Month: December 2007

medFICO

by dday

Big hat tip to Turkana at The Left Coaster for higlighting this story.

Mortgage lenders aren’t the only ones showing more interest in your credit score these days – the health industry is creating its own score to judge your ability to pay.

The new medFICO score, being designed with the help of credit industry giant Fair Isaac Corp., could debut as early as this summer in some hospitals.

Healthcare Analytics, a Waltham, Mass., health technology firm, is developing the score. It is backed by funding from Fair Isaac, of Minneapolis; Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp.; and venture capital firm North Bridge Venture Partners, also based in Waltham. Each kicked in $10 million for the project.

The score is already raising questions from consumer advocacy groups that fear it will be checked before patients are treated. People with low medical credit scores could receive lower-quality care than those with a healthy medFICO, they argue.

First of all, if you’re looking for fiscal stability, I can’t think of a better industry to imitate than the mortgage lending industry. But why stop at medFICO scores? How about we add in some subprime diagnosis and treatment, and interest-only leg surgeries, and I know, how about a whole new class of medical debt-backed securities, which banks can sell to investors, and try to get bailed out of when they turn to crap? They could call it “Big Medical Shitpile” and park it on a beach in New Jersey! (hey, I’ve lived in Jersey, so I can say that…)

Seriously, this is hideous. It used to be that the medical care industry, particularly the insurance companies had to use some prior injury as a basis to deny coverage. Now it’s some years-old debt that hospitals can use to hang over your head and deny care. Enough. Health care is a human right. It’s not a privilege of the wealthy. Willingness to pay is a metric that can be abused to the nth degree to deny treatment to the sick. It will create another tier to the medical system; you have the uninsured, the wealthy who can afford the best, and now the discount class who can’t afford access to the good stuff.

I guess this is what Rudy Giuliani meant by private solutions.

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Hurry Up And Veto

by digby

Hey, remember this?

President Bush on Thursday called on Congress to approve billions of dollars in additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan before lawmakers leave for their Christmas break.

He said the Army will have to shut down bases and start furloughing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilian workers by mid-February if Congress does not clear the funds. “Pentagon officials have warned Congress that the continued delay in funding our troops will soon begin to have a damaging impact on the operations of this department,” Bush said Thursday. “The warning has been laid out for the United States Congress to hear.”

Naturally, the congress got all askeered and scurried to pass the Bush approved legislation so that they wouldn’t be accused of not supporting the troops.

Today, the Bush administration says it’s going to veto it. Why? Because the Iraqi government says one section could expose Iraqi assets in U.S. banks to requests for compensation for American victims of Saddam Hussein.(Oh no!)

The problem is that Bush never objected to the provision before he ordered the congress to pass this vital and necessary emergency legislation that couldn’t even wait until after Christmas or all hell would break loose (which they dutifully did.) Now, without even blinking an eye, he’s going to veto it.

It sure is a good thing that Bush is held to absolutely no standards because otherwise he and his fellow fearmongering Republicans might just start to look like idiots over things like this. But they have nothing to worry about. Only the Democratic leaders in congress are still foolish enough to believe anything they say.

Update: This is bizarre. Steve Benen flags this AP report which says that Iraqi funds are already exempted from such lawsuits. What’s going on?

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Forgetting To Hide It

by digby

Joan Walsh does a nice rundown of the reactions of the candidates to the Bhutto assassination yesterday. I hadn’t heard this one, though:

Fred Thompson doesn’t have a problem with a female heading a government. But he’s not ready for it in this country, at least not yet. Speaking today to a small group of supporters in the last campaign rush before the Iowa caucuses next week, Thompson railed against those who opposed — and ultimately assassinated — former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. “They’re driven to distraction by the notion that a secular woman would be head of government,” the Republican presidential hopeful said of the woman who was slain as she campaigned for her country’s presidency after years in exile. But in America, Thompson said, repeating remarks earlier in the week, no woman is up to the job just yet. “This year, it’s a man, and next year, it’s going to be a man,” said the actor and former US senator from Tennessee. “I can see no one else who’s qualified to be president of the United States.”

Gosh, I sure hope that if a woman does accidentally get elected here, Thompson and his neanderthal followers aren’t “driven to distraction” by it and do something unfortunate.

It would seem that Pakistan is far more sophisticated and evolved than the US, at least by Thompson’s standard. After all, Bhutto first became Prime Minister in 1988 at the age of 35. Too bad we don’t have any women who are similarly qualified here in America. Maybe someday.

The Aqua Velva scented Thompson, by the way, is on Peggy Noonan’s list of “reasonable” candidates she can see as president — along with Romney, McCain, Giuliani, Duncan Hunter, Biden, Dodd, Richardson and Obama. (Greenwald has more on the kook, fag and bitch Peggy says aren’t reasonable at all…)

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OxyGiuliani

by dday

This one’s personal for me. I have a relative who has suffered under an addiction to OxyContin since he was 14, and is only now putting his life back together. Purdue Frederick, maker of the drug, knew that they were peddling an addictive product that could be easily abused, but intentionally hid the warnings from the general public for a decade. They got off with a slap on the wrist a few months back, after the Justice Department attempted to slow down the investigation and the prosecution produced such a poor case that even the judge yelled at them for failing to jail the executives for their crimes. Today in the New York Times, Barry Meier, who wrote a great book on this subject called Painkiller, has a long piece detailing Rudy Giuliani’s business involvement with Purdue Frederick.

In 2002, the drug maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., hired Mr. Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, to help stem the controversy about OxyContin. Among Mr. Giuliani’s missions was the job of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him […]

A former top federal prosecutor, Mr. Giuliani participated in two meetings between Purdue officials and the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency investigating the company. Giuliani Partners took on the job of monitoring security improvements at company facilities making OxyContin, an issue of concern to the D.E.A.

As a celebrity, Mr. Giuliani helped the company win several public relations battles, playing a role in an effort by Purdue to persuade an influential Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, not to blame it for OxyContin abuse.

Yes, I’m sure it was difficult to get Curt “Working For the Russians” Weldon to play ball.

Purdue Frederick is still a client of Giuliani Partners, and Giuliani still draws a salary from the business, so he continues to profit on the suffering of millions of addicted teens.

Read this shill-of-the-year quote:

“I understand the pain and distress that accompanies illness,” Mr. Giuliani said at the time. “I know that proper medications are necessary for people to treat their sickness and improve their quality of life.”

By the way, at one point Rudy assured the DEA that everything was fine, he’s put his top man on the job.

The D.E.A. was not only critical of how OxyContin had been marketed, its inspectors had found widespread security and record-keeping problems at the company’s manufacturing plants […]

At two meetings, the first at Giuliani Partners in early 2002, Mr. Giuliani and Purdue’s executives argued that they were already taking steps to eliminate any problems.

(Bernard) Kerik had been sent to Purdue’s manufacturing plants to revamp internal security, they assured Mr. Hutchinson. The federal investigators, they argued, should back down and give them a chance to prove they could handle the problem on their own.

Don’t worry, Bernie’s on it! The plant will have a numbers racket and a love nest suitable for affairs in no time.

Rudy’s dead in the water for this election, as evidenced by his resorting to more 9/11 ads to energize his campaign. But the moral blackness of defending this indefensible pharmaceutical company is perhaps the most telling example of how this guy would run the country. It also informs this quote from the other day.

“I suspect that our Democratic colleagues would get that question more often in a Democratic audience than we get in a Republican audience,” he said. “Maybe more Democrats are concerned about their health care than Republicans, maybe because Republicans have health care or maybe Republicans generally like the idea of private solutions.”

Private solutions like a company who poisons the country and lies about it.

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Caged Heat

by digby

I’ve got a new post up over at CAF, riffing on d-day’s from yesterday about the voting rights issues we are going to be facing in this upcoming election. Let’s just say that the Republicans obviously believe they can’t legitimately win elections.

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Let’s See ‘Em

by dday

We’ll have to hold the EPA to their word:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday signaled it is prepared to comply with a congressional request for all documents — including communications with the White House — concerning its decision to block California from imposing limits on greenhouse gases.

The EPA’s general counsel directed agency employees in a memo to preserve and produce all documents related to the decision including any opposing views and communications between senior EPA officials and the White House, including Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.

The documents should include “any records presenting options, recommendations, pros and cons, legal issues or risks, (or) political implications,” said the all-hands memo from EPA General Counsel Roger Martella Jr.

They’re saying that now, of course, but David Addington hasn’t gotten his hands on the memo to use his red pen.

The presiding committee in the Congress on this one is Henry Waxman’s House Oversight Committee.

Happy New Year, Fourthbranch. We got you Henry Waxman.

UPDATE: And I should mention that this is how a functioning Congressional oversight committee works, unlike the one over in the Senate, where Joe Lieberman spends his days playing cribbage with Susan Collins instead of doing his job. What a waste of jowls.

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Still Playing The Great Game

by dday

The major news accounts of Benazir Bhutto’s death are numerous, but I really like this account of how US policy was so staked on Bhutto’s return to Pakistan.

For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy — and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan’s most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington’s key ally in the battle against terrorism […]

“The U.S. came to understand that Bhutto was not a threat to stability, but was instead the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact,” said Mark Siegel, who lobbied for Bhutto in Washington and witnessed much of the behind-the-scenes diplomacy.

But the diplomacy that ended abruptly with Bhutto’s assassination yesterday was always an enormous gamble, according to current and former U.S. policymakers, intelligence officials and outside analysts. By entering into the legendary “Great Game” of South Asia, the United States also made its goals and allies more vulnerable — in a country in which more than 70 percent of the population already looked unfavorably upon Washington.

Don’t worry, though, we’ve got a plan B: that other former Prime Minister who was almost killed yesterday:

On Thursday, officials at the American Embassy in Islamabad reached out to members of the political party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, according to a senior administration official. The very fact that officials are even talking to backers of Mr. Sharif, who they believe has too many ties to Islamists, suggests how hard it will be to find a partner the United States fully trusts […]

The administration official said American Embassy officials were trying to reach out to Pakistani political players across the board in the aftermath of the Bhutto assassination.

“Look, most of the people in Musharraf’s party came out of Nawaz’s party,” the official said, referring to Mr. Sharif and speaking on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities. While he acknowledged that an alliance between Mr. Sharif and Mr. Musharraf was unlikely given the long enmity between the men, he added, “I wouldn’t predict anything in politics.”

Of course, the big question is who is that senior Administration official? Does he perhaps believe he exists in a fourth branch of government?

The idea that we can find someone, anyone, acceptable to Musharraf to put an imprimatur on democracy there is, in the words of this Pakistan analyst:

“…insane,” said Teresita Schaffer, a Pakistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, of the proposed alliance. “I don’t think Musharraf ever wanted to share power.”

Elections weren’t likely to be all that fair anyway, given that the entire judiciary was installed by the dictator. I think a military coup is likelier than just sliding over to some other national politician and expecting democracy to flourish.

The answer to that depends in part on his successor as army chief, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who, although a protege of the president, must consider whether his mentor has become an impediment to stability.

“He will listen carefully to what Musharraf has to say, but his decision will be geared to security interests of the army, and the country,” (analyst Faranza) Shaikh said.

We’re not going to be able to snap our fingers and come up with a magic solution in a country of 164 million where our presence is increasingly reviled.

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Was Moe Green Hit At The Tropicana Too?

by dday

I had seen this earlier in the day, and forgot about it, and then a Kos diarist reminded me that Benazir Bhutto wasn’t the only former Pakistani Prime Minister marked for death today.

At least four supporters of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif were killed Thursday when unidentified gunmen fired at his party’s procession in the outskirts of Islamabad, local press reports said.

Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), was due to address election rallies in the eastern Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, some 30 kms south from Islamabad.

A procession was taken out to welcome Sharif when unidentified gunmen opened fire from a house at Karal Chowk on the main Islamabad airport road, the PML-N said.

Let’s add these facts into the mix as well:

• In an email that was only revealed after her death, Bhutto blamed the Pakistani government for their failure to adequately protect her on the campaign trail, going so far as to say she would hold Musharraf responsible for anything that happened to her.

• Nawaz Sharif said the same thing.

• The Bhutto attack occurred in Rawalpindi, home of a large military garrison, described by Peter Bergen today as akin to having an assassination occur right next to the Pentagon.

• The ties between the Pakistani military, the ISI (intelligence services) and radical Islamist groups like the Taliban are legion.

• Obviously, knocking off the top opposition leaders makes it easier to consolidate rule, as does a terror attack that could postpone elections or lead to a restoration of martial law.

So, while you can’t exactly say Musharraf pulled the trigger on Bhutto, you might be able to make a case that he was at a family baptism at the time and may have smiled a bit hearing the news from Tom Hagen.

This, by the way, is our major ally in South Asia in the war on terror, someone who stood to benefit this much from a terrorist attack.

(h/t americangoy)

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Not Like They’re Stopping With The Vote Suppression Effort

by dday

I know that Digby has done a lot of work on the coming Republican emphasis on bogus claims of “voter fraud,” turning the tables on Democratic concerns about our elections and giving a pretense to increased voter suppression and intimidation. The Supreme Court is about to weigh in on some cases that are very central to this effort.

The Supreme Court will open the new year with its most politically divisive case since Bush v. Gore decided the 2000 presidential election, and its decision could force a major reinterpretation of the rules of the 2008 contest.

The case presents what seems to be a straightforward and even unremarkable question: Does a state requirement that voters show a specific kind of photo identification before casting a ballot violate the Constitution? […]

“It is exceedingly difficult to maneuver in today’s America without a photo ID (try flying, or even entering a tall building such as the courthouse in which we sit, without one),” Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner, a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote in deciding that Indiana’s strictest-in-the-nation law is not burdensome enough to violate constitutional protections.

His colleague on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, Bill Clinton appointee Terence T. Evans, was equally frank in dissent. “Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic,” Evans wrote.

These cases are a solution in search of a problem. Indeed there have been virtually no credible documented cases of voter fraud almost everywhere in the country. This idea to institute this voter ID law came right out of the Justice Department and directly from the lead villian in these matters, the guy who but for 9 second pro forma Congressional sessions might be sitting on the Federal Election Commission by now.

(Hans) Von Spakovsky was the voting counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 2003 to 2005. In that role, he supported Georgia’s voter photo identification law despite the objections of four of the five government attorneys on a panel set up to make sure the Georgia law complied with the Voting Rights Act, who warned that the law would hurt minority voters because they were less likely to have photo IDs, according to former Justice Department officials. “Spakovsky played a major role in the implementation of practices which injected partisan political factors into decision making,” said six former Justice staffers in a letter to senators.

Von Spakovsky, like other Republicans, argues that such strict voter ID laws are needed to combat fraud. Von Spakovsky’s election administration experience includes sitting on the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, which administers elections in the largest county in Georgia.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School asserts that von Spakovsky’s partisan bias extends beyond his signing off on the Georgia bill. Citing recently released E-mails, it says that he tried to quash the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s efforts to support voting ID rules in Arizona and tried to cancel a research contract on the impact of and need for voter ID. (He would not comment for this story.)

It’s a real simple plan. The idea is to put these laws in place, under-report them to the populace, and use them to invalidate the votes of hundreds of thousands of low-income and elderly citizens, many of whom vote Democratic. All this to stop the “scourge” of non-existent incidents of voter fraud. Which is a fake scourge whipped up by the Republican noise machine and absolutely tied to this sudden demonization of illegal immigrants.

Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita (R) said voter fraud was something he was asked about “almost daily” by constituents. “At the Kiwanis Club, the chamber of commerce groups, people would say, ‘Why aren’t you asking who I am when I vote?’ ” Rokita said.

This, by the way, is why we must continue pressing for answers in the US Attorney probe. The firing of the eight federal prosecutors is intimately tied to their unwillingness to pursue B.S. vote fraud cases. If that investigation, and the look into who was giving the orders to fire, is pushed aside for the sake of bipartisan comity or a desire not to confront the President, then we’ll never see the reality of the politicization of justice and the use of federal prosecutor offices as an arm of the RNC. Which will make it that much easier for these needless voter ID laws to be adopted nationwide, expanding the voter suppression.

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Lighten Up, Francis *

by dday

I can almost hear the political consultants throughout Iowa reacting to the news of Benazir Bhutto’s death with admonitions that their candidate has to “own it.” But there’s something rather unseemly about using it as some sort of club to bash their opponents with. The media isn’t solely to blame for the politicization of absolutely everything; the candidates themselves can shoulder some of it.

Mind you, I’d much rather have candidates argue over US policy in Pakistan than, say, which candidate wrote what essay in kindergarten or did drugs or got a haircut or wore a low-cut top. But shouldn’t that argument have something to do with the ACTUAL US POLICY in Pakistan and not this crystal ball formulation of how Bhutto’s death reflects on various election messages and themes?

* Stripes is actually a movie equally good to watch and quote, at least until the disappointing third act when they graft a plot on to it. Discuss, again, if you wish.

P.S. The real coup de grace of this comes from Slummy Joe Lieberman, whose campaign email for St. McCain is nicely deconstructed by Matt Yglesias. Shorter Joementum: “Bush-Cheney caused a lot of problems. That’s why we need John McCain to use the same policies to fix them!”

UPDATE: Krugman:

If you’re a tough guy (or gal) who believes in exerting US power — never mind, there are just too many heavily armed people in Pakistan for anyone but Norman Podhoretz to believe that we could throw our weight around. If you believe you can bring new understanding to the world through your enlightened outlook — sorry, there are too many people in Pakistan who don’t want to be enlightened. If you believe that we’d have more influence in the world if we hadn’t squandered our resources and good will in Iraq (which I do) — well, sorry, that influence wouldn’t extend to being able to bring peace and light to Pakistan.

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