Lansing Lines is presented in cooperation with MIRS, a Lansing-based news and information service.
Appellate Court Affirms Dismissal Of Suit Challenging MSU Vaccine Mandate
A federal appellate court affirmed this month the dismissal of a lawsuit challenging Michigan State University’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
In a published opinion from Circuit Judge John K. Bush, the court held that MSU’s policy “furthers a legitimate government interest of protecting public health.”
Bush added: “Thus, the policy passes rational basis review. Given that MSU’s policy satisfies rational basis review, no employee’s rights are violated, and thus the policy is not an unconstitutional condition on plaintiffs’ employment.”
The panel, including Judges Raymond M. Kethledge and Helene N. White, also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that MSU’s policy is preempted by federal law regulating the distribution and use of pharmaceuticals.
MSU announced in July 2021 a directive that all faculty and staff had to be fully vaccinated or receive at least one of a two-dose series of vaccines by Aug. 31, 2021, including employees who worked remotely.
The policy provided for religious and medical exemptions.
The plaintiffs – Jenna Norris, Kraig Ehm and D’ann Rohrer – each tested positive for COVID-19, and they claimed their naturally acquired immunity should exempt them from the policy, but the university disagreed.
While Norris was eventually granted a religious exemption, Ehm’s employment was terminated in November 2021 and Rohrer was placed on unpaid leave.
The plaintiffs then sued, alleging MSU violated their constitutional rights and that the vaccine mandate was preempted by federal law.
The district court dismissed the lawsuit at MSU’s request.
Hockey, Sports Medicine Supplier Gets MEDC Money For Expansion
A Kent County hockey and sports medicine supplier will receive funding from the Michigan Economic Development Corp. to expand in Gaines Township.
Howies Hockey Tape is getting a $270,000 Michigan Business Development Program performance-based grant to help construct a new office and warehouse space. The project is expected to generate $6 million in capital investment and create 45 jobs.
“Growing up in Eastown, Grand Rapids has always been a special place to me – I’m blessed to have been raised here and I’m proud to make Michigan my home,” Howies Hockey Owner Howard Max Sieplinga said. “As we look toward the future of Howies, our dream is to build a sporting goods brand that is widely recognized across the globe.”
Sieplinga said the company started in a 900-square-foot building and has outgrown the space because the Grand Rapids-based company has seen a larger demand from customers in the NHL, NFL and NCAA.
He said the new facility was expected to be finished in spring 2024.
The company was started in 2002, Sieplinga said, when he was frustrated with shoddy hockey tape and set out to develop a better-quality product.
Since that time, Howies has moved into other sports products and clothing for rock climbing, downhill skiing, football, baseball, tennis, golf and more. Sieplinga said he wants to build a brand that West Michigan would be proud of.
“Founders did it in beer, Steelcase in furniture, and we hope to accomplish it in hockey and the sports medicine world,” Sieplinga said.
Rheingans Resurrecting Universal Health Care System
Freshman Rep. Carrie A. Rheingans (D-Ann Arbor) is attempting to defibrillate the discussion surrounding a universal health care system in Michigan, which she said will address the $800 million in Michiganders’ medical debts.
Rheingans plans to introduce HB 4893 in another Democratic attempt to create the MiCare program – a universal and publicly funded health care system for Michigan residents.
“All 10 million Michiganders, regardless of where in the state they live, should have high quality, affordable health care,” Rheingans said. “Michiganders deserve to have the freedom to receive the care that they need without fear of bankruptcy.”
Rheingans said as of 2022, 1.3 million Michiganders had medical debt, totalling over $800 million.
“The system that we have has been failing us,” she said. “For years, we have heard from the health care industry that with multiple competing payers, the market will course correct whenever costs get too high or benefits are restricted. Year after year, we hear this, but we still haven’t seen it.
“We need a different way forward,” she said.
Rheingans said the MiCare system will be publicly funded, using a mix of private and public providers to deliver physical, dental and mental health care without deductibles, copays or premiums.
She said the system will save Michiganders money by “cutting down on excessive administrative costs and treating health care like a right, instead of a for-profit industry.”
The bill was supported by former House Democratic Floor Leader Yousef Rabhi, now legislative director of the Michigan Nurses Association, who originally sponsored the bill in 2018.
“Our profit-driven system is broken, inefficient and inhumane,” Rabhi said. “Michiganders deserve to live with dignity and should never be forced to choose between getting lifesaving care and keeping the lights on at home or buying food to feed their families.”
The newest version of the bill has not yet been formally read in, Rheingans said, but is identical to Rahbi’s 2022 version of the legislation, HB 5966.
Rheingans said she understands the major health care system change will be an “uphill battle,” but “I ran for this office to make universal health care a reality for Michiganders. I will not stop fighting for universal, affordable health care, even if it takes the rest of my time in the Legislature.”
She plans to host a series of statewide town halls throughout the summer to discuss Michiganders’ experiences with the current health care system, along with changes they want to see moving forward.
The Michigan Association of Health Plans did not share an official position on the legislation at this time, but MAHP Deputy Director of Commercial Market Affairs and Communications Brian Mills said the Association is aware of Rheingans’ interest in the issue.
“We look forward to working with her to provide resourceful information as to the detriments of a sole, single-payer health care system that eliminates healthy competition among health insurance providers,” Mills said, “and empowers the government to control individuals’ health care decisions.”
A Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Michigan spokesperson said the agency has not been contacted by Rheingans regarding her legislation.
“Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan believes everyone should have access to affordable, high-quality health care. Unfortunately, proposals like this increase costs, limit choice and decrease the quality of care.”
Early on, the bill was supported by the Michigan Universal Health Care Access Network, Michigan for Single Payer Healthcare and the Michigan Nurses Association.
Dr. Susan Fabrick, a former Fruitport family doctor, also supported the legislation, adding that the current system negatively impacted her ability to deliver high-quality care.
“As a primary care physician from 1991 to 2021, I have seen the increase in methodical extraction of profit from every health care interaction,” she said. “It now takes multiple clerical employees to handle billing, referrals and ‘quality improvement’ measures, as well as the constant headache of seeking approvals for medications, referrals and testing.”
She said primary care physicians, nurses and medical workers in every category are facing increased burnout, and “the amount of time primary care physicians spend documenting care rivals the amount of time they can spend with their patients.
“Patient care suffers as the overall medical system pays far more attention to maximizing profits than to human beings who are suffering and need medical care,” she said.
Municipalities Hit Spending Struggles With Federal COVID Relief Dollars
Federal funds intended to stabilize the budgets of local communities have proven a daunting task to take down for multiple reasons, a recent policy survey by the University of Michigan found.
Cities, villages and townships trying to spend the $4.4 billion of COVID-19 relief funding from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) have hit snags along the way, including inflation, supply chain issues, bureaucracy and the amount, a University of Michigan Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (CLOSUP) survey found.
“It’s kind of like a boa constrictor having to swallow a pig. It’s a large infusion of money that many local governments were not prepared for in the beginning,” said Tom Ivacko, CLOSUP Executive Director.
Ivacko said municipalities were spending the money in 13 different categories and communities with more than 30,000 residents saw 81% spending some of the funding on capital improvement projects. Overall, 53% of all local governments were spending some of the ARPA funds on public buildings, public parks or other such projects.
He said the next biggest portion that municipalities were spending money on was local infrastructure projects, with 38% spending on roads and bridges and 31% spending on sewer infrastructure, with 44% spending on water projects.
Ivacko said Michigan was a departure from the national trend in these respects. In other states, the top sources were backfilling lost tax revenue from early in the pandemic.
“The thing that it says to me is that is a reflection of the fact that the system of funding local government in Michigan is broken,” he said.
He pointed to the American Society of Civil Engineers 2023 Report Card that had the infrastructure of the state at a C- in May.
“I believe that is a result of this broken system of funding here in the state, and so to see ARPA funds going, primarily to these kinds of infrastructure and capital improvement projects, isn’t necessarily surprising to me,” he said.
Michigan Municipal League (MML) State and Federal Affairs Director John LaMacchia agreed that the funding system was broken.
“In order to correct some of those things, that is really where we need the state to partner with us, because not all of those things require financial resources. Some of it requires policy changes that would allow local governments to better track the economy, rather than always dealing with the negative impacts,” LaMacchia said.
He said he was glad to see all the one-time funding that was in the current budget waiting for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s signature, but that didn’t deal with the ongoing challenges faced by municipalities.
He said there are budgetary constrictions put on local government that are antithetical to what Whitmer has been asking from them to attract population.
“If we don’t invest in our communities, it’s kind of a core function of that, we’re going to continue to see population declines or the lack of growth in population being consistent and persistent,” LaMacchia said.
He said the MML doesn’t tell members how to spend their money, but he said they have set up programs to help them unhinge their jaw further to swallow the pig.
Ivacko said associations like the MML, the Michigan Association of Counties, and the Michigan Townships Association have helped in those regards, which numbers in the survey bore out. He said 47% of the municipalities that responded to the survey were challenged by bureaucratic issues, which was down from 55% in 2022.
LaMacchia said the MML has asked municipalities to be mindful about how they are spending ARPA funds and make them last or be generationally impactful.
“I have great confidence that our members have gone to extensive lengths to spend these resources appropriately and in ways that are going to have long and lasting impacts,” he said.
Appeals Panel Affirms Dismissal Of Suit Challenging Nurses’ Union
A Michigan Court of Appeals panel affirmed a lower court’s ruling that a lawsuit challenging control of a nurses’ union is moot.
Former board members of the University of Michigan Professional Nurse Council’s (UMPNC’s) Executive Committee sued its parent labor organization, the Michigan Nurses Association (MNA), in February 2021 alleging MNA’s decision to place UMPNC in trusteeship and removal of its officers was unauthorized and illegal.
That move came about 20 days after a membership meeting resulted in a vote for UMPNC to disaffiliate with MNA.
The trial court subsequently held a hearing and dismissed all claims after determining the issues were moot once the Michigan Employment Relations Commission conducted a representation election in March 2021. That election ended with UMPNC-MNA winning with about 58% of the vote against the proposed UMPNC-Independent union.
The panel, Judges James Robert Redford, Colleen A. O’Brien and Kathleen A. Feeney, said it is an “interesting question” whether a dissenting group within a local union can declare the union disaffiliated from a parent union. But the issue is moot “because MNA and its affiliated local bargaining unit” continue to represent the nurses.
MNA argued, in part, that the trial court granted relief on irreconcilable and contradictory claims, but the appeals panel equated the argument to two children arguing over who is entitled to the last piece of cake.
“They go to their parent to resolve the dispute and, before the parent can issue a decision, the family eats the cake. It simply no longer matters who was right and who was wrong and the parent no longer needs to resolve the dispute. It is now moot,” the panel’s opinion reads.
COVID-19 Emergency Funding Cycling Through System Until 2026
The COVID-19 pandemic ended in May, but the funding for the emergency will be circulating in the government for quite a while, with a deadline to earmark the funds set for Dec. 31, 2024, and be spent by Dec. 31, 2026.
Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Lynn Sutfin said even though the pandemic ended that COVID-19 was going to persist and that several COVID-19 grants were given before the emergency orders ended, which had funding allocated through 2024.
“All of which continue to be needed and utilized by Michigan residents,” Sutfin said.
Sutfin said one of those federal grants went to a program at Wayne State University to support a mobile care unit that would help improve access to health care for underserved populations.
Wayne State University Associate Vice President for Translational Science Phillip Levey is directing the Wayne Health Mobile Unit program. The program was still providing services for people impacted by COVID-19, but the program was also receiving money to become a blueprint as to how to handle mobile health.
While the program has been receiving COVID-19 emergency funding, it didn’t start out like that.
In the early days of the pandemic, Levey said the group at Wayne State and Wayne Health combined forces to conduct testing, which quickly transitioned to the drive-thru testing sites. The drive-thru then evolved into a drive-to program.
“We wanted to bring resources deeper into the community to go into areas where there was social vulnerability,” Levey said.
He said many of the areas had people with advanced age, with high-risk diseases, such as diabetes and high blood pressure. The factors were not only the risk factors for getting COVID-19, but also dying from the virus. Many of them had health risks of their own associated, such as heart disease.
From there, a Ford Motor Co. innovation hub helped them with four vehicles to deploy into the communities.
Sean Penn’s organization, Community Organized Relief Effort, or CORE, also gave $560,000 to help get the program off the ground.
The Racial Disparities Task Force appointed by Gov. Gretchen WHITMER kicked the effort into overdrive.
“Our program became a pillar of that because they realized they could do a couple things: They could create these neighborhood testing sites, which are part of some of the funding that went beyond Wayne State for the COVID packages,” he said.
He said the state also realized the mobile unit could deploy to different areas of the community, which allowed them more access to CARES funding.
The idea of health care has evolved with it, because as the health teams were gathering blood tests to study antibodies for COVID-19 they realized they could also get information about cholesterol, kidney function and risks of diabetes.
Levey said as they were giving vaccines they realized they could just as easily give childhood routine vaccines or flu vaccines and started partnering with schools and other organizations.
“As we’ve gotten further on, we’ve continued to push the edge of what we can do with place-based care delivery services, using data to direct deployment of these vehicles so that we know communities with highest risk and have a resource to bring testing and other prevention-oriented services into these communities,” he said.
He said the model they created during the COVID-19 pandemic could be replicated and help the poor or immobile in other areas of the state.
Levey said that preventative care of the poor was a good way to help the state prepare for any other disease outbreak.
Now, the program has been able to work out a deal with other nonprofits, such as the American Heart Association and National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities to help not just COVID-19, but any health-related concerns.
“Really reimagining what we can do with these encounters to say not only can we bring prevention services into your neighborhood, but we can also actually work with community health workers and pharmacists to do all of the care in the neighborhood,” he said.
When one of the now eight vehicles goes into a neighborhood, they are usually posted up in highly visible and high traffic areas where people tend to congregate, or they pair up with a church or community organization to provide a level of safety for their people.
He said there is a trust that exists with their health care units and the community and they haven’t seen a violent incident yet.
“I honestly believe at some level, even those who may have intent to do ill-will are looking and saying, ‘Wait, these guys are here to help the community. They’re doing a good thing, there’s no reason to rock the boat on that,’” Levey said.
He said the program would get money in the current budget to continue that work.
Levey said the team has done almost 90,000 encounters since starting with nearly 16,000 people, but the ultimate success would not be able to be accurately measured until five years from now, when or if they see the rates of death from diabetes or heart disease going down in those poor areas.
“We know communities are high risk, we deploy resources and we can see the number of people we help and then we can look at the number of people we helped relative to the entire denominator of the community and see what changes occurred,” he said.
DHHS Director’s COVID Orders Ruled Unconstitutional
A state law that allowed the state health director to issue pandemic-related orders is “extremely broad” and an “unconstitutional delegation of legislative power,” the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled in mid-July.
But the lone dissenting judge said challenges from the plaintiff, T & V Associates, are moot and it’s time for the courts to end the “COVID wars” remaining on the court docket.
“The overheated rhetoric in briefs and oral arguments suggest that the remaining COVID-19 disputes on court dockets are sacred causes, rather than mere court cases, and the litigants and attorneys in these disputes seem determined to keep these battles going endlessly,” wrote Appeals Judge Christopher P. Yates, who was appointed to the bench in March 2022 by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“But it doesn’t have to be this way. We judges have the power and, in my view, the duty under the mootness doctrine to dismiss the combatants from the COVID wars and bring down the curtain on this chapter in our history,” he added.
Appeals Judges Michael F. Gadola and Mark T. Boonstra, both appointees of Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, disagreed, holding “an actual case and controversy exists based upon existing facts and rights.”
“The dispute is not abstract,” the majority’s opinion reads. “… Moreover, the dispute is not concluded; plaintiff continues to be a banquet and catering corporation and MCL 333.2253 continues to authorize defendant to issue emergency orders. A case is not necessarily rendered moot by a party ceasing the activity that is challenged as illegal.”
Lynn Sutfin, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson, said the department believes the Court of Appeals majority “reached the wrong result” and plans to appeal.
“Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the … MDHHS used many tools to protect Michiganders from a novel, deadly and fast-moving virus,” she said. “One of those tools was the department’s epidemic orders, which rested firmly upon authority given by the Legislature to the director of the MDHHS over 100 years ago and reaffirmed by the Legislature just last year.
“As the trial court correctly recognized, this long-standing law, written to provide critical protection to our state ‘s public health in times of greatest need, is fully consistent with our state constitution. Furthermore, the COVID public health emergency has ended, and so have all of the department’s epidemic orders; in fact, the specific orders this lawsuit challenges have been gone for over two years now,” Sutfin added.
T & V Associates, who did business as River Crest Catering, which closed in December 2021, challenged DHHS Director Elizabeth Hertel’s now-defunct March 2021 pandemic order limiting restaurant operations to 50% occupancy and setting a 10 p.m. closure time. The company argued the order violated the separation of powers clause and the non-delegation doctrine of the state constitution.
The state argued that River Crest Catering lacked standing because it permanently closed its doors.
Court of Claims Judge Douglas Shapiro, who was appointed to the bench in 2009 by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, agreed with the state and dismissed the suit. He said the statute was “narrower in scope” than the Emergency Powers of Governor Act (EPGA), which Whitmer used to issue her pandemic-related orders and which the Michigan Supreme Court subsequently ruled was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power.
Appeals Panel Affirms Dismissal Of COVID Suit
The Michigan Court of Appeals agreed to dismiss a lawsuit challenging Gaylord Community Schools and the health department’s now-defunct COVID-19 mask order.
In a per curiam opinion, Democratic Appeals Judges Elizabeth Gleicher, Michelle Rick and Allie Greenleaf Maldonado, sided with the health department and school district, holding the case is moot.
In 2021, an association of parents, Let Them Breathe, and four individual parents challenged the mask mandate, arguing the health department lacked the authority to issue the order and the school district lacked the authority to suspend students for violating the order.
The appeals panel rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the mask mandate is likely to recur, yet evade judicial review.
“Since there is no meaningful relief that we could grant, and a judgment of this Court would have no practical effect on the existing controversy, plaintiffs’ challenge to the mask mandate is moot,” the unpublished order reads.