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Thursday, August 4, 2011
Grad student school loans lose backing in budget cuts
WEEKEND TODAY Pop Princess Sing-Along
By Huma Munir Daily Texan Staff
Sing along with the pop princesses of the past two decades at the Alamo Drafthouse at 10 p.m. Tickets are $12.
FRIDAY
Free movie under the stars
Head to West Austin at 8:15 p.m. for a free outdoor screening of the 2009 movie “The Blind Side” starring Sandra Bullock at 1010 West Lynn Street, hosted by Bond’s Television and Electronics. Rebeca Rodriguez | Daily Texan Staff
SATURDAY Chicago
The pop rock and fusion band formed in the Windy City will perform at the Austin City Limits Live theater downtown at 8 p.m. Balcony seats start at $50.
‘The Good Thief’ The Hyde Park Theatre is closing out its run of Conor McPherson’s “The Good Thief.” The show starts at 8 p.m., and tickets are $19 for students.
Campus watch Pay up
2100 blk. of San Jacinto Boulevard Arrested passed out pedestrian for public intoxication. Subject was unable to care for himself. He attempted to hand over a $20 bill as if to secure his release.
Today in history In 1958
Billboard introduces its first Hot 100 list.
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Quote to note “We’ve been up, we’ve been down because of inexperience and youth. I have to commend the young lady from Texas. She made a bad play then comes back with a clutch hit that was basically the difference in the score tonight.”
— Ken Eriksen Softball U.S. National Team head coach SPORTS PAGE 8
Nahla, a young girl whose mother chose to not give her daughter’s last name, drinks water at the Nueces Mosque on Wednesday evening in a crowd of women. Ramadan is an Islamic holy month where followers traditionally fast during daylight hours.
RAMADAN By Victoria Pagan
HEATS UP
Since Ramadan began Monday, UT’s practicing Muslim students have abstained from food and water from sunrise to sunset — a challenge when temperatures have reached 107 degrees twice this week. Ramadan is from Aug. 1 to Sept. 1 this year. Pre-pharmacy junior Pari Wayafee said Ramadan becomes more challenging every year because it falls on the ninth month of the lunar Islamic calendar, which gets
shifted back around two weeks yearly. She said the two-week change has moved Ramadan into mid-summer this year, which means dealing with extreme heat and humidity. “It takes a lot of energy out of you, especially in this time of heat in Austin walking from class to class,” Wayafee said. “It really drains you. The worst thing is not so much the
RAMADAN continues on PAGE 2
Allen Otto | Daily Texan Staff
Members of the Nueces Mosque partake in prayer as part of Ramadan on Wednesday night. People of the Islamic faith started their month-long fast Monday in accordance with the traditions of Ramadan.
The bill to raise the debt ceiling that passed Congress this week offers mixed results for students as it preserves Pell grants but cuts from subsidized loans for graduate students. The stalemate in Congress ended Tuesday with a bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling by a trillion dollars in exchange for cutting more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years in federal spending. Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, who voted for the bill, said in an email it was a difficult decision for him. He said he was dissatisfied with several portions of the bill, particularly those that increase the cost of postgraduate education by eliminating subsidized loans. The deal reached, however, was the best they could have agreed to, Green said. “While the cuts to the forbearance of interest on government subsidized student loans for postgraduate education is unpleasant, the alternative was to see Pell grants dramatically cut,” he said in the email. The bill will preserve Social Security, Medicaid, most of Medicare and Pell grants for the time being, Green said. At the last minute, the deal averted a bad credit rating for the United States that would have caused interest rates to skyrocket and a default that would have prevented the government from paying its bills. Democrats and Republicans agreed the deal isn’t perfect but it saved the country from a self-inflicted
CUTS continues on PAGE 2
Austin hospital put on chopping block
In August of 2012, new guidelines will go into effect mandating that insurance providers cover a wide variety of new sexual and reproductive services for women. However, it’s not certain how the new policy, devised by the Department of Health and Human Services, will affect the premiums of health care providers and insurers.
By Will Alsdorf Daily Texan Staff
Because of increasing operating costs and decreased state funding, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston may cease operating the Austin Women’s Hospital located at University Medical Center Brackenridge, a UTMB spokesman said. Legislative budget cuts reduced UTMB’s budget by $114 million over the next two years. Spokesman Raul Reyes said the health system is responding by reducing its budget by 6.1 percent for the 2012 fiscal year. “We are being more prudent in the way that we manage our costs and are implementing measures to ensure financial success,” Reyes said in a statement. “It is projected that UTMB will sustain a $1.5 million
Photo Illustration by Andrew Edmonson
loss on the Austin Women’s Hospital contract for fiscal year 2011. We have to mitigate those losses.” Reyes said one cause for the projected loss is a lower-than-expected number of patients. “We staff based on the assumption that there will be a certain level of patients coming in the door, and we don’t have that level,” Reyes said. Central Health, formerly known as Travis County Healthcare, owns University Medical Center Brackenridge. In 1995, it leased the hospital to the Seton Healthcare Family, a Catholic health care system. After Seton could no longer provide contraceptive and sterilization services because of the Catholic Church’s Ethical and Religious Directives, the health department took back the fifth floor of the Brackenridge building in 2002 to open a “hospital within a hospi-
tal” that could provide those services Seton could not, according to Catholic Health East, a Catholic health system. According to the UT System, in 2003 the city of Austin and UTMB reached an agreement for UTMB to run the Austin Women’s Hospital on the fifth floor of University Medical Center Brackenridge. If UTMB does decide to withdraw from the hospital, there are currently no plans for Seton to take over the fifth floor for its own uses, said Seton spokeswoman Adrienne Lallo. Reyes said no decision regarding UTMB’s withdrawal has actually been made. “We’re considering our options,” Reyes said. “We just want to make sure we do the financially responsible thing for UTMB and Texas taxpayers.”
Insurance requirements to raise women’s coverage By Liz Farmer Daily Texan Staff
Women’s health advocates are celebrating a new set of guidelines from the Obama Administration that require insurance providers to cover a slew of sexual, reproductive and mental health services for women. For all new and renewed policies, insurance providers will be required to waive co-pays for contraception, women’s health visits, domestic violence counseling, sexually transmitted disease screening and support for breast-feeding equipment because of guidelines adopted by the Department of
Health and Human Services. The nonpartisan Institute of Medicine proposed the guidelines, which go into effect August 2012. This additional health insurance reform is part of the Affordable Care Act President Obama signed into law March 23, 2010. Other items that require coverage under the act include mammograms, colonoscopies, blood pressure checks and childhood immunizations. It is unclear how the changes will affect insurance premiums or health care providers and pharmacies, such as the University Health Andrew Edmonson | Daily Texan Staff
WOMEN continues on PAGE 2
Hospital visitors walk by the entrance to the Austin Women’s Hospital on Wednesday evening.