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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">omfg fire whistleblower</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-what-wall-street-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-its-grip-on-emergency-rooms/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-what-wall-street-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-its-grip-on-emergency-rooms/</font></a></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Here’s what Wall Street doesn’t want you to know about its grip on emergency rooms</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt / Independent Media Institute April 3, 2020</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Doctor Ling Min is the first emergency room doctor to be fired for going public with his concerns about poor hospital emergency room safety practices and shortages of medical supplies and protective gear for health workers.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He won’t be the last.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Like many hospitals in the US, PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham Washington, where Ling Min worked for the past 17 years as an emergency room doctor, has outsourced the management and staffing of its emergency room. </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">So, Min works on-site at the hospital’s ER, but he is employed by a physician staffing firm that runs the ER. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b style="">These staffing firms are often behind the surprise medical bills for ER services that patients receive after their insurance company has paid the hospital and doctors, but not the excessive out-of-network charges billed by these outside staffing firms</b><b style="">.[huh?]</b></span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">About a third of hospital emergency rooms are staffed by doctors on the payrolls of two physician staffing companies—TeamHealth and Envision Health—owned by Wall Street investment firms. Envision Healthcare employs 69,000 healthcare workers nationwide while TeamHealth employs 20,000.</font><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Private equity firm </font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Blackstone Group owns TeamHealth</font></span><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">, Kravis Kohlberg Roberts (KKR) owns Envision.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Care of the sick is not the mission of these companies; their mission is to make outsized profits for the private equity firms and its investors</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Overcharging patients and insurance companies for providing urgent and desperately needed emergency medical care is bad enough. But it is unconscionable to muzzle doctors who speak out to advocate for the health of their patients and co-workers during the global pandemic that is rapidly spreading across the US.</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yet, that is what Blackstone-owned TeamHealth just did. Why would an experienced ER doctor be fired in the middle of a pandemic?</span><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> One clue may be that </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Blackstone’s CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is part of President Trump’s inner circle. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He may not want to risk that relationship by allowing TeamHealth’s doctors to inform the public about Washington’s mishandling of the allocation of supplies and protective gear. The president might conclude that TeamHealth doctors didn’t appreciate him enough, and where would that leave Schwartzman?</span></b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center may have the distinction of being the first hospital to have a doctor outsourced from a physician staffing firm unceremoniously fired for telling the public the truth. But it won’t be the last. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Hospitals are now telling doctors treating coronavirus patients they will be fired if they speak to the press</span>.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The American Academy of Emergency Medicine protested Dr. Min’s ouster and questioned how TeamHealth is allowed to provide hospital services when the law requires that physician practices must be owned by a licensed medical practitioner. TeamHealth skirts the law by owning all the assets of the physician practices it acquires—the real estate, offices, equipment, supplies, inventory, and even accounts receivable.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On paper, the physician practices are owned by a doctor-led organization that TeamHealth has set up to comply with the law. But what does it mean to own a physician practice if the practice has no assets and no possibility to exist on its own?</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The furor over patients hit by surprise medical bills revealed that TeamHealth controls the billing for the doctors it supplies to hospital emergency rooms. The firing of Doctor Ling Min pulls back the curtain and reveals that TeamHealth controls the doctors as well.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eileen Appelbaum is the Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and visiting professor, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rosemary Batt is the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work, Cornell University ILR School.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-some-alabama-county-sheriffs-force-their-inmates-into-medical-debt"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-some-alabama-county-sheriffs-force-their-inmates-into-medical-debt</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div><b>How some Alabama county sheriffs force their inmates into medical debt</b></div><div>
</div><div>Written by ProPublica December 26, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>This article was produced in partnership with AL.com, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.</div><div>
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</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In Alabama, the county in which you’re arrested could be the deciding factor in who will be financially responsible for your medical bills behind bars.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In Baldwin County, known for its white-sand Gulf Coast beaches and waterfront communities, the sheriff’s office ensures that inmates in the county jail do not have to pay anything more than a $15 copayment for medical care.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Inmates are not billed for the full cost of any medical care either inside or outside” the jail, Sheriff Hoss Mack said in an email. “Alabama Code Title 14 assigns financial responsibility of inmates’ medical treatment to the department where they are being held.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Just across the bay in Mobile County, home to one of the busiest ports in the U.S. and the eponymous city of nearly 200,000 people built around it, Sheriff Sam Cochran takes a different tack: Some of his inmates are personally on the hook for the full cost of medically necessary care they receive from outside doctors while incarcerated, even if they are awaiting trial.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>The difference between the two sheriffs’ approaches demonstrates the unique power Alabama sheriffs have to set their own rules and answer only to voters.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Legal experts and civil rights advocates say sheriffs like Cochran are likely violating both state law and the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment and excessive fines.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It’s not just happening in Mobile County. In multiple instances confirmed by AL.com and ProPublica, inmates have had medical bills sent to collections while they were still behind bars, damaging their credit and putting pressure on their family members to pay up to ensure the care continued.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Brandon DeLaFosse is among them. He was arrested on domestic violence, burglary and robbery charges and booked into the Mobile County Metro Jail in November 2018, three months after he underwent surgery on his inner ear. Since then, he has received bills totaling thousands of dollars for necessary follow-up appointments and tests, some of which have gone to collections while he remains behind bars.</div><div>
</div><div>“He keeps getting bills in the mail,” said Alicia DeLaFosse, Brandon’s mother, who has paid hundreds of dollars for care he has received while in custody. “It’s all money he owes from going back and forth to the doctor.”</div><div>
</div><div>Like many inmates, DeLaFosse doesn’t have significant income or access to public or private insurance in jail.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Alabama law is clear: If an “inmate develops a medical condition which requires immediate treatment at a medical-care facility outside the county jail, the department shall be financially responsible for the cost of the treatment of the inmate.”</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But Cochran said when the jail’s doctors determine inmates need care that goes beyond what in-house medical staff and contracted outpatient providers can handle, they are often taken to private medical professionals who do not have contracts with the jail. And he allows those medical providers to bill at least some of those inmates directly.</span></div><div>
</div><div>“When that person is taken out to that private medical facility or something like that, then, yeah, they’re going to bill him for that treatment,” Cochran said during an interview in his office last month. “It’s a more than reasonable thing to do.”</div><div>
</div><div>Asked later about the details of Brandon DeLaFosse’s case and how the practice squares with state and federal law, Cochran provided an email written by Trey Oliver, warden of the Mobile County Metro Jail.</div><div>
</div><div>Oliver wrote that inmates are required to pay “when they have a follow-up procedure or visit from a surgery conducted prior to being booked.”</div><div>
</div><div>As for DeLaFosse, Oliver wrote, “There was a follow up visit or two and his mother agreed to pay it beforehand.”</div><div>
</div><div>Most jails and prisons across Alabama and the U.S. either have doctors and nurses on staff or contract with outside companies to provide medical care in their lockups. It’s not uncommon for inmates to be charged low copays — typically less than $20 — for medications and medical services.</div><div>
</div><div>But requiring inmates to foot the bill for their health care takes that practice to another level.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>That’s “like charging them for their own food,” said John Lentine, a Birmingham criminal defense attorney and adjunct law professor at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law and the Birmingham School of Law. “To me it’s a basic human rights kind of thing.”</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law and Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, said the practice is “absolutely” unconstitutional.</span></div><div>
</div><div>“There is a constitutional obligation to provide health care that meets the serious medical needs of people who are incarcerated,” said Deitch, who co-wrote the American Bar Association’s Standards on Treatment of Prisoners. “That’s not negotiable.”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The tactic is another way in which sheriffs across Alabama are avoiding financial responsibility for inmate medical care. AL.com and ProPublica reported in September that many sheriffs in Alabama and across the country are finding ways to release inmates from jail just before they incur expensive hospital bills, a tactic known as “medical bond.”</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>In several recent cases, incarcerated people around the country have successfully challenged policies restricting their access to free medical care in prison.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Last year, a federal court ruled that transgender inmates in Missouri’s state prisons have a right to receive hormone therapy free of charge while incarcerated, regardless of whether they were already receiving the treatments when they were taken into custody. And this year, prisoners in Minnesota reached a settlement with the state’s Department of Corrections that requires the prison system to provide prisoners who have Hepatitis C with expensive drugs that often cure the infection.</span></div><div>
</div><div>AL.com and ProPublica attempted to contact the sheriffs of all 67 counties in Alabama via email or phone to ask whether they allow inmates to be billed for care they receive while incarcerated. Of those, 13 sheriffs and one chief deputy responded. The sheriff of Mobile County and chief deputy of Jackson County each said they allow providers to bill inmates for necessary care in certain situations. Ten sheriffs said they do not allow inmates to be billed. Two others declined to comment.</div><div>
</div><div>“I’m Still Getting Bills”</div><div>
</div><div>Days after Thanksgiving last year, Brandon DeLaFosse was arrested in Mississippi on outstanding warrants stemming from an incident earlier that month in Mobile County, Alabama.</div><div>
</div><div>The then-28-year-old was driven back to Mobile, where he stayed in the county jail until Feb. 28, when he was sentenced to three years in prison.</div><div>
</div><div>DeLaFosse’s health problems continued behind bars. Since his ear surgery last year, he has suffered from persistent ear infections and severe hearing loss.</div><div>
</div><div>And his bills are piling up.</div><div>
</div><div>In between Marlboro Lights and peanut butter-and-syrup sandwiches at her Irvington home last month, DeLaFosse’s mother, Alicia, said she spends many hours each week making calls, sending emails and conducting research to advocate on behalf of her son.</div><div>
</div><div>She said a steady stream of medical bills addressed to her son has arrived at her house since his arrest. Billing records show that she has spent more than $600 on his care since his arrest, and more than $1,000 in outstanding bills have gone to debt collection.</div><div>
</div><div>On Dec. 6, 2018, while he was in the Mobile County Metro Jail, Brandon DeLaFosse was taken to see an ear, nose and throat specialist at Providence Hospital in Mobile for a surgery follow-up visit recommended by the doctor. But first, his mother said, jail staff required her to make a payment to the doctor’s office. After the appointment, the hospital’s billing department sent a bill for $729 for tests he underwent that day to Alicia DeLaFosse’s house.</div><div>
</div><div>“The way the nurse at the jail explained it to me is because it was something that didn’t happen at the jail, it’s preexisting. … I had to go pay for it myself,” she said. “For the jail to allow him to go see the doctor, I had to go to the doctor’s office and pay $125 first.”</div><div>
</div><div>A registered nurse at the jail in Mobile noted in Brandon DeLaFosse’s medical record that his mother made a payment and that the nurse had scheduled a follow-up visit for later that month. In January 2019, a nurse practitioner at the jail wrote a note in his file stating she would request another follow-up appointment with his doctor “with the expectation that it is handled in the usual fashion with his mother arranging for payment.”</div><div>
</div><div>“I don’t think it’s fair. They’re responsible for my medical care, so why should it be coming out of my pockets or my family’s pockets?” Brandon DeLaFosse said in a jailhouse phone call.</div><div>
</div><div>Cochran, the Mobile County sheriff, said via email that he views the situation as a “legal dispute between [Brandon DeLaFosse], us and our contracted provider. I know of no complaint or claim made against us.”</div><div>
</div><div>“The mom agreed to pay [the] bill. Looks like she reneged,” Cochran wrote. “Otherwise if it would have been medically necessary our contracted folks would have handled.”</div><div>
</div><div>Alicia DeLaFosse said she “didn’t renege” and paid for all of the medical costs she knew about in advance.</div><div>
</div><div>Brandon DeLaFosse continued to be billed for outside medical care after he was moved to state prison. On July 23, nearly five months after his sentence began, he saw a doctor and underwent tests at Providence Hospital. He was sent a bill for $224.70 for outpatient diagnostics administered that day, plus $71.98 for the doctor visit.</div><div>
</div><div>That shouldn’t have happened, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Department of Corrections said in a statement.</div><div>
</div><div>“By ADOC’S policy, all inmates in the care, custody, and control of any ADOC correctional facility are not charged or responsible for community-based medical care or mental health services,” the spokeswoman, Samantha Banks, said.</div><div>
</div><div>Any state prisoners “incorrectly” billed for outpatient medical care should notify the provider that they were incarcerated at the time, the statement explained. “The medical provider should submit to the Department the appropriate paperwork and any outstanding inmate medical bills will be directed to the appropriate payer.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>State prisoners in Arizona have reported similar issues with providers billing them directly for medical care they received while incarcerated,</b> as KJZZ radio reported this year. Like in Alabama, the Arizona Department of Corrections has said the bills were sent out in error and that the department or its medical contractor would pay the inmates’ bills.</div><div>
</div><div>But that’s a vastly different situation than the one facing inmates in some Alabama counties, where sheriff’s offices are not chalking up such bills to error and are in fact deliberately choosing to avoid paying medical bills for inmates in their charge.</div><div>
</div><div>Constitutional Question</div><div>Though the public often has little sympathy for inmates, incarcerated people do have clear rights, particularly when it comes to health care behind bars.</div><div>
</div><div>Alabama law states that “necessary clothing and bedding must be furnished by the sheriff or jailer, at the expense of the county, to those prisoners who are unable to provide them for themselves, and also necessary medicines and medical attention to those who are sick or injured, when they are unable to provide them for themselves.”</div><div>
</div><div>In another section of the state code, a definition of a county inmate includes an explicit reference to their health care being provided for: “any person being held in a public institution under the administrative control and responsibility of the county sheriff and for whom the county is responsible for the provision of medical care.”</div><div>
</div><div>Brandon Blankenship, an assistant professor of law and ethics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said that allowing inmates to be billed for care that they receive while incarcerated amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and that the bills are excessive fines.</div><div>
</div><div><b>“I don’t think it’s ever been challenged in court in Alabama, but from where I’m sitting, the answer to me is that, no, it’s certainly not constitutional under the Eighth Amendment.”</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The tactics of some Alabama sheriffs stand in sharp contrast to what’s going on elsewhere in the country. This year, California and Illinois banned the practice of charging inmates copays, and a number of other states have taken, or are considering, steps to rein in the practice.</span></div><div>
</div><div>“They usually cannot afford even a $5 copay, so the idea that they could pay thousands of dollars for these services is laughable from a practical perspective and it’s downright evil on many different levels,” said Deitch, the University of Texas at Austin professor.</div><div>
</div><div>In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a seminal case, City of Revere v. Massachusetts General Hospital, involving a person who was hurt during an arrest and taken to a hospital. The court ruled that “as long as the governmental entity ensures that the medical care needed is in fact provided, the Constitution does not dictate how the cost of that care should be allocated as between the entity and the provider of the care. That is a matter of state law.”</div><div>
</div><div>But that ruling did not answer the question of whether inmates can be stuck with the bill.</div><div>
</div><div>“We don’t have any clear Supreme Court ruling,” said Fred Cohen, a professor emeritus at the University at Albany’s School of Criminal Justice who has decades of experience in corrections law and serves as executive editor of Correctional Law Reporter.</div><div>
</div><div>Cohen said he believes there is a good case to be made that the practice of allowing inmates to be billed for medical care violates their constitutional rights.</div><div>
</div><div>“I don’t think it’s an open policy question in that inmates should not be required to pay,” he said. “I think it could be held unconstitutional by the right court.”</div><div>
</div><div>Different Systems</div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/they-loan-you-money-then-they-get-a-warrant-for-your-arrest/</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div><b>They loan you money. Then they get a warrant for your arrest</b></div><div>Written by Anjali Tsui / ProPublica December 3, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>Cecila Avila was finishing a work shift at a Walmart. David Gordon was at church. Darrell Reese was watching his granddaughter at home. Jessica Albritton had pulled into the parking lot at her job, where she packed and shipped bike parts.</div><div>
</div><div><b>All four were arrested by an armed constable, handcuffed and booked into jail. They spent anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days behind bars before being released after paying a few hundred dollars in bail or promising to appear in court.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">None of the four, who live in northern Utah and were detained last year, had committed a crime. They had each borrowed money at high interest rates from a local lender called Loans for Less and were sued for owing sums that ranged from $800 to $3,600. When they missed a court date, the company obtained a warrant for their arrest.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Avila was handcuffed and marched down the main aisle in the Walmart in front of customers and co-workers. “It was the most embarrassing thing,” said Avila, 30, who has worked at the store for eight years. At the time of the arrest, Loans for Less had applied to garnish her wages. “It just didn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “Why am I being arrested for it?”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It’s against the law to jail someone because of an unpaid debt. Congress banned debtors prisons in 1833. Yet, across the country, debtors are routinely threatened with arrest and sometimes jailed, and the practices are particularly aggressive in Utah. (ProPublica recently chronicled how medical debt collectors are wielding similar powers in Kansas.)</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Technically, debtors are arrested for not responding to a court summons requested by the creditor. But for many low-income people, who are not familiar with court proceedings, lack access to transportation, child care options or time off, or move frequently and thus may not receive notifications, it’s a distinction without a difference.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Reese, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran, said he missed a hearing because he couldn’t afford to put gas in his car. </span>Gordon, 46, said he was never personally notified of the court date. Avila and Albritton, 32, said they couldn’t take time off work.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In Utah, payday lenders and similar companies that offer high-interest, small-dollar loans dominate small claims court. <b>Loans for Less, for example, filed 95% of the small claims cases in South Ogden,</b> a suburban city of 17,000 about a half-hour north of Salt Lake City on the interstate, in fiscal year 2018, according to state data.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Across Utah, high-interest lenders filed 66% of all small claims cases heard between September 2017 and September 2018, according to a new analysis of court records conducted by a team led by Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah and the financial services director at the <b>Consumer Federation of America</b>, and David McNeill, a legal data consultant and CEO of Docket Reminder.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Companies can sue for up to $11,000 in Utah’s small claims courts, which are stripped of certain formalities: There are rarely lawyers, judges are not always legally trained and the rules of evidence don’t apply.</div><div>
</div><div>Lenders file thousands of cases every year. When defendants don’t show up — and they often don’t — the lenders win by default. Once a judgment is entered, companies can garnish borrowers’ paychecks and seize their property. If borrowers fail to attend a supplemental hearing to answer questions about their income and assets, companies can ask the court to issue a bench warrant for their arrest.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Arrest warrants were issued in an estimated 3,100 small claims cases during the period studied by Peterson’s team. Almost all of the warrants — 91% — were issued in cases filed by payday, auto title or other high-interest lenders</b>. The number of people who are jailed appears to be small. The state does not track the information, but ProPublica examined a sampling of court records and identified at least 17 people who were jailed over the course of 12 months.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Most people scramble to meet bail to avoid being incarcerated. Others, like Avila, Gordon and Albritton, are booked into jail and held until they pay. They often borrow from friends, family, bail bonds companies and even take on new payday loans.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>“Bail” has a different meaning in Utah than it does in other states — one that tilts the power even more in the direction of lenders and other creditors. </b>In 2014, state legislators passed a law that made it possible for creditors to get access to bail money posted in civil cases. Prior to that, bail money would return to the defendant. Now, it is routinely transferred to high-interest lenders. The law has transformed the state’s power to incarcerate into a powerful tool to guarantee that loan companies get paid.</div><div>....</div></div></div>