July 27, 2019

Dialysis Firm Cancels $524,600.17 Medical Bill After Journalists Investigate

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/07/26/745596505/dialysis-firm-cancels-524-600-17-medical-bill-after-journalists-investigate

On Thursday, a representative from Fresenius told Sovereign's wife, Dr. Jessica Valentine, that the company would waive their unpaid bill. Instead, they will be treated as in-network patients, and Fresenius will seek to negotiate with their insurer a rate higher than what the insurer has already paid. The Valentines are responsible only for their $5,000 deductible, which Sovereign, who goes by "Sov," has already hit for the year. That leaves them with $0 left to pay on their in-network deductible.

"It's a huge relief," Sov said. "It allows me to put more energy back into just taking care of my health and not having stress hormones raging." Sov said he hopes his experience will shed light on the problem of balance billing and help other patients in similar situations.

A 50-year-old personal trainer, Sov was diagnosed with kidney failure in January and sent for dialysis at a Fresenius clinic 70 miles from his home in rural Plains, Mont. A few days later, Sov and Jessica learned that the clinic was out-of-network and that they would be required to pay whatever their insurer didn't cover.

The Valentines initially could not find an in-network option, and Sov needed dialysis three times a week to survive. After he underwent 14 weeks of dialysis with Fresenius, the couple received a bill for $540,841.90. Their insurer, Allegiance, paid $16,241.73, about twice what Medicare would have paid. Fresenius billed the couple the unpaid balance of $524,600.17 — an amount that is more than the typical cost of a kidney transplant.

Fresenius charged the Valentines $13,867.74 per dialysis session, or about 59 times the $235 Medicare pays for a dialysis session.

Fresenius spokesman Brad Puffer said that the Valentines should always have been treated as in-network patients because their insurer, Allegiance, is a subsidiary of Cigna, which has a contract with the dialysis company. Under this contract, Fresenius would have been paid a higher rate than what Allegiance paid. The Valentines, he said, were caught in the middle of a contract dispute between the companies.

July 27, 2019

South Korea balcony collapses, killing 2 and injuring 16, including 3 California water polo players

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-07-27/2-dead-16-injured-swimming-athletes-skorea-balcony-collapse

SEOUL, South Korea — An internal balcony at a nightclub in South Korea collapsed on Saturday, killing two people and injuring 16 including American and other athletes at the world swimming championships, officials said.
Hundreds were at the nightclub in the southern South Korean city of Gwangju when the collapse occurred next to the athletes’ village.

Two South Korean men died while 16 others were injured, police said. According to a police account, the injured include 10 foreigners, eight of them athletes who were in Gwangju to participate in the swimming championships. Among the athletes were three Americans, two New Zealanders, one Dutch, one Italian and one Brazilian, a police officer said, requesting anonymity ahead of an official announcement. He said most had minor injuries but an American female water polo player required surgery. The other two Americans — a man and a woman — are also water polo players, the police officer said.

Police said they detained one of the nightclub’s co-owners and summoned three other club officials to investigate whether the collapsed balcony was an unauthorized structure.

July 27, 2019

Haunting Photo Captures Guatemalan Mother Begging Soldier To Let Her Into U.S.

Haunting Photo Captures Guatemalan Mother Begging Soldier To Let Her Into U.S.
Lety Perez and her son traveled some 1,500 miles from Guatemala, only to be stopped mere feet from the United States.

“The woman begged and pleaded with the National Guard to let them cross ... she wanted to cross to give a better future” to her young son Anthony Diaz, Gonzalez said. The soldier, dressed in desert fatigues, an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, said he was only following orders, according to Gonzalez.

All of a sudden, seizing the opportunity when the battle-ready soldier glanced away, Perez lunged into the shrubs growing on the side of the river bank, pulling her son with her. They quickly ran across to the other side of the river and out of the guardsmen’s jurisdiction where U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents took them into custody.

“According to information from (U.S.) Border Patrol, the (Guatemalan) national crossed the border into the city of El Paso, Texas at 8:10 pm (on Monday) and was detained. The national and her son are in good condition and are being processed at the Border Patrol station in Lordsburg, New Mexico while her case moves forward,” said Tekandi Paniagua, the Guatemalan consul general in Del Rio, Texas.



https://www.huffpost.com/entry/photo-guatemalan-mother-pleading-soldier-into-us_n_5d3a4c06e4b0a6d6373d56b2

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July 27, 2019

America's harshest immigration judge is a Clinton appointed Democrat

Inside the Courtroom Where Every Asylum Seeker Gets Rejected

Over eight years, America’s harshest immigration judge denied more than 200 claims in a row.
In February 2018, in a small courtroom in rural Louisiana, an Eritrean man was fighting an impossible battle. The man, whom I’ll call Abraham—he asked that his real name not be used—was trying to convince immigration judge Agnelis Reese that he should receive asylum in the United States. He told Reese he had been imprisoned for 12 years in Eritrea for refusing to complete his military service, and tortured—not only beaten but sexually assaulted. “What do you mean?” Reese asked.

Abraham, who did not have a lawyer, told Reese he was too ashamed to share what he had been through. She pressed him. “I’m not trying to force you,” she said, according to a transcript of the hearing, “but this type of harm would be important to your case.” With his future at stake, Abraham explained how two Eritrean prison guards had covered his nose with plastic before at least one of them put his penis in Abraham’s mouth, at which point he passed out. “Did they do anything else that was sexual molestation?” Reese asked.

“They also inserted a stick in my bottom,” Abraham said. Reluctantly, he recalled being sodomized at least three times in a bloodstained room “intended for suffering.”

When Abraham mentioned that he was a Pentecostal Christian and that his status as a religious minority had contributed to his mistreatment in Eritrea, Reese pounced. During an initial interview with an American asylum officer, Abraham had not mentioned being sexually assaulted. “When you lied to the asylum officers or failed to disclose your sexual abuse,” Reese asked, “what do you think Jesus thought about that?”

“I did not lie,” Abraham replied.

“If this woman is to hear your case,” one asylum seeker was told, “you are going back home.”
Reese rejected his asylum claim on narrow technical grounds. Abraham had stated, correctly, that the Eritrean government effectively controls the state church. Yet, Reese wrote, he did not produce documentation for this fact. Even if he somehow had been able to satisfy this requirement, Abraham probably never had a chance. Between 2011 and 2018, Reese denied every single one of the more than 200 asylum claims she heard.

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/07/inside-the-courtroom-where-every-asylum-seeker-gets-rejected/

On paper, Reese might seem like someone who would be sympathetic to the challenges facing persecuted minorities: She’s a black woman, a Clinton administration appointee, a registered Democrat, and a preacher. But her unforgiving reputation precedes her. Theodore Tonka, a Cameroonian who sought asylum in 2017, recalls other African asylum seekers telling him to pray he wouldn’t get Reese. “If this woman is to hear your case,” he remembers one saying, “you are going back home.” Tonka started to believe them when an attorney he hoped would represent him said she didn’t want to waste her time with Reese. After the judge rejected his claim, “I left with the same impression that everyone else had,” Tonka said. “She’s evil.” Two attorneys I spoke with compared Reese to the devil; one called her “Satan incarnate.” (Reese, reached by phone, declined to comment.)


She lays traps, twists respondents’ words against them, and uses the intricacies of immigration law to ensure that her decisions are nearly impossible to overturn on appeal.

(ICE has taken advantage of the difficulty of appeals in the region by more than tripling its detention space in Louisiana since February. Donald Trump’s Justice Department has sent six new immigration judges to rural Louisiana.)

July 27, 2019

People of color are embracing self-care, activism after Trump's latest racist tweets

President Donald Trump's recent Twitter post telling four congresswoman to go back to where they came from. The U.S., he said, still has a long way to go to overcome its racist history.

Since the remarks, Gibbes said he has spent time speaking to church members, family and friends about staying positive. They have to remain hopeful, he tells them, that there will be better days ahead.

"I'm making my voice heard in my inner circle," said Gibbes, who preaches at churches in Georgia and South Carolina. “The truth is this: America is a racist country and we never got racism taken care of.”

Trump sparked a national debate on racism earlier this month after he said a group of newly elected female lawmakers known as "the Squad" should "go back" to the countries they came from. To many of people of color, there was never a question that the president, who has often derided Latinos, black people, women and Muslims during his time in office, had made yet another racist and cruel remark. And for many, it marked the latest moment of anger and distress in a presidency that has often come across as hostile to people of color while still enjoying the support of roughly half the nation.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/26/trump-tweets-trigger-anger-anxiety-many-people-color-us/1804518001/

"It does really strike fear in people’s hearts and minds and leaves them disoriented as to what we do next," said Luis H. Zayas, professor of social work and psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin. "But it's always good to be around people with whom you can commiserate with and get together with other people who are similarly targeted."

Zayas said oppressed racial or religious groups should form safe spaces where they can share information and comfort each other. Closed social media groups are being used by some people to stay connected, he said.

July 27, 2019

Emails Show DeVos Aides Pulled Strings for Failing For-Profit Colleges

WASHINGTON — Dream Center Education Holdings, a subsidiary of a Los Angeles-based megachurch, had no experience in higher education when it petitioned the federal Education Department to let it take over a troubled chain of for-profit trade schools.

But the organization’s chairman, Randall K. Barton, told the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, that the foundation wanted to “help people live better lives.”

The purchase was blessed despite Dream Center’s lack of experience and questionable finances by an administration favorable to for-profit education. But barely a year later, the company tumbled into insolvency, dozens of its colleges closed abruptly and thousands of students were left with no degree after paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.

Making matters worse, the college is accused of enrolling new students and taking their taxpayer-supported financial aid dollars even after some of its campuses had lost their accreditation, which rendered their credits worthless.

Company emails, documents and recordings show that part of why Dream Center kept going is that it thought the Education Department, which under Ms. DeVos has rolled back regulations on for-profit education, would try to keep it from failing. Mr. Barton emailed other Dream Center executives that the department’s head of higher education policy — Diane Auer Jones, a former executive and lobbyist for for-profit colleges — had pulled strings to help the company’s schools in their effort to regain a seal of approval from an accreditor, despite their perilous positions.

In another instance, Dream Center’s chief operating officer told faculty at an endangered campus that Ms. Jones was changing departmental regulations to help the schools obtain accreditation retroactively.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/politics/dream-center.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Education

July 26, 2019

so now trump is insulting Sweden "we do so much for Sweden...."

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1154502673514684416

Give A$AP Rocky his FREEDOM. We do so much for Sweden but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. Sweden should focus on its real crime problem! #FreeRocky


https://twitter.com/fideIista/status/1154323591556739072

July 26, 2019

Gun-toting frat bros pose in front of bullet riddled Emmett Till memorial, may face federal charges

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https://nypost.com/2019/07/25/gun-toting-frat-bros-pose-in-front-of-emmett-till-memorial-may-face-federal-charges/

Three fraternity brothers at the University of Mississippi have been suspended — and are possibly facing federal charges — for taking a photo in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till while holding a shotgun and AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

“The photo is on Instagram with hundreds of ‘likes,’ and no one said a thing,” says a complaint filed with the UM Office of Student Conduct.

The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network, reviewed the complaint and obtained a copy of the picture in question, which was taken earlier this year.

Ole Miss student and Kappa Alpha Order member Ben LeClere posted it on his private page in March and is reportedly the one holding a shotgun.

Two of his fraternity brothers, John Lowe and another young man who has yet to be identified, can be seen posing alongside him — the latter of whom is toting the AR-15.

A fourth person, said to be the photographer, may have also been with the trio, the complaint says.

July 25, 2019

How do I visit a red state without contributing financially to their intolerance?

July 25, 2019

This Husband Gave His Amazon-Obsessed Wife The Best Birthday Surprise

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This Husband Gave His Amazon-Obsessed Wife The Best Birthday Surprise
"You know you order from Amazon a little too much if your husband gets this cake," Emily McGuire said.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wife-amazon-box-birthday-cake_l_5d39f4b4e4b020cd995077cd

One clever husband came up with an out-of-the box idea for his wife’s birthday this year.

Waylon “Mac” McGuire surprised wife Emily McGuire with a custom cake shaped like one of her very favorite things — an Amazon package — for her July 19 birthday. Sweet Dreams Bakery in Dunn, North Carolina, created the confection with true-to-life details such as a personalized shipping label and Amazon Prime box tape — all edible, of course.

“I laughed so hard when I saw it,” McGuire, who works as a photographer, told HuffPost.

“In that moment, I knew my husband gets me,” she told CafeMom.

McGuire said she orders pretty much everything on Amazon, from clothes to coffee, and gets packages delivered to the house several times a week.