On the healthcare profits article... what would be more interesting is to add the industry **revenues,** apply whatever the annual growth rate (%) in health care costs is expected to be, multiply by ten (years) and compare to the $1.7T price tag of the senate bill.
The datapoint about just the medicare fraud being several times greater than industry profits is incredible... but it would be more interesting to see this in terms of costs to the public and to the companies paying for our insurance (i.e. the providers' revenues).

Last call ya'll

Neil's AJC column
First order of business for your column, Neil, should be a good editor. That way, if you slip up and misspell something, such as "utility poll" for "utility pole," it won't appear in print. This is also a good way to avoid those embarrassing dangling participles.
By Toby Moore

Have you read the AJC!!! LOL, the proofreaders need proofreading. That is one of the worst examples of edited/proofed rags on the market.

Looks like someone at the AJC decided, "Turns out, we DO need to make some money after all..."

So let me get this straight...one of the guys whose an advisor to the president that is reporting on the "success" of the stimulis is named DeSeve. Is that pronounced like 'deceive'? Too funny. His name says it all.

Well, a personal appearance by Obama actually made things worse for the democrats in Virginia, a State that voted for the Great Stimulator last November. Its crisis time for the democrats now. Acorn to the rescue.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/02/mcdonnell-lead-gop-landslide-virginia-race/

The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.

J. Edgar Hoover

Boortz Column: excellent! A reason to read the Saturday paper.

Speak Truth to Power: golly-gosh. I practice this with myself!!!

Medicare Fraud/Insurance Company Profit: Interesting. How about making SOMEONE accountable for Medicare fraud. Isn't there someout in D.C. who's responsible for this?

The Arts: Art should support itself. I just despise my tax dollars being used for art of any kind.

Calculator Abuse: I was talking to my calculator, Casio, this weekend. He threatened to stop working unless his computations supported the right. He went out with the trash this morning.

Congressional Constituant Avoidance Fund: They don't need any studies, they already know how to do this - on both sides.

Daylight Saving Time: My circadian rhythm is a bit off today. I will speak truth to power re: my circadians.

Medicare is ripped off because it isn't profit driven. Insurance companies look for patterns of abuse and deal with them directly. Abuse is not fraud but it steals 10 times as much money from Medicare than actual fraud.

Here is a good example of abuse. An internist does a quicky residency and becomes credentialed to read medical ultrasound studies. He buys his own cheapo ultrasound machine and orders studies on every patient remotely meeting medicare criteria. He then bills Medicare for the studies and the interpretations of those studies, even though the scan was performed and read by the tech. Voila', a new fat revenue stream for the cost of a tech's salary and and lease payments on the cheapo ultrasound machine.
I have hundreds of other examples and have seen most of them. The problem is that Medicare is a non-profit driven government disaster that can't fix itself. The only possible solution for Medicare is to cut reimbursement.

It’s the control they really want. They need it to try and put off the collapse of social security and medicare/aid.

How many dp politicians of either party can even understand the language the Founding Fathers used? What’s more important, and far more difficult, is to get the general public to understand the Constitution, and its’ language. Then politicians can’t misrepresent what it says or means.

The foxes are investigating their fellow foxes over a chicken coop incident. That’s reassuring.

That sounds like a study born of the summer of ’09. I guess they noticed.

That’s how fads like obamania are, you can’t expect much more out of the people that would fall for him.

Typical guardian writer, it’s a bad thing if the USA holds others to their agreements with us. They have no answer to what hussein would certainly be doing in response to the mad mullahs nuke program, or how they would have found out about, much less stopped khadaffy’s program or the khan proliferation network.

If they want to pretend they aren’t socialists, maybe they should lay off the socialist slogans and sayings.

Thank God the dp is stuck on the health care takeover, delaying implementation of their energy racket. They’ll still waste the fuel to party and hobnob in Copenhagen.

“Worst bill ever,” is about what I’d expect from that bird brain Pelosi.

The damage cap and trade would do to our economy is difficult to impossible to calculate, because energy supply and price effects everything.

In nine months the dp went from creating millions of jobs to ‘saving’ hundreds of thousands of government jobs. Ain’t it funny how the standards of success change depending on the party in power.

What’s stopping European leaders from starting such a ‘climate’ fund and putting their money in it? Nothing but the fact that it’s our money they are really after.

$8 billion health insurance profits and $60 billion in Medicare (I wonder how much Medicaid fraud would add to that) fraud, yet the government is going to somehow cut costs and increase quality and availability when they take the rest of the system? That’s beyond blind faith and into stupid beyond belief.

On Honduras, so much for Constitutional Republic. Commies are fine with democracy, especially when they (zelaya, chavez, etc…) know the vote tally before any votes are cast. Let me know when hussein and the dp support anyone but another commie against commies.

Barney frank isn’t that slick a shyster, he’s just smarter than the idiots on the other side of the aisle.

Everything in the dp is a cheesy soap opera. It’s half the amateurish and hopelessly biased msm’s fault.

We’ve ‘progressed’ beyond those silly ancient moral codes to those of marx, Lenin, and mao.

This NEA hussein worshiper obviously didn’t go in for the literary arts, or their history. Is it any wonder they were telling government grant recipients to do works that praise hussein and his policies (as if they needed to, that’s what’s dumbest about them doing it)?

Yea, the dp is big on speaking truth to power, that’s why they go after anyone with a differing opinion that attempts to do so. Their attacks on the secret ballot and the privacy of petitioners don’t extend to. One of these days they will attempt to intimidate the wrong person. I hope I’m up for jury duty then.

It’s bad news for hussein if he loses his coattails this early.

It’s not like hussein and the dp will be called on their transparent hypocrisy and broken promises by the msm.

Any calculations that show how wasteful and ineffective the dp idea of ‘stimulus’ is, are by definition calculator abuse by the dp, who are usually off in their cost estimates by a factor somewhere between two and 10.

huh?

because there isn't any cash in the till - the gub'mint can't find enough suckers dumb enough to buy enough bonds to come up with the cash ...

The ONLY reason for the stimulus was to create jobs. Had we remained at 4.5% unemployment, there would have been no reason whatsoever for the the stimulus package. In actuality, the stimulus package was nothing more than pork for congressional constituents. Almost none has been spent and almost no jobs have been created. It has been one big boondoggle.

The United States has ensured the return of ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. So much for democracy.

Should read:

The United States has ensured the return of ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. So much for rule of law.

Basically Will can bugger himself. Typical rockefeller pseudo republican, neo-conservative, anti-populist, Russell Kirk top lofty, elitist, 2 measly cheers for capitalism HORSE CRAP: daring, PRESUMING--EARLY in his sewage spewing--to conflate the thuggish pseudo liberalism in the state of Washington against undeniably good sterling people just trying to maintain some personal safety while pushing a homo-fobic agenda, & the fine noble resolve of the state government of Alabama in the 1950s doing what it could in the name of state rights & article 10 of the federal bill of rights to neutralize the communist inspired agitation, militance, trouble making & incitement of minority uppitiness of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a KNOWN NOTORIOUS communist front organization even BEFORE J Edgar Hoover formally verified said fact. F--- him, f--- his sympathizers, f--- his critics who hedge their objections with do gooder qualifications & f--- the sort of people who call me out of line for saying f--- him & all those others. The success of the avid drive for minority civil rights was an unalloyed DISASTER to America & ANY use as a bad example of ANY part of the opposition & resistance thereto is what is actually out of line. He could have found another example for his analogy & thus spared the volatile sensibilities of his arch conservative, psychologically authoritarian ethno-centric caucasian readers but he just HAD to jab THAT raw nerve! Well, F--- HIM. Some one inform him to be extra grateful at least ONE of his far right detractors yet has too much to lose. We will see for how long.

Suprise, this article in the NYT got it wrong. Zelaya has to get past the supreme court and the full congress, both of whom voted overwhelmingly against him already. It's not as bad as this article makes it look.