Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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March 31
The Orlando Sentinel on how lawmakers handle health care:
Hundreds of thousands of Floridians each year struggle with mental-health problems and substance abuse. Their hardship extends to their families and even to the state’s economy, which loses billions of dollars a year in productivity.
State lawmakers took some significant steps during their regular session this year to improve mental-health and substance-abuse care. But once again, they squandered the opportunity that would have made the biggest positive difference.
First, the improvements.
Lawmakers passed legislation that should help Floridians who need treatment get it sooner, before their problems require acute, high-cost care in state mental hospitals. That’s important, because those hospitals are understaffed and underfunded.
They approved a measure that will require multiple players with a role in mental-health and substance-abuse treatment to coordinate their efforts. They gave courts more discretion in diverting mentally ill offenders from jail to treatment. To counter a shortage of psychiatrists, they authorized psychiatric nurses to prescribe some medications.
And the budget they passed for next year included a $65 million increase in funding for mental health and substance abuse. That’s a substantial sum, though it’s only about half what lawmakers would need to allocate just to get spending back to its level in 2001, after accounting for inflation.
Leading authorities on mental-health and substance-abuse treatment such as Miami-Dade County Judge Steve Leifman say Florida needs to invest more in those categories to improve care and expand access. Leifman told the Tampa Bay Times that $65 million is “a lot of money for us. But is it enough? No.”
Which brings us to the squandered opportunity.
Last year, the state Senate overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan plan to accept $50 billion from the federal government over a decade to provide private insurance for 800,000 lower-income Floridians. The feds would have covered the full cost through 2016, then dialed back their share to 90 percent of the cost by 2020. Florida’s chief economist said taxes generated by the increased economic activity would have paid for the state’s share.
Even so, the House and Gov. Rick Scott rejected the plan. They objected to the source of the dollars - the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare - and they mischaracterized the plan as an expansion of government coverage under Medicaid. The bitter standoff caused the 2015 session to break up three days early.
This year, facing unrelenting opposition from the House and Scott to accepting the federal funds, Senate leaders didn’t mount a serious effort to revive their plan. Tallahassee insiders don’t expect the idea to make a comeback next year, either.
Recently, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report made clear the pain that this partisanship has caused, starting with Floridians in need of mental-health and substance-abuse care. About 309,000 uninsured Floridians with a serious need for treatment in 2014 would have been eligible for coverage if the state had accepted federal health dollars.
About two-thirds of uninsured Floridians don’t get treatment, according to the report. Many of them end up jobless, homeless or behind bars. For the third who get treatment, the cost of their uncompensated care gets shifted to hospitals and other health providers, local governments and patients with insurance.
So for all the progress they made this year on mental health and substance abuse, state lawmakers could accomplish far more - if they would only put aside partisanship, defy insiders’ expectations, and finally embrace a golden opportunity to expand care to uninsured Floridians.
Online: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/
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March 31
The Bradenton Herald on juvenile detention costs:
Good governance came to the fore March 29 when Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill into law that corrects an atrocious inequity long fought by dozens of Florida counties. This marks the end to the years-long legal tussle between the state and counties over the cost of juvenile detention.
Manatee County commissioners are rightfully ecstatic. “Awesome,” Chairwoman Vanessa Baugh told Herald reporter Kate Irby.
Thanks to Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, sponsor of this legislation, county taxpayers will no longer bear the burden of paying more than their fair share of those costs, leaving more money for local programs and projects. Kudos to his son, too, Rep. Chris Latvala, R-Clearwater, who pushed the House version of the bill.
State law requires counties to pay the predisposition costs of detaining underage offenders. After sentencing, the state picks up the bill.
Beginning next year, the state and 38 counties will split the expense evenly, 50-50, far better than the state policy that required a 57-percent share by counties not fiscally restrained (mostly rural areas that are exempt from these costs). This fiscal year, the new law pumps $11.2 million in state dollars into detention bills, thus reducing county payments immediately - another plus.
Latvala’s law also settles another hotly contested dispute - the state’s bizarre billing system by which counties prepaid the cost of incarcerating juveniles before adjudication according to an estimate by the Department of Juvenile Justice. This guessing game proved expensive for counties.
DJJ’s assessments often led to overpayments - an unseemly system that ultimately cost counties some $200 million, money the state kept. The counties sued to recover those tax dollars and won a 2013 state appeals court decision that confirmed counties were overpaying for juvenile detention.
Under the new system in Latvala’s legislation, DJJ will now bill counties for actual costs after they’ve been expended during the previous year. The simple logic of that system had escaped state policymakers.
To win legislative passage, some two dozen counties agreed to abandon pending lawsuits should the bill become law. Manatee County joined that successful bid to resolve the issue, sending a letter to Latvala last month agreeing to drop the legal challenge.
The history of this issue illustrates once again the Legislature’s propensity to shift state costs onto counties, thus giving lawmakers more money to spend on pet projects and other programs. It also reflects political disdain for the electorate.
In 1998, Florida voters amended the Constitution, mandating the state pay the full cost of the state court system beginning in 2004. That didn’t sit well with legislators, who revised state law so counties paid pre-sentencing costs of juvenile detention. That launched the legal battle.
The feud heated up in 2009 when DJJ determined the counties’ share should be 75 percent, but an appeals court invalidated that amount in 2013 and cited a figure of 32 percent. Since the Legislature did not address this in 2014, Scott and DJJ implemented the current 57-43 percent formula, with counties paying the higher amount — which they justifiably fought as still unfair.
This Editorial Board has railed against this injustice many times over the past few years. Both the Senate and House finally addressed the inequity with unanimous votes in both chambers, thus serving their constituents. And Gov. Scott didn’t hesitate in signing the bill into law only a few days after receiving it. Local taxpayers are the winners here.
This matter is finally closed.
Online: https://www.bradenton.com/
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April 2
The Miami Herald on how the state has handled prison deaths:
The heartbroken families of relatives who died under suspicious circumstances behind bars in Florida’s prisons have every reason to ask, Will the stonewalling ever end?
One more family, one of too many, has been pushed down the rabbit hole, searching for answers about their loved one’s death, possibly the result of official neglect, indifference or violence.
It’s yet another account of governmental entities doing more to obscure than shed light on what’s still amiss in Florida prisons, in spite of some improvements since Corrections Secretary Julie Jones has come on board. But what look like coverups continue, and if elected officials and state bureaucrats allow them to go unaddressed, then they, too, are culpable.
As reported by Herald writer Julie K. Brown, in several letters, Michael Baker - now the late Michael Baker - begged for relatives’ help. An inmate at Santa Rosa Correctional Institution in the Panhandle, Baker said he had been beaten and had his teeth kicked out, and that corrections officers doused him in chemicals because, he alleged, he filed complaints against them.
In addition, Baker had sickle cell disease. According to his sister, he told her in several tearful phone conversations that nurses were withholding his medication.
“It’s just heartbreaking,” said Baker’s attorney, James V. Cook. “I have a series of five or six letters in which, in letter after letter, he tells me the nurses are making fun of him, they are telling him to go ahead and just die.”
And that’s what Baker did on March 10, in a private hospital after his excruciating pain allegedly had been ignored too long.
Such stories of cold-hearted and deliberate negligence have become a chillingly familiar story throughout Florida’s corrections system. As a result, Corizon, the private company that provides medical care in prisons is on the way out, and not a moment too soon. Florida taxpayers were funding the $1.1 billion contract and buying, along with healthcare, suspicious inmate deaths that were covered up or never reviewed, inadequate staffing and, as in Michael Baker’s case, complaints of neglectful care that were ignored. Bad deal.
Corizon terminated its contract with the state in the fall. It will be replaced by Centurion of Florida, a well-connected firm that lawmakers and Ms. Jones must ensure provides the total opposite of Corizon’s substandard performance.
However, the nightmare for many families hasn’t ended. In the case of Baker’s family, they have requested an autopsy report. But Medical Examiner Andrea Minyard won’t do it, and does not have to - it’s up to her discretion. Why doesn’t she want answers, too?
In Ocala, a contoversial autopsy found the death of Latandra Ellington - an inmate who predicted her own death, likely at the hands of an abusive prison guard who threatened to kill her - to be from natural causes, despite a finding of near-toxic levels of a blood pressure medication in her system.
And in Miami-Dade County, a preliminary autopsy in the most notorious recent prison death, that of Darren Rainey, declared his demise - in a scalding-hot shower in a locked stall - accidental.
This questionable pattern around the state continues to let some state employees, possibly, get away with murder. And that lack of accountability means Floridians still aren’t getting their money’s worth.
Online: https://www.miamiherald.com/
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