Dance of the Reptiles (16 page)

With a $3.7 billion budget hole and the nation’s second-highest rate of uninsured residents, Florida is rejecting more federal health-care funds than any other state. This is a matter of button-busting pride to Speaker Cannon and also to the governor, who continues to float through his own squirrelly parallel universe.

The same guy who made a fortune from overbilled Medicare payouts to his hospitals recently sat down with a
New York Times
reporter to reiterate his distaste for U.S. assistance. Said Scott: “There are a lot of programs that the federal government would like to give you that don’t fit your state, don’t fit your needs and ultimately create obligations that your taxpayers can’t afford.”

Sure. Why throw money away on abused children when you can spend it on something really important, like Project Equis?

Maybe someday, if we behave, they’ll even tell us what it is.

August 13, 2011

ALFs’ Foxes Guarding the Henhouses

Anyone who’s been following this newspaper’s investigation of the wretched conditions in some of Florida’s assisted-living facilities might wonder how the state could have cruelly turned its back on so many sick and helpless people.

The answer is as simple as it is sickening: Money.

Florida doesn’t spend enough of it enforcing the laws and regulations governing ALFs, while the industry spends a fortune buying off key state lawmakers with campaign donations.

One of them is Sen. Rene Garcia, a Republican from Hialeah who chairs the Health Regulation Committee. Remember this character’s name, in case he ever dreams of running for statewide office.

Garcia’s district includes more than 100 assisted-living facilities, including some of the worst and most heavily fined in Miami-Dade. Thanks to Garcia and others, it’s not easy for one of these joints to get in trouble, no matter what horrors are taking place inside.

Statewide, more than 70 ALF residents are known to have perished from gangrene, starvation, narcotic overdoses, and burns. At least 200 others have died under suspicious circumstances, but the records have been sealed. In one case, care-givers at an ALF in Manatee County managed to overlook an 85-year-old man while nearly half of his face was consumed by a cancerous tumor. In another facility, three people died, including a senior who fell down 24 separate times.

Despite all this, legislators beholden to ALF lobbyists assiduously labored to gut the laws meant to keep these homes safe. Too many rules and regulations, they complained.

Heck, it’s only human suffering we’re talking about.

Even as the authorities found residents neglected, abused, and even dying, lawmakers like Garcia—who are rarely made to sleep in their own urine—were working aggressively on behalf of the ALFs. Their mission was to shrink state oversight, minimize the number of inspections, and make it harder to shut down rogue facilities.

This year in Tallahassee, 23 bills were introduced to weaken state supervision over ALFs. Most of them were written by the Florida Assisted Living Association, the industry lobby group. No one is more slavishly obedient to their wishes than Garcia, who collected $8,100 in campaign contributions from ALF corporate interests.

One of the bright ideas in Garcia’s proposal would have removed the state’s power to automatically shut down the most dangerous ALFs—the ones found to repeatedly put residents at risk of death—after two more Class I violations. Garcia also pushed to block the state from slapping additional fines on ALFs when inspectors catch workers breaking the law. Without that enforcement measure, operators wouldn’t have much incentive to clean up their acts.

When questioned by reporters, Garcia said he didn’t actually favor reducing legal protections for residents in assisted-living facilities. He said the legislation he sponsored was mostly initiated by FALA, the ALF lobby group—a pathetic excuse that tells you all you need to know about how things work at the Capitol.

Furthermore, Garcia said he wasn’t aware of language in his own proposal that would have stripped regulators of the authority to revoke the licenses of ALFs with multiple critical violations. “I just don’t recall that,” he said.

People are dying under the most miserable conditions,
and this guy conveniently can’t remember pimping a law that would have made things even worse.

He’s not the only one who’s foggy these days. Sen. Don Gaetz, a Destin Republican, said he couldn’t recall language in one of his own cosponsored bills that stopped the state from bringing medical teams to ALFs to decide whether sick residents should be removed from the homes for their own safety. “I just don’t remember,” Gaetz said.

The legislation passed in 2009. Now the ALF operators, not doctors, decide when an ailing resident should be moved. No big deal, unless it happens to be your grandmother or grandfather who’s in trouble.

To further deter nosy inspectors, lawmakers have kept on a shoestring budget the agency charged with overseeing ALFs. Over the last decade, investigations of serious incidents involving residents have declined radically even as the toll of deaths and abuse cases has risen.

Only seven homes were closed during a two-year period in which the state could have shut down 70, based on repeated violations that endangered residents, fatally in some cases. The
Herald
’s series temporarily stalled many of this year’s worst bills, including Garcia’s, but they’ll be back the next session. Meanwhile, Gov. Rick Scott has put together a task force heavily weighted toward the ALF industry (big surprise), which began meeting last week.

In the fall, a group of state senators will convene to draw up new legislation that supposedly would increase inspections of ALFs and hike penalties for repeat offenders. The best choice to chair the panel would have been Ronda Storms, a Republican from Valrico who heads the Senate’s Children, Families, and Elder Affairs Committee.

Storms has been a strong advocate for strengthening
supervision and cracking down on assisted-living facilities that neglect frail and sick residents. As leader of the reform committee, she would have brought some credibility and compassion to a debate that’s been dominated by colleagues who sold out to the industry.

But Senate President Mike Haridopolos made sure that the ALF owners will have little to worry about this autumn. Instead of appointing Storms to run the committee, he appointed none other than Rene Garcia.

If it weren’t so tragic, you’d almost have to laugh.

March 17, 2012

Surprise—Lawmakers Turn Down Free Drug Test

Among its dubious achievements this year, the Florida Legislature passed a law authorizing random drug tests for state workers.

Guess who’s exempt? Lawmakers themselves.

So now the clerk down at the DMV gets to pee in a cup—but not the knuckleheads in Tallahassee who control $70 billion in public funds.

Who do you think is more dangerous to the future of Florida?

In the session that just ended, the Legislature jacked up tuition on state college students while creating a new university to placate one cranky senator. It threw more than 4,400 state workers out of their jobs while handing out more than $800 million in tax breaks to businesses.

Clearly, legislators are impaired. Is it meth? Coke? Mushrooms?

We’ll never know.

A few months ago, I offered to pay for drug tests for all
160 state senators and representatives. The deal was that all of them had to do it. Not a penny of taxpayer money would be spent.

Shockingly, the Republican leadership showed zero interest in my proposal. However, they were very excited about Gov. Rick Scott’s plan to impose mandatory urine testing on welfare applicants, who statistically use drugs at a lower rate than the public. That particular law is currently stalled in the courts because of serious constitutional questions, which is where the new statute will end up as well, if Scott signs it.

Meanwhile, let’s hear from its proud sponsor, Rep. Jimmie Smith of Lecanto, which is near Inverness, which is sort of near Wildwood. Smith’s Web page says he’s a “security officer” who is retired from the army. He has been in the Legislature about 18 months. “This is not to do drug testing because they’re state workers,” he said. “This is to do drug testing for one problem: drugs in Florida.”

The new law would allow state agencies to randomly test up to 10 percent of their workers every three months. Failing one test can get you fired; the present law requires treatment after the first positive urine screen.

An amendment that would have included drug-testing the governor and lawmakers was indignantly rejected. “Political theater,” whined Rep. Smith. “It was found to be unconstitutional to drug-test elected officials because it prevents us, as citizens, from having that First Amendment right.”

Based on that fog-headed explanation, which not even Cheech could explain to Chong, Smith’s urine should be the first to get screened.

He was attempting to reference a 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a Georgia law requiring political candidates—not just elected officials—to take drug
tests. The ruling wasn’t based on the First Amendment but on the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

It’s the same constitutional provision at the core of multiple legal challenges to Scott’s drug-testing initiatives. While private companies may screen employees whether or not there is cause or reasonable suspicion, the judiciary often takes a dim view when government tries that.

A few Florida lawmakers pointed out the hypocrisy of excluding themselves from a statewide drug-testing program. “I have to conclude that this is an elitist body not prepared or courageous [enough] to lead by example. Shame on you,” Rep. Mark Pafford, a Democrat from West Palm Beach, told his colleagues.

Carlos Trujillo, a Republican from Miami, agreed that the governor and elected officeholders should be drug-tested with other state workers. Still he voted to ice the amendment, citing concerns over the Georgia ruling.

That decision, written for the majority by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, criticized the Georgia law because it “diminishes personal privacy” and was mainly a symbolic remedy to a situation that hadn’t even been documented—drug use among political candidates.

Ironically, the same argument can be made against random testing of Florida employees. Jimmie Smith and other supporters of the bill didn’t produce any proof that drug abuse was rampant in the state work force. They just wanted to look like tough guys.

The high court has sanctioned government drug testing for certain professions in which public safety is at stake. For example, a train engineer may be ordered to submit a urine sample even if there’s no indication of a substance problem.

You could make a strong case that lawmakers fall into the
same high-risk category, considering the damage they do in their annual train wreck known as the Legislative session.

The offer still stands. I’ll pay for every one of them to pee in a cup.

The governor, too. In fact, we’ll let him go first.

November 3, 2012

Florida Voters Won’t Be Fooled Again—or Will We?

There are so many bad constitutional amendments on Florida’s ballot that it’s hard to know where to start.

The most deceptive is Amendment 8, which is fraudulently captioned “Religious Freedom.” If passed, it would open the door to taxpayer funding of private religious schools and institutions, a dangerous mixing of church and state that has been prohibited here for 126 years. Amendment 8 used to be Amendment 7, which was derailed by a court challenge and then hastily rewritten. It would bar government from denying public funds to organizations or institutions based on “religious identity or belief.” Specifically, it would eliminate the long-standing constitutional ban on using state money “directly or indirectly” to aid any “church, sect or religious denomination.”

Amendment 8 was concocted by Republican lawmakers who support a student-voucher system that would benefit private schools and church schools while bleeding critical funds from state education revenues. This should anger you only if you’ve got children or grandchildren in public school.

Another terrible ballot measure is Amendment 6, an anti-abortion manifesto that would punch holes in the privacy clause in Florida’s Constitution. If anything deserves a legal shield of privacy, it’s a woman’s personal and often difficult choices about birth planning.

Christian conservatives in the Legislature are exasperated because their attempts to restrict abortions have stalled in the courts because of the privacy issue. Their solution is to rewrite the Constitution to exclude abortion-related matters from that protection. By weakening privacy rights, Amendment 6 would set the stage for politicians to interfere in a broad range of medical and family decisions in which they should have no say, no influence, no presence whatsoever.

Who can forget their disgraceful theatrics during the Terri Schiavo case?

Partisan spittle is likewise all over Amendment 1, which is basically just a ham-handed attack on the federal health-care law. It declares that government can’t make employers provide health insurance for their workers and that it can’t force uninsured people to purchase insurance. Where were these bold libertarian voices when mandatory auto liability insurance got passed in Florida? You can be sure they carry their little State Farm cards tucked safely in their wallets.

The good thing about Amendment 1 is that it’s all hot air, and it won’t have any effect on health-care reform. That’s because federal law supersedes state law, a somewhat substantial technicality that failed to deter the grandstanding boneheads in Tallahassee.

To demonstrate their contempt for taxes, lawmakers have also larded the ballot with several amendments that would amount to a mugging of city and county governments. Among them is Amendment 3, so dense and confusing that it might as well have been transcribed in Slovenian. It would change the equation for setting the state’s revenue cap, potentially restricting the amount of funds available for some rather basic municipal needs.