Another Medical Horror Story

Chicago Hospital Accused of Cutting Throats for $160,000 - Bloomberg:

...Based in part on surreptitious tape recordings, an FBI affidavit lays out allegations that a Sacred Heart pulmonologist kept patients too sedated to breathe on their own, then ordered unneeded tracheotomies for them -- enabling the for-profit hospital to reap revenue of as much as $160,000 per case...

This is what you get when the profit motive rules the medical industry.

Drug Corruption Continues

Did Novartis Violate Its Corporate Integrity Agreement? - Forbes:

Twice this past week, the US Department of Justice filed lawsuits alleging Novartis paid kickbacks to boost prescriptions and caused federal healthcare programs to pay for medicines based on false claims. One complaint seeks damages and civil penalties for corrupting the dispensing process with multi-million-dollar ‘incentive programs’ that targeted doctors. The other involves kickbacks in the form of rebates and discounts to at least 20 pharmacies in exchange for switching transplant patients from rival medicines to its Myfortic immunosuppressant treatment (back story)...

Sounds About Right

Cable News Obsessively Covers Cuts To White House Tours, Virtually Ignores Cuts To Programs For The Poor | ThinkProgress

Thanks to Congressional gridlock, automatic budget cuts took effect 14 days ago, threatening 700,000 jobs and gutting funds for vital programs in housing assistance, early childhood education, disaster relief, and national security. Secret Service staffing was also impacted, prompting the cancellation of White House tours last week. Republicans immediately attacked the decision as a political move designed to turn the public against the sequester and 14 Republican senators signed a letter demanding information.

The media has also latched on to preserve the White House tours, while largely ignoring other much more devastating sequester cuts. As Ari Melber of The Nation pointed out on Wednesday, there are 12,000 news stories concerning White House tours and less than 1,000 about the sequester’s impact on housing assistance programs, which disproportionately affect low-income Americans...

GOP Follows Historical Precedent

Frank Rich: Surprise! Mitt As Robotic As Thought -- Daily Intelligencer

...The House GOP still doesn’t know that Obama won the election. This includes Paul Ryan, who is like one of those Japanese soldiers who kept on fighting on a remote atoll years after V-J Day, refusing to believe that his army had been defeated. What’s fascinating about the new Ryan budget is that it restates all the planks that failed to move voters when he was on the Republican ticket: repealing Obamacare, vouchering Medicare, cutting taxes for the wealthy, ending the Medicaid expansion (now already being lapped up by Republican as well as Democratic governors), and vowing to close tax loopholes that still remain mysteriously unidentified. Ryan explains this consistency by saying that to compromise on any of this means that he would “surrender our principles.” As I’ve written, the GOP is not going to move to the center after its 2012 defeat any more than it did after Barry Goldwater’s 1964 landslide loss to LBJ. It may even move further right, with each new Ryan budget being “the worst...”

The New Ryan Pillage

...almost the same as the old Ryan pillage.

Paul Ryan’s budget: Social engineering with a side of deficit reduction

Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25 percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25 percent...

Death Dealing Drug Makers

New England Compounding Company Steroid Scandal - The Drug Scandal That's Finally Hitting The Big Time - Esquire

...But the principle obtained — make a deal to make a deal, and the devil take the details. Now, almost 50 people are dead because Everyone Agrees that The Market will always be more efficient at doing things like picking up deadly fungal infections than the dead hand of government regulation will. Some day, we are going to have to count up the cost of The Third Way of the 1990's, and it is not going to be pretty.

Ryan Attacking The 99%-- Again

Ryan: New House Republican budget includes ObamaCare repeal | Fox News

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said Sunday that his new budget includes the repeal of President Obama’s health-care reform law known as ObamaCare.

Ryan told “Fox News Sunday” that the new proposal will make enough cuts to balance the federal budget in 10 years, compared to his previous one that tried to achieve that goal in 25 years...

The first thing that ought to be cut is Congressional salaries, benefits, and pensions.

Scootin' Fraud & Hoverin' Too!

Uppity Woman | I'm just one of those Uppity Women. Live with it.

...Now there’s the obvious truth that some people are in need of these scooters. But the truth is, a hundred million dollars worth of people who have them have no business defrauding the Medicare and Medicaid systems at the peril of people who just got rejected this morning for a needed medical procedure. These people deserve to wake up one morning really soon not able to walk, and crawling to that free scooter they didn’t need the day before. The FBI won’t be going after these “customers”. That’s too bad. I think these system milkers all belong in jail and should be forced to reimburse Medicare and Medicaid for their part in this fraud.

One more thing. It seems that scooter website references to medicare are disappearing like cockroaches under a sink. Here’s USA Mobility’s “Medicare” reference page. Or what was their Medicare reference page.

Well, there is one silver lining here. I won’t have to look at that smug smirking bastard in that commercial who says, “It didn’t cost me a thing!” every five minutes on cable Tee Vee. I always wanted to smack that arrogant bastard in the face.

Up next, really soon we hope: Hoveround, where “Your local Mobility Specialist” is standing by!”……..and “9 out of 10 Hoveround owners got their electric wheehchair at little or no cost.”

This Is Not The South

Mich. hospital denies honoring father's racial request

...Last month, Battle, an African American, filed a lawsuit contending that the hospital prohibited her from caring for an infant last year because a man objected to her race.

She said the problem occurred when the father of a newborn found her caring for his child in October. When she asked to see his identification as he reached toward the child, he demanded to see her supervisor, she told the Detroit Free Press on Monday. According to Battle, a note was placed on the assignment chart that read: "No African-American nurse to take care of baby..."

Dumber

The Ignorance Caucus - NYTimes.com

...The truth is that America’s partisan divide runs much deeper than even pessimists are usually willing to admit; the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.

In her parting shot on leaving the State Department, Hillary Clinton said of her Republican critics, “They just will not live in an evidence-based world.” She was referring specifically to the Benghazi controversy, but her point applies much more generally. And for all the talk of reforming and reinventing the G.O.P., the ignorance caucus retains a firm grip on the party’s heart and mind.

Sandy Hook Father Speaks Out

Stem Cell Printer

'Stem Cell Printing' Gets Closer, As Scientists Use 3D Technology To Spit Out Human Embryonic Cells

Imagine if you could take living cells, load them into a printer, and squirt out a 3D tissue that could develop into a kidney or a heart. Scientists are one step closer to that reality, now that they have developed the first printer for embryonic human stem cells...

GOP Shafting Poor, Part The Infinite

Republicans who oppose Obamacare could deny millions of low-income people insurance | theGrio

Still opposed to President Obama’s health care law, a growing number of Republican governors are declaring they will reject federal funds for Medicaid that they could receive next year, putting almost 5 million low-income Americans in danger of not getting health insurance...

The Biggest Losers

Americans Closest to Retirement Were Hardest Hit by Recession - NYTimes.com

These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company...

Generation Card Played

Democrats still saying Republicans aim to shortchange 'greatest generation' in fiscal deals | Fox News

President Obama and fellow Democrats are keeping up their argument that fiscal conservatives want set to slash entitlements for the country’s “greatest generation” to balance the budget for the country's greatest generations, despite no apparent plan...

Right Wing Fetus Lunacy

Today In Right Wing Lunacy we present some of the stupidest crap ever uttered by the mouth of anyone. Not content just to explore the boundaries of stupidity and ignorance, Mr. Swanson reaches into the Horror Twilight Zone to find zombie fetuses, giving the universe visuals that even bleach could not expunge from the minds scalded by this grotesque nonsense. And no, both sides don't have this level of utter contempt for women.

On The Pill? Tiny Dead Fetuses Are Eating Your Innards

...Swanson: I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies...

Abortion Facts

How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement | RH Reality Check

Gay Haters Gay?

Homophobic? Maybe you're gay: The New York Times on a new study of secret sexuality. - Slate Magazine

Why have some of the nation's most vehement anti-gay activists—Ted Haggard, Larry Craig—had gay sex scandals of their own? An op-ed in the New York Times' Sunday Review section tries to explain. The authors of the piece, two research psychologists, say they have "empirical evidence that homophobia can result, at least in part, from the suppression of same-sex desire..."

ER Bill Collectors

Accretive Placed Debt Collectors in Hospitals, Minnesota AG Says - Bloomberg

Patients at a Minnesota hospital chain were met in the emergency room and even at their bedsides by debt collectors from a company that didn’t disclose its role,the state’s attorney general alleges.

Employees of Fairview Health Services, a nonprofit chain of seven hospitals based in Minneapolis, were required to use a computer system derisively called “Blue Balls” to track whether patients paid their bills and pressure them for payment before they received care, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said. The payment system began after Fairview hired the collection agency Accretive Health Inc. (AH) in May 2010, Swanson said today in a report describing the companies’ relationship.

Obamacare Troubles

The Associated Press: Nonpartisan gov't auditors rebuke Medicare bonuses