Month: August 2022

Firefighters on Friday set up lights in front of a fatal house fire in Nescopeck, Pa., that killed 10 people.

Jimmy May/Bloomsburg Press Enterprise via AP

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Jimmy May/Bloomsburg Press Enterprise via AP

Firefighters on Friday set up lights in front of a fatal house fire in Nescopeck, Pa., that killed 10 people.

Jimmy May/Bloomsburg Press Enterprise via AP

NESCOPECK, Pa. — Fire tore quickly through a house in northeastern Pennsylvania early Friday morning, killing seven adults and three children and horrifying a volunteer firefighter who arrived to battle the blaze only to discover the victims were his own family, authorities said.

The children who died were ages 5, 6 and 7, Pennsylvania State Police said in a news release, while the seven adults ranged from their late teens to a 79-year-old man. Autopsies were planned for this weekend.

Harold Baker, a volunteer firefighter in the town of Nescopeck, said the 10 victims included his son, daughter, father-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, three grandchildren and two other relatives. He said his two children of him and the other young victims were visiting their aunt and uncle’s home for swimming and other summertime fun.

He said 13 dogs were also in the two-story home, but didn’t say if he knew whether any survived.

“All I wanted to do was go in there and get to these people, my family. That’s all that I was thinking about, getting in to them,” Baker said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

Baker grabbed a hose and air pack, and started pouring water on the fire, desperate to make his way inside and calling out to his son. His chief realized whose house it was, and fellow firefighters escorted Baker back to the firehouse.

A preliminary investigation suggests the fire broke out on the front porch at around 2:30 am, Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce said Friday evening.

“The information I have is that the fire started and progressed very quickly, making it very difficult to get out,” he said.

Three people were able to escape the blaze, Sanguedolce said. Four state police fire marshals are involved in the investigation, although it won’t be classified as a criminal probe unless they determine the fire was intentionally set, he said.

Nescopeck is a small town on the Susquehanna River, about 20 miles southwest of Wilkes-Barre. The house was on a residential street of largely owner-occupied, single family homes.

Baker said the address initially given for the call was a neighboring house. I realized it was his family members’ residence as the firetruck approached. He said his unit was the first on scene, and the house was already engulfed in flames.

“There wasn’t anything we could’ve done to get in there. We tried, but we couldn’t get in,” said Baker, 57, who’s been a firefighter for 40 years.

His son, 19-year-old Dale Baker, had followed both of his parents into the fire service, joining when he was 16.

“He said it all his life, he was just going to be like his dad,” Harold Baker said.

Heidi Knorr, the Nescopeck Volunteer Fire Company secretary, called Dale Baker “such a fun-loving soul. He just loved life.”

The family was “always willing to help lend a hand to anyone in need,” Knorr said. Dale’s mother was not among the dead listed by Harold Baker.

Mike Swank, who lives two doors away across the street, said he happened to be awake early Friday and looked outside after hearing a sharp explosion. He saw the porch “was really going” and went outside, using another neighbor’s hose to keep the blaze from spreading to a garage.

“I saw two guys outside and they were in various states of hysteria,” Swank told the AP by phone.

One man was on a cellphone, “and I’m trying to ask him if everybody’s out,” he said. “The other guy was out in the street and he was just running around in circles.”

Swank said he wasn’t able to get information from them. A fence prevented him from getting to the back of the property.

Baker said 14 people were living in the home. One was out delivering newspapers, and three others escaped.

Swank said the family had moved in a few months ago under what he understood to be a rent-to-own agreement, and spent a lot of time on the cluttered front porch.

“It was so quick and so much smoke, you just knew nobody was going to make it out,” Swank said. He saw cadaver dogs being used to search the scene until the bodies were located.

Yet the plan will now move forward without a provision that would have penalized drugmakers for hiking costs faster than inflation in private insurance plans as well as Medicare.

The exclusion of the private insurance price limits means there is little left that will reduce costs for the vast majority of Americans who receive health insurance through their private sector employer. Democrats are still waiting on a separate parliamentarian ruling on their policy to cap the cost of insulin both inside and outside of Medicare.

The decision also means tens of billions less in federal savings in the bill overall, a potential threat to Democrats’ hopes of offsetting the cost for shoring up Obamacare’s subsidies.

Still, Democrats argue that the bill will move forward in the coming weeks with its most important provision intact: a repeal of the longstanding ban on the federal government directly negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the parliamentarian’s ruling “good news” in a statement Saturday.

“Medicare will finally be allowed to negotiate prescription drug prices, seniors will have free vaccines and their costs capped, and much more,” he said.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), a key negotiator on the House version of the bill, said the provision “would break the iron curtain Big Pharma has maintained against negotiating drug prices, and that’s game-changing. If it passes, Pharma won’t be able to continually stick it to the consumer at their will and whim. And that’s especially important with inflation hammering folks at the pump and the grocery store.”

But Welch, who is running to replace the retiring Sen. patrick leahy (D-Vt.), acknowledged the parliamentarian’s ruling is still a big win for the drug industry.

“It would essentially mean that pharma companies could raise price increases well beyond inflation,” he said in an interview in the days leading up to the vote.

Drug companies and Senate Republicans had planned for months to target the inflation caps provision — through a process known on Capitol Hill as a “Byrd bath.” Sen. mike krapo (R-Idaho), the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters that they went through the bill “line by line” in an effort to bring every challenge they could find.

Democrats who have pushed the policy for years had been confident it could pass under the Senate’s strict reconciliation rules, which limit what kinds of bills can pass with a simple majority. Only proposals that are primarily related to federal spending or revenue can fly, but not those that make major policy changes and only have an “incidental” impact on the federal budget.

Democrats argued that the bill needs inflation caps for drug prices across the board in order to function, warning that failing to do so will mean that pharmaceutical companies can hike prices even higher for people with private insurance to make up for what they lose from the cost controls the bill still imposes on Medicare.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said such points are “normally the kind of argument that is persuasive with the parliamentarian.”

“You can’t untangle the private sector from the public sector — one doesn’t work without the other,” he said.

Backers of the provision also pointed to the Congressional Budget Office’s finding last year that the inflation caps provision would save the government around $80 billion over a decade to argue that it should be allowed to remain in the bill.

Yet reconciliation experts and industry insiders were equally certain that the provision would get knocked out of the package.

“A lot of people think that if something gets a significant CBO score, it can’t be considered incidental — but it’s more about whether the policy implications outweigh the budgetary ones,” said Stephen Northrup, a lobbyist who previously worked as the health policy director for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions. “If the inflation cap were limited to Medicare, you could draw a very direct relationship between the policy and the score. But when you extend it to the commercial market, the relationship becomes more tenuous. It looks less like you’re trying to save money than you’re trying to extend a policy that has impact beyond the federal budget.”

Democrats do not currently have a backup plan for the policy, though some advocates are now pushing to try to apply inflation caps to other federal insurance programs such as Medicaid and the insurance for federal employees.

Even if they are able to do so, progressives who originally pushed for much more sweeping drug price controls are disappointed that their already watered-down plan has become even weaker over the past year.

Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who worked for months on crafting the drug pricing language and wrangling the votes to pass it, blamed the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on Capitol Hill for the inflation cap provision’s demise.

“The special interests always work against us getting relief to hard-hit Americans, particularly seniors,” he told POLITICO ahead of the parliamentarian’s ruling. “So what a surprise that the special interests — and you’ve seen the numbers on how many lobbyists they have — are trying to protect their profits.”

WAUKESHA – Former President Donald Trump looked to boost his chosen candidate for Wisconsin governor in Milwaukee’s Republican suburbs during a rally Friday, adding pressure to a contentious primary that will be decided on Tuesday.

Here are five takeaways from the rally held at the Waukesha County Fairgrounds:

Tim Michels was fired up

Governor hopeful Tim Michels gave one of his most energetic speeches yet, buoyed by Trump’s late-stage appearance. The construction executive, who entered the race late and shot up in the polls after Trump’s endorsement, is hoping to capitalize off the momentum, particularly in the Milwaukee suburbs on Kleefisch’s home turf. Election integrity, Michels said, is his No. 1 priority.

“We are going to stop the Zuckerbucks, out-of-state billionaires coming into our state and taking control of our election process. It won’t happen anymore.” Michels was referring to grants to Wisconsin municipalities funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Courts have upheld the private grants, most of which went to larger cities where Democratic voters are concentrated.