Longform.org’s weekend reading list

Every weekend, Longform.org picks the week’s best in-depth stories on politics and policy for Wonkblog. For daily selections of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform.org or follow @longformorg on Twitter.

For the Families of Some Debtors, Death Offers No Respite

Jessica Silver-Greenberg • Wall Street Journal • December 2011

Debts are generally buried along with the deceased, so lenders go to great lengths to recover assets from the living:

Some debt collectors send condolence cards that double as collection letters. In September, Maxine Feinberg of Brooklyn, N.Y., got a letter from AscensionPoint Recovery Services LLC, a debt collector in Coon Rapids, Minn. The company offered its “deepest condolences,” referring to the death of her husband, David.

The company then brought up the $407.96 owed by Mr. Feinberg on a Macy’s Inc. credit card. The letter thanked Mrs. Feinberg for “promptly attending to this important matter in the life of David Feinberg.” Macy’s didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Aunt Midge Not Dying in Hospice Reveals 14B Market

Peter Waldman • Bloomberg • December 2011

Hospice care, once the realm of volunteers who sought to ease the pain of dying patients, is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Increasingly, the focus is as much on profits as patient care:

Profit margins on healthier patients who survive for years with minimal care can exceed 20 percent, according to Medpac. Medicare patients can stay on hospice indefinitely, as long as a hospice physician recertifies that they are terminally ill every 60 days.

Besides the “Summer Sizzle” promotion, the push for patients at HCK included “Christmas Cash Blitz” and “Fall Frenzy” admission drives. Those eligible for cash incentives in these and other programs included managers and admissions and medical staff, according to a dozen former employees.

In Foreclosure Capital, Meltdown And Poverty Feel Permanent

Peter S. Goodman • Huffington Post • December 2011

Cape Coral, a sun-drenched Florida municipality, was laid low by the Great Recession. Even as the economy slowly recovers, the local population doesn’t expect to benefit. “This is the new normal,” a pastor tells Goodman. “The old normal wasn’t normal.”

When the unraveling began here, a sense of hope endured that it was perhaps a momentary pause. Housing prices were plummeting, as they would soon nationally, but people told themselves that the Florida story would again prevail, exerting its magnetic pull on regions familiar with snow tires. Houses would be filled with retirees and younger people seeking bargains. Fear would give way to the next wave of upward mobility.

But so much time has elapsed with the damage still rippling out that a sense of resignation has entered the local conversation. Among those focused on providing aid, the mission has evolved from one of handing out temporary relief. Now, they talk long-term strategies to assist a community in which poverty has become indisputably entrenched, albeit papered over for a time by easy money.

The Visionary

Garry Wills • The New York Review of Books • March 1995

Newt Gingrich, profiled at the height of his political power:

Gingrich wants to give the poor laptop computers as a way of earning, not just of learning. Gingrich’s fascination with technology, modernization, and new life styles antedated his exposure of the Tofflers’ ideas. His 1971 dissertation, written in the history department at Tulane, was partly critical of colonialism in the Belgian Congo, but was on the whole an apologia for it. It is not surprising that an army brat brought up on or near military bases should think imperially; but the grounds for his defense of Belgium are the most interesting thing in the dissertation. The colonizers did the native people an unwanted favor by forcing modernization on them.

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