Medicaid Health Care Denied To Needy Due To Red Tape, Costs

Editor's Note: As states "Opt Out" of Medicaid in exchange for the taxpayer-funded insurence boon (Obamacare), various services (cardiac operations normally permitted for elderly) will be denied. My friend's father is experiencing this right now.

Huffington Post

Gracie Fowler got her children enrolled in 

Medicaid after overcoming bureaucratic

 hassles that face applicants for the health 

benefits program, which leaves out many 

eligible for help.

She jumped through hoops, wrangled with bureaucrats and overcame obstacles, but Gracie Fowler finally figured out how to make sure her kids weren't among the more than 500,000 Florida children without health insurance.

Fowler, 35, has struggled since becoming pregnant with her 8-year-old son to get, and hold onto, the Medicaid health benefits to which he and his seven-year-old sister are entitled. They've been dropped by the state, and she's fought with agencies and their private contractors about lost applications, multiple requests for the same documentation and conflicting information about whether her kids were even covered.

The Fowlers are exactly the sort of people Medicaid was created to help: a single mother with a low income, and her children. Children in poor families and their parents make up more than three-quarters of people on Medicaid, which also serves many pregnant women. But the Fowler family had to overcome bureaucratic obstacles, poor outreach and services and an emphasis on preventing fraud that also places barriers in front of people in legitimate need. When Gracie Fowler was at her wit's end, she had to march into a state legislator's office to get her problems fixed.

The political debate of the moment is focused on whether Medicaid, which is jointly funded and managed by the federal and state governments, should be expanded or shrunken -- but this mostly ignores the fact that the program today leaves out millions of needy people who already are eligible for health care and aren't getting it.

That's because actually covering people under Medicaid, not just offering the benefits, costs money. When states do a good job of reaching out to the needy, it drives up the number of people getting benefits, which increases spending. Politicians react by saying, "'Oh my god, people are actually signing up! We can't afford this!'" said Carol Brady, the executive director of the Northeast Florida Healthy Start Coalition in Jacksonville, Fla. That's when the cutbacks start.

Fowler succeeded in navigating the system, but others aren't as fortunate. They or their children remain uninsured for no good reason. The bureaucratic barriers to Medicaid aren't just unintended consequences of the program's complexity, said Laura Goodhue, the executive director of the Florida Community Health Access Information Network (CHAIN), an advocacy organization based in Jupiter, Fla. "There's always been efforts to make it difficult to enroll in programs which people are already eligible for," Goodhue said.

"I wish it wasn't so difficult," said Fowler, who makes $11 an hour as a mortgage title processor. Apart from receiving Medicaid coverage during and immediately after her pregnancies, she was uninsured for most of the last decade before gaining workplace health benefits earlier this year. "When it works, it's so nice and helpful," she said of Florida KidCare, the state's Medicaid program for children. Now her kids have access to regular pediatrician visits instead of the emergency room where she had to take them, at a cost of thousands of dollars she still owes, because their Medicaid lapsed for a while when they were toddlers.

The reasons people don't get the benefits they could are myriad and vary from state to state, but mainly fall into two categories.

Budget-cutting across safety-net programs, red tape and rules designed to stop people from scamming the program have the effect of blocking people -- often mothers and children in poor families -- who are legally entitled to coverage under Medicaid and a related benefit, the Children's Health Insurance Program, also known as CHIP.

The paperwork requirements can be overwhelming for low-income workers who may have multiple jobs or change employment frequently, making it harder to prove their earnings are low enough. Poor people who move often in search of work or because of housing costs can have trouble proving they reside in the state where they're seeking assistance. "It's the equivalent of applying for a mortgage. Just think about that level of paperwork," said Anthony Wright, the executive director Health Access California, a Sacramento-based advocacy organization.

In addition, the poorest people can be the hardest to reach and to help. "Your priorities are day-by-day whereas insurance is sort of a longer-term outlook," Wright said. "If you're thinking about food on the table [and] making rent, then health insurance is something that is just not on the same level." Poor people also are more likely to lack transportation to government offices and have work schedules that are incompatible with the hours those offices are open, he said.

There's also a stigma attached to programs people wrongly associate with welfare and a feeling that Medicaid is meant only for the most destitute, said Alice Weiss, who directs a program to help maximize enrollment in health benefits at the National Academy for State Health Policy in Washington, D.C.

"Many individuals falsely believe that these programs are only for quote-unquote truly needy and they don't think of themselves in that category," Weiss said. "You have a lot of low-income working families who think it's for those other people who are poor but not me."

This reflects a failure on the part of federal and state authorities to educate and find the people who could benefit from Medicaid and CHIP, said Anne Swerlick, the deputy director of advocacy for Florida Legal Services in Tallahassee, Fla., which assists people applying for benefits. "We put pretty minimal amounts of investment in outreach," Swerlick said.

So people looking for help are dependent on outside organizations to guide them through the process. "You have to be persistent in making sure that your application is accepted," Florida CHAIN's Goodhue said. "We have a fragmented system that relies heavily on overburdened case managers, social workers, providers, [and] hospitals that do this work." Florida CHAIN arranged for Gracie Fowler's interview with The Huffington Post.

President Barack Obama's health care reform law could lead to as many as 4.9 million of currently eligible people signing up for Medicaid starting in 2014, along with up to 12.3 million childless adults who will be eligible for the first time, according to the Washington-based Urban Institute. Those numbers likely won't be reached, however, because Republicans like Florida Gov. Rick Scott have vowed not to expand Medicaid in their states, which the Supreme Court ruled in June that states could do.

The health care reform law aims to ease the path to health care coverage under Medicaid and CHIP in several ways, Wright of Health Access California, said.

For one thing, he said, the law "streamlines" the application process and reduces the amount of documentation people need to provide. For another, the law's nationwide effort to enroll as many as 30 million people into Medicaid or private health insurance will include outreach to those currently eligible but not receiving Medicaid and CHIP, he said. In addition, the law's health insurance "exchange" marketplaces are intended to make make it easier for people to find out what assistance is available, and the individual mandate that nearly everyone obtain health benefits is supposed to push people to seek coverage.

Study: Many Americans die with 'virtually no financial assets'

Phys
Peter Dizikes

It is a central worry of many Americans: not having enough money to live comfortably in old age. Now an innovative paper co-authored by an MIT economist shows that a large portion of America’s older population has very little savings in bank accounts, stocks and bonds, and dies “with virtually no financial assets” to their names.

Indeed, about 46 percent of senior citizens in the United States have less than $10,000 in financial assets when they die. Most of these people rely almost totally on Social Security payments as their only formal means of support, according to the newly published study, co-authored by James Poterba of MIT, Steven Venti of Dartmouth College, and David A. Wise of Harvard University. That means many seniors have almost no independent ability to withstand financial shocks, such as expensive medical treatments that may not be covered by Medicare or Medicaid, or other unexpected, costly events. “There are substantial groups that have basically no financial cushion as they are reaching their latest years,” says Poterba, the Mitsui Professor of Economics at MIT. However, the study — one of the first to examine Americans’ end-of-life finances — also reveals a diversity of outcomes among senior citizens. Between 1993 and 2008, it found, unmarried older individuals had median wealth of about $165,000 roughly a year before they died — a figure that includes current and future Social Security income, job-related pension benefits, home equity and financial assets. In the same period, the median wealth for continuously married senior citizens, roughly a year before they died, was more than $600,000. “There is a lot of divergence in how people are doing,” Poterba says. Those disparities also complicate the public-policy issues relating to the new findings. “One of the clear messages is that it is very hard to do a one-size-fits-all retirement policy,” Poterba says. “We need to recognize that, for example, if we were to substantially reduce Social Security benefits for those later in life, that there is a share of the elderly households for whom that would translate very directly into reduced income, because they seem to have accumulated little in the way of financial resources.”


The paper appears as a chapter in a book edited by Wise — “Investigations in the Economics of Aging” — newly published by the University of Chicago Press. The three pathways of retirement … While much attention has been paid to how much wealth people should aim to accumulate at the time of retirement, this study focuses on the evolution of that wealth during retirement, right up until death. The idea, as Poterba puts it, was “instead of looking at these people going into retirement, why don’t we try looking late in the game, and see how it all came out.” The research in question draws from data collected in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), an ongoing survey that follows people throughout their retirement years, thus providing data on their wealth over time; it is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and based at the University of Michigan. Poterba, Venti and Wise focused their study on people who were 70 and older in 1993, when the HRS began, and examined data running through 2008. This enabled them to track levels of wealth, prior to the participants’ deaths, over an extended period. People were surveyed every two years, which means that on average, those who passed away between 1993 and 2008 were last studied roughly one year before their deaths. The researchers identified three main “pathways,” running between the early years of retirement and death, for the households in the survey: those consisting of one person who remained single until death; married individuals who outlive their spouses and die single; and married individuals who die before their spouses. The three pathways tend to produce very different financial outcomes for the elderly. Married couples, for one thing, are better able to mitigate the financial burdens of old age. Among retirees in the study, 52 percent who were single had annual incomes of less than $20,000 and less than $10,000 in other financial assets; by contrast, just 36 percent of single people who started out in two-person households at retirement fell below those levels, and only 26 percent of people in two-person households fit that description.  “There really is a key distinction between what it looks like for the married [couples] and the singles,” says Poterba, who is also the current president of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The study also revealed a “strong correspondence” between wealth in 1993 and the length of time that people lived. That relationship held true across a variety of asset classes: People whose homes were worth more, who had larger retirement incomes, and who had more financial savings all tended to live longer than those who had fewer assets. While there is, Poterba observes, a “very active debate” among social scientists about the precise causal relationship between wealth and health, the study helps confirm, he notes, that “the patterns of health status in these years are quite persistent.” …

And at least two pathways for future research The paper, which Poterba presented at an NBER conference last week, has earned praise from other researchers. David Laibson, an economist at Harvard, calls it “a terrific paper, which should have a significant impact on our national conversation about savings adequacy.” Moreover, Laibson suggests that the replacement of defined-benefit retirement plans with 401(k) plans for many workers — investments that are subject to market fluctuations — means that the financial situation for some seniors “is likely to get even worse in the years ahead. … For many reasons, especially preretirement leakage and poor stock market returns, households are accumulating far too little wealth in their 401(k) plans.” For his part, Poterba agrees that this is an issue for further discussion, although he also notes that in the current study, many people “who end up in the bottom [tier] in terms of income when they are very old are folks who were probably not covered by defined-benefit plans during their working lives in any event.” Poterba also suggests that future research is needed to identify the mechanisms that financially struggling seniors use to pay for their needs late in life. “There may be other sources of support that are hard to track,” he says, citing informal help from family members as a way in which seniors likely supplement their incomes. Broadly, Poterba hopes that tracking the wealth of seniors as they move through retirement will add nuance to the policy dialogue.

“It’s a complicated problem,” he says. “Households that reach retirement differ widely in their financial circumstances, and that heterogeneity not only persists, but is accentuated as people go further into their retirement years.” The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Aging. Poterba serves as a trustee of the College Retirement Equity Fund and the TIAA-CREF mutual funds, which offer retirement savings products to consumers. Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.

Health Care: Victory for Obamacare, A Defeat for the American People

Global Research
Shamus Cooke

The political victory for President Obama in the Supreme Court has created an interesting shift in American politics. More important than the blow against his Republican opponent has been the re-energizing of Obama's base, a loose coalition of liberals, labor, and leftists.  

Many in these groups were lured into supporting Obamacare because of the political forces aligned against it, especially the loud extremists of the right wing. Obama's campaign skillfully exploited this fact, and soon a win for Obamacare was a strike against evil. The massive disappointment the President had been to his once enthusiastic supporters was swept aside amid anti-Republican euphoria, just in time for election season.  

But aligning with Obama will have dire consequences for his allies, who are leaving the wider working class behind in an attempt to boost a President who hasn't earned the support. Without the active support of their base and broader population, the liberal and labor groups supporting Obama have less leverage to make the critical political demands needed to fight the recession, ensuring that their demands will fall on deaf ears.

The sad fact remains that most Americans do not support Obamacare, as poll after poll has shown. The pro-Democratic Party New York Times reports: 

 "...just 32 percent supported the Affordable Care Act when it was approved in March 2010, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. As of a month ago, 34 percent supported it, virtually unchanged."  

Keep in mind that the anti-Obamacare majority includes many members of labor, senior, and liberal groups whose leadership endorsed the measure.  

Indeed, Obamacare will negatively affect labor and senior groups in a direct way. The health care legislation levies new taxes on "Cadillac" health care plans - any health care policy that is above meager. Union members typically have these plans, and employers are already preparing for the new tax by slashing these plans with an aim to get them below the Obamacare tax threshold. 

The fact that Obamacare gives employers this strong incentive to weaken their employees health care plan is not an accident, but a key provision in the plan that will fundamentally change health care in a negative way, for millions of people.   

Worse still is that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts that employers are expected to use Obamacare as an excuse to stop providing employer-based health care altogether, creating millions of newly-uninsured employees who will then be mandated to buy insurance for themselves.  

The CBO predicts that 3-5 million people are likely to be victimized in this way, but the figure could rise to 20 million. Of course employers will take advantage of Obamacare to shift the cost of health care onto individuals, in the same way that employers shifted away from pensions and onto the 401(k) scheme.  

Senior groups - most notably the AARP - supported Obamacare even though it is funded, in part, by cutting Medicare by $500 billion. Politifact explains:  

"Nearly $220 billion [in Medicare cuts] comes from reducing annual increases in payments that health care providers [hospitals, etc.] would otherwise receive from Medicare...Then there's another $136 billion in projected savings that would come from changes [cuts] to the Medicare Advantage program. About 25 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan."

A First Ever Default? Closing the Gold Window, Forty Years On

Triple Crisis
Gerald Epstein

During the recent “Debt Ceiling” debacle, many warned that the failure to lift the debt ceiling would lead to a “first ever” US default and to numerous financial catastrophes, including the demise of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

“First Ever Default?” Think again.

Forty years ago this month, on August 15, 1971, President Nixon “closed the gold window”, refusing to let foreign central banks redeem their dollars for gold, facilitating  the devaluation of the U.S dollar which had been fixed relative to gold for almost thirty years. While not strictly a default on a US debt obligation, by closing the gold window the US government abrogated a financial commitment it had made to the rest of the world  at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944  that set up the post-war monetary system. At Bretton Woods, the United States had promised to redeem any and all U.S. dollars held by foreigners – later limited to just foreign central banks — for $35 dollars an ounce. This promise explains why the Bretton Woods monetary system was called a “gold exchange standard” and why many believed the US dollar to be “as good as gold”.  When Nixon refused to let foreign central banks turn in their dollars for gold, and encouraged the devaluation of the dollar which reduced the value of foreign central bank holdings of dollars, the Nixon administration effectively “defaulted” on the United States’ long-standing obligations ending once and for all the Bretton Woods System. (See the useful history by Benjamin Cohen and Fred Block’s masterful history of Bretton Woods, The International Economic Disorder published University of California, Berkley Press.)


The move by Nixon was designed to restore US competitiveness that had been harmed by the reconstruction of Europe and Japan in the decades following the Second World War, and to improve his re-election chances by increasing employment, profits and exports.  By the cunning of history, though, while the Nixon “default” was designed to restart the American manufacturing machine, instead it set into motion the forces that would lead to the dominance of finance, the hollowing out of American manufacturing, the massive destruction of decent employment — and eventually to the Crash of 2008.

The dominance of finance resulted from the dramatic political and economic changes engendered by, as Naomi Klein puts it, the rise of disaster capitalism, which took a very specific financial form. The oil “shocks” and stagflation of the 1970’s brought about the rise of Volckerism, Thatcherism and Reaganism, leading to the policies of sky high interest rates, which undermined the New Deal structures of finance.  The extraordinarily high and unstable interest rates created enormous need for new hedging instruments and opportunities for new speculative financial practices. They also imposed enormous losses on financial institutions and financial elites.  But the rentiers and financiers did not just sit there and take it: they fought back (see Gerald Epstein and Arjun Jayadev in Financialization and the World Economy) and  pushed for financial de-regulation to let them compete in the new environment. One financial crisis led to another, from the third world debt crisis to Long Term Capital Management. After each crisis, finance pushed for more bail-outs and more financial de-regulation and won.

As America's Economy Collapses, "New Normal" Police State Takes Shape

Global Research
Tom Burghardt

Antifascist Calling...

Forget your rights.

As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.

After all, with world share prices gyrating wildly, employment and wages in a death spiral, and retirement funds and publicly-owned assets swallowed whole by speculators and renter scum, the state better dust-off contingency plans lest the Greek, Spanish or British "contagion" spread beyond the fabled shores of "old Europe" and infect God-fearin' folk here in the heimat.

Fear not, they have and the lyrically-titled Civil Disturbances: Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources, otherwise known as Army Regulation 500-50, spells out the "responsibilities, policy, and guidance for the Department of the Army in planning and operations involving the use of Army resources in the control of actual or anticipated civil disturbances." (emphasis added)

With British politicians demanding a clampdown on social media in the wake of London riots, and with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency having done so last week in San Francisco, switching off underground cell phone service to help squelch a protest against police violence, authoritarian control tactics, aping those deployed in Egypt and Tunisia (that worked out well!) are becoming the norm in so-called "Western democracies."

Secret Law, Secret Programs

Meanwhile up on Capitol Hill, Congress did their part to defend us from that pesky Bill of Rights; that is, before 81 of them--nearly a fifth of "our" elected representatives--checked-out for AIPAC-funded junkets to Israel.

Secrecy News reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee "rejected an amendment that would have required the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to confront the problem of 'secret law,' by which government agencies rely on legal authorities that are unknown or misunderstood by the public."

That amendment, proposed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) was rejected by voice vote, further entrenching unprecedented surveillance powers of Executive Branch agencies such as the FBI and NSA.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department "demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans' telephone records without any legal process or oversight."

The DOJ refused and it now appears that the Senate has affirmed that "secret law" should be guiding principles of our former republic.

Secrecy News also disclosed that the Committee rejected a second amendment to the authorization bill, one that would have required the Justice Department's Inspector General "to estimate the number of Americans who have had the contents of their communications reviewed in violation of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 [FAA]."

As pointed out here many times, FAA is a pernicious piece of Bushist legislative detritus that legalized the previous administration's secret spy programs since embellished by our current "hope and change" president.

During the run-up to FAA's passage, congressional Democrats, including then-Senator Barack Obama and his Republican colleagues across the aisle, claimed that the law would "strike a balance" between Americans' privacy rights and the needs of security agencies to "stop terrorists" attacking the country.

If that's the case, then why can't the American people learn whether their rights have been compromised?

Perhaps, as recent reports in Truthout and other publications suggest, former U.S. counterterrorism "czar" Richard Clarke leveled "explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials--George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee--accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence ... about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks."

Clarke's allegations follow closely on the heels of an investigation by Truthout journalists Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold.

"Based on on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and an interview with a former high-ranking counterterrorism official," Kaye and Leopold learned that "a little-known military intelligence unit, unbeknownst to the various investigative bodies probing the terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's movements prior to 9/11."

As readers are well aware, the 9/11 provocation was the pretext used by the capitalist state to wage aggressive resource wars abroad while ramming through repressive legislation like the USA Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act that targeted the democratic rights of the American people here at home.

But FAA did more then legitimate illegal programs. It also handed retroactive immunity and economic cover to giant telecoms like AT&T and Verizon who profited handily from government surveillance, shielding them from monetary damages which may have resulted from a spate of lawsuits such as Hepting v. AT&T.

This raises the question: are other U.S. firms similarly shielded from scrutiny by secret annexes in FAA or the privacy-killing USA Patriot Act?

Echelon Cubed

Last week, Softpedia revealed that "Google has admitted complying with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers, most likely in violation of European Union data protection laws."

"At the center of this problem," reporter Lucian Constantin wrote, "is the USA PATRIOT ACT, which states that companies incorporated in the United States must hand over data administered by their foreign subsidiaries if requested."

"Not only that," the publication averred, "they can be forced to keep quiet about it in order to avoid exposing active investigations and alert those targeted by the probes."

In other words, despite strict privacy laws that require companies operating within the EU to protect the personal data of their citizens, reports suggest that U.S. firms, operating under an entirely different legal framework, U.S. spy laws with built-in secrecy clauses and gag orders, trump the laws and legal norms of other nations.

Given the widespread corporate espionage carried out by the National Security Agency's decades-long Echelon communications' intercept program, American firms such as Google, Microsoft, Apple or Amazon may very well have become witting accomplices of U.S. secret state agencies rummaging about for "actionable intelligence" on EU, or U.S., citizens.

Indeed, a decade ago the European Union issued its final report on the Echelon spying machine and concluded that the program was being used for corporate and industrial espionage and that data filched from EU firms was being turned over to American corporations.

In 2000, the BBC reported that according to European investigators "U.S. Department of Commerce 'success stories' could be attributed to the filtering powers of Echelon."

Duncan Campbell, a British journalist and intelligence expert, who along with New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, helped blow the lid off Echelon, offered two instances of U.S. corporate spying in the 1990s when the newly-elected Clinton administration followed-up on promises of "aggressive advocacy" on behalf of U.S. firms "bidding for foreign contracts."

According to Campbell, NSA "lifted all the faxes and phone-calls between Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi Government" to gain this information. In a second case which came to light, Campbell documented how "Raytheon used information picked up from NSA snooping to secure a $1.4bn contract to supply a radar system to Brazil instead of France's Thomson-CSF."

As Softpedia reported, U.S.-based cloud computing services operating overseas have placed "European companies and government agencies that are using their services ... in a tough position."

With the advent of fiber optic communication platforms, programs like Echelon have a far greater, and more insidious, reach. AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein noted on the widespread deployment by NSA of fiber optic splitters and secret rooms at American telecommunications' firms:

What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." ...

This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine... And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)

What was Google's response?

In a statement to the German publication WirtschaftsWoche a Google corporate spokesperson said: "As a law abiding company, we comply with valid legal process, and that--as for any U.S. based company--means the data stored outside of the U.S. may be subject to lawful access by the U.S. government. That said, we are committed to protecting user privacy when faced with law enforcement requests. We have a long track record of advocating on behalf of user privacy in the face of such requests and we scrutinize requests carefully to ensure that they adhere to both the letter and the spirit of the law before complying." (translation courtesy of Public Intelligence)

Is the Senate Intelligence Committee's steadfast refusal to release documents and secret legal memos that most certainly target American citizens also another blatant example of American exceptionalism meant to protect U.S. firms operating abroad from exposure as corporate spies for the government?

It isn't as if NSA hasn't been busy doing just that here at home.

As The New York Times reported back in 2009, the "National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year."

Chalking up the problem to "overcollection" and "technical difficulties," unnamed intelligence officials and administration lawyers told journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen that although the practice was "significant and systemic ... it was believed to have been unintentional."

As "unintentional" as ginned-up intelligence that made the case for waging aggressive war against oil-rich Iraq!

In a follow-up piece, the Times revealed that NSA "appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants."

A former NSA analyst "read into" the illegal program told Lichtblau and Risen that he "and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages."

Email readily handed over by Google, Microsoft or other firms "subject to lawful access" by the Pentagon spy satrapy?

The Times' anonymous source said "Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits--no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told--and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches."

Despite insurance, medical bills push family to bankruptcy

Orlando Sentinel
Kate Santich

The day their daughter was born should have been one of the happiest of Simon and Marsha Sutherland's lives. Both previously married, they were having their first child together, a 6-pound, 10-ounce, dark-haired girl they would name Ellie Marguerite.

The pregnancy had seemed perfectly healthy. But moments after Ellie made her entrance into the world, doctors ordered her rushed to Winnie Palmer's neonatal intensive-care unit, fearing she'd had a seizure. Marsha didn't even have a chance to hold her daughter in her arms.

Ellie's birth on Aug. 30, 2007, began a 25-day, $74,000 stay in one of the most expensive places in any hospital. More daunting, it would launch a four-year journey of fear, hope, devotion and grief — a journey made all the more difficult by financial devastation.

Ultimately, it led two middle-class parents with good jobs, two major health-insurance policies and a house in suburbia into foreclosure and bankruptcy.

"To this day," Simon said, "we still have creditors calling us, wanting to talk to Ellie. They'll say things like, 'We want to discuss how she's going to take care of this overdue bill.' I just lose it."
 
Ellie Sutherland died June 26. She was two months shy of her fourth birthday.

Though financial failures often have been blamed on careless consumer borrowing or the widespread layoffs of the recession, the Sutherlands' financial storyline is strikingly common.

Two years ago, researchers at Harvard and Ohio universities reported that 62 percent of all bankruptcies were related to medical debt. An American family, they said, filed for bankruptcy in the aftermath of illness every 90 seconds — and three-quarters of those families had health insurance.

Although the data used for the study is now 4 years old, most experts interviewed said the problem is likely only to have worsened, at least until this year, as out-of-pocket medical costs have continued to spiral.

In addition, widespread layoffs have contributed to the rapid rise in uninsured Americans, who now number more than 59 million. For most of them, any major medical expense threatens to overwhelm their resources, leading to further bankruptcies and driving up costs for those who can pay. According to Families USA — a nonprofit, nonpartisan consumer-advocacy group — the shifting of uncompensated care onto insured patients results in a "hidden health tax."

For an average family health-insurance policy, that means an additional $1,017 a year in deductibles, copays and other out-of-pocket expenses.

Pointing fingers

When Marsha Sutherland became pregnant with Ellie, she was a full-time reading teacher at Windy Ridge School in southwest Orange County. Husband Simon was a manager of a chain pizzeria. Together, they made about $100,000 a year. Each had insurance.

She had two children from a previous marriage; he had three. They had a nice three-bedroom home with plans for a swimming pool — plans they put on hold when they found out about the pregnancy, long before they knew Ellie would have extensive needs.

For most of their daughter's life, Marsha and Simon would have no diagnosis. Ellie was nearly deaf, couldn't sit up and was prone to dangerously high fevers. Half her face had almost no muscle tone, and in the second year, she began scratching at her eyes and cheeks and biting her lip until she bled profusely.

"I'd go to get her up, and she'd be a mess," Marsha said.

Eventually, doctors removed eight of her front teeth to protect her. But in her scratching, Ellie managed to damage one of her corneas.

There were two trips to The Johns Hopkins Hospital. There were extensive blood panels conducted to look for missing genes. And there were almost weekly visits to Central Florida specialists for Ellie's hearing, eyes, spine and gastrointestinal system.

With two insurance companies — Marsha's was the primary coverage — "we were thinking that what one didn't cover, the other would," Simon said. "Instead, they were both pointing the finger at each other, and neither wanted to pay anything. It was a royal battle."

Though Marsha tried to continue working part time, after only a few months it became clear that taking care of Ellie wasn't just full-time; it was virtually around the clock. Simon became the lone breadwinner.

Marsha tried to sign Ellie up for Social Security disability, and when that failed, for Medicaid. Even after the family was down to a single income, though, the couple made too much to qualify.

"I was very overwhelmed at first," Marsha said. "Now I know that the game is that they automatically deny you at least three times — any parent in our world knows that. But back then, I was naive, and I was exhausted trying to keep Ellie going and me going, and I just didn't have it in me at the time to keep up the fight."

Obamanomics: Waging War on American Workers

Indybay
by Stephen Lendman

Since taking office, Obama shamelessly betrayed his constituents by:

-- ignoring popular needs during America's greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression;

-- giving Wall Street crooks trillions of taxpayer dollars;

-- spending another $1.5 trillion annually on militarism, imperial wars, and related policies at a time America has no enemies;

-- waging war on organized labor and public education, as well as civil and human rights; and

-- claiming "tough choices" demand class warfare through neoliberal austerity for working Americans, mainly middle and lower income ones least able to afford it.

On April 13, he announced his latest plan through $4 trillion in largely social spending budget cuts over the next 12 years. More on them below.

The same day, New York Times writers Mark Landler and Michael Shear headlined, "Obama's Debt Plan Sets Stage for Long Battle Over Spending," saying:

Obama's Wednesday George Washington University speech "propos(ed) a mix of long-term spending cuts, tax increases, and changes to social welfare programs," omitting that they harm working Americans most.

A Times editorial headlined, "President Obama, Reinvigorated," saying:

"The man America elected president has re-emerged." His budget speech "was a reasonable basis for a conversation and is far better than its most prominent competitors. That is because it is grounded in themes of generosity and responsibility....(I)t was a relief to see Mr. Obama standing up for the values that got him to the table."

These aren't surprising comments from a broadsheet long associated with wealth and power interests, now pretending hammering working Americans is fair and just.

A supportive Washington Post editorial headlined, "President Obama's deficit plan: Benefits and drawbacks," saying:

Obama "made an important and welcome contribution to the debate over deficit reduction Wednesday...(S)orely needed presidential engagement on the nation's fiscal crisis has arrived at last."

A Wall Street Journal editorial, however, called Obama "The Presidential Divider," saying:

His speech was "toxic," "dishonest," (and) even worse (for) deficits and debt" by not matching Rep. Ryan's (R. WI) slash and burn plan even more draconian that his own - "in the midst of a fiscal crisis" both parties refuse to address responsibly, nor do major media reports, op-eds, and editorials explain it.

In fact, Obama largely embraces plans proposed by Republicans and his own deficit cutting commission, offering a different mix for the same purpose - protecting America's super-rich while hammering working Americans through "shared sacrifice."

In other words, middle and low income households "sacrifice" to let wealthy ones "share," his agenda since day one in office.

For example, his proposed tax increase plan is a sham, knowing Republicans won't agree. Moreover, since taking office, he broke every major campaign pledge, and twice, since December alone, capitulated to Republicans on taxes and spending:

-- last December, with Democrats controlling both Houses, by extending Bush's tax cuts to the rich after promising to end them; and

-- in April, agreeing to $38 billion in largely vital social services cuts after promising to preserve them, rationalized by arguing for "a willingness to give on both sides."

Representing wealth and power, his promises are empty. His April 8 budget deal includes significant social spending cuts including:

-- $3.5 billion from Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funding;

-- $2.2 billion from nonprofit health insurance cooperatives;

-- $600 million from community healthcare centers;

-- $1 billion from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other disease prevention programs;

-- $1.6 billion from EPA's clean/safe drinking water and other projects;

-- $950 million from community development grants;

-- $504 million from nutrition aid for poor Women, Infants, and Children (WIC);

-- $500 million from education programs;

-- $390 million from home heating subsidies to the poor, as well as $2.5 billion for the Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) announced in February;

-- $350 million from labor programs, including grants for community service jobs for seniors;

-- other social service cuts;

-- $786 million from FEMA first-responder funding;

-- $407 million from energy efficiency and renewable energy programs;

-- $260 million from National Institutes of Health (NIH) medical research;

-- $127 million from the National Park Service; and

-- billions less for public infrastructure and transportation spending, while increasing war appropriations by multiples more, including for conquering and controlling Libya.

Moreover, Obama agreed to more draconian FY 2012 cuts and corporate tax breaks as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling before its limit is reached in mid-May. Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press April 10, senior White House advisor David Plouffe said he'd consider new austerity measures to raise the debt ceiling and reduce the deficit - an oxymoronic compromise, especially with unlimited defense spending and generous corporate handouts instead of major reductions.

Obama Proposes Draconian Cuts on Working Americans

According to White House.gov, Obama's plan over 12 years includes:

-- $4 trillion overall;

-- $770 billion from education, environmental, transportation, and other infrastructure cuts, as well as lower wages and benefits for federal workers when they need more, not less;

-- $480 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, besides another $1 trillion from Obamacare;

-- $360 billion from mandated domestic programs, including food stamps, home heating assistance, income for the poor and disabled, federal pension insurance, and farm subsidies;

-- $400 billion from military-related spending from unneeded weapons, as well as healthcare and other benefits for active service members and veterans - not priority items the Pentagon and war profiteers want to protect generous annual defense spending increases and supplemental add-ons, plus black-hole black budgets for intelligence and other nefarious purposes.

Like all his demagoguery, Obama hypocrically stressed we're broke and have to make shared sacrifices, suppressing how he's served wealth and power interests at the expense of working Americans during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The times demand stimulus, job creation, help for the working poor and unemployed, and much more, including:

-- programs to prevent banks from foreclosing on homeowners they defrauded;

-- slashing defense spending;

-- ending imperial wars and occupations;

-- using the funds for vital domestic programs;

-- breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks; prosecuting their officials guilty of grand theft;

-- reinvigorating public education;

-- strengthening Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as assuring universal healthcare;

-- guaranteeing every qualified student affordable higher education;

-- supporting organized labor;

-- instituting tough regulations to end monopoly and oligopoly power, punish corporate theft, curb speculation, end subsidies, and assure they all pay their fair share in taxes;

-- replacing today's dysfunctional tax system with a progressive one, making the rich share the burden they now avoid;

-- making social justice issue one at a time none exists, Democrats as mean-spirited as Republicans; and

-- instituting real government of, by and for the people, what's never existed and doesn't now under corrupted duopoly governance, ignoring people needs to serve Wall Street, war profiteers, and other corporate favorites.

The alternative assures greater militarism, social inequality and decay, growing poverty, eroding freedoms, police state harshness, and overall conditions too dire to imagine because public apathy let elected officials do nothing to change things.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen [at] sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com