Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/146135
Thursday, July 25, 2013 – Daily News CUTS care for all Medi-Cal patients." "We sometimes have to Continued from page 1A wait three years to receive will be like when the ER is reimbursements, as it is," the only option of medical said Laura Fierce, Corning Medical Association Billing Manager. Nielsen and Crow promised to assist rural clinics plead their case before the legislative body. "However, the cuts will most likely pass," Nielsen said. "What we need is a long range master plan that triggers an automatic increase in reimbursement as the economy recovers." Calif. to see wave of spending to sell 'Obamacare' LOS ANGELES (AP) — California could see more than $300 million invested in television and online ads, billboards, door-to-door visits and other sales pitches and promotions to convince uninsured residents to enroll in national health care coverage, a potentially unprecedented level of spending to sell a government program in the nation's most populous state. The state agency guiding President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, Covered California, faces a monumental task to reach millions of people without insurance and sway them to sign on, while overcoming geographic, language and cultural barriers. Nationwide spending on publicity, marketing and advertising to promote the health overhaul could hit at least $684 million, according to data compiled The Associated Press from federal and state sources. About one in four of those federal dollars will be targeted for California, or more than $174 million, according to the AP review. Additionally, the California Endowment, a private health foundation, expects to spend $130 million of its own money for ads and other enrollment efforts aimed largely at Hispanics, in a campaign coordinated with the state. ''Like most public programs that have been tried in California, this could fail on the difficulty in doing outreach and enrolling people,'' California Endowment spokesman Daniel Zingale said. With food stamps and other programs that help lower-income people ''we have a terrible track record in this state on public-program enrollment,'' he added. With at least $86 million earmarked for ads, Covered California is counting on global marketing firms to get the job done: Weber Shandwick and Ogilvy Public Relations. According to Covered California, ads will appear in multiple languages on TV, radio, newspapers, billboards and social media. Weber Shandwick, which is managing the ad campaign, is expected to earn $12 million in fees over two years. Ogilvy's contract for public relations is pegged at $18 million. Stanford University political scientist Bruce Cain said he was unaware of any comparable effort to sell a government program to a hard-to-target population in the state. ''The really important selling job will be with younger, healthier voters who are going to get hit with the (insurance) mandate on top of a really bad job market. Many may opt to pay the fine rather than enroll, and that could throw things off massively,'' Cain said in an email, referring to the government penalty residents could face if they refuse to enroll in health insurance. About 16 percent of Americans are uninsured. An estimated 2.3 million state residents will enroll in a health plan through Covered California by 2017, according to the agency. Open enrollment begins in October, with the health care exchanges in full operation by January. California's per-capita ad and public relations spending, $4.68, is among the highest in the U.S., the AP review found. Twenty-one states have budgeted less than $1 in per-capita spending. The goal is to make sure the message gets out to potential enrollees, whether they are ''at work, at home or in the car,'' Ogilvy project manager Kevin Slagle said. The program also will have to overcome public skepticism at a time when polls show most Americans have a dismal view of Washington and are unaware of how to approach the health care reforms. ''If the government said Bassett hounds have long ears, people would take out their rulers to check it out,'' said Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. STATE BRIEFING Calif. GOP adds state party director ahead of 2014 SACRAMENTO (AP) — The Republican National Committee and California Republican Party have hired a new state party director to oversee field operations as the GOP seeks to hang on to its congressional seats. In a joint announcement Wednesday, the groups said Clinton Soffer would help the battered party build a ground operation and capture new voters. Republicans have fallen below 30 percent of registered voters in California. This spring, delegates elected former state Senator Jim Brulte as state party chairman, hoping he can reverse the GOP's fortunes. California's newly redrawn districts led to several competitive congressional contests in 2012, and both parties are preparing for close races next year. Republicans hold 15 of the state's 53 congressional seats. Soffer's hiring comes much earlier than usual in an election cycle, signaling the state's importance. Court petition seeks EPA action on pesticide drift SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Activists have filed another petition to force federal regulators to set safety standards that protect children from pesticides that drift from farm fields into nearby communities. Pesticide Action Network, the United Farmworkers of America and other groups filed the petition Wednesday in San Francisco federal court. It asks a judge to force the Environmental Protection Agency to answer a petition from 2009, which demanded the agency evaluate children's exposures to pesticide drift and adopt no-spray buffer zones around homes, schools, parks and daycare centers. Plaintiffs say in the four years since the initial petition was filed, the EPA hasn't responded or taken action. Poll: Brown approval dips slightly but still high SACRAMENTO (AP) — A new Field Poll finds that 51 percent of California voters say they approve of the job Gov. Jerry Brown is doing and that most are inclined to re-elect him next year. The survey released Wednesday shows the Democratic governor's popularity dipped from his 57 percent approval rating last February. About 43 percent said they are inclined to support Brown if he seeks re-election next year, as expected. The poll found that men are more likely to support Brown, while women are divided. It was based on telephone interviews with 846 registered voters from June 26 to July 21 and has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. 7A Former California news chopper pilot arrested SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A former California news helicopter pilot was in federal custody on Wednesday in New York after being charged with flying without a proper license and lying to officials, authorities said. John Michael Dial, 57, who worked under the fake name of Thomas R. Cuni while making hundreds of flights in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento between 2009 and last year, was arrested Monday in Skaneateles, N.Y., on a warrant out of Sacramento, U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner announced. Dial appeared before a U.S. magistrate judge in Syracuse, N.Y., on Monday and was ordered held without bail and transported to Sacramento. The arrest came nearly 20 years after Dial was convicted of providing false information to the Federal Aviation Administration. He was sentenced in 1994 to two years in prison and a one-year term of supervised release. Dial's latest legal problems raise questions about FAA security procedures. FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said Wednesday the agency declined to comment on the arrest. However, he explained that generally people who apply for pilot certificates must present a government-issued photo ID and sign documents certifying under penalty of perjury the information they are providing is true and correct. The current grand jury indictment in California was unsealed on Tuesday. It charges Dial with two counts of making a false statement to Federal Aviation Administration officials and one count of operating an aircraft without a pilot's license. He could face up to five years in prison if convicted. An FBI affidavit says Dial provided false information to FAA officials for years to work as a pilot for an air ambulance service in Susanville and as a news helicopter pilot in the Sacramento and San Francisco media markets. He is accused of using his alias while supplying the air ambulance service with bogus information, including an FAA temporary airman certificate, an FAA medical second class certificate, a Vermont driver's license bearing his picture, a U.S. Army helicopter pilot qualification card and an Army discharge from active duty. The affidavit said Dial got his FAA certification using the alias and was hired as a news helicopter pilot, flying in that capacity about 265 times in the San Francisco area between December 2009 and August 2010. It does not include the media outlets that used his services, only that he was contracted through Helicopters Inc., a news helicopter service headquartered in Illinois. Dial's last recorded flights were under his real name. He is suspected of using fake FAA documents to get a job with Sacramento television news station KCRA to fly a news helicopter in March 2012. According to the complaint, Dial told law enforcement in Idaho in April 2012 that he used the name Thomas R. Cuni in order to avoid apprehension for two outstanding felony warrants. Dial has used 24 other names and aliases over the past 12 years as well as six Social Security numbers and even 10 dates of birth, authorities said. He has had multiple theft and forgery convictions as well as numerous misdemeanor convictions relating to bad checks dating as far back as the late 1970s, the affidavit said. Feds advance plan to kill barred owls in Northwest GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Federal wildlife officials plan to dispatch armed bird specialists into forests of the Pacific Northwest starting this fall to shoot one species of owl to protect another that is threatened with extinction. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday released a final environmental review of an experiment to see if killing barred owls will allow northern spotted owls to reclaim territory they've been driven out of over the past half-century. The agency has been evaluating the idea since 2009, gathering public comment and consulting ethicists, focus groups and scientific studies. It will issue a final decision on the plan in a month. ''If we don't manage barred owls, the probability of recovering the spotted owl goes down significantly,'' said Paul Henson, Oregon state supervisor for Fish and Wildlife. The agency's preferred course of action calls for killing 3,603 barred owls in four study areas in Oregon, Washington and Northern California over the next four years. The plan is expected to cost about $3 million and requires a special permit under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which prohibits killing nongame birds. Neither the timber industry nor the Audubon Society was pleased with it. ''Shooting a few isolated areas of barred owl isn't going to help us as forest managers, nor is it going to help the forest be protected from wildfires, and catastrophic wildfire is one of the big impediments to spotted owl recovery,'' said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group. Bob Sallinger, conservation director for the Audubon Society of Portland, said saving the spotted owl is of paramount importance, but the focus must remain on protecting habitat. ''To move forward with killing barred owls without addressing the fundamental cause of spotted owl declines, from our perspective, is not acceptable,'' he said. Henson said the Northwest Forest Plan, which cut logging by 90 percent on national forests in the 1990s, has done a good job of providing habitat for the spotted owl. But the owls' numbers have continued to slide. Henson said unless barred owls are brought under control, the spotted owl in coming decades might disappear from Washington's northern Cascade Range and Oregon's Coast Range, where the barred owl incursion has been greatest. It has taken the federal government a long time to get to this point. The California Academy of Sciences killed some barred owls in spotted owl territory on the Klamath National Forest in Northern California in 2005, and the owner of some redwood timberlands in Northern California regularly kills barred owls to protect spotted owls. The idea of killing one type of owl to protect another underscores a fragile balance of nature that biologists have struggled with for years. Between 2000 and 2006, wildlife officials captured and removed more than 40 golden eagles from the Channel Islands off Southern California to protect the island fox. They also hired a company to kill 5,000 feral pigs on Santa Cruz in a controversial program to restore the island's ecosystem. In Oregon, officials have used lethal injections to kill selected California sea lions that feast on protected salmon in the Columbia River. And in Yosemite National Park, saving bighorn sheep has meant hunting protected mountain lions. The northern spotted owl is an icon of bitter disputes between the timber industry and environmentalists over the use of Northwest forests. Because of its dwindling numbers, the little bird was listed as a threatened species in 1990, which resulted in logging cutbacks and lawsuits. Barred owls are bigger, more aggressive and less picky about food. They started working their way across the Great Plains in the early 1900s, and by 1959 were in British Columbia. Barred owls now cover the spotted owl's range, in some places outnumbering them as much as 5-to-1. The Fish and Wildlife Service's proposal calls for a combination of killing and capturing barred owls. But capturing owls is far more expensive and difficult. And the agency has found only five zoos or other facilities willing to take a barred owl if it's captured, said Robin Bown, the wildlife biologist in charge of the evaluation. Henson said the service has yet to work out details of how barred owls will be killed, whether by government hunters from the U.S. Agriculture Department's Wildlife Services, or by contract hunters. The favored method involves luring the birds with a recording of a barred owl call, then shooting them with a shotgun when they fly in to drive out the intruders. Hunting would start this fall on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in Northern California, where the locations of barred and spotted owls are well-known, Henson said. It will begin in fall 2014 in three other study areas made up primarily of federal land. The northernmost is in the Cascade Range near Cle Elum, Wash. Another is in the Oregon Coast Range west of Salem. The third is in the Klamath Mountains south of Roseburg. Hunting will take place only in the fall and winter, to prevent taking birds when they are caring for their young. Each study area will be divided in two, with half serving as a control with no barred owl hunting. Scientists will see if spotted owls move back into areas where barred owls have been killed. The four study areas add up to 1,207 square miles, which amounts to 0.05 percent of the northern spotted owl's range.