Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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May 19
The Orlando Sentinel on Gov. Ron DeSantis stating user error may be one reason why Floridians haven’t received their unemployment benefits:
As if getting laid off isn’t scary enough, as if getting put through the unemployment wringer isn’t humiliating and frustrating enough, Gov. Ron DeSantis has decided to start blaming the jobless for the state’s failure to pay benefits.
In other words, the governor thinks the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of people who still haven’t received unemployment benefits to pay for rent and food have only themselves to blame. User error.
Not a state unemployment system that was designed to fail and frustrate workers who find themselves out of a job through no fault of their own. A system that, in the year 2020, is asking people to fax information.
We get the governor’s frustration. DeSantis is taking a lot of heat for an albatross he inherited from former Gov. Rick Scott. And DeSantis had been in office barely a year when the economy collapsed, producing an unprecedented number of claims (not that we think fixing the system would have ever been a priority for the governor without the prompting of a pandemic).
But we’ve reached a new level of tone-deafness when responsibility is shifted from the state to the citizens who desperately need benefits they’re entitled to.
How many times have we heard that government should be run like a business? Even if we take DeSantis at his word, that applicants who haven’t gotten paid are making mistakes, then why isn’t the government doing everything in its power to help customers rectify those mistakes rather than pointing an accusing finger at them?
The governor’s newly aggressive posture first emerged on Friday during a press conference when, asked by a reporter about out-of-work Floridians not getting benefits even though they first applied in March, the governor snapped, “Who’s been waiting?”
The reporter replied that he already had sent the names to the Department of Economic Opportunity, which runs the unemployment system.
That prompted DeSantis to say: “I can tell you that DEO goes through this, and nine times out of 10 the application’s incomplete. And I think if you have complied in that time period, and your application’s complete, and you qualify, I think 99.99% of those folks have been paid.”
Meet some people who haven’t been paid, governor, and who don’t appear to have botched the applications they first filed in March.
Angelique Sambrook was an events planner for The Porch restaurant in Winter Park. She first applied for unemployment on March 22 and was twice deemed ineligible even though she had worked there more than five years.
She’s spent hours on the phone, hours on the state website, and has no explanation yet for why the state turned her down.
Or Astrid Lowe, a Central Florida YMCA employee who filed her claim on March 20, the day after she was furloughed. Let’s hear her story in her own words:
“As of today it still states pending, and I have not received any benefits. I have called hundreds and hundreds of times without anyone picking up the phone! I have emailed and am only getting an ERROR messages back. On May 1, I finally got hold of someone at the DEO and he suggested via a supervisor to reapply on their new website specifically for COVID-19 people. He claimed it was easier and faster. That has now been 2.5 weeks and all it says is ‘submitted.’ I am beside myself with frustration. My employer, who I reached out to on Friday, hasn’t even received my claim and it now has been 8 weeks. The system is so messed up it is absolutely ridiculous.”
Here’s Bill Christman of Kissimmee, a personal trainer at LA Fitness who applied for unemployment on March 18:
“I provided all information that DEO requested, even after being inexplicably kicked off the site multiple times. I called to check on the status of my benefits at the 4-5 week mark and was told everything was in order and to keep waiting. I called at the 8-9 week mark and again was advised that everything was in order with my claim and to hurry up and wait. While Disney cast members have already stared to receive their benefits, I haven’t seen a cent. I have worked entire adult life and just want the benefits I’ve earned and am allegedly entitled to. It’s beyond frustrating not knowing if I will receive benefits or not. My fear is I have waited this whole time just for the DEO to reject my claim in the end for no reason.”
Thousands more just like them are waiting. According to the state’s own dashboard, 1.37 million people have applied for unemployment, and the state has paid nearly 780,000 of those, a little more than half.
The governor probably is right that many of those who haven’t been paid were deemed ineligible to receive unemployment for one reason or another. What’s mystifying is how DeSantis, knowing better than anyone how lousy and glitchy the state’s system is, can be so confident those people truly are not eligible.
This was a bad moment for the governor. People are hurting. They’re scared. They’re broke. But DeSantis gets peevish, and sounds like he’s totally over answering questions about unemployment benefits.
So over it that, after declaring his belief that user error is behind so many of the problems on Friday, he pleaded with reporters to change the subject, aking, “Does anyone have any questions about, kind of, Florida’s reopening?”
Online: https://www.orlandosentinel.com
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May 17
The Miami Herald on Miami governement leaders sanctioning the removal of a homeless encampment:
Obviously, there was a failure to communicate.
In a blatantly thoughtless act, workers showed up Wednesday morning at a long-standing homeless encampment under an Overtown overpass, posted a metal sign in the ground saying anyone on the premises was trespassing, then forcibly removed the people - yes, the homeless are people, too - to who-knows-where.
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The workers, of course, were following ill-thought-out orders, gathering the heap of belongings left behind in the makeshift tents set up along Northwest Second Avenue and 11th Street in Miami. By Wednesday night, the Greater Miami ACLU and Southern Legal Council, sent a letter to the leaders of Miami, Miami-Dade County and the Florida Department of Transportation, calling the eviction an “indefensible and inhumane assault.”
A group of local activists, the Dream Defenders, captured on video the poorly conceived mission and posted it on social media. Outrage, including the Editorial Board’s, ensued.
Kicking homeless Miamians out of their “home” in the middle of a pandemic is ridiculous. Doing so without a clear plan as to where to house them, testing them for COVID-19 and getting treatment for anyone testing positive is sheer - and dangerous - lunacy.
For hours, it was unclear who had ordered the camp cleanup. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez wanted it known that the county had nothing to do with such an careless action. Ron Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust, told the Editorial Board that his agency, charged with ending homelessness in the county, had no knowledge that a homeless community would be upended.
“We were kept in the dark and were not given any warning,” he said.
A clarification from Miami city staff given to the Editorial Board said that: “This cleanup was coordinated by the Neighborhood Enhancement Team (NET) and several other City of Miami Departments … and the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT). This was a cleanup that has been planned for several weeks due to the unsanitary conditions.
“This was not a break down or removal of an encampment,” the explanation from the city states.
The clarification continues: “City staff discarded trash and/or contaminated items that were on the city right-of-way. FDOT was responsible for clearing any items that resided on FDOT property,” which means, under the overpass.” So the area was cleared out.
So, basically, it was the “break down or removal of an encampment.”
The city’s explanation recognizes that CDC guidelines “do recommend not disbanding encampments during a pandemic.” But those guidelines, the explanation states, also require social distancing at 12 feet within encampments. “These guidelines were not being adhered to at this encampment,” the city said.
However, we are not persuaded that dispersing homeless residents into the wider community, offering them, perhaps, only one night in a hotel and, most important, failing to test them for the coronavirius was a smart move. Especially in a city that, so far has moved with all due caution to protect residents.
This could have been handled much more humanely by alerting homeless agencies that such an action would take, finding the homeless accommodations and leading them to coronavirus testing.
Miami blew this one.
Online: https://www.miamiherald.com/
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May 17
The Palm Beach Post on nursing homes seeking immunity from civil and criminal litigation stemming from the virus pandemic:
COVID-19 is at its deadliest in nursing homes.
Start with a highly vulnerable population: elderly men and women, often with underlying health conditions, frequently in need of hands-on assistance from aides. Put them in indoor spaces shared by dozens of the similarly susceptible — and you have a perfect formula for the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus that has killed more than 85,000 Americans. And counting.
Sure enough, of the 1,917 Floridians who had succumbed to COVID-19 — the disease caused by the coronavirus — as of Friday, 43% were residents or workers at long-term care facilities, according to state reports. Of the 263 people who had died in Palm Beach County, roughly 30% were linked to elder care homes.
The toll surely would be worse were it not for one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ indisputably effective measures early in the coronavirus crisis: sealing off nursing homes from outsiders, including close relatives, to sharply limit the chances that the virus would make its way inside.
(DeSantis is now considering easing the nearly two-month-old ban, while AARP Florida, laudably, is calling for more widespread testing in all elder-care facilities to ensure that face-to-face visits are safe.)
The spouses and sons and daughters of these facilities’ residents have been in anguish since this pandemic began, filled with worry for their loved ones’ welfare and helpless to comfort them in person or inspect their living conditions to ensure that adequate care is being taken to keep them safe from the virus’ spread.
Now, the nursing-home industry is seeking to eliminate a relative’s recourse if the quality of care is so sloppy that it results in a resident’s falling ill or dying. The association representing nursing homes wants Florida to grant their industry protection from lawsuits alleging inadequate patient care during the pandemic.
The governor and the Legislature should say no.
The state’s largest nursing-home association sent a letter to DeSantis on April 3 requesting that he use his executive authority to shield nursing homes from civil and criminal litigation stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed blanket immunity shouldn’t apply to willful or intentional criminal misconduct or gross negligence, the group said. But the facilities do want protection from problems resulting from staffing or resource shortages.
DeSantis hasn’t directly said what he intends to do. In the meantime, the well-known Florida law firm Morgan & Morgan has announced it will sue a nursing home in Ormond Beach where 16 residents died, according to state data, and another in Suwanee County where 18 have died.
An state industry spokeswoman belittled the announcement as “trial lawyers positioning themselves to profit from this tragic situation.”
But a lawsuit will provide a way of finding out why so many people died in these two places. Families of these residents should have the right to a probe. There is no good reason to spare nursing homes with death tolls like these from close scrutiny.
The push for such legal immunity in Florida is part of a national drive by the American Health Care Association, which represents nearly all of the nation’s more than 15,000 nursing homes — almost 70% of which are owned by for-profit companies. Hundreds have been bought and sold in recent years by private-equity firms.
This means that even before the pandemic, many nursing homes faced powerful temptations to cut corners on residents’ care to maintain their financial margins.
The industry, in fact, regularly seeks to reduce staffing requirements and inspections. In 2014, for example, the Florida Legislature passed a law making it harder to sue nursing homes for punitive damages and preventing “passive” investors from being named in lawsuits.
To clear this industry of the threat of civil lawsuits now, when hundreds are dying, the state would be saying, in effect, “We trust you to do the right thing.” Unfortunately, plenty of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in Florida have shown they can’t be trusted to do the right thing.
As of last month, only 68% of Florida’s 691 nursing homes have installed generators and fuel tanks to comply with the 2018 law requiring backup power sources, and obtained all the necessary local and state approvals. Another 15% of facilities obtained variances from the law, but do have onsite temporary generators and the capability to obtain the fuel necessary for 96 hours of power in an emergency.
In other words, almost three years after former Gov. Rick Scott pushed this law in the wake of the disastrous deaths of 12 residents of a sweltering Hollywood nursing home whose power was knocked out by Hurricane Irma, one in six of Florida’s licensed providers still haven’t installed generators or obtained variances.
Some lawmakers, thankfully, are taking notice. The incoming Senate president, Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, has suggested that this industry’s foot-dragging on the generator requirement could affect its chances of getting lawsuit protection.
“I would suspect the state would have no mercy on folks who are not doing what they are supposed to be doing or should be doing,” Simpson told the Tampa Bay Times.
Sounds good. But will that display of nerve translate into real backbone? The record isn’t encouraging.
So far, the nursing-home industry’s national lobbying effort has brought them victories in at least 15 states, including New York, where 5,300 nursing-home residents have died. Lawmakers tucked a nursing-home immunity provision in a sweeping budget bill enacted in March.
Now some New York state legislators are being flooded by complaints that poor staffing and shoddy conditions allowed the virus to spread out of control in some of the state’s nursing homes, the New York Times reports - and these legislators want the new law repealed.
DeSantis and Florida legislators shouldn’t make the same mistake. Our most vulnerable deserve our most resolve when it comes to accountability.
Online: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/
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