Portland Press Herald. March 24, 2024.
Editorial: Maine finally turns a corner on public defense
After years of unacceptable neglect, the state now has three offices dedicated to representing people who can’t afford to pay for legal counsel.
The Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, an embattled body this editorial board has written about critically on numerous occasions in recent years, is no more.
A measure signed into law by Gov. Janet Mills last Thursday renames the quasi-state agency the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services. That’s the least important provision contained in the emergency legislation from the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee, which provides for the creation of two new public defenders offices and 22 new positions for public defender offices in Aroostook, Penobscot and Piscataquis counties.
The first dedicated office, which is to say the state’s first, serves Kennebec County and opened last year in Augusta. Until it opened, Maine was the only state in the nation without such an office, instead relying exclusively on private lawyers.
In recent years, fewer and fewer of those private lawyers were willing to take on the work of public defense. Even as the fee for taking cases was eventually raised (to $150 per hour from $80 per hour), the crisis showed no sign of abating.
What has resulted is scandalous: scores of Mainers languishing in jails for weeks or months without the effective legal support they are constitutionally entitled to.
Pressure to fix the system has been heaped on Maine by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the state for failing to uphold state and federal laws that require states to provide attorneys to criminal defendants who cannot afford to hire them (by one estimate, 80% of people charged with crimes cannot afford their own counsel). Last year, the commission was responsible for more than 32,000 new cases in Maine.
Pressure was also aggressively and repeatedly applied by the people tasked with leading the commission. “I’m hopeful that as we have finally arrived at the point of failure, the Legislature will recognize what it needs to do,” the former executive director of the Commission on Indigent Legal Services, Justin Andrus, said back in August of 2022.
Robert Cummins, the commissioner in the role before Andrus, sounded many alarms in his April 2022 resignation letter to Gov. Mills that he believed the sustained neglect of the system seemed to “boil down to an ‘I just don’t give a damn’ attitude.”
After a few false starts, the Mills administration now appears to be firmly on the right track. By instituting a new system of state-employed lawyers and beginning to commit the necessary funding and resources to it, Maine appears to have started to give a damn about guaranteed legal representation for all. It’s about time.
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Bangor Daily News. March 22, 2024.
Editorial: Your tax form can help ease hunger in Maine
Hunger in Maine is a persistent problem with food insecurity in the Pine Tree States significantly higher than the national average. In Maine, 10 percent of people — and, worse, one in seven children — face hunger, according to Feeding America.
There is a relatively new way for Mainers to help ease this persistent problem. When filing your state tax forms this year, you can check a box to donate money to a hunger relief fund. An emergency food assistance fund is one of eight charitable checkoffs on Schedule CP, which accompanies the state’s standard 1040ME tax form. The form allows a portion — or all — of a person’s tax refund to be directed to one or several of these funds.
The checkoff is the result of legislation passed by lawmakers in 2021. You can also donate to funds that benefit children, military members, veterans, public libraries, wildlife, and companion pets, or to support childhood cancer research.
The minimum contribution is $5 and you can donate to multiple funds. You can also use your state income tax refund to purchase state park passes through Schedule CP.
Money collected through the Emergency Food Assistance Program checkoff will go toward a program run by the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. Food pantries and other emergency food providers can apply for assistance from the fund.
“Hunger and food insecurity carries an immense stigma. It’s not something we typically like to talk about,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Maureen Terry, D-Gorham, said in testimony in March 2021.
“To me, this checkoff option is just like making dinner for a sick friend or community member in need of a little extra TLC. It provides a way for more of our neighbors experiencing food insecurity to access meals without all of the added stress and fear often associated with asking for help,” she added. Terry is a chef and former restaurant owner, who now operates a cookie company and serves on the boards of two farmers markets.
“During my 10 years in this office, I have seen increasing levels of poverty and increasing food insecurity. Of course, the pandemic has made such matters even worse,” Alan Casavant, the then-mayor of Biddeford, said in testimony in 2021 in support of the bill. “This bill represents a simple way in which individuals can assist those in need. … With so many of our neighbors struggling day to day, it is important, I think, to add new tools to the proverbial tool box to assist them in any way that we can.”
This new tool offers an easy way for Mainers to help their neighbors in need.
So, as you complete your tax forms, don’t forget to fill out Schedule CP if you’d like to donate a portion of your tax refund to the worthy cause of your choice.
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Boston Globe. March 24, 2024.
Editorial: When 2 in 5 people report delaying health care because of costs, something is wrong
The state’s Health Policy Commission tracks the overall cost of health care, but it should also eye the costs that consumers are paying.
Despite Massachusetts’ reputation as a medical mecca, health care here is becoming increasingly unaffordable. And while the state has taken important steps to rein in increases to the overall cost of care, those savings haven’t always been passed on to the consumer.
This makes it crucial for the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission, together with the Legislature, to establish an affordability benchmark — a new measure that would highlight how much consumers pay for health care, which could be used to hold the health care system accountable for keeping patient costs down.
The state has long struggled to contain its high health care costs, which are passed on to consumers through health insurance premiums and copays. According to the Center for Health Information and Analysis’ 2024 annual report, 41 percent of Massachusetts residents polled in a 2021 survey had trouble affording health care during the prior 12 months, including more than 50 percent of Black and Hispanic respondents. Nearly one-third of residents reported going without needed health care because of cost. A poll conducted in February and March 2024 for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts found that 40 percent of respondents reported delaying care because of cost.
Struggles paying for care are unsurprising given the high cost of insurance. The average commercial health plan cost $595 per member per month in 2022, or $7,140 annually, an increase of 5.8 percent from the prior year, according to the CHIA report. The average person with commercial insurance paid another $730 a year in cost-sharing. Because plans are so expensive, more small businesses are offering high-deductible health plans, and 1.7 million Massachusetts residents were enrolled in health plans with deductibles of at least $1,400. Having a high deductible can dissuade people from seeking care since they know they will have to pay out of pocket until the deductible is met.
Between 2020 and 2022, both premiums and cost sharing grew faster than wages or inflation. And these numbers do not include the cost for care obtained outside the insurance system — for example, many mental health clinicians require payment out of pocket.
Massachusetts was the first state to establish a health care cost growth benchmark. The Health Policy Commission, working with the Legislature, sets a target each year for health care cost growth. Providers and insurers have to publicly testify at an annual hearing on how they are keeping costs in line. The commission has authority to require any provider that does not adhere to the benchmark to adopt a performance improvement plan. (Only one plan has ever been negotiated, with Mass General Brigham.)
That benchmark is important and should be expanded. For instance, this editorial board has supported requiring pharmaceutical companies, pharmacy benefit managers, and drug wholesalers to testify about cost drivers related to prescription drugs. The provider review process should be expanded to cover all hospitals and specialty care providers, rather than only those with affiliated primary care physicians.
But a separate affordability benchmark is also necessary because curbing health care costs does not always mean limiting consumer costs, due to the health care system’s complexity. For example, if a drug manufacturer lowers a drug price through a rebate pocketed by a pharmacy benefit manager, the patient still pays the same amount.
“You can get savings sometimes at the system level, and it doesn’t always translate to the direct experience consumers are having,” said Alex Sheff, senior director of policy and government relations for Health Care for All, a health care consumer advocacy group.
That is why a new measure that would monitor spending by patients with commercial insurance — insurance bought through an employer or the state exchange — would be a valuable tool to better understand consumer costs and hold the health care system accountable for containing them. Ideally, this metric could be parsed in a way that helps policy makers understand whether certain populations have bigger cost burdens, like people with disabilities or chronic conditions or people of different races, ethnicities, ages, or income levels.
To be effective, the affordability benchmark must be paired with accountability. The challenge will be developing a fair way to hold the entire system accountable.
The easiest measure of affordability relates to how much consumers are paying for insurance. But insurer profits are already regulated, and the amount insurers charge reflects the prices doctors and drugmakers charge.
David Seltz, executive director of the Health Policy Commission, said the commission is still in the early stages of developing an affordability benchmark, but it is considering different accountability methods, such as including affordability as another factor in the current system of health care cost reviews and performance improvement plans; having the Division of Insurance consider affordability in approving insurance rates; and developing a new system. While the commission can develop the affordability metric on its own, any accountability measure needs legislative approval. Lawmakers should ensure that there is a system with teeth in place to keep consumer costs down, and that it is done in a way that includes providers, insurers, and the pharmaceutical industry.
While no state has done exactly what Massachusetts is considering, other states have addressed health care affordability within broader efforts to contain costs, including Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, and California.
The best way to keep people healthy is to ensure everyone can get the care they need when they need it, without worrying about whether they can afford it.
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Rutland Herald. March 26, 2024.
Editorial: Big data
Far too frequently, we learn about data breaches here in Vermont. As we all move into a more digital world, it would only make sense that there would be more bad actors trying to get at our personal information.
Since the start of the year, the state Attorney General’s office, which keeps tabs on security breach notices, lists dozens from around the nation affecting Vermonters. Vermont’s Security Breach Notice Act requires businesses and state agencies to notify the Attorney General and consumers in the event a business or state agency suffers a “security breach.” A security breach is defined as the “unauthorized acquisition or a reasonable belief of an unauthorized acquisition of electronic data that compromises the security, confidentiality, or integrity of personal information maintained by the (business or state agency).”
It’s scary when we receive notifications from our banks, health care provider or other providers we rely upon that indicate there has been a breach.
Fortunately, Vermont is closing in on passing the Vermont Data Privacy Act, which proponents say would give us the second-strongest privacy law in the nation.
In February 2024, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), gave Vermont low marks when it came to data privacy. That, along with some high-profile in-state data breaches, spurred lawmakers into action this session.
In the report’s executive summary, EPIC’s authors laid out the chasm between where the world is and where many states are when it comes to protecting themselves.
“Today, much of our lives are lived online. How we work, learn, and play is often mediated by screens with companies on the other side gathering data about us. Often, these practices are out of line with what consumers expect, and they put consumer security and privacy at risk,” the summary explains. “The more data companies collect about us, the more our data is at risk. When companies hold your data, the greater the odds it will be exposed in a breach or a hack and end up in the hands of identity thieves, scammers, or shadowy companies known as data brokers that buy and sell a huge amount of data about Americans. The unregulated online advertising and data broker market can result in turbocharged scams, discrimination, and invasive targeted ads. Yet there are very few rules that prevent all this from happening.”
The report notes that despite massive data collection, the U.S. has no federal privacy law.
“Therefore, an increasing number of states are passing laws that purportedly aim to protect people’s privacy and security. However, these laws largely fail to adequately protect consumers. In our evaluation of the 14 states that have passed consumer privacy legislation, nearly half received failing grades, and none received an A,” the summary states.
According to the report, strong consumer privacy law would: requiring companies to limit their data collection to better match consumer expectations; strictly regulate all uses of sensitive data, including health data, biometrics, and location data; establish strong civil rights safeguards online and rein in harmful profiling of consumers; provide strong enforcement and regulatory powers to ensure the rules are followed; and enable consumers to hold companies accountable for violations in court.
Besides Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Illinois and Maryland are considering strong legislation that would force changes to the abusive data practices driving commercial surveillance and online discrimination, while allowing businesses to continue to innovate.
EPIC is convinced that states will be able to lead the way on this issue.
So for the Vermont House to give unanimous approval on Friday of H.121 was a step in the right direction. The bill heads to the Senate.
As written, H.121 earns a B+ grade from the groups for how well it protects consumers’ data privacy and security, according to a news release on the Vermont Data Privacy Act vote.
“Right now, Vermonters’ web searches, online purchases and location check-ins are being harvested, bought, and sold by companies totally legally,” said Zach Tomanelli, a consumer protection advocate with the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. “The unchecked spread of our personal information exposes consumers to all sorts of threats like scams, identity theft, harassment and discrimination. Vermonters deserve common sense protections that limit companies from harvesting whatever data they want and doing whatever they want with it.”
“Vermont is taking important steps toward protecting consumers from abusive corporate data practices,” said Caitriona Fitzgerald, EPIC’s deputy director. A key piece of this bill is a private right of action, which allows consumers to hold companies that violate their rights accountable in court. The bill does give businesses a chance to correct any violations before they can be sued.
We congratulate Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, chair of the Vermont House Committee on Commerce & Economic Development, for leading this charge toward consumer protection and safeguarding information against big data.
It’s the kind of assurance Vermonters need right now.
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Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. March 23, 2024.
Editorial: Action taken
Police departments across Vermont, including the Vermont State Police, continue to report an increasing number of incidents with fewer officers.
While there are individuals who would rather see even smaller law enforcement agencies, protecting public safety remains a priority. In fact, we have segued from pleas to “defund the police” to consideration of crime bills in the Legislature that put more teeth into the criminal statutes so that law enforcement can more effectively do its job. Communities across the state argue that with potentially stronger sentences — for many misdemeanors and crimes that are subject to repeat offenders — might dial back the “catch-and-release” system now in place.
It is, of course, a process that is far more complicated than that, and there are arguments at both ends — prevention and incarceration — that also warrant merit and consideration.
Ultimately, taxpayers want accountability in law enforcement and the subsequent judicial process.
In recent years, high-profile cases of police misconduct have become part of the narrative nationwide. Steps have been put into place — even as law enforcement has come under attack in a fairly stigmatic fashion — to assuage public concerns and to justify actions — or inactions.
Vermont has the State Police Advisory Commission, which was created in 1979 by state statute, to “provide civilian oversight of the Vermont State Police and to advise and counsel the Commissioner of Public Safety in his/her overall responsibilities for the management, supervision and control of the Vermont State Police.” That includes reviewing cases of misconduct by troopers.
“SPAC is statutorily empowered to provide advice and counsel to the Commissioner of Public Safety to ensure appropriate action is taken with respect to allegations of misconduct by Vermont State Police officers,” according to a news release on the most recent synopsis of complaints. “To assist the Commissioner of Public Safety and SPAC, Vermont law also requires DPS to maintain an Office of Internal Investigations (IA), whose sole responsibility is to investigate allegations of misconduct by members of the Vermont State Police.”
Since 2021, the state has been highlighting the results of these reviews more publicly than they have in the past. It has been a welcome act of transparency by the VSP and the Department of Public Safety. (A few local law enforcement agencies would be well advised to take note.)
Last week, the seventh semiannual summary of internal investigations was released. Synopses in the report do not include identifying information about the troopers involved, which is confidential as a matter of law. While it does not provide details of the incidents involving members of the Vermont State Police, it does reveal the outcome, as well as address any concern that an internal review had been ignored.
According to the news release, “Vermont law requires that all internal investigations ‘shall be confidential’ except in limited circumstances. Accordingly, specific details beyond the synopses regarding these 2023 investigations cannot be made public.”
According to the report, between Jan. 1, 2023, and June 30, 2023, there were 15 matters that were resolved before SPAC. (The group meets bi-monthly, and are open to the public, however, they do, on occasion, enter into executive sessions at times.)
The summary shows that 11 incidents arose as the result of a concern raised internally by members of the Vermont State Police, while four came to the attention of supervisors following a report from the community. Two incidents involved multiple troopers.
The report shows that 11 troopers were found to have violated VSP policies. Three troopers were determined to have committed no policy violations. In four other cases, the troopers involved resigned before the internal investigation review process concluded, the report notes.
According to the summary: “Cases involved instances related to compliance with the Vehicle Pursuit Policy; an allegation of criminal conduct; actions during a missing persons investigation; engagement in unbecoming conduct; the negligent discharge of a firearm; participation in the court process; and conduct during a search. An inquiry into an allegation that two troopers used excessive force during the arrest of a subject proved unfounded.”
The outcomes ranged from letters of reprimand to a case being reported to the Vermont Criminal Justice Council.
For sure, not all complaints rise to the level of requiring a formal internal affairs investigation. But we are grateful for the accountability and the seriousness the department and VSP are taking to ensure that Vermonters are being served well, and when they are not that proper action is being taken.
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