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Gun Violence At U.S. Schools Continues To Grow Sharply

Gun Violence At U.S. Schools Continues To Grow Sharply

By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times

A fatal shooting in Oregon on Tuesday was the 31st firearms attack at a U.S. school since the start of the year, marking a sharp acceleration in the rash of violence that has occurred on campuses across the nation.

The incidents range from the 20 people shot near UC Santa Barbara less than three weeks ago to gunfire that resulted in no injuries at all.

The frequency of attacks has picked up since the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., where 20 first-graders and six adults were gunned down.

In the 18 months since that tragedy, 41 deaths have occurred in 62 documented incidents at U.S. schools. In the 18 months before that attack, there were 17 deaths in 17 incidents. Everytown.org, a group that promotes gun safety, lists 72 incidents since Sandy Hook.

The increase comes at a time when all types of violent gun deaths have been essentially flat since about 2000, following a sharp drop since the 1980s, when such deaths peaked in the U.S.

But underlying the high-profile shootings are thousands of incidents involving American youths that never make national headlines, or even get noticed locally. Each year, for example, about 2,000 teens and young children commit suicide with guns at home, according to Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

“School shootings are part of a much bigger problem,” he said. “There are 86 people who die from bullets on an average day.”

On Tuesday, a teen gunman armed with a rifle killed a student at a high school in Troutdale, Ore., injured a teacher and then apparently shot himself in a bathroom. During the evacuation, authorities found another student with a gun not related to the shooting.

These school shootings mirror past upsurges in other venues.

During the 1980s and 1990s, for example, there were at least 10 shooting incidents that occurred at U.S. post offices, leading to the term “going postal.” In 1991, a fired postal worker in suburban Detroit killed three people and wounded six in a post office before taking his own life. More recently, few post office shootings have occurred.

“I don’t know why they have decreased,” Postal Inspection Service spokeswoman Stacia Crane said. “The economy changes. People change.”

Garen Wintemute, director of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, hesitates to brand such serial events as copycat crimes, but he said shootings tend to feed off themselves.

“The more we are all aware of them, the easier it is for one of us to do the next one,” he said.

Still, Wintemute said that guns remain widely available to individuals who are clearly at risk of committing such violence and that authorities have few tools to intervene.

A bill in the California Legislature would allow families and others to seek a warrant on such individuals, allowing police to search for guns and confiscate them. But another bill, barring gun ownership for individuals with a history of alcohol abuse and drunk driving arrests, was recently vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown, Wintemute noted.

Gross said the political power of the gun lobby has barred such reasonable approaches to limiting gun possession by individuals who are likely to commit mass murder.

“It is too easy for dangerous people to get their hands on guns,” he said.

Though Gross says there is a growing public outcry against the school shootings, he also says that “we need to turn up the heat.”

Wintemute pointed to the successful campaign to improve highway safety as proof that the death rates can be reduced. In the 1950s, motor vehicle death rates were twice as high as firearm death rates, but improvements in auto safety have result in parity today.

Nonetheless, the reduction in deaths were difficult to achieve and further improvements are bitterly fought by automakers, the trucking industry and others, said Joan Claybrook, a longtime safety advocate who spent a career crusading for auto safety.

Claybrook said the recent deaths of 10 people, including five high school students, aboard a bus on a Northern California highway outraged her as much as a school shooting.

“The bus accident was more preventable,” Claybook said.

It is difficult to fight a well-funded opponent, whether it is the gun lobby or the multibillion-dollar motor vehicle industry, she said.

“The National Rifle Assn. and their allies scare the hell out of politicians,” she said.

AFP Photo/Mat Hayward

British Economic Recovery Picks Up Speed

British Economic Recovery Picks Up Speed

London (AFP) – Britain’s economic recovery picked up further speed in the first quarter, official data showed on Tuesday, boosting the coalition government one year before the country’s next general election.

The economy has expanded for five successive quarters, but has struggled to return to the levels of output witnessed before the 2008 global financial crisis.

Nevertheless it is outperforming other major economies, helped by state austerity, a pick-up in bank lending, and policies by the government and the Bank of England that have helped to support the country’s employment and housing markets.

Gross domestic product — a measure of all goods and services produced by a nation’s economy — grew by 0.8 percent in the first three months of 2014 compared with the fourth quarter of last year, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said in a preliminary estimate on Tuesday that could be revised.

That was higher than the 0.7 percent expansion experienced in the final three months of 2013, but undershot market expectations for GDP growth of 0.9 percent.

The ONS added that GDP was 3.1 percent higher in the first quarter compared with the equivalent period of 2013. That was the best year-on-year growth rate since the fourth quarter of 2007.

Finance minister George Osborne, a member of the Conservative party that heads a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, hailed Tuesday’s data but vowed to maintain his austerity policies that are aimed at slashing Britain’s huge deficit.

The coalition has insisted upon deep spending cuts to try and eliminate the deficit inherited from the opposition Labor party in 2010.

Speaking after the GDP figures were released, Osborne said the government had to carry on working through its long term austerity plans.

“The biggest risk to economic security would be abandoning the plan that is laying those foundations” of recovery, he added in a statement.

Osborne last month said that Britain’s economy was expected to grow faster in the run-up to an election due in mid 2015.

Analysts said Britain was in a solid phase of recovery.

“Today’s GDP report wholly supports our view that the economic recovery is strengthening,” said Daniel Vernazza, economist at UniCredit Research.

“The economy is now just 0.6 percent smaller than its pre-crisis peak hit in the first quarter of 2008.”

The ONS said economic activity was bolstered in the first quarter by the services sector, which grew 0.9 percent in the first quarter of 2014. Industrial production rose 0.8 percent and construction output increased 0.3 percent.

Manufacturing meanwhile soared 1.3 percent — its strongest quarter for nearly four years.

The nation’s economy had expanded by 1.7 percent last year, which was the strongest growth rate since before the notorious global financial crisis.

Last month meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund forecast that the economy would grow by 2.9 percent this year.

That puts Britain ahead of the United States, Germany and Canada, and marked an upgrade from the previous IMF growth estimate of 2.4 percent.

The IMF had previously warned that Osborne’s austerity policies were “playing with fire” and risked endangering the recovery.

©afp.com / Eric Piermont

Medicare Advantage Payments Won’t Be Cut Next Year

Medicare Advantage Payments Won’t Be Cut Next Year

By Tony Pugh, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration reversed itself on Monday, announcing that private health plans that provide Medicare benefits will receive a slight increase in government payments next year, rather than the reduction that was proposed earlier.

Congressional Democrats, many facing tough re-election campaigns, recently joined Republicans in asking that the private health plans, known as Medicare Advantage, be spared from payment cuts next year, even though they receive an average of 6 percent, or $8 billion, more this year to cover their enrollees than it would cost under the traditional Medicare program.

The administration had proposed a 2 percent cut in Medicare Advantage payment rates in February under the Affordable Care Act, to help bring the payments more in line with the regular Medicare program.

The reduced payments would cause some plans to reduce benefits, but they would still have to provide all the benefits covered by traditional Medicare.

A February report from Barclay’s projects that advantage plans “have ample room to adjust benefits downward while maintaining benefit levels that are better for their members than the traditional (Medicare) fee for service program.”

But a series of attack ads by the insurance industry and Republican-backed groups claimed that the Medicare Advantage cuts would reduce benefits for seniors, cause premiums to increase and force some plans to pull out of certain markets altogether, making access to coverage more difficult.

The ads helped Republican David Jolly narrowly defeat Democrat Alex Sink in a House race in the Tampa, Fla., area last month that was largely viewed as an early test of how health care could affect the November mid-term elections.

Senate Democrats, including Al Franken of Minnesota and Chuck Schumer of New York, joined House Democrats like Reps. John Barrow of Georgia and Patrick Murphy of Florida in asking that Medicare Advantage payment rates remain untouched next year.

They got their wish on Monday when Jonathan Blum, principal deputy administrator at the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced an average payment increase of about 0.4 percent next year. Actual payment rates will vary by plan based on location, a plan’s quality rating and other factors, Blum said.

Many Democrats expressed relief.

“This proposed cut would have been disproportionate, hurting seniors who would lose doctors or pay more,” Schumer said in a statement on Monday. “We’re glad the administration heeded our call and reversed the policy.”

Not everyone, however, was pleased with the decision. Max Richtman, president and chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, called the move “bad policy and bad economics for the Medicare program.”

“Since 2003, all seniors in Medicare (including those not even enrolled in Medicare Advantage) have paid higher premiums to help fund the billions in government overpayments to private Medicare Advantage insurance companies,” Richtman said in a written statement. “This annual drama with private insurers in Medicare proves, once again, that when private Medicare Advantage plans are unwilling to compete on a level playing field with traditional Medicare, seniors will ultimately pay the price.”

House Speaker John Boehner said the policy change does little to address ongoing conerns about the Affordable Care Act.

“We have called on the president and his Cabinet to develop a plan to help American seniors deal with the consequences, both now and in the future, of this destructive law. Thus far we’ve seen no such plan,” Boehner said in a written statement.

Nearly 16 million seniors, about 30 percent of Medicare’s 52 million beneficiaries, are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans, up from 14.6 million enrollees in 2013, according to Avalere Health, a health-care consulting firm.

The Medicare Advantage program allows private managed care plans, typically HMOs and PPOs, to provide hospital coverage and physician services for Medicare enrollees. Rather than bill Medicare for each medical service, the plans receive a flat monthly sum to cover each patient and a separate payment to provide prescription drug benefits. The plans typically provide extra benefits like coverage for eyeglasses, hearing aids and gym memberships.

The extra benefits have helped fuel the funding disparity between Medicare Advantage plans and the traditional Medicare program.

To address these concerns, the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, changed the formula for paying Medicare Advantage plans, with the goal of saving more than $130 billion over 10 years. The law phases in payment reductions to the Medicare Advantage plans that bring them more in line with payments for services under the traditional Medicare program.

That plan has worked. Medicare Advantage used to cost 14 percent more to care for enrollees than the traditional program. That payment disparity is now down to 6 percent, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent congressional agency that advises Congress about Medicare.

Blum said the trajectory of lower payments will continue in spite of the slight payment increase next year. He said overall program costs won’t rise as quickly in coming years as healthier, less costly baby boomers continue to join the program.

Photo: joetta@sbcglobal.net via Flickr

Obama, Lampooning GOP, Calls For Hike In Minimum Wage

Obama, Lampooning GOP, Calls For Hike In Minimum Wage

By Christi Parsons and Michael A. Memoli, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Wednesday that Republicans were “not necessarily coldhearted” in their policies but then devoted much of his speech at the University of Michigan to lampooning GOP opposition to his views on economic issues, including his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage.

As Congress gears up for a debate on his proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, Obama said lawmakers would have to decide between sticking with him or sticking it to working Americans.

“They’ve got to make a clear choice — talk the talk about valuing hard work and families, or walk the walk and actually value hard-working families,” Obama said. “You’ve got a choice. You can give America the shaft, or you can give it a raise.”

The address in Ann Arbor featured Obama in a feisty mood, a day after he announced that 7.1 million people had signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, exceeding the administration’s target.

Obama said that if Republicans tried to sell their economic plans at the deli where he had just ordered a Reuben, “they’d have to call it the Stinkburger or the Meanwich.” And he said opponents to a minimum-wage increase complain it will primarily help young people, which he suggested was not much different than yelling, “Get off my lawn!”

The edgy message opened a new phase for Obama. With the rollout of his 2010 health law nearly complete, the president is now focusing on the congressional elections and on keeping the Senate in Democratic hands, a task his advisers think depends in part on his ability to draw a sharp contrast with the GOP’s economic proposals.

For starters, Obama is leading off with the fight to raise the $7.25 minimum wage, an idea that polls have shown is favored by a strong majority of Americans.

But even as Obama used the minimum wage to highlight a difference with Republicans, Democrats on Capitol Hill are preparing for the politics of the issue to grow more complicated.

Democrats concede that they are unlikely to get enough support from Republicans to overcome a 60-vote procedural hurdle to advance the measure. But there is also some concern that an effort by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), to support a smaller increase — perhaps to $9 an hour — could siphon off some Democratic support. Collins is the only Republican senator running for re-election this year in a state that Obama won in 2012.

A Collins aide said the senator has had discussions over the last three weeks with a number of Democrats about packaging a wage increase with other economic measures, including tax credits for small businesses.

Senate Democratic leaders say they are committed to passing the president’s $10.10 proposal. Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, the number three Democrat in the Senate, argued Wednesday that other Republicans had made it clear they would not support a minimum-wage measure no matter what the increase might be.

“We’re sticking with $10.10,” Schumer said. “We’re not negotiating against ourselves.”

But Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the number two Democrat, raised the possibility of a compromise, although he also predicted that Democrats would “hold our votes” to open debate on an increase to the $10.10 level.

“Let me be honest about this,” he said. “If we reach a level where we don’t have the votes to pass it, then we have to be open for conversation about what it might look like in the future.”

It took months of work to advance an extension of unemployment insurance benefits, a measure that could finally pass the Senate on Thursday. The plan attracted enough Republican votes to end a filibuster Wednesday.

“How many times did we come at that before we finally reached a bipartisan agreement?” Durbin said.

In the Republican-controlled House, an aide to Speaker John A. Boehner (R-OH), took issue with a minimum-wage increase, noting reports from economists who say that the president’s proposal would lead to job losses.

“The president’s plan would increase costs for consumers and eliminate jobs for those who need them the most,” Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said. “The House is going to continue focusing on our plan to protect workers’ hours and create jobs, not the president’s plan to destroy them.”

In Michigan, where the retirement of Sen. Carl Levin has fueled GOP hopes of picking up a Democratic seat, Obama delivered a sharp-edged critique that fused Republican policy with Republican personality.

The new House Republican budget plan is a replay of the party’s 2012 campaign themes, the president said, “like that movie ‘Groundhog Day,’ except it’s not funny.”

Photo: pbarcas via Flickr