May 13, 2017

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Business May 13, 2017

Can't Pay Your Student Loans? The Government May Come After Your House

Graduate cap weight pulls a student down a mountain.

James Yang for NPR

On Adriene McNally’s 49th birthday in January, she heard a knock on the door of her modest row-home in Northeast Philadelphia.

She was being served.

“They actually paid someone to come out and serve me papers on a Saturday afternoon,” she says.

The papers were from a government lawsuit that represents something more than just an unwelcome birthday gift — it’s an example of a program the federal government has brought to 19 cities around the country including Brooklyn, Detroit, Miami and Philadelphia: suing to recover unpaid student loans, like the ones McNally owes.

Every day, 3,000 people default on their federal student loans — and those lack of payments amount to an unpaid bill of $137 billion for the federal government. For decades, the government has tried to get borrowers to pay up by hiring debt collection agencies to call and send letters. But now the government is trying this new lawsuit strategy.

McNally filed for bankruptcy in 2006 and cleared out all her creditors — except for student loans, which are nearly impossible to get rid of in bankruptcy. As she and many others have found out, it’s not easy escaping federal student loan debt.

“Your whole body heats up with frustration,” McNally says. “I’m so frustrated over all this. It’s been so many years that they’ve been sending me mail and threatening me on the phone.”

In the last two years, more than 3,300 student loan borrowers have been sued after defaulting, according to the Department of Justice. In nearly every one of those suits, the borrower loses and the government wins.

What does the government win? A lien on the borrower’s assets — meaning that the debt is now attached to his or her most valuable belongings, like a home.

Jennifer Schultz, an attorney with Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, says that a lien traps a person, like house-handcuffs.

“I describe a lien as a kind of marker on the house,” Schultz says. “Any time a person tries to do a transaction involving their house — a new mortgage, a refinance, or if they try to sell it — they’re going to be expected to clear up any debt that’s attached to that house.”

The government has long been able to garnish wages, take income tax returns and divert Social Security and disability benefits. But targeting property is a way of applying even more pressure to get former students to pay up.

“It’s to try to awaken the avoider from their slumber,” says Drew Salaman, a debt-collection attorney in Philadelphia.

Salaman doesn’t work with student loans, but he’s familiar with debt avoidance. He says some of the borrowers are playing “catch me if you can.” These lawsuits ensure that people take responsibility for their debts.

“After all,” he says, “if we don’t have systems in place to recover debts, how can credit be extended?”

The end result of these suits — the liens — can be seriously threatening to borrowers. For many it’s a matter of housing preservation, says Joanna Darcus, an attorney on the student loan team at the National Consumer Law Center.

“For folks already living on the margins financially, the fear of losing that house can be palatable,” Darcus says.

Once a lien is in place, the government can force the sale of a former student’s home. That’s “exceedingly rare,” officials say, but it does sometimes happen.

The federal lawsuit program is expected to keep expanding, and with more than 8 million people currently behind on their federal student loans, it doesn’t look like the private firms will run out of work any time soon.

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Health May 13, 2017

In Rural Alaska, A Young Doctor Walks To His Patient's Bedside

Dr. Adam McMahan has been practicing medicine in rural Alaska for three years. It’s the kind of intimate, full-spectrum family medicine the 34-year-old doctor loves.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

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Elissa Nadworny/NPR

In rural Alaska, providing health care means overcoming a lot of hurdles.

Fickle weather that can leave patients stranded, for one.

Also: complicated geography. Many Alaskan villages have no roads connecting them with hospitals or specialists, so people depend on local clinics and a cadre of devoted primary care doctors.

I followed one young family physician, Dr. Adam McMahan, on his regular weekly visit to the clinic in the village of Klukwan.

It’s a speck of a town alongside the Chilkat River in Southeast Alaska, framed by snowy mountains that loom in the distance.

The village of Klukwan is populated mostly by Alaska Natives of the Tlingit tribe, and has fewer than 100 residents. It sits along the Chilkat River in Southeast Alaska.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

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The clinic staff drives up to Klukwan twice a week from the bigger town of Haines, 22 miles to the south.

Our Land is a project from special correspondent Melissa Block. She’s spending the next few months traveling the country, capturing how people’s identity is shaped by where they live. Help her decide where to go and who to spend time with by filling out this form.

On our drive, McMahan points out the clouds of dust blowing off sandbars along the river: “Likely today we’ll see somebody with a lung issue because of the sand coming off the river.”

Klukwan is populated mostly by Alaska Natives of the Tlingit tribe, fewer than 100 people in all, with a few hundred more people in the surrounding area.

Over the three years that he’s been practicing medicine in Klukwan, McMahan has come to know his patients well, and that becomes clear as he begins the day’s consultations.

With patient Lani Hotch, along with reviewing her cholesterol and blood sugar levels, McMahan remembers that she has a new dog. “What type of puppy did you get?” he asks her. (A yellow Lab.)

With fisherman Henry Chatoney, he wonders, “Hey, did you find a deckhand?”

And knowing that Everett Simons grows great potatoes and has been put on a low-starch diet for his diabetes, the doctor joshes, “How often are you sneaking a potato?”

The Klukwan clinic is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and includes two exam rooms, a dental suite and a small lab for basic diagnostics. It’s part of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

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This is the kind of intimate, full-spectrum family medicine the 34-year-old doctor loves.

“I know that Everett, he’s an amazing potato farmer,” he says. “I know that Henry is full of adventures and has fished Bristol Bay for longer than I’ve been alive. You get to know your patients as human.”

McMahan can trace his inspiration to become a physician back to a striking series of black-and-white photographs he saw in a magazine when he was a teenager. His grandfather was a pediatrician and had a 1948 issue of Life magazine on a shelf in his office. The photo essay by W. Eugene Smith, “Country Doctor,” shows a dedicated general practitioner tending to his patients in rural Colorado: making house calls, taping up broken ribs, stitching wounds.

“Those stills were really captivating,” McMahan says. “I was looking at those the other day and they’re not that different than what we do now here in Alaska.”

Everett Simons and Lani Hotch chat in the waiting room at the health clinic.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

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The Klukwan clinic is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s part of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC.

The clinic has two exam rooms, a dental suite and a small lab for basic diagnostics.

“A lot of it is doing the best we can in the moment with limited resources,” McMahan says. “I can’t send you down the street to go see a cardiologist. I can’t get a CT [scan] done in 10 minutes.”

On the day we visit, McMahan is seeing mostly elderly patients, including one, a Tlingit elder named Evelyn Hotch, who is confined to her bed after a stroke.

So with stethoscope looped around his neck, McMahan walks down the road to pay her a house call.

Once we’re inside her home, the first thing Evelyn Hotch does is offer all of us a snack: dried red seaweed. “You came to an Indian house,” she says, “and this is what Indians like to eat!”

It’s only after McMahan has shared her seaweed and inquired about the grandchildren whose photos cover just about every inch of her walls that he turns to her medical issues, asking about pain and what supplies she needs. “We’ll see you next week, OK?” he says as he heads out.

McMahan pays a house call on a Tlingit elder named Evelyn Hotch, who is bedridden after a stroke.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

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The goal with regular primary care like this is to keep people out of the emergency room. But in such a small, remote town, what happens in an emergency? There’s a volunteer ambulance squad that will drive up from Haines, about a half hour away.

Haines doesn’t have a hospital, though, so critically ill or injured patients might need to be medevacked by Coast Guard helicopter from Haines to Juneau.

“The vibratory effect of that, when your heart rate’s beating fast and you’ve got a really sick patient, hearing the helicopter, hearing the blades, is such a relief,” McMahan says.

Once a patient makes it to Juneau, he or she might still need to be flown by air ambulance to bigger hospitals in Anchorage or Seattle, hundreds of miles away.

“The Rubik’s Cube of resource coordination and transport is probably one of our biggest challenges,” McMahan says.

In part because of these complicated logistics, Alaska has some of the highest health care costs in the country.

For people who don’t have health insurance, “it’s often cause for catastrophe, financially,” McMahan says.

McMahan and medical student Jesse Han head back to the clinic after a home visit.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

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But, he adds, since Alaska expanded its Medicaid program in September 2015 under the Affordable Care Act, he is able to treat patients now who had gone for years without access to primary care.

More than 32,000 Alaskans have gained health coverage through Medicaid expansion.

McMahan worries about what might happen to his patients if the ACA is repealed and replaced by Congress: “I think if the Medicaid expansion is undercut, people will go without care,” he tells me. “They’re not going to be able to afford it.”

Even though the current health care debate is taking place thousands of miles away from his clinic, it hits home.

“It’s amazing how politics impact my day-to-day life when it comes to just getting somebody basic, basic care,” he says.

For now, though, Dr. McMahan turns to his immediate concerns: He has more patients to see, and more stories to hear.

The “Our Land” series is produced by Elissa Nadworny.

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Sports May 13, 2017

Not My Job: We Quiz Olympic Skier Hannah Kearney On Business Moguls

Hannah Kearney competes in the women’s freestyle skiing aerials qualification at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

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Hannah Kearney is one of the greatest mogul skiers of all time. She’s won 43 World Cup mogul medals, three U.S. Championship medals and two Olympic medals.

Kearney is obviously really good at one kind of moguls, so we’ll ask her three questions about another kind: business moguls.

PETER SAGAL, HOST:

And now the game where people who’ve won everything important try to win at something trivial. Hannah Kearney is one of the greatest mogul skiers of all time. She’s won 43 World Cup mogul medals…

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: …Three U.S. Championship medals and two Olympic medals, including a gold. Frankly, we are amazed that with all those medals around her neck she can even lift her head. Hannah Kearney, welcome to WAIT WAIT… DON’T TELL ME.

(APPLAUSE)

HANNAH KEARNEY: Thank you so much.

SAGAL: So you live here in Salt Lake City, which, of course, is a winter sports mecca. But you did not grow up here.

KEARNEY: I did not. I grew up skiing on ice in Vermont.

SAGAL: Right.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: And is that why you became a mogul skier, ’cause you couldn’t find a decent groomed run anywhere in Vermont?

KEARNEY: It certainly built character, and it honed my turns. It made skiing in Utah much easier.

SAGAL: Wow. Yeah. I should probably explain because…

MO ROCCA: Yeah, what moguls are.

SAGAL: …Not everybody knows that mogul skiing is. So you’re – basically you’re skiing, you’re going around these many, many, many bumps in the course. And then every now and then you hit a jump, you go flying in the air, you do a somersault or something impressive, you land, you keep going.

KEARNEY: Yep. And then it’s also timed.

SAGAL: Right. So how did you – well, first of all, how old were you when you started skiing?

KEARNEY: I was 2 years old when my parents put my 2-year-old body inside of a horse halter and let me go down the slopes. And I don’t remember learning how to ski.

SAGAL: Really? So, like, you have no memory of yourself before you knew how to ski?

KEARNEY: Correct.

SAGAL: Wow.

ROCCA: You were in the horse halter? Were they riding you?

(LAUGHTER)

KEARNEY: The whip. That’s why I became a good skier. Just kidding, mom and dad.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCCA: So when you get in a car, do you love streets with a lot of potholes when you’re driving? Because they’re sort of the same thing, right?

KEARNEY: Yeah. Those you’d be dodging, moguls you’re going straight over them, but similar.

SAGAL: Yeah. Yeah. Now…

KEARNEY: No backflips in the car.

SAGAL: This is a relatively new competitive sport – right? – because ski racing classically was just downhill and slalom and giant slalom. And when did they start adding these sort of crazy new types of skiing to the international circuit?

KEARNEY: At the Olympic level it was 1992 for our sport. And they’ve been, as you’ve seen, adding more crazier sports year after year. In my sport alone, I was, I think, 16 years old when I had to just start learning backflips because someone – his name was Jonny Moseley – decided he was going to push the sport and make it so that all future generations were going to have to learn crazy flips and maneuvers. They’re not as dangerous as they sound, but I don’t think that’s what my parents thought when they first heard. And certainly nothing I was interested in doing when I signed up for mogul skiing, meeting my dad at Tower Eight (ph) and skiing bumps. I wanted to keep my feet on the ground.

ALONZO BODDEN: Can I ask you something? You keep talking about you didn’t want to do the acrobatics and so on. Was there a point when you realized, like, wow I’m really good at this? I mean, you were the best in the world and you didn’t want to do it. What if you had focused?

(LAUGHTER)

KEARNEY: We might never know.

SAGAL: We might never know.

KEARNEY: I tricked myself into thinking I liked them. I put little Post-its in my room at the Olympic Training Center that said, I love jumping.

SAGAL: Really? That was your…

(LAUGHTER)

KEARNEY: And it’s only now that I would admit that I didn’t really like it, that it’s all over.

SAGAL: That was your self-motivation program?

KEARNEY: It worked.

SAGAL: I thought you guys had, like, you know, multi-thousand-dollar sports psychologists. You know, like…

KEARNEY: Nothing’s better than a Post-it.

SAGAL: Post-it, OK.

ROCCA: It’s like the world’s shortest TED talk.

SAGAL: Exactly.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Now, you’ve skied in two Olympics, 2010 and – excuse me…

KEARNEY: The first one was so unsuccessful that it would be better off if we just…

SAGAL: Where was that?

KEARNEY: Torino, Italy, in 2006.

SAGAL: Yeah. And then you came back in 2010 and you won gold. Yeah, that was where exactly? That was…

KEARNEY: Vancouver.

SAGAL: Vancouver. That was a final that you were in, right?

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: I have heard – we have all heard that the Olympic Village is like an absolute decadent Roman orgy all the time.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: That is what they tell us. And they say, well, you know, young athletes, they’re away from home…

ROCCA: They’re going at it like sled dogs.

SAGAL: Exactly.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: What comment can you make about that, shall we say, stereotype of Olympic villages?

KEARNEY: I can make a couple comments.

SAGAL: All right.

(LAUGHTER)

KEARNEY: I will start with the rumor, which was there’s a bowl of condoms at, like, the health center…

SAGAL: Yes, that’s what we hear about.

KEARNEY: …At the – in the Athlete Village.

SAGAL: Yeah.

KEARNEY: And they disappear quickly, so it’s like, oh, my goodness, these are being put to use. But let me ask you this – if you were at the Olympics and there were Olympic condoms, wouldn’t you take one?

ROCCA: Oh, my God.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Wait a minute.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: So – (laughter) so they’re Olympic-branded – little five rings on the condoms?

KEARNEY: I never opened it, so I’m not positive.

SAGAL: All right.

(LAUGHTER)

KEARNEY: They come in all the colors of the Olympic rings.

SAGAL: Of course they do.

ROCCA: And there’s a – and they work so well there’s a flame at the tip.

SAGAL: I know.

KEARNEY: You might be on to something.

(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Hannah Kearney, it is a pleasure to talk to you. We have asked you here to play a game we’re calling…

BILL KURTIS: I am the master of all I survey.

SAGAL: You ski mogul, so we thought we would ask you about the other kind of moguls – business moguls. Answer two out of these three questions correctly, you’ll win our prize for one of our listeners. Bill, who is Hannah playing for?

KURTIS: Kyle Trotter of Salt Lake City, Utah.

SAGAL: All right.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: First question. Ready to do this?

KEARNEY: Ready.

SAGAL: All right. Samuel Goldwyn was one of the great movie moguls. And he was famous for his odd turns of phrase known around Hollywood as Goldwynisms, including, at least allegedly, which of these – A, when told he couldn’t make a movie from a book because it was about lesbians, he said, it’s OK, we’ll make them Hungarians instead?

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Or B, quote, “my own personal theory is that the pyramids were built to store grain”; or C, quote, “people are not as stupid as the media think they are. Many of them are stupid, but I’m talking about overall”?

KEARNEY: C.

SAGAL: You’re going to go for C?

KEARNEY: Yep.

SAGAL: No, that was actually said by Ben Carson, the department…

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: The secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The real answer was A, the one about the lesbians.

KEARNEY: Oh, second choice.

SAGAL: Yeah.

ROCCA: So what was it?

SAGAL: No, the – so the first one about Hungarians was – that was Samuel Goldwyn. The other two about the pyramids storing grain and people are often, in fact, stupid, that’s Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

BODDEN: He would recognize stupid.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: OK, Hannah, you’ve got two more chances. Here’s your next question. Working for a mogul can be pretty dangerous, as in which of these cases – A, cosmetics mogul Vidal Sassoon required that his employees never wear bike helmets which might cover their silky, lustrous hair; B, in the early days at Ben and Jerry’s, ice cream mogul Ben Cohen used to make employees eat new flavors as fast as possible to test brain freeze; or C, in order to test the quality of his wares, bulletproof clothing mogul Miguel Caballero shoots all of his employees in the chest?

UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: C.

KEARNEY: Well, Ben and Jerry’s is a Vermont company and I’m a Vermonter, and their motto is if it’s not fun, why do it? And that didn’t sound fun. A.

SAGAL: You’re going to go for A, which is that Vidal Sassoon told people they could never wear bike helmets no matter what they were doing?

UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: C.

ROCCA: Ooh, I don’t…

KEARNEY: Can I poll the audience? Is that an option?

SAGAL: You can do whatever the hell you want.

KEARNEY: I already heard – so C.

SAGAL: C it is. Very good.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: Did you know that? It was great.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: All right, last question. You get this right you win. One of the most famous moguls we have today is, of course, Rupert Murdoch. He made his first fortune in Australia, and then he moved to the U.K. in the 1960s, buying the then-struggling tabloid The Sun. He turned its fortunes around by telling its editor what – A, quote, focus on football, footballers’ girlfriends and things that look like footballs; B, if you use a word longer than three syllables you’re fired; or C, I want a paper with lots of boobs in it?

ROCCA: How could you prove he didn’t say any of those things?

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Well…

ROCCA: Like, she could – she’s going to be right whatever she answers.

KEARNEY: I do – I like that option.

SAGAL: I like your thinking.

KEARNEY: They all sound possible, yeah.

SAGAL: They do. But according to…

ROCCA: I mean, is there, like, a transcript of everything he’s ever said?

SAGAL: According to his biography, he said one of those things.

ROCCA: Oh, OK. OK.

KEARNEY: Oh, had I read his biography. Has anyone read his biography?

UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: C.

KEARNEY: Really? That would be absolutely not my choice.

SAGAL: It’s funny. You don’t have to read his biography. You just have to read an issue of The Sun.

(LAUGHTER)

KEARNEY: OK, the audience in my ear is saying C.

SAGAL: And it is C.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL, APPLAUSE)

KEARNEY: Thank you. Well done.

SAGAL: Bill, how did Hannah Kearney do on our quiz?

KURTIS: Well, of course she won, two out of three.

(APPLAUSE)

KEARNEY: Thanks for the help.

SAGAL: Congratulations. Hannah Kearney is an Olympic gold medal-winning skier who just finished her junior year at Westminster College here in Salt Lake City. Hannah, thank you so much for talking to us on WAIT WAIT… DON’T TELL ME. Give it up for Hannah Kearney.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS’ “BUGLER’S DREAM AND OLYMPIC FANFARE MEDLEY”)

SAGAL: In just a minute, we’ll tell you the hip way to prevent a broken hip in our Listener Limerick Challenge. Call 1-888-WAITWAIT to join us on the air. We’ll be back in a minute with more of WAIT WAIT… DON’T TELL ME from NPR.

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