They are doing their job, PROTECTING the PEOPLE of the US from insidious and amoral DANGERS to their SECURITY.
Even though, in this case, the danger was/is presented by the military-industrial complex that wanted the war and the huge profits wars bring.
"TRUTH MATTERS! END STATE-SPONSORED LIES"
COAL FIRES ARE BIG... THEY CAN BE PUT OUT -
In fact, they are the most concentrated source of CO2, each a bigger factor than any single factory or city...
That is why it is essential for the developed countries to band together to PUT OUT UNDERGROUND COAL FIRES NOW..
Seriously.. This should be a no-brainer..
What is happening to the world? Is God trying to tell us something?
The temperate countries have had an intrinsic advantage in that they are healthier places to live.
Cold kills germs. Diseases kill faster in the heat. And so on.. Its almost an oxymoron..
Tropical nations have been plagued with all sorts of diseases for all human history. Lives there were significantly shorter, all other things being equal.
Read this WHO report on Climate Change and Human Health..
http://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/cchhsummary/en/
For more on climate change and health, also see
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/topic/climate.html
(Get it while you can.. EHP is an endangered resource)
"Despite congressional efforts to fix balloting procedures after the Florida debacle in 2000, last year's presidential election saw additional problems. Long lines at the polls and disputes over voter lists and provisional ballots surfaced in a number of states, particularly Ohio where President Bush narrowly defeated John Kerry. Today a private commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker presented President Bush and Congress with a new report on how to fix the system further.
Among the commission's 87 recommendations are: calls for standardized photo ID's for all voters; state, not local control over voter registration lists; verifiable paper trails for electronic voting machines; uniform statewide standards for counting provisional ballots; and moving towards the nonpartisan administration of elections.
The full text of the Final Report of the Federal Commission on Election Reform is available on the web at http://www.american.edu/ia/cfer/ or you can download the full report in PDF format here:
http://www.american.edu/ia/cfer/report/full_report.pdf
[Being a Patient: Treated for Illness, Then Lost in Labyrinth of Bills http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/13/health/13paper.html
]
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/13/health/13paper.html
Some quotes:
When Bracha Klausner returned home after an extended hospital stay for a ruptured intestine three years ago, she found stacks of mail from doctors and hospitals waiting for her.
...
When she finally did open some of the envelopes, there were pages filled with dozens of carefully detailed items, each accompanied by a service code: "Partial thrombo 2300214 102.00," "KUB Flat 2651040 466.00."
...
Another mailing, from her insurance company, clearly said, in large type, "This is not a bill." But she could make no sense of the remark codes: "G7 - Your benefit is based on the difference between Medicare's allowable expense and the amount Medicare paid" or "QN - Your claim may have been separated for processing purposes."
Mrs. Klausner's experience is shared by millions of Americans who, frustrated and confused, find themselves devoting enormous amounts of time and energy to sorting out their medical bills.
Walk into any drugstore, and the next few minutes of your life are fairly predictable. After considering the choices, you make your purchases and head for the cashier. Seconds after the transaction, you are handed a receipt that reports to the penny what you paid for each product, along with its brand, its size, and the date, time and location of the purchase. But become a patient, and you enter a world of paperwork so surreal that it belongs in one of Kafka's tales of the triumph of faceless bureaucracies. And although some insurers and hospitals are trying to streamline and simplify bills, the efforts have been piecemeal.
Medical paperwork is a world of co-payments and co-insurers, deductibles, exclusions and contracted fees. Nothing is as it seems: patients receive statements that often do not reflect what is actually owed; telephone calls to customer service agents are at best time-consuming and at worst fruitless. The explanations of benefits that insurers send out - known as E.O.B.'s - are filled with unintelligible codes.
...
"I'm the president's senior adviser on health information technology, and when I get an E.O.B. for my 4-year-old's care, I can't figure out what happened, or what I'm supposed to do," said Dr. David Brailer, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, whose office is in the Department of Health and Human Services. "I can't figure out what care it was related to or who did what."
...
"Suppose you walk into a restaurant," he said, "and you don't get a menu, you don't get any choice of what food you'll eat, they don't tell you what it is when they're serving it to you, they don't tell you what it's going to cost."
"Then, weeks or months later, you get a bill that tells you all the food you ate and the drinks you had, some of which you remember and some you don't, and although you get the bill, you still can't figure out what you really owe," Dr. Brailer said.
Some people make valiant efforts to sort through bills and claims, but end up throwing up their hands; others ignore them, until they are pursued by collection agencies; still others, basically healthy but weary at the prospect of a paperwork fusillade, stop going to the doctor altogether.
In the days before managed care, most insurance plans operated on a fee-for-service basis. Patients paid 20 percent of medical fees; insurers paid 80 percent. But as health care costs have continued to rise, many patients are being required to pay an ever-larger part of their medical bills, and deductibles continue to increase. And to keep the system churning, close to 30 cents of every dollar spent on health care goes for administration, much of it spent generating bills and explanations of benefits.
"The number of bureaucrats between the point of service and the final cash reckoning is just incredible," said Dr. Thomas Delbanco, a professor of primary care medicine at Harvard Medical School who is a leader in the field of patient-centered care.
For many people, the piles of paperwork they must contend with reinforce a simmering discontent with a system that aggravates tensions among patients, hospitals, doctors and insurers.
...
"Even though the amount of paperwork a patient has to deal with might seem to be a lot, it would be much worse if there wasn't a unifying organization like a health plan easing that burden," said Dr. Alan Sokolow, chief medical officer at Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield in New York.
...
"People get these things that look expensive that they can't understand," Dr. Mustille said, "and then there's the worry that the people they've paid for insurance may decline to assume responsibility for it."
...
In the end, Medicare and United Healthcare paid most of Mrs. Klausner's bills, which added up to more than $150,000. And although the unwelcome mail has ceased, she cannot bring herself to throw out the bags filled mostly with unopened envelopes dating back to 2002, as if doing so might violate a law.
...
He said that his mother wrote check after check and that "I'm sure she was paying many of the same bills twice."
...
Finally, in the last months of his mother's life, Dr. Middleton hired a social worker who knew how to navigate the system to help with the bills.
...
"Each of them has their own system of paperwork, with their own billing codes," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a health care advocacy group.
...
Mr. Pollack and other health care experts said they believed that only a small percentage of people end up calling their insurance company to inquire about a claim or to dispute a decision. Still fewer call a hospital to go over a bill they believe might contain errors.
...
Though pushed to their emotional limits, Ms. MacKellar and her husband, Thomas Dube, refused to buckle until the bills started to appear in the mail each day: hospital bills amounting to tens of thousands of dollars; invoices from doctors she did not remember meeting; E.O.B.'s from her insurance company that explained nothing.
"It is hard to describe what it is like to be confronted with mounds of scary claims and bills when you have a 2-year-old who is extremely ill, who needs constant nursing and doesn't have a great chance of surviving," Ms. MacKellar said. "And to sit in a hospital room, on hold with the insurance company for 30 minutes or more only to have your child start puking just as you get a rep on the line."
The E.O.B.'s seemed to serve little purpose beyond engendering fear. They were detailed enough ("radiology services 2/19/04"), but when it came to understanding the boxes listing the amounts charged, the amounts not covered, the fees allowed, the available benefit and the remark code (IT, 29, and the ever-mysterious QN ), Ms. MacKellar and her husband were at a loss.
...
The breaking point came when the group number on the health plan changed, and Ms. MacKellar was unable to convince the insurance company that it was billing under the wrong number.
...
An expert in deciphering insurance and hospital billing codes, Ms. Osborn spent several days straight working on the case and took care of the entire mess, Ms. MacKellar said.
Although there is no single solution to the medical billing morass, Dr. Brailer, of the Health and Human Services Department, said that the increasing use of electronic records to enable insurers, physicians, hospitals and pharmacies to share data would help.
...
For the past 18 months, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina has been working to reduce the total amount of paper it sends out.
"When there's no remaining financial liability, then we don't send the E.O.B.'s," said Bob Greczyn, president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina is offering physicians an electronic card reader that lets patients find out how much they owe while they are still in the doctor's office.
In another effort to improve the system, the Patient Friendly Billing Project, led by the Healthcare Financial Management Association, is working with insurance companies on a long-term project to make bills more comprehensible.
...
Dr. Brailer pointed out that there had been frequent calls for a standardized insurance billing form, which would sharply reduce duplication and paperwork costs and "make patient management of these as simple as online checking."
...
Mr. Mayne went to his doctor three times between March and June for the same thing: recurring bronchitis.
Yet the explanation of benefits statements he received from his insurer after each office visit differed drastically in the amount he owed, varying from $10.66 to $90, with no explanation of the services provided.
...
When he calls for an explanation of the E.O.B.'s, he said, the most tangible result he sees is a new card in the mail with no indication of the amount he owes as a co-payment printed on the card.
...
And this last thought below - Tomorrow, it could be you or me...
"Oh wow, I hadn't even thought of that," Mr. Mayne said. "That's actually a pretty scary proposition. If I can't manage my health care as a healthy individual, the prospect of trying to manage it and be really sick at the same time - I don't know that I could do it."
The New York Times is making the point that many Americans - especiaally those who simply don't have the extra money to pay the increased costs of heating oil and natural gas to the oil industry, are preparing now for the long cold winter nights. Many are buying wood stoves and stores of firewood, or planning to cut their own as they do in Third World countries, or cutting back on all nonessential purchases. Others are closing off parts of their houses so they will be cheaper to heat. Others don't have any of these options, and some are still trying to pay back their debts from last years heating bills. Their only option seems to be to move in with others, perhaps adopting some sort of communal lifestyle in which others body heat and the sharing of meals and chores lessens the burdens of raw survival somewhat. Who knows...
But anyway, the question I am driven to ask out of all of this is:
Is it Un-American to share?
If not, why not?
It looks like Arctic ports that had never before (within recorded history) been very useful, because Arctic pack ice boxed them in for most of the year, are now apparently opening up to year-round traffic as that ice melts in the warmer global climates - This 'sea change' is shaving thousands of miles off of shipping routes between countries in the Northern Hemisphere!
This could be the beginning of a huge boom for Canada, as well as Alaska and Russia, Scandinavia, etc.
Check it out:
· Does McCain Want to Reenact the Draft? (fbihop)
· SD: New Poll Shows Tim Johnson Romping (lowkell)
· Iowa commission takes one small step against CAFOs (desmoinesdem)
· LA-06: Cazayoux's Gittin' It Done! (DailyKingFish)
· Secrets of the American Future Fund (chase martyn)
· Happy Birthday Jerome! (Jonathan Singer)
· Oilmen For Scott Garrett (NJ-5) (Aaron Banks)
· Youth Delegates at DNC Outnumber RNC 15 - 1 (Mike Connery)
· LA-02: James Carter's First Ad (DailyKingFish)
· Clean Coal's Goodie Bag for Dem. Delegates (lowkell)
· Liveblogging Obama Town Hall (fbihop)
· McCain's Goons Throw Birthday Cake In Trash (fbihop)
