thedailybeast--2019-02-18--Prince Charles Backs Free Yoga To Beat Healthcare Crisis

Prince Charles has long been mocked and criticized as a ‘meddler’ owing to his interventions on behalf of alternative medicine.  However, in new remarks which seem deliberately designed to telegraph both his ongoing commitment to alternative medicine and using his position as the next king to promote it, Charles has declared that yoga could help ease the strain on Britain’s National Health service.  Charles made the comment in a written address to a conference held by the Yoga in Healthcare Alliance, (YIHA), which describes itself as “a social enterprise that is enabling the U.K. National Health Service to provide yoga to its patients … Our first job is to enable the NHS and yoga teachers to work together effectively.”  The NHS already ‘prescribes’ yoga for the treatment of back pain, the YIHA says.  According to the Telegraph, the Prince, endorsing their mission, wrote: “For thousands of years, millions of people have experienced yoga’s ability to improve their lives … The development of therapeutic, evidence-based yoga is, I believe, an excellent example of how yoga can contribute to health and healing.  “This not only benefits the individual, but also conserves precious and expensive health resources for others where and when they are most needed.”  While many (including, one assumes, his new daughter-in-law, Meghan Markle who is a keen practitioner of yoga and whose mother is a yoga teacher) will salute the prince’s intervention, it seems deliberately calculated to reignite the controversy over Charles’ habit of promoting alternative medicine.  Charles, who has said he talks to his trees, famously used his inaugural address as president of the British Medical Association (BMA) in 1982 to advocate a radical overhaul of the medical system in favor of alternative therapies leading to a three year enquiry into such therapies. The inquiry reached the view that they were “unscientific.”  By 2010, the BMA had hardened its position and said: “Homeopathy is witchcraft.”  As The Daily Beast reported in 2015, Charles was accused of abusing his power to silence one of Britain’s leading academic critics of alternative medicine. Professor Edzard Ernst of the University of Exeter said he was treated “like shit” by university officials after he rubbished a report into the efficacy of alternative medicine commissioned by Prince Charles. The report said complementary medicine was cost-effective and should be made available through the National Health Service.  Ernst took early retirement and his department was closed down in 2011.  Charles’ Duchy Originals company was forced to pull advertising for Duchy Herbals Echina-Relief Tincture and Duchy Herbals Hyperi-Lift Tincture in 2009 because there was no evidence that the remedies had any effect.  Charles is probably on safer ground endorsing yoga, as many studies have shown yoga (and of course, other forms of exercise) can help with arthritis and back pain, as well as reducing the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and depression.  Charles said yoga classes had “tremendous social benefits”, adding, “I will watch the development of therapeutic yoga in the U.K. with great interest and very much look forward to hearing about the outcomes from your conference," he wrote to delegates.  The Telegraph previously reported that the Prince of Wales’s charity funds yoga, meditation, and “breath-focused stretches” for young prisoners, in a bid to help restore “hope and positivity” behind bars.


thedailycaller--2019-02-08--A Solution to Lower Healthcare Costs

A Solution to Lower Healthcare Costs

If you’ve paid for any healthcare expenses in the years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, you know that the cost of paying for healthcare expenses continues to rise, leaving many Americans searching for a more affordable way. One solution that is often discovered during this search is known as healthcare sharing.  You may be asking “How have I not heard of healthcare sharing? Is this a new thing?” While you may not have heard of it, it is certainly not a new thing.  Healthcare sharing ministries have existed in their current state since the Reagan administration, and they present an affordable method of paying for medical expenses that allows members the freedom to choose healthcare that aligns with their personal moral values. Though each healthcare sharing ministry varies in the way it facilitates the payment of medical expenses, the general theory remains the same: healthcare sharing ministry members directly share each other’s medical expenses. The monthly share amount paid by each member also varies by ministry, but as a reference point, one of the largest healthcare sharing ministries, Liberty HealthShare, has monthly share amounts as low as $199 for individuals and $429 for families.  Think of everything you could do with all of that extra money!  When presented with the idea of such an affordable solution to pay for health care costs, many families think this is simply too good to be true. However, with membership in healthcare sharing ministries on the rise, it’s apparent that these ministries are operating quite effectively. Liberty HealthShare, which shares the same non-profit status as every other healthcare sharing ministry, paid out over $55 million dollars in medical bills during 2016 according to the annual audit posted on its website. These expenses were paid solely from contributions by members, and the remaining funds were carried over into the next year to safeguard against a spike in members’ medical expenses. Through this facilitation of members’ funds, healthcare sharing ministries such as Liberty HealthShare are providing their members with the opportunity to change the way they pay for healthcare.  Honestly, isn’t it refreshing to see an organization manage money so efficiently?  If you still need more evidence that healthcare sharing ministries are not “too good to be true,” look no further than the sheer volume of people who take personal responsibility for their medical costs by using healthcare sharing ministries. As of the end of 2017, membership in healthcare sharing ministries surpassed the one million mark, which is more than five times as many members than in 2012 when the number was around 175,000. The drastically increased popularity of healthcare sharing ministries can be partly attributed to the exemption members receive from the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. Thanks to the religious exemption that healthcare sharing ministries received prior to 1999, members of these ministries are not required to pay a tax penalty for not being a member of an ACA-approved plan.  Preventing government interference in healthcare? It’s no wonder so many Americans have joined the movement!  It’s a common misconception that healthcare sharing ministries keep prices low by not sharing expensive medical bills, such as hospital stays, emergency room visits, and ambulance transportation. However, these expenses, and any other expense classified as medically necessary, such as doctor visits, vaccinations, chiropractic services, hospice care, and alternative care are all shareable expenses according to Liberty HealthShare’s sharing guidelines. In addition to these eligible expenses, Liberty HealthShare and a number of other healthcare sharing ministries offer member discounts on prescriptions, dental, and vision services.  As Americans search for an affordable way to pay for their healthcare, healthcare sharing ministries look poised to continue their growth. More and more people are starting to realize that these ministries are not “too good to be true,” and they actually do provide Americans with an affordable solution to pay for medical expenses. These ministries are subject to annual financial audits and have proven over and over again to have a good track record of paying eligible expenses. With this independent audit validating the effectiveness of these ministries, those who want to control healthcare costs for themselves and their families may want to consider a healthcare sharing ministry as a top option.


thedailycaller--2019-02-12--Kamala Harris Claims There Is Racial Bias In Healthcare Delivery System

Kamala Harris Claims There Is ‘Racial Bias’ In Healthcare Delivery System

When discussing public health and healthcare reform Monday on a podcast called “The Breakfast Club”, Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris referenced a bill she proposed in August 2018 concerning the high maternal mortality rate of black women, stating that “black women are dying at 3 to 4 times higher rate, in connection with childbirth in America.”  She explains this phenomena by claiming “it is literally about racial bias in the healthcare delivery system.”  Harris went on to characterize the components of her 2018 bill and how it would solve this problem. “And so I have an initiative, it’s a bill, that says we need to train medical schools and doctors on how to take black women seriously, when they walk through that hospital door. And talk about their illness, and take them seriously and not reject their complaints or thing of them as hysterical,” she explained. (RELATED: Kamala Harris Admits To Smoking Weed—She Even Inhaled)  Harris has said that her bill, the “Maternal Care Access and Reducing Emergencies (CARE) Act”, is “a step towards ensuring that all women have access to culturally competent, holistic care and to address the implicit biases in our system.” (RELATED: Kamala Harris Made Her First Campaign Speech All About Race)  Here are the objectives of the bill, according to Kamala Harris’ senatorial website:


thedailycaller--2019-03-15--Healthcare By The People For The People

Healthcare By The People, For The People

As we know, the Preamble to the United States Constitution begins with the line: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union.” This line suggests that the people of the United States of America can and should make laws to govern themselves based on the will of the collective citizenry. However, as we move further and further from the time of our Founding Fathers, power continues to shift away from the will of the American people and toward the will of those in the United States Congress and the corporations that influence those elected to represent us.  A perfect example of public policy that does not conform to the will of the American people is the Affordable Care Act. The healthcare bill was signed into law in March 2010 despite only about 40 percent of Americans being in favor of the law at that time. Since the law went into effect in 2010, healthcare prices have skyrocketed, placing a financial burden on many Americans. The will of a couple hundred members of Congress and the President outweighed the will of millions of Americans.  So, how would healthcare by the people and for the people truly look? Well, the answer already exists.  One healthcare option, known as healthcare sharing, operates outside of Affordable Care Act regulations thanks to an exemption written into the law. The purpose of these organizations is to return to the consumer the power to make healthcare decisions. One healthcare sharing organization that has been very successful in returning power to the consumer is Liberty HealthShare. By utilizing a Statement of Shared Beliefs, which each member agrees to at the time of enrollment, Liberty HealthShare members know exactly which types of medical expenses their money will be shared toward. This is just one aspect of the transparency Liberty HealthShare strives to offer its members.  As a non-profit organization, Liberty HealthShare serves not to record profits, but rather to facilitate the sharing of medical expenses across the entire membership base. As non-profit organizations, healthcare sharing organizations are not built to run up massive profits. Instead, they use members’ money only to pay overhead expenses and share members’ medical expenses. The goal of these organizations is to serve the needs of the members, not the needs of a group of wealthy investors, because there are no wealthy investors. The money comes from people just like you who want affordable healthcare and also want to help their fellow Americans afford healthcare for themselves and their families.  The “by the people, for the people” approach doesn’t stop with how these healthcare sharing organizations facilitate the payment of members’ medical bills. Many of these organizations, including Liberty HealthShare, utilize medical repricing to keep costs down for their members. This consists of a third-party company reviewing each bill that a Liberty HealthShare member submits and ensuring that the amount the member is billed for is a fair price for the treatment or services they received. If a bill is found to be overcharging the member, the third-party company negotiates with the provider who issued the bill to have the bill reduced. This process ensures that healthcare sharing members are getting the most for their money, allowing them to share in more medical bills from the same amount of money.  As a result of these “by the people, for the people” approaches, healthcare sharing organizations are able to offer substantially lower prices than many health insurance plans. For example, Liberty HealthShare offers healthcare plans starting as low as $199 per month for singles and $429 per month for an entire family, regardless of the number of children. These low monthly prices are coupled with a lower cost the member is responsible for each year, to make healthcare sharing a great value. The amount members are responsible for with Liberty HealthShare is $1,000 per year for singles and $2,250 per year for a family. This is the amount of eligible medical expenses a member must pay in a year before their expenses will be shared by their fellow members.  If you’re tired of the government’s will being imposed upon you, especially relating to your healthcare, it may be time for you to consider healthcare sharing. These healthcare sharing organizations return freedom and power to the member, by being on the side of the member instead of focusing on profits for wealthy shareholders. It’s truly people coming together to eliminate government involvement and fund their own healthcare. Healthcare “by the people, for the people,” just as the Founding Fathers intended.


thedailycaller--2019-06-27--Heres The Conservative Path Forward On Healthcare

Here’s The Conservative Path Forward On Healthcare

Conservative groups are rising to the challenge of crafting a health care plan that embraces individual choice as opposed to the big government plans proposed by Democrats.  The right’s efforts on health care last blew up when Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain gave his infamous “thumbs down” to the Senate’s “skinny repeal” of Obamacare, and support for the follow-up Graham-Cassidy bill collapsed.  Since their 2017 failures, the Republican Party has been relatively quiet on the issue of health care reform, despite years of bluster about the Affordable Care Act. Their silence gave the Democratic Party the opportunity to control the debate during the 2018 midterm elections, during which voters consistently said that healthcare costs were their top issue.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that “healthcare won” in the midterms, suggesting that voters’ focus on the issue helped Democrats retake control of the House. (RELATED: Democrats Credit Health Care For House Win In Midterms)  The Democratic Party’s momentum on health care seems ripe to continue into the 2020 presidential election, with a variety of candidates proposing single payer health plans, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All.” Such plans would give even greater power to the government to determine insurance coverage and, in the case of Sanders’ plan, could cost trillions of dollars over the next ten years.  While Republican lawmakers have offered little in the way of alternatives, national and state conservative think-tanks and private sector stakeholders have been steadily crafting a comprehensive health care plan since September 2017.  This “Health Care Consensus Group” of activists and researchers has been meeting almost weekly at The Heritage Foundation for the past 18 months, discussing how conservatives can move forward on healthcare after a series of failures.  The result is the “Health Care Choices Proposal,” a detailed plan that skirts repealing and replacing Obamacare and instead tries to make the existing healthcare framework work better for consumers.  The proposal would provide block grants to states that can be used much more freely than under the ACA system, including to subsidize the cost of private insurance plans for low-income individuals or other people who have left the insurance market entirely. The proposal would also eliminate onerous federal regulations on what type of coverage insurers must offer and would allow states the ability to create their own programs for citizens.  According to economic modeling of the plan by the Center for Health and Economy, the Health Care Choices Proposal would decrease the cost of private insurance plans by up to 32% and would decrease federal spending by $22 billion over eight years. The scoring projects a slight decrease in the number of insured because of a redirection of funding away from Medicaid, but adds that “the decrease in Medicaid enrollment would be mostly offset by increases in enrollment in the individual market.”  Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania Senator and Republican presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016, is just one of the advocates involved in the new plan.  “This is about getting money out of Washington and to the states,” Santorum told The Daily Caller. “My theory is you can’t repeal an entitlement once it’s put into place, but you can make it more effective and efficient and place a budget on it.”  Marie Fishpaw, the Director of Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, told the Caller that the plan was designed based on what Americans said they wanted in a health care system.  Polling conducted by Heritage shows that 76% of Americans oppose plans that would decrease choices in health care providers and treatments, 69% oppose plans that would require an increase in taxes, and 62% oppose eliminating private insurance.  When asked what they support, 97% said they want lower costs and higher-quality plans, while 94% said that health care policy “should empower people — not government bureaucrats or insurance companies — to make decisions for their themselves and their own families.”  “If you get sick, you want to know you can see a doctor. You also don’t want to pay as much,” Fishpaw explained. “This plan lowers costs, protects people with preexisting conditions, and it puts people in the driver’s seat instead of government or insurance companies.”  Fishpaw expressed concerns about Republicans heading into another election cycle without a reasonable alternative to Democrats on the health care question.  “You cannot go back into another campaign year and not have an answer on this,” Fishpaw said. “Candidly, I think it’s a shame they don’t have one right now.”  President Donald Trump seems to agree with that assertion — in April he insisted that Republicans are working on a new health plan that they would vote on after the 2020 election. The tease opened up the possibility that he plans to campaign for reelection with the promise to deliver on health care.  “[Republicans] are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) [and] deductibles than ObamaCare. In other words it will be far less expensive [and] much more usable than ObamaCare,” Trump said.  Santorum said he has “no idea” if Trump’s tweet was referring to the Health Care Choices Proposal, but expressed optimism that the president would embrace something similar.  “Trump understands that we need a plan,” Santorum asserted. “The concept [for the Health Care Choices Proposal] was that we knew the president would love it … this would work in concert with what Trump has already done.”  Fishpaw noted that a version of the proposal has been included in the president’s budget over the past two years.  “This is a very broad working group, including policy makers in federal government as well as throughout the country,” she said.  The president has taken other actions to overhaul the healthcare system in the meantime, including an executive order this week on increasing transparency on health care pricing. Trump called the order, which requires hospitals and insurers publish negotiated rates for service, the “opposite of Obamacare.” (RELATED: Trump Calls Latest Health Care EO The ‘Opposite Of Obamacare’)  The administration predicts that the new rules will cause health costs to drop significantly.  It is still unclear if Congress or the White House will publicly pick up the Health Care Choices Proposal, but Fishpaw pointed out the fundamentally different process embraced by conservatives working on the plan.  “It’s unusual in the sense that you often see congressional leaders drafting the bill and pitching it to conservative leaders,” Fishpaw stated. “This is the opposite.”


thedailyecho--2019-10-17--Future of our healthcare is on the table as consultations launch

NHS STAFF from across Hampshire will join forces this week to showcase plans for the future of healthcare in the south.  Led by the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP), events will be held in Southampton, Portsmouth and on the Isle of Wight.  The first drop-in session took place in Basingstoke last week and provided an opportunity for members of the public and staff to find out more about developments in services.  The events follow a survey conducted by Healthwatch, a national and regional group of bodies which aim to ensure the needs and ideas of patients and the public are listened to and responded to.  Among the topics to be discussed at the events this week will be the current challenges facing healthcare, such as increasing demand and ensuring the numbers of staff being recruited keeps pace with growth.  Various clinicians, specialists and support staff will be on-hand to describe plans around mental health, cancer, GP services and digital developments, as well as a dedicated wellbeing area demonstrating a focus on staying well and preventing ill health and the role of volunteers in the NHS.  The Southampton event, which was held at Solent University on October 14, featured the work of the Wessex Cancer Alliance, which is chaired by University Hospital Southampton’s chief executive Paula Head and urological surgeon Matt Hayes.  Projects currently underway under this alliance include the WesFit clinical trial into prehabilitation before cancer surgery.  “We are hosting this event to discuss with local people, staff and community groups how we are responding to the commitments set out in the national NHS long term plan,” said Richard Samuel, lead for the Hampshire and Isle of Wight STP.  “We will be describing our local priorities based on the opportunities available to us, the current challenges we face such as increasing demand and the availability of workforce and, crucially, what our population has told us needs to change.”


thedailyexpress--2019-01-29--British retirees in EU will LOSE free NHS healthcare in event of no-deal Brexit - Devasta

British retirees in EU will LOSE free NHS healthcare in event of no-deal Brexit - ‘Devasta

Retired Britons living in an array of member states such as hotspots Spain and France will no longer have their healthcare covered by the NHS, the Government has said. In a blow to the 190,000 British citizens who have retired in other EU nations such as the South of France, Spanish Costas and Tuscany in Italy. It could also add further strain to the NHS should pensioners feel forced to return to the UK for treatment, the Guardian reports. The UK Government said: “An S1 certificate helps you and your dependents access healthcare in the EU/EEA country where you live. If you have an S1 certificate, it will be valid until 29 March 2019. After this date, the certificate may not be valid, depending on decisions by member states.”  Bremain in Spain campaign group chair Sue Wilson that said should Prime Minister Theresa May be unable to get a deal with the EU, it would be “devastating” for retirees. She said: “All along we’ve been told our healthcare is protected. This is a big shock to everyone and our members are really, really scared.” She also called on Mrs May to keep their rights in tact.  Ms Wilson added: “We’ve been hearing about EU citizens in Britain getting settled status. Well, we have unsettled status.” Colin Yeo, an immigration lawyer and freedom of movement campaigner, said: “It is another example of how those advocating no deal are playing with the lives of British citizens living in other EU countries. “Many of these politicians and pundits probably haven’t bothered to find out how their policies would actually affect such people.”  The news follows an eventful evening for Mrs May that saw Parliament vote on a series of amendments to her Brexit deal. Mrs May had a positive night in the Commons after MPs widely supported Graham Brady's amendment that hands the Government a mandate to renegotiate the Irish backstop. MPs backed the Brady amendment, which called for "alternative arrangements" to the backstop, the insurance mechanism to prevent a hard border on Ireland, passed by 317 votes to 301 in the most significant vote in the Commons tonight.  But Brussels was far more interested in a non-binding proposal tabled by Conservative MP Caroline Spelman that begs the Government to take a no-deal Brexit off the table. A spokesman for European Council President Donald Tusk celebrated the “ambition” shown in the House of Commons to block a no-deal Brexit in their response to the chaos in Westminster. But a Downing Street spokesman has said tonight's vote shows that there is a majority to change the withdrawal deal.  They said: "Tonight parliament has sent a clear message that there is a way forward to secure this deal if we are able to secure changes in relation to the backstop. "The EU's position remains that they want the United Kingdom to leave with a deal. They want the UK to leave with a deal because it's in their interests as well as those of the UK."


thedcclothesline--2019-02-04--Democrats Openly Promote Mass Murder Socialized Healthcare and Extreme Taxation

Democrats Openly Promote Mass Murder, Socialized Healthcare, and Extreme Taxation

Democrats openly promote mass murder, extreme taxation, and socialized medicine that would literally turn our medical system upside down. Of course this article won’t talk about demanding a “Green New Deal” that would require every homeowner, business, city and state to go to renewable energy. Did they notice that Alaska has 6 months of darkness that makes solar panels worthless? I thought not. First, the mass murder situation.  Embattled Virginia Governor Ralph Northam told reporters, in response to the Kathy Tran legislation on abortion introduced in the legislature, that “If a mother is in labor…the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians & mother.”  Comforting a child until they die. That’s murder. Period. And with the number of abortions performed each year, that’s mass murder.  The whole abortion issue, now being pushed to the max by Democrats because they’re afraid that Roe v Wade will be overturned, has brought 8 states into the last trimester debate over killing babies all the way to birth. And with Northam’s statement, he apparently is happy with watching a child die after the womb. And that man is a pediatrician.  “Sen. Bernie Sanders presented a plan Thursday to expand estate taxes on the wealthy, including a new 77 percent rate on billionaires’, as he becomes the latest liberal Democrat to advocate a levy on the rich to combat income inequality.  ‘The fairest way to reduce wealth inequality, invest in the disappearing middle class and preserve our democracy is to enact a progressive estate tax on the inherited wealth of multi-millionaires and billionaires,’ Sanders tweeted of his proposal.”  Sanders isn’t the only one proposing extreme taxation: Ocasio-Cortez proposed a 70% tax on the rich. Ilhan Omar proposed also a 70%, 80% or 90% tax.  “So there are a few things that we could do. One of them is that we could increase the taxes that people are paying who are the extremely wealthy in our communities. Seventy percent, 80 percent, we’ve had it as high as 90 percent.” Ilhan Omar in an interviewreported by the Tennessee Star.  AOC once said that having billionaires in America is immoral. Did anyone ask me? No. I’m not for taxing the rich at exorbitant rates. That’s stupid. Most of them are the employers of America. Tax them that high and watch jobs disappear and bread lines become a reality.  If you’ve ever had to wait for an appointment to see a surgeon, you would know that the whole “Medicare for All” gig is a loser. When you’re on Medicare, you get to wait sometimes for months to get an appointment (speaking from personal experience). If you remove the private insurance policy and everyone has to wait for a medical appointment, like in Canada and Britain, for example, you’re pardon-the-expression screwed. It takes our state-of-the-art medical system and dumps it into the trash heap of socialized medicine.  Remember: doctors under medicare get significantly less money when they have a Medicare patient. What do you think that will do to our healthcare system?  Kamala Harris even went so far as to suggest that private insurance companies should be dumped in her “Medicare for All” plan. Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand also promote a total single-payer medical plan.  It’s not about “keep your plan and your doctor if you like them,” it’s about dumping everything and you get the US government only. Not my favorite idea.  So let’s just drive the United States in the path of Venezuela. Socialism is NOT the answer for the United States. And neither are these extremists masquerading as lawmakers.


thedcclothesline--2019-12-17--Medicare and Medicaid Destroyed Healthcare

In a December 1 article entitled “Yes, Americans are Feeling the Squeeze. It’s Coming from Health Care,” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson points out that “In the early 1960s, before Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted in 1965, health spending was about 2 percent of federal outlays. Now it is nearly one-third, at $1.3 trillion.”  Samuelson goes on to observe that  Unfortunately, Samuelson doesn’t wrap up his article with the obvious conclusion, that the only possible solution to America’s healthcare crisis lies with repealing Medicare and Medicaid and, in a broader context, ending government involvement in healthcare.  take our poll - story continues below  Before Medicare and Medicaid, the United States had the finest healthcare system in history. Healthcare costs were low and stable, to such an extent that most people didn’t even have major medical insurance. That’s because they didn’t need it. Going to the doctor was like going to the grocery store. How many people have grocery insurance to help them cover soaring grocery costs? Healthcare costs were just as low and stable as grocery store prices, so there was no need for major medical insurance.  At the same time, healthcare inventions and innovations were skyrocketing. Doctors loved what they were doing, and, equally important, the poor were being treated by both doctors and hospitals, purely on a voluntary basis.  I grew up in Laredo, Texas, which is on the Texas-Mexico border. When I was a kid, we were told that the Census Bureau had named Laredo the poorest city in the United States. Every day, the doctors’ offices in Laredo were filled to capacity, sometimes also with people from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Doctors knew that a large percentage of them could not pay. Yet I never heard of a single doctor turning anyone away. They were knowingly providing free medical treatment to the poor on a voluntary basis.  A modern-day example of this phenomenon was with my dentist here in Virginia. There is no Medicare or Medicaid for dental services. Several years ago, he told me that he and other dentists had gotten together and, on a rotating basis, were providing free dental care to the poor one day a week.  Everything changed with the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid. Healthcare costs began soaring. Doctors and hospitals began entering into all sorts of complex and convoluted arrangements to deal with the increasing crisis. Consumers started buying major medical insurance. The federal government embarked on a series of never-ending reforms. Doctors began to hate what they do and started to retire early. The drive toward medical invention and innovation lost its vitality. Today, many consumers are being pushed into bankruptcy owing to enormous medical bills.  Medicare and Medicaid ended up destroying the finest healthcare system in history, and the healthcare crisis has become a permanent part of American life. Perhaps worst of all is the mindset of dependency that it has inculcated in the American people, many of whom are convinced that without Medicare and Medicaid people would be dying in the streets. These two socialist programs have contributed to the lack of faith that modern-day Americans have in voluntary charity, free markets, and in freedom.  In the process, what so many people simply do not want to confront is that there is only one solution to this never-ending crisis — the repeal of its original cause, the repeal of both Medicare and Medicaid. Most everyone just keeps coming up with minor reforms or looking for some sort of “comprehensive healthcare reform” that will finally make the system work.  They’ll never find it, and they are just wasting their time, money, and energy looking. If we learned anything from the twentieth century, it is that socialism is inherently defective. It is incapable of working and it produces crises. And the very worst thing that Americans could do is double down by making their healthcare socialism even larger.  When a patient has cancer, the recommended treatment is to remove the cancer if possible. Medicare and Medicaid are cancers of the body politic. It is still possible to remove them through repeal. The longer they are permitted to remain and grow, the bigger the chance that the patient will die.  Originally published by the Future of Freedom Foundation.


theepochtimes--2019-10-16--Democrats Pile on Warren Over Healthcare Costs During Debate

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, right, speaks as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) looks on during the Democratic Presidential Debate at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio on Oct. 15, 2019. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)  Democrats Pile on Warren Over Healthcare Costs During Debate  Multiple Democratic presidential contenders piled on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) during the Oct. 15 presidential debate.  Warren has refused to say that taxes would go up for the middle class under Medicare for All. She has endorsed a bill written by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has said multiple times his plan would require higher taxes.  Asked by a moderator on Tuesday, Warren declined to say taxes would go up; she reiterated that overall costs would go down.  “I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families,” she said.  South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg hit back when asked about his prior criticism of Warren as “evasive”: “Well, we heard it tonight. A yes or no question that didn’t get a yes or no answer. This is why people here in the Midwest are so frustrated with Washington in general and Capitol Hill in particular,” he said. “Your signature, senator, is to have a plan for everything, except this.”  “No plan has been laid out to explain how a multi-trillion-dollar hole in this Medicare for All plan that Sen. Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in,” he said.  Buttigieg plugged his plan, which he calls Medicare for All who want it.  “We take a version of Medicare, we let you access it if you want to, and if you prefer to stay on your private plan, you can do that too,” he said.  “Whenever someone hears the term Medicare for All who want it. Understand what that really means: Medicare for All who can afford it,” Warren rejoined.  “I don’t think the American people are wrong when they say what they want is a choice. … It’s affordable for everyone because we make sure the subsidies are in place. It’s just better.”  Sanders then said that his bill would remove premiums, co-payments, deductibles, and all out-of-pocket expenses.  “At the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of people will save money on their healthcare bills. But I do think it is appropriate to acknowledge that taxes will go up,” he said.  He said taxes would be higher for people. Still, the overall costs for many people would be lower than what they are paying now for premiums and other healthcare costs.  Warren was asked again to acknowledge Sanders’ admission, but she declined again.  Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) also called out Warren, alleging the senator hasn’t been honest about the costs of the healthcare program and the way 140 million people would be kicked off of their healthcare plans under Medicare for All.  Warren responded by saying that most people go broke because of healthcare costs. “The problem we’ve got right now is the overall cost of healthcare. You can try to spin this any way you want. … I put out nearly 50 plans on how we can fight back and how we can rebuild an America that works.  “The difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something we can actually get done,” Klobuchar said.


theguardian--2019-02-27--Medicare for All House Democrats unveil bill to expand healthcare nationwide

Medicare for All: House Democrats unveil bill to expand healthcare nationwide

House Democrats have unveiled details of their ambitious plan to expand a popular, government-run healthcare program to all Americans. The measure marks a fresh sign of the party’s growing support for a once fringe idea that will play a defining role in the 2020 presidential campaign.  The Medicare for All Act of 2019, to be formally introduced on Wednesday with 107 co-sponsors, would transform the American healthcare system from one in which millions of Americans are uninsured to one that provides universal coverage.  “The state of our healthcare system is absolutely atrocious,” said the Washington congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who is introducing the bill with Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell. “How is it possible that the United States, the richest country in the world, is the only major country that does not guarantee healthcare to our residents?”  She added: “Americans are literally dying because they can’t afford insulin or the cancer treatment they need.”  The bill would establish a national health insurance program by gradually expanding Medicare – the federal health insurance program for people who are 65 or older – until it covered all Americans.  “Everybody in, nobody out,” Jayapal said, describing coverage under the plan, which she said amounted to a “complete transformation of our healthcare system”.  The bill does not include details on how the government would pay for the new healthcare system, which some studies have estimated could cost tens of trillions of dollars over the next decade.  Jayapal envisions major savings as a result of reducing administrative costs and inefficiencies in the current healthcare system. To pay for the plan, she suggested proposals such as taxing the rich at higher rates and mandated employer contributions.  A universal healthcare plan that moves the US closer to the systems in Canada and the UK has long been a dream of the party’s left.  A version of the legislation was first introduced in 2003 by the former congressman John Conyers of Michigan, but the idea began to gain traction when Senator Bernie Sanders championed the issue in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. The year after, a majority of the House Democratic caucus supported Conyers’ bill while one-third of Senate Democrats signed on to Sanders’ version.  The plan comes amid a widening debate over how boldly to reform the American healthcare system, pitting progressives clamoring for Medicare for All against moderates pushing for smaller-scale changes. Several Democratic hopefuls have endorsed the idea of a universal healthcare system but are split over the details.  The plan has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate. But the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has promised to allow hearings on the bill for the first time, giving progressives a prominent platform to make the case for a single-payer system.  Supporters speak about universal healthcare as a moral imperative. They argue that millions cannot afford the rising out-of-pocket costs most are obliged to pay when insurance coverage is less than comprehensive.  Some Democrats, conscious that many Americans are wary of losing their current insurance options, are pushing for more incremental changes to the healthcare system, such as allowing people between 50 and 64 to buy into the Medicare system and imposing a cap on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.  Polling shows that a growing share of Americans, frustrated with the rising costs of healthcare, support a so-called “single-payer” system, where the payer is the government. Surveys have, however, found that support drops when respondents are asked their view if the program would result in higher taxes or longer waiting times for treatment.  But as momentum grows, so, too, does the opposition. Private health insurers, doctors and hospitals are partnering to oppose single-payer proposals, which could significantly affect their bottom line.  The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future has been mobilizing members to ramp up support for improving the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, as opposed to repealing it, as Republicans attempted to do, or replacing it with a new system.  “Medicare for All may be a catchy slogan,” the group tweeted on Tuesday, “but it would do more harm than good for Americans who deserve affordable coverage and high quality care.”  Half of Americans have employer-sponsored health insurance. Polling suggests that they, by and large, like their plans and want to keep them. Others receive coverage through a patchwork of public health programs and private insurers.  Republicans, meanwhile, are eager to see Democratic 2020 candidates embrace the plan, confident it will help cast the party as too liberal and out of touch with everyday Americans.  Under the proposal, Medicare would become the country’s universal insurer. But the bill would also make significant changes to the American healthcare program, by greatly expanding the type of coverage offered and eliminating all deductibles, copays and premiums.  According to a summary of the legislation provided by Jayapal’s staff, the program would cover “primary care, hospital and outpatient services, prescription drugs, dental, vision, audiology, women’s reproductive health services, maternity and newborn care, long-term services and supports, prescription drugs, mental health and substance abuse treatment, laboratory and diagnostic services, ambulatory services, and more”.  The transition to a Medicare for All system would happen over the course of two years.  The authors know the bill has no chance of becoming law as long as Trump occupies the White House, but they hope to lay the groundwork for a future Democratic president. Activists are working with progressive members to help build public support for the plan.  “We will be pushing it as far as we can, as hard as we can, as fast as we can,” Jayapal said. “Enough nibbling around the edges. We really need to transform the system.”


bbc--2019-07-05--US labour market booms in June

US labour market booms in June

The US labour market boomed in June, creating many more jobs than expected, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  It showed that 224,000 jobs were created in June, many more than the 160,000 that economists had forecast.  The figures, a rebound from poor jobs data in May, eased concerns the economy was heading for a recession.  The professional and business services sector was the biggest contributor to employment, adding 51,000.  Large numbers of jobs were also created in healthcare, transportation and warehousing.  Despite the strong job creation in June, wage growth was relatively modest at 0.2%, keeping the annual rate at 3.1%.  The jobs data is closely watched by economists who analyse how it might affect interest rate decisions at the US Federal Reserve.  Some are betting that the Fed might lower interest rates following its next meeting which starts on 30 July.  Last month the Fed indicated that interest rates might head lower due to subdued inflation and the effects of the trade war between the US and China.  "These are good numbers, but a rate cut in July is still all but inevitable," said Luke Bartholomew, investment strategist at Aberdeen Standard Investments.  "Employment growth remains a bright spot amid a fairly mixed bag of US data and yet markets have come to expect a cut now so will fall out of bed if they don't get one."  Andrew Hunter, senior US economist, at Capital Economics also forecasts a rate cut, although not until September.  "Employment growth is still trending gradually lower but, with the stock market setting new records and trade talks back on (for now at least), the data support our view that Fed officials are more likely to wait until September before loosening policy," he said.  The US has posted some poor manufacturing data recently, prompting concerns that the economy was heading for a downturn.  But Doug Duncan, chief economist at Fannie Mae, said the numbers suggest "that what has been seen in the manufacturing sector doesn't appear to indicate we may be heading into a recession... the warning signs people saw in manufacturing might not be so strong".


theguardianuk--2019-03-19--UK jobs report to show if Brexit is hurting the labour market - business live

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, including the latest UK unemployment report


birminghammail--2019-12-23--Workers face Universal Credit Christmas pay cut if employers break this one rule

Universal Credit and other benefits can cause big worries for claimants over the Christmas holidays.  There are always extra costs at this time of year - including higher energy bills, festive food and drink, gifts for family and other loved ones.  On top of all that, variations with payment dates can cause concern and confusion.  Universal Credit replaces six existing benefits and is paid to those who are in work on a low income as well as people who are unemployed.  But some claimants could be left with no money if their bosses don’t stick to the official guidance on paying wages at this time of year.  The problem arises when claimants are paid early because of the Christmas holidays. That shows as two wages in one month, which then means Universal Credit payments are cut.  Claimants are allowed to earn £287 a month if they get help with housing costs, or £503 a month if they don’t get that help.  Every amount earned above those levels is subject to deductions of 63p in every £1.  Above a certain level of income, the DWP stops paying Universal Credit altogether. That means claimants have to start all over again with claiming the benefit once their income goes down to normal levels.  In its latest Employer Bulletin, HM Revenue and Customs gives guidance for company bosses on reporting PAYE information.  It is reminding employers not to log early wage payments on the day but to record them on the day they would originally have been paid if Christmas holidays hadn’t got in the way. That prevents it looking like people have been paid twice in a month.  The advice says: "In December 2018, we wrote to employers to advise a temporary easement on reporting PAYE information in real time, as we know some employers pay their employees earlier than usual over the Christmas period.  "This can be for a number of reasons, for example during the Christmas period the business may close, meaning workers need to be paid earlier than normal.  "Following feedback from employers and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) we have received approval to make this easement permanent.  "If you do pay early over the Christmas period, please report your normal (or contractual) payday as the payment date on your Full Payment Submission (FPS) and ensure that the FPS is submitted on or before this date.  "For example: if you pay on Friday 20 December 2019 but the normal/contractual payment date is Tuesday 31 December 2019, please report the payment date on the FPS as 31 December and ensure the submission is sent on or before 31 December.  "Doing this will help to protect your employees’ eligibility for Universal Credit, as reporting the payday as the payment date may affect current and future entitlements.  "The overriding PAYE reporting obligation for employers is unaffected by this announcement and remains that you must report payments on or before the date the employee is paid, i.e. payday."  The issue has also been highlighted by Advice NI, an independent advice network in Northern Ireland, but it is also affecting claimants in England and Wales.  Advice NI has expressed concerns about "a flaw in the Universal Credit (UC) system whereby claimants may be treated as receiving two monthly wages in one assessment period, resulting in a dramatically reduced or even nil Universal Credit award.”  Bob Stronge, Advice NI Chief Executive said: “Government says that it’s all about work, making work pay and that Universal Credit will help make sure people are better off in work. However we are highlighting a fundamental flaw which could inflict hardship on claimants and undermine public confidence in Universal Credit.  "For example if someone receives their monthly wage on the last Friday of each month then they will have been paid on Friday 29th November and ought to be paid on Friday 27th December. However many people will be paid early for Christmas, some as early as Friday 20th December.  "Universal Credit assessment periods run for a calendar month, so for example if a UC claimant has an assessment period which runs from 25th to the 24th, they will in fact find that they have received 2 monthly wages in this assessment period (29th November & 20th December) and so may receive little or no Universal Credit at Christmas.  "Whilst there may be months with no wage packet and other months with one wage packet which will lead to an increased Universal Credit award, Advice NI believes this issue will undoubtedly lead to claimants having a lack of certainty about finances and will undoubtedly cause distress and hardship for some at Christmas."  Advice NI says it is concerned that neither employers nor employees are fully aware of the HMRC’s latest advice on reporting staff pay.  Universal Credit - 7 things you need to know Universal Credit is the biggest change to the welfare system in a generation. But what exactly is it and how does the system work? Here's all you need to below. Follow the links below to find out more. Universal Credit is a new social security benefit that was approved in the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and first appeared in 2013. By the end of 2018, it was rolled out to all jobcentres. It replaces six existing benefits, now known as 'legacy benefits'. Find out more by clicking on the link above. 2. Universal Credit calculator - how much you will get The amount you are given is calculated according to various factors. The Government says if you have children, a disability, or you need help paying for your rent, you may be entitled to extra amounts on top of the standard allowance. Find out more by clicking on the link above. 3. Universal Credit eligibility and how to apply Among the qualifying criteria, you must be on a low income or out of work. And it's important to bear in mind your partner’s income and savings will be taken into account, even if they themselves are not applying for the benefit. Find out more about eligibility by clicking on the link above. 4. How often is it paid and how the online account works To get Universal Credit, TWO accounts are needed. One is a Universal Credit online account where your details (such as the date of the next payment) are available to look at, the other is a payment account at a bank or building society where the Government pays in your money. Find out more by clicking on the link above. 5. Universal Credit contact numbers if you need help There are some special helpline numbers to call if you want assistance. They have been changed to freephone numbers so there is no charge for calling. Find out more by clicking on the link above. 6. How to change your payments if you're struggling Claimants need to be aware the first payment doesn't come through until five weeks after a claim - and then every month after that. If you're not used to waiting a whole month for your payment, it can prove difficult. But there is a little-known way around that. Find out more by clicking on the link above 7. What to do if your Universal Credit payments are cut There are occasions where the Department for Work and Pensions imposes sanctions on claimants if they appear to have broken the rules, for instance by not showing up at jobcentre appointments. In such cases, Universal Credit can be cut or stopped altogether. Find out what to do by clicking the link above.  Universal Credit officials in Northern Ireland said it was not a flaw in the system, with a Department for Communities spokesman saying: “Where two sets of earnings are received in one month a customer will receive less benefit to reflect this.  "However customers will then receive an increase in Universal Credit in those months where no earnings are received.  "This is not a system flaw and is part of the design and build of Universal Credit.”  BirminghamLive asked the Department for Work and Pensions - which is responsible for Universal Credit in England and Wales - about the issue.  A DWP spokesman told us: "Assessment periods are fixed at the point of when a person makes a claim, and if two months’ wages are paid in the same period then either the previous Universal Credit payment or the next one will be higher to reflect this."


conservativehome--2019-07-29--Joe Shalam Modern employers are learning the Bournville lesson better housing for workers benefit

Joe Shalam: Modern employers are learning the Bournville lesson – better housing for workers benefits them, too

Joe Shalam is Head of Financial Inclusion at the Centre for Social Justice.  In-work poverty has been described as ‘the problem of our time’. But making progress in tackling it will only be achieved if the true complexity of poverty is taken into account. While income is critically important, raising wages above an arbitrary poverty threshold, as has been prevailing wisdom for many years, simply does not account for range of issues that serve to hold people back.  For example, at the Centre for Social Justice we hear increasingly regularly from our alliance of 350 poverty-fighting charities about the ways insecure, cramped or otherwise inadequate housing is undermining people’s ability to address the problems in their lives: be that their family instability, their reliance on alcohol to get through the day, or the barriers they face progressing in work and boosting their earnings.  The CSJ’s Housing Commission has therefore called on the Government to dramatically increase the supply of truly affordable homes, so that more people have a stronger foundation from which to escape poverty and thrive. Yet, as the Commission argues in its latest interim report, the Government will not be able to achieve this alone. Business and philanthropy can play a role, too.  Looking at history we are reminded of this. One often celebrated example is George Cadbury, whose enterprising family give their name to the Victorian chocolate brand still enjoyed by millions today.  Cadbury was no ordinary chocolatier. An enthusiastic social reformer in the Quaker tradition, he and his brother sought to offer workers an alternative to the life they had come to expect in the rapidly industrialising and grimy cities of 19th Century England. So they founded a village, named ‘Bournville’ for its quaint French twang and proximity to the Bourn river, providing garden cottages in sharp contrast to the neighbouring city slums.  Still, Cadbury was a businessman. He knew that an inadequately housed workforce was an unhealthy and unhappy workforce. As such, they were also less productive for the company – particularly when stricken by what he described as the ‘evils of modern, more cramped living conditions’.  This fact remains as true today as it was then. While we have come a long way since the familiar slums of Dickensian Britain, the housing crisis gripping parts of the country is having a profoundly negative impact on businesses, the wider workforce and their families.  The report reveals that half of UK companies with 1,000+ employees say that housing issues are adversely affecting the wellbeing of their staff, compounded by long commutes to work and rising housing costs.  The economic consequences of an increasingly overburdened and low-morale workforce are also emerging. We found that a shocking two-in-three companies are concerned about how the affordability of housing is impacting their business. And 43 per cent of employers say that housing issues are having a negative effect on their business’ productivity.  Yet the report also reveals that, like Cadbury, employers today are responding to these pressures in innovative and impressive ways.  Take Nationwide, for example, who are proceeding with a multi-million pound not-for-profit housing development in Swindon. Drawing inspiration from Bournville, where ‘Ten Shilling Houses’ were offered to the workforce beyond the Cadbury payroll, Nationwide’s Oakfield development aims to provide a high proportion of affordable homes and lease these without giving preferential treatment to employees.  Elsewhere, Pret a Manger recently opened the Pret House in Kennington. Building on their long-established homeless trainee scheme, they recognised that even the most supported trainees on the programme were suffering as a result of returning after a day’s work to the chaotic ‘temporary’ accommodation they had been placed in by local councils.  As Nicki Fisher, the Pret Foundation’s head of sustainability, told us, ‘If you can imagine, having to get up at 5am after spending a night in a homeless shelter, where they’re often very crowded, very noisy, quite chaotic… we were starting to see a couple of people dropping out because it’s just very difficult to maintain coming to work normally every day’. The Pret House provides a safe and secure home for trainees to return to, thanks to a number of conditional ground rules.  We also looked abroad for inspiration. The expansion of technology firms in coastal areas of the US has resulted in the creation of new jobs in cities with limited housing, such as Seattle and San Francisco. This has contributed to steep increases in housing costs. Companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft are responding by investing millions of dollars in affordable housing programmes.  In partnership with the Mayor of Seattle, Microsoft alone has pledged $500 million for programmes supplying ‘housing that is within the economic reach of every part of the community, including the many dedicated people that provide the vital services on which we all rely’.  Where employers are leading the way in championing housing support, they should be recognised and supported to do more. Schemes like private tenancy deposit loans, on the familiar model of a season ticket loan, are relatively inexpensive for businesses, but can be life changing to those unable to afford the (sometimes eye-wateringly expensive) upfront costs of rented accommodation. The Government should be rewarding the companies that offer this type of support with a new ‘Housing Confident’ accreditation.  The Government could also be better at harnessing employers as fuel in the engine of housing supply, by setting up an Innovation Fund in Homes England to support more not-for-profit developments that don’t fit the conventional mould. And it should do more to facilitate ambitious partnerships between both public and private employers to secure new investment in affordable Build-to-Rent developments, with thriving and mixed communities of working families.  In short, though there have been profound changes to our society, economy and labour market since Cadbury first set eyes upon the Bourn, the same level ambition is already being displayed by some employers today in seeking to improve the workforce’s housing conditions and address poverty in its true complexity. For all the government can do, we should also aim to unlock the spirit of Bournville and extend the ‘opportunity of a happy family life’ that he believed everyone deserves.


crooksandliars--2019-09-26--Employers Used Facebook To Keep Women Older Workers From Seeing Job Ads

Employers Used Facebook To Keep Women, Older Workers From Seeing Job Ads

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.  Two years ago, ProPublica and The New York Times revealed that companies were posting discriminatory job ads on Facebook, using the social network’s targeting tools to keep older workers from seeing employment opportunities. Then we reported companies were using Facebook to exclude women from seeing job ads.  Experts told us that it was most likely illegal. And it turns out the federal government now agrees.  A group of recent rulings by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found “reasonable cause” to conclude that seven employers violated civil rights protections by excluding women or older workers or both from seeing job ads they posted on Facebook.  The agency’s rulings appear to be the first time it has taken on targeted advertising, the core of Facebook’s business. “It answers the question from the EEOC’s perspective,” former agency commissioner Jenny R. Yang said. “If you’re excluding older workers from seeing your ads for jobs it does violate” anti-discrimination laws. The EEOC declined to comment.  The decisions stem from complaints filed by the Communications Workers of America, the American Civil Liberties Union and plaintiff’s attorneys after our reporting. The agency made the rulings in July, but they are becoming public now as part of a separate pending class-action suit in federal court accusing companies of age discrimination.  The ads are all from 2018 or earlier. Since then, Facebook has agreed in a settlement to make sweeping changes to the way employers, landlords and creditors can target advertising. The changes are scheduled to take effect by the end of the year.  A Facebook spokesperson pointed to the company’s recent changes and said, “Helping prevent discrimination in housing, employment or credit ads is an area we believe we lead the advertising industry.”  In the latest rulings, the EEOC cited four companies for age discrimination: Capital One, Edwards Jones, Enterprise Holdings and DriveTime Automotive Group. Three companies were cited for discrimination by both age and gender: Nebraska Furniture Mart, Renewal by Andersen LLC and Sandhills Publishing Company. The companies can now work out a settlement with the EEOC or go to court.  Most of the companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nebraska Furniture Mart declined to comment. A spokesperson for financial firm Edwards Jones said, “We strongly disagree with the claim that our firm engaged in discriminatory practices in advertising of job opportunities, recruiting or hiring.”  Dozens of other complaints have been filed with the EEOC about discrimination in targeted advertising on Facebook. Most of the allegations are still pending.  The EEOC’s batch of decisions are significant, attorney Peter Romer-Friedman of Outten & Golden says, because they are the first time companies besides Facebook have had to defend how they use Facebook’s tools to advertise jobs.  His firm also filed a suit against seven real estate companies last week for allegedly discriminating by age in housing ads. We first reported on discriminatory housing ads on Facebook three years ago. The company changed its process for screening housing ads after we retested the system two years ago and showed it was possible to buy dozens of ads that excluded people by gender, race, religion, national origin, age and other categories protected by civil rights laws.


fortune--2019-02-05--Low-Income Workers Are Less Likely to Receive Employer-Funded Insurance

Wealthier people are more likely to receive employer-sponsored insurance than low-wage workers.  A report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that just 28% of full-time workers below the federal poverty level received benefits from their employers, as low-income jobs are less likely to offer company subsidized benefits to workers.  “Employer health coverage is a part of compensation for workers, and low-wage workers just can’t command that level of compensation,” Larry Levitt, of Kaiser, told Axios.  With the costs of health care rising rapidly—and outpacing wages over the past decade—workers are also paying more out of pocket health care costs, Axios reports. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 51% of workers have to meet a deductible of more than $1,000 on their employer-based insurance, up from 34% in 2012. The increase signals a shift toward less coverage to meet the rising costs of health care.  Though half of Americans receive health insurance through their jobs, more than 30 million people remain uninsured.  Campaigns to nationalize health insurance have become more popular in recent years. Last fall, a Pew Research Center poll found that 60% of Americans believed that ensuring health care coverage is the responsibility of the federal government, including 31% of people who supported “single payer” insurance.


fortune--2019-08-14--ICE Raids Raise Question What About the Employers That Profit Off Unauthorized Workers

ICE Raids Raise Question: What About the Employers That Profit Off Unauthorized Workers?

The images of children crying after their parents were arrested in a massive immigration raid in Mississippi revived a longstanding complaint: Unauthorized workers are jailed or deported, while the managers and business owners who profit from their labor often go unprosecuted.  Under President Donald Trump, the number of business owners and managers who face criminal charges for employing unauthorized workers has stayed almost the same, even as almost every other enforcement measure has surged.  Last week's raids at seven chicken-processing plants were the largest worksite operation conducted under the Trump administration. The operation led to 680 arrests of people in the U.S. illegally, with expected criminal charges to follow for some. But no plant owners or top managers were immediately charged, following the pattern of other recent sweeps.  Lawyers and experts agree that investigating managers takes longer and is far more difficult than arresting workers. A key hurdle that predates the Trump administration is that federal law makes it a crime to "knowingly" hire workers who are in the U.S. illegally.  "The 'knowingly' term has proved to be a huge defense for employers," said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. "The employer says, 'I'm sorry, I didn't know they were unauthorized.'"  In a statement Tuesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Matthew Albence said that anyone found to have broken the law in the Mississippi case would be held accountable, including "the employers who profit off their crimes." Warrants unsealed after the Mississippi arrests allege that managers at two processing plants participated in fraud.  After Trump took office, then-Acting Director Thomas Homan declared that ICE would try to increase all worksite enforcement actions by 400%.  ICE succeeded almost across the board in just one government fiscal year. According to statistics the agency released in December, it quadrupled the number of investigations it opened and audits of paperwork submitted by employees to get hired. And it made 2,304 arrests in worksite cases, seven times as many as the previous year.  The major exception was for managers. ICE arrested just 72 managers in the 2018 fiscal year, compared with 71 the year before. And 49 managers were convicted of crimes, down from 55 the previous year.  Congress first created criminal penalties for employers in 1986. According to researchers at Syracuse University, prosecutions under the law banning employers from knowingly employing unauthorized workers have rarely exceeded 15 a year since then. Between April 2018 and this March, just 11 people were prosecuted in seven cases.  Employers can also be charged with other crimes. The former owner of a meat-processing plant raided in Tennessee last year was sentenced in July to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion, wire fraud and employing unauthorized workers. Investigations are still ongoing following several major Trump administration raids.  Companies and business owners are also better equipped to fight charges than workers who were already earning low wages and now face detention and deportation.  Those workers are sometimes victims of labor-trafficking schemes. They can be critical witnesses to prove businesses knew about their lack of legal status, except they may fear coming forward. Some opponents of the administration blame its immigration crackdown for deterring people from contacting law enforcement.  And while both Republicans and Democrats have previously supported enforcement of workplace immigration laws as a way to protect U.S. citizen workers, many businesses are having trouble finding workers due to low unemployment nationally. They quietly rely on unauthorized labor to stay productive, making prosecutions politically unpopular, Chishti said.  Trump himself has been accused of employing unauthorized workers at his hotels, golf courses and other businesses.  "On paper, there is a lot of enforcement of law, but in reality, people are constantly abusing the law," Chishti said.  Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, argued that ramping up penalties for employing unauthorized workers was counterproductive. Instead, he said, the U.S. should better enforce workplace safety standards and prevent wage theft, reducing the incentive for unscrupulous businesses to hire unauthorized workers.  "When you make immigrant workers afraid of the federal government, then you are protecting employers who exploit," Saenz said.  A common outcome in workplace cases is a settlement where the offending company pays a fine and agrees to adopt measures like checking every new hire in the federal E-Verify program, which examines personal information submitted to an employer in government records for any potential fraud.  ICE in August 2018 raided a trailer company in Sumner, Texas. Nearly 160 people were arrested at the company, Load Trail LLC.  Load Trail had reached a settlement with ICE just four years earlier. A new criminal investigation is now ongoing, and lawyers for Load Trail say they are close to reaching another settlement. The company said it had relied on staffing companies to provide workers and confirm their legal status.  In April, another raid targeted CVE Technology Group , which repairs and refurbishes cellphones, leading to 284 arrests. That investigation is also ongoing.  Both companies say their business has fallen and they have had trouble hiring replacement workers. Rick Gump, a lawyer for CVE, said the company lost several major contracts after the raid, causing a roughly 75% decline in business.  "The likelihood is a lot of the business that was here in the U.S. has been sent overseas," he said.  Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.


fusion--2019-10-01--Nail salon workers call out employers for health safety violations

Nail salon workers call out employers for health & safety violations

Despite new regulations, New York nail salon workers say they continue to deal with poor conditions and low pay. The people who work there are mostly female immigrants who say they’re jeopardizing their safety while trying to earn a living. Blanca Rosa Vilchez explains.


hitandrun--2019-08-11--If You Oppose Punishing and Deporting Undocumented Workers You Should also Oppose Punishing Employe

If You Oppose Punishing and Deporting Undocumented Workers, You Should also Oppose Punishing Employers that Hire Them

Last week's ICE raids on undocumented workers in Mississippi—the largest of its kind—has drawn widespread protest for brutally separating parents from their children and deporting migrants whose only sin is escaping poverty and oppression in their homelands by finding job opportunities in the US. The protests are justified. But some critics also complain that ICE targeted workers, without also penalizing their employers. For example, CNN commentator Jake Tapper simultaneously decried the humanitarian effects of the raids, and also criticized an administration official for failing to "hold buisnesses responsible for this."  Such complaints are not new. There is a long history of federal immigration enforcement agencies rarely penalizing employers, and critics complaining that they should do so more often, even as they also lament the harm ICE raids inflict on workers.  But if you truly believe that it is wrong to punish and deport undocumented workers, you also have every reason to oppose punishing the employers who hire them. Those who oppose deportation do so, at least in large part, because they believe (correctly, in my view) that these individuals should not be barred from starting a new life in the US and seeking opportunity here. But they cannot do that if they are effectively barred from holding jobs because anyone who hires them will be punished for doing so.  Some of the opposition to deportation is driven by the impact on families, most notably children (including many who are US citizens) separated from parents. But children also suffer if their parents are not allowed to work, and therefore cannot earn income to support their families.  Imagine that a person named Bob is seeking work to escape poverty and support his family. Congress enacts a bill known as Bob's Law. Under this legislation, Bob is allowed to live wherever he wants, and law enforcement agencies are forbidden to punish him for taking any job that might be offered him. But there's a catch: any business that hires Bob will be severely sanctioned for doing so, even though Bob himself will not be (perhaps they must pay a large fine, or the owner must go to prison, or both). Moreover, Congress earmarks funds for a special Bob's Law Enforcement Budget (BLOB), which can only be spent on prosecuting Bob's Law violators, so that officials will have a strong incentive to actually go after employers who dare hire Bob, as opposed to letting them off the hook.  Formally, Bob's Law doesn't constrain Bob in any way. The only people who can be punished are the employers who hire him. But, in reality, the law consigns Bob to a life of poverty and desperation, as he will either have to take shady black market jobs, or subsist on charity or welfare (if he can get it).  Bob's family will also suffer, of course, since he is unlikely to be able to support them with more than a paltry (and highly uncertain) income.  Bob's law is purely imaginary. But those who argue that the federal government should refrain from punishing undocumented workers, but rigorously prosecute the employers who hire them, are effectively advocating much the same sort of policy in real life. This regime would not target undocumented workers directly, but in practice it would consign them to much the same sort of miserable existence as Bob would face.  A "punish employers only" also prevents undocumented workers from contributing to the economy as much as they otherwise would. Rigorously prosecuting employers who hire them ensures that they will either be unable to find work at all, or will only be able to do so in underground enterprises, where they are likely to be less productive than at legitimate enterprises.  Targeting businesses is also likely to harm US-citizen workers, as well as undocumented ones. The types of measures employers would have to adopt to ensure compliance are likely to exclude many citizen workers, or at least put them through bureaucratic nightmares, such as those inflicted by the E-Verify system, mandated by some states.  Some might argue that the employers should be punished regardless of consequences, because they have violated the law. But, of course, the same thing can be said for the workers. In the case of the latter, opponents of deportation rightly point out that the laws in question are so deeply unjust that migrants are justified in violating them. Moreover, in a world where we have vastly more violators of federal law than the government can possibly punish, law enforcement should focus its resources on enforcing those laws that have the strongest moral justifications. "Just enforce the law" is not a viable moral theory in a world where many laws on the books are deeply unjust, and it is in any event impossible to punish more than a small fraction of violators. These objections apply to employer sanctions in much the same way as attempts to punish workers. Indeed, efforts to punish the former almost inevitably harm the latter, as well.  If you nonetheless do believe that all laws should be enforced to the hilt,  regardless of how unjust, than you cannot also argue that the government should let undocumented workers go, but punish their employers. Both are lawbreakers, after all.  Another possible variant of the "punish employers only" theory is that these businesses should be blamed for the poor conditions under which many undocumented workers labor. If employment conditions are your beef, then you should at least advocate limiting enforcement actions only to cases where conditions fall below whatever you believe to be the right minimum standard. There should be no general effort to punish employers of undocumented immigrants, as such.  You should also keep in mind that government-mandated employee benefits tend to result in a combination of reduced employment, reduction of salary and/or other employee benefits, or some combination of both. Undocumented workers might prefer worse conditions with higher pay to the opposite combination. At the very least, the more you care about the welfare of these workers, the more you should hesitate to support policies that forcibly reduce the range of options available to them, at least in the absence of strong evidence that those measures will make them better off.  Obviously, there are cases where employers use coercion or fraud to abuse undocumented workers. Where that happens, there is good reason to punish them, as is also true of employers who inflict similar abuse on other employees. Unlike in the case of poor working conditions that employees might willingly accept in exchange for higher pay, coercion and fraud are not voluntary transactions, and usually don't leave workers better off than they would be otherwise. But mandatory infliction of sanctions on all employers of undocumented workers actually makes it more difficult to root out such genuine abuses. Workers are unlikely to report abusive employers if doing so will predictably lead to them losing their jobs, because the employers are not allowed to hire them in the first place, and the government will terminate those jobs if it finds out about them.  In sum, if you oppose punishment of undocumented workers, you should also oppose punishing their employers. The latter inflicts much the same injustices as the former, including by harming the workers themselves.


mercurynews--2019-01-20--H-1B visas The Bay Areas non-tech employers seek foreign workers too

H-1B visas: The Bay Area’s non-tech employers seek foreign workers, too

Mike Evans isn’t the kind of worker most people would associate with an H-1B visa. He’s British. He’s got a Ph.D. in astronomy and worked on the Cassini project. And he’s employed by Mountain View’s SETI Institute.  Evans is among hundreds of Bay Area H-1B workers who aren’t employed by Google, Facebook or outsourcers in the tech industry, which is closely associated with a visa that has become a flashpoint in the immigration debate.  More than 5,600 Bay Area companies applied for H-1B visas in fiscal year 2018, according to data from the Department of Labor. And though the majority were tech companies seeking engineers, developers and programmers, including more than 70,600 software developers, the department’s data shows that dozens of other local employers sought foreign workers, from soccer coaches and marriage and family therapists to accountants and lawyers.  Pixar, in Emeryville, applied for a story artist and a character designer. The Gap, in San Francisco, wanted a couple of fashion designers, a senior designer and a vice president of design for its Old Navy brand. And the San Jose Unified School District sought five special education teachers for preschool, kindergarten and middle school.  The data, analyzed by this news organization, shows how the H-1B visa touches nearly every corner of the Bay Area economy. The data comes from applications that companies hoping to hire an H-1B worker must submit to the labor department, with a job title and a proposed wage. Once that’s certified, the company applies to the Department of Homeland Security for the actual visa.  In fiscal year 2018, the Department of Labor certified almost 1.2 million H-1B applications nationwide, but it’s not clear how many of those resulted in visas. Some applications were for visa extensions, or to hire workers already in the country on an H-1B visa with a different employer. Other companies abandon the process before getting to Homeland Security, and even those that do aren’t guaranteed one of the 85,000 H-1B visas given out each year.  At the Mountain View-based SETI Institute, whose mission includes searching for new planets and exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the H-1B visa is a way to bring in foreign scientists like Evans for highly specialized work. While SETI officials understand that some see the visa as a mechanism for supplanting American workers with cheaper foreign labor, they say that’s far from what they’re doing.  “I think we feel very comfortable in the fact that if somebody comes to the institute with a specialized degree and capability, we haven’t hired them at the expense of some other poor astronomer in the U.S. not getting a job,” said Bill Diamond, SETI’s CEO. “There’s just not enough of the kinds of scientists we want to bring in.”  Diamond estimated that about 6 percent of the institute’s 70 to 80 astronomers and researchers are on H-1B visas.  Evans, who joined SETI late last year, has been in the U.S. for more than nine years, first on an academic J-1 visa and since 2014 on an H-1B. The U.S. was attractive, he said, because it spends so much more money on astronomy than any other country.  “If I went back to Europe, it’s possible that I could get a similar job,” he said. “But it’s easier in the U.S. just because there’s much more funding, so there’s more opportunities.”  As a nonprofit research institution, SETI is exempt from the 85,000 visa cap. It’s also unique because it only hires astronomers and researchers who already have funding for specific projects, for example through private or government grants. Armine Saroian, SETI’s director of human resources, said the institute is focused on applicants’ qualifications and funding, not their visa status.  Evans’ background is on the Cassini mission, a joint program from NASA and two European space agencies that sent a probe to orbit Saturn for more than a decade before it was intentionally crashed into the planet in 2017. Evans had worked on Cassini for 19 years — his entire professional career. At SETI, he’s working on archiving the probe’s observational data.  He estimated that maybe five people in the world have the kind of experience he has. “And all five are working in the U.S.,” Evans said.  According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, computer-related fields accounted for about 70 percent of all H-1B recipients in 2017. Another eight percent work in architecture, engineering and surveying, and slightly less than 6 percent work in administrative specializations, such as accounting. The majority of all H-1B visas are granted to workers from India.  San Jose Unified has about a dozen teachers here on H-1B visas, according to a district spokeswoman. In its applications to the Department of Labor last year for five special education teachers, the district said it expected to pay between $55,000 and $97,000.  In an email response, a district spokeswoman said the goal was, in part, to hire for high-need STEM and special education positions. Roughly 5 percent of H-1B visas nationwide are to workers in education.  Despite their close association with tech companies, researchers say the original intent of the H-1B visa was much broader.  Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, said H-1Bs are part of a long tradition of making it easier to bring in skilled workers who aren’t being produced within the U.S.  “The first exemption for skilled professionals was for professional actors, nurses, ministers, professors and musicians of distinguished merit and ability,” she said. “That was in 1917.”  When the H-1B visa was created in 1990, it was healthcare, not technology, that saw it as a way to bring in skilled foreign labor. By 1995, half of all H-1B workers were physical therapists, according to a 2003 study from Ronil Hira, now a professor at Howard University.  “It really wasn’t until the late 90s, when the tech industry became more visible as the face of the visa,” Hira said. By 1998, computer specialists were receiving 57 percent of H-1Bs.  Both Pierce and Hira said that today, employers like Pixar or The Gap with just a few H-1B employees are at risk of being crowded out by large tech outsourcers such as Cognizant, which received more than 29,900 visas in 2018, or Tata Consultancy, which got about 14,700 visas.  Without H-1B visas, Diamond, the SETI CEO, said he wouldn’t have the researchers he needs to do the work the institute was set up to do. He said there’s also a benefit to the exchange of ideas that happens when scientists from around the world work together.  “You want to bring as many new sources of knowledge and information and understanding as you can on the kind of work we do,” he said. “To restrict that in any way would be problematic, both to us on a micro-scale, but more broadly to science.”


slate--2019-09-02--Why Is It OK for Employers to Constantly Surveil Workers

Why Is It OK for Employers to Constantly Surveil Workers?

Even if you aren’t trying to get pregnant, fertility apps can be useful for helping you remember when your last period was. Users can log their menstrual cycle rather than rack their brains (or write it down in a notebook they might lose or forget about) and get predictions on when their next cycle will begin. They can also track intimate information on their bodies and sexual activity, including weight, mood, and frequency of sex. It’s great.  Unless your employer has paid to get a copy of that data. In April, the Washington Post reported that Ovia, a fertility app, allows employers to provide accounts as part of wellness programs and to access an aggregate of the data employees provided. Employers may use this information to inform hiring, promotion, or pay decisions—which violates federal prohibitions. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It can be especially dangerous in a workplace with few women, in which “de-identified” data provides little protection from discrimination.  Ovia is an example of employers seeking more information on their workers and expecting employees to help them via self-surveillance. Yet if you were to tune in to the roiling privacy debate on Capitol Hill, you’d hear little of this. Congress’ debate around passing privacy legislation has largely left out workplace protections. The current debate centers “consumer privacy,” but this distinction falsely creates dual identities with different protections for you the consumer and you the worker.  The surveillance of workers and the workplace is far from a modern phenomenon. Like racial minorities, immigrants, and religious minorities, poor and working people have long been disproportionately surveilled by their employers and the government. (This will be the subject of the upcoming Color of Surveillance conference at Georgetown Law on Nov. 7, a project I’m co-organizing.) For example, Henry Ford sent detectives to his factory workers’ homes. Investigators would ask employees questions and examine homes to evaluate their moral standing. Concerned about high employee turnover, Ford wanted his employees to conform to his social and moral expectations. The Pinkerton Detective Agency infiltrated mining communities and unions at the direction of union-busting owners. Detectives gathered information to disrupt organized action and disband unions.  From the 1590s to 1800s, English lawmakers monitored the poor who received financial assistance. The “Poor Laws” they enacted required paupers to work in exchange for benefits. The policies also carried mechanisms for social control: Administrators could use absence from church services and drunkenness to reduce or withhold support. According to historian Steve Hindle, one woman lost her pension after refusing to marry the man who impregnated her. The Poor Laws also relied on neighbors to report on one another.  But historically, surveillance had limitations. A detective could only keep track of so many workers at one time. It was expensive and resource-intensive.  Over time, surveillance has become more sophisticated, more granular, and more invasive. Employers have gone from using human informants to scanning employee emails or monitoring Reddit. In July, a Walmart employee was fired for posting confidential information about a new Walmart program on a subreddit used by other Walmart employees. Members responded by posting pro-union memes (Walmart is notoriously anti-union).  But surveillance goes much further than spying on communications. Rather than asking a foreman about employee productivity, an employer can pull up this information from an app—a new form of surveillance made possible with algorithmic managers. In contrast with previous methods of surveillance, algorithmic managers require workers to watch and report on themselves. The artificial manager stores and manages worker input, constantly collecting information. It knows, with precise detail, your location and how much work you’ve completed. Hotels give their housekeepers apps to track workflow. The app knows which room the housekeeper is in because the housekeeper tells it. Housekeepers tell the app how long it took to clean a room. Algorithmic managers also keep track of what orders warehouse workers have fulfilled and how many miles rideshare drivers have traveled. Employees often cannot disable these apps without retaliation—and in some cases, like ride-sharing and food delivery gigs, it would be literally impossible to work without the app.  As surveillance increases, workers are losing protections. Collective bargaining could give workers the opportunity to push back against surveillance, but few have this opportunity. At the height of union membership, 1 in every 3 Americans belonged to a union. Today, it’s only 1 in 10. Additionally, the workers most affected by algorithmic managers are dispersed and have particular difficulty organizing collective action. In May, for instance, Uber and Lyft drivers organized a strike to raise objections to the Uber initial public offering. However, without a centralized place to communicate, some drivers learned about the protest during or after the strike.  Workers need protections from expanding surveillance and control. Yet, if current congressional debates bear any fruit, the average American will soon have more protection from tech giants and telecommunications companies than from the people who sign their paychecks. The unauthorized or harmful uses of geolocation data affect both consumers and workers. However, only harms to consumers, not workers, are being addressed. After Vice reported that bounty hunters were purchasing consumer geolocation information from cellphone companies (two were allegedly involved in a triple murder earlier this year), Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Geoffrey Starks and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden called for agency action or policy change to end the sale of this data. Yet employers can directly access their employees’ geolocation data through mobile apps, and there’s no congressional action at hand. Workers should have privacy over their data in the same way consumers do—or else they’ll continue to find themselves coded into a corner.  Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.


sottnet--2019-06-19--Nevada becomes first state to ban employers from testing workers for marijuana use

In a move that could blaze a small but important trail for workers' rights across the U.S., Nevada has passed a bill telling employers and state agencies that they can no longer refuse to hire workers on the basis of their testing positive for cannabis. It's a long way to come for a state that was once infamous for its notoriously strong prohibitionist laws penalizing those in possession of marijuana.Last week, Governor Steve Sisolak signed AB 132 , which prohibits the denial of employment to cannabis consumers after drug pre-screenings. Advocates are hailing the passage of the bill because it finally clears a major gap in the law between states that have rendered marijuana totally legal for medical or recreational purposes and those U.S. companies that try to block their workers from toking up at all.In Nevada, as in the other several states that have made recreational cannabis legal across the country, employers were still able to turn people away from jobs if they failed the "whizz quiz," or urine-based drug tests. NFL players seeking to recover from the intense physical pressures of football are unable to use cannabis-based remedies, doctors have lost their licenses for using medicinal cannabis, and 48 percent of businesses in otherwise weed-friendly Colorado have "well-defined" rules that allow them to fire employees if marijuana is detected in a worker's test results.According to the Nevada law, which kicks in January:However, a number of provisions in the bill complicate matters. Safety-sensitive positions includingPaul Enos, the chief executive of the Nevada Trucking Association who helped ensure revisions to the law that would allow safety exemptions for certain workers, told the Washington Post:The law has come a long way since it was introduced, with some employers accusing state politicians of allowing workers to blaze it up while on the clock.Lead sponsor of AB 132 and Democratic Assemblywoman Dina Neal said during a hearing for the bill in February:Yet Madisen Saglibene, the executive director of the Nevada and Las Vegas chapters of NORML, worked hard alongside legislators to ensure the bill's passage in the face of opposition from industry representatives and politicians like Ellen Spiegel, chair of the Commerce and Labor committee.Saglibene told VICE that the troubling provisions in the bill were a result of compromises necessary to pass the bill, explaining:But thanks to Neal, who held meetings with all parties interested in the bill, a compromise was finally met. Saglibene said:Gov. Sisolak has also signed Assembly Bill 192, which provides for a process through which individuals can petition to have their criminal records sealed if their conviction was for offenses that were eventually decriminalized, such as for a cannabis conviction.Saglibene remains optimistic about the prospects of the AB 132, which opens the door to similar-and perhaps stronger-legislation across the country. Acknowledging that there is still work ahead, she noted:


sputnik--2019-10-19--US Detention Center Worker Alleges Employer Barred Her From Wearing Hijab - Complaint

Brown, who works at the New Castle County Detention Center, has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency responsible for dealing with workplace discrimination cases.  Two months later, she reapplied for the same position at the detention center, this time forgoing a hijab for the interview, and she was awarded the position. She started working at the detention center in February 2012. In 2014, Brown wore her hijab to work and was told by one of her supervisors she could not wear it for “safety reasons.” Even though Brown agreed to modify her hijab to be detachable to address security concerns, her supervisors did not approve the garment.  In August, when Brown had issues with the metal detector at the facility, a supervisor yelled at her, “Now you’re looking like a terrorist” in front of other employees. It is unclear if Brown was wearing a hijab during this incident.  "This is a clear example of religious discrimination and the state of Delaware has no basis from preventing Madinah from working with her hijab on," Zanah Ghalawanji, an attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is quoted as saying by Delaware Online. CAIR is representing Brown.  "We must carefully balance our strong support of religious freedom with the need to keep youth and staff safe," the statement reads. "In some instances, a person's job may require them to do certain actions, such as the physical restraint of a youth, that makes wearing some religious clothing unsafe."