Fact-esque

Candidate Gingrich Wants a "Conversation" About Medicare

Is Newtie Gangrene actually running for president this time instead of pretending he is as a way of boosting his new book or his lecture fees (which has always before turned out to be his real agenda)? Seems it may be so given that yesterday he backed off his long-term support for privatising Medicare and attacked the House Pubs' plan as "too radical".

Phoenix Bishop Excommunicates Nun for Not Murdering a Pregnant Woman

OK, so there's not much question that the Catholic Church is currently in the hands of the kind of Pope the Borgias would have understood and approved. Is there likewise any question that the church Ratzinger runs is a hierarchy with a top-down political structure similar to the Mafia's?

Phoenix's Bishop Tom Olmsted doesn't think so. He is clearly aware what stance he'd better take on issues if he wants to get the attention of the Don and make his way up the ladder in the Family. This week he excommunicated a nun charged with administering a Catholic hospital. Was she stealing money? Holding Satanic rites in the operating rooms? No. She OK'ed an abortion in order to save the life of a pregnant woman who was critically ill.

Massey and Wellpoint: BAU and FU, Too (Updated)

Wall Street lobbyists - or "pond scum" as we know them around here - may be scrambling to feed the leeches in Congress enough blood to make sure the banksters squeeze past the febrile attempts at banking "reform" that are all the Dems are interested in ("We gotta have 60 votes!" says Harry Reid again today, just like teh Olden Times). Poor Blanche has been told that her amendment won't be part of the Dodd bill and will have to sink or swim on its own, and poor Brad Sherman has yet to realize that Dodd accepted his tweaking because even if it's included, it doesn't mean anything. It only looks like it does, and that's the n of the g in DC.

To see how this is all likely to play out doesn't require a stinger of Owlsley and a crystal ball. All you have to do is look at some recent beneficiaries of the very same process and see how they're doing. Having been slapped down in public by the Congress and the media, are they chastened and correcting their previously appallingly greedy and inhumane behavior? Um, based on two recent stories, not exactly. (Both links via the indefatigable Mark G.)

Bernanke Fires Latest Shot in the War Against Social Security

The signs have been around for quite a while that Corporate America, Wall Street, and the Investor Class were all going to work together to use the massive Bush deficit as an excuse to cut back and then kill Social Security. Recently Pres Obama joined the killers by first making one of his "we all have to make sacrifices" (except bankers and corporations) speeches about the need to cut "entitlements", then by making a speech identifying the right-wing's mythical GIANT MEDICARE FRAUD! scare tactic as a real threat and promising to spend resources to fight it, and finally by putting together a Presidential Commission on Social Security and naming four well-known anti-SocSec evangelistas to the panel to make recommendations.

Yesterday Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, speaking in banker-friendly Texas, publicly allowed as how the deficit requires the govt to cut back SocSec.

The Future of Health Insurance After "Reform"

It is important to remember as you read what follows that the Democrat healthcare "Reform" bill is based on the model Massachusetts adopted in '06. It has the same weaknesses and flaws. That makes it a viable predictor of our future as a nation with regard to health insurance except for one little, teensy weensy difference: the Massachusetts law included an insurance commissioner. The national plan does NOT.

As expected, a number of health insurance companies in Massachuetts recently announced double-digit premium hikes. State Insurance Commissioner James Murphy, after studying the numbers, told the insurance companies to take a hike and rejected the proposed raises.In response, the insurance companies have filed suit claiming that Murphy doesn't have the power to do what he just did even though the statute specifically says he does.

What Good Is a Law Against Predatory Health Insurance Co's When There Are No Penalties for Predatory Behavior?

H&HS Sec Kathleen Sebelius is putting at least part of the new healthcare "reform" act into practice immediately.

In one of its first steps to carry out the new health care law, the Obama administration announced Friday that it was establishing a temporary insurance pool where uninsured people with medical problems could buy coverage at reduced rates.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the program would "help provide affordable insurance for Americans who have been locked out of the insurance market."

Federal health officials said the program would be available from late June of this year to Jan. 1, 2014, when private insurers will be required to accept all applicants without varying premiums on account of a person's medical condition.

Under the new law, Ms. Sebelius can sign contracts with states to operate insurance pools meeting federal standards. The federal government can operate the pool directly or hire a nonprofit organization to run it in any state that does not want to do so.

So in 4 years (why the lengthy wait? as if I didn't know....) the insurance companies who refuse to cover pre-existing conditions and practice recission to dump anybody who has PEC's for a variety of fraudulent-to-silly technical reasons are going to have to accept the money of people they have no intention of insuring and that the law CANNOT prevent them from dumping because THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES BUILT INTO THE BILL.

Kabuki Wins! Next Up: More Kabuki (Updated)

As carefully choreographed as it was, there was still some slight fear in the insurance community that healthcare "reform" might actually end up reforming something. This morning the NYT Business section was crowing with delight that insurers had dodged a bullet aimed in the opposite direction. This is the first sentence:

With a sweeping overhaul of the nation's health care system, Congress would be giving the health care industry as many as 32 million additional paying customers in the next few years.

So "overhaul" is now defined as providing victims for health insurance ripoff teams. Glad they got their priorities straight. I was concerned that somebody might think it necessary to rein in obscene profits and dirty tricks but it turns out that wasn't even on the agenda, let alone at the top of it. Here's what was:

Make-Believe Healthcare "Reform", A Make-Believe Jobs Bill, and Make-Believe Financial "Reform": It's All Good

There are 3 huge bills in the pipeline now, and what they all have in common is that none of them - NOT ONE - is going to change much of anything. It's important to remember that.

Liberals to WH on Jobs Plan: "Are you Kidding?"

The pressure building up in Congressional liberals who've been asked to swallow Bushian policies by the barrelful in the name of "party unity" is beginning to reach critical mass, it seems. When economist Christina Romer, chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, appeared at a House Appropriations Committee hearing on the economy bearing some pretty scare news concerning job creation, a couple of them let her have it.

Insurance Fraud: It's Not Just for the Big Boys Any More

A fish rots from the head down.

As Sisela Bok showed decades ago, when the leaders of a culture or society resort to lies and criminal behavior to get what they want just because they can get away with it, it isn't long before the notion that such behavior is acceptable spreads throughout the society and pretty soon after that everybody really is "doing it".

For the past 30 years, especially the Bush Decade of the Oughts, the corporate conservatives who have controlled our culture, particularly the Wall Street bankers who heisted our economy and robbed us blind, have beaten home the message that Greed Is Good and Fraud Is Fun.

And oh yes, don't worry about consequences because there aren't any.