As States Privatize Medicaid, More Money For Corporations and Less Money For Patient Care
September 6, 2011 No CommentNow remember, Medicaid is the default option for the Affordable Care Act. So if more and more states privatize it, those who are enrolled in those states will get significantly less money allotted to their care: There have long been moves to privatize the management of Medicaid, but with shock-doctrine austerity hawks making as much mileage from their budget crises as possible, this year has seen an especially strong push to privatize the heath care of low-income and disabled Medicaid users at a state level. All across the country in states like Texas, New York, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, South Carolina and Kentucky, state governments are stealthily privatizing Medicaid by handing over the money they get from the federal government to private contractors — sometimes with minimal savings to the states themselves. It’s all part of a broader trend called “managed care” or “co-ordinated care” — deceptively bureaucratic terms for a turn with sometimes deadly consequences for Medicaid patients. Figures recently published by the Commonwealth Fund, show that the percentage of people receiving Medicaid who are signed up through publicly traded HMOs has increased nationally from 19.6 percent in 2009 to 27.1 percent in June this year. This is set to increase this year by at least 1.7 million new people, bringing Medicaid patients in privatized health plans to a record 29.8 percent. In June, California began moving 380,000 older and disabled patients into private plans, while New York will begin moving 1.5 million patients into managed care in October. Further south, Florida is looking to move most of its 3 million Medicaid enrollees into private plans. And with the Affordable Care Act (the recent health care reform law) expected to raise Medicaid enrollment by 16 million by 2019, the Commonwealth Fund concluded that “given recent patterns in state contract awards to managed care plans, it is reasonable to anticipate that plans operated by publicly traded companies will enroll the majority of the expanded Medicaid population.” As a result, the Washington Post reports that insurers expect $60 billion in new annual revenue from this market after 2014. As usual, Republican governors are leading the way when it comes to trading public programs for private profits. The most severe move is in Louisiana, where managed care is being brought in without the approval of even the State Legislature. There, Governor Bobby Jindal is unilaterally turning over $2 billion in tax money to contractors to run the Medicaid system, while the savings projected to the state are only $135 million. In a state as poor as Louisiana, even that relatively small savings might seem significant, though the true cost to the state may end up being much greater. Research on the over-65 Medicare system has shown that private sector health care is a significantly less efficient use of public funds. A 2009 report delivered by the Bart Stupak-chaired Energy and Commerce Committee found that Medicare spends less than 1 percent on administrative costs and 98 percent on health care, while HMOs eat up 15 percent of their revenue on profits, marketing and other corporate expenses. As with Medicare, the privatization of Medicaid through managed care is likely to result in a significant reduction in public moneys spent on health care .
Continue reading …Click here to view this media About the time I think I’ve heard the worst of what anyone can say or do, Charles Koch ratchets it up a notch. This recording was made in June at a secret meeting in Vail, Colorado with right-wing donors. Here’s the relevant transcript [ Full transcript available at The Brad Blog ]: KOCH: But we’ve been talking about — we have Saddam Hussein, this is the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months. For the life or death of this country. So, I’m not going to do this to put any pressure on anyone here, mind you. This is not pressure. But if this makes your heart feel glad and you want to be more forthcoming, then so be it. He goes on to recognize a list of donors who have given a million dollars or more to right wing causes, which largely squares with the list published by ThinkProgress last year , but includes a few new names like Charles Schwab, Paul Singer (the hedge fund mega-giver), and John Templeton, Jr. Perhaps one of the other more remarkable laments on the part of the billionaire Koch family was this one, made later on, in response to Fox News’ Judge Napolitano’s remarks about how the government fears fear, but they should really be fearful. In response, Charles Koch says 99.9 percent of the media is against them (meaning the right wing, I assume), but that Napolitano is one of the “bright stars.” Click here to view this media JUDGE ANTHONY NAPOLITANO: … So what does the government fear the most? I think the government fears fear. I’m afraid the government is going to take the property and the freedom of everybody in this room. The government should fear that we will take its power away from it and put it into the hands of worthy custodians of our freedom. Jefferson articulated this when he said, “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” Thank you and God bless you, my friends. [applause] CHARLES KOCH: You know, Judge, I wish I had said that. [laughter] I’m workin’ on it. But, you know, we’ve talked about our competitive disadvantage, how we’re overwhelmed in a number of areas, but we have — and one of those areas, of course, is the media — and we’re overwhelmed. The media’s ninety-plus percent against us. But we have a few bright stars and Judge here is one of ‘em. So we thank you so much. [applause] Not only for being with us tonight but what you do every day in defending our free society. [ full transcript ] This is what we’re fighting right here: U.S. billionaire oligarchs who think the elected President of this country is Saddam Hussein. Oligarchs who buy their media yet whine that the media is against them. Oligarchs who view elections as the “mother of all battles.” I, too, view 2012 as the mother of all battles, but I wouldn’t dare call Charles Koch a deceased terrorist despot, would I? I’m digging more into the names Koch mentioned and will have more on that shortly. In the meantime, will someone please tell Fox News to ratchet down their whining over “hate speech?” Of course, it wouldn’t be a true Koch megameeting without some high-profile governors in attendance. Brad Friedman reports via Mother Jones : Several GOP governors made it to the Vail seminar in June, among them Florida’s Rick Scott, Virginia’s Robert McDonnell, and White House hopeful Rick Perry of Texas. News of the event slipped out after McDonnell put the trip on his weekend schedule ; neither Perry nor Scott initially disclosed the trip to their constituents. A Perry spokesman acknowledged his attendance only after the Austin American-Statesman tracked the tail number of a plane belonging to one of the governor’s top donors from Texas to Colorado. He described the summit as a “private gathering of business leaders.” I wonder where Scott Walker was. Perhaps he thought it would be bad form to be linked up with his benefactors publicly. Charles Koch is right about one thing: 2012 is a pivotal election. It’s about the Supreme Court and the heart of this nation. It will either belong to the oligarchs or the people, depending.
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I believe that morality is absolute. There are values in our world that express how things ought to be. These values tell us that certain things are always right and certain things are always wrong. As a religious person, I look to the sacred texts of my religious tradition to tell me what those absolute values are. My religious faith binds me to the Torah and the Torah guides me as I search for the God-given standards that I believe must direct my life. In this case, my religious beliefs and elemental human instincts coincide. As a Jew, I know that God has certain expectations of me. As a human being, I feel in my gut that certain things can never be right in any place or at any time and that there are rules of morality that apply to all humankind; and not only that, I feel confident that the preponderance of the human race feels as I do. True, the world is not lacking in relativists. For them, such matters are culturally determined, and we can do no more than suggest that something is acceptable or not according to the code of a particular nation, group or culture. But this is a minority view. Civilized people everywhere assert that taking a life or abusing a child is always wrong. And if that is the case, should it not be so that other things are always right? Hence, I continue to search for ultimate values, using religious texts as my guide. But now the problem: Those religious people who share my belief about absolute morality often display an intolerance that I abhor and a coercive mentality that I reject. And the Jews who revere the same texts that I do often come to radically different conclusions about what they mean. Furthermore, I sometimes change my mind; after studying a text, I find myself reconsidering a moral decision that I had previously made. Given all this, is it not contradictory for me to talk about absolute values at all? Because of the vagueness of religious language, it is not. The Hebrew Bible is written with majestic simplicity, but it — like the Constitution of the United States — is vague in many important parts. While it contains a record of God’s message to the Jewish people and to all humankind, the exact meaning of the words is often not clear. I continue to believe in transcendent truth, but the Bible alone — and its wonderfully imprecise language — does not provide it. As a Jew, I deal with this dilemma by studying both the Hebrew Bible (the Written Torah) and the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries (the Oral Torah). While the former is a record of God talking to us, the latter is a record of the Jews talking to God and each other. The Oral Torah is a massive work, a comprehensive effort to fill in the blanks of the Written Torah and construct a schema of what constitutes transcendent values in our imperfect world. For me, as a liberal Jew, this process is ongoing and unfinished. God’s word is in the biblical text, and it is final — after all, God instructs us “to do that which is right in the eyes of the Eternal” (Deut. 13:19) — but getting to the ultimate, transcendent meaning of those words is something yet to be worked out. What is true for Jews is true for others, too. When Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann was asked about the obligation of a Christian wife to be submissive to her husband, it was interesting for me to follow the debate among scholars and church leaders about the New Testament verse in Ephesians chapter 5 that deals with this subject. Those participating, it seems to me, were believers in the authority of the Bible on moral questions, but they engaged in spirited discussion on what the words mean and how they are to be translated. Despite differences in culture and context, Muslims argue about their texts as well. My conclusion, then, is that as a believer in revelation, I look to the religious writings of my tradition for the answers that I seek about values. I search, study and question texts that are holy but imprecise and that I do not fully understand; engaging in this process, I see that revelation has a progressive nature. Still, I have no patience for those who want a non-judgmental morality that is so “inclusive” as to be without meaning. Values are not fads or fashions; they do not change everyday. Absolute values are there, even if, in all the particulars, I have yet to completely figure them out.
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Best 10 Table Saws on Amazon 2011 Therese meeting family for the first time at Sheltering Wings Orphanage, Burkina Faso New York Wing Eating Contest 2011 rubyseventyfour says: @ LittleJen62 @ giggles3475 hahaha, you growing wings Jen ? x
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Continue reading …Sony adds lenticular sheet to laptop for webcam-enhanced glasses-free 3D
September 6, 2011 No Comment
It looks like those not fond of 3D glasses will soon have another means to add an extra dimension to their laptop. Sony’s now showing off a simple lenticular sheet that can be placed on top of a standard laptop screen for a 3D effect. That will initially be available for Sony’s VAIO S series laptops and, most interestingly, it comes complete with some head-tracking software that takes advantage of the laptop’s webcam to adjust the 3D image based on your position. Unfortunately, as simple as it may seem, it’s still not exactly the cheapest solution — you can expect to shell out €129 (or about $180) when this option becomes available next month. [Thanks, Ron] Sony adds lenticular sheet to laptop for webcam-enhanced glasses-free 3D originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …The Man Booker Prize Shortlist Has Been Announced, With Books By Julian Barnes, Carol Birch, Patrick deWitt, Esi Edugyan, Stephen Kelman, and A.D. Miller
September 6, 2011 No Comment
The shortlist for The Man Booker Prize 2011 has just been announced. According to British sportsbook company Ladbrokes, the favorite is clearly Julian Barnes, who has been shortlisted for the prize four times, but has never won it. Notable facts about this year’s shortlist are that two of the books are from first-time novelists, and four are from independent publishing houses. The six shortlisted books are: Julian Barnes, “The Sense of an Ending” (Jonathan Cape – Random House) Summary: Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumor and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove. Carol Birch, “Jamrach’s Menagerie” (Canongate Books) Summary: “I was born twice. First in wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.” Jaffy Brown is a young boy when he is knocked unconscious by a Bengal tiger in the East End of London. He is saved by the tiger’s owner, Charles Jamrach, importer and purveyor of wild and extraordinary animals. Jaf begins working at the Menagerie, and is soon given the opportunity to take part in voyage of a lifetime: a trip to hunt down and bring back a dragon. Patrick deWitt, “The Sisters Brothers” (Granta) Summary: Oregon, 1851. Eli and Charlie Sisters, notorious professional killers, are on their way to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, the brothers have a series of unsettling and violent experiences in the Darwinian landscape of Gold Rush America. Charlie makes money and kills anyone who stands in his way; Eli doubts his vocation and falls in love. And they bicker a lot. Then they get to California, and discover that Warm is an inventor who has come up with a magical formula, which could make all of them very rich. What happens next is utterly gripping, strange and sad. Esi Edugyan, “Half Blood Blues” (Serpent’s Tail) Summary: The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black. Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero’s bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there’s more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero’s fate was settled. Stephen Kelman, “Pigeon English” (Bloomsbury) Summary: Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on an inner-city housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers – the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen – blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang – the Dell Farm Crew – and the pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival. But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe. A.D. Miller, “Snowdrops” (Atlantic) Summary: A riveting psychological drama that unfolds over the course of one Moscow winter, as a young Englishman’s moral compass is spun by the seductive opportunities revealed to him by a new Russia: a land of hedonism and desperation, corruption and kindness, magical dachas and debauched nightclubs; a place where secrets – and corpses – come to light only when the deep snows start to thaw… Summaries courtesy of The Man Booker Prize website. The award is open to novels written by a citizen of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland or Zimbabwe, and published between Oct 1 2010 and Sept 30 2011. It is currently sponsored by Man, an alternative investment management company. The winner will be announced on Oct 18th.
Continue reading …A bacterium found in soil could be a useful tool in fighting many types of cancer, reports the BBC . The Clostridium sporogenes bacterium, a relative to botulism and tetanus, produces spores that only grow when there is no oxygen. The human body is full of oxygen, but solid cancer tumors,…
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Ken Clark says decision to allow sentencing to be televised will increase public confidence in justice system Judicial sentencing is to be televised, the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has announced. . The ban on filming in law courts will now be overturned, Clarke confirmed, as the government hopes to improve transparency and public understanding of the courts. The issue had been due to go for consultation with senior judges but in recent days Downing Street had moved to circumvent this consultation process and support the change. Announcing the decision on Tuesday, Clarke said: “The government and judiciary are determined to improve transparency and public understanding of courts through allowing court broadcasting. We believe television has a role in increasing public confidence in the justice system. “Broadcasting will initially be allowed from the court of appeal, and government will look to expand to the crown court later. All changes will be worked out in close consultation with the judiciary.” Filming will be of judges’ summary remarks only – victims, witnesses, offenders and jurors will not be filmed. The televising of court is currently banned by acts of parliament and so legislation will be required to allow cameras into court. A shift towards televising court has always been hampered by the spectre of OJ Simpson’s trial in the US which degenerated into prime-time entertainment. Television companies have been pressing for greater access to the highlights of court cases, and a consultation on the shift was undertaken by the previous Labour government but was eventually discarded. Now the present government has revived the plans, believing a judicial pronouncement should become more of a moment of public reckoning. Officials believe transparency would aid public understanding of the court process and the idea has gained momentum in the aftermath of the riots. After a Guardian report saying the prime minister was set to announce the change in the coming weeks, Clarke told Sky News on Tuesday morning he could see “no good reason” why television cameras should not be allowed in court to “record and give to the public the remarks of the judge”. By the afternoon, the government had decided to push ahead. Clarke also announced that new information on the performances of courts will be published in future to allow everyone to see how their local courts are working. This will include: • court-by-court statistics for the time taken for cases to be processed, from offence to conviction, allowing people to compare the performance of their local courts. • details on how many trials were ineffective and why they were ineffective. • anonymised data on each case heard at local courts and the sentences given. • details of how many people have been convicted or released from prisons in each area and how often they re-offended afterwards. From next May justice outcomes will be placed alongside crime data on police.uk so people can see what happens next after crimes are committed in their areas. When the country’s most senior court – the supreme court in Westminster – was opened in September 2009 it was fitted with cameras. As things stand it is the only court where footage is routinely available for broadcasters on request and has been televised live. It allows visitors to watch appeals and judgments on televisions around the building without sitting in the courtrooms, but it is seen to be a different case since supreme court hearings do not involve witnesses being cross-examined or juries. Cameras have been allowed in some Scottish courts under tight restrictions since 1992. The appeal of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi against his conviction for the Lockerbie bombing was televised in 2002. Writing in the Guardian in December, the head of Sky News, John Ryley, suggested the trials of six MPs who were accused of misusing their parliamentary expenses were prime examples of public interest trials that would have benefited from being televised. Last month he renewed his call for televised sentencing in an open letter to Clarke Sadiq Khan, Labour’s shadow justice secretary, welcomed the announcement that certain aspects of court proceedings will be televised. “Allowing the broadcast of judges’ sentencing remarks could make the sentencing process more transparent and understandable,” he said. “However, it will be extremely important to ensure that careful controls are in place to protect jurors, victims and witnesses. We do not support the televising of anything that might make jurors, victims and witnesses vulnerable to intimidation. “Our criminal justice system relies on victims and witnesses coming forward to give evidence and nothing should be done to jeopardise that. “It is important that our justice system is open and accessible. If done well and responsibly, this could be an important step in achieving that.” Cameras in court Kenneth Clarke UK criminal justice Allegra Stratton guardian.co.uk
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