- “Essentially, the agency wants to ‘protect’ patients from knowing about their own health” [David Rivkin and Andrew Grossman, USA Today, earlier] FDA-defying workaround lets you get your info even if 23andme’s muzzled [Ron Bailey]
- “Insane Department of HHS plan would criminalize lifesaving bone-marrow donor incentives out of woolly concern with ‘altruism'” [Steven Pinker, Sally Satel/Bloomberg, Michelle Meyer/Bill of Health]
- Affordable Care Act opens up funding stream for alternative medicine. The start of something big? [Kevin Williamson, NRO]
- On underused Gotham hospitals, de Blasio is in hole of his own digging [Bob McManus, City Journal]
- ADA lawsuit against hospital a harbinger of others to come? [Peoria Journal-Star]
- If goal is access to affordable contraception, making Pill available over the counter would seem good first step [Shikha Dalmia/Time, earlier]
- Home-health-aide overtime rules are bad news for seniors hoping to stay out of nursing homes, but AARP can’t shake its scripted role as loyal union ally [More: Free Beacon, from 2011 on AARP brief in state overtime case; earlier here, here, and here]
Posts Tagged ‘NYC’
NYC subway jumper: city saved my life, then violated privacy
[Yasmin] Rahman tried to commit suicide in 2001 by jumping in front of a subway train. NYPD officers saved her life. She was 15. Now, 27, she’s suing the city for $7 million, claiming the city and the NYPD posted pictures, police reports and hospital records of her failed suicide attempt on a database open to the public. She claims that has prevented her from obtaining a job.
Although her lawsuit alleges that the publication of the material has prevented Rahman from “obtaining any type of job,” a reporter “found that she actually did have a job from 2010 to 2012,” among other difficulties with the story. Rahman’s lawyer, Andrew Schatkin, commented on the $7 million demand: “I put a large figure in because if I put a small figure in I would only get that small amount. It’s not that I’m making an outsized or frankly a lie about it for a better word. I’m simply enabling a figure that would get her as much compensation as possible.” [MyFoxNY.com; Eric Turkewitz on ad damnum clauses in New York]
Update: “‘Unfireable’ NYC firefighter quits”
“The female FDNY probie who was allowed to graduate from the Fire Academy without passing a required running test has quit” after a sixth unsuccessful try to run a mile and a half in 12 minutes or less. Wendy Tapia will “return back to EMS ranks,” said a fire spokesman.
“It’s really not about her, it’s about preferential treatment,” said Paul Mannix, president of Merit Matters, a firefighter group that opposes hiring quotas. “People are encouraged that she won’t be fighting fires, not because she’s a woman, but because she couldn’t meet the standards.”
For an excerpt from my discussion in The Excuse Factory of litigation challenging timed tests for firefighters, see this 2007 post. [New York Post, earlier]
NYC: “Meet the seemingly unfirable female firefighter”
“Despite failing a required FDNY running test five times, Wendy Tapia was allowed to graduate from the Fire Academy and become a firefighter. On Dec. 2, she is taking the test for an unprecedented sixth time.” [New York Post] In The Excuse Factory, I told the story of how prolonged litigation from civil rights groups claiming to speak for the interests of female applicants had severely eroded testing for strength, endurance and agility among many urban fire, police and trash services.
November 11 roundup
- Incoming Australian attorney general: we’ll repeal race-speech laws that were used to prosecute columnist Andrew Bolt [Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Herald-Sun, earlier]
- Texas sues EEOC on its criminal background check policy [Employee Screen]
- After Eric Turkewitz criticizes $85M announced demand in Red Bull suit, comments section turns lively [NYPIAB]
- If only Gotham’s official tourism agency acted like a tourism agency [Coyote on NYC’s official war against AirBnB; Ilya Shapiro, Cato; earlier here and here, etc.]
- “Lawmaker wants Georgia bicyclists to buy license plates” [WSB]
- Religious liberty implications of European moves to ban infant circumcision [Eugene Kontorovich]
- Video on CPSC’s quest for personal liability against agency-mocking Craig Zucker of Buckyballs fame [Reason TV, earlier]
#LifeUnderDeBlasio
Enjoying the genre of #LifeUnderDeBlasio satire tweets from New Yorkers, such as: “I remember when the screens in the back of taxis showed light entertainment, not statistics about iron production.” [@tomgara] “I thought de Blasio gave a good speech but am just not sure how the Five Year Plan for the Park Slope roof gardens will turn out.” [@stuartpstevens] And the one about considering teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten as schools chief.
Wait a minute. That one’s real!
NYC bureaucracy and the expediter culture
Businesses in New York that permits from City Hall — which at one time or another is likely to be most of them — commonly pay thousands of dollars for “expediters” to navigate municipal departments for them. That this system continues even after years of putatively pro-business, modernizing administration by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, says Ira Stoll, is “outrageous.” [Future of Capitalism]
$445,000 per South Bronx “affordable housing” unit?
Some reasons to think Bill de Blasio’s schemes for “mandatory inclusionary zoning” are likely to fall short. [Jim Epstein, New York Daily News]
Richard Epstein on Carnegie Hall’s $419,000 stagehands
Yes, the New York City arts scene has a lot of money sloshing around in it, that of Minneapolis-St. Paul much less, but in neither instance are performing-arts labor unions doing well at reaching a livable accommodation with the needs of high culture. [Hoover “Defining Ideas”]
NYC sues Hasidic stores over “modest dress required” signs
“Exhibiting a complete lack of common sense, the city’s Human Rights Commission is determined to take seven Hasidic-owned stores in Brooklyn to trial for the high crime of requiring modest dress of their customers.” Signs the HRC deems “discriminatory” include “No Shorts, No Barefoot, No Sleeveless, No Low Cut Necklines Allowed.” [editorial, New York Post] But shops catering to a secular clientele routinely post demands that their customers button up: no shirt/socks/shoes, no service, business attire only, and so forth. “Which means the city is targeting the Hasidic stores because of religion!” [Ann Althouse]