Don’t pull plug on people who can die without it

They’re at it again.

As we barrel toward May 1, when the state’s electric and home heating moratorium ends, a bill before state legislators seeks to heavily restrict who can access protections that prevent shut-offs for utility customers who have life-threatening illness and need utilities to survive.

The protections have been in place since 1995, when Hartford resident Artemus Johnson, then 28, nearly died after Connecticut Light & Power cut off his home’s electricity for nonpayment. Johnson, who lived with a degenerative muscle disease and died in 1998, could not breathe on his own without ventilation equipment. The shut-off left him unable to breathe, and he was found by a family member blue and gasping for air.

It gets worse. CL&P had on file a letter that informed them of Johnson’s medical needs, and the company shut off power, anyway. As paramedics worked to transport Johnson to the hospital, Johnson’s sister called CL&P.

According to news reports, she was put on hold.

At the time, CL&P was a part of Northeast Utilities, which since 2015 has been doing business as Eversource.

By whatever name you do business, if you are a billion-dollar utility and you’re not making money quickly enough, this suggested business model is akin to kicking puppies. How else to explain even considering cutting off electric services of people who will die without it.

As the delightfully forthright Kathy Flaherty, Connecticut Legal Rights Project, Inc., executive director, said, “Medical protection was put into place to make sure people who need electricity to live, don’t die.

“It shouldn’t be meanstested.”

As just about every person who testified at a midMarch public hearing said, this is a bad idea — maybe even an evil one. Organizations you should support – including Operation Fuel and Center for Children’s Advocacy — are against it. In her testimony, Bonnie B. Roswig, director of the center’s Disability Rights Project, called the proposed bill “inconceivable.”

At the same hearing, an Eversource spokesman worried that some customers weren’t paying their fair share, which may be true, but do we have to go after the sick and infirmed? A United Illuminating spokeswoman said essentially the same thing, and (as did the Eversource spokesman) reminded committee members that no other state has such broad protections for customers with serious medical issues, as if that’s a bad thing.

So what kind of customers are we talking about? A 2020 Journal of American Medicine article said that program Connecticut beneficiaries tended to be older, female, English-speaking, and Black, and their illnesses included asthma, diabetes, end-stage kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and congestive heart failure. Dialysis was the most common ailment among customers with medical exemptions.

This latest nonsense is not new. Medical protections have been targeted for years, said Roswig. The assault was paused during the pandemic, and now? They’re back again, begging to be allowed to flip the switch.

Protection is extended to utility customers who have had a medical professional (doctor, APRN, and PA) submit a certification acknowledging that losing electricity in their homes would be devastating. From Eversource’s own website, requests for that protection — unless otherwise specified — must be renewed every 15 days.

I include that lest you think someone can say, “I’m sick. I’m not paying” and skip out on a bill. It’s a process and it involves medical personnel who would best know the seriousness of someone’s ailment and how that might keep them from paying an electric bill. The medical professional gives the OK (or not, if that’s warranted), and medical personnel set the time frame.

In 2020` the state’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, or PURA, issued a report that looked at vulnerable communities and found several snags in the system, including an inability on the part of the state’s utilities to adequately inform medically protected customers about payment plans.

Bad communication is kind of our state utilities’ thing, and things haven’t improved.

We all want lower electric bills, but achieving that on the backs of the medically vulnerable is ghoulish, at best. The best pre-pandemic data from PURA says that in 2020, Eversource customers paid all of $1.17 and United Illuminating customers paid $2.72 extra per month to make up the deficit from community members with life-threatening illness whose medical teams said they could not survive without electricity, and should be given a break.

That same year, 2.4% of Eversource customers and 2% of UI customers were in the hardship program.

Beyond the ethics of playing roulette with the lives of medically vulnerable people, we are not, in other words, talking about a lot of money that might be recouped. Sufficiently informing medically-protected customers of already-existing payment programs could recoup a significant portion of this shortfall, especially considering the bonuses enjoyed by, say, Eversource’s CEO, whose salary was doubled last year while other senior officials took pay cuts and the rest of us paid higher bills. You bet this is inconceivable.

Fix the system, if there are concerns about fraud. Figure out how to proactively inform medical customers — all customers, really — of the payment plans available to them. But don’t, whatever you do, put the lives of vulnerable people on the line.

Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is distinguished lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.

Kurt Strazdins/Tribune