated each year to keep the property tax rate where it is and I don't suspect we would discontinue doing so going forward."

O'Malley this year has already proposed reducing the overall size of the state's capital budget to $925 million from $1.1 billion after a commission said Maryland was too close to its state's debt limit of 8 percent of revenues.


By Aaron C. Davis  | January 28, 2011; 7:17 PM ET

_____________________________________________


Remember, the billion dollar school building deal was only done this way to have all the schools tied to this debt default into the hands of the investors----stakeholders.  O'Malley and Wall Street worked these extreme bond leveraging deals in a way that allowed Moody's and S & P state rating agencies to pretend Maryland still has a AAA bond rating.  This is the same Moody's that gave us the massive subprime mortgage fraud by pretending these loans were good. 

THE ENTIRE O'MALLEY SCHEME OF EXTREME BOND DEBT IS ILLEGAL AND IT IS PUBLIC MALFEASANCE IN A GRAND SCALE AND MARYLAND ASSEMBLY VOTED FOR IT----AS DID BALTIMORE CITY HALL IN SOME CASES.

We are talking fraud big time folks.  The Maryland Assembly deliberately placed the citizens of Maryland in harms way knowing the coming bond market crash and the FED's backing away from yet another criminal act-----manipulation of the interest rates and inflation-----is ready to implode.  It is illegal because the FED knew these actions would blow up the economy and the FED's mission is to create economic stability. 

THIS IS ALL ILLEGAL.


The FED's solo act------remember, Rule of Law demanded that the Wall Street banks be downsized by recovery of tens of trillions of dollars in financial industry fraud.  That was the solution and it would not have destroyed the economy -----the US would be on the road to recovery and not ready to crash in the deepest crash in history if Obama, Congress, and the FED not been working to enrich those at the top and empire-building.  The FED has no choice but to end its manipulations----it is $4 trillion in debt with a national debt reaching $21 trillion. 

IT IS MAXED OUT AND INTEREST RATES AND INFLATION WILL RETURN TO NORMAL AND THEN RISE FAR MORE.


As the article below says the rest of the world is ignoring the FED's criminal policies assuring 'A MAJOR CORRECTION IN THE ECONOMY' which is THUG-SPEAK for a major economic crash.

How does all of this have anything to do with property taxes?  Bond deals are tied to interest rates-----when the FEDS allows interest rates to rise----so to will the interest rates on these bonds.  The cost to the citizens of Maryland will be huge and all that cost is tied to Maryland citizens and their property taxes.  BUT THESE BONDS ARE TIED TO THE LOW INTEREST RATE you say=====remember LIBOR?  This bank fraud that stole trillions of dollars using interest rates that has never been recovered hitting Baltimore hardest because O'Malley was Mayor and through Baltimore citizens under the bus just as he is doing now to Maryland citizens.  The Maryland Assembly voted for all this so this is YOUR POL THAT VOTED FOR THIS......Baltimore had so many BOND issues last election to supersize this effect on Baltimore citizens. 

THEY REALLY WANT YOUR REAL ESTATE!


This is boring but I will get less technical soon---please scan to see the US is alone in its economic policies and none of it has anything to do with what needed to happen because of the 2008 crash.  Look who is advising Yellen for goodness sake!


Center for Financial Economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a former adviser to Fed chair Janet Yellen.

Fed's solo act gets tougher with ECB, others in stimulus mode


By Howard Schneider and Michael Flaherty

WASHINGTON Fri Jan 23, 2015 10:01am GMT



U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen (L) and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew (R) participate in Financial Stability Oversight Council open meeting at the Treasury Department in Washington January 21, 2015.

Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

(Reuters) - Federal Reserve policymakers, already struggling to assure investors that they remain on track for a mid-year interest rate rise, will find the task has just become harder with their peers in Europe and elsewhere headed in the opposite direction.

The swelling ranks of central banks cutting rates and ramping up stimulus make it more difficult and riskier for the Fed to proceed with plans to end crisis-era policies, according to Fed analysts and former staffers.

It is not unusual for central banks to be out of synch at times, but the deepening divide between the Fed and much of the rest of the world is unprecedented, heightening the risks and uncertainty surrounding the Fed's plans, economists say.

The European Central Bank's decision on Thursday to pump 60 billion euros ($68.17 billion) a month into the faltering euro zone economy just deepened the divide. The stimulus rivals the size of the quantitative easing program the Fed ended only three months ago in a sign of confidence about U.S. economic recovery.

The euro fell below $1.14 after the ECB announcement, its lowest level since July 2003, while interest rates on long term U.S. bonds continued their recent nosedive.

“The foreign outlook...has darkened. And that will make this decision - lift off, the path of interest rates thereafter, how you communicate it – harder,” said Jon Faust, director of the Center for Financial Economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a former adviser to Fed chair Janet Yellen.

“It will be doubly important for the (Fed’s policy setting committee) to communicate how it is thinking about risks flowing from abroad, because we are facing a truly unique constellation of circumstances.”

The Federal Open Market Committee meets next week, and is expected to repeat that those risks from abroad have yet to throw the U.S. recovery or their rate plans off track. U.S. central bankers have been adamant on that point over the past several months despite tumbling oil prices, ebbing global growth, and market expectations that the Fed will eventually capitulate and delay its first rate increase since 2006.

U.S. policymakers have insisted that as long as the economy continues generating jobs, growth will remain on track and inflation eventually would begin to rise towards the Fed's two percent target.

PULLING THE OTHER WAY

But next week will test whether, in fact, they are willing to swim against the current in conditions that get tougher by the week, and also if they can make their case convincingly.

The ECB is not the only one pulling in the other direction.


The Bank of Japan and a host of important secondary players - Canada, India, Turkey, China, Denmark, and Switzerland among them - have cut interest rates recently, often surprising markets and showing how unpredictable conditions have become.

The steps those banks are taking will make the mechanics of raising U.S. rates more challenging: lower rates and massive new liquidity overseas will lure investors to U.S. assets as the higher-yielding safe haven of choice, pushing down the very rates the Fed will try to increase, and driving up the value of the dollar.

They could also hurt U.S. jobs and growth, the indicators the Fed arguably cares most about. Fed officials have downplayed the dollar's strength, noting that the United States is less reliant on trade than other developed nations, and able to count more on domestic demand.

Yet the impact could be significant.

Bank of Canada's surprise rate cut on Wednesday knocked down the Canadian dollar against the U.S. currency below 81 cents, adding to a drop of 15 percent since mid-2014. Canada is the United State's largest trading partner. It also shares supply chains in the auto and other industries that allow jobs and investment to shift to the cheapest source.

Other countries may follow along soon, driving up the value of the dollar further and making U.S. goods more expensive.

"The pressure on other commodity-dependent central banks to follow suit will likely rise in the coming months as they wipe the dust off their competitive devaluation playbook," said TD Securities analyst Millan Mulraine.

OPENING THE FLOODGATES?

The Fed will also now have to contend with a potential flood of money from investors looking to the United States as the global economy's sole bright spot.

U.S. bond rates have been falling in recent months.
Hundreds of billions of dollars that will be created by the ECB and potentially other banks in coming months may be headed this way, meaning even more downward pressure on market rates and dollar strengthening that the Fed will have to deal with when it decides to hike.

There are other risks as well.

If Europe, Japan, China and other economies fail to respond to more stimulus, it would reinforce the notion that the world has moved into a permanently lower gear, so called "secular stagnation" - a bad omen for U.S. wages and growth.

The World Bank also warned last week that developing countries "may be tested" in coming months if investors decide to shift from emerging market stocks, bonds and businesses into U.S. assets.

In the tidal struggle that is developing over the direction of global interest rates, investors last year already pulled a quarter of a trillion dollars out of emerging markets, according to a recent report by the Institute of International Finance. Cross-border investment is expected to fall again in 2015 as a Fed policy shift approaches, according to the IIF.

"We have not lived through a period of such wide monetary policy divergence...We don't have a good roadmap for how this plays out," said IIF chief economist Charles Collyns.

If Fed tightening proceeds, it could lead to market turmoil, potentially undermining global growth and, in the extreme, the U.S. recovery. "The markets could wake up one day and make a substantial and abrupt move and it could have quite a negative impact."


________________________________________


LIBOR was a scheme that pretended to give municipalities good deals on interest rates and then banks simply committed fraud instead.  This is what will happen to these credit bond leverage deals.  All Maryland pols know this----they knew the subprime mortgage scheme was filled with fraud and used to move real estate into the hands of a few in Baltimore ------this bond deal scam does the same.  Think of all the real estate tied to this bond scam through the Maryland law tying property tax to these bonds deals.  When the bond market collapses the FED will have no ability to manipulate and interest rates and inflation will grow higher than ever.  Maryland property taxes will rise along with this. That is what the first article addressed.

As I stated---the Maryland Assembly did all this knowing what was coming so is Larry Hogan really going to reverse all of this?  Hogan does not want to----he supports moving real estate to a few.  He will hem and haw about State Center or a few things-----but the point is

THIS IS ALL ILLLEGAL AND CAN BE REVERSED BY ANYONE BY SIMPLY TAKING IT TO COURT AS FRAUD AND MALFEASANCE AGAINST THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND.

Hogan will say it is those Clinton neo-liberals who won't let me reverse this terrible policy, but he has the power to go to court and I know he will not.
  Baltimore was allowed to be ground zero because they think we have no power for justice.  We need citizens of Maryland and especially Baltimore heading for the courts as we simply need to document this malfeasance for when we reinstate Rule of Law.  Remember, this is a state-wide bond deal and everyone will be effected-----there are projects that never needed to be funded by these bond deals in your neck of the woods.  Maryland has plenty of revenue for all of its public works-----it is simply being stolen.


More on Municipal Malfeasance

Posted by Larry Doyle on August 15, 2012 7:01 AM |     

  We should never discount the lengths to which some will go to fund a supposed immediate need via an exorbitant future expense. I highlighted specifics of just such a reality a few days back in writing Joel Thurtell Shames Poway, CA Financing.

What do others think of the financing Poway and other municipalities have undertaken? Not much. Bloomberg highlights further details of this horrendous situation in writing, California Schools Barring Taxes Push Bills to 2051,

California school districts are financing projects by pushing debt payments as far as 40 years into the future, defying a warning from the Los Angeles County treasurer while incurring interest that dwarfs principal by 10- to-1 or more. 

Last year, 55 school districts were among local authorities selling bonds that mature in more than 25 years, the most since 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The practice is akin to state and local governments raising pension benefits without funding them, said John Hallacy, head of municipal research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Increased retirement costs helped push Stockton and San Bernardino into bankruptcy court this year.

“It’s not so much kicking the can down the road as it is burying a drum of toxic waste in the back of the school,” said Jonathan Fiebach, a partner at Grant Williams LP, a Philadelphia investment advisory firm.


The practice persists in California, Illinois and other states, even though Michigan outlawed the bonds in 1994 and Los Angeles County Treasurer Mark Saladino last year counseled California school officials against issuing them.


San Diego County Treasurer Dan McAllister said many districts are struggling to come up with funding for much-needed expansion and modernization projects, causing them to turn to nontraditional instruments. McAllister has approved the longer- term bonds even though debt service on some “is a pretty outrageous proposition,” he said.

The Poway and Santee bond sales were managed by Stone & Youngberg LLC, which was acquired last year by St. Louis-based Stifel Financial Corp. (SF) Stifel’s media-relations department didn’t return phone messages left last week and yesterday.

Three of the 11 districts with capital-appreciation bonds maturing in 2051, including Poway, were advised by Dolinka Group LLC, a consultancy in Irvine, California, that has worked for more than 250 school districts, community college districts and county offices of education, according to its website.


The municipal market has traditionally had very low rates of default. Those days are gone. With more municipalities financially strapped, they have clearly forsaken any semblance of prudent financial management. One reader had expressed keen insight on these municipal financings,

Is not there some standard of “reasonableness” that should be in place here, such as a reasonable expectation that the loan can be paid back without “pie in the sky” projections for property values in place (e.g., CalPers anticipated returns for the State of California’s, now unfunded pension liabilities).


I know that after the meltdown there was much talk about the concept of reasonableness in mortgage lending. This seems pretty egregious and another example of so many people being asleep at the wheel.

Another reader also had two words of wisdom for investors.

Caveat Emptor.


______________________________________

The article below has been removed----notice they are selling these bonds as 'high quality'?



With “High Quality” Moody’s, S&P Ratings, City Schools ...
vtma.baltimorecityschools.org/News/PDF/BondRating.pdfPRESS RELEASE For Immediate Release: Friday, November 20, 2009 With “High Quality” Moody’s, S&P Ratings, City Schools Issues $51 Million in School Construction ...

All the pols in this adventure as with all of the non-profit directors bringing people out to support these deals all know the goal and the coming economic collapse.  I am no rocket scientist-----I simply read the national news journals.  All of these deals are now tied to your property tax and likely most of these projects will default and be handed to private investors.

These are city specific bonds so are not supported by the state-----the billion dollar school bond does tie the state to some of the debt.


7 bond issues you'll see on the Baltimore City ballot


Tuesday Nov 3, 2014, 1:47pm EST


The National Aquarium is one of several Baltimore City institutions that could receive funding as a result of bond issues on the Nov. 4 ballot.


Sarah MeehanReporter- Baltimore Business Journal


  As much as $130 million in funding for Baltimore City schools, parks and museums is on the line in Tuesday's election.


Along with electing Maryland's next governor, city voters will have the chance to approve or reject seven motions that would allow Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the Baltimore City Council to borrow money for a range of projects.


Public schools, the Enoch Pratt Library, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the National Aquarium are among the institutions that stand to receive the funds.

Here's an overview of the bond issues you'll find on the Baltimore City ballot on Election Day:

  • Question A: School loan
This measure would authorize Rawlings-Blake and the City Council to borrow up to $34 million to acquire property to build new schools and renovate existing schools.

  • Question B: Recreation and parks and public facilities loan
The second question on the ballot would allow the city to borrow up to $47 million for improving city-owned buildings and property, public parks and recreation land, and the Enoch Pratt Library. It would also provide for tree planting programs.

  • Question C: Community and economic development loan
This measure would authorize the city to borrow up to $47 million to go toward creating economic development programs. It would also provide for loans for cultural projects and programs that promote tourism.

  • Question D: Baltimore Museum of Art loan
This ballot question would allow the city to borrow up to $400,000 for construction, renovations and repairs at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

  • Question E: Walters Art Museum loan
This measure would allow the city to spend up to $400,000 on construction, renovation and repairs at the Walters Art Museum.

______________________________________

How does a city right on the edge of bankruptcy get all of these bond deals?  It allows Wall Street to create fraudulent financial instruments that hide debt in order to make it seem as all these deals are not public malfeasance.  THEY ARE PUBLIC MALFEASANCE.

The deals are tied to property taxes for one and the goal is default so Wall Street loves when deals are made for default.


No one wants your real estate more than Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins.  We have Baltimore City Hall creating fake water and tax bills serving them to homeowners in city central just to make these homeowners default on payment.  Then, laws that allow the city to sell tax and water debt to private investors move these homes from city homeowners to investors.  If you do not believe conspiracy goes this deep----you do not know Baltimore politics.  The same will happen with this bond debt tied to property taxes.  These taxes will rise in areas they want to claim as selective taxation is the city grows.

This article is the only one that actually educated the citizens of Baltimore as to the real situation with bond issues in Baltimore.  The media was silent as were all of the non-profits that should be trying to protect the citizens of Baltimore from this ongoing fraud.

Why I'm Opposing 15 of Baltimore’s 16 Proposed Bond Issues




by Lynda Lambert  Baltimore Chronical


I voted for the library loan about 10 years ago or so, expecting renovation of the neighborhood libraries. What did we get? They closed five neighborhood libraries. There is little question that every single one of us leaves, until the last minute, our decisions on bond issues. They get little publicity; we have no public discussion. We often simply allow ourselves to be guided by who the bond is for. Oh, it’s for the libraries, vote ‘yes,’ of course. The schools? Yes. The museums? Yes. NO!

If you think that way, you’ll get stung. I’ve learned over the years: it’s in the wording.

Every bond issue begins by saying that they are asking us to “authorize the Mayor and the City Council of Baltimore to borrow [a certain dollar amount] to be used for the acquisition of land or property to” do something. Every bond issue ends with these words: “...and for doing all things necessary, proper or expedient in connection therewith.”

In other words, give us the money to do with as we like.

Consider, as an example, question B, which is asking for $43 million for the public schools.

We had plenty of good school buildings. Many of them were fully occupied, like Eastern High School. Rather than pay $3 million to fix the heating system, they closed that school, and many like it. Now they want $43 million to build new ones. And where are they going to build them? Whose block will get torn down to do that? Your house? My house?

They often say, “Oh, no, we’re going to renovate.” But that just isn’t true. How many of us have spent weekends painting our schools and fixing windows and cleaning up? They never fix up the schools. They let them fall into disrepair, then close them, then ask us for more money to build new ones.

A great many bond issues are meant to lead us to believe they’re talking about renovation, when, in fact, they’re talking about demolition or destruction of other kinds.

Many years ago, there was a bond issue to “renovate” the Lyric Theatre—and, in fact, question H in this election is asking for another $1 million for The Lyric. Well, in the prior bond issue, everyone was talking about how The Lyric had never been finished; how the original builders had not had the money to put on the fancy facade they’d wanted and that the money would be used for that. So, I voted “yes.” You can see plainly what they did. That is no archaic facade; they put on the front of that venerable theatre what I consider to be a modern monstrosity that's completely at odds with the original builders’ plans. And what will this million be used for? Buy up the block of buildings across the street and build a parking lot? Who knows? They never say specifically.

I voted for the library loan about 10 years ago or so, expecting renovation of the neighborhood libraries. What did we get? They closed five neighborhood libraries, tore down some historic buildings in East Baltimore, and built the “regional” library.
There was a big fight about it, after we all figured out what they were trying to do. We saved two libraries, which did get renovated, but it took years. No one wanted or needed a regional library, but we’ve got one.

And then there are some loans which simply don’t make sense. For instance, the Baltimore Zoo, which is no longer the Baltimore Zoo. It was renamed The Maryland Zoo, because the citizens of Maryland were going to be paying for it. So...why are Baltimoreans being asked to pony up $300,000? You can’t tell from the description of the issue, that’s for sure.

And some of these bond issues are to help private nonprofits. People are losing their homes right and left to foreclosure, and they want us to secure loans for Port Discovery and Everyman Theatre, The Meyerhoff, and the aforementioned Lyric. What gives?

Bottom line: I will be voting “no” on all 16 bond issues, save for “F,” which is for public parks. I don’t figure they will be tearing down blocks of houses to put up public parks. Of course, I could be wrong. You can never tell, because they don’t really want you to know.

I would like, just once, for us to defeat all bond issues and force them to tell us really, truly, honestly, what they want the money for. I would like, just once, for us to defeat all bond issues and force them to tell us really, truly, honestly, what they want the money for. This standard wording, which gives them carte blanche with $215.2 million of our money this year alone, is simply insufferable.

Lynda Lambert, a college instructor, writes from the Hampden community in Baltimore City.



0 Comments

February 23rd, 2015

2/23/2015

0 Comments

 
I WILL TALK TAX POLICY THIS WEEK-----

This week I will be talking of Maryland Assembly meetings and bills.  I want to look at tax policy today as we listen to Congress move forward with corporate tax reform to lower corporate taxes because they are so burdened-----the same is happening at the state level.
 

Maryland is one state where all of the state's revenue makes it to the 1% through fraud or public policy.  Laws on the books may look progressive but they are not enforced.  The State of Maryland is in crisis because it has such a declining tax revenue collection.  The legislative policy analysts say that Maryland citizens are largely unemployed, moving away, or are being paid too little to support the tax base needed.  Corporate tax credits are at $100 million but I don't know where that low figure comes as Exelon in Baltimore was just given a $100 million credit just for themselves.  The corporate tax credits are huge in Maryland, corporations are allowed to be categorized as non-profits, the corporate subsidy and fraud take the rest of the Maryland Treasury so we know where the revenue shortfall comes.
  Think as well at the degree of free or cheapened labor in Maryland as 'business-friendly'.

REMEMBER, FDR RAISED TAXES ON CORPORATIONS AFTER THE GREAT DEPRESSION TO 90% TO RECOVER THE MASSIVE FRAUDS THAT CAUSED THE ECONOMY TO CRASH----THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS ARE DOING THE OPPOSITE.


Yet the solution for Maryland Assembly as well as Congress is more 'business-friendly policy.  Baltimore is already mirroring Delaware in being corporate tax-free.  What citizens in Maryland want is a state economy driven by small and regional businesses---not global corporations.  Know who pays higher taxes, fees, fines, and service rates when corporations pay no taxes?  Working/middle-class and small businesses.  Ask the citizens in Delaware---they will tell you they pay for the corporations headquartered in their state that do not pay taxes.

Below you see the bogus progressive idea of taxing the corporations when the last several years has seen historic subsidy and tax credit given to corporations.  Obama's IRS did not even collect those corporate taxes owed---hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate taxes not collected as in Maryland.  Remember as well that Trans Pacific Trade Pact seeks to make it impossible to assess a financial transaction tax or any attempts to address too big to fail--so Obama's ploy of embracing this bank Robin Hood tax is posing.

The several years of Obama's terms have seen record-breaking merger and acquisitions of US global corporations of other global corporations. They used the tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud, the FED's free money of zero % interest, and a trillion of Congressional stimulus given as job creators but only expanded global corporations overseas with hiring overseas. The end result is that global corporations do not need to list publicly anymore-----the public stock exchange will end. So, the rich will own each other's stock and no taxes will be paid. Obama allowed this to happen by suspending Rule of Law and refusing to bring back the fraud. Trans Pacific Trade Pact seeks to allow global corporations to operate in the US without loss of profit----so taxation will be impossible as these global corporations are headquartered in developing nations. So, Obama wants to reform corporate taxes downward and this is just a ploy to make it look like they are holding corporations and wealth accountable.


More Big Venture-Backed Companies Shun IPOs, For Now


Number of Such Firms Valued at $1 Billion-Plus Hits a Record as Many Are Able to Get Funding Privately 
Wall Street Journal


Forget these polls----they are no longer accurate.

AP-GfK Poll: Most back Obama plan to raise investment taxes



By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER and EMILY SWANSON 19 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The rich aren't taxed enough and the middle class is taxed too much. As for your taxes, you probably think they're too high as well.



Those are the results of an Associated Press-GfK poll that found that most people in the United States support President Barack Obama's proposal to raise investment taxes on high-income families.

The findings echo the populist messages of two liberal senators — Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — being courted by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to run for president in 2016. The results also add weight to Obama's new push to raise taxes on the rich and use some of the revenue to lower taxes on the middle class.

Obama calls his approach "middle-class economics."


It's not flying with Republicans in Congress, who oppose higher taxes.

But Bob Montgomery of Martinsville, Virginia, said people with higher incomes should pay more.

"I think the more you make the more taxes you should pay," said Montgomery, who is retired after working 40 years at an auto dealership. "I can't see where a man makes $50,000 a year pays as much taxes as somebody that makes $300,000 a year."

According to the poll, 68 percent of those questioned said wealthy households pay too little in federal taxes; only 11 percent said the wealthy pay too much.



Obama laid out a series of tax proposals as part of his 2016 budget released this month. Few are likely to win approval in the Republican-controlled Congress. But if fellow Democrats were to embrace his ideas, they could play a role in the 2016 race.

One proposal would increase capital gains taxes on households making more than $500,000. In the survey, 56 percent favored the proposal, while only 16 percent opposed it.

Democrats, at 71 percent, were the most likely to support raising taxes on capital gains. Among Republicans and independents, 46 percent supported it.

Obama's other tax plans didn't fare as well.

About 27 percent said they favored making estates pay capital gains taxes on assets when they are inherited, and 36 percent opposed it.

Just 19 percent said they supported the president's aborted plan to scale back the tax benefits of popular college savings plans, 529 accounts, named after a section in federal tax law. Obama withdrew the proposal after Republicans and some Democrats in Congress opposed it.


"That's kids trying to make their own away in this world without having student loans," she said.

Obama's proposal to levy a new tax on banks was supported by 47 percent of those surveyed. Only 13 percent opposed it, while 36 percent were undecided.


It's tax season, that time of the year when people are confronted by their obligations to the government. The poll found that 56 percent of us think our own federal taxes are too high, and 4 percent said they pay too little.

________________________________________
While Obama and Congressional neo-liberals are pretending to get tough with capital gains and transaction taxes the entire financial industry has moved on from those issues.  As I stated Obama has TPP blocking bank transaction taxes and as you see below-----these now huge and wealthy US corporations do not even have to list publicly----they are hiding behind 'going dark'.  So, there is no intent to tax these corporations---TPP seeks to make any US law that takes from corporate profit able to be challenged in the global tribunal court.

What we need is Rule of Law to downsize these corporations and have them pay more taxes.  It can be done----easy peasy if we GET RID OF GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS!

Publicly Traded Companies Going Private : NPR


Nov 13, 2005 · Koch Industries is buying paper products manufacturer Georgia Pacific for $13.2 billion, a deal that will make it the largest privately held company in the ...



March 17, 2009 Attorney Articles
  • Also appearing in Business Finance's blog, 04/08/2009
The 2008-2009 stock market crash and current deep recession are causing many small public companies to reexamine the costs and benefits of remaining listed on a national securities exchange and continuing as a public reporting company under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the “Exchange Act”). Over the past twelve to eighteen months, many companies have experienced steep declines in their total market capitalization and revenues. For smaller companies, public company compliance costs have increased significantly as a percentage of revenues. In early 2009, more than 200 NASDAQ listed companies and 50 NYSE listed companies were facing delisting for non-compliance with applicable continuing listing requirements. As a result, both NASDAQ and the NYSE have currently suspended certain of such requirements, including the $1.00 minimum bid price standard to avoid an avalanche of delistings.1

Companies facing delisting are more likely to consider “going dark” than those not under immediate pressure to address their listing status. However, many companies not facing near term delisting pressure may also wish to consider this possibility
. Public company burdens are particularly acute for companies with a market capitalization of less than $50 million and total revenues of under $100 million. Public company compliance costs can range from $1.0 million to over $3.0 million annually even for such a relatively small company. The more troubled the issuer, the more burdensome public company status can become as a company spends a greater proportion of its diminishing resources dealing with difficult disclosure and accounting questions. In the past there has been some stigma associated with “going dark.” As the current recession has deepened, this negative perception may have less force as companies face the very high costs of remaining a public company in a very difficult business environment.

What “Going Dark” Means “Going dark” refers to the process of voluntarily delisting a public company’s shares from a national securities exchange or inter-dealer quotation system (if so listed or quoted) and subsequently deregistering the shares under the Exchange Act, thus suspending or terminating the company’s public reporting obligations under the Exchange Act. Delisting alone does not eliminate public reporting requirements. Many non-listed companies are also reporting issuers. However, for such an unlisted public reporting company, the lack of a stock exchange listing may substantially diminish the benefits of remaining a public company.

“Going dark” should not be confused with a “going private” transaction. A “going private” transaction generally involves the cash-out of all or a substantial portion of a company’s public shares so that the company becomes eligible to delist and deregister its shares under the Exchange Act. “Going private” transactions can take many forms and may involve a merger, tender offer or reverse split of the company’s shares. “Going private” transactions require extensive and detailed disclosure filings under Rule 13e-3, the “going private” rule. “Going private” transactions are often undertaken by or at the direction of controlling shareholders or third party acquirors and require extensive board consideration, disclosure, fairness opinions, SEC filings and often a shareholder vote.

“Going dark,” on the other hand, can be accomplished without a shareholder vote, fairness opinion or any shareholder cash out. While some companies electing to delist and “go dark” have considered the possibility of providing shareholders with a liquidity event, such as a tender offer or stock repurchase program, in practice this is not often done because companies which “go dark” rarely have sufficient cash resources to make a meaningful tender offer. Nevertheless, such a liquidity event could be undertaken in connection with a “going dark” transaction by a company that has the cash resources to offer one, provided that care is taken not to trigger the “going private” rules.2

Procedures for “Going Dark” To understand the “going dark” procedure, it is first necessary to understand what triggers Exchange Act reporting requirements. A company’s Exchange Act obligations can be triggered in any of three ways:

  • under Section 12(b) if it has shares listed on a national securities exchange;
  • under Section 12(g) based on having over 500 record holders of a class of securities and total assets exceeding $10 million3; and
  • under Section 15(d) by having a registration statement declared effective under the Securities Act.
Each of these three independent predicates for Exchange Act registration must be separately addressed as a company considers whether and how to “go dark.”4

Both U.S. domestic issuers and foreign private issuers can delist and/or deregister if there are less than 300 holders of record of the relevant class of its securities as defined in Rule 12g5‑1. It is possible for a company to have less than 300 holders of record of a class of securities even though it has thousands of beneficial owners of that class of securities. This is because, in counting record holders, in general, the issuer need only count the number of registered holders on its shareholder list and if depositaries are listed, the number of holders for whom the depositary holds securities. For most U.S. issuers, this mean counting the registered holders and adding the number of participants listed in the security position listing of DTC, the principal depositary for U.S. issuers.5 For purposes of determining whether the Company has less than 300 holders of record, Rule 12g5-1 has been interpreted to mean that an issuer does not have to further “look through” DTC participants to the ultimate beneficial owners. Many companies may therefore be eligible to delist and “go dark” without management or the board of directors even being aware of the possibility.

Foreign private issuers can also delist and deregister under Exchange Act Rule 12h-6 but that Rule requires the company to have and maintain a foreign listing which is its primary trading market. Since the non‑U.S. company would still be listed on a non‑U.S. Exchange, using Rule 12h-6 would not technically be “going dark,” although it would involve withdrawal from the U.S. reporting system.6



Conclusion
The decision by a board of directors whether to “go dark” or remain a public company can be a difficult one, and it is important to engage experienced legal advisors early on in the process. The principal decision for the board of directors is whether remaining a public reporting company outweighs the benefits of “going dark.” Each company will have different factors to consider. Some companies are simply too small to achieve any significant benefit from public company status. On the other hand, public shareholders almost always prefer the more liquid market provided by an exchange listing and continuous disclosure requirements. Factors such as stock price, public float, company performance, and the costs of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and public company disclosure and accounting requirements must be weighed against the benefits to the company and its shareholders of having publicly traded stock as incentive compensation and acquisition currency. Creditor and customer requirements, company prestige and the company’s relationship with its stockholders can also be important factors to consider. Some boards of directors and special committees have found it helpful to retain a financial advisor to advise on the effects of “going dark” on comparable companies and on the desirability of providing cash to stockholders in the form of a stock repurchase program, tender offer or other liquidity event in connection therewith. In many instances, after a thorough review, the board of directors may conclude that going over to the “dark side” is not such an unpleasant option after all.



_______________________________________________
Below you see the Maryland Assembly ready to do the same corporate tax reform----what more could we give away to corporations to bring them here?  It is of course this global market economy that is putting Maryland businesses out of business.

The answer is WE DON'T WANT CORPORATIONS OR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS COMING TO MARYLAND.  WE WANT A DOMESTIC ECONOMY OF SMALL AND REGIONAL BUSINESSES THAT SIMPLY NEED ROOM TO GROW.


As Congressional neo-liberals prepare to reform corporate taxes downward because they are struggling to compete globally you know------so too are states and Maryland----where corporate subsidy is held to the highest standard is going to pretend to need to be 'business-friendly' as well. The citizens of Maryland of course want relief for small business owners who bear the burden of corporations paying no taxes along with the working and middle class.....but these tax reforms are going to further hit the big corporations as Maryland looks to Delaware and its reputation as a corporate headquarters for national and global corporations as its model. Talk to someone from Delaware and they will say what Maryland citizens say-------we are taxed to the gills as corporations are subsidized to the max!


Governor's commission on small business----REALLY?

The only small businesses being created in Maryland are the ones breaking up public education and public health and they will be taken over by global corporations in no time!  Notice no talk of tax burden on citizens and notice national corporations are the draw for Hogan.  The citizens of Maryland come out of their house in the morning with their hands up because they are fleeced by every business because of no oversight and accountability----Hogan says we need to get rid of more licensing and regulation.

Remember, Trans Pacific Trade Pact seeks to allow global corporations to ignore all labor and justice laws----and third world business environments are not pretty.  Small businesses do not stand a chance in crony subsidized and global economy!

LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING ARE THE MAIN STRENGTHS IN THIS KIND OF BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

'Open for business' in Md.


By Jay Steinmetz Baltimore Sun


Op-ed: What will it take to improve Maryland's business climate?

Realism and willing legislators.
The political momentum exists to make the changes everyone wants to improve Maryland, and now is the time to come together to make that happen. But it will take more than highway signs and campaign slogans to turn that momentum into policy changes needed to make Maryland economically competitive. We need to define our own success, and this election helps us do that.

Gov. Larry Hogan's campaign message was among the most focused of any statewide race in the country: Lower taxes, improve the business climate and create jobs. What he needs now is cooperation from the General Assembly.

Political and policy developments are setting the stage for what will define the next four years. Foremost among them are emerging disagreements between the governor and the General Assembly on the budget and taxes and the expected release of findings from Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller and House Speaker Michael E. Busch on how to improve the business climate.

Nobody said this election was a mandate for gridlock, so let's determine what success is by examining what it is not. Success is not replacing auto factories and steel plants with casinos and call centers. Success is not propping up Baltimore City with politically-derived artificial spending supports that mask its true problems.

  As planning took place for the governor's inauguration events, Hertz was building its new headquarters in Southwest Florida, and Georgia economic development officials sealed the deal for Atlanta to be the new home for Mercedes. Meanwhile, the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Commission was hard at work approving requests by the state's largest casinos to reduce slot machines and add more profitable table games.

One of Maryland's casinos tells customers that it will "make your poker dreams come true." While Hertz, on the other hand, manages a global fleet of automobiles and industrial equipment. Which company do you think has more of a need for coveted, high-paying IT jobs? Which ones will bring in more cash from customers using its products and services around the world? This election was based not on poker dreams, but on the American dream, which many see slipping away from Maryland.

Governor Hogan's Change Maryland organization detailed how high taxes affect job creation and accelerate the deterioration of the tax base. In one telling statistic, Baltimore City clearly has a problem. Despite the valiant efforts of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, no U.S. city can expect to maintain essential services on its own as its tax base slips away at nearly 1.5 percent between tax years, as Baltimore saw according to a Change Maryland analysis of IRS data. In dollar terms, that equates to nearly $125 million in incomes that vanished. Overall, the state's tax base is declining as well.

The General Assembly for years has missed key economic indicators such as the declining tax base. According to Maryland Business For Responsive Government, only 18 percent of state delegates and senators are business owners. The organization's annual Roll Call report lists key business votes and chronicles years of open warfare that have made national headlines. Anti-business legislators have caused great damage to Maryland's perception among the financial media, site selection consultants and main street retail establishments. Now is the time to fix that.

The economic development commission will be releasing two reports. The first one, on the business climate, is slated for release this month. The Senate president and House speaker wisely adjusted the time frame to allow the committee to examine tax policy in a second report to be released later this year. This commission has an opportunity to define success by taking a serious look at the tax burden and making recommendations on how to improve our state's competitive position. Fortunately, their review will go beyond taxes.

Serious efforts to improve the business climate must go beyond tax policy to reduce regulations and cut bureaucratic tentacles that impede government approvals for routine processes such as licensing and permitting. The governor has a great deal of control to simplify regulations and direct state departments and agencies to improve outcomes for business dealing with the government.

The commission has been on a listening tour with Maryland businesses in which the feedback is not flattering. Of course it's not. After decades of harmful tax and regulatory policy, much work remains. Political momentum creates opportunities, and that moment has arrived. Now that Maryland is "open for business," we must invite businesses back in and encourage them to stay. When they start coming and stop leaving, we will know what success is.


Jay Steinmetz is CEO of Baltimore-based Barcoding Inc. and a member of the Governor's Commission on Small Business. His email is jay@steinmetz.com.

________________________________________

The major problem for Maryland businesses is Maryland and city governments award bids to corporations often not even in the state and local businesses are made subcontractors-----making Maryland businesses bid so low for work that they cannot make profit and go out of business.  The second major problem for Maryland businesses is that the citizens of Maryland are kept so poor-----no disposable income---that the only way to earn money it to go global for the world's rich.  That is deliberate.  The third problem for Maryland's businesses is they pay high taxes, fees, fines, and services just as the working and middle-class while corporations are paying nothing.

So, it is deliberate public policy to keep small businesses unable to compete and in fact pushing them out of business because Maryland sees itself as a global market economy catering to global corporate profit.  No amount of pretending to be progressive with taxation towards small business or the public will happen.  Think about Erhlich as a neo-con with all his taxes and fees and Hogan will do the same.  O'Malley and Clinton neo-liberals are worse.

Look at who in on this commission----almost all are appointments from governor or friends of Chamber of Commerce.


I will be looking this week at Maryland and national tax policy and how global corporate pols will soak the people more and more as Trans Pacific Trade Pact is installed!

GET RID OF THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS---ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS!



Below you see the commission to study tax policy in Maryland. 

EXPLANATION:CAPITALS INDICATE MATTER ADDED TO EXISTING LAW.[Brackets]indicate matter deleted from existing law.*hb0221*

HOUSE BILL 221Q75lr1388HB 554/14 –W&MCF SB 73By: Delegates Dumais, Serafini, Anderson, Barkley, Beitzel, Carr, Conaway, Cullison, Fraser–Hidalgo, Frick,Frush, Gilchrist, Gutierrez, Hammen, Hixson, Kaiser, Kelly, Kipke, Korman, Kramer, Lisanti, Luedtke, McIntosh, A.Miller, Moon, Platt, Reznik, S.Robinson, Smith, Tarlau, Valentino–Smith, A.Washington, B.Wilson, and ZuckerIntroduced and read first time: February 2, 2015

Assigned to: Ways and Means



Commission on Tax Policy, Reform, and Fairness


2FOR the purpose of establishing the Commission on Tax Policy, Reform, and Fairness; 3specifying the membership of the Commission; providing for the appointment of a 4Senate cochair and House cochair of the Commission; providing for the staffing of 5the Commission; prohibiting a member of the Commission from receiving certain 6compensation, but authorizing the reimbursement of certain expenses; requiring the 7Commission to study, consider, and make recommendations regarding certain 8matters; requiring the Commission to report its findings and recommendations to 9the Governor and the General Assembly on or before a certain date; providing for the 10termination of this Act; and generally relating to the Commission on Tax Policy, 11Reform, and Fairness. 12SECTION 1. BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF MARYLAND, 13That:14(a)


There is a Commission on Tax Policy, Reform, and Fairness.

The Commission consists of the following members:

(1)two members of the Senate of Maryland, appointed by the President of 17the Senate;

(2)two members of the House of Delegates, appointed by the Speaker of 19the House;

(3)the Comptroller of the Treasury, or the Comptroller’s designee;

2HOUSE BILL 221

(4)the Secretary of Budget and Management, or the Secretary’s designee;

(5)a representative of the Maryland Association of Counties;

(6)a representative of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce;

(7)a representative of the Maryland Municipal League;

(8)a representative of the State Department of Assessments and Taxation, 5designated by the Director of Assessments and Taxation;

(9)a representative of the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce;

(10)one economist, appointed by the Governor;

(11)one member of the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, appointed by the Governor;

(12)one member of the faculty of the University of Maryland Robert H. 11Smith School of Business, appointed by the Governor; and

(13)two members of the public, each of whom shall be an attorney at law or an accountant knowledgeable about the State’s tax structure, appointed by the Governor.

(1) The President of the Senate shall designate one of the members appointed from the Senate of Maryland as cochair of the Commission.

(2)The Speaker of the House shall designate one of the members appointed from the House of Delegates as cochair of the Commission.

(d)The Office of the Comptroller and the Department of Budget and Management shall provide staff for the Commission.

(e)A member of the Commission:

(1)may not receive compensation as a member of the Commission; but

(2)is entitled to reimbursement for expenses under the Standard State Travel Regulations, as provided in the State budget.

(f)The Commission shall:

(1)study the current revenue structure of the State, including income, 26sales, corporate, motor fuel, excise, and property taxes, tax exemptions and credits, and fees;


HOUSE BILL 2213

(2)review the academic and economic research on state and local tax policy 1to assist in the overall assessment of efficacy, fairness, and competitiveness of the current 2revenue structure of the State;3(3)review the revenue structure of neighboring jurisdictions for the 4purpose of evaluating the regional competitiveness of the State’s tax structure;5(4)consider the nature of the State’s economy and the importance of service 6and professional businesses to economic development;7(5)consider whether or not the current revenue structure of the State 8should be reformed, modified, and modernized; and9(6)make recommendations regarding changes to the State’s revenue 10structure that:11(i)promote job growth and economic development;12(ii)ensure fairness, simplicity, and transparency;13(iii)provide a stable, balanced, and reliable revenue stream, while 14not reducing services; and15(iv)create a business friendly environment.16(g)On or before December 1, 2016, the Commission shall report its findings and 17recommendations to the Governor and, in accordance with § 2–1246 of the State 18Government Article, the General Assembly.19SECTION 2. AND BE IT FURTHER ENACTED, That this Act shall take effect July 201, 2015. It shall remain effective for a period of 2 years and, at the end of June 30, 2017, 21with no further action required by the General Assembly, this Actshall be abrogated and 22of no further force and effect


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February 22nd, 2015

2/22/2015

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I'd like to take today to look at the bills coming into Maryland Assembly and look at how they fit a big picture goal of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.  Education, public safety, health care, and taxes are the big items of course.

Health care:

I listened to a pol supporting the funding of tests for new born babies.  Maryland has some of the worst outcomes for infant mortality because it does not provide health care for the poor and working class.  The Federal funds for Medicaid end up subsidizing corporate profits.  I testified that Baltimore loses a billion dollars a year in Medicare and Medicaid fraud and invited the Maryland Assembly committee members to join my organization in citizen audits for fraud bringing back and stopping that fraud which then could fully fund all Medicaid and Medicare programs for all citizens qualifying.  These funds would be flush with money for seniors and low-income by simply stopping the fraud.  The Maryland Assembly pretends to pass progressive legislation like this pol's policy of testing new born infants but with no oversight and accountability the money rarely goes to implement these policies----they simply sit on the books.

I listened to a budget meeting on Medicare and health care for the aging and disabled.  Hogan is giving 2% cuts all around so programs that were gutted Federally for seniors, the poor, and disabled are now being cut again.  Again, this is taxpayer money citizens have paid during their lives to assure they would have the coverage needed to support them----the Constitution guarantees Federal funds designated for these demographics so every time they cut funding they know they are not meeting Federal requirements.....they are simply starving these programs to death.  There was testimony by a man in social services that explained that a tax credit for seniors that could save money is often not taken because seniors do not know about it and the state does not have the staff to provide the support in making sure these seniors and the poor get these tax credits.  I read in Baltimore, hundreds of millions of dollars are not taken in low-income tax relief because people do not know about it.  We had a strong public sector that offered this support that is now gone.  Where does all that money not claimed by seniors and the poor go?  It goes to corporate subsidy.

Then at the same budget meeting where these public agencies were being told they were losing money------the Catholic and Jewish religious organizations testified to receive a share of public money for their non-profit work.  I listened as the Jewish organization presented its plan for those on Medicaid/Medicare not able to access care anymore -------having seniors work as caretakers in order to receive caretaking.  The Catholic organizations are doing the same.  I approached these groups after they spoke and invited them to join my organization in citizen audits to bring back a billion dollars in fraud each year of money from these agencies losing funding.  I explained stopping and recovering that fraud would make public agency funds flush with money and everyone would be cared for -----help the people recover the money they paid into the system to get the care you now want them to work for.  A wink and a nod said that these agencies would get the funding for programs putting seniors to work for their care and the groups were not interested in helping to recover the fraud.  Who are the biggest donors to Catholic and Jewish charities? 

THE PEOPLE AND CORPORATIONS COMMITTING THE FRAUD.


Below you see where this is going.  If we end Social Security and Medicare as they are doing now-----dismantling all the jobs tied to public health from senior centers to nursing homes----from social workers to hospital staff----

ALL THOSE JOBS DISAPPEARING WITH ALL OF THE READY ACCESSIBILITY OF THESE PLACES FOR SENIORS ALL PAID FOR FROM FEDERAL FUNDING FOR SENIORS

now being reduced to immigrant workers living as caretakers and seniors not having the programs supporting them now must do the same.....become caretakers or take people into their homes.


In Israel, seniors and foreign caretakers develop symbiotic relationships


Posted on May 28, 2014 by Jeffrey Barken / JNS.org . By Jeffrey F. Barken/JNS.org




"Today the foreign caregiver that lives with the patient—this is the most common way to grow old in Israel," says Yaron Bengera, vice president of Yad Beyad, a Tel Aviv-based agency that recruits foreign workers.


Janet Tauro and Varda Kahanovich made a deal upon which their lives depend. Tauro, a foreign worker from Mumbai, provides Kahanovich, a 90-year-old Israeli woman living on Kibbutz Maagan Michael, warm and devoted care. In return, Kahanovich hopes to live a long and happy life, well beyond her current age, with Tauro as caregiver. 

Morbid as it may be to contemplate an old woman’s passing, for Tauro and the 60,000 other foreign workers currently employed as caregivers in Israeli households, the stakes are high. Work visas are patient dependent and are granted for four years and three months, with no extensions or opportunities for reassignment in the event of the elder person’s death. Following the patient’s death, a caretaker must return to his or her country of origin, terminating a source of income that has provided countless opportunities for their families. The lots of the elderly and the caretaker are intertwined.

The situation of Tauro and Kahanovich is a familiar one in the Jewish state. 

“Today the foreign caregiver that lives with the patient—this is the most common way to grow old in Israel,” Yaron Bengera, vice president of Yad Beyad, a Tel Aviv-based agency that recruits foreign workers, tells JNS.org. “In the past, patients would be taken care of by their family, but this is changing fast. With more capitalism and more demanding lives, it gets harder.” 

There is a consensus among Israelis that caring for the elderly is demanding work. Many senior citizens require constant supervision and assistance. Despite their best efforts, working adults—balancing careers and young families—buckle under the pressures of modern life in Israel and are unable to provide adequate care for their aging parents without hiring help.



Yad Beyad helps Israeli families find the right caregiver to suit their specific needs. The agency also supports foreign workers, providing information about their rights and cultural resources, and counseling them to ensure their success as caretakers. In the case of Tauro and Kahanovich, a perfect match was made. 

“I was astonished to see such a beautiful girl. She is my friend,” Edna Oren tells JNS.org, recounting the day that Tauro first arrived at Maagan Michael to take care of her twin sister. In this case the culture shock was minimal, since Tauro had previous experience working in another Israeli home and she had even learned Hebrew.

“We are so lucky,” Oren says. “There are not many people like Janet,” Oren says. “She has two brains, not one, and she has four hands. She even learned to sing Hatikvah (the Israeli national anthem).”


Tauro says she works as a caretaker but also works “from my heart.” In her first job as a caretaker, she looked up Israeli songs on YouTube, singing and dancing with the woman she served. She even learned her patient’s style of cooking.


“My motive is to make her (Kahanovich) feel like she is living in her own house and can make her own decisions,” says Tauro.


The system is not without faults. Many foreign workers suffer emotional distress, having been separated from their children and families abroad. Likewise, difficult work environments have, on occasion, resulted in abuse.



“You’re always dependent on your employer for your quality of life,” Nora Lender, Kibbutz Maagan Michael’s administration manager for the elderly welfare, tells JNS.org.
Both Lender and Bengera confirm having personally witnessed cases where employers physically and mentally abused foreign workers. Hidden cameras have caught caretakers hitting elderly patients and revealed neglect.

“Like anything in life, you take a chance,” Lender says.

Israel may not be perfectly adapted to support a foreign work force, but a significant effort has been made to inform workers of their rights, regulate payment, and provide a genuine welcome. By law, workers are entitled to a base salary of 4,300 NIS ($1,235) per month, out of which employers can make deductions accounting for the live-in caretaker’s room and board. Contracts also stipulate that caretakers receive nine paid holidays based on their own country’s calendar, and 150-percent pay on weekends.

It is not a competitive salary from a Western perspective, yet it “can be life-changing for families in the third world,” Bengera explains. 

“If you had a country that you could work in and then you could buy your own house, put your kids through school, you would take this opportunity,” he says.  

According to Kavlaoved.org, a website and hotline providing an overview of foreign workers’ experiences in Israel, nearly 80 percent of foreign caregivers in Israel are female. 

“We prefer to bring female caretakers with families to Israel because they need the income and are better motivated,” Bengera says.

Bengera is conscious that the presence of this workforce is affecting the culture of Israel, as well as that of the foreign workers’ native countries. 


“In the worker’s homeland the fathers become the mothers,” he says. “Sometimes mothers don’t go back to their husbands. The women feel free here. We are not sure that this is for the better.”

Patriarchal and traditionally closed societies are being pried open by what Bengera calls the “global competition for a workforce.” Israel is providing a path of escape to some individuals and a sound mechanism for social mobility. 

Critics may call the system exploitative, calling the isolation that foreign workers endure borderline inhumane.

“If a first-degree relative is working in Israel it is almost impossible for [his or her kin] to visit,” Bengera notes.

But workers like Tauro tell a different story. Asked how she copes with being so far away from her two children, she says, “It’s not the hardest part of my job, it’s the hardest part of my life.”

Life’s circumstances led Tauro to the conclusion that seeking work abroad was the best way to provide for her children, and she is committed to the course she chose, no matter the hardship.

“Everything I earn is for my kids’ education, I believe in education,” Tauro says, adding that her work will be complete only when her children can stand up on their own and say, “Mom, we’re done with the help. Now we want to help you, it’s our turn.”

Being dependent on Kahanovich’s health for continued employment, there is always the fear that Tauro’s contract will end abruptly, leaving her unable to continue working in Israel and creating a family financial crisis. Bengera, however, affirms that the experience of foreign workers in Israel is valuable to other Western employers, specifically in the United States, Canada, and England. Many workers use Israel as a steppingstone for better positions in other countries.

Critics lament that for talented workers like Tauro, there is no path to Israeli citizenship and no exceptions to the patient-dependent contracts of four years and three months. Israel is throwing away valuable expertise whenever veteran workers are deported, they say.


Bengera suggests that the contracts exist partially as a practical protection against worker burnout, but believes there should not be a limit on the number of years a worker can stay in Israel.


“I think the [Israeli] government should recognize that these workers are a part of the fabric and culture and I think it should be possible for families to visit,” he says.
It will do good for the workers and the tourists to see their children in Israel, and for the children to understand their parents’ work.”

Tauro echoes those sentiments when she explains her sympathy and involvement with the Jewish people whom she has met and served in Israel. 

“After being in Israel this long, I am a part of the pain and the joy,” she says regarding her experience caring for Holocaust survivors and observing Israeli memorial days for fallen soldiers. “I salute the country.”

___________________________________________


The Israeli human trafficing corporation Yad Beyad is the same as the Johns Hopkins human trafficing business.  As the article above points out these immigrants are almost never happy---they do it because they have no way of earning money at home.  The article highlights a woman from Mumbai-----India has huge wealth inequity throughout its partnership with the US in building global industry and it still has human exports as its major industry.  The article above shows the dynamic of the '21st century economy' where the job opportunities even in the Western world are living as ex-pats in poverty jobs.

Now, think about how all of this affects US workers.  US global corporations are not going to allow unemployment for domestic workers to end----they are forcing Americans to seek employment overseas as Americans become this roving immigrant-class. 

THAT IS WHAT THE GOAL OF BUSH NEO-CONS AND CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS ARE-----EXPORTING AMERICAN POOR AND WORKING CLASS OVERSEAS.
 

THIS IS CALLED THE MODERN-DAY SLAVE TRAFFICING.

'But they get to live in a comfortable home' is the excuse for not paying a domestic citizen decent wages in well-run public facilities to care for citizens who pay taxes for this care.


Below you see where this is going-----as US religious organizations are preparing to put Americans to work to receive their health care and support-----US neo-liberals and neo-cons are preparing to send Americans overseas to become part of the ex-pat diaspora.  Keep in mind poverty for youth in Europe is soaring as it is in the US and they want to send citizens abroad while bringing foreign workers to the US creating societies that are largely non-citizen without rights----remember the Bahrain model created by Wall Street.

This doesn't have to happen folks----we are at a point where we can return to a first world nation by simply getting engaged in politics and getting rid of global corporate pols.  These policies being installed in Maryland Assembly as in Baltimore City Hall all work towards this global economy and global immigrant trafficing.


The article below is long but please scan through!

'Reason #4 – It’s time for everyone to grow up and become global citizens
'

Why Young Americans Should Work Overseas


May 1, 2013 Mark Manson

I should start off by saying the reasons laid out in this article on why young Americans should work overseas are practical and not ideological. This is not a liberal argument or a conservative argument — it’s a life argument. For two centuries, if you were young, ambitious, and college-educated, North America offered you the best opportunities. But the tides are changing and that’s no longer the case.

The odd thing is that no one in the United States seems to realize this yet. People haven’t caught on. And what does that mean? Opportunity. Tons of it.

One of my best friends recently told me that the prestigious multinational corporation he worked for was itching to permanently send him to India. They wanted him to manage their expansion into that market. And obviously, India is a huge emerging market. They gave him the Godfather offer to go — enough money to live in a mansion, with personal chefs, private drivers, everything. The irony, of course, was that my friend is a first generation Indian-American. His parents gave up everything decades ago and fought their way to the US to give their kids opportunities they would never have had back in India. They succeeded. What they didn’t expect was that the opportunity for their son they gave up everything for — it was back in India.

And such is the irony for this generation of Americans. Our grandparents immigrated to the US for opportunity. And now, in many cases, with our US education, the greater opportunity is elsewhere.

If you are college educated and under 30, there’s a significant chance that you would be better off working in a country outside of the United States and I’m here to tell you why.

Reason #1 – Your market value is higher elsewhere


So the primary argument of this whole piece boils down to this: We’ve all heard the horror stories about how college grads can’t find work or are stuck working a job they’re insanely over-qualified for. In the US, there are simply no longer enough quality jobs for everyone with a university education. We have an education surplus. It’s reached the point where many are openly questioning whether going to university is even worth it, while others call it an outright scam.

Meanwhile, you have massive emerging economies in Asia and South America that are desperate for college grads and especially for western-educated college grads.


It’s simple supply and demand. There aren’t enough jobs in the US and Europe anymore for young people. There aren’t enough highly educated people in emerging countries. Put two and two together, and your market value is much higher elsewhere.

In fact, western-educated employees are valued so highly in many parts of the world, that companies will deck you out, covering everything from your expenses, housing, transportation, as well as benefits, just to get you to come over.

Reason #2 – The quality-of-life/cost-of-living ratio is now much higher elsewhere

A friend of mine recently told me that he spoke to a luxury hotel owner in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The hotel owner was desperate to hire managers with western education. He claimed that Malaysia’s education system, while good, taught obedience and that Malays did not problem solve or think for themselves. Therefore, they made poor managers. He was willing to hire anyone — yes, anyone — with a western university degree and immediately put them in a management position, a position that would take at least five to 10 years in the industry to reach back in the US. Perks included paid housing (penthouse suite within the hotel in downtown KL), paid transportation, and all the benefits.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Hah, yeah, but who would want to live in a shithole like Koala Oompa Loompa?” I know. I thought the same thing… until I went there. I expected dusty markets with loud motorbikes, no electricity and spiders the size of my face.

But, as with most Asian cities, I got something totally unexpected: Kuala Lumpur is amazing. In fact, it’s probably a nicer city than the one you live in right now. Don’t believe me? Let’s just put it this way. I went to a mall in Kuala Lumpur and there was a ferris wheel and a roller coaster inside the mall. Yeah…

Kuala Lumpur’s indoor roller coaster is better than you.The fact of the matter is that the developing world (minus much of Africa) has, in many ways, caught up to the developed world and caught up fast. It’s happened under our noses and we haven’t even realized it. When I started traveling the world in 2009, almost every place I went to blew my expectations away. I expected to show up to a dirt heap and get my kidneys carved out, and what I got was an amazing quality of life for my money.

Similarly, when my girlfriend, who is Brazilian, began traveling around the world a few years ago, she had the exact opposite reaction: every place she went was not nearly as nice as she expected. Why? She grew up in Brazil and assumed that the US and Europe were technological and social paradises, light years ahead of her native country. She was wrong. Over and over again — wrong, wrong, wrong.

Economists measure quality of life with different metrics. They also measure cost of living. By these metrics, usually the same countries come out on top. What nobody has measured (to my knowledge) is a quality of life PER cost of living metric. Why nobody asked me about this, I have no idea.

But it’s an easy concept to grasp. Here’s an example: $3000 per month in New York City gets you a shitty, roach-infested studio apartment in a bad part of Brooklyn or Queens and a lot of fatty take-out meals. Chances are you are working 50- or 60-hour weeks and the weather sucks six months out of the year. In Bangkok, $3000 per month gets you the nicest penthouse apartment in the city, your own driver, access to some of the best restaurants and nightlife in Asia, and you’re probably working 30- or 35-hour weeks. The high-life there is probably 90% of the high-life in NYC, but you’re now living it on the same income that got you a shitty studio apartment back in Queens.

Reason #3 – The Jobs Aren’t Coming Back


I hate to be the one that breaks this to you, but the jobs aren’t coming back. Sure, unemployment rates have dropped to below 8%, but as Republicans correctly point out, this is because people are giving up on working altogether and the real number of jobs is falling. The US government keeps reporting job growth every month, but what they fail to mention is that the job growth is slower than the overall population growth.

There is a structural change in the economy. Technological improvements mean our economy can produce more value while employing fewer workers. Economists refer to this as the de-coupling of labor and growth. Technological automation and globalization has created an economy that can grow while employing fewer people. This technology and outsourcing has also developed an economy that disproportionally rewards entrepreneurs, investors and corporations. Hence the whole “We are the 99%” hubbub a year or two ago.

And with the accelerating rate of technological advancement, the problem is only going to get worse, not better. Democrats and Republicans will continue to blame the sluggish economy and shitty job numbers on each other. But know this: that if it’s anybody’s fault, it’s Silicon Valley’s. And the same technology that has enriched our lives and allows me to write this and you to read it, is ultimately the culprit.

Shit’s changing, folks. And it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. We’re seeing a perfect storm of sorts: the decoupling of economic growth to household income and labor productivity with a simultaneous aging population. I don’t care who is president, things are going to be a mess for a while to come.


Reason #4 – It’s time for everyone to grow up and become global citizens


Christopher Hitchens, about traveling the world, once wrote:

What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight.

This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people.

In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.

There’s a lot of alarmism in the media these days. Iran is going to start World War III. War between China and the US is inevitable. A bunch of rag-tag tribesmen in Pakistan are going to wrought nuclear annihilation on all of us. Drug runners in Mexico are going to chop off your limbs. Bizarrely named African rebels are going to drink your blood.

It’s time to get over the hype, move beyond the overblown cultural differences within the human species, and to get over, as Hitchens quotes Freud as saying, “the narcissism of the small difference.”

Living abroad has been one of the biggest personal growth experiences of my life. It’s given me the most unique and memorable experiences of my life. It’s made me smarter, wiser, more tolerant, and more empathetic. And I’m by no means unique in this regard. Just about any world traveler will tell you the same thing.

But the biggest asset has been eliminating my narcissism of that small difference. A lot of people throw around the cliché “broadening your horizons.” But I see it simply as engaging humanity. Recognizing that our perceptions of the dreaded “other” are dominated by the extremes. And that despite cultural differences, people are all trying to get the same needs met.

As a young adult, your biggest assets are time and ambition. If you fail today, you have the advantage of being able to start fresh tomorrow. The difference between a broke, jobless 22-year-old and a broke, jobless, 26-year-old is basically nothing. So use those four years to do something crazy, to shoot for the moon.

Leverage these years. Because one day you won’t be able to. The world is changing in ways people haven’t caught on to yet. And you can position yourself to be there to capitalize on this new borderless, instant-information economy.

Or you can position yourself as part of a by-gone era, serving up lattes at Starbucks, paying off that English Lit degree you never used, wondering where you went wrong, and why Obama (or whoever is in the White House) hasn’t fixed everything yet.

It’s your job to fix your life. So get moving.


________________________________________

The Maryland Assembly is seeing lots of individual higher education and K-12 funding that targets a small group of students.  This replaces the equal opportunity War on Poverty Federal funding for all low-income students and is unconstitutional.  I've spoken about the charter school KIPP in Baltimore tied with scholarships to University of Maryland College Park and now they want to give all Baltimore City students free tuition at Baltimore City Community College.  BCCC is a job-training facility where student work for free and are not guaranteed a job.  It's a win-win for businesses tied to BCCC.  I listened to businessmen at the Maryland Assembly wanting to get some of Baltimore's free labor.  Whether BCCC, the mayor using city funds to subsidize summer jobs for low-income students that then do not get hired----the VISTA programs are heavy in Baltimore with college grads working on the cheap-----and even the veterans are being thrown into this 'volunteering' as work along with the disabled.  The key word for Baltimore is WORKING FOR FREE.

I talked with a young lady from Baltimore working with one of many Baltimore region Healthy Community programs about what her organization does. 

IT'S A JOHNS HOPKINS ORGANIZATION THAT GETS PEOPLE TO VOLUNTEER TO CLEAN UP NEIGHBORHOODS she says.

There was even a bill that Maryland Public Justice worked to create that targets a small number of homeless students for scholarships to university.  Remember, financial aid for low-income families was readily available for anyone qualifying for any college. 

THERE IS PLENTY OF FUNDING FOR ANYONE WANTING TO GO ANYWHERE----THEY ARE SIMPLY ALLOWING IT ALL TO BE STOLEN.

So, I asked this Maryland Public Justice person if she wanted to join my organization in doing citizen audits for fraud telling her that a billion dollars has been lost in Baltimore this past decade in for-profit education industry fraud targeting low-income people-----recovering that would make financial aid and scholarship funding flush with money for everyone----and besides----THAT IS THE JOB OF MARYLAND PUBLIC JUSTICE.  She ran away saying she didn't have the time.
I said the same to a full committee speaking of education funding for low-income students.  They were trying the PAY -FORWARD policy that pretends to address the dismantling of Federal financial aid programs guaranteed in the Constitution by War on Poverty programs. 

RECOVER A BILLION DOLLARS IN FOR-PROFIT EDUCATION FRAUD AND YOU HAVE A FULLY FUNDED TRUST FOR LOW-INCOME STUDENT FINANCIAL AID FROM EXISTING REVENUE----EASY PEASY.


Just where are these selective few students going who attend university on scholarship?  Well, let's look at the foreign language push.  Georgia is the gateway for foreign global corporations coming to the US and they are number 1 in K-12 foreign language----all with a goal of sending Americans overseas to work as immigrants are brought to the US to work.  Sadly, most of this legislation in the Maryland Assembly is sponsored by pols from Prince Georges and Baltimore City targeting low-income schools.  Learning a language is good-----making the only choice for employment going overseas is bad.

KIPP NYC College PrepAcademics Students complete four years of math, science, English, and social studies, and at least three years of a foreign language.


Gwinnett schools launching foreign language immersion programs

Aug 1, 2014, 1:25pm EDT  Greg Barfield

Staff Writer- Atlanta Business Chronicle

A workforce development program run by the Georgia Department of Education is reaching down into the elementary schools to train the workers of tomorrow.

Starting next week, three elementary schools in Gwinnett County will be offering dual foreign language immersion programs. Kindergarten pupils at Annistown Elementary School in Snellville and Bethesda Elementary in Lawrenceville will receive instruction for half the day in Spanish, while their counterparts at Trip Elementary School in Grayson will be learning French on the same 50/50 teaching model.



Foreign Language Education and the Education-Reform Movement: Opportunity or Threat?


Christine Brown


THE voices of education reform are once again calling for major changes in the United States educational system. For more than a decade, prominent leaders in education, government, and business, as well as parents and educators, have known that the educational system needs substantive change. Beginning with the publication in 1983 of the report A Nation at Risk commissioned by the then Secretary of Education Terrel Bell, and continuing today with countless governmental committees and local and statewide reform efforts, educators have been reeling from the numerous changes that appear to be under way. The context for this education-reform effort is a nation where children are growing up in increasing poverty and violence and schools are burdened with complex societal issues. The country is facing substantial changes in the economy and in the type of jobs available. Many ideas and plans have been put forth to make the educational system more responsive to the perceived changes in society, to the future needs of our nation, and to our nation's changing relation to the world.

There are many parallels between the present education-reform movement and reform efforts in American industry over the last fifteen years. Because the present movement has been spurred by the perceived lack of American competitiveness abroad as well as by comparisons, of the American workforce with Western European and Japanese workforces, the impetus and some of the models for change have come from a theory that has been developed and applied in the business community. In fact, when one carefully examines the components of education reform, the similarity to the shift in business from the so-called factory model to the learning-organization model becomes apparent.

The vast bureaucratic systems of education are often compared to the factories of the past. In the factory model of business, the vision for the company, if one existed, usually belonged solely to the head of the company. A small group of people made all the decisions, and the workers implemented them without any opportunity for dialogue and discussion. The bureaucracy contained many managers and layers of administration. Workers tended to have specialized jobs and no broad understanding of how the entire product was developed.

Today, some segments of business and industry have been transformed by theories of organizational management promulgated in the United States at the end of World War II and adopted by Japan and other postindustrial nations. Commonly called Total Quality Management, these theories have transformed the factory model into a learning-organizational model. Several elements of these new models can be observed in many of the most successful companies in the nation. First, it is generally accepted by leaders in the business community that change comes about when they create a vision of what the industry or the system should be. Second, the vision is developed and linked to policies. Third, those policies, after being debated and modified, are implemented by an informed and prepared group of stakeholders. Fourth, as a result of the policies and practices implemented, a product is developed. The product is then tested and evaluated through a process that includes development, production, marketing, and sales (McKernan).

In contemporary business philosophy, boundaries between managers and workers are blurred. The system is open, and communication flows in a circular pattern or from the bottom up instead of always from the top down. Decision making occurs at a level close to product development. Visions, goals, and objectives are conceived with comments and suggestions from the workforce. In fact, visions are often created by the workforce. The product is monitored carefully, assessed, and modified to meet everchanging economic demands.

Education Reform If one examines the national agenda for education reform and the concomitant change agendas in states and local school districts, one sees that the process for change is very similar to the process in business and industry. The call to arms for educational improvement has come from politicians, business leaders, the Education Commission of the States, the chief state school officers, legislators, school board members, administrators, teachers, and parents. Everyone seems to want to forge a new vision for the American educational system. Educators believe standards that can be implemented in schools will be derived from this new vision, whether it be national, statewide, or local in scope. Supposedly parents and teachers, working together, can implement the necessary changes at the local level. At the same time, educators theorize that when local, state, and national standards are in place, the schools, operating independently from the vast bureaucracies of the past, will be able to meet their goals in a number of innovative ways.

Innovation is another element of the education-reform effort. In the United States, innovation is seen as the key to economic success now and in the next century. Some businesses expend tremendous resources in the search for innovation. Business leaders often look to successful international competitors for innovative management theories and practices. Business leaders have also called for the educational system in the United States to build teamwork and critical thinking practices into the delivery of the curriculum to prepare students to join the workforce of the future. Educators postulate that if teachers, administrators, and parents work together to build innovative schools, these schools will foster teamwork and creativity.

Supposedly, once schools have empowered teachers and parents to make decisions about the curricula, a series of assessments will provide checks and balances. Perhaps just as products are judged in the arena of international competition, so too will students and schools be judged by state, national, and international assessments and comparisons.

Although many voices are calling for reform in education, they do not all make the harmonious music! In fact, many of the reform efforts seem contradictory. For example, the calls for innovative “break-the-mold schools” are being made at the same time that national standards and assessments are being promulgated. In addition, the present efforts at reform are affected by political and educational realities. Schools and school systems are complex institutions involved in complex societal transformations. The educational system certainly cannot change quickly or without the resources to support teachers and administrators and to relieve them of the weight of the societal change occurring in nearly every school in the nation. Change takes time. It cannot take place without enormous suspicion and resistance from teachers and administrators toward change agents, such as school-board members, school principals, and superintendents, who enter and leave the system every two to four years. Also, teachers become demoralized when they make tremendous efforts to be creative and successful with students only to see their innovative practices, programs, and schools eliminated in budget cuts by new administrators or school-board members.

When Europeans or Canadians examine the educational-change process supposedly going on at every level of society in the United States, they are amazed that Americans have chosen this method. In countries with national educational policies and national curricula, both the establishment of vision and assessment are done by a central authority. Educators in other nations find it almost inconceivable that a nation would attempt to have this change process go on in every institution at every level, but this is precisely what is happening in the United States. So strong is the concept of local autonomy that the federal effort at establishing a vision to be implemented in schools nationwide has been severely attacked by local and state legislators, policy makers, and parents. The current national efforts will result in strictly voluntary educational standards that may or may not affect local school districts. Although this result seems inconceivable to those outside our country, for those who work in United States education it may actually be a healthy and enduring way to ensure true reform.

Foreign Language Education and Reform In 1983, language educators were as shocked as other educators to see the dismal and depressing findings of the National Commission on Excellence appointed by Bell. Although language teachers had known for years that the language capabilities of American youth lagged far behind those of their counterparts in almost every other nation, they were stunned to find out that our youth lacked essential knowledge in many other disciplines as well. As a result of A Nation At Risk , some of the first steps of education reform included foreign language initiatives (Bell and Crosby 592). States and local districts were prompted to examine their curricula, practices, and assessments. Foreign language requirements were enacted at some local and state levels, and programs were widely expanded in some states. Inspired by A Nation at Risk and by the calls for more and better foreign language education from political champions such as Senators Paul Simon, Christopher Dodd, and David Boren and former Representative Leon Panetta, some beneficial legislation was enacted. The report drew attention to the need for citizens of the United States to be cognizant of their neighbors abroad as well as to be able to converse with them. Many of the promising initial reform efforts are still under way, but some have not been implemented because of a lack of resources.

A second wave of education reform came as a result of initiatives begun under President Bush. In 1989, the National Governor's Association met with President Bush in Charlottesville, Virginia, to begin to establish a new vision for American schools. The meeting resulted in national educational goals that eventually formed the basis of the recently enacted Goals 2000: Educate America Act, President Clinton's education initiative.


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Learning a foreign language is always a good thing-----it is the goal of this language push that is bad.  It's goal is tied to outsourcing American citizens overseas in jobs that will create the same status for Americans as exist today for immigrants in the US-----we will be ex-pats living overseas just for a job.  As the article at the top on Israeli immigrant labor-------the Yad Beyad and Johns Hopkins make sure their human capital is trained in languages of the countries they are sent to work.

REMEMBER----THE US DOES NOT HAVE TO GO THIS GLOBAL ROUTE----JUST SAY NO BY GETTING RID OF THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS.  ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE GLOBAL POLS.

Maryland is keen on foreign languages as they are ground zero for 21st Century sending Americans abroad to work policy.  This is the goal of these education reforms that have foreign languages in early elementary.


Not once does Arne shout that all of this has to do with sending Americans globally to live----it becomes our patriotic duty to support US global corporations and global markets with Clinton neo-liberalism and Bush neo-conservatism. 

It is NOT OUR DUTY TO END THE SOVEREIGNTY OF AMERICA BY HANDING OUR NATION OVER TO GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNALS.

Learning foreign language to create more tolerance for people coming to America is a good thing-----having it as policy simply to prepare to send Americans overseas for jobs as they keep the American economy stagnant DELIBERATELY is wrong.



Education and the Language Gap: Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks at the Foreign Language Summit

December 8, 2010 Contact:   (202) 401-1576, press@ed.gov

It is an honor to be here at the University of Maryland which has worked closely with the Department of Education for more than 20 years to advance the teaching of languages such as Hebrew, Farsi, Chinese, and Russian.

As President Obama said on Monday: "Our generation's Sputnik moment is now." The Soviet satellite was a wake-up call that launched a wave of innovation and reform in American schools, particularly in math, science and language instruction. Today's call to action is an economic one. We need to build a strong foundation for growth and prosperity.

We have to educate our way to a better economy, just as our competitors are doing.

This week, we found out that the brutal truth that we're being out-educated. On the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment, the United States scored as average in reading and science – and below average in math.

We're behind global leaders such as Finland, South Korea, and Canada. The most surprising news is that Shanghai outscored every other nation. We see this as a challenge to get better.

And one place we obviously need to get better is in teaching languages. The United States is a long way from being the multi-lingual society that so many of our economic competitors are.

My message to you today is that K-12 schools and higher education institutions must be part of the solution to our national language gap.

The President and I want every child to have a world-class education – and today more than ever a world-class education requires students to be able to speak and read languages in addition to English.

The Department of Education plays an important role in supporting second language instruction starting in the earliest grades and to ensure that students are engaged in language all the way through high school.

We have an important responsibility to provide opportunities for those who want to master other languages and prepare them to support America's economic and strategic interests as diplomats, foreign policy analysts, and leaders in the military.

This is a high-stakes issue. For too long, Americans have relied on other countries to speak our language. But we won't be able to do that in the increasingly complex and interconnected world.

To prosper economically and to improve relations with other countries, Americans need to read, speak and understand other languages.

It's absolutely essential for the citizens of the United States to become fluent in other languages—and schools, colleges and universities must include producing bilingual students as a central part of their mission.


Nelson Mandela has said, "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart."

No one understands that better than CIA Director Leon Panetta. As a public servant in Congress, at the White House, and now at the CIA, Leon has been a consistent voice urging Americans to become fluent in other languages.

At the CIA, he has reinvigorated the agency's commitment to ensuring their employees know and use their language skills to ensure our national security.

He has set a five-year goal to double the number of CIA analysts who have a proficiency in a language other than English.

He is working to transform the agency's language training. He has created a powerful incentive for existing CIA employees to maintain their proficiency in languages other than English.

Leon, thank you for all of your leadership, and thank you for convening this meeting today.

When I look at the challenges you face as the CIA director, it's obvious that schools need to do a better job supporting you and other leaders on our national security team.

This commitment goes beyond the European languages traditionally taught in high schools and colleges.

It extends to languages that are essential for our economic and strategic interests – languages such as Arabic and Mandarin Chinese, Urdu and Farsi, Pashto and Dari.

As Mr. Panetta has been pointing out for years, the United States may be the only nation in the world where it is possible to complete high school and college without any foreign language study – let alone with the mastery of another language.

Just 18 percent of Americans report speaking a language other than English. That's far short of Europe, where 53 percent of citizens speak more than one language.

And some researchers predict that China will soon have the world's largest English-speaking population.

Our education system is one of the reasons Americans aren't learning other languages.

Foreign language instruction in the United States is spotty--and unfortunately on the decline.

In 2008, one-quarter of elementary schools offered some form of language instruction – down from one-third 11 years earlier.

Just 10 states require foreign language study for high school graduation--and low-income and minority students in particular lag behind their peers in other countries in their knowledge of languages, as well as geography and other cultures.

Low-income students and those who live in rural areas are a lot less likely to attend a school with language instruction. We have to level the playing field for them and offer better opportunities.

I think everyone can point to bright spots in our K-12 system. During my tenure as superintendent in Chicago, the district made a significant investment in Chinese language instruction.

Over the past decade, the Chicago Public Schools has expanded its Chinese language program to include 43 schools and serve 12,000 students. Many of the children involved are Hispanic. They will grow up trilingual with a new world of opportunity ahead of them.


I am proud to say that Chicago has the largest enrollment in Chinese language courses of any district in the country. But I'm the first to admit that I wish the bar was much higher than that.

Today, even if public schools wished to provide second language instruction, the dearth of qualified instructors often prevents school leaders from hiring teachers.

In the 2007-08 school year, three-fourths of the states reported shortages in second language teachers. I believe that where we have areas of critical need, we should pay those teachers – be they foreign language, math or science teachers – more money. Not everyone agrees with me, but I want to stop just talking about the problem and do something about it.

Teacher preparation programs at postsecondary institutions are simply not meeting the demand for new instructors.

In 2007-08, only 136 bachelor's degrees, 188 master's degrees, and 14 doctorates were awarded in foreign language teacher education in the United States.

And in 2002, colleges in the United States awarded just six bachelor degrees in Arabic language and literature. Six years later, that number increased to 57. It's an increase, to be sure, but clearly we're still far short of what's needed.

Right now, too many colleges and universities are starting to scale back language programs or eliminate them altogether.

And even those where the language programs remain intact, the priority is often put in the wrong place.

Ninety-five percent of college students enrolled in a language course to study a European language, but fewer than 1 percent of graduate students are studying a language that the Department of Defense considers critical for national security.

It's clear to all of us that schools, colleges and universities need to invest more and invest smarter in language instruction.

But how do we get from where we are to where we need to be?

The North Star of everything we're doing at the Department of Education is President Obama's goal that, by the end of the decade, the United States will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

Working with Congress, the Obama administration has made a great start in expanding college access this year with the reform of the federal student loan program, which freed up $40 billion for Pell Grant scholarships for low-income undergraduates.

That is the biggest increase in student aid since the G.I. bill. And it came at a critical time. We have seen a 38 percent increase in the number of Pell Grants awarded over the past two years. We did that simply by stopping subsidies to banks and instead investing in our nation's college students.

K-12 schools have a critical role to play as well by ensuring that high school graduates are truly prepared to succeed in college.

Over the past two years, state and local leaders have responded by raising the bar for students.

Forty states and the District of Columbia have voluntarily adopted a set of common standards that truly measure whether a student is ready for success in college or a career when the graduate from high school.

This is a game-changer. Historically, states have dumbed down standards to make politicians look good.
THIS IS TRUE!

These standards focus on reading and mathematics because they include the foundational skills and knowledge that students need to excel in other parts of the curriculum.

But today's students also need a well-rounded curriculum that provides the opportunity to learn a second language, as well as history, civics, and the arts.

These subjects are essential ingredients to a world-class education. Education leaders need to be perpetually vigilant that their schools do not narrow the curriculum and offer students the language instruction that will prepare them for success.

One of my top priorities for next year is to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. I want to underscore that our proposal goes much further than the existing law in supporting a well-rounded curriculum.

It will allow states to incorporate assessments of subjects beyond English language arts and math in accountability systems.

The blueprint to reform ESEA would create a competitive pool of $265 million to strengthen the teaching of languages, the arts, civics and government, and other subjects. This pool represents a $43 million increase in total funds available for this work – a significant new investment.

Existing programs for all of these subjects have worthy goals. But they have resulted in fragmented funding at the federal, state, and local level.

Under the ESEA proposal, high-need districts, and states and nonprofits in partnership with high-need districts, would be eligible to apply for the grants.

At the same time, we would increase access and funding for college-level, dual credit, and other accelerated courses in high-need schools to support not only a well-rounded, but a rigorous curriculum. Exposure to college-level classes is an extraordinary opportunity for high school students. We want to invest $100 million in this effort.

I recognize that the plan to include funding for foreign language education into a competitive program with other subjects may make some of you in this room nervous, even if it means you can potentially compete for significantly more funding than in the past.

But I urge language educators to participate in this process and demonstrate the impact of their programs on student outcomes. Multiple, small pots of funding perpetuate the status quo, but they don't lead to the transformative change we need.


One promising development in the research about language instruction is that programs that are proven to be successful continue to grow and thrive.

With a strong research base that's emerging around such programs, our investment in these and other language projects could potentially easily exceed the amount currently appropriated for programs.

I hope you will accept this proposal as a challenge to show the outcomes of second language programs and an opportunity to assemble grant applicants that will demonstrate the necessity to expand and improve foreign language instruction in schools.

But our investment must go beyond K-12 and continue in higher education.

Since the Sputnik launch in 1957, the federal government has focused the development of second language instruction through resource centers and fellowships to support the study of languages.

Over time, these programs have shifted as economic and strategic interests have changed, and today they are supporting thousands of students as they earn degrees and have experiences in foreign languages that will prepare them for careers in public service and the private sector.

Through Title VI of the Higher Education Act, the Department of Education supports colleges and universities that are teaching strategic languages.

The funding goes to just 3 percent of the nation's higher education institutions that offer language instruction.

But those institutions account for half of all undergraduate enrollment and more than three-quarters of graduate enrollment in rare languages.

In addition, the National Resource Centers under Title VI support teaching and fellowships for the study of 110 languages every year. The 48 colleges and universities with National Resource Centers award an average of 2,000 PhDs and 6,000 graduate or master's degrees in languages every year.

These graduates represent a high proportion of the employees in our national security agencies and our military. The U.S. Army, for example, sends its officers seeking master's degrees in languages to institutions supported by the resource centers.

In particular, these resource centers have been strengthening ties with partner institutions with substantial Muslim populations around the world.

The department will support and help build on innovative education efforts like the University of Hawaii's Muslim Societies in Asia and the Pacific program.

And four-year grants have supported advanced intensive language study in Indonesian, through Ohio University; Turkish through Princeton University; Arabic in Egypt and Syria through the University of Texas at Austin; and Kiswahili in Tanzania through Michigan State University.


The resource centers also do significant outreach to K-12 educators by posting curriculum materials and offering workshops for teachers.

The Department also funds faculty, doctoral students and educators at the K-12 level in their study of other languages and cultures through the Fulbright Hays program.

The program supports doctoral students conducting research and teachers as they develop curriculum and instructional resources.

The program also gives doctoral students, faculty and future teachers the opportunity to travel abroad and use their language skills in critical languages such as Arabic, Mandarin, and Vietnamese – to name just a few.


While these programs are making significant contributions to the expansion of language instruction in K-12 schools and colleges, it's clear that they aren't doing enough.

The path to expanding and improving language instruction faces many significant challenges.

Perhaps the biggest are the budget constraints in K-12 schools and higher education. At every level of education, schools are facing a New Normal in which they will need to be more productive and efficient.

There are productive ways and unproductive ways for schools to meet the very real challenge of doing more with less.

The right way is to cut waste and to identify ways to accelerate student achievement without raising costs.

The wrong way is to cut programs like foreign languages that are essential to providing our students with the well-rounded education that they need to excel in the interconnected, knowledge-based economy.

Our country needs to create a future in which all Americans understand that by speaking more than one language, they are enabling our country to compete successfully and work collaboratively with partners across the globe.


So this is our challenge: To expand and improve language instruction at a time when financial resources are tight and the international economic competition is greater than ever.

We need to embrace this challenge with all of our collective will and courage – the stakes are too high for the future of our children and our country to ignore it.

Let's embrace the fourth 'R' – reality – that Director Panetta spoke so passionately about today.

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February 20th, 2015

2/20/2015

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Folks, dismantling New Deal and War on Poverty health programs will hurt every American family but it will hurt women and children most as it is this demographic targeted for these policies.  Women are the majority of seniors living longer lives than their husbands.....they are the single mother living at poverty....they are the caretaker of aging parents not able to work full time.

THIS IS WHAT CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS ARE DISMANTLING ALL WHILE PRETENDING REPUBLICANS MADE THEM DO IT!



Have you noticed that Obama and Clinton neo-liberals are adding all kinds of special funding for children and the poor as they dismantle all of the War on Poverty with the health protections as well.  So, they send money for dentists and we find it all goes to private national dentistry chains that are then found filled with fraud and abuse.  Then they create mobile units that supposedly visit schools instead of having a nurse in each school and access to local hospitals.  These mobile units do not have the capacity to see everyone and they are filled with people less trained than if these children simply went to a public clinic.  But, O'Malley was able to spend money on mobile vehicles----he was able to pretend to meet the Constitutional laws surrounding Medicaid when in fact they are not and he opens yet another channel of systemic fraud by privatizing the entire child health system to national health business chains.  That is what Maryland's health reform has been about these several years......dismantling health regulations that would not allow this lower level of care.  This system of care being developed for Medicaid -----and remember most people will fall on this plan as corporations stop health plans, veterans are moved to Medicaid as well as public employees and seniors no longer getting the Federally required level of care with global pooling of funds-----is modeled on third world health care developed over decades in working in Africa and Asia. 

THEY ARE BRINGING THIRD WORLD CLINIC CARE TO THE US AS THE STANDARD FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID.

The War on Poverty and New Deal lifted the quality of life for hundreds of millions of Americans and most of those lifted were women and children.  Reagan/Clinton and now Bus/Obama spent all their efforts dismantling these programs.  Neo-liberalism means small government and no public subsidy-----it means working to maximize profits with no thought of public interest so when we allow Clinton neo-liberals to win primary elections at all levels of government we get extreme poverty and desperate health conditions.  Republicans didn't make them do it----they did it because that is what Wall Street Clinton neo-liberals do.


Below you see how Maryland centralized yet another public agency into an appointed commission that then has appointments who outsource and privatize all that is public with no public input on policy. 
They create the conditions for massive fraud in the Medicaid funding just as is done with Medicare through the Federal exemption from oversight and deregulation.

Keep in mind that all these commission used to be simply public agencies given oversight and held accountable and the average person knew what was happening in their communities.  This is what takes all democracy out of Maryland and creates this cronyism as the governors and mayors simply appoint people open to thuggery.


Keep in mind the leveraging that these groups do is what gets Maryland caught in constant loses to Wall Street fraud when we do not even need to do the leveraging.  It is done because so much of the Maryland Treasury is lost to fraud and they are trying to hide (no transparency) and make harder finding these trails.

YOU ARE RE-ELECTING POLS OVER AND AGAIN THAT ARE DOING THIS.  PLEASE FIGHT AGAINST ELECTION RIGGING BY BEING THE CANDIDATE AND VOTING FOR PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CAPTURE!


Community Health Resources Commission (CHRC)


The Maryland Community Health Resources Commission (CHRC) was created by the Maryland General Assembly in 2005 to expand access to health care services in underserved communities in Maryland. The CHRC is an independent commission operating within the Maryland Department of Health & Mental Hygiene (DHMH), whose 11 members are appointed by the Governor. Since its inception, the CHRC has awarded 143 grants totaling $42 million, supporting programs in every jurisdiction of the state. These programs have collectively served more than 140,000 Marylanders, and grants awarded by the CHRC have enabled grantees to leverage $14.7 million in additional federal and private/non-profit resources.

The CHRC supports the work of community health care resources and fulfills its statutory mission in the following activities:  
  1. Awarding grants to expand access in underserved areas and support public health priorities;
  2. Implementing the Health Enterprise Zone (HEZs) Initiative jointly with DHMH
  3. Supporting the Local Health Improvement Coalitions (LHICs) and efforts to promote population health initiatives; and
  4. Executing additional Special Projects.
  In fulfilling these responsibilities, the Commission implements a robust system of performance measurements to ensure public resources are utilized effectively and efficiently so that Maryland’s underserved communities are receiving high quality health care services.
_______________________________________


If you see Maryland Health Care for All and the children's health initiative you see the groups pretending to advocate for the public but who have directors working to cheapen and privatize all the Constitutional requirements for Medicaid and Medicare.  They are the ones creating these bills opening what was a strong public health to these crazy outsourced privatized contractors and national health businesses.  Community Health Resources should be regulating how Medicaid and Medicare is spent and meeting the guidelines to protect the citizens of Maryland and especially Baltimore----but they are the ones creating the outsourcing that breaks down the public structure.  They pretend to look progressive by recruiting people of color to own these health businesses as small business owners while the goal is to simply have global corporations take all of this Medicare and Medicaid business and loot it to the max!  I showed how Manor Care owned by hedge funds is now senior care -----well, Health Enterprise Zones do the same with low-income health.


We had a few years ago O'Malley and supposed progressive groups try for gun control and wanted to attack a repressive mental health policy to these gun laws just as they did with forced dosing for the mentally ill.  They are basically ending civil rights for anyone attached with the mentally ill status.  As the article below shows the dismantling of public health and Constitutional guarantees to health access is causing the rise in mental health issues which are not seeing funding because of Medicaid cuts.  Maryland Eastern Shore cannot afford to recruit mental health doctors giving no coverage at the same time O'Malley is pretending to supply the mental health coverage as part of gun control.  None of this meets with the Federal Constitutional requirements set by War on Poverty health laws.

IT IS THE CONSTANT USE OF PROGRESSIVE ISSUES TO INSTALL THE MOST REPRESSIVE POLICY THAT KILLS MARYLAND'S ABILITY TO HAVE A HEALTHY POLITICAL DEBATE THAT WOULD GET PEOPLE TO COME OUT TO VOTE.


US child poverty remains at highest rate in 20 years

By Andre Damon
27 October 2014

Nearly one in four US children lives in poverty, the highest level in 20 years, with a similar proportion not getting enough food to eat. These were among the findings of an article published last week in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics, entitled Seen but Not Heard: Children and US Federal Policy on Health and Health Care.

While the Obama administration praises the “economic recovery,” the facts presented in this report show that since 2009 there has been an immense social retrogression in every measure of well-being among the most vulnerable section of the population: children.

“It shouldn’t be this hard for kids to grow and thrive in the world’s richest, most powerful nation,” said Bruce Lesley, one of the study’s co-authors and the president of the child advocacy organization First Focus.


The report listed a panoply of dangers to the health and well-being of children in the United States, including hunger, lack of health and mental health care, cutbacks in social spending, the havoc wracked on immigrant families by deportation, and others. It found, among all these, that by far the worst impact on the health and well-being of children is poverty.

The report notes that there is overwhelming popular support for government programs to fight child poverty: “82% of voters want Congress and the White House to cut child poverty in half within 10 years.” But with the upcoming midterm election only a week away, such a project could not be farther from the minds of US politicians.

The Obama administration’s 2015 budget proposal, for example, calls for slashing the budget of the Department of Health and Human Services, which funds the Head Start preschool program, and the Department of Agriculture, which administers the food stamp program, by more than five percent.

Keep in mind that poverty stats are very skewed because they use guidelines from the 1960s and not what living today costs.  As well, there is no national debt or deficit-----it is all massive corporate fraud and tax evasion yet Clinton neo-liberals are pretending the debt requires austerity to social programs.  70% of American people are at or near poverty and growing.

The report found that 16.1 million children, or 22 percent, live in poverty. It lists a string of adverse health impacts, including “significantly higher risks of low birth weight, injuries, lower IQ, intensive care unit admissions, and infant, condition-specific, and overall mortality.”


The impact of child poverty affects people once they grow up, and even affects their children. As the report notes, “Childhood poverty is associated with substantially higher mortality rates in adults, regardless of adult socioeconomic status (i.e., even affluent adults who were poor as children have elevated death rates), and this increased mortality risk extends across 2 generations.”

The second threat to the well-being of children listed in the report is food insecurity. The report notes that sixteen million children, or 22 percent, live in food-insecure households. An enormous number of children—one in three—rely on food stamp benefits for nutrition, and 47 percent of food stamp recipients are children. The report concludes, “Food insecurity is associated with deleterious consequences for children’s health, including elevated risks of suboptimal health and hospitalizations.”

The report noted that budget cuts that went into effect last year have had a devastating impact on anti-poverty programs for children. For example, the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, which provides food assistance to children and mothers, was cut back by more than $354 million. It added, “Some in Congress are proposing SNAP [food stamp] cuts at a time when SNAP participants already experienced benefit cuts in November 2013.”

The report also noted that seven million US children, or nine percent, have no health insurance. Despite this, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, jointly funded by the states and the federal government, is scheduled to have its funding drop by 73 percent, from $21.1 billion to $5.7 billion, in 2016.

Keep in mind this is almost always followed by state cuts as well.  So, they pretend to be meeting the requirements of care in Medicaid and Medicare but they don't have the funding to do so----THEY ARE LYING.
  Maryland does turn these Federal funds into block grants with the global funding model of pooled sources.  This makes for easy misappropriation and fraud and NO OVERSIGHT TO SEE REQUIREMENTS ARE MET WHICH IS THE POINT.

Congressional Republicans have proposed turning CHIP, together with Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, into a block grant or impose caps on the amount of healthcare funding individual children can receive. The report noted that such proposals “devastatingly restrict or eliminate benefits, underfund Medicaid, disadvantage children with even lower caps, and ration care.”

Among the most tragic elements depicted in the report is the effect of mass deportation on children. It noted that between 2010 and 2012, under the Obama administration, more than 200,000 parents of US citizen children were deported. As a result of these deportations, more than five thousand children have been put in foster care.

The report notes that one in three US children are overweight—which it refers to as a “pandemic”—and that 17 percent are obese. It relates these health problems to insufficient access to healthy food, both as a result of poverty and cutbacks to the funding of school lunch programs.

One in five children have mental disorders, and the rates are growing. “Pediatric mental-health and substance-abuse hospitalizations increased by 24% between 2007 and 2010, and hospitalizations for mood disorders increased by 80% between 1997 and 2010.” Suicide is the leading cause of death among teenagers, and rates have gone up since the start of the recession.

Despite the widespread prevalence of mental illness among children, only half of US children with mental disorders receive any form of mental-health services, according to the report. On the state level, more than $1.6 billion in funding for mental health services have been slashed between 2009 and 2012, resulting in the elimination of 4,000 psychiatric hospital beds since 2010.

Whole areas of the country simply have no mental health care available to the poor, who tend to suffer disproportionately from the effects of mental illness. The report notes “35% of US counties have no outpatient mental-health treatment facility accepting Medicaid.” Only three percent of psychiatrists who practice alone accept Medicaid.

Despite the disastrous prevalence of poverty and preventable disease in the US, funding for medical research is being slashed. The report noted that the sequester budget cuts slashed $1.57 billion from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and $289 million from the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report is a devastating indictment of a society that is going backward, not forward, in every measure of social well-being. These disastrous cuts in social services, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, are accompanied by the enormous enrichment of the super-wealthy, who have doubled their net worth since 2009.



___________________________________________

In Maryland, the corporatization of Community Health Resources that have always been public is being done with HEZs.  As usual, tax credits and all kinds of subsidy is given to corporations for coming in and doing what was always a public sector service that needed no incentives to do their jobs.  So, instead of hiring a public employee and paying them a Living Wage with some benefits and job security-----Maryland is handing all of those funds to health corporations that are already known to cause fraud to soar, provide abusive service and work conditions all while being given tax credits to do this.


THAT IS THE ONLY REASON FOR HEALTH ENTERPRISE ZONES.  THEY REPLACE PUBLIC HEALTH.

Of course Baltimore is ground zero for these policies------health corporations University of Maryland Medical Center and Johns Hopkins act as anchors for these national health chains taking public health and all this is great policy adding to the betterment of our city says Johns Hopkins!  Who owns those national health chains coming in and taking over public health for seniors and low-income?  THAT'S RIGHT----THE BIGGEST THUGS AROUND!


O'Malley running as a Democrat installed these Johns Hopkins policies with Baltimore's Maryland Assembly pushing the bills.  Larry Hogan will continue this because it is a Republican policy to privatize and maximize corporate wealth while getting rid of War on Poverty and New Deal programs. 

SEE WHY PRIMARY ELECTIONS ARE CAPTURED AND RIGGED AGAINST ANY CANDIDATE THAT RUNS AS A PROGRESSIVE LABOR AND JUSTICE?  REMEMBER, IT IS LABOR UNIONS AND JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS THAT SUPPORT THESE CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS DISMANTLING MEDICARE AND MEDICAID.


We now have a bill in Maryland Assembly to allow tax credit for grocery stores simply for opening in 'food deserts'.  Now food deserts is a term for eliminating corporate taxes.  Know how to have grocery stores in underserved communties? Think any business not wanting to be a good corporate citizen is going to be good to citizens in these communties?  Safeway charges more for product in its stores in underserved communities than Whole Foods does.  Rather than hiring employees to watch for theft they allow the theft and raise the prices.  None of this has anything to do with good healthy food policy.

LET THE PEOPLE LIVING IN THESE COMMUNITIES RUN THESE STORES AND PUBLIC CLINICS!


HEALTH ENTERPRISE ZONES (HEZs)



Jointly administered by the Community Health Resources Commission (CHRC) and Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH), the HEZ Initiative is a four-year pilot program with a budget of $4 million per year.

The purposes of the HEZ Initiative are to:

  1. Reduce health disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations and among geographic areas;
  2. Improve health care access and health outcomes in underserved communities; and
  3. Reduce health care costs and hospital admissions and re-admissions. 
To receive designation as an HEZ, community coalitions identified contiguous geographic areas with measurable and documented economic disadvantage and poor health outcomes and proposed a creative plan for targeted investments in community health. 

HEZ Key Implementaion Dates  
  • Fall of 2011 - Maryland Lt. Governor Anthony G. Brown convenes the Maryland Health Quality and Cost Council’s Health Disparities Workgroup.  The key recommendation of the Workgroup was the
    creation of “Health Enterprise Zones.”
  • April 2012 - Maryland Health Improvement and Disparities Act of 2012 (SB 234) signed into law. 
  • June 2012 - Public comment period takes place to solicit feedback on the selection criteria for the HEZs, the potential uses of HEZ funding, and the outcome metrics that should be developed to monitor the progress and implementation of the HEZs.
  • August 2012 - A Joint Chairmen’s Report, summarizing the public comment period is submitted to the legislature.
  • September 2012 - The HEZ Request for Proposal is issued to the public.
  • November 2012 - 19 HEZ Applicantions are recieved and reviewed by by an independent HEZ Review Committee comprised of experts in the fields of public health, health care finance, health disparities, and health care delivery.
  • January 24th, 2013 - DHMH Secretary Sharfstein designates Maryland’s first five HEZs based on the recommendations from CHRC.
  • Spring 2014 - Program implementation and peformance tracking of all five Zones begins.
HEZ Enacting Legislation   Chapter 3 (Senate Bill 234) of 2012 established a process whereby the Secretary of the DHMH, in collaboration with the CHRC, designates HEZs. The purpose of establishing these zones is to target State resources to reduce health disparities, improve health outcomes, and reduce health costs and hospital admissions and readmissions in those zones. The bill also authorizes specialized tax credit incentives to "HEZ Practitioners" who practice in a zone.  HEZ Requirements   For an HEZ to be designated by the Secretary, a non-profit community-based organization or local health department must apply to DHMH and CHRC with a comprehensive plan to address disparities in a defined geographic area. The bill contains several possible incentives that can be utilized to address disparities within the HEZ including:  
  • Loan assistance repayment;
  • Income tax credits;
  • Priority to enter the Maryland Patient Centered Medical Home Program;
  • Grant funding from CHRC; and
  • Priority for receiving funds for establishing an electronic health records program.
The bill also requires the Maryland Health Care Commission to establish and incorporate a standard set of measures regarding racial and ethnic variations in quality and outcomes and track health insurance carriers’ and hospitals’ efforts to combat disparities. In addition, state institutions of higher education that train health care professionals will be required to report to the Governor and General Assembly on their actions aimed at reducing health care disparities.

______________________________________

I cannot begin to show the network of private non-profits that are funded by Baltimore Board of Estimates that come and go-----that never receive oversight until some outside agency finds tons of fraud and misappropriation----but this outsourcing is soaring now with Affordable Care Act wanting to gut Federal funding and send these public health programs private.

No oversight and accountability -----no patient continuity-----no personal bonds being built in communities and citizens.  It is a mess.  Baltimore has had this network of outsourcing for decades and it is the 'MODEL' that Clinton neo-liberals and Republicans are trying to expand nationally.  This is why we have hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and much of the awarding of funds leads to pay-to-play politics.


2011
BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Baltimore City residents are living a little bit longer than they used to, but they still have some of the lowest life expectancies in the country.  That’s according to a new study that looked at life expectancies across the U.S. and compared them to other countries.


This stat above occurs because of the dismantling of public health and oversight and accountability of health regulations and funding.

Baltimore community clinics.

Clinics and health centers across Baltimore provide individuals with free or low cost medical care, dental assistance, health services and medical referrals for the uninsured and low income. Many locations are federal government qualified which means that they will help anyone, regardless of their income or insurance status. Patients may need to pay some money towards their bills. Every year thousands of Baltimore Maryland patients receive assistance from the community clinics.

While each center will offer its own programs and referral assistance, in general services offered by the clinics include chronic care, preventative care, check ups, acute care, medications, and immunizations. Depending on the location, they may also offer adult medical or dental care as well as, HIV/AIDS treatment, pediatric care for children, OB/GYN care, and possibly even substance abuse treatment & referral.

As indicated, if a facility can’t help you with your need, they will usually give a referral to other Baltimore non-profits or health/dental centers for specialty cases. Regardless of the center selected, the amount a patient is billed will usually depend on their income and health insurance status.






Mental /
Behavioral Health
  • REACH Mobile Health Services information provided by: Baltimore Mental Health Systems Inc. REACH provides substance abuse treatment. Services include the operation of two mobile vans that dispense methadone at locations around the city of Baltimore. Funds:
Public and Private Funding

Record last updated: Dec 11 2014 3:07PM




Baltimore Crisis Response Incorporated
Mobile Crisis Team

Not every crisis requires in-patient treatment.  Our mobile crisis teams are comprised of mental health professionals including psychiatrists, social workers and nurses who can be dispatched to any Baltimore City community location to provide immediate assessment, intervention and treatment. Teams operate from 7:00am till midnight seven days per week. Currently the teams average over 2000 responses per year.

We come to you in small teams of plain clothed individuals in unmarked vehicles so as not to draw any outside attention to you and to make you feel more relaxed.  We can meet you in your home or at any public place; whichever is more comfortable for you.  All information and assessments are held strictly confidential. 


People Encouraging People: Mobile Treatment Services
Phone: (410) 764-8560
Address: 4201 Primrose Avenue Baltimore, MD 21215 view map

Programs provide a wide range of services, from rehabilitation, to assistance for the deaf and blind, to residential and vocational ventures....

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February 19th, 2015

2/19/2015

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I WILL END THE TALK ON WAR ON POVERTY HEALTH CARE POLICY AND HOW OBAMA AND CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS ARE WORKING WITH REPUBLICANS TO END ALL OF THESE PROGRAMS FRIDAY.  CHILDREN AND WOMEN HEALTH ARE MOST AFFECTED.


When the media covered Obama and Congressional neo-liberals and the Affordable Care Act they spent the entire time talking about a handful of benefits these changes would bring.....pre-existing conditions and youth on their parents plans until 27 years old.......over and over this was the hype.    

OBAMA IS WRITING A NEW PATIENT'S BILL OF RIGHTS.

  Let's take a look at what the old Patient's Bill of Rights included to see what Obama did was write them away to deregulate the health industry.
  Remember, these are US Constitutional laws-----they say they are not going to honor the Constitutional Amendments, but they must.  We can reverse this because this health reform ignores all constitutional protections for patients, seniors, and low-income/poor.  Below you see the first violation of patient's rights----

'Hospitals
are also prohibited from requiring a deposit from a Medicare or Medicaid patient'.



This is a long article but please scan through to see what your rights are and how these rights are being changed and ignored with ACA and private health systems.


Patients' Rights

The
legal interests of persons who submit to medical treatment.


For many years, common medical practice meant that physicians made decisions for their patients. This paternalistic view has gradually been supplanted by one promoting patient autonomy, whereby patients and doctors share the decision-making responsibility. Consequently doctor-patient relationships are very different now than they were just a few decades ago. However, conflicts still abound as the medical community and those it serves struggle to define their respective roles.


Terms like 'best practices' and 'evidence-based care' are being used to used to circumvent this doctor/patient control of health care making room for a system built and enforced by health institutions and health insurance corporations.  It kills the doctor/patient dynamic and with it Hippocratic Oath and the ability to sue for malpractice and medical injury.  Remember, Medicare has decades of medical information on all procedures as regards health outcome and cost so none of this collaboration between health industries to define all of this is necessary-----only to assure maximized corporate profits.


Consent

Consent,
particularly informed consent, is the cornerstone of patients' rights. Consent is based on the inviolability of one's person. It means that doctors do not have the right to touch or treat a patient without that patient's approval because the patient is the one who must live with the consequences and deal with any dis-comfort caused by treatment. A doctor can be held liable for committing a Battery if the doctor touches the patient without first obtaining the patient's consent.

The shift in doctor-patient relationships seems inevitable in hindsight. In one early consent case, a doctor told a woman he would only be repairing some cervical and rectal tears; instead he performed a hysterectomy. In another case, a patient permitted her doctors to examine her under anesthesia but insisted that they not operate; the doctors removed a fibroid tumor during the procedure. In yet another case, a doctor assured a man that a proposed operation was simple and essentially without risk; the patient's left hand was paralyzed as a result of the surgery.

Consent must be voluntary, competent, and informed. Voluntary means that, when the patient gives consent, he or she is free from extreme duress and is not intoxicated or under the influence of medication and that the doctor has not coerced the patient into giving consent.


Think about consent as regards the current situation where they are trying to force patients into certain behaviors in order to have a certain kind of insurance.  Corporate health policies are forcing workers to participate in wellness programs and getting worker's personal medical data to see if blood tests are showing a lower cholesterol level for example.  Medicare primary doctors are setting appointments 4 times a year to do blood work on these same fat/sugar etc levels requiring these visits which the patient pays out of pocket in order to have a Medicare doctor.  Insurance corporations are using these stats to determine insurance rates and acceptance onto plans and none of this has to do with consent or patient/doctor control of health care.  Everyone is aware of how medical research changes these treatment protocol----so connecting fat and sugar levels to disease control when plastics and artificial sugar are now thought to be the biggest factors shows these rules are only being developed as reasons to exclude.

The law presumes that an adult is competent, but competency may be an issue in numerous instances. Competence is typically only challenged when a patient disagrees with a doctor's recommended treatment or refuses treatment altogether. If an individual understands the information presented regarding treatment, she or he is competent to consent to or refuse treatment.

Consent can be given verbally, in writing, or by one's actions. For example, a person has consented to a vaccination if she stands in line with others who are receiving vaccinations, observes the procedure, and then presents her arm to a healthcare provider. Consent is inferred in cases of emergency or unanticipated circumstances. For example, if unforeseen serious or life-threatening circumstances develop during surgery for which consent has been given, consent is inferred to allow doctors to take immediate further action to prevent serious injury or death. Consent is also inferred when an adult or child is found unconscious, or when an emergency otherwise necessitates immediate treatment to prevent serious harm or death.



Are you really giving consent if hospitals are now telling you to do something not wanted because of an inability to pay?  You cannot have this new cancer treatment because it costs more but you are eligible for older treatment procedures----oh, wait, they are not manufacturing these old treatments so you really have no choice.  If you volunteer for this program you get this treatment.  Remember, Medicaid and Medicare patients always were able to go to the hospital to get the same treatment with the Federal agency paying the difference ---the Federal agency exists because of Federal law.  It is the Federal income tax you pay each year.

Consent is not valid if the patient does not understand its meaning or if a patient has been misled. Children typically may not give consent; instead a parent or guardian must consent to medical treatment. Competency issues may arise with mentally ill individuals or those who have diminished mental capacity due to retardation or other problems. However, the fact that someone suffers from a mental illness or diminished mental capacity does not mean that the individual is incompetent. Depending on the type and severity of the disability, the patient may still have the ability to understand a proposed course of treatment. For example, in recent years most jurisdictions have recognized the right of hospitalized mental patients to refuse medication under certain circumstances. Numerous courts have ruled that a mental patient may have the right to refuse antipsychotic drugs, which can produce disturbing side effects.If a patient is incompetent, technically only a legally appointed guardian can make treatment decisions. Commonly, however, physicians defer to family members on an informal basis, thereby avoiding a lengthy and expensive competency hearing. Consent by a family member demonstrates that the doctor consulted someone who knows the patient well and is likely to be concerned about the patient's well-being. This will probably be sufficient to dissuade a patient from suing for failure to obtain consent should the patient recover.

Obama and Congressional neo-liberals and states like Maryland are passing laws that allow for forced medication of people with mental illness with a VERY VERY BROAD definition of what constitutes conditions to do this.

Legal, moral, and ethical questions arise in competency cases involving medical procedures not primarily for the patient's benefit. These cases typically arise in the context of organ donation from one sibling to another. Many of these cases are approved in the lower courts; the decisions frequently turn on an examination of the relationship between the donor and recipient. If the donor and recipient have a relationship that the donor is aware of, actively participates in, and benefits from, courts generally conclude that the benefits of continuing the relationship outweigh the risks and discomforts of the procedure. For example, one court granted permission for a kidney transplant from a developmentally disabled patient into his brother because the developmentally disabled boy was very dependent on the brother. In another case, a court approved a seven-year-old girl's donation of a kidney to her identical twin sister after experts and family testified to the close bond between the two. Conversely, a mother successfully fought to prevent testing of her three-and-a-half-year-old twins for a possible bone marrow transplant for a half brother because the children had only met the boy twice and were unaware that he was their brother.

Married or emancipated minors, including those in the Armed Services, are capable of giving their own consent. Emancipated means that the minor is self-supporting and lives independently of parents and parental control. In addition, under a theory known as the mature minor doctrine, certain minors may consent to treatment without first obtaining parental consent. If the minor is capable of understanding the nature, extent, and consequences of medical treatment, he or she may consent to medical care. Such situations typically involve older minors and treatments for the benefit of the minor (i.e., not organ transplant donors or blood donors) and usually involve relatively low-risk procedures. In recent years, however, some minors have sought the right to make life- or-death decisions. In 1989, a state court first recognized that a minor could make such a grave decision. A 17-year-old leukemia patient refused life-saving blood transfusions based on a deeply held, family-shared religious conviction. A psychologist testified that the girl had the maturity of a 22-year-old. Ironically, the young woman won her right to refuse treatment but was alive and healthy when the case was finally decided. She had been transfused before the slow judicial process needed to decide such a difficult question led to a ruling in her favor.

Some state statutes specifically provide that minors may give consent in certain highly charged situations, such as cases of venereal disease, pregnancy, and drug or alcohol abuse. A minor may also overrule parental consent in certain situations. In one case, a mother gave consent for an Abortion for her 16-year-old unemancipated daughter, but the girl disagreed. A court upheld the daughter's right to withhold consent.

Courts often reach divergent outcomes when deciding whether to interfere with a parent's refusal to consent to a non-life-threatening procedure. One court refused to override a father's denial of consent for surgery to repair his son's harelip and cleft palate. But a different court permitted an operation on a boy suffering from a severe facial deformity even though his mother objected on religious grounds to the accompanying blood transfusion. In another case, a child was ordered to undergo medical treatments after the parents unsuccessfully treated the child's severe burns with herbal remedies.

Parent choices as to the ability of children to access care deemed not life-threatening will disappear.  The costs of health care not connected to saving a life are extraneous.  So, common surgeries will no longer be available for Medicare and Medicaid patients----fast becoming 80% of Americans.
  Don't forget that the lower-tiered clinic care being built for Bronze, Silver, Medicare, and Medicaid patients will not even have many of these basic medical procedures available.  Think you are safe with Silver and Gold?  Just think how health rates will soar in deregulated and global health systems----look at finance or air flight with all of its fees.


Courts rarely hesitate to step in where a child's life is in danger. To deny a child a beneficial, life-sustaining treatment constitutes child neglect, and states have a duty to protect children from neglect. One case involved a mother who testified that she did not believe that her child was HIV positive, despite medical evidence to the contrary. The court ordered treatment, including AZT, for the child. Many other cases involve parents who want to treat a serious illness with nontraditional methods or whose religious beliefs forbid blood transfusions. Cases involving religious beliefs raise difficult questions under the First Amendment's Free Excise of Religion Clause, Common Law, statutory rights of a parent in raising a child, and the state's traditional interest in protecting those unable to protect themselves.

When a child's life is in danger and parental consent is withheld, a hospital seeks a court-appointed guardian for the child. The guardian, often a hospital administrator, then consents to the treatment on behalf of the child. In an emergency case, a judge may make a decision over the telephone. In some cases, doctors may choose to act without judicial permission if time constraints do not allow enough time to reach a judge by telephone.



Doctors are now not required to accept patients at emergency rooms and cases like this will not be taken not only for the cost but the exposure to lawsuits.  Lawsuits are a cost and cost containment means policy that avoids the examples right here.

In 1982, a six-day-old infant with Down's syndrome died after a court approved a parental decision to withhold life-saving surgery. The child had a condition that made eating impossible. The baby was medicated but given no nourishment. The public furor over the Baby Doe case eventually helped spur the department of health and human services to create regulations delineating when treatment may be withheld from a disabled infant. Treatment may be withheld if an infant is chronically and irreversibly comatose, if such treatment would merely prolong dying or would otherwise be futile in terms of survival of the infant, or if such treatment would be virtually futile in terms of survival and the treatment would be inhumane under these circumstances.

Although courts overrule parental refusal to allow treatment in many instances, far less common are cases where a court overrides an otherwise competent adult's denial of consent. The cases where courts have compelled treatment of an adult usually fall into two categories: when the patient was so physically weak that the court ruled that the patient could not reflect and make a choice to consent or refuse; or when the patient had minor children, even though the patient was fully competent to refuse consent. The possible civil or criminal liability of a hospital might also factor into a decision. A court typically will not order a terminally ill patient to undergo treatments to prolong life.


Informed Consent Simply consenting to treatment is not enough. A patient must give informed consent. In essence, informed consent means that before a doctor can treat or touch a patient, the patient must be given some basic information about what the doctor proposes to do. Informed consent has been called the most important legal doctrine in patients' rights.

State laws and court decisions vary regarding informed consent, but the trend is clearly toward more disclosure rather than less. Informed consent is required not only in life-or-death situations but also in clinic and outpatient settings as well. A healthcare provider must first present information regarding risks, alternatives, and success rates. The information must be presented in language the patient can understand and typically should include the following:

  • A description of the recommended treatment or procedure;
  • A description of the risks and benefits—particularly exploring the risk of serious bodily disability or death;
  • A description of alternative treatments and the risks and benefits of alternatives;
  • The probable results if no treatment is undertaken;
  • The probability of success and a definition of what the doctor means by success;
  • Length and challenges of recuperation; and
  • Any other information generally provided to patients in this situation by other qualified physicians.
Only material risks must be disclosed. A material risk is one that might cause a reasonable patient to decide not to undergo a recommended treatment. The magnitude of the risk also factors into the definition of a material risk. For example, one would expect that a one in 10,000 risk of death would always be disclosed, but not a one in 10,000 risk of a two-hour headache.

Think about the policy of releasing patients for outpatient care soon after a procedure.  You are given a list of after-care facilities with the hospital employee telling you he/she cannot advise which to take.  People are being pushed out of hospital doors and into this tiered level of after-care with 'choices' they have no ability to assess.  The reason this is called patient choice and made to sound good----is that is really is bad.  Informed consent to ship a patient to an after-care driven largely by what people can afford rather than staying at the hospital with trained staff until strong enough to go home-----THERE IS NO CONSENT.

Plastic surgery and vasectomies illustrate two areas where the probability of success and the meaning of success should be explicitly delineated. For example, a man successfully sued his doctor after the doctor assured him that a vasectomy would be 100 percent effective as Birth Control; the man's wife later became pregnant. Because the only purpose for having the procedure was complete sterilization, a careful explanation of probability of success was essential.

Occasionally, informed consent is not required. In an emergency situation where immediate treatment is needed to preserve a patient's health or life, a physician may be justified in failing to provide full and complete information to a patient. Moreover, where the risks are minor and well known to the average person, such as in drawing blood, a physician may dispense with full disclosure. In addition, some patients explicitly ask not to be informed of specific risks. In this situation, a doctor must only ascertain that the patient understands that there are unspecified risks of death and serious bodily disabilities; the doctor might ask the patient to sign a waiver of informed consent.

If you go to a hospital in Maryland you fall under a 'evidence-based' treatment with steps that cannot be broken if insurance coverage is to occur.  I have friends that are refused critical PHARMA and pain medication because these may inhibit how fast you recover from your health event.  People are literally dying from this kind of care and people have no right to demand they receive their prescribed medications due to these evidence-based treatment pathways.  Do you really have Consent when it is to be denied the power of treatment?


Finally, informed consent may be bypassed in rare cases in which a physician has objective evidence that informing a patient would render the patient unable to make a rational decision. Under these circumstances, a physician must disclose the information to another person designated by the patient.


Informed consent is rarely legally required to be in writing, but this does provide evidence that consent was in fact obtained. The more specific the consent, the less likely it will be construed against a doctor or a hospital in court. Conversely, blanket consent forms cover almost everything a doctor or hospital might do to a patient without mentioning anything specific and are easily construed against a doctor or hospital. However, blanket forms are frequently used upon admission to a hospital to provide proof of consent to noninvasive routine hospital procedures such as taking blood pressure. A consent form may not contain a clause waiving a patient's right to sue, unless state law provides for binding Arbitration upon mutual agreement. Moreover, consent can be predicated upon a certain surgeon doing a surgery. It can also be withdrawn at any time, subject to practical limitations.

Living Wills that people now must sign every time they enter a hospital has a patient sometime in the worst of conditions worrying about the costs of care pressured right at that minute to sign this Living Will.  Raise your hand if you may not think straight in the midst of a crisis with a bad prognosis!  We are now being forced to consider whether we can pay for the extended care given to keep us alive beyond initial treatment.  Keep in mind there are cases of extreme measures with added cost to hospital procedures----but these are not what people are signing away.  Often it is simply respiratory or heart interventions that are often successful.  When consent is predicated on crisis decision it is not informed!

Right to Treatment


In an emergency situation, a patient has a right to treatment, regardless of ability to pay. If a situation is likely to cause death, serious injury, or disability if not attended to promptly, it is an emergency. Cardiac arrest, heavy bleeding, profound shock, severe head injuries, and acute psychotic states are some examples of emergencies. Less obvious situations can also be emergencies: broken bones, fever, and cuts requiring stitches may also require immediate treatment.

Both public and private hospitals have a duty to administer medical care to a person experiencing an emergency. If a hospital has emergency facilities, it is legally required to provide appropriate treatment to a person experiencing an emergency. If the hospital is unable to provide emergency services, it must provide a referral for appropriate treatment. Hospitals cannot refuse to treat prospective patients on the basis of race, religion, or national origin, or refuse to treat someone with HIV or AIDS.

In Baltimore ambulances will not take you to a hospital unless you have a certain coverage----they ask to see your medical insurance card to decide which hospital to go.  It does not matter which is closest.  If people arrive at a hospital with the wrong insurance they are treated well enough to transfer to another hospital for care.  All of this adds tremendous stress to a patient in critical condition all because of cost aversion. 

NONE OF THIS MEETS THE PATIENTS BILL OF RIGHTS BUT THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT REQUIRES THESE EVIDENCE-BASED DECISIONS AND THIS IS USED AS AN EXCUSE TO DENY PATIENTS ACCESS TO THE CARE GUARANTEED IN THESE CONSTITUTIONAL HEALTH LAWS.


I am hearing talk of ending public subsidy in Baltimore for ambulances......that is how neo-conservative Baltimore is with all of Baltimore City Hall working for neo-conservative Johns Hopkins writing these laws they pass all while they run as Democrats!

In 1986, Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) (42 U.S.C.A. § 1395dd), which established criteria for emergency services and criteria for safe transfer of patients between hospitals.
This statute was designed to prevent "patient dumping," that is, transferring undesirable patients to another facility. The law applies to all hospitals receiving federal funds, such as Medicare (almost all do). The law requires hospitals to provide a screening exam to determine if an emergency condition exists, provide stabilizing treatment to any emergency patient or to any woman in active labor before transfer, and continue treatment until a patient can be discharged or transferred without harm. It also delineates strict guidelines for the transfer of a patient who cannot be stabilized. A hospital that negligently or knowingly and willfully violates any of these provisions can be terminated or suspended from Medicare. The physician, the hospital, or both can also be penalized up to $50,000 for each knowing violation of the law.

I told you of the MedStar patient with a severely broken leg and fractured ankle being received in the emergency room and having the leg set with NO XRAYS because that costs.  That patient was released to home health care and told not to come back without the right insurance.
 

THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME IN BALTIMORE----HOME OF THE GLOBAL MODEL OF HEALTH CARE FUNDING.

All of those Medicare and Medicaid funds that would have assured these patients the care they needed are pooled to assure hospital profit and access to care that creates cost is denied and that violates the guarantees of Federal health laws.

One of the first cases brought under EMTALA involved a doctor who transferred a woman in active labor to a hospital 170 miles away. The woman delivered a healthy baby during the trip, but the doctor was fined $20,000 for the improper transfer of the woman. In addition to federal laws such as EMTALA, states may also impose by regulation or statute a duty on hospitals to administer emergency care.

There is no universal right to be admitted to a hospital in a nonemergency situation. In nonemergency cases, admission rights depend largely on the specific hospital, but basing admission on ability to pay is severely limited by statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions. For example, most hospitals obtained financial assistance from the federal government for construction; these hospitals are required to provide a reasonable volume of services to persons unable to pay. The amount of services to be provided is set by regulation, and the obligation continues for 20 years after construction is completed. Patients must be advised of the hospital's obligation under the law, or the hospital may be foreclosed from suing to collect on the bill. In addition, many states prohibit hospitals from denying admission based solely on inability to pay; some courts have made similar rulings against public hospitals based on hospital charters and public policy reasons. Hospitals are also prohibited from requiring a deposit from a Medicare or Medicaid patient.

All of the hospital construction in Baltimore and Maryland these few decades were largely funded by Federal, State, and local funds and all hospitals are still categorized as non-profits.  We are supposed to believe that they all only have a few percentages of profit margin as if they have not massaged data to make sure profits are dispersed.  It is these laws that required hospitals to take uninsured and under-insured and these laws still exist even as this policy of ACO and exclusion by health insurance plan is installed.  THEY ARE SIMPLY IGNORING THESE LAWS.

Once a patient has been duly admitted to a hospital, she or he has a right to leave at any time, or the hospital could be liable for False Imprisonment. This is so even if the patient has not paid the bill or if the patient wants to leave against all medical advice. In rare cases, such as contagious disease cases, public health authorities may have state statutory or regulatory authority to quarantine a patient. In addition, state laws governing involuntary commitment of the mentally ill may be used to prevent a person of unsound mind from leaving the hospital if a qualified psychiatrist determines that the person is a danger to himself or herself or to the lives of others.

A doctor familiar with a patient's condition determines when a patient is ready for discharge and signs a written order to that effect. If the patient disagrees with a decision to discharge, she or he has the right to demand a consultation with a different physician before the order is carried out. The decision to discharge must be based solely on the patient's medical condition and not on nonpayment of medical bills.

OH REALLY??????

In the mid-1990s, concern over maternity patients being discharged just a few hours after giving birth prompted legislation at both the state and federal levels. In September 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a law ensuring a 48-hour hospital stay for a woman who gives birth vaginally and a 96-hour stay for a woman who has a caesarean section, unless the patient and the doctor agree to an earlier discharge. A number of state legislatures have passed similar laws as well.

Do you know that women are now being discharged in a 24 hour period and that deaths from early discharge of women giving birth is growing?


With the rise of Managed Care and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), patients faced new issues involving the right to treatment. HMOs may deny authorization for expensive or experimental treatments, or for treatments provided outside the network of approved physicians. HMOs contend that they must control costs and make decisions that benefit the largest number of members. In response, state legislatures have enacted HMO regulations that seek to give patients a process for appealing the denial of benefits. The HMOs have opposed these measures and have vigorously defended their denial of benefits in court.

Maryland has no public justice system and you will not see any lawyers defending a citizen against these ACO exclusionary policies that obviously break the intended laws connected to War on Poverty health care.  So, it is not that we could not win in these lawsuits----it is that we do not have public attorneys defending our rights as citizens. 

MAKE NO MISTAKE-----THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT IGNORES US CONSTITUTIONAL LAWS IN HEALTH CARE.


In Moran v. Rush Prudential HMO, Inc., 536 U.S. 355, 122 S.Ct. 2151, 153 L.Ed.2d 375 (2002), the Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision upheld an Illinois law that required HMOs to provide independent review of disputes between the primary care physician and the HMO. The law mandated that the HMO must pay for services deemed medically necessary by the independent reviewer. Most importantly, the court ruled that the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) did not preempt the Illinois law. ERISA is an extremely complex and technical set of provisions that seek to protect employee benefit programs. The decision was significant because it empowered other states to enact similar laws that give patients more rights in obtaining treatment

Medical Experimentation Medical progress and medical experimentation have always gone hand in hand, but patients' rights have sometimes been ignored in the process. Sometimes patients are completely unaware of the experimentation. Experimentation has also taken place in settings in which individuals may have extreme difficulty asserting their rights, such as in prisons, mental institutions, the military, and residences for the mentally disabled. Legitimate experimentation requires informed consent that may be withdrawn at any time.

Some of the more notorious and shameful instances of human experimentation in the United States in the twentieth century include a 1963 study in which terminally ill hospital patients were injected with live cancer cells to test their immune response; the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, begun before World War II and continuing for 40 years, in which effective treatment was withheld from poor black males suffering from syphilis so that medical personnel could study the natural course of the disease; and a study where developmentally disabled children were deliberately infected with hepatitis to test potential vaccines.

Johns Hopkins is having the debate over the costs of clinical trials in developing medical procedure.  They are overseas in all of the global health corporations in India and China doing anything they want because there are no health laws.  Hopkins brings that home to Baltimore as well and we are seeing more and more PHARMA and medical procedures sent to market without the level of clinical trial requirements.  At the same time TV ads for class action lawsuits are soaring as Americans are harmed and used as population trials by American medical research corporations----

OUR BIO- RESEARCH UNIVERSITY CORPORATIONS PATENTING ANYTHING THEY CAN TO SELL IT.


Keep in mind they have been selling overseas for years and now they are beginning to allow drugs manufactured overseas be sold here.....Baltimore sees LUPIN tied to Hopkins and UMMS and its BIO-TECH doing this.  These are protections guaranteed by law---and they are using the American people in lieu of clinical trials.

Failure to obtain informed consent can arise even when consent has ostensibly been obtained. The California Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that a physician must disclose preexisting research and potential economic interests that may affect the doctor's medical judgment (Moore v. Regents of the University of California, 51 Cal. 3d 120, 793 P. 2d 479). The case involved excision of a patient's cells pursuant to surgery and other procedures to which the patient had consented. The surgery itself was not experimental; the experimentation took place after the surgery and other procedures. The cells were used in medical research that proved lucrative to the doctor and medical center.


Patients in teaching hospitals are frequently asked to participate in research. Participants do not surrender legal rights simply by agreeing to cooperate and validly obtained consent cannot protect a researcher from Negligence.

In hospitals, human experimentation is typically monitored by an institutional review board (IRB). Federal regulation requires IRBs in all hospitals receiving federal funding. These boards review proposed research before patients are asked to participate and approve written consent forms.
IRBs are meant to ensure that risks are minimized, the risks are reasonable in relation to anticipated benefits, the selection of subjects is equitable, and informed consent is obtained and properly documented. Federal regulations denominate specific items that must be covered when obtaining informed consent in experimental cases. IRB approval never obligates a patient to participate in research.

I attended an E-NNOVATION meeting in Baltimore that is simply a mechanism for corporations to fund their private research through Maryland universities......ergo, our universities are subsidized corporate research. That in itself is illegal.  What they were doing was developing a system of private funding for research where university research teams submitted proposals they thought would bring a new product and the corporation funded it.  IT IS ABSOLUTELY ILLEGAL AND CRAZY.  I asked at what point an IRB board looked at these proposals ----since they are all geared to product profit and not patient needs-----and I was met with silence.  You can believe there are no IRB boards interested in regulating these deals to protect people. 

IT IS COMPLETELY ABOUT WHAT RESEARCH WILL BRING PROFIT.


Advance Medical Directives

Every state has enacted advance medical directive legislation, but the laws vary widely. Advance medical directives are documents that are made at a time when a person has full decision-making capabilities and are used to direct medical care in the future when this capacity is lost. Many statutes are narrowly drawn and specify that they apply only to illnesses when death is imminent rather than illnesses requiring long-term life support, such as in end-stage lung, heart, or kidney failure; multiple sclerosis; paraplegia; and persistent vegetative state.


Patients sometimes use living wills to direct future medical care. Most commonly, living wills specify steps a patient does not want taken in cases of life-threatening or debilitating illness, but they may also be used to specify that a patient wants aggressive resuscitation measures used. Studies have shown that living wills often are not honored, despite the fact that federal law requires all hospitals, nursing homes, and other Medicare and Medicaid providers to ask patients on admission whether they have executed an advance directive. Some of the reasons living wills are not honored are medical personnel's fear of liability, the patient's failure to communicate his or her wishes, or misunderstanding or mismanagement by hospital personnel.

Keep in mind-----sitting at home thinking through a Living Will with your family is quite different than arriving at a hospital in critical condition and handed a Living Will at the site. People do not have a life-long idea of these vital decisions and having them legally updated is prohibitive for most people.  So, the way this new procedure was implemented circumvented all of these considerations and it places the pressure on people to think of cost to family and friends.  Think as well the push for legislation ----Heather Mizeur did this in Maryland -----Right to Die goes with Living Will to end life prematurely often because of pressures of cost.  The number one problem for seniors with health conditions IS ABUSIVE SPOUSES so the pressures are heightened now that health coverage for most is taken away. 

SO KILL YOURSELF TO AVOID ALL THE HEALTH DEBT SAY CLINTON WALL STREET NEO-LIBERALS!


Another way individuals attempt to direct medical care is through a durable Power of Attorney. A durable power of attorney, or proxy decision maker, is a written document wherein a person (the principal) designates another person to perform certain acts or make certain decisions on the principal's behalf. It is called durable because the power continues to be effective even after the principal becomes incompetent or it may only take effect after the principal becomes incompetent. As with a Living Will, such a document has little power to compel a doctor to follow a patient's desires, but in the very least it serves as valuable evidence of a person's wishes if the matter is brought into court. A durable power of attorney may be used by itself or in conjunction with a living will.

When advance medical directives function as intended and are honored by physicians, they free family members from making extremely difficult decisions. They may also protect physicians. Standard medical care typically requires that a doctor provide maximum care. In essence, a living will can change the standard of care upon which a physician will be judged and may protect a physician from legal or professional repercussions for withholding or withdrawing care.


Keep in mind that DO NO HARM and HIPPOCRATIC OATH are what assured us when we went to the hospital that all would be done to keep us alive.  No doubt this was abused for added profit but for the most part it was not.  Now the American people enter the hospital knowing decisions are made on cost------short term and long-term---and many are starting to come to the hospital ready to fight for proper care.  It is ridiculous----AND THIS IS JOHNS HOPKINS POLICY OF GLOBAL FUND MODEL OF CARE TO CONTAIN HEALTH COSTS. 

MIND YOU----HEALTH INDUSTRY FRAUD IS SOARING---THE REAL COST----BUT PATIENTS ARE TIED TIGHTLY TO THE LEAST AMOUNT OF CARE POSSIBLE.


Right to Die

A number of cases have addressed the right to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment. Broadly speaking, under certain circumstances a person may have a right to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment or to have life-sustaining treatment withdrawn. On the one side in these cases is the patient's interest in autonomy, privacy, and bodily integrity.
This side must be balanced against the state's traditional interests in the preservation of life, prevention of suicide, protection of dependents, and the protection of the integrity of the medical profession.

In in re quinlan, 355 A.2d 647 (1976), the New Jersey Supreme Court permitted withdrawal of life-support measures for a woman in a persistent vegetative state, although her condition was stable and her life expectancy stretched years into the future. Many of the emotional issues the country struggles with in the early 2000s were either a direct result of or were influenced by this case, including living wills and other advance medical directives, the right to refuse unwanted treatment, and physician-assisted suicide.

The first U.S. Supreme Court decision addressing the difficult question regarding the removal of life support was Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, 497 U.S. 261, 110 S. Ct. 2841, 111 L. Ed. 2d 224 (1990). Cruzan involved a young woman rendered permanently comatose after a car accident. Her parents petitioned to have her feeding tube removed. The Supreme Court ruled that the evidence needed to be clear and convincing that the young woman had explicitly authorized the termination of treatment prior to becoming incompetent. The Court ruled that the evidence had not been clear and convincing, but upon remand to the state court the family presented new testimony that was deemed clear and convincing. The young woman died 12 days after her feeding tube was removed.

The Supreme Court decided two right-todie cases in 1997, Quill v. Vacco, 521 U.S. 793, 117 S.Ct. 2293, 138 L.Ed.2d 834 (1997), and Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 117 S.Ct. 2258, 138 L.Ed.2d 772 (1997). In Glucksberg, the appellate courts in New York and Washington had struck down laws banning physician-assisted suicide as violations of Equal Protection and due process, respectively. The Supreme Court reversed both decisions, finding no constitutional right to assisted suicide, thus upholding states' power to ban the practice.

Though both cases were considered together, Glucksberg was the key right-to-die decision. Dr. Harold Glucksberg and three other physicians sought a Declaratory Judgment that the state of Washington's law prohibiting assisted suicide was unconstitutional as applied to terminally ill, mentally competent adults. The Supreme Court voted unanimously to sustain the Washington law, though five of the nine justices filed concurring opinions in Quill and Glucksberg. Chief Justice william rehnquist, writing for the Court, based much of his analysis on historical and legal traditions. The fact that most western democracies make it a crime to assist a suicide was backed up by over 700 years of Anglo-American common-law tradition that has punished or disapproved of suicide or assisting suicide. This "deeply rooted"opposition to assisted suicides had been reaffirmed by the Washington legislature in 1975 when the current prohibition had been enacted and again in 1979 when it passed a Natural Death Act. This law declared that the refusal or withdrawal of treatment did not constitute suicide, but it explicitly stated that the act did not authorize Euthanasia.

The reason Right to Die has historically been rebuffed is that is compromises all doctor and health care industry responsibility to do no harm.  It has been the major tenet of medicine for thousands of years.  Flash forward to today----we have suicides happening at record numbers as people lose all their wealth to corporate fraud----as veterans are losing their access to health care because the VA is being dismantled and benefits cut.  SUICIDES ARE CLIMBING.  So, do we really want to bring Right To Die combined with a health care reform geared towards reducing costs and maximizing profit?  NO NO NO NO NO!

Clinton neo-liberals are pushing this legislation as part of the health reform that takes people out of the health care market. 

ALL OF MARYLAND POLS ARE CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS AND INSTALLED THESE POLICIES ON MARYLAND CITIZENS BIG TIME


The doctors had argued that the law violated the Substantive Due Process component of the Fourteenth Amendment. Unlike procedural due process which focuses on whether the right steps have been taken in a legal matter, substantive due process looks to fundamental rights that are implicit in the amendment. For the Court to recognize a fundamental liberty, the liberty must be deeply rooted in U.S. history and it must be carefully described. The Court rejected this argument because U.S. history has not recognized a "right to die" and therefore it is not a fundamental right. Employing the Rational Basis Test of constitutional review, the Court concluded that the law was "rationally related to legitimate government interests" and thus passed constitutional muster.

Privacy and Confidentiality

Confidentiality between a doctor and patient means that a doctor has the express or implied duty not to disclose information received from the patient to anyone not directly involved with the patient's care.
Confidentiality is important so that healthcare providers have knowledge of all facts, regardless of how personal or embarrassing, that might have a bearing on a patient's health. Patients must feel that it is safe to communicate such information freely. Although this theory drives doctor-patient confidentiality, the reality is that many people have routine and legitimate access to a patient's records. A hospital patient might have several doctors, nurses, and support personnel on every shift, and a patient might also see a therapist, nutritionist, or pharmacologist, to name a few.

Placing all health records online all while knowing hacking these systems will be a breeze.  Affordable Care Act encourages the sharing of health data not only between your doctors----but with health research industries which are largely corporate research and data consolidation and selling corporations.  So, they say your personal information is not attached----BUT IT IS AND IT IS ILLEGAL .  If we had real politicians in office right now and not global corporate pols working under Trans Pacific Trade Pact-----none of these Affordable Care policies would be legal.  Sharing health data with employers-----THAT WAS A GIVEN VIOLATION.  NOW IT IS PART OF POLICY.  All research shows that this online sharing of medical records does nothing for patient care.  Know where it works best?  Global health are and health tourism----

OH THAT'S WHY FEDERAL TAXPAYERS ARE PAYING FOR THIS USELESS ONLINE HEALTH DATA SYSTEM WHEN MEDICARE HAS A SYSTEM ALREADY.


The law requires some confidential information to be reported to authorities. For example, birth and death certificates must be filed; Child Abuse cases must be reported; and infectious, contagious, or communicable diseases must be reported. In addition, confidential information may also be disclosed pursuant to a judicial proceeding or to notify a person to whom a patient may pose a danger.

In spite of the numerous exceptions to the contrary, patients legitimately demand and expect confidentiality in many areas of their treatment. Generally speaking, patients must be asked to consent before being photographed or having others unrelated to the case (including medical students) observe a medical procedure; they have the right to refuse to see anyone not connected to a hospital; they have the right to have a person of the patient's own sex present during a physical examination conducted by a member of the opposite sex; they have the right to refuse to see persons connected with the hospital who are not directly involved in the patient's care and treatment (including social workers and chaplains); and they have the right to be protected from having details of their condition made public.

A patient owns the information contained in medical records, but the owner of the paper on which they are written is usually considered the actual owner of the records. The patient's legal interest in the records generally means that the patient has a right to see the records and is entitled to a complete copy of them. The patient's rights are subject to reasonable limitations such as requiring inspection and copying to be done on the doctor's premises during working hours.

So, to get around these laws hospitals now get a patient to sign a disclaimer giving them the right to use all data at their hospital at the same time health insurance plans tied to hospitals are making people go to certain hospitals for certain care. 

SIGN AWAY YOUR RIGHTS IF YOU COME TO OUR HOSPITAL IS NOT LEGAL FOLKS!  HOPKINS LEADS IN THESE POLICIES AS WELL.


Federal Patients' Bill of Rights


Dissatisfaction with an expanding corporate healthcare industry dominated by profit margins has spawned numerous reform ideas. One idea that has gained a foothold is a patients' federal Bill of Rights. In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed an Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. The commission was directed to propose a "consumer bill of rights." The 34-member commission developed a bill of rights that identified eight key areas: information disclosure, choice of providers and plans, access to emergency service, participation in treatment decisions, respect and nondiscrimination, confidentiality of health information, complaints and appeals, and consumer responsibilities.

It's funny how Clinton did this Patient Bill of Rights at the same time he was dismantling and corporatizing all of the Federal agencies that would monitor and enforce these laws.  Clinton was the one to start the university as corporation research patenting process that seeks to ignore all the rights Clinton pretended to be protecting.  We see Obama re-write those laws away with the Affordable Care Act.

The proposed rights include:

the
right to receive accurate, easily understood information in order to make informed health care decisions;


the right to a choice of healthcare providers that is sufficient to ensure access to appropriate high-quality health care;

the
right to access emergency healthcare services;

the right and responsibility to fully participate in all decisions related to their health care;


the right to considerate, respectful care from all members of the healthcare system at all times and under all circumstances;


the right to communicate with healthcare providers in confidence and to have the confidentiality of their individually identifiable healthcare information protected;

the right to a fair and efficient process for resolving differences with their health plans, healthcare providers, and the institutions that serve them;

and
the responsibility of consumers to do their part in protecting their health.

This
bill of rights has been debated in Congress and there are bipartisan areas of agreement, but, as of 2003, no final action has taken on enacting a set of rights into federal law.


See how Obama's and Congressional neo-liberal Patients Rights negates almost all of the above.

I want to end by addressing the right to receive accurate and understandable health information and informed consent.  I was riding public transportation and a poor passenger was talking to a friend about vaccines having micro-chips that when vaccines are given to all children coming along they are being implanted with surveillance and this woman was telling everyone to stop getting vaccines.  As a scientist knowing what is happening with bio-medicine people can get a clear idea of what is meant to be a good thing being used for bad....and believe me surveillance society is that bad.

Obama was caught using the Red Cross polio vaccination program to find Osama Bin Laden by analyzing blood from all people having vaccines and VOILA----people in developed nations no longer trust the world vaccination program.  Obama ignored international law to simply get an old man and the entire world vaccination program is harmed and communicable disease is on the rise world-wide and in the US.

India is taking Bill Gates and US PHARMA corporations manufacturing vaccines in the developing nations to international court for what they call ignoring world standards and clinical trial procedures in developing and manufacturing vaccines.  Here in America citizens think vaccines are tied to autism and the families most likely to choose not to vaccinate----upper middle and upper class.  All of this has to do with the loss of oversight and accountability and regulation of the health industry and medical research----

NO ONE TRUSTS HEALTH PRODUCTS BECAUSE ALL LAWS PROTECTING PEOPLE ARE BEING IGNORED AND PROFIT IS THE ONLY MOTIVATOR.

So, now we are going to have a resurgence of communicable disease which will bring all kinds of money to the health industry-----all of those preventative care programs are centered on simply testing for communicable disease.  Since health reform only covers preventative care 80% of people will be monitored and segregated just as happened before modern medicine.


All of this is happening because you and I allowed Clinton Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals take the people's Democratic Party to install what are all Republican wealth and profit policies.  Even Republican voters do not like these policies which is why they assigned the name ObamaCare to a very corporate and wealth health reform.

Simply get rid of these pols and we can reverse this and install Expanded and Improved Medicare for All as a state health system for all states around the nation!

WAKE UP AND GET ENGAGED IN POLITICS!  YOU ARE ALLOWING A BUNCH OF SOCIOPATHS CONTROL OUR GOVERNMENT!



August 29, 2014

Highly educated parents more likely not to vaccinate their children
Expression of privilege in vaccine refusal

CU Denver researcher finds income, education disparity in reasons for not vaccinating

DENVER (August 27, 2014) – Not all students returning to school this month will be up to date on their vaccinations. A new study conducted by Jennifer Reich, a researcher at the University of Colorado Denver, shows that the reasons why children may not be fully vaccinated depends on the class privilege of their mothers.

According to the National Network for Immunization Information, three children per 1000 in the U.S. have never received any vaccines, with almost half of all children receiving vaccines later than recommended. The number of unvaccinated children has led to several recent vaccine-preventable outbreaks in the U.S., including measles and whooping cough.

Published in Gender & Society, a top-ranked journal in Gender Studies and Sociology field, Reich’s research shows that unvaccinated or under-vaccinated children from higher income backgrounds, with parents who are higher educated, have parents who intentionally choose to refuse or delay vaccinations out of a belief that they are protecting their children. On the other hand, children from families with lower incomes and with less educated parents tend to be under-vaccinated because they lack access to resources.


Reich, a professor of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at CU Denver, found that middle and upper class “vaccine-refusers” are mothers who have the resources, education, and time to make decisions regarding vaccinations. These mothers consent only to vaccines they believe are most beneficial for their children and instead rely on other intensive practices they see as rendering vaccines less necessary. Breastfeeding, healthy nutrition, and monitoring social interactions and travel were listed as alternatives to vaccination and ways to prevent disease exposure.

“Vaccine-refusers see themselves as experts on their own children and question the relevance of public health claims that vaccines are necessary for all children,” said Reich. “They trust that “mother’s intuition,” alongside their own personal research, is the best way to protect their children from potential harm.”

On the other hand, mothers in low income families often do not have time to consider individual choices around vaccination. If their children are under-vaccinated it is more likely due to lack of access to medical care. This same lack of health care access makes poor children who are under-vaccinated potentially more vulnerable to health risks as rates of vaccine-preventable diseases continue to rise.

Reich’s findings suggest women with more time, education, and resources claim greater freedom to reject public health interventions, which potentially carries consequences for undervaccinated children from lower income backgrounds who may not have access to care.

“Those who can reject vaccines without health risks are able to do so because they are protected by the large portion of the population who is vaccinated,” said Reich. “Upper class parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids understand that they could be putting others at risk, but reiterated that their own children are their primary responsibility and suggest other mothers should advocate for their own children.”





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February 18th, 2015

2/18/2015

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Maryland has built the most profit-driven global corporate health system in the nation.  O'Malley spent 16 years in office as Mayor of Baltimore and then Governor of Maryland helping Johns Hopkins build the worst of health systems.  Sucking all public money to the few is a success for Johns Hopkins and O'Malley.....a completely dismantled public health system is a win!  O'Malley worked as a neo-conservative in Baltimore for Hopkins and then ran as a neo-liberal for governor.  Dismantling public health as mayor----his job as governor was the Affordable Care Act's consolidation and deregulation to create national health systems.  As I said---Hopkins partners with Kaiser and you have East and West Coast growth right away.  Kaiser partners with Hopkins and global health systems form.  In Baltimore we have a defense industry corporation with a hospital spreading health industry all over the place.  No regulation or public subsidy needed----we are going predatory and profit-driven in Maryland! 

Below you see the big problem for the War on Poverty public health programs.  Manor Care is a national corporation owned by the biggest hedge fund in the world----and it is sucking all of the senior and low-income care into its fold----all of those people unable to afford private health plans which will be 80% and more of people.  Sending people to a hedge fund in the old age is very Charles Dickens.  These are the people who bet on when people will die so as to determine how much life insurance will be paid.  They also see people who cannot pay as their property to do as they want to get the money so what are we seeing for laws regarding aging patients forced into global funded model of health care? 


PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE TO GIVE THEIR PERMISSION FOR ORGAN HARVESTING.  IF YOU DIE OWING MONEY THEY GET YOUR BODY.


People outside of Maryland may find that startling, but citizens in Baltimore have been shouting this was happening for decades.  Since Hopkins controls all public policy and there is no oversight and accountability----transplant medicine is a BIG GLOBAL HEALTH TOURISM INDUSTRY and Baltimore is filled with people unable to afford health insurance.  It's no coincidence that Baltimore is saturated with hedge fund Manor Care. 

THEY ARE COMING TO YOUR NECK OF THE WOODS SO GET RID OF THIS AFFORDABLE CARE ACT AND DEMAND EXPANDED AND IMPROVED MEDICARE FOR ALL!



Carlyle Closing


News Release For Immediate Release

Contacts:

Manor Care
Steven M. Cavanaugh, Chief Financial Officer
419.252.5601
scavanaugh@hcr-manorcare.com

Carlyle
Chris Ullman, Director of Global Communications
202.729.5399
chris.ullman@carlyle.com

The Carlyle Group Completes Transaction with Manor Care

Temporary Restraining Order Dissolved in Michigan

TOLEDO, Ohio, December 21, 2007—Manor Care, Inc. (NYSE:HCR) today announced that global private equity firm The Carlyle Group has completed its $6.3 billion acquisition of Manor Care. Manor Care stockholders will receive $67.00 in cash for each share of common stock owned. The current Manor Care management team, led by Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Paul A. Ormond, will continue to operate the business. Manor Care also announced that the temporary restraining order filed yesterday in Michigan has been dissolved.

“We are pleased with this successful outcome,” said Mr. Ormond.  “We look forward to working with Carlyle and continuing to provide quality care to our patients and residents.”

Karen Bechtel, Carlyle Managing Director and Global Head of Healthcare, said, “We are pleased to back a high-quality company and management team. We support Paul Ormond’s strategic vision and support his commitment to quality patient care.”

On October 17, 2007, Manor Care’s stockholders approved the merger agreement at a special meeting, with more than 99 percent of shares present voting for approval. The number of shares voting to approve the merger agreement represented more than 76 percent of the total number of shares outstanding and entitled to vote.

As a result of this transaction, Manor Care stock will cease trading on the New York Stock Exchange at market close today, December 21, 2007. Stockholders who hold shares through a bank or broker will not have to take any action to have their shares converted into cash, since these conversions will be handled by the bank or broker.  Stockholders who hold certificates can exchange their certificates for $67.00 per share in cash, without interest, through Manor Care’s transfer and paying agent, National City Bank. National City will send out instructions to registered stockholders in the next several days regarding specific actions stockholders will need to take to exchange their shares for the merger consideration. 

Manor Care, Inc., through its operating group HCR Manor Care, is a leading provider of short-term post-acute services and long-term care. The company’s nearly 60,000 employees provide high-quality care for patients and residents through a network of more than 500 skilled nursing and rehabilitation centers, assisted living facilities, outpatient rehabilitation clinics, and hospice and home care agencies. The company operates primarily under the respected Heartland, ManorCare Health Services and Arden Courts names.

The Carlyle Group is a global private equity firm with $74.9 billion under management committed to 57 funds. Carlyle invests in buyouts, venture & growth capital, real estate and leveraged finance in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America, focusing on aerospace & defense, automotive & transportation, consumer & retail, energy & power, financial services, healthcare, industrial, infrastructure, technology & business services and telecommunications & media. Since 1987, the firm has invested $37.7 billion of equity in 737 transactions for a total purchase price of $213.1 billion. The Carlyle Group employs more than 990 people in 21 countries. In the aggregate, Carlyle portfolio companies have more than $87 billion in revenue and employ more than 286,000 people around the world www.carlyle.com.


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I want people to think what the dismantling of Medicare and Medicaid and the defunding of the Federal agency that always subsidized cost paid to hospitals for the balance unpaid.  Below you see a discussion that looks at how much Medicare and Medicaid funding went to transplants that will now disappear.  People will now be forced to pay for health care received rather than think medical costs will be written off.  I do not agree with all of what this doctor writes regarding which institutions are doing what-----I know under the current health law deregulation and paying what you owe opens venues for how people pay for ordinary health costs.  Does someone in a family donate a kidney so their loved one can have cancer treatments?  OF COURSE THAT IS WHERE THIS IS GOING.  All of those seniors heading for Manor Care will have the burden of paying SOME WAY.  Hedge funds and global health tourism in transplants meaning ORGAN HARVESTING.

Hospitals are now sending around Living Wills each time you enter that gives you the right to ask that certain medical procedures not be used in keeping you alive ...every hospital in Maryland has these Living Wills for every patient entering.  With the emphasis on saving cost in delivering care and with the urgency always surrounding harvesting organs......we already see conflicts of moral and ethical medical standards.  Healthcare for profit will end all Hippocratic Oath and working for the patient's interest away.  People with lower health insurance coverage will be victim to what they can do to pay these hospital bills....YOU BETCHA.

SEE WHY HEDGE FUNDS AND A DEFENSE CONTRACTOR WANT IN ON MARYLAND'S HEALTH CARE BUSINESS?

No time to linger in a predatory profit-driven health system.  If your pols supported Affordable Care Act this is to what they are moving!

Hospitals Harvesting Organs From Patients That Doctors Were Pressured to Declare Brain Dead: Lawsuit



Sep 26, 2012 12:31 PM
By Christine Hsu

New York hospitals are routinely "harvesting" body parts from patients before they're even dead, a lawsuit is claiming. The suit claims that transplant non-profit, The New York Organ Donor Network, of bullying hospital staffers to declare patients brain dead when they are still alive so to take their organs.

Keith Bedford/Reuters


New York hospitals are routinely "harvesting" body parts from patients before they're even dead, a lawsuit is claiming.

The suit accuses the transplant non-profit, The New York Organ Donor Network, of bullying hospital staffers to declare patients brain dead when they are still alive in order to take their organs.


Plaintiff Patrick McMahon, 50, an Air Force combat veteran, is a former transplant coordinator who claims he was fired just four months into the job for protesting about the practice and estimates that one in five patients is still showing signs of brain activity when surgeons declare them dead and start ripping out their body parts.

"They're playing God," McMahon told New York Post. The lawsuits, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court Tuesday, cited four examples of improper organ harvesting.

One of the examples cited details of a 19-year-old man injured in a car crash who was still struggling to breath and showed signs of brain activity when doctors at Nassau University Medical Center declared him brain dead under pressure from the donor-network officials, including Director Michael Goldstein, who allegedly said during a conference call: "This kid is dead, you got that?" the suit claims.

McMahon said that the teenager could have easily recovered.

"I have been in Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan in combat," he told New York Post. "I worked on massive brain injuries, trauma, gunshot wounds, IEDs. I have seen worse cases than this and the victims recover."

The three other examples of patients who were still clinging to life when doctors declared them brain dead included a female patient admitted to St. Barnabas Hospital, a man admitted to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn and a woman admitted to Staten Island University Hospital after a drug overdose who was given "a paralyzing anesthetic" because her body was still jerking, according to the Post.


McMahon said when he flagged up the injection, another network employee told hospital personnel McMahon was "an untrained troublemaker with a history of raising frivolous issues and questions," the suit charged. "I had a reputation for raising a red flag," he said.

McMahon accuses the federally-funded network of having a "quota" system and hiring "coaches" to teach staff how to be more persuasive in getting family members to give consent to organ donation. McMahon claims that on November 4, he told the network's CEO and president, Helen Irving, that "one in five patients declared brain dead show signs of brain activity at the time the Note is issued."

However, according to the suit, Irving replied: "This is how things are done."

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Maryland is rewriting these 1996 health laws that work against the privatization and profit-driven health system of today.  We already see these hospital systems telling their doctors on staff to drop patients that become 'expensive' and as we send more and more people to home health care only-----these impersonal and highly unregulated corporations will be making really, really important life and death decisions.  It is incredible to think that what was the duty of highly regulated hospitals and doctor's offices bound by law to keep us safe will now have profit-motive to end all health care arrangements that become too costly.  As Medicare and Medicaid patients are sent to home health care and not good public nursing facilities----their lives will be determined by these staff.

As with the article above that addresses the judgement calls on keeping people alive and how they will pay hospital bills-----this system gets dirtier and more murky with the home health corporations.

Remember, under the Maryland global funding model----all Federal, state, and local health funding goes into this pool and a bolus given to all hospitals who now under ACA do not have to take people-----they can select and patient abandonment will become a business strategy.....

SEE WHY GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND THEIR POLS THINK THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT IS GREAT!


Think how Americans being moved from the care of professional regulated health offices to what is a wild-west of home health corporations all with a model to maximize profits.  Think how someone with a chronic illness having few options are forced into a system that can easily find reasons to dismiss you.  If you do not choose to follow their treatment protocol----you can be dismissed.  The 'skilled nursing' coming with these exploding home health corporations make health care more dangerous than ever in Maryland.  If you have private insurance, you do not face this-----but how long will you be able to afford---our have corporate private plans?  Do not allow the right to quality health care be dismantled in the US.  The decline has the US second world in health care-----these reforms will take the US to third world as Trans Pacific Trade Pact seeks to void all Constitutional rights of American citizens.

Patient Abandonment

Home Health Care
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Law Manual

By George F. Indest III, J.D., M.P.A., LL.M., Board Certified by The Florida Bar in Health Law
An Aspen Publication
Aspen Publishers, Inc.
Gaitherburg, Maryland
1996  Patient Abandonment Introduction

The relationship that exists between a physician and patient, or between other types of health care providers and the client, continues until it is terminated with the consent of both parties.  A patient having health needs, especially a patient who is disabled or feeble, may be dependant on the home health professional.  The patient has the right to expect that he or she will have access to the services he or she needs until receiving proper notice to the contrary and, preferably, until a substitute is provided.

Such a relationship can be terminated by the patient at any time.  The patient has the freedom to choose his or her health care providers.  However, the physician, nurse, or home health provider may also withdraw from the case as long as it is done properly and the patient is not harmed by this action.

The premature termination of medical treatment is often the subject of a legal cause of action known as "abandonment."  Abandonment is defined as the unilateral termination of a physician-patient or health professional-patient relationship by the health care provider without proper notice to the patient when there is still the necessity of continuing medical attention. [1]

Elements of the Cause of Action for Abandonment

Each of the following five elements must be present for a patient to have a proper civil cause of action for the tort of abandonment:

1. Health care treatment was unreasonably discontinued.

2. The termination of health care was contrary to the patient's will or without the patient's knowledge.

3. The health care provider failed to arrange for care by another appropriate skilled health care provider.

4. The health care provider should have reasonably foreseen that harm to the patient would arise from the termination of the care (proximate cause).

5. The patient actually suffered harm or loss as a result of the discontinuance of care.

Physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals have an ethical, as well as a legal, duty to avoid abandonment of patients.  The health care professional has a duty to give his or her patient all necessary attention as long as the case required it and should not leave the patient in a critical stage without giving reasonable notice or making suitable arrangements for the attendance of another. [2]

Abandonment by the Physician

When a physician undertakes treatment of a patient, treatment must continue until the patient's circumstances no longer warrant the treatment, the physician and the patient mutually consent to end the treatment by that physician, or the patient discharges the physician.  Moreover, the physician may unilaterally terminate the relationship and withdraw from treating that patient only if he or she provides the patient proper notice of his or her intent to withdraw and an opportunity to obtain proper substitute care.

In the home health setting, the physician-patient relationship does not terminate merely because a patient's care shifts in its location from the hospital to the home.  If the patient continues to need medical services, supervised health care, therapy, or other home health services, the attending physician should ensure that he or she was properly discharged his or her-duties to the patient.  Virtually every situation 'in which home care is approved by Medicare, Medicaid, or an insurer will be one in which the patient's 'needs for care have continued.  The physician-patient relationship that existed in the hospital will continue unless it has been formally terminated by notice to the patient and a reasonable attempt to refer the patient to another appropriate physician. Otherwise, the physician will retain his or her duty toward the patient when the patient is discharged from the hospital to the home.  Failure to follow through on the part of the physician will constitute the tort of abandonment if the patient is injured as a result.  This abandonment may expose the physician, the hospital, and the home health agency to liability for the tort of abandonment.

The attending physician in the hospital should ensure that a proper referral is made to a physician who will be responsible for the home health patient's care while it is being delivered by the home health provider, unless the physician intends to continue to supervise that home care personally.  Even more important, if the hospital-based physician arranges to have the patient's care assumed by another physician, the patient must fully understand this change, and it should be carefully documented.

As supported by case law, the types of actions that will lead to liability for abandonment of a patient will include:

• premature discharge of the patient by the physician
• failure of the physician to provide proper instructions before discharging the patient
• the statement by the physician to the patient that the physician will no longer treat the patient
• refusal of the physician to respond to calls or to further attend the patient
• the physician's leaving the patient after surgery or failing to follow up on postsurgical care. [3]

Generally, abandonment does not occur if the physician responsible for the patient arranges for a substitute physician to take his or her place.  This change may occur because of vacations, relocation of the physician, illness, distance from the patient's home, or retirement of the physician.  As long as care by an appropriately trained physician, sufficiently knowledgeable of the patient's special conditions, if any, has been arranged, the courts will usually not find that abandonment has occurred. [4]  Even where a patient refuses to pay for the care or is unable to pay for the care, the physician is not at liberty to terminate the relationship unilaterally.  The physician must still take steps to have the patient's care assumed by another [5] or to give a sufficiently reasonable period of time to locate another prior to ceasing to provide care.

Although most of the cases discussed concern the physician-patient relationship, as pointed out previously, the same principles apply to all health care providers.  Furthermore, because the care rendered by the home health agency is provided pursuant to a physician's plan of care, even if the patient sued the physician for abandonment because of the actions (or inactions of the home health agency's staff), the physician may seek indemnification from the home health provider. [6]

ABANDONMENT BY THE NURSE OR HOME HEALTH AGENCY

Similar principles to those that apply to physicians apply to the home health professional and the home health provider.  A home health agency, as the direct provider of care to the homebound patient, may be held to the same legal obligation and duty to deliver care that addresses the patient's needs as is the physician.  Furthermore, there may be both a legal and an ethical obligation to continue delivering care, if the patient has no alternatives.  An ethical obligation may still exist to the patient even though the home health provider has fulfilled all legal obligations. [7]

When a home health provider furnishes treatment to a patient, the duty to continue providing care to the patient is a duty owed by the agency itself and not by the individual professional who may be the employee or the contractor of the agency.  The home health provider does not have a duty to continue providing the same nurse, therapist, or aide to the patient throughout the course of treatment, so long as the provider continues to use appropriate, competent personnel to administer the course of treatment consistently with the plan of care.  From the perspective of patient satisfaction and continuity of care, it may be in the best interests of the home health provider to attempt to provide the same individual practitioner to the patient.  The development of a personal relationship with the provider's personnel may improve communications and a greater degree of trust and compliance on the part of the patient.  It should help to alleviate many of the problems that arise in the health care' setting.

If the patient requests replacement of a particular nurse, therapist, technician, or home health aide, the home health provider still has a duty to provide care to the patient, unless the patient also specifically states he or she no longer desires the provider's service.  Home health agency supervisors should always follow up on such patient requests to determine the reasons regarding the dismissal, to detect "problem" employees, and to ensure no incident has taken place that might give rise to liability.  The home health agency should continue providing care to the patient until definitively told not to do so by the patient.

COPING WITH THE ABUSIVE PATIENT

Home health provider personnel may occasionally encounter an abusive patient.  This abuse mayor may not be a result of the medical condition for which the care is being provided.  Personal safety of the individual health care provider should be paramount.  Should the patient pose a physical danger to the individual, he or she should leave the premises immediately.  The provider should document in the medical record the facts surrounding the inability to complete the treatment for that visit as objectively as possible.  Management personnel should inform supervisory personnel at the home health provider and should complete an internal incident report.  If it appears that a criminal act has taken place, such as a physical assault, attempted rape, or other such act, this act should be reported immediately to local law enforcement agencies.  The home care provider should also immediately notify both the patient and the physician that the provider will terminate its relationship with the patient and that an alternative provider for these services should be obtained.

Other less serious circumstances may, nevertheless, lead the home health provider to determine that it should terminate its relationship with a particular patient.  Examples may include particularly abusive patients, patients who solicit -the home health provider professional to break the law (for example, by providing illegal drugs or providing non-covered services and equipment and billing them as something else), or consistently noncompliant patients.  Once treatment is undertaken, however, the home health provider is usually obliged to continue providing services until the patient has had a reasonable opportunity to obtain a substitute provider.  The same principles apply to failure of a patient to pay for the services or equipment provided.

As health care professionals, HHA personnel should have training on how to handle the difficult patient responsibly.  Arguments or emotional comments should be avoided.  If it becomes clear that a certain provider and patient are not likely to be compatible, a substitute provider should be tried.  Should it appear that the problem lies with the patient and that it is necessary for the HHA to terminate its relationship with the patient, the following seven steps should be taken:

1. The circumstances should be documented in the patient's record.
2. The home health provider should give or send a letter to the patient explaining the circumstances surrounding the termination of care.
3. The letter should be sent by certified mail, return receipt requested, or other measures to document patient receipt of the letter.  A copy of the letter should be placed in the patient's record.
4. If possible, the patient should be given a certain period of time to obtain replacement care.  Usually 30 days is sufficient.
5. If the patient has a life-threatening condition or a medical condition that might deteriorate in the absence of continuing care, this condition should be clearly stated in the letter.  The necessity of the patient's obtaining replacement home health care should be emphasized.
6. The patient should be informed of the location of the nearest hospital emergency department.  The patient should be told to either go to the nearest hospital emergency department in case of a medical emergency or to call the local emergency number for ambulance transportation.
7. A copy of the letter should be sent to the patient's attending physician via certified mail, return receipt requested.

These steps should not be undertaken lightly.  Before such steps are taken, the patient's case should be thoroughly discussed with the home health provider's risk manager, legal counsel, medical director, and the patient's attending physician.

The inappropriate discharge of a patient from health care coverage by the home health provider, whether because of termination of entitlement, inability to pay, or other reasons, may also lead to liability for the tort of abandonment. [8]

Nurses who passively stand by and observe negligence by a physician or anyone else will personally become accountable to the patient who is injured as a result of that negligence ....  [H]ealthcare facilities and their nursing staff owe an independent duty to patients beyond the duty owed by physicians.  When a physician's order to discharge is inappropriate, the nurses will be help liable for following an order that they knew or should know is below the standard of care. [9]

Similar principles may apply to make the home health provider vicariously liable, as well.

Liability to the patient for the tort of abandonment may also result from the home health care professional's failure to observe, examine, assess, or monitor a patient's condition. [10]  Liability for abandonment may arise from failing to take timely action, as well as failing to summon a physician when a physician is needed. [11]  Failing to provide adequate staff to meet the patient's needs may also constitute abandonment on the part of the HHA. [12]  Ignoring a patient's complaints and failing to follow a physician's orders may likewise constitute a tort of abandonment for a nurse or other professional staff member.




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Hopkins has already been charged in connection with illegal organ trafficing in a case.  Allowing foreign patients to come to the US with organs they procure overseas FEEDS ORGAN HARVESTING.  That is what is happening in health tourism.  South and Central America is becoming a huge market for this as drug cartels get into the business of garnering and selling organs.  If Medicare and Medicaid does not exist then the poor will have to come up with payment or have no access to ordinary health care in the US.

This doctor is calling for an end of selective transplants to one that gives transplants to all -----he says Medicare for All.  What is does not write is how the current health reforms take away even that Medicare and Medicaid ability to access transplants and the organ donation is now a very profitable global business that Wall Street predatory health systems like Johns Hopkins will exploit.


'In this government-regulated and essentially government-financed enterprise, and with the full weight of law and omnipresent marketing behind it, it is this discrepancy between those called upon to donate and those eligible to receive that has led me to characterize this aspect of the American transplant industry as the “Reverse Robin Hood” approach to healthcare— taking from the poor and giving to the rich. I welcome anyone to make the contrary argument. I would like to be wrong'.



Posted on January 16, 2015 by P Hasselbacher

In response to a recent article in these pages about human organ transplantation in Kentucky, it was alleged that the University of Kentucky Hospital accepted Medicaid as payment for solid organ transplantation but that the Jewish Hospital program did not. I interviewed a number of individuals with first-hand knowledge but was unable to dispute the assertion that the source (or lack thereof) of a patient’s health insurance makes a difference in who receives an organ— not only here in Kentucky but nationwide. I recently obtained comprehensive payer-specific information from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS)– the government-sponsored organization that regulates and oversees virtually all organ transplants performed in the U.S. The short answer is that there is a considerable difference in the payer-mix for solid-organ transplantation between Jewish Hospital and the University of Kentucky (UK). In 2013– the last year for which a full 12 months of reporting is available– Medicaid beneficiaries made up 6.4% of all transplant recipients at Jewish and 15.9% at UK. These figures can be compared to the national proportion of 8.7% Medicaid beneficiaries. It cannot be said that the Jewish Hospital program does not accept Medicaid beneficiaries altogether. Additional details and commentary concerning local and national transplant programs are presented below. Frankly, I had not encountered such data before and I think it will be of general interest to many.

Source of the data.
UNOS hosts an extensive interactive database, much of which is available to the public on its website. Center-specific information is available on a wide range of elements from 1988 to the present for both donors and recipients. Non-patient-identifiable data is presented in custom reports by organ, sex, age, ethnicity, graft survival, status of donor, numbers and time in waiting lists, and much more. I was impressed! However, in this age of spiraling medical costs, the absence of information about cost or insurance coverage was noticeably absent. As it happens, some such data has been collected beginning in 1994 but had not been made available on the website. At my request, the good folks at UNOS gave me a massive series of spreadsheets identifying the primary payer broken down by every organ, every state, every transplant center, and for every one of the last 20 years. A smaller amount of information is available about the insurance status of living organ donors as well. There is enough information to choke a horse, and extracting data form the heavily formatted tables is tedious, but I have bitten-off a manageable amount to begin some discussion.

Specific categories of payer identified.
Some 96% of all transplants since 1994 had as their primary payer either private insurance (46.5%), Medicare (40.5%), or Medicaid (9.0%). Smaller proportions of less than 1% each were covered from other (mostly) government programs. Any secondary sources of health coverage such as Medicare supplements are not included. For presentation below, I combined three different Medicare categories in the collected data to consolidate traditional fee-for-service Medicare and Medicare Managed Care since 1994. Only a single Medicaid designation was provided by UNOS and while I wait for confirmation, I am provisionally assuming that it includes Medicaid Managed care.

National statistics.
Table 1 (PDF attached) identifies the primary payer source for all solid organs nationally (except combined kidney-pancreas) and for the three solid-organ transplant programs in Kentucky for the years 2011 through 2013. Data collection for 2014 is not yet complete and is omitted. For the most recent comparison year of 2013, I was surprised to learn that overall, the federal government was the largest payer for organ transplantation,covering just over 57% all recipients. Private insurance covered 41.8%. Of the big three, Medicaid covered 8.7%.

Results vary by organ!
The payer mix varies for the specific organ transplanted. (See Table 2.)  Because virtually all patients with chronic kidney failure on dialysis become eligible for Medicare, that federal program is the major payer for kidney transplantation. In 2013 the big three for kidney were Medicare (58%), Private (35.3%), and Medicaid (4.8%). For all the other organs, private insurance was the predominant payer. Medicaid was the third most frequent payer except for intestine for which Medicaid was second at 32.1%. This latter apparent anomaly may be due to the relatively large proportion of covered children undergoing this procedure. Perhaps an expert reader can clarify any of the observations above (or below for that matter).

Results in Kentucky.
The UNOS numbers confirm that economic factors are determinative of whether a prospective transplant patient is accepted to a waiting list and makes it to actual transplantation. Even in our major urban area with more than our share of medically indigent people, the proportion of Medicaid patients receiving an organ at the Jewish Hospital program is less than the national average (6.4% vs. 8.7% in 2013). In contrast, the proportion of Medicaid patients at UK was 15.9%, almost double the national proportion and 2 1/2 times that of Jewish. The University of Kentucky program also had a slightly higher proportion of private payers and considerably fewer Medicare patients than Jewish. No doubt there are many other factors that effect the patient profiles presenting to these two centers— it is a complicated business. However, given that UK makes the point that it accepts Medicaid beneficiaries as a matter of public policy, the considerable difference between these two centers begs to be explained as a matter of social justice.

The solid-organ transplantation program at Kosair Children’s hospitals is smaller than that at its sister Kentucky programs with only 99 transplant procedures recorded in the UNOS database since 1994. Over the years, the three major payers were more or less evenly represented, although in recent years Medicaid and disabled Medicare recipients appear to be in the majority. Because of the small numbers, little more can be said here.

Kentucky by organ.
As is the case nationally, payer mix by organ varies in Kentucky. Table 2 above also extracts the Kentucky numbers for 2013. As expected, Medicare plays a larger role in kidney transplants. There are no doubt several dynamics that influence payer mix.  For example, the percent private insurance for heart transplants at both adult transplant centers is much lower than the U..S average. The total number of heart procedures at both is relatively small– 11 and 14 for the year.  It might be necessary to adopt a more liberal payment policy for heart in order to maintain a minimum number of procedures for Medicare accreditation. Private patients may be being referred out-of-state by their physicians to higher volume centers. Perhaps there is not enough demand in KY for heart transplants such that all candidates are being served.  Someone with more practical experience than I will need to address these matters.

Because the annual volumes of all transplants in Kentucky is relatively small, a few patients  may distort the percentages statistically one way or the other by chance.   I will extract the total experience since 1994, and if it adds to the discussion, will append it here.

Donors.
No information is available to me about the insurance coverage or financial status of deceased donors, but that is an unknown close to my heart and which is driving this series of articles. The cost of harvesting and preparing organs from dead donors is generally assumed by the payer of the recipient. I am uncertain how matters are handled for live donors of a kidney, or portions of livers, lungs, pancreas or intestine. According to UNOS, of 5988 live donors in 2013, 79.7% were insured, 14.2 were uninsured, and the status of 6.1% was unknown.

What are we to make of all this?
The business of organ transplantation carries with it all the baggage of our health system in general but is punctuated by the high cost of the procedure, subsequent medical and pharmaceutical requirements, and the scarcity of available organs. In such a situation, the already impaired access to our main-stream healthcare system faced by disadvantaged persons is magnified. It is a reality that persons of limited financial means, those without employer-sponsored health insurance, or those belonging to ethnic groups that have been systematically disadvantaged by structural racism do not fully enjoy the financial and quality benefits of our healthcare system.

What if you are poor?
The proportion of Medicaid patients in a hospital has long been used as a marker for its share of uninsured and medically indigent patients. Do even the 9% Medicaid transplant recipients nationally fairly reflect the insurance status of people, let alone the medical necessity of those making application for a transplant, or are the poor winnowed out even before making a waiting list? I do not have information about the insurance, or financial, or ethnic status of potential transplant recipients to render a fact-based opinion about the degree of exclusion, but I have little doubt such individuals are blocked at the starting line just as they are for most other medical services. Of the 28,192 people who received a transplanted organ in 2013, only 39 (0.1%) were provided services considered to be donated or free. Even if we include some of the 79 “Self-Pay” recipients, is this enough to justify the non-profit status of transplant centers? I am sure there are no questions asked about the financial status of families who are asked to donate the organs of their loved ones. In ironic counterpoint, it is considered inappropriate to offer compensation to donors or their families!  In this government-regulated and essentially government-financed enterprise, and with the full weight of law and omnipresent marketing behind it, it is this discrepancy between those called upon to donate and those eligible to receive that has led me to characterize this aspect of the American transplant industry as the “Reverse Robin Hood” approach to healthcare-- taking from the poor and giving to the rich. I welcome anyone to make the contrary argument. I would like to be wrong.

Why is it so different in Louisville and Lexington?
Can anyone make the argument that the indigent of Louisville are being as well served as those in Lexington? Where do the medically needy from Western Kentucky go when transplant is needed? Do they bypass Louisville for Lexington? I am impressed and grateful that the University of Kentucky views it as their duty to accept Medicaid as payment-in-full for transplant services, but even UK has not listed any “donated” or “free” transplants in the last twenty years. Perhaps some of their 12 “self-pay” patients fell into these categories. Perhaps they were successful in securing public funding for their patients.

Who should hold the monopoly on transplantation?
In Kentucky, a center needs a state Certificate of Need to offer transplant services. Given the degree of federal and state support for organ transplantation in law, finance, and in promotion; and given concepts of equity and justice concerning who should have access to those services; and especially given an obvious difference in commitment to the public exhibited by the state institution in Lexington— when and under what conditions is it defensible to give a transplant monopoly to a private institution?
The surgical staff at Jewish Hospital are members of the faculty of the University of Louisville, but the transplant program itself is in private hands, a pair that has promised to provide healthcare to the needy of Kentucky regardless of ability to pay. What should therefore reasonably be the expectations of the Commonwealth and its citizens for our transplant centers, or those of citizens in other states for theirs?

How should the trains be run.
I have been writing about these issues for the past 3 years and it is no secret that I am unhappy with the degree of access and equity inherent in our current American health system. Sadly, I do not see a transformation to a “Medicare for all” solution in my lifetime, but what about for organ transplantation? We are already as a society paying for kidney transplants for all who need them medically and for half of the other organs. Why not just extend the coverage to all those for whom transplantation of other organs is medically necessary. How can we justify our current organ-based discrimination? No one should have to have to shake a can or offer a bake sale to raise money for a transplant. And while we are at it, lets assume a legal presumption of consent that suitable organs are available for donation to those who can give them an extended life?  Why stop there? How about basic healthcare for all such that untreated hypertension and diabetes does not lead to the need for so many kidney transplants in the first place.

Enough for now. Tell me how wrong I am— please!  If I have made errors in fact or interpretation, or if there are other rational explanations for the differences I have observed, please let us know. If there is another view of the data you would like to see, or if you would like to see the profile of another center, let me know that too.

Peter Hasselbacher, MD
President, KHPI
Emeritus Professor of Medicine, UofL
January 16, 2015




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February 17th, 2015

2/17/2015

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BYE BYE MEDICARE AND MEDICAID------

I've already spoken of Obama and Congressional neo-liberals gutting Medicare and Medicaid of funding in what small government Clinton neo-liberals like to call THE BIGGEST CUT IN THE DEFICIT SINCE CLINTON.  Indeed, so much was cut that doctors are moving from accepting Medicare patients and the Federal Medicare is helping seniors less and less with some of the most important procedural coverage.  All of this is meant to force seniors to private Medicare Advantage----they of course are offering all of what Federal Medicare does not.  Medi-gap is costing $300 a month making that 20% deductible of Medicare harder and harder to meet. 
WALL STREET NEO-LIBERALS ARE DELIBERATELY MAKING IT TOO HARD FOR SENIORS TO STAY IN FEDERAL MEDICARE.

What about the donut-hole?  Obama and Congress moved most of the PHARMA coverage to generics at the same time they wrote in Trans Pacific Trade Pact laws making generics harder to manufacture as they take from profits of name-brand.  All of the policy around Affordable Care Act is designed to end the Federal programs Medicare and Medicaid.

Let's look at other policy doing the same.  When Obama and Congress chose austerity over recovering tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud to pay down the national debt and budget deficit they did one thing that will literally KILL many American people moving into Medicare.  Since Medicare guarantees seniors access to hospital care since Medicare came into being the Federal government used a fund to subsidize the care hospitals gave not covered by insurance.  This Federal fund covered the low-income uninsured as well as seniors with Medicare who could not meet the 20% deductible.  So, all patients were covered for all the care they needed regardless of coverage. 

Public hospitals and clinics used to take those not insured and used that Federal fund for resources.  Clinton neo-liberalism meant all that was public was closed as were all these hospitals and clinics and THIS IS THE REASON EMERGENCY ROOMS FILLED.  All of that Federal funding then moved to these hospitals instead of the public hospitals and clinics and patients received the worst of care because of overcrowding. 

THOSE HOSPITALS MADE TONS OF MONEY FROM THE FEDERAL AGENCY COVERING THE UNINSURED.

Since the Affordable Care Act ends public subsidy for health care as required by Trans Pacific Trade Pact so ends hospitals taking all citizens.  With public hospitals and clinics closed----THERE IS NOWHERE FOR CITIZENS TO GO.  See what public private partnerships lead to?  Now, Maryland citizens are not allowed to go to any hospital for care and signs tell you this at the emergency room door.


Republicans are pretending its the Democrats fault calling the Republican written health policy Affordable Care Act ObamaCare.  Everyone knew exactly how much harm would come to people with ACA.  National labor union leaders bringing labor endorsements knew as did national justice leaders. 

EVERYONE WHO SUPPORTED ACA KNEW IT WAS A WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE MODEL KILLING PUBLIC HEALTH CARE.  FROM MOVE ON TO AARP-----SUPPOSED PROGRESSIVE ORGANIZATIONS ALL KNEW THIS CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL HEALTH POLICY WOULD BE DEVASTATING.  IT IS NOT A STEP TOWARDS SINGLE-PAYER UNLESS YOU THINK A GUTTED MEDICAID FOR ALL IS A GOOD GOAL.


Cuts in Hospital Subsidies Threaten Safety-Net Care
Stephen Morton for The New York Times Donna Atkins has no insurance and went two years with what she thought was a sore throat. She recently had cancer surgery.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE Published: November 8, 2013
SAVANNAH, Ga. — The uninsured pour into Memorial Health hospital here: the waitress with cancer in her voice box who for two years assumed she just had a sore throat. The unemployed diabetic with a wound stretching the length of her shin. The construction worker who could no longer breathe on his own after weeks of untreated asthma attacks and had to be put on a respirator.

  The New York Times

Dr. Guy Petruzzelli at Memorial Health hospital in Savannah, Ga. Memorial provides care for many patients who fail what Dr. Petruzzelli calls “the wallet biopsy.”

Many of these patients were expected to gain health coverage under the Affordable Care Act through a major expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor. But after the Supreme Court in 2012 gave states the right to opt out, Georgia, like about half the states, almost all of them Republican-led, refused to broaden the program.

Now, in a perverse twist, many of the poor people who rely on safety-net hospitals like Memorial will be doubly unlucky. A government subsidy, little known outside health policy circles but critical to the hospitals’ survival, is being sharply reduced under the new health law.

The subsidy, which for years has helped defray the cost of uncompensated and undercompensated care, was cut substantially on the assumption that the hospitals would replace much of the lost income with payments for patients newly covered by Medicaid or private insurance. But now the hospitals in states like Georgia will get neither the new Medicaid patients nor most of the old subsidies, which many say are crucial to the mission of care for the poor.

“We were so thrilled when the law passed, but it has backfired,” said Lindsay Caulfield, senior vice president for planning and marketing at Grady Health in Atlanta, the largest safety-net hospital in Georgia.

It is now facing the loss of nearly half of its roughly $100 million in annual subsidies known as disproportionate share hospital payments.

Memorial is also facing steep reductions in the subsidies. Cancer care may be among the services reduced, administrators here said. Memorial is now one of only a few hospitals in the state with a tumor clinic that accepts poor patients without insurance. Many show up coughing blood or having trouble breathing because their cancers have gone untreated for so long.

On a recent afternoon, Dr. Wade Fletcher, who practices at the hospital, thumbed through a stack of patient intake forms. The sections on payment contained the same refrain: No insurance. No money.

Even so, many of the patients work, often in Savannah’s huge hotel and restaurant industry. Late last month, Donna Atkins, a waitress at a barbecue restaurant, learned from Dr. Guy Petruzzelli, a surgeon here, that she has throat cancer. She does not have insurance and had a sore throat for a year before going to a doctor. She was advised to get a specialized image of her neck, but it would have cost $2,300, more than she makes in a month.

“I didn’t have the money even to walk in the door of that office,” said Ms. Atkins, speaking in a low, throaty whisper.

Dr. Petruzzelli has a phrase for her situation: “She failed the wallet biopsy.”


Ms. Atkins had surgery last Friday, two years after her first symptoms. It is unclear whether Ms. Atkins, whose income is right around the poverty line, will be left without Medicaid, or if she earns enough to qualify for subsidies to buy private insurance on the federal exchange. She appreciates the intent of the health law, but does not like the outcome: Her hours are being cut so her employer can count her as part-time to avoid having to offer insurance.

As she juggled takeout orders at the restaurant, Ms. Atkins said she would have to try to find a second job. “I’m 53,” she said. “Not too many people want to hire someone my age.”

Patients with chronic conditions like hers often go in and out of emergency rooms for years without treatment because doctors are only required to treat immediately life-threatening conditions. Dr. Christopher Senkowski, a surgeon at Memorial, recalled examining a farmer with pancreatic cancer that had spread throughout his body after months of referrals to specialists that he could not afford.

The cuts in subsidies for safety-net hospitals like Memorial — those that deliver a significant amount of care to poor, uninsured or otherwise vulnerable patients — are set to total at least $18 billion through 2020.  The government has projected that as much as $22 billion more in Medicare subsidies could be cut by 2019, depending partly on the change in the numbers of uninsured nationally.

The cuts are just one of the reductions in government reimbursements that are squeezing hospitals across the country. Some have already announced layoffs. In Georgia, three rural hospitals have closed this year.

Medicaid expansion may not have replaced all of the lost subsidies, but it would have helped, hospital administrators said.


“I understand that the state needs to balance its budget, and control the runaway costs of Medicaid, but to turn a blind eye and say, ‘Let the chips fall where they may,’ you’ll end up with a gutted health care system,” said Maggie M. Gill, chief executive at Memorial Health.

Traditionally, safety-net hospitals have played a special role in caring for poor people. They make up just 2 percent of acute care hospitals in the country, but provide about a fifth of all uncompensated care, according to Dr. Arthur Kellerman, dean of the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine in Bethesda, Md. The subsidy was created in the 1980s to help hospitals with large shares of patients who were uninsured or had government insurance that did not pay very much. Many hospitals came to depend on it.

A full third of Grady’s patients have no insurance, and, if that does not change, the hospital will have no choice but to cut services, said John M. Haupert, Grady’s chief executive. The hospital’s large outpatient mental health program, which handles 58,000 visits a year and is critical to keeping poor patients with behavioral problems from seeking treatment in the emergency room, would most likely be hit, Mr. Haupert said.

Some experts say the cuts in hospital subsidies are part of a larger problem: government programs like Medicaid do not pay enough to cover the actual costs of care. The cheapest private insurance on the new health care exchanges, the Bronze Plan, covers just 60 percent of costs, leaving low-income people who buy it with a lot of out-of-pocket costs that hospitals worry the patients will not be able to pay.

A spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services said that some of the reductions in the subsidy should not hurt safety-net hospitals because states have discretion over how the money is distributed and should be focusing on hospitals with the most uncompensated care. And while there is no special exception for states that did not expand Medicaid, federal officials have said they will revisit that in 2016.

But experts and hospital administrators said it was unlikely that the federal government would make adjustments that would reward states that refused to expand Medicaid. And the health care landscape is changing so rapidly, they say, that the subsidies are crucial to keep going over the next few years.

Hospitals in Georgia are trying to hang on. Rural hospitals rely heavily on the subsidies and as many as 15 could close in the coming months, their trade association estimated, costing jobs in economically depressed parts of the state.

Georgia hospital officials hope that the plight of rural hospitals may eventually cause Gov. Nathan Deal to opt for some version of a Medicaid expansion. The state’s politically powerful hospital association late last month called for expansion.

But for now, the governor is holding firm. His spokesman, Brian Robinson, said Mr. Deal’s opposition to expanding Medicaid was driven by simple math: Georgia cannot afford it. Though the federal government is paying the full costs of the expansion for the first three years, states will have to pay up to 10 percent in later years. States that do not expand should be spared cuts in hospital subsidies, Mr. Robinson said.

The federal government, not Georgia, is to blame for the predicament, he said.


“The state is sitting here, a victim of a crime, and you’re asking the victim, ‘Why did you let yourself get mugged?’ ” he said.

Hospitals are trying to get Congress to delay the subsidy cuts by amending the health law, but House Republicans in Washington have thus far refused.

“The conversation we are having with the congressional delegation goes like this, ‘If we don’t expand Medicaid, what is the Georgia solution to indigent care?’ ” said Matthew Hicks, vice president for government relations at Grady. “So far they don’t have an answer.”


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If you ride public transportation in Baltimore you see all of the health advertisements for drug studies and HIV tests.  Now we see ads for free  cancer screenings and all of the Medicaid funding is being sent to these 'preventative care' programs.  Now, call me suspicious but Baltimore had the highest HIV and Heroin addiction decades ago and today----it has the highest heroin and HIV in the nation.  That is after hundreds of millions of dollars sent by Hopkins to private non-profit health organizations to address this.  Brexton-Chase is now a hospital chain in Maryland that came from one of Hopkins' private non-profits for HIV and heroin use.  It is a health corporation.  Below you see what again is a scam-----because as the article shows below---the Affordable Care Act and cuts from Congress targeted major disease vectors like Diabetes and Cancer for funding cuts.  I heard Baltimore citizens state 2 years ago that even the University of Maryland was not treating people without insurance for cancer beyond initial finding. 

YOU CAN GET THE PREVENTATIVE SCREENING BUT YOU HAVE NO ACCESS TO THE HEALTH CARE PROCEDURES NEEDED IF SOMETHING IS FOUND!


This is preventative care in Baltimore.  All that money funding these preventative checkups that no one will go to because they know its all a scam-----will go to corporate profit.  People will die.




Cancer treatment:

Budget cuts have forced doctors and cancer clinics to deny chemotherapy treatments to thousands of cancer patients thanks to a 2 percent cut to Medicare. One clinic in New York has refused to see more than 5,000 of its Medicare patients, and many cancer patients have had to travel to other states to receive their treatments, an option that obviously isn’t available to lower-income people. Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) proposed restoring the funding, but the legislation so far hasn’t moved in Congress.


In Baltimore, hospitals have designated not to accept patients without insurance and we are seeing media reports of these hospitals using ambulances to cart patients to other clinic outlets where these patients can be seen.  This is happening because the Federal agency funding that used to pay for the care those without insurance is now going to subsidize all of the corporate health system structure that is making health profits soar!

Keep in mind if you are a senior having had a health experience that left you in debt from the 20% deductible----that debt will no longer go away after a few years and you will be considered just as a Medicaid patient level of care.  Accumulating health debt does not go away and it moves you to the lower category of health insurance---- gutted of funding and barely existing Medicaid.

SEE HOW THIS BECOMES A SINGLE-PAYER----MEDICAID FOR ALL!  BYE BYE MEDICARE!

Below you see what deregulation of health care looks like.  Under the guise of needing lots of different care policies to find what works best----as with education----they are deregulating a health industry that worked well to protect the patient.  Now, they pretend to sacrifice all those protections looking for best practices!

Deregulating the health industry will create an impossible maze for the American people trying to access the best care and/or trying to get justice in what will be an explosion of malpractice and wrongful death and injury.  Remember, the Hippocratic Oath of DO NO HARM cannot be done when insurance/health boards are writing standard procedures and steps are required.


ER doctors may not take insurance; even if hospital does


Posted: Aug 06, 2013 8:38 PM EDT Updated: Sep 10, 2013 7:14 PM EDT

By Dave Cherry
Connect   GOODYEAR, AZ (CBS5) - A Goodyear man says he feels duped by an emergency room doctor. He had to pay thousands of dollars for services he expected to be mostly covered by his insurance plan. His experience is a common practice in hospital ERs, and there is little consumers can do about it.

The setup in most hospitals nationwide is perfectly legal. Emergency room doctors are not generally employees of the hospitals they work in. Just because a hospital in "in-network" with your insurance, that doesn't mean the emergency room doctor is. In fact, there's a good chance that an emergency room doctor doesn't take any insurance at all, and that could lead to big out-of-pocket expenses for you.

Richard Davis badly dislocated two fingers last year, when he tripped and fell outside his house. With his Blue Cross, Blue Shield insurance, he went to Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center for treatment.

"It was a Banner hospital and we knew that they were in-network so we had no reason to believe this doctor wouldn't have been in-network also," Davis said.

Davis says insurance wasn't discussed at the hospital. He says the doctor, Lloyd Champagne, spent less than thirty minutes resetting his fingers. Insurance covered the hospital charges, but Davis got a massive bill from Champagne's practice, the Arizona Center for Hand Surgery.

"Almost $11,500 for 20 minutes of service in the ER by this doctor," Davis said.

Turns out Champagne doesn't take any insurance, hospitals don't require emergency room doctors to accept it and many don't. Most emergency room doctors are independent hospital contractors who can bill as they please. The Center for Hand Surgery reduced their bill to $9,600, but Davis says his insurer thought about $2,000 was customary and reasonable. He asked The Center for Hand Surgery to accept the lower amount as full payment.

"They refused. That was it. That was all they were going to do, and if we didn't pay it, they'd send us to collections," Davis said.

Davis paid almost $8,000 out of pocket for something that would have cost very little had the emergency room doctor taken his insurance.

"There are patients out there that are being bilked out of huge amounts of money for procedures that shouldn't cost that much," Davis said.

Hospitals have been hiring independent contractors to run their emergency rooms for years, but many consumers are still shocked when they find out. Most insurance will only pay the out-of-network rate to that doctor, and they'll only pay what is customary and reasonable.  So patients like Davis, who get an extremely large bill, are stuck with a huge balance.

CBS 5 News contacted the Arizona Center for Hand Surgery and Dr. Champagne several times wanting to discuss why this bill was so high, but no one from the practice returned our calls.

There isn't much you can do, if you are in a life/death emergency, you should go to the closest emergency room.  But if it is not life/death, ask the emergency room staff if the physician on duty takes your insurance, if not, assess if you can go elsewhere.

Copyright 2013 CBS 5 (KPHO Broadcasting Corporation). All rights reserved.


________________________________________
Medicaid funding has been so gutted so as to not be a program.....doctors are not taking Medicaid patients and states like Maryland use Medicaid funding for everything other than Medicaid.  They are pretending they are building an entire infrastructure of health care for Medicaid and Bronze level preventative care only----but they are not in most cases.

There is no plan by Clinton Wall Street neo-liberals to offer any care to Medicaid and seniors not able to buy private Medi-gap kinds of insurance beyond communicable disease checkups.

Maryland is making all kinds of policy that protects these health disenfranchised------Maryland Health Care for All ---the Johns Hopkins organization making sure Hopkins' private profit-driven health system is the only one----makes all kinds of policy to protect the poor ----children-----dentist here----raw milk there......while silent as the entire Medicare and Medicaid structure is dismantled.



THIS IS THE MARYLAND GLOBAL MODEL BY JOHNS HOPKINS-----ALL FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL FUNDING FOR HEALTH CARE GOES INTO A POOL OF FUNDS AND ALWAYS ENDS UP SUBSIDIZING HEALTH INDUSTRY PROFIT.

It's also good to know that Obama's Health and Human Services appointment is a Bill Gates global health corporate executive committed to turning Medicare and Medicaid into block grants which is what Johns Hopkins did to these programs decades ago!


Medicaid cuts to hit doctors hard in 2015: California may see fee reductions up to 50 percent as federal subsidy ends


December 11, 2014, 05:00 AM


By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar The Associated
WASHINGTON — Primary care doctors caring for low-income patients will face steep fee cuts next year as a temporary program in President Barack Obama’s health care law expires. That could squeeze access just when millions of new patients are gaining Medicaid coverage.

A study Wednesday from the nonpartisan Urban Institute estimated fee reductions will average about 40 percent nationwide. But they could reach 50 percent or more for primary care doctors in California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois — big states that have all expanded Medicaid under the health law.

Meager pay for doctors has been a persistent problem for Medicaid, the safety-net health insurance program. Low-income people unable to find a family doctor instead flock to hospital emergency rooms, where treatment is more expensive and not usually focused on prevention.

To improve access for the poor, the health law increased Medicaid fees for frontline primary care doctors for two years, 2013 and 2014, with Washington paying the full cost. The goal was to bring rates up to what Medicare pays for similar services. But that boost expires Jan. 1, and efforts to secure even a temporary extension from Congress appear thwarted by the politically toxic debate over “Obamacare.”

Doctors probably won’t dump their current Medicaid patients, but they’ll take a hard look at accepting new ones, said Dr. Robert Wergin, a practitioner in rural Milford, Neb., and president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

“You are going to be paid less, so you are going to have to look at your practice and find ways to eke it out,” Wergin said.

Medicaid covers more than 60 million people, making the federal-state program even larger than Medicare. The health care law has added about 9 million people to the Medicaid rolls, as 27 states have taken advantage of an option that extends coverage to many low-income adults.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell says expanding Medicaid in the remaining 23 states is one of her top priorities. But the fee cut could make that an even harder sell, since it may reinforce a perception that the federal government creates expensive new benefits only to pass the bill to states. In Pennsylvania, where the Medicaid expansion will take effect Jan. 1, doctors are facing a 52 percent fee reduction, according to the Urban Institute study.

The fee boost has cost federal taxpayers at least $5.6 billion so far, but Stephen Zuckerman, one of the study’s authors, said it’s not clear whether access actually improved.

Many doctors did not begin to see the higher payments until the second half of 2013 because of rollout problems. And about three-fourths of Medicaid beneficiaries are in managed-care plans, which may already pay doctors more for routine care and prevention.

Still, Zuckerman said the fee increase was also passed through to doctors seeing patients through managed-care plans, and now they will feel the cuts. “The magnitude of the reduction will be somewhat smaller ... but there is no way to believe there won’t be a decrease,” he said.

Despite such questions, some states have recognized the importance of the fee increase. Fifteen are planning to use their own money to continue paying higher Medicaid fees through 2015, Zuckerman said. Among them are several Republican-led states that have resisted Obama’s broader Medicaid expansion, including Mississippi and South Carolina.

Another dozen or so states are undecided.

“If you are cutting primary care fees, patients could end up in the emergency room for something that could be dealt with in a doctor's office,” said Zuckerman. “That is not a good outcome.”

Doctors groups say they will try to revive the Medicaid fee boost next year, when lawmakers must act to prevent a big cut in Medicare physician payments. The health program for seniors has much stronger political support.

_________________________________________
Everybody understands that a trillion dollars cut to Medicare and Medicaid will make taking new or keeping old patients harder to do.  We understand as well that these new ACO managed care health systems working for profit will not allow their ACO doctors keep unprofitable patients.  So, this will keep what is now 70% of Americans out of ordinary health care and that number will expand to 90% as veterans and  union health plans end-----and the next economic crash sends more people to poverty.

THAT IS WHAT THE AFFORDABLE CARE REFORM WAS ALL ABOUT.

Meanwhile all of that money Obama and Congressional Clinton neo-liberals sent to build this new health system structure is building the global health systems that are making US hospitals and health systems global.  Health tourism is what Maryland hospitals are competing for and that means the rich of the world come to the US to be the patients that American citizens made too poor and without its War on Poverty programs Medicare and Medicaid can afford.  Don't worry----you will get to compete with immigrant workers from developing nations for jobs in these global health systems for a chance to earn developing nation wages!


THOSE CLINTON WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS-----TAKING THE PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR WALL STREET WITH 80% OF DEMOCRATIC VOTERS BEING KILLED BY THESE POLICIES.  JUST GET RID OF THESE CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS AND WE CAN REVERSE THIS!


As more doctors opt out of Medicare, overall shortage increases

  Jul 30, 2013 By Hope Gillette  VOXXI

People over the age of 65 may soon find it difficult to find a primary care doctor. Because of low reimbursement, more doctors opt out of Medicare. (Shutterstock)

Prior to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it was sometimes difficult to find a doctor willing to accept Medicare coverage. As more and more regulations go into effect from the ACA and Medicaid coverage is expanded, that issue isn’t likely to improve—actually, it’s already getting worse as more doctors opt out of Medicare.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, currently, more than ever before doctors opt out of the Medicare program due to increasing regulations and low payment reimbursement. This means a growing number of people over the age of 65 and those with disabilities are left with limited care options.

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in 2009 the number of physicians not participating in Medicare totaled almost 4,000. In 2012, that number had grown to approximately 9,500 physicians. Between 2010 and 2011, approximately 33 percent of primary care physicians did not accept new Medicare patients.

What’s more, not only do doctors opt out of Medicare programs, but they are also refusing to accept small group insurance plans, a fact which may mean newly insured individuals with the ACA market exchange will need to find additional medical providers if certain coverage isn’t accepted.


Just because the Affordable Care Act grants health insurance coverage to millions of people, it does not mean all doctors everywhere will accept every insurance plan. Private practices in many states have the ability to pick and choose providers based on reimbursement numbers and turnaround time.

“In most places, doctors can’t pick and choose because Medicare is the biggest game in town, or the only game in town,” Joe Baker, president of the Medicare Rights Center, told the Wall Street Journal.

However, with the health care exchanges underway, doctors will have more options as to who they can see,
and the need to rely heavily on Medicare won’t be as prominent.

“Medicare has really been pushing its luck with physicians,” said economist Paul Ginsburg, president of the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change. “By allowing the SGR [Sustainable Growth Rate] and its temporary fixes to persist, Medicare is risking a backlash by senior citizens who say, ‘Hey, this program isn’t giving me the access to doctors I need.’ ”

Currently, Medicare reimbursement rates are considered low among coverage plans.

Some, for example, only pay $60 for an office visit, which may normally run $150 or more.


But reimbursement is not the only issue. As the Affordable Care Act is implemented, government-run programs like Medicare are seeing more and more regulations and penalties. Starting in 2015, any facility accepting Medicare that does not switch to electronic medical records will be subject to a penalty.


The number of doctors who opt out of Medicare is concerning, largely because there is already a limited number of them. Insurance providers aside, the United States is short by approximately 16,000 primary care doctors to treat the current population.

AARP indicates the millions of people who will suddenly gain health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act will put a significant stress on the medical community. That stress, combined with the doctors who opt out of Medicare and those who hit retirement age means fewer doctors to treat a growing number of patients.

“The doctor shortage is worse than most people think,” Steven Berk, M.D., dean of the School of Medicine at Texas Tech University, told AARP. “The population is getting older, so there’s a greater need for primary care physicians. At the same time, physicians are getting older, too, and they’re retiring earlier.”

Almost half the nation’s 830,000 physicians are over age 50 and are seeing fewer patients than they did four years ago, a 2012 Physicians Foundation survey reported.

Unfortunately, the doctor shortage is not likely to improve unless there are changes in the education system. Medical students currently graduate and leave primary care positions as soon as possible to help pay for their significant student debt—often upwards of $250,000.

Current numbers indicate only one in every five medical graduates plan on going into primary care as their field of choice.


With so few doctors currently available already, and those that are actively seeing patients opting out of the Medicare program, senior patients may find affordable care increasingly difficult to come by.

_________________________________________

As US doctors are pulled to US health systems going global Americans are going to be forced to go overseas to get 'cheaper' care.  So, US trained doctors taking the rich from the world getting the benefit of the health care the American people paid for using our payroll taxes and Medicare and Medicaid Trusts to expand-----while overseas----they are waiting for desperate US citizens to look for ordinary care outside the US.

This is the Affordable Care Act----consolidating and deregulating the health industry to create global health systems that are as profit-driven and predatory as Wall Street banks.  If you think they are building a system for 90% of Americans----third world clinic care will be it----they say---HIT THE ROAD FOR YOUR HEALTH CARE!




For those thinking the Affordable Care Act funding for more primary care doctors will see doctors coming to American patients think of this global health tourism business that all of America helped build with a trillion dollars in Federal, state, and local taxes building Hopkins global corporation and its headquarters in Baltimore.

The number of doctors tied to both Hopkins and University of Maryland Medical System which is not a state institution as you might think, but a quasi-governmental---which means corporation----dedicated to this global structure is huge.  It has sucked all of the medical personnel out of the city and brings tons of immigrant medical personnel to Baltimore to serve the citizens of Maryland.  Right now citizens are finding availability at Hopkins but Hopkins markets all over the world and nation while people living around the hospital die 30 years earlier than affluent communities.  I keep repeating this because this shows absolutely no caring of public welfare-----and Hopkins writes this Wall Street health policy operating only on what brings more wealth.


Because Hopkins operates only for wealth----all of its data-----all of public transparency-----all of policy protecting patient well-being -------is gone.  It made it's living robbing the poor and protects corporate profit at all cost. 

This is where Maryland's global fund model for subsidized corporate profit was written.


Johns Hopkins Medicine International


Baltimore, US   |   Accreditation: none listed 

601 N. Caroline Street, Suite 1080

Baltimore, Maryland 21287

contact: International Care Coordinator

+ 1-410-955-8032

Features: Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI) facilitates the global development of the Johns Hopkins Medicine mission: to set the standard of excellence in medical education, research and patient care.

As the international access point to thousands of Johns Hopkins experts in medicine, nursing, public health and health care administration, JHI coordinates treatment for out-of-town patients who travel to Baltimore and local patients with limited English proficiency.

Johns Hopkins Medicine International’s International Care Coordinators, Financial Counselors, International Care Management, Guest Services, Remote Medical Second Opinion and other staff members work as a team to provide seamless service tailored to your personal and cultural needs.

International Patients:

Complete an Inquiry Form online and an international care coordinator will contact you within one business day.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore is a cluster of more than 20 buildings where patients from around the world benefit from our internationally renowned physicians and medical treatments. The Johns Hopkins Medicine system also includes two other acute-care hospitals, a satellite clinic and nearly 20 community medical centers.

Every year, we coordinate the highest quality health care for thousands of patients from more than 100 countries, so we understand and can anticipate your needs. Our staff will be there to assist you during all phases of your care.

At times, the magnitude of this institution can be overwhelming. For that reason, each international patient is paired with a personal international care coordinator who provides seamless service before, during and after each visit to Johns Hopkins.

BEFORE Your Visit:

* Appointment scheduling
* Financial information and counseling
* Accommodation arrangements
* Transportation

DURING the Course of Treatment:

* Escort throughout Johns Hopkins facilities/departments
* Language interpretation
* Assistance during inpatient stay and after discharge
* Care management nurse visit during inpatient stay
* Durable medical equipment and/or home care arrangements (as necessary)
* Private duty nurse arrangements (as necessary)
* Assistance with prescriptions and refills
* Follow-up appointment(s) scheduling
* Financial counseling
* Concierge services for dining and entertainment
* Historical tour of The Johns Hopkins Hospital
* International newspapers and Internet access
* Relaxing, hospitable Executive Lounge

AFTER Your Departure:

* Assistance with medical reports and films
* Assistance with prescriptions and refills
* Facilitating follow-up communication with clinical and administrative staff
* Future appointment scheduling
* Providing consolidated final bills

Caring, skilled and dedicated, your coordinator will make your stay efficient and hassle-free by helping you navigate the Johns Hopkins system, scheduling medical appointments with the most appropriate Johns Hopkins medical experts, providing language interpretation services and anticipating your cultural expectations.

Call +1.410.955.8032 or connect with your regional expert:

Contact the Africa Team:

Tel: +1.410.614.4108
Fax: +1.410.614.8254
E-mail: africa@jhmi.edu

Contact the Asia Pacific Team:
(Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Rim)

Tel: +1.410.614.5275
Fax: +1.410.502.5227
E-mail: asiapacific@jhmi.edu

Contact the Bermuda Team:

Tel: +1.410.614.5275
Fax: +1.410.502.5227
E-mail: bermuda@jhmi.edu

Contact the Canada Team:

Tel: +1.410.614.5275
Fax: +1.410.502.5227
E-mail: canada@jhmi.edu

Contact the Europe Team:

Tel: +1.410.955.3661
Fax: +1.410.502.7397
E-mail: europe@jhmi.edu

Contact the Latin America and Caribbean Team:

Tel: +1.410.955.3661
Fax: +1.410.502.7397
E-mail: latinamerica@jhmi.edu

Contact the Middle East Team:

Tel: +1.410.614.4108
Fax: +1.410.614.8254
E-mail: middleeast@jhmi.edu

Specialties: Centers of Excellence include:

Brady Urological Institute
Wilmer Eye Institute
Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center
Comprehensive Transplant Center, as well as many other multidisciplinary centers

Our medical specialties include the departments and health services offered by the health care providers at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Many of our specialty services are continuously ranked among the highest in the country, as we work together to offer the finest patient care, research, and education available.

* Allergy and Clinical Immunology
* Anesthesiology/Critical Care Medicine
* Cancer
* Cardiac Surgery
* Cardiology
* Childrens’ Health
* Dentistry
* Dermatology
* Emergency Medicine
* Endocrinology
* Eyes
* Gastroenterology
* Gynecology and Obstetrics
* Head and Neck Surgery
* Hearing
* Heart
* Hematology
* Infectious Diseases
* Internal Medicine
* Medicine
* Nephrology
* Neurology and Neurosurgery
* Oncology (Cancer)
* Ophthamology (Eyes)
* Oral Surgery
* Orthopedic Surgery
* Otolaryngology (Head and Neck Surgery)
* Pathology
* Pediatrics
* Pediatric Oncology
* Physical Medicine/Rehabilitation
* Psychiatry/Behavioral Sciences
* Pulmonary/Critical Care Medicine
* Radiation Oncology
* Radiology
* Rheumatology
* Social Work (Medical & Surgical)
* Surgery
* Urology
* Vascular Medicine, Surgery, & Endovascular Therapy





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    Author

    Cindy Walsh is a lifelong political activist and academic living in Baltimore, Maryland.

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