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To: Sully- who wrote (73063)	8/5/2009 4:39:14 AM
From: Sully-	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Socialized Medicine In Action By John Power Line The Telegraph headlines, Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections: <<< The Government's drug rationing watchdog says "therapeutic" injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known. Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy. Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment. The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million. But the British Pain Society, which represents specialists in the field, has written to NICE calling for the guidelines to be withdrawn after its members warned that they would lead to many patients having to undergo unnecessary and high-risk spinal surgery. Dr Christopher Wells, a leading specialist in pain relief medicine and the founder of the NHS' first specialist pain clinic, said it was "entirely unacceptable" that conventional treatments used by thousands of patients would be stopped. >>> Under socialized medicine, every aspect of your life is the government's business, and your preferences count for little or nothing. powerlineblog.com

To: Sully- who wrote (73063)	8/25/2009 8:48:41 AM
From: goldworldnet	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 90947

Analyst Bove sees 150-200 more U.S. bank failures Sun Aug 23, 2009 5:04pm EDT reuters.com NEW YORK (Reuters) - A prominent banking analyst said on Sunday that 150 to 200 more U.S. banks will fail in the current banking crisis, and the industry's payments to keep the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp afloat could eat up 25 percent of pretax income in 2010. Richard Bove of Rochdale Securities said this will likely force the FDIC, which insures deposits, to turn increasingly to non-U.S. banks and private equity funds to shore up the banking system. "The difficulty at the moment is finding enough healthy banks to buy the failing banks," Bove wrote. The FDIC is expected on August 26 to vote on relaxed guidelines for private equity firms to invest in failed banks, after critics said previously proposed rules were too harsh and would actually dissuade firms from making investments. Bove said "perhaps another 150 to 200 banks will fail," on top of 81 so far in 2009, adding stress to the FDIC's deposit insurance fund. Three large failures this year -- BankUnited Financial Corp in May, and Colonial BancGroup Inc, Guaranty Financial Group Inc in August -- collectively cost the fund roughly $10.7 billion. The fund had $13 billion at the end of March. Regulators closed Guaranty's banking unit on Friday and sold assets of the Texas-based lender to Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA. The FDIC agreed to share in losses with the Spanish bank. Bove said the FDIC will likely levy special assessments against banks in the fourth quarter of this year and second quarter of 2010. He said these assessments could total $11 billion in 2010, on top of the same amount of regular assessments. "FDIC premiums could be 25 percent of the industry's pretax income," he wrote. * * *