We have been following with increasing amazement the saga of Amy Bishop, the Harvard-educated biology professor who certainly is in touch with her rage, if not much else. She was involved in a year-long conflict with the University of Alabama-Huntsville over tenure. Sometime after receiving the final denial, she calmly taught a class and then attended a faculty meeting with 13 colleagues. Forty-five minutes into the meeting, she took out an unregistered automatic pistol and methodically shot six colleagues in the head, three of whom died. Had her gun not jammed, she might have succeeded in executing the remaining 7 people. After being forced out of the room, she calmly called her husband and asked for a ride home.
The astonishing part of this story is that she had apparently already committed a cold-blooded murder. In 1986 she killed her younger brother with a blast from a shotgun. In what now wreaks as a coverup, the incident was classified as an accident: she claimed that she was attempting to remove the shells from the shotgun and accidentally drilled her brother. Sounds reasonable, except that she had already discharged the gun in her bedroom – no one in the family heard the blast (just Amy being Amy?). She was, coincidentally, in the middle of an argument with her brother. As we have now all learned, you definitely do not want to get on Amy’s bad side.
Her mother, claiming to have witnessed the shooting, upheld Amy’s version of the event. Mom, conveniently, was a politically connected official in the local town. Amy was released into the custody of her parents (enjoying, we presume, her new status as an only child). The investigative report ignored the utter implausibility of the entire story: the incoherent sequence of events, Amy’s evident rage, her fleeing the house with the gun and subsequent threatening of people on the street.
Defending the Indefensible Self
Here’s the risk management part: Amy’s father bought the shotgun after someone allegedly broke into the house. (There is no mention of any police record of this earlier incident.) Dear old dad kept the shotgun in the bedroom, with the shells conveniently laid out on top of a dresser. Amy, a brilliant scientist, but, she would have us believe, mechanically inept, took down the gun and put in the ammunition. (Why? no one bothered to ask.) She “accidentally” discharged the gun into the ceiling. Oops, how did that happen? Then she carries the gun downstairs and asks for help in unloading it. Her brother walks into the kitchen. The rest, as they say, is history as written by the (cruel) victors.
Twenty four years later, Amy practices shooting at a firing range. Her husband does not ask where she got the gun or why she wants to learn how to shoot it. He apparently has no clue what she is planning to do. He claims that he is “no psychologist” – and who could possibly argue with that? When he finally gets to talk to his homicidal wife, secure in a jail cell, she asks if the kids have all done their homework. From executing colleagues to worrying about homework. Who could possibly know what is going on in the mind of this brilliant, demented woman? And how could you possibly hold her parents accountable for enabling this monster and letting her loose upon an unsuspecting world?
Posts Tagged ‘Alabama’
Risk Management, Family Style
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Quo Vadis Alabama?
Monday, August 25th, 2008It was only a matter of time before the perfect storm hit state employee healthcare. It happened this week, on August 20, in, of all places, Alabama.
By 2011, Alabama employees who are obese, hypertensive, or have high cholesterol or high blood glucose will have to pay $25 more each month for their state health insurance. In 2010, they’ll pay $25 more if they haven’t enrolled in wellness programs to address their health risks.
Alabama has 37,555 active state agency employees covered by the State Employee Insurance Board. In the last ten years state health care costs for these workers have risen 172%. As yet untouched by the new rules are the 222,445 active duty and retired teachers covered by a separate system – the Public Education Employees Health Insurance Plan, but one suspects their time will come. After all, their health care costs have risen 200% in the same period.
To put this in perspective, consider this. Since 1999, Alabama health care and pension costs for all employees, including active and retired teachers, have risen 241%. But state revenues have risen only 67%. When one factors into the mix that:
- Only two states in the nation have more overweight people than Alabama, and that
- 43% of Alabama’s state employees are overweight, and that
- 19% are extremely overweight with body mass index greater than 35, and that
- Medical costs for the extremely overweight are $1,700 a year higher than for employees of normal weight (body mass index less than 25), and that
- Current economic indicators do not suggest a rapid rise in state revenues over the next few years, but that
- Health care annual costs are expected to continue increasing at double digit rates, then
- It doesn’t take much of a genius to conclude that as time goes by the situation becomes more and more untenable, hence,
- The unveiling and rapid descent of the economic Hammer of Thor.
You may ask why smokers are not included. Well, they are. Alabama employees who smoke are already charged an extra $22 per month for their health insurance.
Notwithstanding that, obesity is the big killer. As I wrote in a monograph on The Best Health Care in the World that debuted here in the Insider as a 5-part series in March of this year:
Unfortunately, obesity has been shown to be a greater driver of health care and health care spending than alcohol consumption or smoking – “the effects of obesity are similar to 20 years of aging.” According to Thorpe, et al, 27% of the per capita increase in US health care spending between 1987 and 2001 was attributable to obesity. There is a direct correlation between obesity and Type 2 diabetes, obesity and hypertension and obesity and heart disease (the trends in obesity accounted for more than 38% of the increase of diabetes spending and more than 41% of the increase in spending on heart disease since 1987).
It is as yet unknown whether Alabama will assist its 7,100 extremely overweight employees currently at risk for the higher health insurance charges by defraying some or all of the cost of the wellness programs toward which it is now herding them. Also unknown is if and when this surcharge program will be extended to all those teachers, who now pay $134 per month for their share of family coverage, compared to a nationwide average of $273 per month according to a survey by The Kaiser Family Foundation and The Health Research an Educational Trust.
Although one can hardly say that Alabama is noted for leading the national way, one has to ask, “As Alabama goes, can the nation be far behind?”
Rescue worker health & safety resources; disaster coverage
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of southern Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In watching CNN last night, I was struck by the bravery of the police, firefighters, and volunteers who put themselves in harm’s way to rescue survivors. Health care workers are also doing an amazing job under terrible circumstances: staffing flooded hospitals, tending to refugees in the Superdome, and relocating elderly nursing home residents.
The disaster recovery is boggling in scope, and we will no doubt address it further. For now, here are some health and safety resources for rescue workers:
Worker safety after a flood
Worker Safety in a Power Outage
Emergency Response Resources for Workers
Response, Cleanup and Safety for Workers
The above links were found via Poynter. The Poynter Institute is a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists. The website is often a good source of information for large, breaking news stories. In addition to the above links, they also have an extensive list of links to post-disaster health and safety resources for civilians and workers alike. It seems like a good time to give these resources wider circulation.
Online news coverage
In addition to the national media outlets, here are some online resources to local coverage.
NOLA – Breaking News from the Times Picayune
The Irish Trojan – a New Orleans area blogger who is posting frequent updates
Today’s Times Picayune – special online edition in pdf
Large graphic of the New Orleans levee system
Some of the following links to online TV resources can be slow loading due to demand.
WLOX – streaming video from Biloxi, MS
WJTV – online video from Jackson, MS
WPMI – online video from Mobile. AL
WLTV – online streaming video (embedded) from New Orleans
Joe Paduda has a post on Katrina’s impact on insurance costs in which he links to several articles and offers good commentary.
More on the prescription drug saga
Tuesday, January 6th, 2004The story continues to unfold as the FDA says “nix” to states and cities seeking to import prescription drugs from Canada to get relief from onerous pricing here in the U.S. No states are actually importing drugs yet, but many say they will fight the FDA ruling. The cities of Springfield, MA and Montgomery, AL are both currently running programs to purchase drugs, and saving quite a bit of money by doing so.
The ruling was a response to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s request for a waiver to allow the state to purchase drugs from Canada for state workers and retirees. He estimates that the state could realize a savings on the order of $91 million a year.
The FDA frames this as a consumer safety issue saying that “imported drugs could be tainted, old or fake,” but to many these protestations seem disingenuous. The pharmaceutical industry no doubt fears that this could open the door to drug pricing controls here in the U.S., and it would seem likely that the administration is going to want to keep the deep pockets in this industry happy pre-election.
See our prior discussion of this issue and a study pointing to the alarmingly high prescription drug costs in workers’ comp.
