Link of the day

B-Daddy in writing about Medicare and fraud presented this from Aghaegbuna Odelugo who was testifying before Congress about Medicare fraud but wandered off course and started riffing on Medicare reimbursement rates:

I would like to finally talk about what I perceive to be the most significant flaw in Medicare: the rates of reimbursement. I do not know who decides, or how the decision is made, but the rate of reimbursement for certain pieces of durable medical equipment is beyond exorbitant. An example is the case of the knee braces. These items are available on the market to a DME provider for less than $100.00. Medicare, however, reimburse, if I remember correctly, approximately 1,000% of this cost. Back braces that cost approximately $100.00 are reimbursed at a rate of almost 900%. Wheelchairs that cost less than $1,000.00 are reimbursed at almost 500% of cost. For anyone engaging in fraud, these numbers are too good to be true.

Not fraud, not even a bug, but a feature!

Medicare is popular and expensive. No wonder, right? Expensive for obvious reasons as illustrated above but popular also because of a lack of cost transparency. It's not as if you are paying out of pocket for those mark-ups... not expensive for you so what's to worry about?

And that's pretty much it: "paying into a system" soon slips the clutches of reality as increased layers of bureaucracy and rules and regulations shield just what are the real costs of healthcare. And when those rules and regs are at the whim of the pols, there is no end to the amount of candy that will be tossed around.



Here's B-Daddy to wrap things up:

Ultimately, I understand that the U.S. has a robust social safety net. But I think we have gone overboard. We aren't a country that promises cradle to grave support, like socialist Europe.

There might not be an explicit promise but there appears to be an increasing implicit acceptance by the public that there is indeed a promise of cradle to grave support. How else do you explain the across-the-board bad polling numbers when it comes to any mention of entitlement reform?

Until there is "skin in the game", until there is true cost transparency as to realizing what health care goods and services actually cost and until we remove the layers between the health care providers and consumers, we will never succeed in bending the cost curve downward.

Panic on the streets of Boston Pt. II (UPDATED)

We suppose this is what passes for responsible democracy with the liberal-Left. Here’s MSNBC’s Ed Schultz on his radio program Friday breaking out the tried and true variant of “vote early, vote often”.



And guess who’s rolling into town to uh, assist with the electoral proceedings? Why, it’s the purple people-beaters, that’s who.

UPDATE #1: Apparently, not all SEIU folks are in the bag for Coakley. Link here to some pretty awesome pictures of people who seem to be asking, "Hey, what can Brown do for you?".

Yeah, we know, but we couldn't resist.

H/T: Hot Air

Quote of the Day

With apologies to Instaglen…

Hey, do you remember when they told us that if we voted for McCain it would just be a continuation of the values of religion over the facts of sound science that was the M.O. of the Bush administration, particularly with respect to global warming?

Well, it looks like they were right.

"[The Emails] confirm suspicions that I have had in 30 years of working in climate science that I saw the hijacking of climate science particularly by computer modelers and then by a small group of people associated with the intergovernmental panel on climate change. The difficulty was that even though I sensed there was these thing going on, proving it is extremely difficult. But now with the exposure of these public files it is not only a smoking gun, it's a battery of machine guns. ...

On A global scale it's frightening. This group of people not only controlled the Hadley Center which controls the global data on temperatures, so that the global temperature record is in their hands, they also control the IPCC. ... The IPCC is the basis in all governments for the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and so on. ..... The problem they had is they kept saying the 20th century and the latter part of it is the warmest ever. And of course skeptics like myself [and several other names] were saying it was warmer 1000 years ago when the Vikings were in Iceland and Greenland and that's why they decided they had to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and they achieved that with the hockey stick. In other words they completely rewrote the history."

The rest here at Mish's place who also asks a very important question with respect to the global warming email bombshell: Do you select The Cause or does the The Cause select you?

via KT

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing your Pahrump Cowboys

For starters, Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for “advance work.”)
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Obama downplays his ties to ACORN, and his campaign denies coordinating with ACORN to register voters.

And in other news today…

In Nevada, state officials say the fraudulent registrations included forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team, including quarterback Tony Romo.
"Romo is not registered to vote in the state of Nevada," Secretary of State Ross Miller said, "and anybody trying to pose as Terrell Owens won't be able to cast a ballot on Nov. 4."


ACORN… You all remember those guys. Not content to just play fast and loose with mortgage lending practices, they are also heavily into voter registration drives and as a result are the subject of investigations and criminal indictments nationwide. And because all this fraudulent behavior seems to be a result of business-as-usual group-think at the state/local level rather than any nation-wide coordination, it may spare ACORN a RICO investigation but... one can always hope.

What slays us about all this is that the people perpetrating this fraud don’t even make an honest(?) effort at deception. Just fill-out a bunch of voter registration cards with funny names and dump them at the registrar’s office to deal with.

And isn’t it comforting to know that all these “get out the vote” efforts and community organizing is done on your nickel?

But we’re going to give M.T. Suit the benefit of the doubt here. It is indeed rather difficult to accomplish anything of note or consequence… hell, anything at all when his every waking hour is spent distancing himself from unsavory associations.

P.S. Fire up that Short Bus!

And, as The Post reported Monday, another pro-Obama group, Vote Today Ohio, took advantage of a quirk in that state's law, which allows people to register and vote on the same day without having to prove residency, to drive hundreds of people from homeless shelters and drug-rehab centers to the polls.

H/T: Hot Air