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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (303905)	9/22/2006 7:18:44 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574007

Insurance Horror Stories By PAUL KRUGMAN “When Steve and Leslie Shaeffer’s daughter, Selah, was diagnosed at age 4 with a potentially fatal tumor in her jaw, they figured their health insurance would cover the bulk of her treatment costs.” But “shortly after Selah’s medical bills hit $20,000, Blue Cross stopped covering them and eventually canceled her coverage retroactively.” So begins a recent report in The Los Angeles Times titled “Sick but Insured? Think Again,” which offers a series of similar horror stories, and suggests that these stories represent a growing trend: more and more health insurers are finding ways to yank your insurance when you get sick. This trend helps explain something that has been puzzling me: why is the health insurance industry growing rapidly, even as it covers fewer Americans? Between 2000 and 2005, the number of Americans with private health insurance coverage fell by 1 percent. But over the same period, employment at health insurance companies rose a remarkable 32 percent. What are all those extra employees doing? Now we know at least part of the answer: they’re working harder than ever at identifying people who really need medical care, and ensuring that they don’t get it. In the past, they mainly concentrated on screening out applicants likely to get sick. Now, it seems, they’re also devoting a lot of effort to finding pretexts for revoking insurance after they’ve already granted it. They typically do this by claiming that they weren’t notified about some pre-existing condition, even if the insured wasn’t aware of that condition when he or she bought the policy. Welcome to the ugly world of American health care economics. Health care is poised to become America’s largest industry. Employment in manufacturing, which once dominated the economy, has fallen 18 percent since 2000, to 14.2 million. Meanwhile, employment in the private health services industry has risen 16 percent, to 12.6 million. Another 1.3 million people are employed at government hospitals. So we’re quickly approaching the point at which more Americans will be employed delivering health care than are employed producing manufactured goods. Yet even as health care becomes the core of the American economy, our system of paying for health care remains sick, and is getting sicker. Because everyone faces some risk of incurring huge medical costs, only the superrich can afford to be without health insurance. Yet private insurers try to refuse coverage to those most likely to need it, and deny payment whenever they can get away with it. The point isn’t that they’re evil or greedy (although you do wonder how the people who cut off the Schaeffers can look themselves in the mirror). The fact is that cruelty and injustice are the inevitable result of the current rules of the game. Blue Shield of California is a nonprofit insurance provider, yet as a spokesman put it, if his organization doesn’t follow the for-profit practice of selectively covering only the healthiest people, “we will end up with all the high-risk people.” Now, before you panic about the state of your own coverage, you should know that the horror stories in The Los Angeles Times article all involve individual insurance; if your coverage comes via your employer, you’re reasonably secure against sudden cancellation. But employment-based insurance is in rapid decline, as employers balk at the cost and more and more companies adopt Wal-Mart-style minimal-benefit policies. That’s why many people are turning to individual insurance — only to find out, in some cases, that they didn’t get what they thought they paid for. And here’s the thing: it’s all unnecessary. Every other wealthy nation manages to provide almost all its citizens with guaranteed health insurance, while spending less on health care than we do. And there’s no mystery why: we’re paying the price for pointless, destructive reliance on private insurers. Medicare, which is a universal health insurance program for older Americans, spends less than 2 cents of every dollar on administrative costs, leaving 98 cents to pay for medical care. By contrast, private insurance companies spend only around 80 cents of each dollar in premiums on medical care; much of the remaining 20 cents is spent denying insurance to those who need it. If we had a universal system — Medicare for everyone — there would be no more horror stories like those reported by The Los Angeles Times. And we’d almost certainly spend less on health care than we do now.

To: TimF who wrote (303905)	9/22/2006 12:33:36 PM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1574007

Forbes 400 richest Americans all billionaires By Jonathan Stempel Fri Sep 22, 8:54 AM ET Buddy, can you spare a billion dollars? That's how much it took this year to make Forbes magazine's annual list of the 400 richest Americans, the first time everyone on the list was worth at least $1 billion. The collective net worth of the country's wealthiest people rose $120 billion to $1.25 trillion. Bill Gates, founder of software leader Microsoft Corp., topped the list as usual, with a $53 billion net worth, while his friend and bridge partner Warren Buffett, who runs diversified holding company Berkshire Hathaway Inc., was second with $46 billion. Gates and Buffett are also the world's richest people, Forbes has said. Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim ranked third with $30 billion, the magazine said in March. Buffett in June agreed to donate 85 percent of his fortune, valued at the time at $37 billion, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities. Third place among Americans went to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the chief executive of Las Vegas Sands Corp., with $20.5 billion -- up $9 billion from a year earlier. Forbes estimated he has made nearly $1 million an hour over the last two years. Shares of Las Vegas Sands have more than doubled since going public in December 2004. Adelson was followed by software company Oracle Corp.'s Chief Executive Larry Ellison with $19.5 billion, and another co-founder Microsoft, Paul Allen, with $16 billion. Two women made the top 10, both named Walton. Christy Walton, the daughter-in-law of top retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s founder Sam Walton, was worth $15.6 billion, ranking seventh, while Sam Walton's daughter Alice ranked ninth with $15.5 billion. Fidelity Investments' Abigail Johnson ranks 16th, with $13 billion. Unsurprisingly, it takes time for most to get rich. Most billionaires are at least in their 50s, and only seven have yet to hit 40. The youngest -- co-founders of Internet search engine Google Inc. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who ranked 12th and 13th with respective net worths of $14.1 billion and $14 billion -- are each only 33. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, 51, ranked 45th with $5.2 billion. More than one in five billionaires came from California, and about one in seven came from New York. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median income of the nation's 105.9 million full-time wage and salary workers is $34,268 per year.

To: TimF who wrote (303905)	9/23/2006 2:09:53 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574007

Violent crime began to uptick in 2001 slowly at first and faster as time went on. What's your source of data for that assertion? The news. Also once again - "To the extent that the difference is a function of government is primarily local, and then state. Its not mostly a federal issue. And it probably has a lot more to do with demographic changes and other things that are not the direct results of government polices." Yes, that would be the neo's understanding of how things work....after all, they could never be bothered to find out how the three levels of gov't interact and function. In reality, they are not three separate entities but very much interconnected. Consequently, the Clinton administration from the federal level worked with local police agencies and implemented some important changes in how they dealt with crime. And they passed info from one city to the next. If the LAPD had been successful with gangs by implementing a particular action, then the feds passed that onto other cities with gang problems. In addition, the Clinton administration went about mitigating the effects from such contributing factors as high unemployment among the poor. It was the entire package put together by Clinton that contributed to one of the lowest crime rates in decades. It didn't happen by chance........liberals are very good at working with matters having to do with the well being of its citizens.