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VOLUME 93-NUMBER 12 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA - SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 2014 TELEPHONE (919) 682-2913 PRICE: 30
NC legislators look at health care
By Gary D. Robertson
, RALEIGH (AP) - Legislators heard and offered divergent perspec-
ves March 18 on the federal health care overhaul’s effectiveness in
orth Carolina as a new committee met and revisited debates in Ra-
eigh on the Affordable Care Act.
House Speaker Thom Tillis, R-Mecklenburg, and Senate leader
Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, created the 46-member committee to ex-
mine the effects the law’s requirements were having on businesses,
idividual and group insurance markets, and health care services,
awmakers have until the end of the year to make recommendations.
I “This is an education process,” said Rep. Jim Fulghum, R-Wake, a
ommittee co-chairman and retired surgeon. “We want to understand
his as best we can.”
Speaker Chris Conover of the Center for Health Policy and In-
qualities Research at Duke University told the committee that the
)10 law should be repealed. He said it likely will reduce full-time
lemployment in North Carolina as employers make potentially hun-
reds ofthousands of workers part time to avoid providing affordable
iverage.
The Affordable Care Act “has us moving literally in the wrong
rection toward bigger government and handing far too much control
ier what used to be private decisions by patients and doctors, and
aiding these to the most dysfunctional part of American govern-
ent,” Conover told the committee.
Conover, who is also affiliated with conservative-leaning think
nks, warned against taking a second look at expanding Medicaid
iverage, which Republican legislators and Gov. Pat McCrory re-
sed to do last year and Democrats are urging to have reconsidered,
e said the health overhaul law is too shaky financially to assume
e federal government will continue to pay nearly all of the costs of
ivering more of the working poor in the years ahead.
The Kaiser Family Foundation calculated in the fall almost 320,000
lople in North Carolina will miss out on the Medicaid expansion.
Already suspicious ofRepublican leaders who assembled the com-
ittee, Democrats in support of the health care law and Medicaid
cpansion held a news conference before the meeting to highlight the
w’s positives in North Carolina.
More than 200,000 state residents had enrolled in private coverage
hrough the federally run health exchange by March 1, according to
federal records, or more than half of those eligible to apply for a plan.
“We’re finally going in the right direction getting our uninsured
ivered,” said Rep. Verla Insko, D-Orange.
Those benefiting from the federal marketplace include small-busi-
:ss owner Retta Riordan, 61, of Apex. She was uninsured for 10
onths last year, unable to get knee surgery. A torn meniscus made
alking up the stairs a chore.
“I’m no longer living in fear of a catastrophic illness or injury,”
lid Riordan, who got the surgery in January.
Some speakers also said GOP legislative leaders and McCrory
ere to blame for much of the poor rollout by refusing to create
orth Carolina’s own online insurance exchange, relying instead on
le overloaded federal marketplace.
I “Not expanding Medicaid is a tragedy,” added Dr. Susan Eder,
psychiatrist in Raleigh. McCrory and GOP leaders said in 2013 it
idn’t make sense to expand Medicaid because the state’s program
'as struggling with large shortfalls, and the state wouldn’t have much
:al control over a health exchange.
’ Insko and Rep. Beverly Earle, D-Mecklenburg, predicted earlier
uesday the panel likely would only provide talking points for Re-
iblicans in the fall elections. Tillis is also running for the U.S. Sen-
The GOP-led legislature approved a bill in 2011 directing the state
’join a legal challenge to the federal law, but then-Gov. Beverly
erdue vetoed the bill.
The health care law is expected to place additional burdens on
late agencies. The health insurance plan for current and retired state
nployees and teachers, as well as their dependents, projects require-
tents of the law will make up 2 percent of its overall expenses dur-
igthe 2014-15 fiscal year, or $59 million, according to a committee
resentation.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, the state’s largest
with insurer with 3.8 million members, is one of only two insurers
roviding plans to state residents on the health care exchange.
Blue Cross is concerned about preliminary figures showing a
disproportionate percentage of insurance exchange applicants from
ges 45 to 64 and high utilization levels of certain services, company
obbyist Mark Fleming told the committee. Insurers are counting on
younger, healthier residents to buy insurance to counter the costs of
'Ider, sicker subscribers.
Leader of El Paso
desegregation effort dies at 94
EL PASO, Texas (AP) _ A graveside service is scheduled
for Monday for Albert Schwartz, a former El Paso depart
ment store executive who led an eflfort that made El Paso the
first city in the old Confederacy to end segregation in public
accommodations.
Bob Brannon, husband to Schwartz niece Edi Schwartz
Brannon, says the 94-y ear-old former president of The Pop
ular department store died at his El Paso home Friday after
along illness.
The El Paso Times (http://bit.ly/lkVDBxA) reports The
Popular closed in 1995 after 93 years in business.
Schwartz was with the 104th Infantry Division when it
entered Germany’s Nordhausen concentration camp in 1945
and was confronted by more than 3,000 corpses and 750
starving survivors.
In 1959, he led an Anti-Defamation League effort that led
to a 1962 city ordinance ending racial segregation.
First Lady Michelle Obama plays ping pong with students while touring the Beijing Normal School in Bei
jing, China, March 21, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Amanda Lucidon)
Parents of Hadiya Pendleton Still Mourning’
By Jazelle Hunt
NNPA National Correspondent
WASHINGTON (NNPA) - After a long day of travelling, then
networking on Capitol Hill, Nathaniel and Cleopatra Pendleton re
turned to their downtown Washington, D.C. hotel and dressed for
a dinner in their honor. Later that evening, they shook hands and
smiled for photographs as they accepted the 2014 NNPA Newsmaker
of the Year Award, an accolade they earned as a result of their work
against gun violence in the aftermath of theirl5 year-old daughter’s
death. They shared the honor with the parents of Jordan Davis, a
Black teen killed in Jacksonville, Fla.
“We are mourning still. We still wake up every day and have to
determine what to do, whether what we’re doing is right for us,”
Cleopatra says. “So many people want to see something positive
come from this, a lot of people came to us and said we need to do
something. They empowered us.”
Not as much as the parents have empowered Black America.
On January 29, 2013 their daughter, Hadiya Pendleton, went to
the park with friends to enjoy an unseasonably warm Chicago after
noon after a day of final exams. There, her life was taken by a pair
of gang-affiliated young men not much older than she, who fired into
the group of teens sheltering from a passing rain after mistaking one
of them for a rival gang member. Hadiya was hit in the back and
passed away in the arms oftwo friends.
For months afterward, her name was emblazoned in headlines,
sometimes with a days-old photo of her performing in President
Barack Obama’s second Inaugural Parade. Other times, the headlines
accompanied a video of her parents, evenly imploring the nation to
honor Hadiya and other victims by passing common-sense gun laws.
Hadiya’s death was the last of 44 homicides that month in Chi
cago.
Va. historic marker
to recognize
divinity school
PETERSBURG, Ya. (AP) - A Petersburg school that
prepared black men for the ministry is being recognized
with a Virginia historical marker.
The marker honoring the Bishop Payne Divinity School
will be dedicated on March 29. The school was estab
lished in 1878 at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church Normal
and Industrial School.
The divinity school was started by the Rev. John
Payne, the first bishop of Liberia. Its graduates included
James Solomon Russell, who founded St. Paul’s College
in Lawrenceville.
Bishop Payne Divinity School merged in 1949 with the
Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria. The sign
was approved this month by the Virginia Department of
Historic Resources.
The sign will be dedicated at St. Stephen’s Episcopal
Church in Petersburg.
Nathaniel A. Pendleton, Sr., father of Hadiya Pendleton,
speaks about about daughter’s death as his wife, Cleopatra,
looks on (NNPA Photo by Roy Lewis).
In the Black community, gun violence is horrifyingly common.
Homicide is the number-one cause of death for Black males ages
15 to 34, according to 2010 data collected by the Centers for Disease
Control. Between 2008 and 2009, Black teenage boys were eight
times as likely to die (and 25 times as likely to be injured) at the bar
rel of a gun than White teen boys.
Globally, a report released last year by the Institutes of Medicine
and the National Research Council finds that the rate of firearm-relat
ed homicide is 19.5 times higher than the rates in other industrialized
countries.
“Sometimes a person that’s just interested [in reducing gun vio
lence] can be a little more insensitive without knowing they are.
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Winston-Salem State
chancellor to step down
WINSTON-SALEM (AP) - Donald Reaves says he
will step down as chancellor of Winston-Salem State
University after more than seven years leading the
school.
But Reaves isn’t leaving the historically black college.
He says he will join the school’s faculty as a political
science professor with full tenure.
Reaves says he plans on stepping down as the school’s
leader at the end of 2014, but will stay on if his succes
sor has not been found by then.
Reaves says he has accomplished what he wanted to
do at Winston-Salem State like improving student reten
tion and graduation rates even though the state cut its
funding for higher education.
He also says he only planned to stay five years when
he was hired in August 2007.