Oregon

They Were Entitled to Free Care. Hospitals Hounded Them to Pay.

In 2018, senior executives at one of the country’s largest nonprofit hospital chains, Providence, were frustrated. They were spending hundreds of millions of dollars providing free health care to patients. It was eating into their bottom line.

The executives, led by Providence’s chief financial officer at the time, devised a solution: a program called Rev-Up.

Rev-Up provided Providence’s employees with a detailed playbook for wringing money out of patients — even those who were supposed to receive free care because of their low incomes, a New York Times investigation found.

nonprofits like Providence. They enjoy lucrative tax exemptions; Providence avoids more than $1 billion a year in taxes. In exchange, the Internal Revenue Service requires them to provide services, such as free care for the poor, that benefit the communities in which they operate.

But in recent decades, many of the hospitals have become virtually indistinguishable from for-profit companies, adopting an unrelenting focus on the bottom line and straying from their traditional charitable missions.

focused on investments in rich communities at the expense of poorer ones.

And, as Providence illustrates, some hospital systems have not only reduced their emphasis on providing free care to the poor but also developed elaborate systems to convert needy patients into sources of revenue. The result, in the case of Providence, is that thousands of poor patients were saddled with debts that they never should have owed, The Times found.

provide. That was below the average of 2 percent for nonprofit hospitals nationwide, according to an analysis of hospital financial records by Ge Bai, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Ten states, however, have adopted their own laws that specify which patients, based on their income and family size, qualify for free or discounted care. Among them is Washington, where Providence is based. All hospitals in the state must provide free care for anyone who makes under 300 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four, that threshold is $83,250 a year.

In February, Bob Ferguson, the state’s attorney general, accused Providence of violating state law, in part by using debt collectors to pursue more than 55,000 patient accounts. The suit alleged that Providence wrongly claimed those patients owed a total of more than $73 million.

Providence, which is fighting the lawsuit, has said it will stop using debt collectors to pursue money from low-income patients who should qualify for free care in Washington.

But The Times found that the problems extend beyond Washington. In interviews, patients in California and Oregon who qualified for free care said they had been charged thousands of dollars and then harassed by collection agents. Many saw their credit scores ruined. Others had to cut back on groceries to pay what Providence claimed they owed. In both states, nonprofit hospitals are required by law to provide low-income patients with free or discounted care.

“I felt a little betrayed,” said Bev Kolpin, 57, who had worked as a sonogram technician at a Providence hospital in Oregon. Then she went on unpaid leave to have surgery to remove a cyst. The hospital billed her $8,000 even though she was eligible for discounted care, she said. “I had worked for them and given them so much, and they didn’t give me anything.” (The hospital forgave her debt only after a lawyer contacted Providence on Ms. Kolpin’s behalf.)

was a single room with four beds. The hospital charged patients $1 a day, not including extras like whiskey.

Patients rarely paid in cash, sometimes offering chickens, ducks and blankets in exchange for care.

At the time, hospitals in the United States were set up to do what Providence did — provide inexpensive care to the poor. Wealthier people usually hired doctors to treat them at home.

wrote to the Senate in 2005.

Some hospital executives have embraced the comparison to for-profit companies. Dr. Rod Hochman, Providence’s chief executive, told an industry publication in 2021 that “‘nonprofit health care’ is a misnomer.”

“It is tax-exempt health care,” he said. “It still makes profits.”

Those profits, he added, support the hospital’s mission. “Every dollar we make is going to go right back into Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Alaska and Montana.”

Since Dr. Hochman took over in 2013, Providence has become a financial powerhouse. Last year, it earned $1.2 billion in profits through investments. (So far this year, Providence has lost money.)

Providence also owes some of its wealth to its nonprofit status. In 2019, the latest year available, Providence received roughly $1.2 billion in federal, state and local tax breaks, according to the Lown Institute, a think tank that studies health care.

a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures.”

Ms. Tizon, the spokeswoman for Providence, said the intent of Rev-Up was “not to target or pressure those in financial distress.” Instead, she said, “it aimed to provide patients with greater pricing transparency.”

“We recognize the tone of the training materials developed by McKinsey was not consistent with our values,” she said, adding that Providence modified the materials “to ensure we are communicating with each patient with compassion and respect.”

But employees who were responsible for collecting money from patients said the aggressive tactics went beyond the scripts provided by McKinsey. In some Providence collection departments, wall-mounted charts shaped like oversize thermometers tracked employees’ progress toward hitting their monthly collection goals, the current and former Providence employees said.

On Halloween at one of Providence’s hospitals, an employee dressed up as a wrestler named Rev-Up Ricky, according to the Washington lawsuit. Another costume featured a giant cardboard dollar sign with “How” printed on top of it, referring to the way the staff was supposed to ask patients how, not whether, they would pay. Ms. Tizon said such costumes were “not the culture we strive for.”

financial assistance policy, his low income qualified him for free care.

In early 2021, Mr. Aguirre said, he received a bill from Providence for $4,394.45. He told Providence that he could not afford to pay.

Providence sent his account to Harris & Harris, a debt collection company. Mr. Aguirre said that Harris & Harris employees had called him repeatedly for weeks and that the ordeal made him wary of going to Providence again.

“I try my best not to go to their emergency room even though my daughters have gotten sick, and I got sick,” Mr. Aguirre said, noting that one of his daughters needed a biopsy and that he had trouble breathing when he had Covid. “I have this big fear in me.”

That is the outcome that hospitals like Providence may be hoping for, said Dean A. Zerbe, who investigated nonprofit hospitals when he worked for the Senate Finance Committee under Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.

“They just want to make sure that they never come back to that hospital and they tell all their friends never to go back to that hospital,” Mr. Zerbe said.

The Everett Daily Herald, Providence forgave her bill and refunded the payments she had made.

In June, she got another letter from Providence. This one asked her to donate money to the hospital: “No gift is too small to make a meaningful impact.”

Following a Script ‘Like Robots’

In 2019, Vanessa Weller, a single mother who is a manager at a Wendy’s restaurant in Anchorage, went to Providence Alaska Medical Center, the state’s largest hospital.

She was 24 weeks pregnant and experiencing severe abdominal pains. “Let this just be cramps,” she recalled telling herself.

Ms. Weller was in labor. She gave birth via cesarean section to a boy who weighed barely a pound. She named him Isaiah. As she was lying in bed, pain radiating across her abdomen, she said, a hospital employee asked how she would like to pay. She replied that she had applied for Medicaid, which she hoped would cover the bill.

After five days in the hospital, Isaiah died.

Then Ms. Weller got caught up in Providence’s new, revenue-boosting policies.

The phone calls began about a month after she left the hospital. Ms. Weller remembers panicking when Providence employees told her what she owed: $125,000, or about four times her annual salary.

She said she had repeatedly told Providence that she was already stretched thin as a single mother with a toddler. Providence’s representatives asked if she could pay half the amount. On later calls, she said, she was offered a payment plan.

“It was like they were following some script,” she said. “Like robots.”

Later that year, a Providence executive questioned why Ms. Weller had a balance, given her low income, according to emails disclosed in Washington’s litigation with Providence. A colleague replied that her debts previously would have been forgiven but that Providence’s new policy meant that “balances after Medicaid are being excluded from presumptive charity process.”

Ms. Weller said she had to change her phone number to make the calls stop. Her credit score plummeted from a decent 650 to a lousy 400. She has not paid any of her bill.

Susan C. Beachy and Beena Raghavendran contributed research.

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Hispanic Population In Portland Is Growing Rapidly

A specific city in Oregon has seen a huge amount of growth in the Hispanic community.

It’s almost 7 o’clock at night and Rosa Ramirez has had a fruitful day. Today her sales were good, but Ramirez says it isn’t always this way.

Rosa Ramirez moved to Oregon from El Salvador.

She sells pupusas that she makes at a market in Hillsboro, Oregon. It’s a traditional dish from her home country of El Salvador.

Ramirez says she was pregnant when she almost died at a shooting during the civil war in her country.

Her unborn child did not survive. Heartbroken, she left El Salvador in 1992. Oregon has been her home for the last 30 years.

“When I came here there was almost no one who spoke Spanish. Only English, and it was difficult for me because I was a nanny, and I was working for people who only spoke English and then I started fighting with the language,” said Ramirez.

She is one of the almost 600,000 Latinos living in the state.

According to the 2020 Census, Oregon’s Latino population grew by more than 30% in the last ten years.

Latinos are now the largest minority group in the state and their numbers have grown faster than the national rate in each of the last three decades.

Maria Caballero Rubio is the executive director of Centro Cultural in Washington County.

“That just shows that we are making a mark and we are growing. And I think people are acknowledging that we are a growing population,” said Rubio.

She has seen steady growth since her farmworker family settled in Washington County in 1969. They migrated from Durango, Mexico.

“Maybe eight years ago, the only flags we had up here were the Mexican flag, because a lot of people were from, [or] have their ethnicity from Mexico. And then we had the American flag. But then the more that we started having visitors, they would say to me, you know, ‘where’s my flag?’ so, we decided that we would bring in the flag for people who’ve come to visit,” said Rubio.

Caballero says that the thriving Latino population is starting to rise out of the fields and into professional jobs.

“We had jobs in farm work or we had farms, jobs in in landscaping and those kinds of things. But more and more, as our communities have stayed here and the next generations have grown up and they become educated, they are coming back as professionals,” she continued.

More than half of Oregon’s Latino population is in three counties: Multnomah, Washington and Marion. There the Latino communities grew by at least 25% in the last decades.

“We are becoming more visible now, I have to say. Ten years ago, you couldn’t find an elected official here in Washington County or the Portland metro area that was Latino,” said Rubio.

In fact, Carmen Rubio became Portland’s first Latino city commissioner in 2020. She is Maria’s daughter.

Maria says the younger population may cause a shift in politics as more become eligible to vote when they turn 18.

NEWSY’S AXEL TURCIOS: There’s more representation in the Latino community, in the state legislature, city councils, more Latinos getting into office, representing these growing communities across the state. Will this last?

MARIA CABALLERO RUBIO: I think so. I think it will last. We’re going to move forward and we’re going to continue making change, you know, social and systems changes that need to happen because of the historic disenfranchisement of people of color.

The state once legally banned Black people.

“But, you know, department heads and managers and, you know, police chiefs and all of those. I think that they have not — they have not taken steps to be more inclusive in terms of recruiting and making it more more available to people of color to apply it. That’s an area that we still lack,” said Rubio.

The increase in the Latino population here in Oregon has also been propelled by new waves of migrants. One of those waves is Venezuelan migration, fleeing poverty and the government in their country. According to the American Community Survey, there are more than 1,400 Venezuelans living in the state of Oregon.

Giselle Rincon is the president and co-founder of Venezuela’s Voice in Oregon.

“Everybody’s struggling to find food, medical supplies or jobs, especially safety,” said Rincon. She says the new Venezuelan migrants are facing new challenges.

“Mostly access to education, how to find a job, how to navigate the system, where to apply. Most of the Venezuelans are professionals and they want to help prosper the economy of Oregon.”

“I think our new generations are becoming more involved. They are, you know, getting an education,” said Jaime Miranda, the owner of M&M Marketplace.

Back at the Hillsboro market, Miranda says he was one of only a few Mexican immigrants in his neighborhood when he moved from Chihuahua, Mexico in 1985. He was 10 years old.

He went to college and has owned this Latino market for 22 years. He started it with only 12 vendors and now the establishment has 66.

TURCIOS: How do you think the new generations of Latinos are shifting culture here in Oregon?

JAIME MIRANDA: You know, from migrant workers to people who are starting their businesses, own their homes, they are getting a career, an education. So, we are definitely shifting to that second generation where they are integrated, and they understand how to navigate the system and be part of the community as a whole.

“Now you see more Hispanics than before. Before, you didn’t see any Hispanics. Hispanics were very rare to find here in Oregon,” said Ramirez.

As for Rosa, she says she carries El Salvador in her heart, but she’s beyond grateful to the United States, a nation that gave her a new life and optimism about the next generation.

: newsy.com

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Why Is The U.S. West Experiencing A Megadrought?

Climate change is affecting the U.S. especially strongly in the west. Rivers and reservoirs are experiencing dangerously low levels.

The Colorado River is vanishing before our eyes.

The nation’s two largest reservoirs are at dangerously low levels.

This was one of them, Lake Mead, In 2001 and then in 2015. In just fourteen years, the lake dropped 143 feet and fires are devastating forests and homes from Oregon to Arizona.

2022 has been a year of drought, but officials say the west has actually been in a megadrought since the year 2000.

Why is it so dry out west? Should we blame climate change? And most importantly for the 79 million Americans that live in the U.S. West: Is this the new normal?

Scientists have answered these questions by studying the silent witnesses to climate’s annual fluctuations in trees.

Fat rings usually mean wet years, thin rings mean dry years.

Ancient trees have revealed that the West has suffered periods of drought for centuries, long before giant dams or human-caused climate change.

But in February scientists wrote a paper in the journal Nature Climate Change putting the ongoing megadrought in historical perspective.

They found drought conditions in the west haven’t been this severe in at least 1200 years.

One driver of this megadrought is high temperatures. The blue line indicates the average temperature since 1895.

Meanwhile, since 2000, the west has had mostly low precipitation. Notably, there’s a shortage of snow. Snowpack is more valuable than rain, say scientists, since it moistens soils for months into the summer as it steadily melts.

Robert Davies is an associate professor at Utah State University.

“The snowpack is definitely declining over the last 40 years, particularly in the lower and mid elevations,” said Davies.

There’s another factor, what scientists call vapor pressure deficit, or more simply, dry air. Over the last 22 years, the dry air has grown thirstier and thirstier, sucking moisture right out of the ground.

As the drought has worsened, municipalities have desperately tapped their wells for water, but that’s putting the system at severe risk. For example, in California’s Central Valley, government data shows that groundwater is getting deeper and deeper to access.

So how much of the blame can we pin on climate change? For the Nature paper, the scientists did two experiments using 29 climate models. In one they measured how a warming planet had exacerbated the megadrought. On the other, they simulated what soil moisture would be like if climate change had never happened. The warming planet, they found, made the drought worse by 19%.

A few years of better snow and rain could break the western megadrought, the report says. But its authors expect the U.S. west’s climate to become more and more arid.

In the report it says the “increasingly dry baseline state” makes “future megadroughts increasingly likely” which will change the west for generations to come.

: newsy.com

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Weather Helping, But Threat From Western Fires Persists

By Associated Press
September 11, 2022

Cooler temperatures and rain brought respite to firefighters battling the massive Fairview Fire after sweltering heat last week.

Firefighters made progress against a huge Northern California wildfire that was still growing and threatening thousands of mountain homes, while crews also battled major blazes Sunday in Oregon and Washington.

The Mosquito Fire in foothills east of Sacramento spread to nearly 65 square miles, with 10% containment, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.

“Cooler temperatures and higher humidity assisted with moderating some fire activity,” but higher winds allowed the flames to push to the north and northeast, according to a Cal Fire incident report Sunday.

More than 5,800 structures in Placer and El Dorado counties were under threat and some 11,000 residents of communities including Foresthill and Georgetown were under evacuation orders.

In Southern California, cooler temperatures and rain brought respite to firefighters battling the massive Fairview Fire about 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles after sweltering heat last week.

The 44-square-mile blaze was 45% contained Sunday. The fire has destroyed at least 30 homes and other structures in Riverside County. Two people died while fleeing flames last Monday.

The southern part of the state welcomed the cooler weekend weather as a tropical storm veered off the Pacific Coast and faded, helping put an end to blistering temperatures that nearly overwhelmed the state’s electrical grid.

Thunderstorms and the risk of flooding persisted in mountainous areas of greater Los Angeles on Sunday. But after Hurricane Kay made landfall in Mexico last week it quickly was downgraded and weakened further until it largely disappeared, forecasters said.

In Washington state, a raging wildfire sparked Saturday in the remote Stevens Pass area sent hikers fleeing and forced evacuations of mountain communities. There was no containment Sunday of the Bolt Creek Fire, which had scorched nearly 12 square miles of forestland east of Seattle.

“It’s going to be several days” before crews get a handle on the blaze, Peter Mongillo, spokesperson for Snohomish Regional Fire and Rescue, told the Seattle Times.

California’s Mosquito Fire has covered a large portion of the Northern Sierra region with smoke. California health officials urged people in affected areas to stay indoors where possible. Organizers of the Tour de Tahoe canceled the annual 72-mile bicycle ride scheduled Sunday around Lake Tahoe because of the heavy smoke from the blaze — more than 50 miles away. Last year’s ride was canceled because of smoke from another big fire south of Tahoe.

The Mosquito Fire’s cause remained under investigation. Pacific Gas & Electric said unspecified “electrical activity” occurred close in time to the report of the fire on Tuesday.

Scientists say climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. In the last five years, California has experienced the largest and most destructive fires in state history.

And the rest of the West hasn’t been immune. There were at least 18 large fires burning in Oregon and Washington, leading to evacuations and targeted power outages near Portland as the challenge of dry and windy conditions continued in the region.

Sprawling areas of western Oregon choked by thick smoke from the fires in recent days were expected to see improved air quality on Sunday thanks to a returning onshore flow, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

South of Portland, more than 3,000 residents were under new evacuation orders because of the 134-square-mile Cedar Creek Fire, which has burned for over a month across Lane and Deschutes counties. Firefighters were protecting remote homes in Oakridge, Westfir and surrounding mountain communities.

According to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, this weekend there were more than 400 square miles of active, uncontained fires and nearly 5,000 people on the ground fighting them in the two northwestern states.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Why Is It So Difficult To Tackle Homelessness?

How to resolve homelessness is a long-running topic of conversation, with few easy answers.

The U.S. is struggling to solve its homelessness crisis.

The number of Americans living on the streets and in shelters is growing.

“This is home. Housing is so expensive, and you can’t afford. I would be killing myself to pay rent,” said Knoye Brown, who lives in a tent.

Those rent prices are only increasing.

And that means even more Americans will have a difficult time affording housing.

When you add in record high inflation, that leaves America’s homeless even more vulnerable.

In 2020 nearly 600,000 Americans were left without a home, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Data from the non-profit organization shows overall homelessness has improved by 10% since 2007.

But in 2020, the U.S. saw a 30% increase in unsheltered homelessness.

And in recent months homelessness has reached crisis levels in major cities across the country.

This year Knoxville saw a 50% increase in its homeless population, Long Beach, California saw a 62% increase since 2020 and

Phoenix saw a 33% spike.

Homelessness can come in many forms and can impact all ages.

In January 2020 70% of the homeless were individuals and 30% belonged to families with children.

“I wasn’t able to finish school because I didn’t know where I would sleep after school. So I would stay where I was at, so I had a spot,” said Conner Showen, a former young homeless person.

States and cities have set aside more funding to try to curb the issue.

New York has more than doubled its spending to over $3 billion since 2014.

Colorado’s governor approved $45 million to convert a youth corrections facility into a homeless recovery campus.

And in New Mexico, $10 million is going to communities to buy old motels and hotels and transform them into transitional housing.

These are just a string of new methods in an attempt to tackle a problem that goes back decades.

According to Bloomberg, homelessness first peaked after the Civil War when veterans without jobs struggled to find housing and freed slaves struggled to find affordable homes or jobs.

From then on affordable homes were demolished in many minority neighborhoods as part of urban renewal.

In the 1970s investment in public housing started to decline when President Richard Nixon imposed a moratorium on new public housing after he declared them a failure, and instead pivoted to housing subsidies.

And in the 80s welfare programs to support those in need were cut under President Ronald Reagan’s economic plans to lower taxes for businesses.

Bloomberg adds the AIDS crisis that hit the LGBTQ+ community, a drug epidemic and mass incarceration of people, specifically Black or Hispanic people, also fueled the problem.

This was further exacerbated by policies that favor single family housing zones.

According to the New York Times, most land plots are designed for a single-family house. Many state laws and zoning rules limit the land that can be used to build multi-unit buildings, like apartment buildings that can house multiple families.

“Really it’s a blend of a trifecta of affordable housing, mental illness and substance abuse. When you add those three at various levels for each person, this is what we’re facing,” said Jeff Hicks, the executive director of Hope Rescue Mission.

Other states like California and Oregon have taken other approaches and passed laws in recent years to end single-family zoning so more affordable housing can be built.

Some cities, like Missoula, Montana have moved toward sanction camps, known as temporary safe outdoor spaces.

“49% of the people that have gone through here are now permanently in housing, recovery, or in areas where we mended some family situations, but they have not turned back to the system,” said April Seat, the director of outreach at Hope Rescue Mission.

In the last year a number of state legislatures introduced bills that some say criminalize homelessness.

In Tennessee, it’s now a felony for homeless people to camp in parks or other public property. Some argue this is not the solution.

“I believe it’s only a misdemeanor but with a small misdemeanor and a failure to appear, now you have warrants. You can be jailed at any time, it’s difficult to walk into a state building or federally funded building because you’re worried instead of getting help or resources, you’re scared you’re going to get indebted to a lack of it all,” said Seat.

Others, like Judge Glock with the Cicero Institute, believe camping bans are the right path to helping the homeless long-term.

And record-high inflation is adding another hurdle for Americans struggling to keep up with rising rent prices.

For some those rent price increases are simply unaffordable.

“We do see people falling into homelessness because they can’t afford rent. It’s not like it’s being raised $30 to $60 and some areas are raising $200,” said Seat.

According to government data reviewed by the LA Times, new rent leases have increased by more than 11% year-over-year.

And polling from Freddie Mac found a majority of renters saw a rent price hike in the last year.

One in five say they’re “extremely likely” to miss a payment.

The severity of America’s homeless problem ranges depending on the city and state, but cities across the country are taking action to address the problem.

The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness says the solution is to tackle the housing issue, integrate healthcare, strengthen crisis response systems and build career pathways. But this can’t be done without building and fostering partnerships to address the root causes of homelessness.

: newsy.com

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

California Officials Warn Of Possible Blackouts Due To Extreme Heat

California is experiencing a major heatwave that may cause a statewide blackout due to extreme temperatures.

California’s beaches are about the only bearable place to be as the state endures what is now a week of scorching, triple-digit temperatures.

The state’s electric grid operator anticipates its highest demand ever in the month of September.

“This heat wave is on track to be both the hottest and the longest on record for this state and many parts of the west for the month of September,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Now leaders are increasing the urgency of their warnings to Californians about rolling blackouts if they can’t conserve enough electricity to avoid forecasted shortfalls.

The operator said the state’s grid narrowly avoided outages Monday.

They issued a level three alert Tuesday evening, just one step away from ordering rolling blackouts.

“Just go out early in the morning, and then stay home. That is how I would describe it. It is hot,” said Marilyn Abrams, who is visiting Southern California.

The temperatures have offered no help to firefighters battling more than a dozen blazes across the state.

Near Los Angeles, the so-called Fairview Fire is now deadly and is blamed for two deaths.

The fire is burning uncomfortably close to homes.

Firefighters feared it would explode in the hot, dry conditions this week.

The temperatures are not isolated to California.

Medford, Oregon hit 105 degrees Fahrenheit Tuesday.

And in Vegas? 112 degrees.

In Sacramento it hit 114 degrees.

In Utah, Salt Lake City is having its hottest summer on record.

Fish are washing up dead in the Lost Creek Reservoir where a shrinking water level heats up faster during the day, and deprives fish of oxygen.

“Less fish is always a bad thing, right?” said Tom Thomson, a Utah fisherman.

“Hoping to see more snow and get more water here,” said Steven Randall, a Utah paddleboarder.

Further east in Denver, students were released early as highs hit the upper 90s challenging older schools without A/C.

It’s been a challenge to keep people safe and keep the power on in an oven-hot West.

: newsy.com

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Record-Breaking Temperatures Continue Across The West

While even those lucky enough to have an air-conditioned home, you can’t count on it staying on in some of the worst heat the west has seen in years.

Hellish temperatures across the West — From California to Oregon, Nevada to Utah, temperatures are hitting triple digits in some of the country’s biggest cities, and a massive swath of the West is under some type of heat alert.

Almost the entire state of California is under an excessive heat warning. The state’s electric grid operator declared an energy emergency, warning of rolling blackouts if residents can’t conserve enough energy.

“We have all hands-on-deck ready to respond if there are outages, so that we can get the power restored as quickly and safely as possible,” Southern California Edison Spokesman David Eisenhauer said.

Near Los Angeles, crews are preparing spare transformers as state leaders expect the highest energy demand they’ve seen all year and potentially the most they’ve seen in five years.

In Long Beach, Deree Dickens charges his electric vehicle and worries about what that demand will mean in years to come, with leaders having just voted to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

“We’ve had power issues in the state for years,” he said. “The power grid is already taxed and then you’re going to put greater demand, significantly greater demand, on it by having all electric cars. You know, I don’t see that as a recipe for success personally, at least not not in that time span.”

In the short term, volunteers in Salt Lake City are doing whatever they can to keep cool the homeless who don’t have a place to find refuge.

“It is life or death,” Unsheltered Utah Executive Director Wendy Garvin said. “We really worry about people in this heat. In some ways, the heat is worse than the cold of the winter. We see more deaths from heat stroke than we do freezing injuries or freezing deaths.”

While even those lucky enough to have an air-conditioned home, you can’t count on it staying on in some of the worst heat the west has seen in years.

“I actually had to put a fan in my daughter’s bed because it was that hot,” one San Diego mom said. “My other slept in our room. We had all the windows open, we had gym fans in our room. It was intense. It was intense heat.”

: newsy.com

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Walmart Ordered To Pay Oregon Man $4.4M For Racial Profiling

By Associated Press
August 23, 2022

Walmart spokesperson Randy Hargrove called into question some of the claims and said Walmart considers the verdict “excessive.”

DDA Multnomah County grand jury has ordered Walmart to pay $4.4 million in damages to a man who sued the store, saying he was racially profiled and harassed by a Walmart employee at a Portland, Oregon, area store in 2020.

According to the lawsuit the employee “spied” on Dovey Mangum while shopping, ordered him to leave and called police when he refused, KGW reported.

According to the lawsuit and a news release from his attorneys, Mangum, who was 59 at the time, visited the Walmart in Wood Village on March 26, 2020, to buy a light bulb for his refrigerator. After Mangum arrived, he noticed store employee Joe Williams watching him as he shopped.

Williams told Mangum to leave the store, but Mangum refused, saying he’d done nothing wrong. Mangum’s lawyers said Williams told Mangum he was going to call the police and tell them Mangum had threatened to “smash him in the face.”

Williams called the non-emergency police dispatch line and told the operator he “had a person refusing to leave,” the lawsuit states.

According to Mangum’s lawyers, deputies from the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office responded and “refused to take action against Mangum.” The lawyers said deputies made that decision based on Williams’ “shifting explanations” for the reason he called and because of his “reputation for making false reports to police.”

According to Mangum’s lawyers, the next day, Sheriff’s Sergeant Bryan White and another deputy met with the director of the Walmart and the assistant manager and explained that deputies had noticed a “pattern of behavior” in which Williams would call police to report “dangerous active situations, such as customers physically assaulting him or other employees,” that were not happening.

The store and Walmart corporate officials kept him on the job for several more months. and fired him in July 2020 for “mishandling $35 of Walmart property,” the lawsuit said.

Williams in a deposition denied the allegations that he wrongly called the police, saying Mangum had threatened to hit him.

Mangum filed the lawsuit against Walmart for negligent retention and action against person who summons police with improper intent.

“He lives the same message of self-respect that he teaches to young people, ‘stand up for yourself when you know you’re right,'” Mangum’s trial lawyer, Greg Kafoury, said in a statement. “Because of his courage, we were able to show the jury an unconscionable failure of responsibility by the world’s largest corporation.”

Walmart spokesperson Randy Hargrove called into question some of the claims and said Walmart considers the verdict “excessive.”

“We do not tolerate discrimination. We believe the verdict is excessive and is not supported by the evidence,” Hargrove said in a statement to the news outlet.

He said Mangum interfered with Walmart associates as they were surveilling and stopping confirmed shoplifters, and then refused to leave despite being asked to repeatedly.

“We are reviewing our options including post-trial motions, he said.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press.

: newsy.com

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

How a New Corporate Minimum Tax Could Reshape Business Investments

WASHINGTON — At the center of the new climate and tax package that Democrats appear to be on the verge of passing is one of the most significant changes to America’s tax code in decades: a new corporate minimum tax that could reshape how the federal government collects revenue and alter how the nation’s most profitable companies invest in their businesses.

The proposal is one of the last remaining tax increases in the package that Democrats are aiming to pass along party lines in coming days. After months of intraparty disagreement over whether to raise taxes on the wealthy or roll back some of the 2017 Republican tax cuts to fund their agenda, they have settled on a longstanding political ambition to ensure that large and profitable companies pay more than $0 in federal taxes.

To accomplish this, Democrats have recreated a policy that was last employed in the 1980s: trying to capture tax revenue from companies that report a profit to shareholders on their financial statements while bulking up on deductions to whittle down their tax bills.

reduce their effective tax rates well below the statutory 21 percent. It was originally projected to raise $313 billion in tax revenue over a decade, though the final tally is likely to be $258 billion once the revised bill is finalized.

would eliminate this cap and extend the tax credit until 2032; used cars would also qualify for a credit of up to $4,000.

Energy industry. The bill would provide billions of dollars in rebates for Americans who buy energy efficient and electric appliances as well as tax credits for companies that build new sources of emissions-free electricity, such as wind turbines and solar panels. The package also sets aside $60 billion to encourage clean energy manufacturing in the United States. The bill also requires businesses to pay a financial penalty per metric ton for methane emissions that exceed federal limits starting in 2024.

Because of that complexity, the corporate minimum tax has faced substantial skepticism. It is less efficient than simply eliminating deductions or raising the corporate tax rate and could open the door for companies to find new ways to make their income appear lower to reduce their tax bills.

Similar versions of the idea have been floated by Mr. Biden during his presidential campaign and by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts. They have been promoted as a way to restore fairness to a tax system that has allowed major corporations to dramatically lower their tax bills through deductions and other accounting measures.

According to an early estimate from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax would most likely apply to about 150 companies annually, and the bulk of them would be manufacturers. That spurred an outcry from manufacturing companies and Republicans, who have been opposed to any policies that scale back the tax cuts that they enacted five years ago.

Although many Democrats acknowledge that the corporate minimum tax was not their first choice of tax hikes, they have embraced it as a political winner. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, shared Joint Committee on Taxation data on Thursday indicating that in 2019, about 100 to 125 corporations reported financial statement income greater than $1 billion, yet their effective tax rates were lower than 5 percent. The average income reported on financial statements to shareholders was nearly $9 billion, but they paid an average effective tax rate of just 1.1 percent.

“Companies are paying rock-bottom rates while reporting record profits to their shareholders,” Mr. Wyden said.

told the Senate Finance Committee last year. “This behavioral response poses serious risks for financial accounting and the capital markets.”

Other opponents of the new tax have expressed concerns that it would give more control over the U.S. tax base to the Financial Accounting Standards Board, an independent organization that sets accounting rules.

“The potential politicization of the F.A.S.B. will likely lead to lower-quality financial accounting standards and lower-quality financial accounting earnings,” Ms. Hanlon and Jeffrey L. Hoopes, a University of North Carolina professor, wrote in a letter to members of Congress last year that was signed by more than 260 accounting academics.

the chief economist of the manufacturing association. “Arizona’s manufacturing voters are clearly saying that this tax will hurt our economy.”

Ms. Sinema has expressed opposition to increasing tax rates and had reservations about a proposal to scale back the special tax treatment that hedge fund managers and private equity executives receive for “carried interest.” Democrats scrapped the proposal at her urging.

When an earlier version of a corporate minimum tax was proposed last October, Ms. Sinema issued an approving statement.

“This proposal represents a common sense step toward ensuring that highly profitable corporations — which sometimes can avoid the current corporate tax rate — pay a reasonable minimum corporate tax on their profits, just as everyday Arizonans and Arizona small businesses do,” she said. In announcing that she would back an amended version of the climate and tax bill on Thursday, Ms. Sinema noted that it would “protect advanced manufacturing.”

That won plaudits from business groups on Friday.

“Taxing capital expenditures — investments in new buildings, factories, equipment, etc. — is one of the most economically destructive ways you can raise taxes,” Neil Bradley, chief policy officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. He added, “While we look forward to reviewing the new proposed bill, Senator Sinema deserves credit for recognizing this and fighting for changes.”

Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Wildfires Are Spreading Rapidly Across The U.S.

There are 60 large fires burning across the west, with millions of acres burned. Residents are forced to evacuate their homes.

Huge fires are rapidly growing out west.

“We knew there was a fire we just didn’t think it would reach us,” said Paisley Bamberg, a fire evacuee.

From Nebraska and Wyoming to Washington, Oregon and California, at least 60 large fires are burning in the West.

Dry forecasts are meeting hot temperatures and cooking up a deadly recipe for inferno.

“We’re seeing a lot of fire growth very rapidly. And so we just want to make certain that our citizens are abiding by the evacuation orders and warnings. If you’re in a warning zone, you need to make certain that you’re ready to go should we call an order,” said Amy Travis, who works at the California Office of Emergency Services.

In northern California crews found two more bodies in homes in a remote area near the Oregon border.

That’s where the McKinney fire has burned 56,000 acres, and it’s completely uncontained.

“When that fire came over that ridgeline, it had 100-foot flames for about five miles and the wind was blowing. It was coming down like a solid blowtorch. There was nothing to stop it,” said Roger Derry, who almost lost his home in the blaze.

That fire almost wiped out the town of Klamath River.

“Everything’s gone except you go up towards Oak Knoll there’s one or two houses that are that are still okay. The rest are all gone. I mean, it burned so hot. You can’t believe it,” Derry said.

In Montana, the Elmo Two fire is burning about 20 miles south of Kalispell, forcing evacuations.

Sara Rouse is the public information officer for Northern Rockies Coordination Center Team Seven.

“This afternoon we had some winds come out of the west, pushing the fire east,” Rouse said.

Those winds are keeping helicopters and planes from fighting the fire from the air.

Forecasters are watching storms across the West from California to the four corners, bringing the potential for rain but also wind and lightning — both of which could make the West’s fiery summer worse.

: newsy.com

View

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<