Health insurers are pressuring Congress to soften provisions in new health care legislation. As the New York Times points out, the details of implementation are worked out after the broader bill is passed. Insurance companies are right in there, pitching.
More than 40 provisions of the law require or permit agencies to issue rules. Lobbyists are focusing on two whose stated purpose is to ensure that consumers “get value for their dollars.”
One bars insurers from carrying out an “unreasonable premium increase” unless they first submit justifications to federal and state officials. Congress did not say what is unreasonable, leaving that to rule writers.
Another provision, effective Jan. 1, requires that a minimum percentage of premium dollars be spent on true medical costs related to patient care — not retained by insurers as profit or used to cover administrative expenses. Insurers must refund money to consumers if they do not meet the standards, known as minimum loss ratios. ... NYT
The "yes, buts" are being added as "the health insurance industry has shifted its focus from opposing health care reform to influencing how the new law will be implemented."
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BP has been lying through its teeth. We knew that. But no one called them on it and no one mentioned the missing oxygen. Whole sectors of the Gulf are dying or dead. Dive a little deeper into events and get at the truth the movers and shakers have been unwilling to face. Ain't that always the case!
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.
The variations between what scientists are telling us and what BP and the government are admitting about the rate at which the oil spewing into the Gulf are enormous. Don't bother us with rates now, BP insists, refusing to let scientists go down there and make exact measurements. Rates aren't relevant. Not relevant? Check this out.
Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well. ...NYT
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Remember Blackwater? Well, it's happening again. Only this time it's privately-contracted spies in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pentagon is worried about them (and investigating them) and we should be too. Wait. The Pentagon is worried about them, but the Pentagon is running the operation in partnership with Lockheed.
Military officials said that when Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, signed off on the operation in January 2009, there were prohibitions against intelligence gathering, including hiring agents to provide information about enemy positions in Pakistan. The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region, and information that could be used for “force protection,” they said.
Some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to morph into traditional spying activities. And they pointed out that the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation.
But a review of the program by The New York Times found that Mr. Furlong’s operatives were still providing information using the same intelligence gathering methods as before. The contractors were still being paid under a $22 million contract, the review shows, managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by the Pentagon office in charge of special operations policy.
The biggest outcry comes, of course, from the CIA. The CIA, thought by the Pentagon to be slow and timorous, is defending its turf. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is investigating itself, saying the program will close down at the end of this month. Should we believe the Pentagon? Or will the program "close down" officially but continue to operate? It's been in place for a long time.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon has used broad interpretations of its authorities to expand military intelligence operations, including sending Special Operations troops on clandestine missions far from declared war zones. These missions have raised concerns in Washington that the Pentagon is running de facto covert actions without proper White House authority and with little oversight from the elaborate system of Congressional committees and internal controls intended to prevent abuses in intelligence gathering. The officials say the contractors’ reports are delivered via an encrypted e-mail service to an “information operations fusion cell,” located at the military base at Kabul International Airport. ...NYT
