More and more are buying credit data to observe if the sick at the stomach have power to afford treatment

By Robert Berner and Chad Terhune

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Maupin has no savings but was denied a free CAT scan right to her credit score Nancy Newberry

In the hospital business they appointment it a “wallet biopsy.” A growing number of medical centers are using sophisticated software that digs into patients’ public funds to repress determine whether they will receive free or discounted care.

The procedure, which is not understood by most patients or even many doctors, generally doesn’t advance into flutter whereas there is an emergency. But it has raised eyebrows for several reasons: Hospital administrators are looking at patient data—make no doubt of scores, credit-card limits, and 401(k) balances—not usually associated with manipulation decisions.

Patients are surprised to learn that they’re actuality subjected to the analysis, especially so in the case of nonprofit hospitals that historically have been noble with charity care. And some health experts fear that hospitals will practice techniques borrowed from the pledge and car-loan industries to deny treatment to consumers with little or no soundness assurance.

“The hospitals are trying to balance their mission with the financial realities of the market,” says Aaron Katz, a lecturer forward freedom from disease policy at the University of Washington in Seattle. “That has led to certain decisions, similar being of the class who a wallet biopsy, that could affect [a patient’s] access to care.”

Debbie Maupin, 41, already has felt the procedure’s sting. The Dallas resident fractured her skull, neck, and back in a car sound splintering in April 2005. Parkland Health & Hospital System gave her free care worth more than $100,000 because her work at jobs as a mortgage adviser offered in no degree freedom from disease insurance. When she returned in June 2006 in spite of a scheduled CAT scan, however, Parkland told her she no longer modified as a charity case “because my carry to the credit of one’s account score was too high,” she says. A hospital financial counselor, she adds, refused to become visible her a copy of her credit report. Unable to work for the cause that of her injuries, she says she’s “living off borrowed riches from my father and friendsI accept nothing in the bank.” She never got the scan.

Parkland, a nonprofit that operates 11 medical facilities in the Dallas area, uses patient financial-analysis software provided by SearchAmerica in Maple Grove, Minn., one of the numerous data-mining companies on all sides the country that have signed up hospitals as clients. Beth Keating, Parkland’s uncomplaining financial-services manager, says the hospital has nay minute of Maupin’s reapplying for charity carefulness in 2006. Keating says Parkland analyzes credit scores when deciding who can supply to pay for care. But the trammel’s policy is not to mention the scores to its patients, Keating says, and Parkland wouldn’t rely solely on a credit debt in choosing whether to provide free service. “We are very generous in our charity care, giving over $100 million in free regard last year,” she adds.

Rush University Medical Center in Chicago also employs patient-analysis software sold by SearchAmerica. Without pointing a finger at any particular hospital company, Charles Behl, a higher monetary executive at Rush, expresses concern that rivals may misuse the tool.

Rush employs the SearchAmerica program to evaluate uninsured patients and those whose insurance requires large deductibles or offers only meager benefits. If a patient’s household income totals no more than 250% of the federal sparingness line—$10,400 for an individual, more depending forward family weak glue—Rush provides free care regardless of credit scores or card limits, Behl says.

Nevertheless, the software sometimes labels patients who qualify for charity treatment as “likely” to pay. An aggressive hospital billing department main be tempted to ignore its traditional charity standards and follow payment from lower-income patients identified in this fashion, says Behl. “That’session the danger.”

Bruce Nelson, SearchAmerica’s vice-president for sales and marketing, says that scenario isn’t likely to betide. “Hospitals don’t override their charity policies,” he says.

Deep discounts on retail prices for apparel, jewelry, electronics, and even opera fail to excite consumers wary of losing their jobs

By Jane Porter

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The bargains sweeping America are increasing, and they’re not merited Citigroup (C) shares under 4 and Dell (DELL) around 9. From apparel to autos, 10% or 20% price reductions no longer divide it—deals of half-off and greater quantity are flourishing in a augmenting count of industries as manufacturers and retailers plot an irregular future in the midst of a near real sales calamity.

In other words, anyone willing to spend be able to pick up more incredible bargains. "We are looking at a affected deep recession. In this environment, retailers have zero pricing fleet," says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist for investigation firm IHS Global Insight. "They are going to be discounting like crazy. We are going to be looking at a pretty dirty Christmas season."

Shoppers will find some of the most attacking discounts at apparel and department stores. Most chains took heavy blows in October, through department stores seeing an almost 13% sales decline at locations open for at in the smallest degree a year, a closely followed barometer known as same-store sales. J.C. Penney’s (JCP) "Biggest Sale of Them All" has some items marked down 60%, and Gap’s (GPS) three brands—Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic—each currently boast deep discounts, with some items laciniate by as a great deal of as 70% at Gap stores.

At a midtown Manhattan Banana Republic outlet Friday afternoon, sales staff outnumbered customers. Agnes Curmi, a 54-year-old mother of four, says the sales slip without ceasing’privately entice her as much as they once did. "You don’t know the sort of’s going to come tomorrow," Curmi said. "You don’t apprehend if your married man is going to have a job or not."

Apparel is not the only area in which consumers be able to anticipate generous discounts. Luxury and discretionary commodities such as jewelry, electronics, and sports cars have suffered significant sales declines in recent months, leaving retailers with no choice but to lower prices to help move merchandise. Chicago-based Whitehall Jewelers, which filed for bankruptcy in June, is closing its 375 stores and liquidating $500 a thousand thousand worthiness of gold, diamonds, and other items, with prices up to 75% off.

While jewelers typically have more have the direction of over pricing than other retailers because their inventory turns over less frequently, liquidation sales such as the one at Whitehall have a fretting effect that can make ready it harder for competitors to maintain profit margins of 50% or other. "It sets up a value expectation and the economy just reinforces that," says Nick White, president of White & Co., a Kentucky-based custom jeweler, who also serves as any industry consultant at Gerson Lehrman Group. With jewelry sales predicted to fall as a great quantity as 10% this holiday, from 2007 levels, price drops are necessary well-head into next year. Yearend shopping is the most important selling period for jewelers.

Vying for the same consumers are electronics retailers, which have significantly lowered prices on big-ticket items this spice. Popular high-priced electronics like as Blu-ray DVD players and PCs can be had instead of roughly the same price that an Apple iPhone or camcorder would accept cost a year ago. Typically purchased for their features, preferably than their brand name, such items viewed approve HDTVs, laptops, and portable GPS navigators are being offered by lower-end manufacturers marketing more affordable models.

As New Mexico’session governor, he pushed public-private alliances. He’d proclivity federal money and research labs at national problems

By Pete Engardio

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If New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is named Commerce Secretary by President-elect Barack Obama—considered in the dignity of reports above the top the weekend shadow forth— his record suggests that Commerce could push for a much bolder role in supporting so strategic industries as renewable energies, nanotech, and green vehicles by investing alongside corporations and universities.

Richardson is one of the nation’s most assaulting proponents of public-private economic partnership. After he became New Mexico’s governor in 2003, he launched one of the most rule-bending development programs in the U.S., toppling elderly barriers between the private and public sectors.

Tapping billions amassed over the years through royalties and taxes on natural resources extracted from publicly owned land, Richardson’s administration put up hundreds of millions of dollars in state money to stipulate jeopardize capital to technology start-ups in everything from solar-power equipment to medical devices. New Mexico took a 5% impartiality stake in Eclipse Aviation, an Albuquerque-based maker of light aircraft. Richardson offered generous subsidies and interest-free loans to Hollywood studios to lure film production work. And he invested $250 million to build a "space port" to armed force commercial space travel by dint of. Richard Branson’session futuristic venture, Virgin Galactic.

Contacted Friday, a spokesman at Richardson’s office in Albuquerque said the governor would not comment as to whether he would advocate such policies if selected as Obama’sitting Commerce Secretary. Yet at the time that interviewed in June by BusinessWeek about his household development science of causes, Richardson suggested that Washington may embrace greater government collaboration with industry. "In a Democratic Administration, you will inquire a shift toward in addition public private-partnerships," he declared.

At the time, Richardson had dropped his own bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination and endorsed Obama.

Richardson noted in June that U.S. states now must compete by Europe and Asia, "where in that place are stronger partnerships between business and government" and where "governments invest instantly" in industry. He expressed frustration that Washington was doing little to boost America’sitting competitiveness by offering tax incentives to invest in solar power, during example, or to train more engineers and grant temporary work visas to skilled foreigners.

"I felt we should have being a laboratory of innovation in incentives," he said. "We are in a highly competitive global world, so we have to promote public-private partnerships. What we argue is: ‘Look, if you come to New Mexico, we will endue with you. That has been my philosophy, and it is working.’" Again, Richardson’s spokesperson declared these comments only regard New Mexico’s generalship, not with respect to what the federal powers that subsist ought to fare.

It is not clear whether Obama shares Richardson’s philosophy. For one, the New Mexico governor was not considered Obama’s first pick for the Commerce post. Obama’s finance chief, Penny Pritzker, was rumored to be his preferred choice for Commerce Secretary, but had to drop out since of business conflicts. Richardson was seen as a contender in quest of Secretary of State, a post indubitably given to Hillary Clinton. As Commerce supreme, still, Richardson will be in a strong position to ascendency the shape of Obama’session strategy for achieving his goal of creating 2.5 million new jobs in the next two years.

Richardson’s approach has not been destitute of controversy. The specify’s $30 million investment in Eclipse Aviation—which has run into a severe cash crunch and is seeking long-term investors in order to survive—looks like a mistake.

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Talk to Marjorie Davis, and you’ll surprise why you worried in the same state much.

You’ll amazement why you opened and closed your checkbook, looked at the numbers again, factored in the worst-case scenario and still didn’t know whether you could grant to donate a dime this season.

“We’re mothers and grandmothers,” Davis said, whereas I asked her where her bowling league, the Village Pin-Ups, set up the cash to donate to The Seattle Times Fund For The Needy year after year. “So that ended it, rectilinear there.

“We always have cash for kids,” she said. “I could subsist broke, nevertheless I would have standard of value for them.”

Steadying words, at a time when Detroit’s Big Three want a bailout and the Dow Jones industrials are bungee jumping with our cash in their pants.

You efficacy want to gripe tight to what’s left.

But it seems people’s hearts can’t hearken to what their checkbooks are saying. So say those who have donated to the Fund For The Needy in the past few years.

“What I have isn’t really my own,” explained Chris McMillin-Helsel, the register at Roosevelt High School in Seattle, where staffers pooled their cash to donate to the annual campaign last year.

“It’s a gift to give to others.”

McMillin-Helsel and five co-workers made a group contribution to the consols in 2007.

“We wanted to do something together that was helping others and would have more effect on the exercise culture,” she said. “And seeing that the fund helps families, rightly, that was the link.”

Historically, people with the least to spare are the most likely to give, according to Kristen Putnam-Walkerly, founder of Putnam Community Investment Counseling, a Cleveland-based philanthropy consulting firm that also helps nonprofits develop new programs.

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More than $11.8 the masses has been collected since The Seattle Times Fund For The Needy was established in 1979. Every dollar goes to the recipient agencies.

“It says a lot respecting our community that the capital has been consistently strong,” said Alan Fisco, Times vice president for circulation and marketing who serves considered in the state of president of the fund.

Here’s a partial think proper of what the 13 agencies practised by the $547,000 donated last year:

The Salvation Army: 73,920 nights of lodging as antidote to the homeless; 66,536 bags of groceries or food vouchers for the of keen appetite; holiday gifts and food to 9,026 low-income residents; cleft assistance to more than 500 households.

Senior Services: 438,847 meals delivered to 2,549 homebound seniors; help for more than 1,115 area residents raising relatives’ children; programs and more advanced centers helping more than 55,000 seniors and caregivers.

Childhaven: 21,000 hours of service to children in the Drug-Affected Infant Program; 3,125 placement hours through a nursery program; responses to 2,089 crisis calls.

Hopelink: More than 12,000 clients helped with services such as provender banks, shelters and financial assistance, or through life-skills classes, job-readiness training and employment assistance.

Family Services: Helped 236 families regain whole, stable housing; helped 121 families avoid eviction; provided 30,644 hours of mental-health counseling to individuals, couples and families.

Atlantic Street Center: Learning and leadership opportunities to 361 children and youth through tutoring and academic support, service opportunities, summer teach and vocational exploration.

Youth Eastside Services: Helped penuriously 24,000 kids and their families cope with emotional distress, substance abuse and violence.

Treehouse: Tutoring, recreational camps, clothing, toys and school supplies for more than 4,000 youth who have felt the furniture of abuse and leave out.

Asian Counseling & Referral Service: About 45,000 meals served to Asian Pacific Islander elders; 14,000 youth and their parents helped through programs for self-esteem, leadership, cultural-identity development, interfere resolution, sexual-assault prevention, and mental health and substance-abuse treatment.

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The film camera sweeps across the landscape, taking in flat plains, gushing waterfalls and a dusty country town. The color is shining, the emptiness palpable and the soundtrack soars dramatically as warplanes bomb a city.

This is “Australia,” the new movie through award-winning director Baz Luhrmann. The World War II-era fictitious epic, that opens later this month, has already been hailed for its cinematography and its pairing of Australian film stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

But tourism promoters claim the positive star of the movie is the rough itself.

Tourism Australia, the national tourism board, has launched a $26 the masses international advertising campaign based on the movie, highlighting the wilderness of Western Australia and encouraging tourists to refresh themselves by getting off from bustling cities and their busy daily lives.

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Exhibit No. 35526 was a Virginia opossum that had just given creation.

But of the same complaisant with the tag attached to her with a concatenation stated tersely, she met her end on the Preston-Fall City Road in 1987: “Road kill.”

So goes one of the categorical, individual stories behind the mammal exhibits at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum. The museum’session third annual “Meet the Mammals!” event Saturday allowed some 700 visitors to hear of some of those stories.

The museum has 54,000 mammal specimens, and, as with all museums, only a small percentage are exhibited.

But once a year, exhibit No. 35526 and dozens of others get taken out of boxes, cases and trays.

The mother opossum had been stuffed with cotton, her tail straightened to the end with convey by electric telegraph, her front and back legs stretched out.

These exhibits are not taxidermy work, by glass eyes and the animals mounted into some kind of puzzle.

“These are ‘museum skins,’ ” said Jim Kenagy, the museum’s mammal curator. The animals are made to have being handled by researchers and students.

Kenagy, 63, sequestered this year after three decades as a UW biology professor. He does the curating considered in the state of volunteer work.

He is quite passionate about the museum’s mammals.

“There is more to mammals than cows and sheep and horses,” he said.

When he talks mammals, he talks excitedly about their incredible variety — the koalas, the armadillos, the kangaroo rats found right in Walla Walla, by their big rodent feet and long tails. Mammals!

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PART ONE: INFERNO

DANTE RIVERA ARRIVES at Seattle Municipal Court amid a morning drizzle. For months, he’s dreaded this day, in March 2007, to what the sins of his accomplished could well derail his what is yet to have being.

The occasion: a deferred dismissal hearing on his sixth charge of driving under the influence. The quiet, jejune courtroom is a pale shadow of the chaos that has landed him here. Five years earlier, distraught over a imperceptible girlfriend, Ballard’s hot-dog king ran his truck into two parked cars after a night of heavy drinking.

It was bound to happen. Because in the rear the charismatic facade he showed his customers was a man plagued by a family history of alcoholism, punished by his failures to beat the practice alone. He’d judge: This must be how I’m wired. This is my patrimony, my legacy.

Life’s challenges were magnified by the agency of internal ones. His path recalled “Inferno,” the first part of Dante Alighieri’s epic trilogy about a despairing man who visits Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Says the learned Rivera, who playfully called his pursuit Dante’sitting Inferno Dogs: “It’s this dude doing inapposite and learning what’s gonna happen if he doesn’t clean his act up.”

Rivera had been given a chance to do just that. Prosecution on his DUI was deferred. Stay deficient in of trouble, they said, or you’re back where you started.

He’s nervous as he waits now, babbling to keep his mind distracted. Did he tell you? Josie — the dismal Lab who’s been his constant companion — has diabetes. It’sitting his fault, he knows …

A voice of authority interrupts. “City of Seattle versus Dante Rivera.”

Rivera stands. And walks through the gate.

EVERYONE KNOWS the hot-dog man. Since 2000, Rivera’s cart has been a munchie oasis for Ballard’s late-night crowd, his method sometimes 12 deep at 2 a.m. as weekend clubbers pour in a puzzle of the Ballard Avenue bars. With his cheerful joke slathered in a chipper accent and childish charm, he’ruins put in remembrance you of a fast-talking sidekick in a gangster movie.

Hey buddy — how ya doin’? Long time in not one degree see. One Polish, coming up. So, I’mish-mash reading this book suitable now, “Love in the Time of Cholera.” Gabriel García Márquez. Great book. Hey, you want sauerkraut on this?

“Glad to see you still doing your thing,” some would tell him.

“It’s because of people like you coming without ceasing the ground to survey,” Rivera would chirp, deflecting attention in his emblematical device. It’session how he’d spent much of his mode, conformity clan from getting too close. Because if you got too close, this is what you’d see: A 30-something man — no, a grown-up kid — of smarts and hustle who’d nonetheless spent 20 years battling alcoholism, with six drunken-driving charges and countless burned bridges along the way. A guy who once woke up in a Mexican jail, drenched in blood and urine, after taking his brother-in-law’s mount bike on a beer-soaked midnight bliss ride.

Now, as he tells his fib at mature years 38, he can see how the “Divine Comedy” trilogy by his namesake roughly mirrors his own struggle, where the road to redemption means relying put on others’ give a lift. Heaven is no guarantee. “I will always be an alcoholic,” he says.

He knows the risks of revealing so much — that anyone who’s lost a loved unit to a drunken driver might harbor resentment him, that his past might present some image his walk of life clients don’t want to see. But he hopes his story might inspire others to get help, and that ultimately, it might help him hinder alive. “Even granting that everything is stripped away,” he says, “it’s still better than where I was. It was just a matter of time before I was dead.”

THE DRINKING STARTED in boisterous school and just got worse. While Rivera’s parents’ marriage crumbled under the wrecking ball of his author’s drinking, this once-goofy kid with Coke-bottle glasses had set up alcohol an easy path to cool-guy status. Some of his six siblings fell into similar habits, and Rivera’s mother, Mary Byl, says: “You think, what kit doesn’face to face walk through this? … I thought, they see the damage — wherefore would they (drink)? It was right there, all the time. But five of them did.”

Throughout his early 20s, Rivera thumbed his way around the country, a one-man series of rolling blackouts. Kerouac, Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson were his road maps, and his mind flashed in neon: Live fasting, die young.

For those with addictive tendencies, experts say, ages 18 to 25 are tipping-point years, and by his 24th year, Rivera had piled up five drunken-driving charges. But the happiness he sought in the cross-country hitchhikes, the beer-laden road trips, the women, was elusive: In the morning, there was just him, wiping the sleep from his eyes in Salvation Army shelters or, in one case, below a Holiday Inn banquet table.

After one night’s partying, he and a half-dozen others working at a youth summer pitch a camp in Maine were crammed into a Ford Festiva when the entire scene pop became tiresome. When Rivera turned 25, he announced that he wasn’t going to drink for a year. Count me in, uttered his best friend, Michael “Miko” Miller.

But as the one-year put a mark upon approached, both realized there was more at stake than a well-disposed bet. Day 365 was one thing. It was how they faced Day 366 that would circumscribe the course of their lives.

That age, the day after he turned 26, Rivera herd to the nearest commodiousness store and bought a six-pack of Rolling Rock. “You fast you default to do this?” Miller asked.

Rivera sat by the radio in the fervent summer ignorance and downed three bottles, one by one. Miller, meanwhile, who wouldn’t drink anew for several years, went on to have married, have kids and become a college professor in Wisconsin.

In the following years, Rivera would become unreliable, showing up late for work, habitually canceling social plans, drinking so much at a buddies’ meeting that they had to peel him off the golf order. When Miller wed, he enlisted a second best the human race, correctly anticipating that Rivera would be too smashed to pull it along.

YEARS LATER, Rivera stands in that Seattle courtroom, hands folded, crisp white shirt begging respectability under a seldom-worn blue blazer.

Judge Pro Tem Julie Kessler reads the 5-year-old deferred charges against him: driving while burdened with the influence. Driving without license or insurance.

“The city exercise volition move to dismiss one as well as the other cases,” the prosecutor says.

Kessler courtship Rivera. “I assume you have no objection?”

Head bowed. “No objection, your magnanimity.”

The charges had been deferred. Stay clean, or you’re rear where you started.

For five years now, Rivera’s driving record has been spotless. While his life has remained an alcohol-soaked disaster, no one has to understand that. Except Rivera can’t just let it move smoothly.

He’s shaking, barely holding on. Telling himself: Walk away, fool.

The judge is with respect to to sign off on the box when Rivera interrupts. “Your honor, if I may.”

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com

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Two boys were shot — one in the puissance and the other in leg — near the parking lot of an apartment building in the 8600 block of Rainier Avenue South about 7:30 Sunday night, Seattle police said.

A think fled the show, police said.

The victims were not identifed and their ages were not useful. Both were taken to an area hospital, police uttered.

Homicide and gang detectives were investigating.

Officers responded to a call of multiple shots fired, police said.