TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
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patient
safety
program
Jessica Barnett died when she was 17. She had
started fainting when she was 12. It looked like a sei-
zure. Her lips would go blue. She was put on epilepsy
medication. The fainting didn’t stop.
Her grandmother read an article about Long QT
syndrome. The Mayo Clinic defi nes it as “a heart
rhythm condition that can potentially cause fast, cha-
otic heartbeats. These rapid heartbeats might trigger
you to suddenly faint. Some people with the condition
have seizures. In some severe cases, LQTS can cause
sudden death.” The family thought that’s what Jes-
sica could have. It is treatable.
They had her tested. One test was positive. Some
at a different clinic were ruled negative. Her doctors
didn’t believe that was what she had.
Jessica fainted again one day. It was a bad episode.
Paramedics couldn’t revive her and she died.
Genetic testing after Jessica was dead confi rmed
she had Long QT syndrome. Her parents wanted
answers. They called the CEO of the hospital to try
an arrange a meeting with her doctors. They were
denied, so they decided to sue.
Her parents gathered up her medical records.
Jessica’s mother discovered the cardiologist never
even looked at one of the tests. It was only sent to her
general practitioner because that was the hospital’s
practice. Other tests were apparently misread. The
family was tested. Her father had it as well, though
showed no symptoms.
A lawsuit was settled out of court. Another 18
months after the lawsuit was settled and fi ve years
after Jessica’s death, the parents fi nally got to meet
with her doctors. They didn’t know the family had
requested to meet with them. They had not been told.
“The physicians jaws dropped open. They were
thinking: ‘If we’d actually spoken to this family we
may not have had to go through litigation,’” Jessica’s
mother said. “They were right. All we ever wanted
was to have our questions answered and know they
were making changes so this wouldn’t happen again.”
The Oregon Patient Safety Commission discussed
this case and cases like it. This case was from Cana-
da. All those details we provided are courtesy of the
efforts of the Canadian Patient Safety Institute and
Jessica’s family. Where it happened, though, does not
matter so much as what can be learned from it.
Medical errors and mistakes where patients are
harmed are going to happen. Oregon actually has a
model that allows families to get answers when medi-
cal errors occur — outside of a courtroom.
Passed in 2013 by the Oregon Legislature, the early
discussion and resolution system allows for an open
conversation between patients, families and medi-
cal providers when serious harm occurs. It creates
confi dentiality protections. Participants can speak
candidly and reconciliation can be found without an
adversarial lawsuit. That can encourage that im-
provements are made in patient safety. It can lower
costs in the medical system. And families can get
answers. Analysis of the program’s performance is
convincing. You can fi nd more about it at the Oregon
Patient Safety Commission’s website.
But the program will go away without action by the
Legislature. It is scheduled to sunset on Dec. 23, 2023.
Senate Bill 110 introduced at the request of Gov. Kate
Brown and the Oregon Patient Safety Commission
would get rid of the sunset provision. It was state Sen.
Tim Knopp, R-Bend, who moved the bill be sent to the
Senate fl oor for a vote with a recommendation that it
pass. It should.
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City Herald.
Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of
the authors and not necessarily that of the Baker City Herald.
What is post-COVID ‘normal?’
By Doug Badger
Can the federal government
ban evictions? Seems like a pretty
straightforward question. But the
answer touches on a deeper one, as yet
unsettled: Will life after COVID-19 be
normal?
Consider what a federal judge
said recently when he struck down a
Centers for Disease Control ban on
evictions, which the Trump administra-
tion instituted last year and the Biden
administration extended: “Although the
COVID-19 pandemic persists, so does
the Constitution.”
The court’s ruling in Terkel v. Cen-
ters for Disease Control and Preven-
tion reminds us that a public health
emergency declaration does not grant
the government unlimited authority to
regulate private behavior. Whether or
not banning evictions is good policy, the
government can’t exercise power with-
out constitutional warrant, something
many public offi cials appear to have
forgotten since the pandemic struck.
Last March, Congress enacted a
120-day ban on evictions of “covered
persons” (couples with incomes of less
than $198,000) living in “covered prop-
erties,” defi ned as those participating in
specifi ed federal programs or fi nanced
through federally backed loans.
Landlords who violate the order are
subject to penalties of up to one year
of imprisonment and fi nes of up to
$250,000.
The ban expired in July, but under a
directive from then-President Don-
ald J. Trump, the CDC revived it in
September and extended it through
the end of 2020. Congress then moved
the expiration date to Jan. 31. Among
President Joe Biden’s fi rst offi cial acts
was to direct CDC to extend it through
March 31.
Lauren Terkel, a Texas property
owner, challenged the order’s constitu-
tionality. Government attorneys argued
that the eviction ban is authorized by
the Constitution’s Commerce Clause,
which grants the federal government
power to regulate interstate commerce.
That clause, they claimed, gave CDC
sweeping powers to “suspend residen-
tial evictions for any reason, including
an agency’s views on ‘fairness.’”
Judge J. Campbell Barker disagreed.
“Real estate is inherently local,” he
wrote in response to the government’s
Commerce Clause argument. “Residen-
tial buildings do not move across state
lines.”
Barker also noted that the order
had only a tenuous connection to the
pandemic. Unlike a quarantine order,
the eviction ban is at best tangentially
related to stemming the spread of
infectious disease.
“Even though quarantining an
infected person from new contacts
would keep the person from traveling
interstate,” he wrote, “the CDC order
is not such a quarantine. The order
applies without regard to a tenant’s
infection with, prior exposure or vac-
cination against COVID-19. It applies
without regard to whether an evicted
tenant would move to a new city, much
less a new state.”
Indeed, the government’s contention
would mean that such orders did not
have to rest on public health grounds
at all, Barker observed.
“The government’s argument,” he
wrote, “would thus allow a nationwide
eviction moratorium long after the
COVID-19 pandemic ends.”
And that is precisely the danger.
While it is unclear whether Barker’s
ruling will be the last word on this case,
especially given past Supreme Court
precedents granting Congress broad
power under the Commerce Clause,
one thing is clear: The COVID-19
pandemic has affected the U.S. and the
Western world in myriad ways, altering
many of our cultural sensibilities.
Nowhere has this been more ap-
parent in the inversion of the consti-
tutional order. Before the pandemic,
we presumed that we had the right
to run our businesses, worship in our
churches and move freely about our
neighborhoods. We understood the
government’s protection of health and
safety as a prerequisite of liberty, not a
reason to restrict it.
We are acclimating to the idea that
liberty is contingent on government
offi cials’ assessments of the latest CO-
VID-19 metrics. Are new cases rising or
falling? Are hospitals getting crowded?
Have enough people been vaccinated?
Some restrictions are sensible and
necessary. Others are misguided and
counterproductive. But the most crucial
question is this: Has the pandemic per-
manently altered our understanding
of the prerogatives of government?
Before COVID-19, few would have
conceived the CDC had the power to
ban evictions. Now, we almost re-
fl exively assume it can. Government
lawyers argue — unsuccessfully before
this judge — that a federal health
agency’s power during a pandemic is
virtually boundless.
That mindset endures among many
federal, state and local offi cials even as
new cases decline and immunizations
accelerate. It will likely persist beyond
the pandemic. Our understanding of
government power and of liberty are
at risk of permanent distortion.
At some point, we will return to
churches and schools, shops and of-
fi ces, theaters and stadiums because
even the most overbearing govern-
ments will grant us leave to do so.
Things will, in that sense at least, be
normal again.
But in another sense, they may
never be.
Normal isn’t government permit-
ting us to exercise our liberty. Nor-
mal means that we needn’t seek the
government’s permission to exercise
our liberty.
Recovering that foundational truth
may prove more challenging than
recovering from the pandemic.
through the immigration courts. There’s
a library of studies by child psychologists
about how damaging such detentions
are to children.
Then came the Trump administra-
tion, whose answers included claiming a
health emergency and directing border
agents to turn children and adults
around rather than letting them pursue
their legal right to seek permission to
enter and stay.
Biden has pledged a more compas-
sionate approach, but he has also
warned that undoing the harsh Trump
policies will take more than a few
strokes of a pen. The administration
reportedly is turning a newly reopened
children’s detention center in Texas into
a processing center to help border agents
meet their legal obligation to turn over
unaccompanied minors within 72 hours
to the Department of Health and Hu-
man Services, which then has 20 days
to place them in safe and secure homes
while their cases are processed — dead-
lines the government routinely misses.
We welcome Biden’s more humane
approach, but wonder whether it will
succeed in the face of the rising tide
of juveniles arriving without parents
or guardians. Once again the nation
is watching its government strain to
meet obligations Congress imposed to
treat unaccompanied minors with the
delicacy they deserve. Once again we
see a growing crisis spotlight the broad
inadequacies of the government’s im-
migration enforcement system to deal
compassionately with human migration.
The solutions require broad vision
and actions, including efforts to reduce
the instability in Central American
countries that send so many people
fl eeing in the fi rst place. Such efforts, of
course, run into a headwind of deep-
rooted corruption in some of those
countries.
But the longer the government leaves
those broad solutions unfulfi lled, the
more it will be forced to deal with waves
of migration, one crisis following an-
other. We need a better way of doing this.
Doug Badger is a Visiting Fellow in
Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage
Foundation.
OTHER VIEWS
Editorial from Los Angeles Times:
President Joe Biden is facing a critical
test as a surge of migrants, emboldened
by the end of the Trump era, is arriv-
ing at the U.S.-Mexico border in hopes
of forging better lives here in the U.S.
One challenge in particular is the sharp
increase in unaccompanied minors.
Federal agents encountered 5,871
unaccompanied minors at the border
in January, up from 3,076 in January
2020. How Biden handles this surge
could become a defi ning moment in his
administration.
We’ve been here before. In fact, the
federal government has been wrestling
with this deeply complex problem for
years. During the Obama administra-
tion an infl ux of unaccompanied minors,
who under law (and basic humanity)
require different handling than work-
seeking adults, overwhelmed the system,
leading the government to hold children
in border stations and detention centers
as offi cials struggled to fi nd places for
them to live while their cases proceeded