HealthMarkets Inc., fined $20M for lax practices

The three-year examination involved 29 states and was helmed by Washington State insurance commissioner Mike Kreidler and Alaska insurance director Linda Hall.

The companies targeted sales to self-employed individuals and sold health plans through associations.

Often, the agent or company did not adequately explain the health benefits.

The Associated Press reports details. Jeffs and four followers were indicted for felony sexual abuse of a child. One was indicted for failure to report child abuse. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports a 17-year-old former YFZ resident, who has a one-year-old daughter, is living with 14 siblings and her mother in a rented house in San Antonio. The Times, perpetually eager to spitshine bullfeathers, headlines their article “The Young Women of the FLDS.” The girl is 17 now, and her child is a year old. That would be a “spiritual sealing” at the age of 15, maybe younger.  Read more 

BooMan:

A team of Reed at Defense and Hagel at State could be a potent and effective one, and progressives should not automatically sneeze at it just because Chuck Hagel is an economic and social conservative.

Yeah, and those Christian Reconstruction ties? The lunatic abortion stance? So fucking what? We’ve got a movement to, uh, move here!

No, I probably won’t sneeze. I’ll be able to hold back.  Read more 

Seeking to participate vicariously in the Austin Netroots palooza, I went to ask Speaker Pelosi why she wasn’t supporting HR 676, as DCBlogger suggests, and saw the site actually had a nifty little tool for uprating and downrating questions posed by the netroots. Here are the questions in the miscellaneous category that the netroots is downrating:

 Read more 

Adopt-a-parasite? The whole health (couldn’t) care (less) system is a parasite on the body politic. At Salon, a doctor lays out the obscenity: (via Suburban Guerilla)

As a resident in a Los Angeles hospital, he tries to get the on-call orthopedic surgeon to come in the middle of the night to treat a five-year-old with a severe broken leg.  Read more 

Tragedy!

Poor William L. Jews. His compensation package for leaving his position as CareFirst CEO has been cut by more than half. This means Mr. Jews will not get the $18 million severance he was expecting, but will receive less than 9 million bucks. Can you imagine having to get by on just shy of 9 million bucks? I mean, you can’t even buy a decent Santa Barbara estate for that kind of money anymore.

Why was this outrage perpetrated? Well, it seems CareFirst is a nonprofit health provider

How much health care does $9 million buy in California?

Vulnerable old people can make you rich.

WellPoint Agrees To Pay $11.8M to California Hospitals Over Health Insurance Policy Cancellations  Read more 

Insurers: Women are just too risky  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

It is a story that has made headlines in the UK because it involves some high-level British players, via The Guardian:

"The British mercenary Simon Mann was today sentenced to 34 years in prison for plotting to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea.

The Eton-educated former SAS officer was sentenced after a trial last month during which it was claimed that a number of western governments knew about the coup plans. The court heard that Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former British prime minister, was a committed member of the group.

Mann was arrested in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 2004 with dozens of mercenaries when their private plane landed. He acknowledged knowingly taking part in the attempt to topple the government, but his lawyer argued Mann was a secondary player.

The sentence is longer than expected."  Read more 

Via the indispensable Avedon Carol: Rich, powerful corporations can break the law

California regulators admitted Thursday that for more than a year they didn’t even try to enforce a million-dollar fine against health insurer Anthem Blue Cross because they knew they would be outgunned in court.

In early 2007, the Department of Managed Health Care pledged to fine the state’s largest insurer for “routinely rescinding health insurance policies in violation of state law.”

But it never did.

That is a real good reason to not do business with Anthem Blue Cross.

Prediction — A Major Assault By The Health Insurance Industry Will Be Launched To Destroy the Medicare System Before BUSH Leaves Office  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Ok, Correntians, this is one of these long and substantial posts of mine where one of you shows up in the comments and summarizes the whole thing in 2 lines… making me look like a blabbering fool!

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts on reports - most of the time by IRIN - on the deplorable conditions under which women and girls live in many parts of the world. However, the articles have been piling up in my Newsreader, so, it’s time for one. So here we go:  Read more 

Tell me again why we bother with a court system?

The Bush administration wants to rewrite the official evidence against Guantanamo Bay detainees, allowing it to shore up its cases before they come under scrutiny by civilian judges for the first time.

That seems fair. I guess, if this were golf, you could call it a pre-Mulligan?

The government has stood behind the evidence for years. Military review boards relied on it to justify holding hundreds of prisoners indefinitely without charge. Justice Department attorneys said it was thoroughly and fairly reviewed.

Now that federal judges are about to review the evidence, however, the government says it needs to make changes.

The decision follows last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which held that detainees have the right to challenge their detention in civilian court, not just before secret military panels. At a closed-door meeting with judges and defense attorneys this week, government lawyers said they needed time to add new evidence and make other changes to evidentiary documents known as “factual returns.”

Rewrite the evidence? That’s inside-the-box thinking.  Read more 

Let’s talk about corporate greed. It is worse than you thought. We know that these companies make money by collecting premiums and then denying care. The question is, money for who? Let’s look at their insider trades:
Cigna’s board of directors and chief corporate officers collectively dumped 129,499 shares of Cigna stock. I tried to add that up to what it would be in dollars, got as far as $17,342,224. That is in addition to their very high salary. How much health care could your municipality buy with $17 million dollars?  Read more 

INSURANCE CO-PAYS, DELAYS, DENIALS, EXCLUSIONS, AND RECISSIONS.

Blue Cross was fined $150,000 by the California Department of Managed Healthcare to penalize it for 12 Million dollars in premium overcharging errors.

Assurant Health — was just fined $3 million by the state of Connecticut for illegally denying care to hundreds of patients?  Read more 

Ever been in a bad relationship? This one has all the signs.

From the comments at Riverdaughter’s place:

Jeff, on June 10th, 2008 at 10:02 pm Said:

I guarantee come November–when you’ve all blown off a little steam at sites like this–the DNC and Obama supporters like myself will have talked you back to the true fold. And in any case– GREAT MEN LIKE SEN. OBAMA ONLY COME AROUND ONCE IN A GENERATION AND WE WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT ALLOW YOU TO DESTROY OUR DREAM!

There are sooo many issues I have with this statement.

1. What about our dream?  Read more 

Kaiser Permanente Agrees to Settle Patient-Dumping Lawsuit

This is an update to a post last November on www.health-insurance-litigation.com about allegations of patient-dumping by Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday that Kaiser has agreed to a settlement of civil and criminal charges brought by the Los Angeles City Attorney. The first-of-its-kind settlement “requires the HMO to establish new discharge rules, provide more training for employees and allow a well-known former U.S. attorney to monitor its progress.”  Read more 

(Hat tip to the invaluable Echidne.)

A Lincoln, Nebraska judge handed down an order that the 21-year-old university student whose experience included being given drugs and having sex against her will could not call what happened to her rape, describe herself as a victim, refer to the man who drugged and had sex with her against her will as a rapist, or refer to the incident as a sexual assault.

This judge is not alone, and rulings like this are a trend in the nation’s courtrooms.

Still, not all judges or law professors agree with the order:  Read more 

Time after time after time, discredited GOP stars rise again — and ruination follows after, on a pale horse.

John McCain’s top economic adviser? Phil Gramm, than whom you cannot get more FITH.

Yeah, that would be the ex-TAMU (sorry, Aggies) economics professor once famed as “the meanest man in the US Senate.”  Read more 

Spy Bill ’Compromise’ Still Gives Amnesty to Telcoms, But Adds Trappings of Justice

House and Senate leaders are still bargaining over how far to expand the government’s domestic spying powers and whether to grant retroactive legal amnesty to companies that violated federal privacy laws by helping the government spy on Americans.

But if a proposal from the top Republican from the Senate Intelligence committee is any indicator, telecom amnesty would be all but assured in any final bill.  Read more 

Family story: When our VW bug’s head gasket blew in the summer heat, we ended up stranded at a cheap hotel in Terra Haute, Indiana — we were moving to a new town because my father’s department was no longer tolerable after it split down the middle on the VietNam war — and on that day RFK was shot.

And when we got to our new house, I remember unpacking with the black-and-white TV on, as I watched RFK’s funeral train make its grainy, slow way up the Northeast Corridor to New York.

A line had been crossed: MLK’s assassination, RFK’s assassination, the war, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, all the lying, and of course, my own childish loss of friends and home… A line had been crossed. Nothing was solid; everything was permitted. And once you’re over the line, there’s no way to get back.

Like now.

Like now, I feel, as do, I suspect, others. The way the Obama campaign, (many of) Obama’s supporters, the OFB, and our famously free press smeared Hillary on her Argus interview crossed the line.

Now we know where we are.

We live in a political system where Obama’s faction of the party — the Democratic Party — enthusiastically endorses the vile and baseless accusation that Hillary Clinton wishes, indeed has called for, Obama’s death; that she wishes for Obama to be assassinated, just like RFK was, in June 1968. Never mind that this same faction also believes that every word of Hillary’s is calculated, and that only an idiot — and whatever else these lunatics believe about Hillary, they don’t believe she’s that — would announce, in advance, that she’d prefer for a political opponent to be shot. And never mind that this same faction is also trying to buy off this supposed would-be murderer with offers of any other office than President — like Senate Majority Leader, or a position on the Supreme Court. That’s doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time, which is becoming an increasingly prominent feature of the political landscape on the side that I thought I was on.

Never mind all that. The key point is this: Hillary did not say what her enemies claim she said. She simply did not say it. The accusation is not true. The people who propagate it are lying liars. In fact, they are propagating a Big Lie, just like the Republicans we thought we were the only “real enemy.” Remember this classic from Ron Suskind? Years ago, it seems:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

So, read the Howler how the Obama campaign and the press propagated this latest Big Lie. It’s instructive and very familiar:  Read more 

I was thinking about that article in The Hill, Dems hedge on healthcare:

“We all know there is not enough money to do all this stuff,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), a Finance Committee member and an Obama supporter, referring to the presidential candidates’ healthcare plans. “What they are doing is … laying out their ambitions.” …  Read more 

from Rachael Ray’s hateful Islamic terrorist, um, scarf.

I’m not kidding. You’ve got to read this to believe it. Click on the link.

Just how ridiculous is Michelle Malkin, anyway?

I guess the only thing more ridiculous is the fact that the Dunkin’ Donuts company gave in to Malkin and took the ad down.

You know, brave defenders of the first amendment over at Dunkin’ Donuts, this sort of reaction just empowers vapid pious pompadours like Michelle Malkin to do more things like this both to get attention and to provoke a reaction.

Wow. I really don’t know what else to say.

although probably only temporarily, and not completely.

He admits that Rove and Libby