A ritual of spring in America is about to begin. Tens of thousands of people will soon get their tax refunds, and when they do, they will finally be able to afford the thing they’ve thought about for months, if not years: bankruptcy.
It happens every tax season. With many more people suddenly able to pay a lawyer, the number of bankruptcy filings jumps way up in March, stays high in April, then declines.
For the past year, I’ve traveled the country trying to understand why bankruptcy often fails those it’s supposed to help. I analyzed millions of filings and interviewed dozens of judges, lawyers and people struggling with debt. The answer turns out to be simple: People are too broke to go bankrupt. Filing costs money, as does hiring an attorney, which is the best way to make sure you actually get debt relief.
“It’s kind of a worthless solution if you can’t pay because you don’t have money,” said one man who lives in a trailer park in a small town outside Indianapolis. “It’s a sad realization that the legal system isn’t there for us.”
Scores of people considering bankruptcy told me the same thing again and again: If they had $1,000 to pay an attorney, then they probably wouldn’t need to file in the first place. “It’s funny how you buy bankruptcy,” marveled Trina Wright of Memphis.
People who hire lawyers to help them file under Chapter 7 have their debts wiped away almost without fail, national filing data shows. And debtors with attorneys fare far better than those who go it alone, filing pro se. Studies show clear benefits for those who successfully wipe out their debts, from higher credit scores to higher incomes. Moreover, this sort of targeted relief can help buoy the broader economy.
Those who can’t afford attorneys often turn to bad options with predictably bad outcomes. Some try to wrangle the complicated bankruptcy forms on their own, risking costly mistakes. Others are lured by unregulated “petition preparers” who promise bankruptcy on the cheap. In Los Angeles, I found a whole industry of petition preparers who often flout bankruptcy laws because of a lack of enforcement.
“If we had adequate access to our legal system,” a judge there told me, vulnerable people with debt “would not be this wonderful ripe field for picking by the fraud artists.”
In the South, debtors often avoid the up-front costs by filing bankruptcy under Chapter 13. Unlike Chapter 7, which clears debts after a few months, Chapter 13 is a payment plan that usually lasts five years. Lawyers in the South will often start a Chapter 13 for $0 down, allowing their much larger fees (usually $3,000 to $4,000) to be paid through the plan. This provides immediate protection to low-income debtors, but most are unable to keep up with the payments. Once their cases are dismissed, their debts return.
Faced with options like these, many people simply try to muddle through, often under the threat of having their wages seized by creditors.
Over the past decade, the number of consumer bankruptcies filed each year has ranged from about 800,000 to 1.5 million. That’s a small share of the millions of financially struggling households, and researchers have long argued that many more people would benefit from filing. And while the reasons someone may or may not file for bankruptcy can be complex, it’s clear that an important ingredient is affordability.
So if attorney fees can determine whether, and how, someone declares bankruptcy, can anything be done about them? The good news, I found, is that the answer is yes. The bad news is that none of the fixes are easy.
In a Chapter 7 case, attorney fees, like any other debt, are wiped out. As a result, most bankruptcy lawyers require that clients pay in full before filing. There’s ample evidence that people struggle to gather the money to do this. It’s what you’d expect in a country where nearly half of adults say that if they were hit with an emergency expense of $400, they wouldn’t have the cash on hand to cover it. Black Americans are particularly likely to have low savings, resulting in a variety of bad outcomes such as being unable to save up to file for bankruptcy.
A 2005 bankruptcy bill made the problem worse. In the name of preventing people from cheating their lenders, the bill heaped new requirements on debtors and their lawyers. The scope of such abuses was questionable, but the burdens of the new requirements drove up attorney fees nationwide by about 50 percent. The average attorney fee for a Chapter 7 today tops $1,100, with court fees adding $335 more. The result? Fewer filings, especially by low-income people.
The cleanest solution would be to change the law to allow more flexibility in how debtors pay their lawyers for Chapter 7 cases.
Crafting “a mechanism where people could pay their attorney fees over time would make Chapter 7 more accessible,” said Judge Elizabeth Perris, who retired in 2015 after serving as a bankruptcy judge in Oregon for over 30 years. Perris co-chairs The American Bankruptcy Institute Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy, a panel of experts working on potential improvements to the system to be released later this year.
Perris said the panel will likely make a specific proposal about attorney fees, but whether Congress will take action is less certain. “We’re not naïve,” said Perris. “We understand it might be difficult to get legislative changes through.”
The idea has at least one influential backer in Congress. When I asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a bankruptcy scholar herself, about it, she responded, “There’s a lot for a family to consider when making the painful decision of whether, when, and how to file for bankruptcy. Whether they can pay their lawyer in installments should not be one of them.”
In the interim, there are some lawyers who try workarounds: One of the oldest is for clients to hand over a stack of postdated checks before filing. After the case is filed, these checks are deposited over several months, resulting in a jerry-rigged installment plan. Most judges have decided that arrangement violates the law, but not all.
In a 2015 opinion approving the use of postdated checks, Chief Judge C. Ray Mullins of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Georgia wrote, “To deprive struggling debtors of willing counsel in such a time of need is markedly opposite of the intentions of the Bankruptcy Code.”
In the Southern District of Alabama, the chief bankruptcy judge, Henry Callaway, is working on a different fix. Troubled by the fact that more than 70 percent of bankruptcies in the district are under Chapter 13, he’s drafting a rule that would allow lawyers to break their fees into two parts for a Chapter 7 filing instead. The first would cover services rendered before the bankruptcy petition is filed; the second, services afterward. Because the second agreement is signed after the petition, it has a different legal status and isn’t wiped out like other debts. Unlike in a Chapter 13 case, where debt relief is conditioned on completing a payment plan, this would give clients relief and then allow payments to lawyers over time.
With a rule, he hopes, local attorneys will be more willing to try something different. “Lawyers are not going to do something unless they’re sure they’re not going to get in trouble for it,” he said.
It is, to be sure, a convoluted arrangement. But some judges consider it legal, including a federal appellate court and bankruptcy judges in Florida and Michigan. Its growing popularity has already spawned a cottage industry to facilitate payments.
BK Billing launched in 2016 to manage the two-part agreements for lawyers, usually with clients paying $0 up front. The company helps attorneys craft what they say are legally defensible client agreements and processes the payments.
So far, the company has worked with a “few hundred” attorneys in more than 40 states, said David Stidham, the CEO. But because few judges have decided whether such arrangements are legal, there is wide uncertainty about the BK Billing model. “It’s so wild west right now,” he said.
Sean Mawhinney, the company’s president, said he used the two-part Chapter 7 arrangement when he practiced as a bankruptcy attorney in Utah, where BK Billing is based. Offering Chapter 7 for $0 down made a huge difference for clients, he said, especially those who were having their wages garnished.
“If they can stop the bleeding and get their case filed quickly, then they can make a reasonable payment to the attorney,” he said.
But, of course, BK Billing is a business, and its services come with a cost that can cause problems of its own. To reduce the risk of clients defaulting, BK Billing pays attorneys up front and charges a 25 percent fee. So, if an attorney normally charges $1,000, BK Billing will pay the attorney $750 and then collect $1,000 from the debtor over the following year.
To account for the fee, attorneys are then tempted to charge more. But Stidham said attorneys must be “willing to take a discount.” Attorneys told me, however, that it was hard to resist boosting their fee.
Late last year, the U.S. Trustee for the Central District of California filed a complaint against a local firm for, among other alleged violations, doubling its fees after moving to BK Billing’s model. The U.S. Trustee, the arm of the Justice Department that oversees the bankruptcy system, called the fees unconscionable and is seeking fines against the firm, which argues that its fees are reasonable for the extra services it provides.
Compared with these complicated maneuvers, another solution to the problem of attorney fees seems blessedly simple: Make legal help with bankruptcies free. But civil legal aid organizations, which are the main source of this kind of assistance, are also financially strapped.
“We don’t have enough resources to provide bankruptcy services in all of our counties,” said Steven McGarrity, executive director of Community Legal Aid, which serves clients in central northeast Ohio.
This year, his group, along with legal-services organizations in 11 other states, will begin using a new tool called Upsolve to help more poor debtors file. Developed by a nonprofit in New York, Upsolve is a kind of TurboTax for bankruptcy, walking debtors through the process of gathering the necessary documentation and asking questions in plain language. The software populates the small stack of forms necessary to file, and then a lawyer reviews them. Cases are filed pro se, but if complications arise, the debtor can get help from the lawyer.
“It was a way for us to expand the volume of people we can help without a lot of resources on our end,” said McGarrity.
Perhaps in the future, free help will be available to all who need it. Or maybe Congress will rewrite the law to allow debtors to pay attorneys over time. In the meantime, people struggling with debt will keep on doing what they’ve always done: waiting and hoping for relief.
]]>A ritual of spring in America is about to begin. Tens of thousands of people will soon get their tax refunds, and when they do, they will finally be able to afford the thing they’ve thought about for months, if not years: bankruptcy.
It happens every tax season. With many more people suddenly able to pay a lawyer, the number of bankruptcy filings jumps way up in March, stays high in April, then declines.
For the past year, I’ve traveled the country trying to understand why bankruptcy often fails those it’s supposed to help. I analyzed millions of filings and interviewed dozens of judges, lawyers and people struggling with debt. The answer turns out to be simple: People are too broke to go bankrupt. Filing costs money, as does hiring an attorney, which is the best way to make sure you actually get debt relief.
“It’s kind of a worthless solution if you can’t pay because you don’t have money,” said one man who lives in a trailer park in a small town outside Indianapolis. “It’s a sad realization that the legal system isn’t there for us.”
Scores of people considering bankruptcy told me the same thing again and again: If they had $1,000 to pay an attorney, then they probably wouldn’t need to file in the first place. “It’s funny how you buy bankruptcy,” marveled Trina Wright of Memphis.
People who hire lawyers to help them file under Chapter 7 have their debts wiped away almost without fail, national filing data shows. And debtors with attorneys fare far better than those who go it alone, filing pro se. Studies show clear benefits for those who successfully wipe out their debts, from higher credit scores to higher incomes. Moreover, this sort of targeted relief can help buoy the broader economy.
Those who can’t afford attorneys often turn to bad options with predictably bad outcomes. Some try to wrangle the complicated bankruptcy forms on their own, risking costly mistakes. Others are lured by unregulated “petition preparers” who promise bankruptcy on the cheap. In Los Angeles, I found a whole industry of petition preparers who often flout bankruptcy laws because of a lack of enforcement.
“If we had adequate access to our legal system,” a judge there told me, vulnerable people with debt “would not be this wonderful ripe field for picking by the fraud artists.”
In the South, debtors often avoid the up-front costs by filing bankruptcy under Chapter 13. Unlike Chapter 7, which clears debts after a few months, Chapter 13 is a payment plan that usually lasts five years. Lawyers in the South will often start a Chapter 13 for $0 down, allowing their much larger fees (usually $3,000 to $4,000) to be paid through the plan. This provides immediate protection to low-income debtors, but most are unable to keep up with the payments. Once their cases are dismissed, their debts return.
Faced with options like these, many people simply try to muddle through, often under the threat of having their wages seized by creditors.
Over the past decade, the number of consumer bankruptcies filed each year has ranged from about 800,000 to 1.5 million. That’s a small share of the millions of financially struggling households, and researchers have long argued that many more people would benefit from filing. And while the reasons someone may or may not file for bankruptcy can be complex, it’s clear that an important ingredient is affordability.
So if attorney fees can determine whether, and how, someone declares bankruptcy, can anything be done about them? The good news, I found, is that the answer is yes. The bad news is that none of the fixes are easy.
In a Chapter 7 case, attorney fees, like any other debt, are wiped out. As a result, most bankruptcy lawyers require that clients pay in full before filing. There’s ample evidence that people struggle to gather the money to do this. It’s what you’d expect in a country where nearly half of adults say that if they were hit with an emergency expense of $400, they wouldn’t have the cash on hand to cover it. Black Americans are particularly likely to have low savings, resulting in a variety of bad outcomes such as being unable to save up to file for bankruptcy.
A 2005 bankruptcy bill made the problem worse. In the name of preventing people from cheating their lenders, the bill heaped new requirements on debtors and their lawyers. The scope of such abuses was questionable, but the burdens of the new requirements drove up attorney fees nationwide by about 50 percent. The average attorney fee for a Chapter 7 today tops $1,100, with court fees adding $335 more. The result? Fewer filings, especially by low-income people.
The cleanest solution would be to change the law to allow more flexibility in how debtors pay their lawyers for Chapter 7 cases.
Crafting “a mechanism where people could pay their attorney fees over time would make Chapter 7 more accessible,” said Judge Elizabeth Perris, who retired in 2015 after serving as a bankruptcy judge in Oregon for over 30 years. Perris co-chairs The American Bankruptcy Institute Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy, a panel of experts working on potential improvements to the system to be released later this year.
Perris said the panel will likely make a specific proposal about attorney fees, but whether Congress will take action is less certain. “We’re not naïve,” said Perris. “We understand it might be difficult to get legislative changes through.”
The idea has at least one influential backer in Congress. When I asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a bankruptcy scholar herself, about it, she responded, “There’s a lot for a family to consider when making the painful decision of whether, when, and how to file for bankruptcy. Whether they can pay their lawyer in installments should not be one of them.”
In the interim, there are some lawyers who try workarounds: One of the oldest is for clients to hand over a stack of postdated checks before filing. After the case is filed, these checks are deposited over several months, resulting in a jerry-rigged installment plan. Most judges have decided that arrangement violates the law, but not all.
In a 2015 opinion approving the use of postdated checks, Chief Judge C. Ray Mullins of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Georgia wrote, “To deprive struggling debtors of willing counsel in such a time of need is markedly opposite of the intentions of the Bankruptcy Code.”
In the Southern District of Alabama, the chief bankruptcy judge, Henry Callaway, is working on a different fix. Troubled by the fact that more than 70 percent of bankruptcies in the district are under Chapter 13, he’s drafting a rule that would allow lawyers to break their fees into two parts for a Chapter 7 filing instead. The first would cover services rendered before the bankruptcy petition is filed; the second, services afterward. Because the second agreement is signed after the petition, it has a different legal status and isn’t wiped out like other debts. Unlike in a Chapter 13 case, where debt relief is conditioned on completing a payment plan, this would give clients relief and then allow payments to lawyers over time.
With a rule, he hopes, local attorneys will be more willing to try something different. “Lawyers are not going to do something unless they’re sure they’re not going to get in trouble for it,” he said.
It is, to be sure, a convoluted arrangement. But some judges consider it legal, including a federal appellate court and bankruptcy judges in Florida and Michigan. Its growing popularity has already spawned a cottage industry to facilitate payments.
BK Billing launched in 2016 to manage the two-part agreements for lawyers, usually with clients paying $0 up front. The company helps attorneys craft what they say are legally defensible client agreements and processes the payments.
So far, the company has worked with a “few hundred” attorneys in more than 40 states, said David Stidham, the CEO. But because few judges have decided whether such arrangements are legal, there is wide uncertainty about the BK Billing model. “It’s so wild west right now,” he said.
Sean Mawhinney, the company’s president, said he used the two-part Chapter 7 arrangement when he practiced as a bankruptcy attorney in Utah, where BK Billing is based. Offering Chapter 7 for $0 down made a huge difference for clients, he said, especially those who were having their wages garnished.
“If they can stop the bleeding and get their case filed quickly, then they can make a reasonable payment to the attorney,” he said.
But, of course, BK Billing is a business, and its services come with a cost that can cause problems of its own. To reduce the risk of clients defaulting, BK Billing pays attorneys up front and charges a 25 percent fee. So, if an attorney normally charges $1,000, BK Billing will pay the attorney $750 and then collect $1,000 from the debtor over the following year.
To account for the fee, attorneys are then tempted to charge more. But Stidham said attorneys must be “willing to take a discount.” Attorneys told me, however, that it was hard to resist boosting their fee.
Late last year, the U.S. Trustee for the Central District of California filed a complaint against a local firm for, among other alleged violations, doubling its fees after moving to BK Billing’s model. The U.S. Trustee, the arm of the Justice Department that oversees the bankruptcy system, called the fees unconscionable and is seeking fines against the firm, which argues that its fees are reasonable for the extra services it provides.
Compared with these complicated maneuvers, another solution to the problem of attorney fees seems blessedly simple: Make legal help with bankruptcies free. But civil legal aid organizations, which are the main source of this kind of assistance, are also financially strapped.
“We don’t have enough resources to provide bankruptcy services in all of our counties,” said Steven McGarrity, executive director of Community Legal Aid, which serves clients in central northeast Ohio.
This year, his group, along with legal-services organizations in 11 other states, will begin using a new tool called Upsolve to help more poor debtors file. Developed by a nonprofit in New York, Upsolve is a kind of TurboTax for bankruptcy, walking debtors through the process of gathering the necessary documentation and asking questions in plain language. The software populates the small stack of forms necessary to file, and then a lawyer reviews them. Cases are filed pro se, but if complications arise, the debtor can get help from the lawyer.
“It was a way for us to expand the volume of people we can help without a lot of resources on our end,” said McGarrity.
Perhaps in the future, free help will be available to all who need it. Or maybe Congress will rewrite the law to allow debtors to pay attorneys over time. In the meantime, people struggling with debt will keep on doing what they’ve always done: waiting and hoping for relief.
]]>Would you believe that President Donald Trump is eligible for an extra Social Security benefit of around $15,000 a year because of his 11-year-old son, Barron Trump? Well, you should believe it, because it’s true.
How can this be? Because under Social Security’s rules, anyone like Trump who is old enough to get retirement benefits and still has a child under 18 can get this supplement — without having paid an extra dime in Social Security taxes for it.
The White House declined to tell us whether Trump is taking Social Security benefits, which by our estimate would range from about $47,100 a year (including the Barron bucks) if he began taking them at age 66, to $58,300 if he began at 70, the age at which benefits reach their maximum.
Of course, if Trump, 71, had released his income tax returns the way his predecessors since Richard Nixon did, we would know if he’s taking Social Security and how much he’s getting. There’s no reason, however, to think that he isn’t taking the benefits to which he’s entitled.
Meanwhile, Trump’s new budget proposes to reduce items like food stamps and housing vouchers for low-income people. It doesn’t ask either the rich or the middle class to make sacrifices on the tax or spending side. And it doesn’t touch the extra Social Security benefit for which Trump and about 680,000 other people are eligible.
The average Social Security retiree receives about $16,900 in annual benefits. Does it strike you as bizarre that someone in Trump’s position gets a bonus benefit nearly equal to that?
Does it seem unfair that by contrast to Trump, most male workers — and for biological reasons, an even greater portion of female workers — can’t get child benefits because their kids are at least 18 and out of high school when the workers begin drawing Social Security retirement benefits in their 60s and 70s?
Trump is eligible for the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus, as we’ve named it, because the people who designed Social Security decided in 1939, about five years into the program, that dependents and spouses needed extra support. They didn’t think much (if at all) about future expansion in the number of retirees, primarily male, who would have young kids.
The Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus goes to about 1.1 percent of Social Security retirees and costs about $5.5 billion a year. That’s a mere speck in Social Security’s $960 billion annual outlay.
Yet the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus is a dramatic — and symbolic — example of hidden problems that plague Social Security, problems that few non-wonks recognize and that reform proposals have largely ignored.
Those problems are why the two of us — Allan Sloan, a journalist who has written about Social Security for years; and C. Eugene Steuerle, an economist who has written extensively about Social Security, co-founded the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and is the author of “Dead Men Ruling: How to Restore Fiscal Freedom and Rescue Our Future” — combined forces to write this article.
We want to show you how we can help Social Security start heading in the right direction before its trust fund is tapped out, at which point a crisis atmosphere will prevail and rational conversation will disappear.
Calling for Social Security fixes isn’t new, of course, but the calls usually focus primarily on fixing the increasing gap between the taxes Social Security collects and the benefits it pays.
For us, however, the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus is an example of why reform should not only restore fiscal balance but should also make the system more equitable and efficient, more geared to modern needs and conditions, and more attuned to how providing ever-more years of benefits to future retirees puts at risk government programs that help them and their children during their working years.
If all that mattered were numbers, we could easily provide better protections against poverty with no loss in benefits for today’s retirees, while providing higher average benefits for future retirees. But that works only if the political will is there to update Social Security’s operations and benefit structure. After all, a system designed in the 1930s isn’t necessarily what we’ll need in the 2030s.
And make no mistake about how important Social Security is. Millions of retirees depend heavily on it. According to a recent Census working paper, about half of Social Security retirees receive at least half their income from Social Security — and about 18 percent get at least 90 percent of their income from it. Add in Medicare benefits, and retirees’ reliance on programs funded by the Social Security tax are even higher.
Given the virtual elimination of pension benefits for new private-sector employees and the increasing erosion in pensions for new public-sector employees, Social Security will likely be needed even more in the future than it is today.
Simply throwing more money at Social Security isn’t the way to solve its imbalances, much less deal with the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus and some of the other bizarre things we’ll show you.
Money-tossing would just continue the pattern of recent decades that provides an ever increasing proportion of national income and government revenue to us when we’re old (largely through Social Security and Medicare), and an ever smaller proportion when we’re younger (anything from educational assistance to transportation spending). This shortchanges the workers of today and tomorrow who will be called upon to fork over taxes to cover the costs of Social Security and other government programs for their elders.
We began with the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus because giving people like Trump — a wealthy man with a young child from a third marriage — an extra benefit unavailable to 99 percent of retirees is a dramatic example of how problems embedded in Social Security cause inequities and problems that few people other than Social Security experts know about.
Think that we’re overreacting to a minor quirk? We aren’t. Here are some additional aspects of Social Security that we think violate standards of equal justice and common sense:
There’s the Single Parent Shortchange, whereby many single parents — largely mothers with below-average earnings — pay Social Security taxes to cover spousal and survivor benefits for other people even though the solo parents can’t receive them. Sure, many people contribute toward benefits they will never see, especially if they die before retirement age. But the Single Shortchange strikes us as horribly unfair. Single parents are among the lowest income payers of Social Security taxes. Why should they subsidize other folks’ never-working spouses in a way that gives the biggest benefits to the best-off people?
Then there’s the Agatha Christie Benefit: Some divorced people get a bonus from Social Security only if their former spouse dies. And the Serial Spouse Bonus: If someone has had, say, three spouses, each might get the same full spousal and survivor benefits available to the one lifetime spouse of another worker — provided that each marriage lasted at least 10 years. If a marriage lasts nine years and 364 days, the spouse gets zippo.
The Equal Earner Penalty means that a couple with two people each earning $40,000 gets about $100,000 less in lifetime benefits than a couple with one spouse earning $80,000 and the other earning nothing. This happens even though both couples and their employers pay identical Social Security taxes.
Many if not most of these inequities would be illegal in private retirement plans.
Fixing the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus and the other inequities we mentioned (as well as plenty that we omitted) is more about remedying injustice than cutting costs; giving some people more benefits and others less would pretty much offset each other.
The system needs to be overhauled not simply to become more fair by giving less to the Trumps of the world and more to the less fortunate among us, but because Social Security, created in the 1930s, was largely constructed around a world in which married women were expected to stay at home. People also had shorter lifespans then and retired later, so that today retirees receive benefits for 12 more years on average than retirees in the system’s earlier days.
Back in 1965, there were about four workers for every person drawing benefits. Currently the ratio is in the low threes. Now, the decline in birth rates is hitting with a bang as baby boomers retire en masse, with the ratio expected to fall to about 2.2 in 2035. Each baby boomer retirement leads to an increase in takers and a decrease in makers.
Not dealing with this decline in workers-to-beneficiaries — a good chunk of which is caused by Social Security treating people as young as 62 as “old” — has broad implications for the revenues available for all government services, not just Social Security, as well as for the growth rate of our economy.
Even as fewer workers support more retirees, the average value of Social Security retirement benefits continues to rise. Look at the increasing “present value” of Social Security benefits for a two-income 65-year-old couple earning the average wage each year and expecting to live for an average lifespan.
In 1960, such a couple needed to have on hand $269,000 (in 2015 dollars) in an interest-bearing account to cover the cost of their lifetime benefits. Today, it’s about $625,000. In 2030, it will be about $731,000. And in 2055, when a Millennial age 30 this year turns 67, the full retirement age under current law, the present value of scheduled benefits hits seven digits: $1,029,000. Include Medicare, and benefits are about $1 million for today’s couple, rising to $2 million for the millennial couple.
These benefit-value increases are caused by a combination of longer lives for retirees and Social Security formulas that increase benefits as wages rise.
These numbers matter because Social Security isn’t like an Individual Retirement Account or a pension plan that sets money aside for you today for use when you retire. It’s mainly an intergenerational transfer system: Today’s workers pay Social Security taxes to cover their parents, who previously paid to cover their parents, who paid to cover their parents. That’s the way the system has worked since its founding in 1935. Social Security taxes paid by current workers and their employers get sent to beneficiaries, not stashed somewhere awaiting current workers reaching retirement age.
The system does have a trust fund that in the early 1980s was about to run out of money. A crisis loomed. As a result, after a report by the Greenspan Commission, Congress in 1983 enacted reforms that included gradually raising the normal retirement age (but not the early retirement age) and subjecting some Social Security retirement benefits to federal income tax.
This led to temporary surpluses while baby boomers were in their peak earning years. But now that boomers are retiring rapidly, Social Security’s tax revenues are falling farther and farther behind benefits being paid out.
The trust fund is projected to run dry in about 15 years. Meanwhile, every year without reform adds to the share of the burden required of the young, who already are scheduled to have lower returns on their Social Security contributions than older workers.
Do you think that if someone offered millennials a choice, they would want to face huge student debt, declining government investment in their children and higher future taxes (which are inevitable as deficits mount) — in exchange for a more generous retirement than today’s retirees get? Or would they prefer a system that treats them and their children better when they’re younger?
We’re both way past millennial age — but we know which we would prefer.
Now, we’ll show you how we can tweak Social Security to address the problems we’ve discussed without cutting benefits for current retirees or denying future retirees average benefits higher than current retirees get.
It’s about math. Social Security pays out far more than would be required to provide well-above-poverty-level benefits to all elderly recipients. Future growth in the economy will help tax revenues and benefits rise, which would give us room to modify the payout formulas and deal with problems that this iconic program isn’t addressing.
Those problems include poverty and near-poverty for millions of retirees, particularly the very old. That problem is greater for people who retired at 62 rather than waiting for their full retirement age, a move that locks them into lower payments for the rest of their lifetimes.
How can we orient the system more progressively to the needs of modern society, provide a stronger base of protection for all workers, and slow the growth rate of benefits to bring the system into better balance? To shore up Social Security permanently, it’ll be necessary to slow down the overall growth in benefits, encourage more years of work and end the pattern of people having ever-longer retirements as lifespans increase and Social Security doesn’t adapt its rules. At some point, it will also require a revenue (i.e., tax) increase, too.
Here, in simplified form, are some suggestions for making Social Security more modern and more fair.
Change the benefit structure. Reduce the level of benefits that retirees get in their 60s and early 70s but give them higher-than-now benefits in their mid-to-late 70s and beyond. That would shift resources to retirees’ elder years when they have greater needs, including a higher probability of having to pay for long-term care.
Raise the minimum benefit. Have a strong minimum benefit for most elderly that’s indexed to wage growth, which typically exceeds inflation. This would raise benefits for one-third to one-half of the elderly in a way that will essentially remove them from poverty.
Trim benefit growth for those at the top. Offset at least part of the cost of higher minimum benefits by paying the highest-paid recipients less in the future than they would get under the current formula. Slow the rise in benefits for future retirees with way-above-average lifetime earnings by indexing their benefits to inflation rather than to wage growth.
Index the retirement age. Having people work for additional years helps pay for higher levels of both lifetime and annual benefits. So if people on average are living a year longer, they should have to work a year longer. Those additional income and Social Security taxes would help support both Social Security and national needs that are higher priority than paying additional retirement years. Gradually phase out the early-retirement age that leads many healthy couples to retire on Social Security for close to three decades for the spouse who lives longer.
Make spousal and survivor benefits more fair. Modify these benefits so that they provide higher benefits for those with greater needs rather than giving the richest bonuses to the richest spouses even when they contributed less in taxes than lower-income spouses. Otherwise, use rules similar to what private pensions use, so that benefits are shared fairly for the time of marriage together.
And one final thing: Bye-bye Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus. Stop paying retirees extra for children under 18. Continue the young-child bonus for widows or widowers below retirement age, and for people on disability.
Eliminating that bonanza for older parents would be a symbolic first step. And who can say? Perhaps now that lots more people (including possibly Trump himself) know that the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus exists, our leaders might just be embarrassed enough to realize that the sooner Social Security is adapted to modern needs and circumstances, the better.
If this results in starting to fix Social Security the right way, the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus will have delivered a big-time bonus of its own. The beneficiaries would be our future retirees, our workers and our country as a whole.
]]>Would you believe that President Donald Trump is eligible for an extra Social Security benefit of around $15,000 a year because of his 11-year-old son, Barron Trump? Well, you should believe it, because it’s true.
How can this be? Because under Social Security’s rules, anyone like Trump who is old enough to get retirement benefits and still has a child under 18 can get this supplement — without having paid an extra dime in Social Security taxes for it.
The White House declined to tell us whether Trump is taking Social Security benefits, which by our estimate would range from about $47,100 a year (including the Barron bucks) if he began taking them at age 66, to $58,300 if he began at 70, the age at which benefits reach their maximum.
Of course, if Trump, 71, had released his income tax returns the way his predecessors since Richard Nixon did, we would know if he’s taking Social Security and how much he’s getting. There’s no reason, however, to think that he isn’t taking the benefits to which he’s entitled.
Meanwhile, Trump’s new budget proposes to reduce items like food stamps and housing vouchers for low-income people. It doesn’t ask either the rich or the middle class to make sacrifices on the tax or spending side. And it doesn’t touch the extra Social Security benefit for which Trump and about 680,000 other people are eligible.
The average Social Security retiree receives about $16,900 in annual benefits. Does it strike you as bizarre that someone in Trump’s position gets a bonus benefit nearly equal to that?
Does it seem unfair that by contrast to Trump, most male workers — and for biological reasons, an even greater portion of female workers — can’t get child benefits because their kids are at least 18 and out of high school when the workers begin drawing Social Security retirement benefits in their 60s and 70s?
Trump is eligible for the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus, as we’ve named it, because the people who designed Social Security decided in 1939, about five years into the program, that dependents and spouses needed extra support. They didn’t think much (if at all) about future expansion in the number of retirees, primarily male, who would have young kids.
The Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus goes to about 1.1 percent of Social Security retirees and costs about $5.5 billion a year. That’s a mere speck in Social Security’s $960 billion annual outlay.
Yet the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus is a dramatic — and symbolic — example of hidden problems that plague Social Security, problems that few non-wonks recognize and that reform proposals have largely ignored.
Those problems are why the two of us — Allan Sloan, a journalist who has written about Social Security for years; and C. Eugene Steuerle, an economist who has written extensively about Social Security, co-founded the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and is the author of “Dead Men Ruling: How to Restore Fiscal Freedom and Rescue Our Future” — combined forces to write this article.
We want to show you how we can help Social Security start heading in the right direction before its trust fund is tapped out, at which point a crisis atmosphere will prevail and rational conversation will disappear.
Calling for Social Security fixes isn’t new, of course, but the calls usually focus primarily on fixing the increasing gap between the taxes Social Security collects and the benefits it pays.
For us, however, the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus is an example of why reform should not only restore fiscal balance but should also make the system more equitable and efficient, more geared to modern needs and conditions, and more attuned to how providing ever-more years of benefits to future retirees puts at risk government programs that help them and their children during their working years.
If all that mattered were numbers, we could easily provide better protections against poverty with no loss in benefits for today’s retirees, while providing higher average benefits for future retirees. But that works only if the political will is there to update Social Security’s operations and benefit structure. After all, a system designed in the 1930s isn’t necessarily what we’ll need in the 2030s.
And make no mistake about how important Social Security is. Millions of retirees depend heavily on it. According to a recent Census working paper, about half of Social Security retirees receive at least half their income from Social Security — and about 18 percent get at least 90 percent of their income from it. Add in Medicare benefits, and retirees’ reliance on programs funded by the Social Security tax are even higher.
Given the virtual elimination of pension benefits for new private-sector employees and the increasing erosion in pensions for new public-sector employees, Social Security will likely be needed even more in the future than it is today.
Simply throwing more money at Social Security isn’t the way to solve its imbalances, much less deal with the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus and some of the other bizarre things we’ll show you.
Money-tossing would just continue the pattern of recent decades that provides an ever increasing proportion of national income and government revenue to us when we’re old (largely through Social Security and Medicare), and an ever smaller proportion when we’re younger (anything from educational assistance to transportation spending). This shortchanges the workers of today and tomorrow who will be called upon to fork over taxes to cover the costs of Social Security and other government programs for their elders.
We began with the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus because giving people like Trump — a wealthy man with a young child from a third marriage — an extra benefit unavailable to 99 percent of retirees is a dramatic example of how problems embedded in Social Security cause inequities and problems that few people other than Social Security experts know about.
Think that we’re overreacting to a minor quirk? We aren’t. Here are some additional aspects of Social Security that we think violate standards of equal justice and common sense:
There’s the Single Parent Shortchange, whereby many single parents — largely mothers with below-average earnings — pay Social Security taxes to cover spousal and survivor benefits for other people even though the solo parents can’t receive them. Sure, many people contribute toward benefits they will never see, especially if they die before retirement age. But the Single Shortchange strikes us as horribly unfair. Single parents are among the lowest income payers of Social Security taxes. Why should they subsidize other folks’ never-working spouses in a way that gives the biggest benefits to the best-off people?
Then there’s the Agatha Christie Benefit: Some divorced people get a bonus from Social Security only if their former spouse dies. And the Serial Spouse Bonus: If someone has had, say, three spouses, each might get the same full spousal and survivor benefits available to the one lifetime spouse of another worker — provided that each marriage lasted at least 10 years. If a marriage lasts nine years and 364 days, the spouse gets zippo.
The Equal Earner Penalty means that a couple with two people each earning $40,000 gets about $100,000 less in lifetime benefits than a couple with one spouse earning $80,000 and the other earning nothing. This happens even though both couples and their employers pay identical Social Security taxes.
Many if not most of these inequities would be illegal in private retirement plans.
Fixing the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus and the other inequities we mentioned (as well as plenty that we omitted) is more about remedying injustice than cutting costs; giving some people more benefits and others less would pretty much offset each other.
The system needs to be overhauled not simply to become more fair by giving less to the Trumps of the world and more to the less fortunate among us, but because Social Security, created in the 1930s, was largely constructed around a world in which married women were expected to stay at home. People also had shorter lifespans then and retired later, so that today retirees receive benefits for 12 more years on average than retirees in the system’s earlier days.
Back in 1965, there were about four workers for every person drawing benefits. Currently the ratio is in the low threes. Now, the decline in birth rates is hitting with a bang as baby boomers retire en masse, with the ratio expected to fall to about 2.2 in 2035. Each baby boomer retirement leads to an increase in takers and a decrease in makers.
Not dealing with this decline in workers-to-beneficiaries — a good chunk of which is caused by Social Security treating people as young as 62 as “old” — has broad implications for the revenues available for all government services, not just Social Security, as well as for the growth rate of our economy.
Even as fewer workers support more retirees, the average value of Social Security retirement benefits continues to rise. Look at the increasing “present value” of Social Security benefits for a two-income 65-year-old couple earning the average wage each year and expecting to live for an average lifespan.
In 1960, such a couple needed to have on hand $269,000 (in 2015 dollars) in an interest-bearing account to cover the cost of their lifetime benefits. Today, it’s about $625,000. In 2030, it will be about $731,000. And in 2055, when a Millennial age 30 this year turns 67, the full retirement age under current law, the present value of scheduled benefits hits seven digits: $1,029,000. Include Medicare, and benefits are about $1 million for today’s couple, rising to $2 million for the millennial couple.
These benefit-value increases are caused by a combination of longer lives for retirees and Social Security formulas that increase benefits as wages rise.
These numbers matter because Social Security isn’t like an Individual Retirement Account or a pension plan that sets money aside for you today for use when you retire. It’s mainly an intergenerational transfer system: Today’s workers pay Social Security taxes to cover their parents, who previously paid to cover their parents, who paid to cover their parents. That’s the way the system has worked since its founding in 1935. Social Security taxes paid by current workers and their employers get sent to beneficiaries, not stashed somewhere awaiting current workers reaching retirement age.
The system does have a trust fund that in the early 1980s was about to run out of money. A crisis loomed. As a result, after a report by the Greenspan Commission, Congress in 1983 enacted reforms that included gradually raising the normal retirement age (but not the early retirement age) and subjecting some Social Security retirement benefits to federal income tax.
This led to temporary surpluses while baby boomers were in their peak earning years. But now that boomers are retiring rapidly, Social Security’s tax revenues are falling farther and farther behind benefits being paid out.
The trust fund is projected to run dry in about 15 years. Meanwhile, every year without reform adds to the share of the burden required of the young, who already are scheduled to have lower returns on their Social Security contributions than older workers.
Do you think that if someone offered millennials a choice, they would want to face huge student debt, declining government investment in their children and higher future taxes (which are inevitable as deficits mount) — in exchange for a more generous retirement than today’s retirees get? Or would they prefer a system that treats them and their children better when they’re younger?
We’re both way past millennial age — but we know which we would prefer.
Now, we’ll show you how we can tweak Social Security to address the problems we’ve discussed without cutting benefits for current retirees or denying future retirees average benefits higher than current retirees get.
It’s about math. Social Security pays out far more than would be required to provide well-above-poverty-level benefits to all elderly recipients. Future growth in the economy will help tax revenues and benefits rise, which would give us room to modify the payout formulas and deal with problems that this iconic program isn’t addressing.
Those problems include poverty and near-poverty for millions of retirees, particularly the very old. That problem is greater for people who retired at 62 rather than waiting for their full retirement age, a move that locks them into lower payments for the rest of their lifetimes.
How can we orient the system more progressively to the needs of modern society, provide a stronger base of protection for all workers, and slow the growth rate of benefits to bring the system into better balance? To shore up Social Security permanently, it’ll be necessary to slow down the overall growth in benefits, encourage more years of work and end the pattern of people having ever-longer retirements as lifespans increase and Social Security doesn’t adapt its rules. At some point, it will also require a revenue (i.e., tax) increase, too.
Here, in simplified form, are some suggestions for making Social Security more modern and more fair.
Change the benefit structure. Reduce the level of benefits that retirees get in their 60s and early 70s but give them higher-than-now benefits in their mid-to-late 70s and beyond. That would shift resources to retirees’ elder years when they have greater needs, including a higher probability of having to pay for long-term care.
Raise the minimum benefit. Have a strong minimum benefit for most elderly that’s indexed to wage growth, which typically exceeds inflation. This would raise benefits for one-third to one-half of the elderly in a way that will essentially remove them from poverty.
Trim benefit growth for those at the top. Offset at least part of the cost of higher minimum benefits by paying the highest-paid recipients less in the future than they would get under the current formula. Slow the rise in benefits for future retirees with way-above-average lifetime earnings by indexing their benefits to inflation rather than to wage growth.
Index the retirement age. Having people work for additional years helps pay for higher levels of both lifetime and annual benefits. So if people on average are living a year longer, they should have to work a year longer. Those additional income and Social Security taxes would help support both Social Security and national needs that are higher priority than paying additional retirement years. Gradually phase out the early-retirement age that leads many healthy couples to retire on Social Security for close to three decades for the spouse who lives longer.
Make spousal and survivor benefits more fair. Modify these benefits so that they provide higher benefits for those with greater needs rather than giving the richest bonuses to the richest spouses even when they contributed less in taxes than lower-income spouses. Otherwise, use rules similar to what private pensions use, so that benefits are shared fairly for the time of marriage together.
And one final thing: Bye-bye Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus. Stop paying retirees extra for children under 18. Continue the young-child bonus for widows or widowers below retirement age, and for people on disability.
Eliminating that bonanza for older parents would be a symbolic first step. And who can say? Perhaps now that lots more people (including possibly Trump himself) know that the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus exists, our leaders might just be embarrassed enough to realize that the sooner Social Security is adapted to modern needs and circumstances, the better.
If this results in starting to fix Social Security the right way, the Late-in-Life-Baby Bonus will have delivered a big-time bonus of its own. The beneficiaries would be our future retirees, our workers and our country as a whole.
]]>At first, we thought it was a typo, a misplaced decimal. Bankruptcy records showed that a woman from Chicago’s South Side owed the city $102,158.40 for unpaid tickets. Could one person really rack up that much ticket debt?
“Nobody will believe me,” she later told me. “But every single year, they send me 30 pages in an envelope with all the tickets. I just throw it away. I don’t look at it. It’s really stressful. You don’t understand how stressful it is to be in debt.”
I’ve spent the past five months going down one avenue after another to figure out why thousands of Chicago drivers turn to Chapter 13 bankruptcy to cope with debt stemming from parking and traffic camera tickets. We published our story this week in partnership with Mother Jones.
The woman didn’t make it into the story, but our conversations haunt me.
As reporters, we often talk to more people than we’ll ever include in a story. It’s part of the research, just like reading the archives, crunching the numbers, wading through court files.
We have to make hard choices about who ends up in a story and who doesn’t. I left out the $102,158.40 woman for a number of reasons, including that we prefer not to use anonymous sources and she was too ashamed to be identified.
More than anything, I worried readers would see her as emblematic of this cycle of ticket debt and bankruptcy when, in reality, most people with ticket debt owe significantly less. The typical debt to the city for people who, in 2017, filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy was approximately $3,900, according to our analysis of federal bankruptcy files.
But I want to tell you a little bit about her, and about some of the other people I spoke with, because though they were not in the story, they helped inform it. According to city records, this woman has gotten 298 tickets since 2011. More than half are $200 tickets for not having a required city sticker. After a couple of months, unpaid tickets double and eventually accrue a 22 percent collection fee, turning a $200 citation into a $488 debt.
She said she used to make $300 a week as a restaurant cook and couldn’t afford to get an annual sticker, which costs $87 for most passenger vehicles. Now, she said, she makes $11.50 an hour as an ambulance driver.
“There’s no way I could afford my rent, take care of my kids, and pay tickets,” she said.
It no longer surprises me to learn that people bury their heads in the sand when they’re drowning in this kind of debt.
This woman filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy last year, mostly to hold onto her driver’s license. Without it, she would lose her ambulance job.
I met others who filed for bankruptcy to prevent the city from taking away their licenses, or to reinstate a license that had been suspended. Drivers who accumulate five unpaid traffic camera tickets or 10 unpaid parking tickets risk losing their license in Illinois.
Some employers — including the city and its sister agencies — won’t hire applicants who have debts to the city, including unpaid tickets. When I met Sharron Lee in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in October, she was wearing a lanyard for Harris & Harris, a company the city contracts with to collect ticket debt.
I thought she might be there as a debt collector. Turned out she owed the city about $11,000 in unpaid tickets herself, according to bankruptcy records. She’d filed for bankruptcy to qualify for a job as a firm debt collector.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Lee, who has filed for bankruptcy more than a half-dozen times in the past decade. “A lot of people are in debt or filing for bankruptcy because of tickets.”
We’ve profiled a few more people who have struggled with the consequences of their unpaid tickets. Some managed to pay off their debts; others are now in bankruptcy court.
You can read their stories. By sharing them, we hope to start a conversation about how Chicago’s ticketing and debt collection affect people’s lives.
If you have a story to share about how ticket debt has affected you, I’d love to hear about your experiences. As I continue reporting on Chicago tickets, license suspensions and other kinds of debt to government agencies, please reach out if you have story ideas or tips. I’m at melissa.sanchez@propublica.org.
]]>At first, we thought it was a typo, a misplaced decimal. Bankruptcy records showed that a woman from Chicago’s South Side owed the city $102,158.40 for unpaid tickets. Could one person really rack up that much ticket debt?
“Nobody will believe me,” she later told me. “But every single year, they send me 30 pages in an envelope with all the tickets. I just throw it away. I don’t look at it. It’s really stressful. You don’t understand how stressful it is to be in debt.”
I’ve spent the past five months going down one avenue after another to figure out why thousands of Chicago drivers turn to Chapter 13 bankruptcy to cope with debt stemming from parking and traffic camera tickets. We published our story this week in partnership with Mother Jones.
The woman didn’t make it into the story, but our conversations haunt me.
As reporters, we often talk to more people than we’ll ever include in a story. It’s part of the research, just like reading the archives, crunching the numbers, wading through court files.
We have to make hard choices about who ends up in a story and who doesn’t. I left out the $102,158.40 woman for a number of reasons, including that we prefer not to use anonymous sources and she was too ashamed to be identified.
More than anything, I worried readers would see her as emblematic of this cycle of ticket debt and bankruptcy when, in reality, most people with ticket debt owe significantly less. The typical debt to the city for people who, in 2017, filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy was approximately $3,900, according to our analysis of federal bankruptcy files.
But I want to tell you a little bit about her, and about some of the other people I spoke with, because though they were not in the story, they helped inform it. According to city records, this woman has gotten 298 tickets since 2011. More than half are $200 tickets for not having a required city sticker. After a couple of months, unpaid tickets double and eventually accrue a 22 percent collection fee, turning a $200 citation into a $488 debt.
She said she used to make $300 a week as a restaurant cook and couldn’t afford to get an annual sticker, which costs $87 for most passenger vehicles. Now, she said, she makes $11.50 an hour as an ambulance driver.
“There’s no way I could afford my rent, take care of my kids, and pay tickets,” she said.
It no longer surprises me to learn that people bury their heads in the sand when they’re drowning in this kind of debt.
This woman filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy last year, mostly to hold onto her driver’s license. Without it, she would lose her ambulance job.
I met others who filed for bankruptcy to prevent the city from taking away their licenses, or to reinstate a license that had been suspended. Drivers who accumulate five unpaid traffic camera tickets or 10 unpaid parking tickets risk losing their license in Illinois.
Some employers — including the city and its sister agencies — won’t hire applicants who have debts to the city, including unpaid tickets. When I met Sharron Lee in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in October, she was wearing a lanyard for Harris & Harris, a company the city contracts with to collect ticket debt.
I thought she might be there as a debt collector. Turned out she owed the city about $11,000 in unpaid tickets herself, according to bankruptcy records. She’d filed for bankruptcy to qualify for a job as a firm debt collector.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Lee, who has filed for bankruptcy more than a half-dozen times in the past decade. “A lot of people are in debt or filing for bankruptcy because of tickets.”
We’ve profiled a few more people who have struggled with the consequences of their unpaid tickets. Some managed to pay off their debts; others are now in bankruptcy court.
You can read their stories. By sharing them, we hope to start a conversation about how Chicago’s ticketing and debt collection affect people’s lives.
If you have a story to share about how ticket debt has affected you, I’d love to hear about your experiences. As I continue reporting on Chicago tickets, license suspensions and other kinds of debt to government agencies, please reach out if you have story ideas or tips. I’m at melissa.sanchez@propublica.org.
]]>WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is poised to permanently extend the drastic cuts it made to the United States diplomatic staff in Cuba last fall after mysterious incidents in which 24 Americans were injured there, State Department officials said.
The staff reductions would have a major impact on U.S. diplomacy toward Cuba, the officials said, obscuring Washington’s view of a historic political transition on the island and limiting the contacts of American diplomats with Cuban officials, political dissidents and others. U.S. officials said the State Department has already informed the Castro government that it will likely not meet its annual commitment to admit at least 20,000 Cubans under a 1994 migration agreement. That deal was meant to discourage Cubans from trying to reach the United States aboard homemade rafts and boats.
Officials said a decision memorandum that was sent to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week included a proposal to keep only the emergency staff of 18 diplomats who have been assigned to Havana since the temporary reassignment of about 25 others last September. Under the department’s regulations, it has until March 4 to either send some diplomats back to their posts or reduce the staff indefinitely.
The State Department’s chief spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, said Tuesday that the department was still weighing what to do about staffing the Havana embassy. “We haven’t made a decision just yet,” she said.
Most of the diplomats who were ordered out of Havana did not want to leave. In a private letter obtained by ProPublica, 35 diplomats and spouses who worked in the embassy appealed to senior State Department officials just before the withdrawals to be allowed to remain in Cuba if they chose.
“We are aware of the risks of remaining at Post,” the group wrote on Sept. 21. “And we understand that there may be unknown risks. We ask that the Department give us the opportunity to decide for ourselves whether to stay or leave.”
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment directly on the letter. But last October, responding to earlier reports that some diplomats in Havana did not want to leave their posts, Nauert said she understood that they “believe firmly in our mission” and wanted to remain. “However,” she added, “when our Secretary looks at the situation and says, ‘We can’t protect you because we don’t know what is causing this, and we don’t know who is responsible,’ he has to make that decision to bring our folks home.”
Several diplomats first reported hearing strange, high-pitched sounds in their homes at the end of 2016, just after the election of President Donald Trump signaled an end to the rapprochement between the two countries under the Obama administration.
The first four people who came forward, ProPublica reported recently, were all intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover. Shaken by the noises, which in some cases seemed almost like beams of sound, they and others in the embassy assumed some kind of high-tech harassment by the Cuban security forces.
But the Cuban government — which has appeared strongly committed to better relations with the U.S. (and the surge of tourism and investment that came with them) — has vehemently denied any involvement in the incidents. Over the past year, Cuban officials have said they would do whatever they are asked to stop the problem, and U.S. national security officials say that Cuban authorities have cooperated closely with FBI agents who visited the island to investigate. Their inquiry has turned up no evidence to implicate the Cuban government, officials who have been briefed on it said.
Despite that, Trump administration officials have blamed Cuba for failing to protect the diplomats, arguing that the government of President Raúl Castro has such control over life on the island that it would be impossible for any attacks to take place without its knowledge.
The State Department issued a formal warning that Americans could be at risk if they traveled to the island. It also ordered 17 of the 26 Cuban diplomats in Washington and their families to leave the country. Those forced out included members of the commercial section, which worked with U.S. businesses seeking to invest in Cuba, and all but one of the embassy’s four consular officers.
The flow of American tourists has declined substantially since last summer, a change that has been felt especially by Cubans who rent out rooms to travelers, operate small restaurants called paladares, or run other small businesses that depend on such visitors.
“The travel warning has been devastating to the Cuban entrepreneurs who had benefitted from the policy of travel and openness,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican, who visited the island in January. “That’s who we say we want to help, and they’re dying on the vine.”
Flake, a longtime proponent of greater engagement with Cuba, had traveled to Havana in August 2015 to attend ceremonies for the reopening of the U.S. Embassy, 54 years after President Eisenhower severed relations. When Flake returned to Havana in this year, he said in an interview with ProPublica, he found the modernist glass-and-concrete chancery building sadly empty. “It was devastating to see basically just a skeletal staff,” he said.
State Department officials said that the emergency staff is capped at 18 — but the embassy has been run of late by as few as 11 or 12 diplomats. That’s roughly the number that Fidel Castro tried to impose in 1961, when he complained that the embassy had become “a nest of spies” trying to subvert the revolution. (Eisenhower said then that such a small staff would “render impossible the conduct of normal diplomatic relations.”)
At a potentially critical moment of political transition in Cuba — Raúl Castro has said he will relinquish the presidency in April — current and former U.S. diplomats voiced concern that Washington will lose insight as well as its growing influence.
“It’s really essential to see what’s happening in Havana and around the country in order to understand where Cuba is headed,” said Vicki Huddleston, who headed the U.S. mission in Havana from 1999 to 2002. “Essentially we’ve gone from the largest diplomatic presence in Cuba to a very small and isolated one.”
Brian Latell, a retired CIA analyst of Cuba who now teaches at Florida International University, cautioned that the two countries could still conduct diplomacy, and that it’s hard to predict how much Washington’s understanding of Cuba would be impaired by a much smaller staff. But he suggested that the big picture was already clear: “The bilateral relationship is restored to some of the darkest days of the cold war.”
A prominent Cuban dissident, Marta Beatriz Roque, said the U.S. withdrawal had already had a “dramatic” impact on human rights advocates on the island, all but eliminating their access to American diplomats and making it much more difficult for dissidents to travel to the U.S.
“Basically, I would say the interaction with the U.S. Embassy right now for us is at a level of zero,” she said in a telephone interview from Havana. “The embassy is not getting the information it needs about the human rights situation in Cuba. Our contact before was frequent. Now there is no contact.”
Roque said that during a recent trip to the U.S., she described those circumstances to Cuban-American representatives in Congress, including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, both of whom have supported the cutback. “Everybody was aware of the problem, but nobody gave me a solution,” she said.
Asked about such concerns, Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, said the U.S. Embassy in Havana “has long been a lifeline, and important symbol, to the democratic opposition.” In a statement, he added, “It is imperative that the United States continue its solidarity with the Cuban people in their democratic aspirations.”
Consular activity at the embassy has ground almost to a halt, State Department officials said. With just one or two officers covering emergencies for visiting Americans and visas for Cuban officials, thousands of Cubans seeking to visit or immigrate to the U.S. have been forced to travel to third countries to submit their requests at American consulates there.
After months in which the U.S. Embassy in Havana issued more than 800 immigrant visas each month, the number fell to 168 in September and only 16 in October, according to State Department statistics. In November, it rose again to 196 and in December it was 22.
Cubans who want to apply for an immigrant visa to the U.S. must now do so at the U.S. Consulate in Bogota, Colombia, an additional step that Cubans have said typically costs them hundreds or thousands of dollars more in travel costs. It has prompted a chorus of complaints from people in Cuba, where the official average monthly salary is about $25, supplemented by subsidized food and free health care and education. Nonetheless, the number of visas issued rebounded to 883 in January, after the Bogotá process was fully implemented.
Some State Department officials said the visa-processing delays could be substantially remedied even with a reduced consular staff in Havana, but they added that the State Department and immigration authorities have still not produced any plan to do so.
If the department’s travel warning is extended along with the so-called ordered departure of the embassy’s non-emergency staff, educational officials said it would likely force the cancellation of about half of the U.S. college and university foreign-study programs that have been established in Cuba, because of their inability to obtain insurance.
On Thursday, an alliance of 28 American tour operators and educational travel groups called on the department to downgrade its travel warning for Cuba from its current Level Three (“reconsider travel”) to a Level Two (“exercise increased caution”), asserting that there are no confirmed cases of private American citizens in Cuba being affected like the injured diplomats. The State Department has said it has been contacted since last September by 19 American tourists who have reported having felt similar symptoms after travel to Cuba, but it did not investigate or verify any of those cases. The tour alliance also noted that Cuba was voted the “safest country in the world” for travel at the recent Madrid International Tourism Fair.
Although human rights and migration have long been top-priority issues for Cuban Americans in South Florida and other parts of the United States, the impact of the embassy staff cuts have prompted relatively little political outcry thus far.
Political analysts said the muted response may partly reflect the fact that the travel obstacles disproportionately affect a more recent (and less politically established) generation of Cuban immigrants. William LeoGrande, a specialist in U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America at American University in Washington, D.C., noted that Cuban Americans and others may also have avoided criticizing the withdrawal because of the circumstances that precipitated it.
“When people on the street in Miami realize that their relatives can’t come and visit or can’t migrate because there’s no consular section at the U.S. Embassy, that has to have a political impact,” he said. “But U.S. personnel were thought to have been attacked, and we still don’t know who did it. So, I think people don’t want to be out in front of that when they think that it could maybe have been the Cubans.”
In a Feb. 15 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, specialists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine found that 21 of the injured Americans had suffered a potentially “novel” type of mild brain injury caused by an unknown directed force, rather than head trauma. The authors also discounted the thesis — advanced by Cuban officials and others — that the affliction might have resulted from mass psychogenic illness.
But the JAMA report did not solve the mystery. An accompanying editorial pointed out the limitations of the study, such as the fact that an average of 203 days passed before the experts evaluated patients, raising questions about whether patients who came forward later were aware of symptoms reported by earlier ones. A lack of baseline data and other information about the patients also made it difficult to exclude other potential causes for some of the ailments, the study found.
“A unifying explanation for the symptoms experienced by the US government officials … remains elusive,” the editorial said.
]]>WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is poised to permanently extend the drastic cuts it made to the United States diplomatic staff in Cuba last fall after mysterious incidents in which 24 Americans were injured there, State Department officials said.
The staff reductions would have a major impact on U.S. diplomacy toward Cuba, the officials said, obscuring Washington’s view of a historic political transition on the island and limiting the contacts of American diplomats with Cuban officials, political dissidents and others. U.S. officials said the State Department has already informed the Castro government that it will likely not meet its annual commitment to admit at least 20,000 Cubans under a 1994 migration agreement. That deal was meant to discourage Cubans from trying to reach the United States aboard homemade rafts and boats.
Officials said a decision memorandum that was sent to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week included a proposal to keep only the emergency staff of 18 diplomats who have been assigned to Havana since the temporary reassignment of about 25 others last September. Under the department’s regulations, it has until March 4 to either send some diplomats back to their posts or reduce the staff indefinitely.
The State Department’s chief spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, said Tuesday that the department was still weighing what to do about staffing the Havana embassy. “We haven’t made a decision just yet,” she said.
Most of the diplomats who were ordered out of Havana did not want to leave. In a private letter obtained by ProPublica, 35 diplomats and spouses who worked in the embassy appealed to senior State Department officials just before the withdrawals to be allowed to remain in Cuba if they chose.
“We are aware of the risks of remaining at Post,” the group wrote on Sept. 21. “And we understand that there may be unknown risks. We ask that the Department give us the opportunity to decide for ourselves whether to stay or leave.”
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment directly on the letter. But last October, responding to earlier reports that some diplomats in Havana did not want to leave their posts, Nauert said she understood that they “believe firmly in our mission” and wanted to remain. “However,” she added, “when our Secretary looks at the situation and says, ‘We can’t protect you because we don’t know what is causing this, and we don’t know who is responsible,’ he has to make that decision to bring our folks home.”
Several diplomats first reported hearing strange, high-pitched sounds in their homes at the end of 2016, just after the election of President Donald Trump signaled an end to the rapprochement between the two countries under the Obama administration.
The first four people who came forward, ProPublica reported recently, were all intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover. Shaken by the noises, which in some cases seemed almost like beams of sound, they and others in the embassy assumed some kind of high-tech harassment by the Cuban security forces.
But the Cuban government — which has appeared strongly committed to better relations with the U.S. (and the surge of tourism and investment that came with them) — has vehemently denied any involvement in the incidents. Over the past year, Cuban officials have said they would do whatever they are asked to stop the problem, and U.S. national security officials say that Cuban authorities have cooperated closely with FBI agents who visited the island to investigate. Their inquiry has turned up no evidence to implicate the Cuban government, officials who have been briefed on it said.
Despite that, Trump administration officials have blamed Cuba for failing to protect the diplomats, arguing that the government of President Raúl Castro has such control over life on the island that it would be impossible for any attacks to take place without its knowledge.
The State Department issued a formal warning that Americans could be at risk if they traveled to the island. It also ordered 17 of the 26 Cuban diplomats in Washington and their families to leave the country. Those forced out included members of the commercial section, which worked with U.S. businesses seeking to invest in Cuba, and all but one of the embassy’s four consular officers.
The flow of American tourists has declined substantially since last summer, a change that has been felt especially by Cubans who rent out rooms to travelers, operate small restaurants called paladares, or run other small businesses that depend on such visitors.
“The travel warning has been devastating to the Cuban entrepreneurs who had benefitted from the policy of travel and openness,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican, who visited the island in January. “That’s who we say we want to help, and they’re dying on the vine.”
Flake, a longtime proponent of greater engagement with Cuba, had traveled to Havana in August 2015 to attend ceremonies for the reopening of the U.S. Embassy, 54 years after President Eisenhower severed relations. When Flake returned to Havana in this year, he said in an interview with ProPublica, he found the modernist glass-and-concrete chancery building sadly empty. “It was devastating to see basically just a skeletal staff,” he said.
State Department officials said that the emergency staff is capped at 18 — but the embassy has been run of late by as few as 11 or 12 diplomats. That’s roughly the number that Fidel Castro tried to impose in 1961, when he complained that the embassy had become “a nest of spies” trying to subvert the revolution. (Eisenhower said then that such a small staff would “render impossible the conduct of normal diplomatic relations.”)
At a potentially critical moment of political transition in Cuba — Raúl Castro has said he will relinquish the presidency in April — current and former U.S. diplomats voiced concern that Washington will lose insight as well as its growing influence.
“It’s really essential to see what’s happening in Havana and around the country in order to understand where Cuba is headed,” said Vicki Huddleston, who headed the U.S. mission in Havana from 1999 to 2002. “Essentially we’ve gone from the largest diplomatic presence in Cuba to a very small and isolated one.”
Brian Latell, a retired CIA analyst of Cuba who now teaches at Florida International University, cautioned that the two countries could still conduct diplomacy, and that it’s hard to predict how much Washington’s understanding of Cuba would be impaired by a much smaller staff. But he suggested that the big picture was already clear: “The bilateral relationship is restored to some of the darkest days of the cold war.”
A prominent Cuban dissident, Marta Beatriz Roque, said the U.S. withdrawal had already had a “dramatic” impact on human rights advocates on the island, all but eliminating their access to American diplomats and making it much more difficult for dissidents to travel to the U.S.
“Basically, I would say the interaction with the U.S. Embassy right now for us is at a level of zero,” she said in a telephone interview from Havana. “The embassy is not getting the information it needs about the human rights situation in Cuba. Our contact before was frequent. Now there is no contact.”
Roque said that during a recent trip to the U.S., she described those circumstances to Cuban-American representatives in Congress, including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, both of whom have supported the cutback. “Everybody was aware of the problem, but nobody gave me a solution,” she said.
Asked about such concerns, Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, said the U.S. Embassy in Havana “has long been a lifeline, and important symbol, to the democratic opposition.” In a statement, he added, “It is imperative that the United States continue its solidarity with the Cuban people in their democratic aspirations.”
Consular activity at the embassy has ground almost to a halt, State Department officials said. With just one or two officers covering emergencies for visiting Americans and visas for Cuban officials, thousands of Cubans seeking to visit or immigrate to the U.S. have been forced to travel to third countries to submit their requests at American consulates there.
After months in which the U.S. Embassy in Havana issued more than 800 immigrant visas each month, the number fell to 168 in September and only 16 in October, according to State Department statistics. In November, it rose again to 196 and in December it was 22.
Cubans who want to apply for an immigrant visa to the U.S. must now do so at the U.S. Consulate in Bogota, Colombia, an additional step that Cubans have said typically costs them hundreds or thousands of dollars more in travel costs. It has prompted a chorus of complaints from people in Cuba, where the official average monthly salary is about $25, supplemented by subsidized food and free health care and education. Nonetheless, the number of visas issued rebounded to 883 in January, after the Bogotá process was fully implemented.
Some State Department officials said the visa-processing delays could be substantially remedied even with a reduced consular staff in Havana, but they added that the State Department and immigration authorities have still not produced any plan to do so.
If the department’s travel warning is extended along with the so-called ordered departure of the embassy’s non-emergency staff, educational officials said it would likely force the cancellation of about half of the U.S. college and university foreign-study programs that have been established in Cuba, because of their inability to obtain insurance.
On Thursday, an alliance of 28 American tour operators and educational travel groups called on the department to downgrade its travel warning for Cuba from its current Level Three (“reconsider travel”) to a Level Two (“exercise increased caution”), asserting that there are no confirmed cases of private American citizens in Cuba being affected like the injured diplomats. The State Department has said it has been contacted since last September by 19 American tourists who have reported having felt similar symptoms after travel to Cuba, but it did not investigate or verify any of those cases. The tour alliance also noted that Cuba was voted the “safest country in the world” for travel at the recent Madrid International Tourism Fair.
Although human rights and migration have long been top-priority issues for Cuban Americans in South Florida and other parts of the United States, the impact of the embassy staff cuts have prompted relatively little political outcry thus far.
Political analysts said the muted response may partly reflect the fact that the travel obstacles disproportionately affect a more recent (and less politically established) generation of Cuban immigrants. William LeoGrande, a specialist in U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America at American University in Washington, D.C., noted that Cuban Americans and others may also have avoided criticizing the withdrawal because of the circumstances that precipitated it.
“When people on the street in Miami realize that their relatives can’t come and visit or can’t migrate because there’s no consular section at the U.S. Embassy, that has to have a political impact,” he said. “But U.S. personnel were thought to have been attacked, and we still don’t know who did it. So, I think people don’t want to be out in front of that when they think that it could maybe have been the Cubans.”
In a Feb. 15 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, specialists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine found that 21 of the injured Americans had suffered a potentially “novel” type of mild brain injury caused by an unknown directed force, rather than head trauma. The authors also discounted the thesis — advanced by Cuban officials and others — that the affliction might have resulted from mass psychogenic illness.
But the JAMA report did not solve the mystery. An accompanying editorial pointed out the limitations of the study, such as the fact that an average of 203 days passed before the experts evaluated patients, raising questions about whether patients who came forward later were aware of symptoms reported by earlier ones. A lack of baseline data and other information about the patients also made it difficult to exclude other potential causes for some of the ailments, the study found.
“A unifying explanation for the symptoms experienced by the US government officials … remains elusive,” the editorial said.
]]>A Florida bill to assist first responders suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder has found new life in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
At least three first responders to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, which killed 49 people, have publicly disclosed that they have a PTSD diagnosis, and advocates have been trying to expand workers’ compensation coverage in Florida since then. A bill to address that failed in Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature last year, and a similar measure’s prospects were uncertain this year.
After the Feb. 14 high school shooting in Parkland, in which 17 people died, the bill gained momentum, though only a few days are left in the legislative session. On Monday, the measure unanimously cleared its final committee hearing in the Florida House, the last step before a floor vote. Today, it passed its final Senate committee.
Orlando Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith lost a friend in the Pulse nightclub shooting. But he also became friends with another man who was pulled from the club by Omar Delgado, an Eatonville police officer diagnosed with PTSD after the shooting.
Smith, a Democrat, voted for the bill to expand coverage Monday, along with 18 other members of the committee.
“Many of the first responders from the mass shooting in Parkland are going to need this bill,” Smith said. “Some of them probably don’t even know it yet.”
PTSD, which is characterized by reliving an event through flashbacks and nightmares, often isn’t diagnosed immediately in the aftermath of a tragedy. Being hypervigilant and startling easily are normal reactions to experiencing or witnessing trauma. It becomes a disorder if the symptoms don’t subside in a month or two, or start causing trouble at home or at work.
To try to head it off, officials from the International Association of Fire Fighters flew into Florida the same night as the Parkland shooting to work with first responders and help them deal with their emotions. Fourteen students and three staff members died that day; 18 others were wounded but survived.
The team from the firefighters union included people who have had PTSD themselves and responded to incidents like the Columbine High School shooting. It’s something they’ve done after every major event in recent memory — from the Pulse nightclub shooting to the Oct. 1, 2017, attack in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“There is a fear that if you reach out for help within your own department, there may be adverse action,” said Jim Brinkley, the director of occupation health and safety for the union. “You may be removed from duty, you’re not allowed to get back on the rigs. By having those who serve outside the area come in, we find the members are more likely to open up and tell us exactly how they’re feeling.”
Lt. Rob Ramirez, a firefighter with the city of Margate, was dispatched to the casualty collection point during the Parkland shooting. There, people who were injured inside the school were assessed and treated before going to the hospital.
Ramirez said the scene was chaotic, and that first responders were overwhelmed with victims who had what he called “battlefield” injuries. Two shooting victims died at the triage scene.
“We transported a total of 14 victims off scene, all of them with major traumatic injuries,” Ramirez said. “As you can imagine, these small frame, small-bodied high school children taking these large caliber weapons, multiple rounds, to the torso, legs, arms, extremity. It was very chaotic.”
Ramirez said he’s “doing well” since the event, but he thinks about it often. And he worries about PTSD developing in the Parkland first responders.
“The men and women that responded to that call ... are not the same men and women that walked away from it,“ Ramirez said. “I know I’m not the same person I was the morning I went to work as who I am today, two weeks after the call. This changes you as a person.“
PTSD isn’t talked about as much as other job hazards facing first responders and, indeed, Florida law doesn’t fully deal with it. Right now, Florida first responders can get medical coverage under worker’s comp if they get PTSD on the job, but not lost wages. About a third of states have similar laws.
If they need time off work to go into treatment, or the PTSD is so bad as to be disabling, they must also have a physical injury to have their salaries covered.
Gerry Realin, an Orlando Police Department officer on the hazmat team, left a family vacation the morning after the Pulse nightclub shooting to respond. His job was to document and process the 49 dead inside the club. He spent four or five hours inside Pulse, with no air conditioning in a sweltering Florida summer, wearing a hazmat suit with no helmet. His boots turned yellow and then red from the blood and body parts.
The sights and smells left Realin with PTSD. He has flashbacks. Depression. Difficulty sleeping. The PTSD didn’t get better.
Outside the Florida workers’ compensation system, he was granted a disability pension from the police department about a year after the shooting. He also sued the Orlando Police Department within Florida’s workers’ compensation system for about $26,000 in lost earnings potential.
Florida Judge of Compensation Claims Neal Pitts ruled against Realin in January.
“If he had sustained even a minor accompanying physical injury, he would be entitled to both medical and indemnity benefits,” Pitts wrote. “To change this outcome would require action by the Legislature, should they deem it necessary.”
Realin’s wife, Jessica, has made it her mission to change the law. When she heard there were still bodies inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School the day after the shooting, she started to cry, thinking about someone doing the same job as her husband after Pulse.
“I promise you, [PTSD] is an ugly monster that will consume your entire world and tear you apart from the inside out,” Jessica Realin said. “If this bill doesn’t get passed, I don’t know how many more first responders we’re going to lose to this illness.”
Florida Rep. Matt Willhite, a Palm Beach representative who’s also a firefighter and paramedic, said first responders doing triage at a scene like the one in Parkland have to decide which children can be saved and which are too far gone.
“Now they’re gonna start thinking — could I have done something for another one? Could we have stopped this tragedy?” said Willhite, a Democrat. “Seeing the visions and thoughts and sights of the horrific aspect of this. But not to mention, they don’t get to just turn it off because every news channel they turn on right now, it’s all over the news.”
Willhite, a sponsor of the bill expanding coverage, said the Parkland shooting shows there could be another event, or even just a bad 911 call that puts someone over the edge. He said he doesn’t want the death toll attributable to the Parkland attack to include “first responders who take their life because of this.”
Until now, the bill’s main sticking point has been financial.
The Florida League of Cities prepared a white paper looking at the costs to local governments. It assumed that, of the 81,470 first responders in Florida, 2.1 percent to 6.4 percent would get PTSD in a given year. It assumed that every one of those responders would take six months or a year off work.
With an average annual salary of $54,728, the group came up with a price tag of $15.3 million to $95.5 million annually in lost wages.
“There’s a significant financial impact by putting this benefit into law,” said David Cruz, a lobbyist with the Florida League of Cities, told lawmakers at a committee hearing last month.
Such concerns tanked the bill last year. It got one hearing, at which Realin brought half-a-dozen first responders and widows who had lost first responders to suicide to testify and lend their support. After 25 minutes of testimony, lawmakers in the committee unanimously approved the measure.
But the bill never advanced beyond that stage. This year, the bill had more momentum; even before Parkland it had gotten four unanimous “yes” votes in committee.
Still, it had three more committee hearings to clear before the full House and Senate could vote, and in one case, it didn’t make it on the agenda until the committee’s last hearing. Until this week, the bills were different in the House and Senate, and there were fears it would die in committee again.
On Monday, two hours before the bill was going to be heard in its first committee hearing since the Parkland shooting, Florida’s chief financial officer, who is also the state’s fire marshal, sent a press release calling the Florida League of Cities’ opposition to the bill “disgraceful.” He called the league’s report flawed and said the group doesn’t “care about the first responders who make up the communities they represent.”
At the hearing two hours later, Cruz, the Florida League of Cities lobbyist, stepped up to the microphone. But instead of talking about the costs of the bill, as he had at every previous committee hearing, he told lawmakers the league now supports the bill.
The bill could go to the floor of the House Friday for first reading; it is also expected to be considered by the Senate soon.
]]>A Florida bill to assist first responders suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder has found new life in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
At least three first responders to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, which killed 49 people, have publicly disclosed that they have a PTSD diagnosis, and advocates have been trying to expand workers’ compensation coverage in Florida since then. A bill to address that failed in Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature last year, and a similar measure’s prospects were uncertain this year.
After the Feb. 14 high school shooting in Parkland, in which 17 people died, the bill gained momentum, though only a few days are left in the legislative session. On Monday, the measure unanimously cleared its final committee hearing in the Florida House, the last step before a floor vote. Today, it passed its final Senate committee.
Orlando Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith lost a friend in the Pulse nightclub shooting. But he also became friends with another man who was pulled from the club by Omar Delgado, an Eatonville police officer diagnosed with PTSD after the shooting.
Smith, a Democrat, voted for the bill to expand coverage Monday, along with 18 other members of the committee.
“Many of the first responders from the mass shooting in Parkland are going to need this bill,” Smith said. “Some of them probably don’t even know it yet.”
PTSD, which is characterized by reliving an event through flashbacks and nightmares, often isn’t diagnosed immediately in the aftermath of a tragedy. Being hypervigilant and startling easily are normal reactions to experiencing or witnessing trauma. It becomes a disorder if the symptoms don’t subside in a month or two, or start causing trouble at home or at work.
To try to head it off, officials from the International Association of Fire Fighters flew into Florida the same night as the Parkland shooting to work with first responders and help them deal with their emotions. Fourteen students and three staff members died that day; 18 others were wounded but survived.
The team from the firefighters union included people who have had PTSD themselves and responded to incidents like the Columbine High School shooting. It’s something they’ve done after every major event in recent memory — from the Pulse nightclub shooting to the Oct. 1, 2017, attack in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“There is a fear that if you reach out for help within your own department, there may be adverse action,” said Jim Brinkley, the director of occupation health and safety for the union. “You may be removed from duty, you’re not allowed to get back on the rigs. By having those who serve outside the area come in, we find the members are more likely to open up and tell us exactly how they’re feeling.”
Lt. Rob Ramirez, a firefighter with the city of Margate, was dispatched to the casualty collection point during the Parkland shooting. There, people who were injured inside the school were assessed and treated before going to the hospital.
Ramirez said the scene was chaotic, and that first responders were overwhelmed with victims who had what he called “battlefield” injuries. Two shooting victims died at the triage scene.
“We transported a total of 14 victims off scene, all of them with major traumatic injuries,” Ramirez said. “As you can imagine, these small frame, small-bodied high school children taking these large caliber weapons, multiple rounds, to the torso, legs, arms, extremity. It was very chaotic.”
Ramirez said he’s “doing well” since the event, but he thinks about it often. And he worries about PTSD developing in the Parkland first responders.
“The men and women that responded to that call ... are not the same men and women that walked away from it,“ Ramirez said. “I know I’m not the same person I was the morning I went to work as who I am today, two weeks after the call. This changes you as a person.“
PTSD isn’t talked about as much as other job hazards facing first responders and, indeed, Florida law doesn’t fully deal with it. Right now, Florida first responders can get medical coverage under worker’s comp if they get PTSD on the job, but not lost wages. About a third of states have similar laws.
If they need time off work to go into treatment, or the PTSD is so bad as to be disabling, they must also have a physical injury to have their salaries covered.
Gerry Realin, an Orlando Police Department officer on the hazmat team, left a family vacation the morning after the Pulse nightclub shooting to respond. His job was to document and process the 49 dead inside the club. He spent four or five hours inside Pulse, with no air conditioning in a sweltering Florida summer, wearing a hazmat suit with no helmet. His boots turned yellow and then red from the blood and body parts.
The sights and smells left Realin with PTSD. He has flashbacks. Depression. Difficulty sleeping. The PTSD didn’t get better.
Outside the Florida workers’ compensation system, he was granted a disability pension from the police department about a year after the shooting. He also sued the Orlando Police Department within Florida’s workers’ compensation system for about $26,000 in lost earnings potential.
Florida Judge of Compensation Claims Neal Pitts ruled against Realin in January.
“If he had sustained even a minor accompanying physical injury, he would be entitled to both medical and indemnity benefits,” Pitts wrote. “To change this outcome would require action by the Legislature, should they deem it necessary.”
Realin’s wife, Jessica, has made it her mission to change the law. When she heard there were still bodies inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School the day after the shooting, she started to cry, thinking about someone doing the same job as her husband after Pulse.
“I promise you, [PTSD] is an ugly monster that will consume your entire world and tear you apart from the inside out,” Jessica Realin said. “If this bill doesn’t get passed, I don’t know how many more first responders we’re going to lose to this illness.”
Florida Rep. Matt Willhite, a Palm Beach representative who’s also a firefighter and paramedic, said first responders doing triage at a scene like the one in Parkland have to decide which children can be saved and which are too far gone.
“Now they’re gonna start thinking — could I have done something for another one? Could we have stopped this tragedy?” said Willhite, a Democrat. “Seeing the visions and thoughts and sights of the horrific aspect of this. But not to mention, they don’t get to just turn it off because every news channel they turn on right now, it’s all over the news.”
Willhite, a sponsor of the bill expanding coverage, said the Parkland shooting shows there could be another event, or even just a bad 911 call that puts someone over the edge. He said he doesn’t want the death toll attributable to the Parkland attack to include “first responders who take their life because of this.”
Until now, the bill’s main sticking point has been financial.
The Florida League of Cities prepared a white paper looking at the costs to local governments. It assumed that, of the 81,470 first responders in Florida, 2.1 percent to 6.4 percent would get PTSD in a given year. It assumed that every one of those responders would take six months or a year off work.
With an average annual salary of $54,728, the group came up with a price tag of $15.3 million to $95.5 million annually in lost wages.
“There’s a significant financial impact by putting this benefit into law,” said David Cruz, a lobbyist with the Florida League of Cities, told lawmakers at a committee hearing last month.
Such concerns tanked the bill last year. It got one hearing, at which Realin brought half-a-dozen first responders and widows who had lost first responders to suicide to testify and lend their support. After 25 minutes of testimony, lawmakers in the committee unanimously approved the measure.
But the bill never advanced beyond that stage. This year, the bill had more momentum; even before Parkland it had gotten four unanimous “yes” votes in committee.
Still, it had three more committee hearings to clear before the full House and Senate could vote, and in one case, it didn’t make it on the agenda until the committee’s last hearing. Until this week, the bills were different in the House and Senate, and there were fears it would die in committee again.
On Monday, two hours before the bill was going to be heard in its first committee hearing since the Parkland shooting, Florida’s chief financial officer, who is also the state’s fire marshal, sent a press release calling the Florida League of Cities’ opposition to the bill “disgraceful.” He called the league’s report flawed and said the group doesn’t “care about the first responders who make up the communities they represent.”
At the hearing two hours later, Cruz, the Florida League of Cities lobbyist, stepped up to the microphone. But instead of talking about the costs of the bill, as he had at every previous committee hearing, he told lawmakers the league now supports the bill.
The bill could go to the floor of the House Friday for first reading; it is also expected to be considered by the Senate soon.
]]>ProPublica and WMFE are investigating post-traumatic stress disorder and how it affects first responders and their families.
Whether it’s called shell shock or combat fatigue, there has long been a recognized link between war and the symptoms we now call PTSD, such as reliving an event through flashbacks and nightmares. That broad recognition often isn’t there for police officers and firefighters — even as more mass shootings bring the scenes of war to U.S. soil.
Psychiatrists now recognize that continued exposure to so-called bad calls over the course of a career can have a stacking effect, leading to PTSD. PTSD rates in first responders haven't been studied at a national scale, but smaller studies of firefighters have found it to be anywhere between 6.5 percent and 37 percent. We know PTSD not only affects the first responder, but also those around them.
And PTSD can lead to suicide. By one survey, one in 15 paramedics and EMTs has attempted suicide. That rate is more than ten times higher than for the general population.
We want to understand the magnitude and the experiences of PTSD in first responders — not only how many are out there, responding to calls and struggling in silence, but the specifics of what they are going through.
It’s why we’ve created a questionnaire for first responders and the people closest to them. Your stories will help fuel our reporting and broaden our understanding of the trauma in a group that feels it.
We recognize that these stories are sensitive and hard to talk about, but we are listening — and we will do everything in our power to protect your privacy. Our reporting is only as strong as the people who come forward to share their stories.
]]>ProPublica and WMFE are investigating post-traumatic stress disorder and how it affects first responders and their families.
Whether it’s called shell shock or combat fatigue, there has long been a recognized link between war and the symptoms we now call PTSD, such as reliving an event through flashbacks and nightmares. That broad recognition often isn’t there for police officers and firefighters — even as more mass shootings bring the scenes of war to U.S. soil.
Psychiatrists now recognize that continued exposure to so-called bad calls over the course of a career can have a stacking effect, leading to PTSD. PTSD rates in first responders haven't been studied at a national scale, but smaller studies of firefighters have found it to be anywhere between 6.5 percent and 37 percent. We know PTSD not only affects the first responder, but also those around them.
And PTSD can lead to suicide. By one survey, one in 15 paramedics and EMTs has attempted suicide. That rate is more than ten times higher than for the general population.
We want to understand the magnitude and the experiences of PTSD in first responders — not only how many are out there, responding to calls and struggling in silence, but the specifics of what they are going through.
It’s why we’ve created a questionnaire for first responders and the people closest to them. Your stories will help fuel our reporting and broaden our understanding of the trauma in a group that feels it.
We recognize that these stories are sensitive and hard to talk about, but we are listening — and we will do everything in our power to protect your privacy. Our reporting is only as strong as the people who come forward to share their stories.
]]>