Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON ― Senate Democrats won’t go along with any legislation that funds the government into next year, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday.

Congress returns from a break next week and lawmakers will have roughly one month to fund the government before they leave for another recess ahead of the November election.

“We’re not doing anything into next year and every Republican should be aware of that right now,” Reid said on a call with reporters, dispelling speculation that Democrats would agree to a longer funding measure. “We are not going to do anything past the first of the year.”

Democrats are confident their party’s presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, will win in November, and hope their party will gain a majority in the Senate. A senior Democratic aide said Democrats don’t want to leave a problem for the next president, and would like to negotiate an omnibus spending bill during the lame-duck session that follows lawmakers’ return from their election break.

Another senior Democratic Senate aide said leaders are “optimistic that the lame duck will be fruitful ground for a good omnibus deal.” President Barack Obama told Reid during an earlier conversation that he would not sign a six-month continuing resolution to fund the government.

Republicans are on a different track. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told Republican members that GOP leaders will likely push for a continuing resolution to authorize government spending past the election, but have little appetite for a large, year-end omnibus bill.

In addition to a continuing resolution, lawmakers will vote on funding for the government’s response to Zika virus. The Senate is still at an impasse on a package that includes measures unrelated to Zika, which Democrats considered poison pills. Included in the $1.1 billion Zika response bill are provisions that would block funding for contraception services, protect the Confederate flag and weaken the Clean Water Act.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said on the call with Reid Thursday that approving money to combat Zika, which causes microcephaly and other birth defects, is of utmost importance for Congress.

“Right now, there is nothing more critical than tackling what is an epidemic,” Stabenow said.

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Millions of federal employees who have participated in the government’s long-term care (LTC) insurance are receiving notices of huge — and often unaffordable — premium increases on their policies.

John Hancock is the insurer for the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program (FLTCIP). Like most long term care insurers, John Hancock vastly underestimated the potential cost of care, policy usage, the impact of increasing longevity and the possibility of today’s lower interest rates.

The federal premium increases are as high as 126 percent, with the average increase of 83 percent — or $111 in the monthly premium. Premiums were not increased for anyone over age 80. Still, federal employees and retirees are confused over the choices and angry at this unexpected hit to their budgets.

Noted long-term care insurance expert Phyllis Shelton has some advice. Her company, LTC Consultants, did the employee education for the FLTCIP when it was first offered in 2002. Now she is helping people plan for LTC at her website, GotLTCi.com.

If you’re facing a premium increase, what should you do? It’s a process of weighing the increased premiums against the potential benefits.

Shelton recommends looking at the Genworth Cost of Care chart for current assisted living costs, adding about $1,500 per month if you want a deluxe facility, and then projecting that number at 5 percent compound for 20 or 30 years, depending on the age you are today with a simple compound calculator.

Now that you have a ballpark idea of how much money care could cost when you need it, you can better assess a response to the options for dealing with the price increase. Here’s an example:

Mary is 54 years old. She is paying $96 per month in premiums for a policy that started with a $200 daily benefit and a five year benefit period with a 4 percent compound inflation protection. She has paid on this policy for 14 years — a total of $16,128 in paid premiums.

Now the federal program wants to increase her monthly premium to $216.96 per month, a 125 percent rate increase, which Mary cannot afford. They have given her some choices. It’s important to choose rationally, not out of anger at the huge monthly premium increase.

She should definitely NOT drop this policy by accepting their offer to stop paying premiums and just settle for care in the amount of the $16,128 she has already paid in. The only winner in this choice is the insurance company!

But if she can’t afford the premium increase, she has been given two other options:

Option 1: Reduce the inflation factor to 2.25 percent, which increases her premium to $156.48 — “only” a 63 percent increase.

Option 2: Reduce the inflation factor to 0.90 percent and keep her premium unchanged.

Option 1 will give her a daily benefit of $673 ($20,471 a month) in 25 years, whereas Option 2 will only give her $438 ($13,322 a month) at that time.

According to Shelton’s calculations, Option 1 means Mary’s premiums will total about $63,000 in 25 years, for what will now be $1,329,695 in benefits. It’s clearly worth it to pay the 63 percent rate increase, especially when you consider that she will need about $22,000 a month in 25 years to pay for a deluxe assisted living facility or significant home care.

Assuming Mary needed to start using care in 25 years, and she needed that care for five years, she would have paid in a total of $45,000 in premiums but would receive total benefits of $1,784,163 to pay for her care!

Another option to lower your premium is to shorten the benefit period. Choices are two, three or five years — probably enough coverage unless Alzheimer’s or stroke runs in your family.

Most important, don’t get angry and don’t act in haste if you’re in the FLTCIP and receive a premium increase. Shelton emphasizes that you aren’t limited to the choices in the rate increase letter. And that’s The Savage Truth.

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DALLAS – The Dallas Police chief who gained national prominence for his leadership after five officers were killed in a sniper attack during a protest march against police violence, unexpectedly announced his retirement on Thursday.

Chief David Brown, 55, said he would step down on Oct. 22 on his 56th birthday, after serving more than three decades as a police officer.

“Serving the citizens of Dallas in this noble profession has been both a true honor and a humbling experience,” Brown said in a statement, without explaining why he was retiring. “This is a difficult decision. I pray for your understanding and well wishes.”

Brown said he joined the Dallas Police Department in 1983 because of the effect of a crack cocaine epidemic on the Oak Cliff neighborhood in which he lived. “I wanted to be part of the solution,” he said.

In the thick of the July sniper attack, Dallas police made the unusual decision to use a bomb mounted on a robot to kill the gunman who was holed up inside a parking garage.

“Let’s always remember the fallen officers including the five officers on July 7, 2016, and the brave men and women of the Dallas Police Department for their sacrifices to keep Dallas safe,” Brown said.

“I know the people of Dallas will never forget the ultimate sacrifice they made on the streets of our city that awful night.”

The Dallas Police Department, which was struggling to recruit officers, reported a surge in applications after Brown urged citizens to get off protest lines and go to work in their neighborhoods as cops.

On Thursday, Mayor Mike Rawlings credited Brown with spearheading the largest reduction of crime in the city in decades and reducing the use of deadly force by police.

“Today is a bittersweet day for the city of Dallas,” Rawlings told reporters. “In the wake of the tragic shootings, the whole world learned what a special man leads our Dallas police.”

Brown had faced criticism from some officers who said he did not do enough for their welfare, from gun rights advocates over his opposition to legal open carrying of weapons by civilians, and from some residents of black communities who said he needed to do more to end racial bias in policing.

(Reporting by Lisa Maria Garza and Jon Herskovitz in Austin; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

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Harris County Jail, which serves the Houston area, is one of the largest jails in the country. Like many other jails in America, it’s full of people who are locked up on minor charges and can’t afford to pay bail, it struggles with understaffing, and it’s plagued by lawsuits. 

But here’s what makes Harris County Jail different: Inmates die there at a higher rate per capita than most other jails in the nation, according to a Huffington Post analysis of death data from July 13, 2015, to July 13, 2016.

The Harris County facility is about an hour from the jail where Sandra Bland was found hanging in July 2015. In the year after her death, at least 12 Harris County inmates died on the jail’s watch, a Huffington Post investigation found. (One of them suffered the fatal injury in custody, but was technically released by the time he died.) Most of the deaths were related to medical issues, as opposed to the results of assault or suicide.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the jail, did not address HuffPost’s requests for comment on this story by deadline.

Nationwide, more than 800 people lost their lives in jail in the year HuffPost studied. Many of those deaths occurred in the first few days of incarceration. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, which counts these fatalities, keeps most of its data to itself. Publicly released reports do not reveal the number of deaths at each facility, only the number of deaths in each state. So until HuffPost’s investigation, it was difficult to identify which jails may warrant additional scrutiny.

As of April, the inmate population of Harris County Jail was more than 9,000, and the facility has suffered from overcrowding. The jail is also understaffed. Overtime pay for staff has skyrocketed in the last two years, according to the Houston Chronicle. The jailers must sometimes work double shifts multiple days a week, which has made employee retention challenging. About 40 percent of staff have reportedly worked at the jail for two years or less.

“It’s not even just lack of staffing, it’s the high turnover rate,” Harris County Chief Public Defender Alex Bunin told HuffPost.

The starting salary for Harris County detention officers is about $34,000 a year. “They don’t make it a career. They treat it as a steppingstone to other work, but it’s basically treated as an entry-level job. It makes it a very hectic and scary place both to work in and to be housed in,” Bunin added. 

Adequate staffing is crucial to preventing jail deaths, because correctional officers are on the front lines watching inmates for signs of injury, illness or suicidal behavior and referring them for medical help.

“Whether you’re talking about jail deaths that result from violence or jail deaths that result from inmate suicide, these are things that can become a problem because of understaffing,” said Wallis Nader, a staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project.

On April 3, Patrick Brown was booked into the jail on allegations that he stole a guitar, a misdemeanor theft charge. His bail was set at $3,000, despite the fact that he had no violent criminal history, the Houston Press reported. Two days later, he was allegedly beaten to death by two other inmates, who were later charged with aggravated assault. In response to that case, the Harris County sheriff suggested that his staff is too stretched to watch the facility’s camera monitors at all times.

A lawsuit filed in April by the family of Patrick Green, another inmate who died last year, claims that guards ignored signs of the bacterial meningitis that killed him. Other inmates allegedly attempted to buzz for staff multiple times, then banged on the walls and held Green up to the glass to show how sick he was. When guards did finally show up, one “kicked Patrick four to five times in the right shoulder” before help was called, according to the lawsuit. (In a May court filing, Harris County acknowledged that Green died of meningitis, but denied the allegations.)

The county paid a $400,000 settlement last year to a mentally ill inmate who was left for weeks in a feces-clogged cell. After that lawsuit, more than two dozen employees were disciplined, including two who were charged with criminal conduct related to falsifying jail logs.

You may be in there with people that are violent or mentally ill or just sick. … You could lose your job if you miss it for a few days. You may have kids to take care of.
Alex Bunin, chief public defender for Harris County

The problems in the jail are exacerbated by the way the bail system works in Harris County. About 70 percent of the jail’s inmates are there because they cannot afford bail. Many individuals accused of low-level crimes await the resolution of their cases behind bars simply because they don’t have the money to purchase their freedom. The Houston Chronicle reported in December that 55 people had died while awaiting trial there since 2009, meaning that dozens of people who were still presumed innocent died in custody.

The county is currently facing a lawsuit filed on behalf of a 22-year-old mother who was jailed over an invalid driver’s license and kept incarcerated because she couldn’t afford the $2,500 bail. That lawsuit was filed by Equal Justice Under Law, a nonprofit that is challenging bail systems across the country.

In Harris County, magistrates setting bail for defendants rarely stray from a “bail schedule” that proposes certain amounts for various crimes. While each defendant is supposed to receive an individual assessment to determine his or her bail, that often doesn’t happen. Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman has said there is a “critical need” to address the bail practices in the county.

“You have two completely different justice systems,” Gerald Wheeler, former director of pretrial services for Harris County, told The Houston Chronicle. “One for the rich and one for the poor.”

Bunin, the chief public defender, said the system puts pressure on people to plead guilty to crimes just to get out of custody.

“You may be in there with people that are violent or mentally ill or just sick. If you’ve never been in that situation before, that would be very scary,” Bunin said. “If you’re a working person, you could lose your job if you miss it for a few days. You may have kids to take care of. You have so many worries about what is going on outside when you’re stuck in there.”

In the short term, at least, the county benefits from pressuring inmates into quick plea deals.

“The unspoken interest is that we have this very efficient system, and if you slow it down, dockets will get longer, it will be harder to process cases,” said Bunin. If more defendants declined to plead guilty, their cases would get “a longer look,” he added, and “maybe not move it so quickly.”

On a Friday evening in June, Christopher Hendricks went into the shower area of the medical detoxification unit at Harris County Jail and tried to kill himself. Hendricks had been booked four days earlier on a felony assault charge against a family member and held after he couldn’t post a $2,000 bond. Guards were able to restore his blood pressure, pulse and breathing, but Hendricks was later declared brain dead.

Jail experts largely agree that most jail suicides could be prevented if the proper procedures were in place, as HuffPost reported.

“We found out about him being in the hospital on Father’s Day,” said Tamara Moe, Hendricks’ sister. “They said they would discuss our options when we got there, so I knew it was not good.”

Told by doctors there was no chance his condition would improve, Hendricks’ family made the difficult decision to remove him from life support. They also agreed to donate his organs, as he had wished.

But first, his family said, representatives of the organ donation group told them that Harris County was blocking the procedure because Hendricks was still officially in custody. (Moe said that message never came directly from county officials.) Harris County told The Houston Press that the situation was resolved after lawyers for the family sent an emergency letter to county officials: Charges against the dying man were dropped, and his family was able to donate his organs.

Moe believes that Harris County wanted bail to be paid for her dying brother so that his death would not technically be in custody. 

Harris County inmates made 186 suicide attempts in 2015, according to county officials. As of June this year, the jail’s inmates had already tried to kill themselves at least 130 times. And this is not a new problem. The Justice Department noted in 2009 that the facility had “a number of conditions that are dangerous for suicidal detainees.”

In one case two years ago, an inmate committed suicide as two guards ate pizza and studied an online training course, skipping the 30-minute required checks. The Houston Chronicle found 35 instances over a number of years in which detention officers skipped cell checks and in some cases covered themselves by faking records.

Several lawsuits filed against Harris County suggest that the county ignored warning signs that inmates would attempt suicide. Jacqueline Smith sued on behalf of her son, Danarian Hawkins, who tried to kill himself at least six times in Harris County Jail.

“A lot of guys say they will kill themselves all the time,” commented one jail guard, according to the lawsuit. “We didn’t think that [Hawkins] was serious.”

So they allowed Hawkins to keep a bedsheet in his cell. He was found dead on Feb. 5, 2014. He had tied the sheet to a smoke detector and hung himself.

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