Michigan Disability Resistance

https://goo.gl/viWaEt

The state can be held liable for teens raped in Michigan prisons, after the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled a state law that halted civil rights at the prison gate was unconstitutional.

In a 2-1 decision released Tuesday, a Court of Appeals panel threw out a 1999 law that said the state’s civil rights law, the Elliott Larson Civil Rights Act, doesn’t apply to prisoners.

That 1999 law, aimed at limited the state’s liability in a lawsuit filed by women who had been raped in Michigan prisons, was pushed by then-Gov. John Engler. Engler’s handling of that suit was raised as a concern when he was named interim president of Michigan State University in January, in the midst of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal.

The majority opinion, written by Judge Kirsten F. Kelly, also ruled the state is not immune from liability in lawsuits filed by prisoners alleging violations of their civil rights.

he ruling clears the way for a lawsuit involving more than 900 young men  to move forward. A similar lawsuit filed by women assaulted in prison cost the state $100 million.

“Children in Michigan prisons have protections under the civil rights act. We all win,” Deborah LaBelle, the lead attorney representing the prisoners, told Bridge Tuesday. “Once you decide that people in jail are still people, it leads you to say … the state has to be held accountable for their wrongs; they don’t have immunity for violating their citizens’ rights."

The lawsuit was filed in 2013 with seven unnamed prisoners and former prisoners, and has grown into a class action with more than 900 young men who claim they were harmed, sexually or otherwise, while being forced to live in the general adult prison population. In 2013, the Michigan Department of Correction changed its policies and now segregates teens from adult prisoners.

The lawsuit contends prison officials did not take claims of sexual assault seriously, and created a culture of institutional indifference to assaults.

https://goo.gl/yaTQ5k

Latinos are greatly underrepresented in studies for prostate cancer screening, and this problem needs to be corrected, an NIH official said here Friday.

"There hasn't been a single screening trial including a significant number of Latinos or blacks ... yet it impacts our practice and we have no data to know if it works in this population," Eliseo Pérez-Stable, MD, director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, in Bethesda, Maryland, said at the National Hispanic Medical Association annual meeting.

Many facts about the U.S. Latino population are not well understood, according to Perez-Stable. For example, although Latinos are, as a group, poorer and less well-educated than their white counterparts, they have a longer life expectancy. It's a bit of an "epidemiologic paradox -- their outcomes are better than expected based on standard predictive risk factors," he said. "Just because you're poor doesn't mean you're always going to do worse ... We seem to have forgotten about that in thinking about disparities and adverse effects."

Smoking is another misunderstood issue in this group, he continued, noting that Latinos have lower rates of smoking than whites -- in 2015, 13.1% of Latino men and 7.1% of Latino women smoked, compared with 17.2% of white men and 16.0% of white women.

"About half of Latinos are very light or non-daily smokers. We've always approached cigarettes as a nicotine addiction problem, but if you don't smoke every day, you can't be addicted." Studies haven't been done on cessation in this population, except for one that is ongoing at Rutgers University, he said.

In fact, better data needs to be collected on minority populations overall, said Pérez-Stable. "We need to have standard measures [in the electronic health record] for demographic and social determinants of health." Health information technology can help minority groups in lots of other ways too. "Touch-screen technology helps ... Portal access to the clinician is really important. If you have an 80-year-old patient, they may not get on the internet and write a message, but their family will."

Interventions to improve minority health need to be done at multiple levels, said Pérez-Stable. "I'm a real big supporter of doing more research into the micro-environment of the clinical care setting between patients and clinicians, and patients and navigating the system." And behavior change can be accomplished through modifying the environment: "If you put in nice, big, easy-to-use stairs, people will use them more."

https://goo.gl/n4iVDY

During a brief stint in 2011 as a heart surgeon at Meriter Hospital in Madison, Wis., Sean Yetman, MD, performed only seven surgeries.

Two of his patients died soon after the procedures, resulting in malpractice lawsuits against Yetman. Both cases were cited by the Wisconsin medical board as a part of a 2014 deal it worked out with Yetman that resulted in the surrender of his medical license.

Meriter had hired a consultant to review his cases and fired him.

After he was fired, Yetman was offered a job at a hospital in Boston and in August 2012 he obtained a license in Massachusetts. He already held a license in New York, one he had since 2009.

Thus, he continued practicing despite the problems in Wisconsin.

In the first case, Yetman performed a coronary bypass surgery on Nancy Glumske, a 61-year-old from Elroy, Wis., on July 20, 2011. She died less than a month later, on Aug. 15. A lawsuit filed by her family accused Yetman of botching the surgery and the repair of a heart valve.

"Dr. Yetman was clearly an incompetent and an unqualified surgeon who had serious general professional deficiencies," Glumske's family said in the 2016 lawsuit.

The court case recently was dismissed, with a judge saying it had not been filed in a timely manner. An attorney for Glumske's surviving husband and her estate said the judge's decision will be appealed.

A day after Glumske died, Yetman performed a similar operation on Thomas Pliner, 77, of Waunakee, Wis. He had experienced shortness of breath and went in for cardiac tests at Meriter Hospital; Yetman said he needed to have a heart valve repaired and bypass surgery.

Within a week, he had the surgery. He suffered profuse bleeding and died the next day.

"My dad was a hard-working family man," said Pliner's daughter, Jodie Busch. "He was married to my mom for 51 years and continued to work as a security guard into his 70s."

In giving up his Wisconsin license, Yetman agreed not to try to renew it.

But neither Massachusetts nor New York imposed any restrictions.

His Massachusetts license lapsed last year. His New York license is active and has no restrictions. Yetman now works at a varicose vein clinic in the New York City area. Not surprisingly, his bio there makes no mention of his time in Wisconsin.

Jeffrey Hammond, a spokesman for the New York Department of Health, said he could not confirm or deny any investigation of a physician unless there is a public action taken by the board.

https://goo.gl/zcvuWi

Like many people with autism, Greg Demer is bright but has difficulty communicating. He has a passion for the history of military aircraft, but he can’t quite keep up a conversation with new people. When he meets someone, he’ll quote from movies or ask them about their favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

His mother, Linda Demer, worried that he wouldn’t be able to make complicated decisions about his finances and health care once he turned 18. So, in 2005, a judge in Los Angeles, where they live, granted her conservatorship over Greg.

“I wanted to protect him,” she said of her son, who is now 31.

But in the conservatorship process, the judge also stripped away Greg’s right to vote. He was not only unfit to make decisions about his health care and finances, the judge ruled, but he also was unfit to participate in the democratic process.

In being declared “mentally incapacitated,” he joined tens of thousands of Americans with disabilities who every year lose their right to vote during guardianship proceedings, according to the California-based Spectrum Institute, an advocacy group for people with disabilities.

Laws in 39 states and Washington, D.C., allow judges to strip voting rights from people with mental disorders ranging from schizophrenia to Down syndrome who are deemed “incapacitated” or “incompetent.” Some of those states use archaic language like “idiots” or “insane persons” in their statutes.

The states that do not have similar restrictions are Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont.

Not only is there no agreement among legal and psychological experts over whether certain people with disabilities should be disenfranchised, but there is also no set standard for measuring the mental capacity needed to vote. There is a tension between protecting the integrity of the electoral process and the civil rights of a person under guardianship, said Dan Marson, a professor emeritus at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s department of neurology.

“What should we require as a minimal standard?” he said. “There is not a clear answer.”

California, in its new law, joined Maryland, Nevada and New Mexico in adopting a standard promoted by the Bazelon Center and the American Bar Association. The standard is simple, Mathis said: Can a person communicate, with or without accommodations, a desire to vote?

“Can you make a choice?” she said. “It’s self-selecting. If someone with dementia can’t make a choice, yeah, that person doesn’t have the capacity to vote.”

https://goo.gl/ZNM21W

The United States has made historic progress in expanding health coverage since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law on March 23, 2010, as highlighted by the charts below (based on the latest available data). Uninsured rates have fallen dramatically across demographic groups; people receiving coverage through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion have better access to health care, financial security, and health; and a large majority of enrollees in the ACA marketplaces say they’re satisfied with their coverage. These facts are worth keeping in mind amidst ongoing efforts to sabotage the ACA.

1: Historic Coverage Gains

2: Improvements Across Demographic Groups

3: Improved Access to Care, Health, and Finances

4: Better Coverage and Access to Treatment for People with Opioid-Use Disorders

5: High Marks for Marketplace Coverage