What ever happened to taxes?

"As it prepares to pay out big bonuses to employees, Goldman Sachs is considering expanding a program that would require executives and top managers to give a certain percentage of their earnings to charity." (From the Times) Christ, what kind of society is America, after all? Relying on the idle rich to give some of their ill-gotten gains to charity--isn't that more like some oldtime monarchy or something? It sure doesn't sound like the US, does it? At least not the US I recall from my youth. The graduated income tax is where we're supposed to get the money to support society; the progressive (get it?) income tax.

Excuse Me?

"For years, the Pentagon has shielded them from public scrutiny: few people have seen alleged teen terrorist Omar Khadr's shrapnel-clouded blind eye, confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed on his knees in prayer, or the shy grin of Yemeni Suleiman al Nadhi."

This quote is from a story about the release by the Red Cross of photos of Guantanomo detainees. I guess our conclusion is supposed to be "Oh sweet Pentagon, you've been so kind." This and torture are the biggest blots on our history ever. We will never live it down and it's clearly the beginning of the end of our hegemony in the world. Why can't they see it? I guess it's just the hopelessly inevitable march of history. But I wish I saw some other country that's better taking over.

Why doesn't the Times write about this?

This comment on the Times website uncovers another reason for the high cost of health insurance and details how to deal with it:

Why is the root cause of high cost not being addressed? Insurance companies just get a discount from whatever the hospitals charge. A hospital Charge Master List is 4, 5 sometimes 6 times cost, and these inflated charges are what the uninsured and underinsured have to pay. The gold standard for pricing is what Medicare pays the hospital, doctor etc., for a particular procedure as defined by the CPT code. Insurance companies pay about 124% of that, still providing a handsome profit for the providers, who are mainly non-profit, don't pay Federal Income Tax and don't have to produce books to prove what charity work they provide, what donations they receive or what they pay their officers (a lot!).When you think abou it, your premiums to insurance companies just provide you with membership in a group that has negotiated lower prices than the inflated charges on the hospital Charge Master list, typically a 65 to 70% discount. That still leaves the hospitals and doctors (usually supplied by a Management company, except for Kaiser and a few others) whopping profits.When my daughter spent a month in hospital and incurred a $265,000 bill, the first billing person I spoke to offered a 50% discount, later increased to 55%. Since the hospital cost was proven to be only around $60,000, they could easily offer huge disounts and still make 100 to 200% profit. After I unearthed $50,000 of completely fraudulent billing, the hospital finally settled for less than $20,000. Another hospital in the same chain had been fined $6.5 Million that same year for Medicare fraud but only after a whistle blower took action.It's no good just going after the Insurance companies (although their act does need cleaning up). The clean-up has to start with the organizations who charge ridiculous and unwarranted prices in the first place, and whose prices unfailingly rise every fiscal year by about 7% regardless of inflation. Publlic options, reining in Insurance companies - it's all hot air until the basic cause of high and increasing initial costs is fully addressed. Hospitals are abusing their non-profit status, and defrauding the tax payers of USA.Incidentally 2 courts in USA have approved uninsured patients paying only what insurance companies would pay, as the normal fee that hospital habitually accept. If you want to analyze your hospital bill, get a detailed bill with CPT codes and contact www.hospitalbillreview.com and fight, fight, fight! I got the doctors' bill reduced from $18,000 to $8,000 in this way also, as well as outside lab bills reduced from $7000 to $3000. (from Mike Walter of San Diego)

Times stories about recommendations for less cancer screening

I think these new medical guidelines would be easier to accept if the various panels and study groups came up with numbers for false positives and went into more detail about the damage that too much testing does to people's lives. That's the missing piece here. The only number we have is the ONE--that's the one person out of almost 2,000 whose breast cancer might not be discovered in time if women between 40 and 50 don't have mammograms. What we need to know is at least some approximation of how many people have their lives disrupted for no good reason when over-testing is the rule. How many people have unnecessary surgery, por ejemplo. And in the case of cervical cancer, how many young women have had trouble in childbirth, maybe, as a result of unneeded pap smears.

Today's letter to The New York Times

Has there ever been a more blatant giveaway of taxpayer money than these latest "health reform" or "patient protection" bills? All these new taxes and higher premiums are being created to shore up the insurance companies' bottom lines. Why do we, as a nation, have that obligation? I thought capitalism was a system in which you take your chances--you can make it big or you can fall by the wayside. Yet somehow (hmm, wonder why?) insurance companies have been enshrined in our system as untouchable, much better protected than the people's health and seemingly more deserving of protection. Their stockholders and their executives are being paid millions on the backs of the American people. There has to be a way to stop this. Is there not one patriot in our government who will do it?
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