Mountain Views News, Combined Edition Saturday, November 16, 2019

12

OPINION: 

Mountain View News Saturday, November 16, 2019 

STUART TOLCHIN

THE FELLOW TRAVELER 


MOUNTAIN 
VIEWS

NEWS

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Susan Henderson

PASADENA CITY 
EDITOR

Dean Lee 

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LaQuetta Shamblee

As I approached the window specifically 
set aside for inquiries by Attorneys I thought 
about my approaching retirement at the end 
of the year. I have been practicing for over 
fifty years and active on this referral panel for 
almost half that period and this is one of the 
very few times I have inquired about a payment 
irregularity. I was appointed on a case in which 
I did not prevail. I was appointed because the 
Defendant’s father had written a letter directly 
to the Court requesting assistance for his son 
who had unquestionable emotional and mental 
difficulties. I had attempted to set aside a ruling 
which resulted in a lifetime requirement that the son register as a sexual 
offender.

 After being referred to the Mental Health Court for examination 
and evaluation examination the Defendant eventually was found to be 
competent and to have the capacity to understand the charges against 
him and to assist in his own defense. Returning to the Criminal Court he 
plead guilty contrary to the advice of the Public Defender representing 
him. As a result of his plea the Defendant was placed on probation and 
informed that for the rest of his life he would be required to register as a 
sex offender which imposed various conditions upon him. In addition 
to restricting the area where he could live, the Defendant would be 
ineligible to participate in certain rehabilitative and diversion programs.

I attempted to speak with the Defendant but was unable to 
generate much of a conversation with him. I did learn the facts of the 
offense which were that the Defendant had approached a young girl 
on the streets while saying “you’re cute” and grabbed her buttocks. 
The young girl became frightened, ran across the street and told some 
friends what had happened. The friends crossed the street and a fight 
between the Defendant and the friends ensued. For this reason the 
prosecutors felt it was a very serious matter and were adamant that the 
requirement of Sexual Registration remain. 

Why I include the history of this matter is not to review the 
legal circumstances but rather to describe the relationship between 
myself and my client and his father. After being released the son was 
refusing to live at home, was once more on the streets, and not taking 
his medication. The father, who was a single father of this disabled 
young man was having a difficult time holding on to his job and was 
continually worried about the welfare of his son. The father and I met 
to speak about the matter and I explained that I too was a single father 
who had raised a son with mental and emotional disabilities. As his son 
was on Probation on another matter I encouraged and accompanied 
the father to meet with a previously-assigned probation officer and 
eventually the father managed to have the son meet with the officer. 
The son has returned home and no longer speaks of himself as a bad 
person who did wrong but sees himself as a person who needs help 
and is willing to accept that help. Once that decision was made we all 
exchanged hugs and have stayed in touch. There have been no further 
incidents of inappropriate touching and I was very relieved to hear that.

Hopefully I will eventually get paid for the time I spent with 
the parties. That is not the point. I have been fortunate to have 
done (not accomplished) just done, the kind of Law I have practiced 
for over fifty years. It has allowed me to act almost as a fellow-traveler 
with my clients. Not acting as a doctor who just prescribed remedies 
but as someone who occasionally, not always or even very frequently 
but sometimes, shared emotions and helped people make what I hoped 
were positive changes in their lives and would as well be a public benefit. 
I will miss this in retirement but at least I won’t have the expectation of 
being paid which gets in the way sometimes. 

It is my hope that, subsequent to retirement, I will do the best 
I can to act in accord with my best self and do whatever good I can do. 
Writing, and more importantly, thinking about these articles I believe 
will assist me to stay on the right path.


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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

PETER ROFF

PETER FUNT

OUR HEALTH CARE SYSTEM 
IS GREAT. THERE'S JUST ONE 
CATCH

TRUMP’S TWEET SETS A 

DANGEROUS 
PRECEDENT


Sonji Wilkes learned the hard way that 
life can still throw you a curve, even 
when you play by the rules. She had 
health insurance and the hospital she 
picked to bring her son into the world 
was “in-network.”

And, since it accepted her insurance, everything 
should have been fine. It wasn’t. 
The Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit 
where her baby son was sent due to post-
delivery complications was operated by 
an “out of network” third-party provider 
with whom her “in-network” hospital 
had contracted.

Wilkes didn’t know that, not that she 
really had much of a choice. She ended 
up – Surprise! – with a $50,000 bill for 
emergency services.

She’s not alone. Insured patients are being 
sent, with increasing frequency, from 
facilities that accept their insurance to 
those that don’t without being made 
aware there’s a difference that matters. 
Some might say it should be an example 
of “let the buyer beware” but America 
is a much more generous, compassionate 
and ethical country for that to be the 
case here.

Surprise billing, as President Donald 
Trump and others call it, is a black mark 
on the world’s finest health care system. 
Something needs to be done, but there’s 
a right way to handle it and a wrong way.

The usually reliable Lamar Alexander, 
chairman of the Senate Health, Educa-
tion, Labor, and Pensions Committee, 
is backing the wrong one. His Lower 
Health Care Costs bill, which has already 
been passed favorably out of his committee, 
would cap what insurers need to pay 
to protect their patients by setting a “median 
in-network rate” for services.

Rather than ensuring a patient’s surprise 
bills are covered, Alexander’s legis-lation 
empowers insurance companies to cut 
costs over years by kicking pa-tients’ 
doctors with the most experience out of 
their networks.

The health insurance lobby is one of 
Washington’s most powerful, so it’s no 
shock this approach is making its way 
through the Senate. Luckily, the Alex-
ander bill looks dead in the U.S. House 
— which may explain why Richard Neal, 
chairman of the powerful Committee on 
Ways and Means, is trying an end-run.

Neal recently sent a letter to his fellow 
Democrats proposing the creation of a 
committee of stakeholders and representatives 
from the departments of Health 
and Human Services, 
Labor, and 
Treasury to draft 
a regulation that 
would take care of 
the problem of surprise 
billing once 
and for all.

What Neal wants 
to do is outsource responsibility for finding 
a solution to the problem of surprise 
billing to unaccountable, unelected federal 
bureaucrats. That’s bad news for 
consumers.

Fortunately, there is a right way, offered 
on a bi-partisan basis in the Senate by 
Louisiana Republican Dr. Bill Cassidy 
and New Hampshire Democrat Mag-
gie Hassan. Their plan taps the power 
of markets to lower health care costs instead 
of caving to the demands of insurance 
industry lobbyists.

The Cassidy/Hassan measure, the STOP 
Surprise Medical Bills Act, uses ar-bitration 
to protect patients. Under its provisions, 
payers and billers would both 
submit a fair price estimate for services 
rendered to a neutral third party who 
would choose either one price or the 
other.

Arbitration, when done right, encourages 
everyone to be fair; if an estimate is 
outrageously high, for example, it’s likely 
to be rejected. A similar idea is gain-ing 
traction in the House where two doctors, 
California Democrat Raul Ruiz and Tennessee 
Republican Phil Roe, are pushing 
a bill allowing arbitration that most of 
the physicians in Congress in Congress 
support.

“People who follow the rules and are doing 
everything right shouldn’t be stuck 
with sky-high bills,” Sen. Hassan said 
during a recent discussion at the Bipar-
tisan Policy Center.

The problem is bigger than arbitration 
alone can solve, but it’s a good start. 
Working Americans shouldn’t have 
emergency situations compounded by 
massive, unexpected medical bills. Lawmakers 
should be looking for ways, like 
Cassidy/Hassan, to empower patients 
and reduce prices across the board. That 
outcome would be a pleasant surprise for 
all of us.

Peter Roff is a senior fellow at Frontiers 
of Freedom and a former U.S. News and 
World Report contributing editor who 
appears regularly as a commentator on 
the One America News network. 

We interrupt this impeachment hearing to 
bring you a message from Donald Trump: “Everywhere 
Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad.”

That tweet, read on live television by House Intelligence 
Chairman Adam Schiff, was shocking 
because it sought to affect the testimony 
of a key witness in an impeachment hearing as she spoke. Moreover, 
it marked what may be a first – and potentially devastating turn – in 
American history. As described by Schiff, it was: “Witness intimidation 
in real time by the president of the United States.”

Yovanovitch, whose testimony was calm, considered and effective, was 
ex-plaining how Trump and his facilitators sought to smear her as she 
served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. She said she was “shocked” 
when she learned that Trump called her “bad news” in his controversial 
phone call last July with Ukraine’s president. As she spoke Friday 
morning, Trump took to Twitter and his reelection campaign sent out 
an email.

With the subject line, “Impeachment Hearing BS,” Trump emailed his 
support-ers that the hearings were “fake” and a “witch hunt trial.”

As is often the case in matters regarding Trump’s malfeasance, the most 
use-ful insight comes from those courageous journalists at Fox News 
who are will-ing to criticize the president. Bret Baier stated that Trump’s 
tweet raised the real possibility of an additional impeachment charge 
against Trump for “wit-ness tampering or intimidation.”

Baier’s colleague Chris Wallace added: “If you were not moved by the 
testi-mony of Marie Yovanovich, you don’t have a pulse.”

Clearly, Trump was moved, so much so that he tweeted about Yovanovitch 
during her live testimony. Apparently he couldn’t help himself – after 
telling re-porters earlier in the week that he wasn’t even watching the 
impeachment hearings.

As fascinating as the first two days of hearings have been – with even 
more critically important testimony scheduled for next week – Trump 
has shifted the focus to the crime of witness tampering. By blasting 
Yovanovitch in real time was the president hoping to silence her? Or, 
more likely, was he sending a thinly-veiled message to future witnesses 
that if they testify they risk public humiliation?

This behavior, made possible by digital access to tens of millions of 
Ameri-cans with a single click, never existed during the impeachment 
hearings in-volving Nixon and Clinton. Trump is acting in uncharted 
territory. His tweets reach roughly 20 percent of all Americans with 
Twitter accounts.

Speaking of developments in real time, less than an hour after Trump’s 
at-tempt to intimidate those who would testify against him in a Congressional 
hearing, his associate, Roger Stone, was convicted of lying to 
Congress to protect Donald Trump.

What drama. Trump signals witnesses that they should fear testifying 
against him. And a court underscores the fact that lying to Congress can 
lead to a lengthy prison sentence.

When digital malfeasance by the Russians came up in the 2016 election, 
then-candidate Trump said, “It also could be somebody sitting on their 
bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”

Friday, there was digital interference that was equally troubling. It was by 
somebody sitting, possibly on their bed at the White House, that weighs 
240 pounds. Clearly, not okay.

Mountain Views News

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concerns of our readers 
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informed citizens. We 
hold in high regard the 
values of the exceptional 
quality of life in our 
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the magnificence of 
our natural resources. 
Integrity will be our guide. 

Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com