Update on Criminal Contempt Case
March 24, 2010 by KT
Filed under Kevin's Blog
Today, we filed our reply to the opposition brief in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in my criminal contempt case.
-KT
Johnson & Johnson Under Scrutiny for Illicit Drug Payoffs, Kickbacks
March 24, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
The U.S. Justice Department has announced that it is investigating pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson for paying kickbacks to pharmacy benefits manager Omnicare.
Pharmacy benefits managers are supposed to negotiate on behalf of health plans and their customers to secure lower prices from drug companies and pharmacies. Yet according to the Justice Department, Omnicare took millions of dollars in payments from companies such as giant Johnson & Johnson in exchange for promoting their drugs.
“Patients have a right to depend on the integrity of the medical advice they’re getting,” said assistant attorney general Tony West. “When kickbacks are involved, the medical judgment of the provider is corrupted.”
Omnicare recently agreed to a $98 million settlement in the Justice Department lawsuit against it, while IVAX pharmaceuticals agreed to pay $14 million. According to prosecutors, IVAX paid Omnicare $8 million to recommend its generic drugs to nursing homes and their patients.
The government alleges that Johnson & Johnson also paid such kickbacks, in order to get Omnicare to promote its antipsychotic drug Risperdal and discourage doctors from prescribing alternative drugs.
Observers and insiders say that the practice of paying kickbacks is widespread in the drug business.
“Almost invariably if we see one practice in one company, it’s happening at other companies,” U.S. Attorney Mike Loucks said.
According to Brian Smith, president of pharmacy benefits manager Veritas, the practice was open and accepted within the business when he entered it in 2002.
“I thought it was just the industry standard,” he said.
Patrick Burns of Taxpayers Against Fraud says that kickbacks are one of the main ways that pharmacies get an edge on competitors who are selling fundamentally similar products.
“In the pharmaceutical industry, the business isn’t selling the best drug, it’s the best scheme of kickbacks to the prescriber,” Burns said. “Omnicare is just one of their sales points.”
Click here for the full report.
Defective Drugs and Side Effects
March 24, 2010 by KT
Filed under Kevin's Blog
As I promised on my radio show last week, here is the list of defective drugs and their side effects.
This is a great document to read because it could end up saving your life.
Click here to view the document.
Click here to get more information on defective drugs, medical devices and other products.
Yours in Health,
KT
IRS to Act as Enforcer for “Obama-care”
March 24, 2010 by Brandy
Filed under Government
March 23, 2010
CNSnews.com
By: Matt Cover
The Internal Revenue Service will function as the government’s chief enforcer for health care reform, should President Obama sign the bill into law as expected, monitoring both businesses and individuals to certify whether they have the insurance coverage the government requires.
The tax collection agency will be responsible for monitoring and enforcing compliance with the individual and employer insurance mandates which form the backbone of the Democrats’ hard-won reforms.
The bill states that the purpose of the mandates is to regulate “economic and financial decisions about how and when health care is paid for, and when health insurance is purchased.”
The mandates require that all Americans carry a minimum level of health insurance or pay a separate tax for every month they are without such coverage. All employers with 50 employers or more will also be required to provide their employees with that same minimum level of coverage.
While that minimum level of coverage will be defined at a later date by the Department of Health and Human Services, it will be the responsibility of the IRS to monitor individuals and employers and to punish those who do not comply.
Under the bill, which passed despite bipartisan opposition March 21, starting in 2014 the IRS would be responsible for monitoring which employers are complying with the mandate and which ones are not. The IRS would begin such monitoring of individuals’ health insurance status in 2014 as well.
The IRS would monitor individuals and businesses’ health insurance statuses through the mandatory reporting the bill requires. Under the law, every individual and most businesses are required to report to the IRS, on their tax returns, whether they have purchased or provided the required level of coverage and disclose to the IRS which months, if any, in which they failed to do so.
Using this information, the IRS would then determine whether an employer or individual falls under the mandate, which contains exceptions for religious conscience, hardship, incarcerated persons, and members of Indian tribes.
If either an individual or a business has failed to comply with this mandate for any month out of the year, they are required to pay a separate tax to the IRS. For individuals this is a maximum of $750 per person (up to $2,250 per household) and $750 per uncovered employee for businesses.
Because these penalties would each apply on a monthly basis, individuals and employers would have to pay 1/12th of the maximum penalties for each month they failed to comply with the mandates.
In order to carry out its new monitoring and enforcement duties, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the IRS will need $10 billion in additional funds, funds which were not made available under the health reform bill.
An analysis done by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that this $10 billion could go to fund an additional 16,500 new IRS agents and other personnel to monitor and enforce the new mandates.
“[T]he IRS could add more than 16,500 additional agents, auditors, examiners, and administrative support personnel to enforce large portions of the nation’s health insurance system,” the report said.
The IRS will also be in charge of collecting the new taxes on high cost insurance plans and on so-called unearned income from couples making over $250,000 per year and single filers making over $200,000 per year.
Both of these provisions could be modified should the Senate approve a budget reconciliation measure the House also passed March 21. Whichever final form they take, they are both direct taxes and thus will be directly administered by the IRS.
Because these new mandates and taxes are under the purview of the IRS, taxpayers and businesses could incur additional penalties normally reserved for normal income tax cheats, paying fees over and above those for not complying with Congress’ new mandates.
The IRS currently charges potentially hefty penalties for, among other things, filing false or fraudulent returns, filing late returns, and failure to pay a tax on time.
Taxpayers and businesses could be hit with these extra penalties because they are required to use their tax returns to prove to the IRS that they are complying with the mandates and because they will have to pay any tax penalties to that agency as well.
Click here for the full report.
How Soon is Too Soon for Infants to Start Drinking Soda?
March 24, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
If you really want to give your baby a head start in life by improving their social standing and guaranteeing their happiness, start feeding them Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other sugary carbonated beverages at the earliest age possible. Even babies as young as a few months old will enjoy the many benefits of soda pop.
Sound bizarre? That’s the message the Soda Pop Board of America promoted back in the 1950′s. Here’s the actual text from a full-page ad:
(View the ad yourself at http://naturalnews.com/Images/Cola-… )
For a better start in life, Start COLA earlier!
How soon is too soon?
Not soon enough. Laboratory tests over the last few years have proven that babies who start drinking soda during that early formative period have a much higher chance of gaining acceptance and “fitting in” during those awkward pre-teen and teen years.
So, do yourself a favor. Do your child a favor. Start them on a strict regimen of sodas and other sugary carbonated beverages right now, for a lifetime of guaranteed happiness.
The Soda Pop Board of America
1515 W. Hart Ave – Chicago, IL
- Promotes Active Lifestyle!
- Boosts Personality!
- Gives body essential sugars!
Sound familiar?
This marketing of harmful products to infants and toddlers sounds eerily familiar to the marketing tactics exploited by Big Pharma and its psychiatric drugs today. The words are almost exactly the same: “A lifetime of guaranteed happiness” echoes the marketing of any number of drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta or other psychotropic drugs.
Soda companies, much like drug companies, have relentlessly tried to convince parents that forcing their products onto their children is a smart thing to do. Do you see how drinking soda was linked to “fitting in” during the teen years? It’s clever, covert persuasion: Your child will be “cool” if you feed him soda pop as an infant. But if you don’t, your child may be an outcast!
It’s the same with psychiatric drugs today: If you don’t put your child on Concerta or other mind-altering drugs, they won’t succeed in school! Or they’ll be hated by their teachers…
It’s all the same mind-game marketing, just dressed up with new chemicals.
What about obesity?
Did you notice that the Soda Pop Board of America somehow neglected to tell parents that feeding their babies sugary carbonated beverages may result in:
• Obesity
• Diabetes
• Loss of bone density
• Dental cavities
• Nutritional deficiencies
These “side effects” of consuming soda pop are mysteriously never mentioned. (Gee, I wonder why?)
Similarly, modern-day drug companies never tell parents the truth about how psychiatric drugs may cause:
• Diabetes
• Suicidal thoughts
• Violent behavior
• Stunted brain development
In both cases — soda pop companies and pharmaceutical companies — their job is to mislead parents into feeding their children poisons that just happen to generate huge profits for the companies doing the advertising.
The whole point of much of the advertising that goes on today is to mislead and mis-inform parents so that they make purchasing and consumption decisions that stand in contradiction to their own interests.
To continue reading this report, click here.
“Obama-care” Equals Elective Dictatorship
March 24, 2010 by Brandy
Filed under Government
March 23, 2010
Telegraph.co.uk
By: Toby Young
Wow. Talk about close. 219-212. No wonder the anti-abortion Democrats were able to secure some last-minute concessions. If four representatives had switched sides, Obama would have lost the vote.
Has America been more politically divided over an issue since the Civil War? Civil Rights? At least that issue cut across party lines, whereas health care reform — or “socialised medicine”, as its opponents call it — has divided the parties right down the middle. Not a single Republican voted for the bill. (Admittedly, 34 Democrats voted against it.) This was a bitterly fought legislative campaign that gave the lie to Obama’s claim that his Presidency would be “postpartisan”. He is the most partisan President in living memory.
In this respect, Obama has had to conduct himself more like a British Prime Minister than an American Head of State. When I studied A-level politics back in the Reagan era, I remember being taught that the two great American political parties, unlike ours, only existed as electoral machines. They coalesced around one candidate every four years, then fractured again, with Presidents bolting together bi-partisan coalitions to push through legislation. The President didn’t depend for his survival on retaining the support of his party in the same way that our Prime Minister does and, hence, his party didn’t have to stay together after he’d been elected, at least not to the same extent. This, I was taught, was one of the advantages of America’s separation of powers. Because the executive branch of the government didn’t need to control the legislative branch in order to remain in office, it hadn’t developed anything like the same control mechanisms as the British Prime Minister. This meant the British people had more to fear from the centralisation of power than Americans. Elective dictatorship — the phrase Lord Hailsham coined to describe the dominance of Parliament by the government of the day — was a greater threat to Britain than it was to America.
The emergence of elective dictatorship in America — with the President having to use every stick at his disposal to beat his parliamentary party into submission — is surely one of the least attractive aspects of Obama’s Presidency. According to today’s New York Times:
Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote. Even President Lyndon B. Johnson got just shy of half of Republicans in the House to vote for Medicare in 1965, a piece of legislation that was denounced with many of the same words used to oppose this one. That may be the true measure of how much has changed in Washington in the ensuing 45 years, and how Mr. Obama’s own strategy is changing with the discovery that the approach to governing he had in mind simply will not work.
“Let’s face it, he’s failed in the effort to be the nonpolarizing president, the one who can use rationality and calm debate to bridge our traditional divides,” said Peter Beinart, a liberal essayist who is publishing a history of hubris in politics.
It seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that this is the end of the affair. No doubt the Republicans in the Senate have a few delaying tricks up their sleeves and opponents of the bill, having failed to stop its passage in the legislative branch of the government, will switch their attention to the judicial branch. It will be interesting to see how far Obama can use the powers vested in him as President to railroad through these reforms. An elected dictator? I cannot see a freedom-loving people putting up with such a figure for long.
Click here for the full report.
Cops Enlist Cabbies to Fight Crime
March 24, 2010 by Brandy
Filed under Government
March 23, 2010
kktv.com
By: Marybeth Brush
Making our community safer; that’s the goal of a new partnership starting today with a local business and Colorado Springs police. The drivers of Yellow Cabs will now be an extra set of roving eyes and ears to help police catch criminals.
One of those drivers is Andy Michopoulos. A Yellow Cab has been his office for three years. But now he will be doing double duty in an effort to help keep our city safe. “As a driver who’s out at all times of night and all over the city, you see things going on and to have a direct way of reporting that to the police is definitely a plus,” says Michopoulos.
“Just like our squad cars they have 2-way radios, they have cell phones and they have mobile data terminals,” says Colorado Springs Police Chief Richard Myers. He feels this is a win-win situation for our community. “So by just increasing their awareness a little bit on how to watch the unusual, how to identify things that could be criminal activity in progress, it’s just a short stretch to get them to take the extra time to pick up the mic and call dispatch,” says Chief Myers.
“I’m very excited about it. Anytime a company or individual can do anything to help the security of community, it’s a good thing,” says Michopoulos.
All the Yellow Cab cars will have a decal on them letting everyone know they are part of the COP program. COP stands for “Cabs On Patrol.” As an extra incentive, the Yellow Cab company is also making some cash awards available for cabbies who report crimes.
Click here for the full report.
Six States See Dramatic Rise in C-Sections
March 24, 2010
New York Times
By Denise Grady
The Caesarean section rate in the United States reached 32 percent in 2007, the country’s highest rate ever, health officials are reporting.
The rate has been climbing steadily since 1996, setting records year after year, and Caesarean section has become the most common operation in American hospitals. About 1.4 million Caesareans were performed in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available.
The increases — documented in a report published Tuesday — have caused debate and concern for years. When needed, a Caesarean can save the mother and her child from injury or death, but most experts doubt that one in three women need surgery to give birth. Critics say the operation is being performed too often, needlessly exposing women and babies to the risks of major surgery. The ideal rate is not known, but the World Health Organization and health agencies in the United States have suggested 15 percent.
The continuing rise “is not going to be good for anybody,” said Dr. George A. Macones, the chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis and a spokesman for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “What we’re worried about is, the Caesarean section rate is going up, but we’re not improving the health of babies being delivered or of moms.”
Risks to the mother increase with each subsequent Caesarean, because the surgery raises the odds that the uterus will rupture in the next pregnancy, an event that can be life-threatening for both the mother and the baby. Caesareans also increase the risk of dangerous abnormalities in the placenta during later pregnancies, which can cause hemorrhaging and lead to a hysterectomy. Repeated Caesareans can make it risky or even impossible to have a large family.
The new report notes that Caesareans also pose a risk of surgical complications and are more likely than normal births to cause problems that put the mother back in the hospital and the infant in an intensive-care unit. The report states, “In addition to health and safety risks for mothers and newborns, hospital charges for a Caesarean delivery are almost double those for a vaginal delivery, imposing significant costs.”
Fay Menacker, an author of the report and a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics, which published the report, said, “There’s been an increase for women of all ages and racial and ethnic groups, and all states.”
The highest rates of Caesarean births were in New Jersey (38.3 percent) and Florida (37.2 percent), and the lowest were in Utah (22.2 percent) and Alaska (22.6 percent).
The report notes that the rate in the United States is higher than those in most other industrialized countries. But rates have soared to 40 percent in some developing countries in Latin America, and the rates in Puerto Rico and China are approaching 50 percent. A report by the World Health Organization published earlier this year in The Lancet, a medical journal, said hospitals in China might be doing unnecessary operations to make money.
There is no single reason for the continuing increase in the United States. Rising multiple births because of fertility treatments have a role, because they often require Caesareans. But, the report notes, Caesarean rates for singletons increased substantially more than those for multiples. Another factor is that more older women are giving birth nowadays, and they are more likely to have Caesareans — but women under 25 had the greatest increases in Caesareans from 2000 to 2007.
Nonmedical issues are also involved. Obstetricians, fearful of being sued if there is harm to a baby after a normal labor and delivery, are quicker than they used to be to perform a Caesarean.
To continue reading this report, click here.
Americans Crave Wall Street Oversight
March 23, 2010
Bloomberg.com
By: John McCormick and Alison Vekshin
Americans are leery about creating a new federal agency to make consumer-protection rules for mortgages and credit cards and would prefer to enhance the existing powers of banking regulators.
Most people interviewed in the Bloomberg National Poll say they don’t like Wall Street, banks or insurance companies and favor letting the government punish bankers who helped cause the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Almost seven out of 10 people surveyed support using current bank regulators for consumer protection, backing positions held by the financial industry and Republicans over President Barack Obama’s proposal to establish an independent agency.
The poll’s findings come as the White House and congressional Democrats pivot to focus more election-year attention on an unpopular political target — banks and Wall Street — following this week’s victory on health-care legislation.
“Let’s not paint all of Wall Street with the same brush, but there are those who really did tremendous harm to our economy,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters. “So now we will have a bill because we can’t ever let this happen again to the American people.”
As the country struggles with a 9.7 percent unemployment rate while financial stocks surge, 57 percent of Americans have a mostly unfavorable or very unfavorable view of Wall Street, versus fewer than one-quarter who have a favorable opinion. Banks are viewed badly by 54 percent of poll respondents, and 60 percent have a negative opinion of insurance companies.
Disdain for Executives
The poll also shows most Americans don’t like the nation’s top corporate bosses. Almost two-thirds say they have an unfavorable opinion of business executives, a rating that rivals the public’s disdain for Congress, which was viewed with disfavor by 67 percent of respondents.
The poll of 1,002 U.S. adults was conducted March 19-22 by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, Iowa. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Low esteem for financial firms was reflected in resentment of big paychecks on Wall Street.
Fifty-six percent of those polled say they would support government action to limit compensation of those who helped cause the financial crisis, or to ban those people from working in the banking industry.
“The amount of money that people on Wall Street make seems to be really out of bounds,” said Laure Sinclair, 52, a part- time accountant who lives in Dallas. “But I don’t know that the government can regulate that because we want to be a capitalist society.”
To continue reading this report click here.
Study Suggests Women Exercise an Hour a Day to Maintain Weight
March 24, 2010
The Wall Street Journal
By Jennifer Corbett Dooren
A new study shows women need 60 minutes of moderate exercise a day to prevent weight gain as they age if they consume a normal diet.
The findings suggest women need more exercise than the current federal guidelines of 150 minutes a week, or 30 minutes five days a week, of moderate-to-intense activity.
The study is being published in the March 24/31 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“I don’t want people to throw up their hands and say ‘I can’t do it,’ ” said I. Min Lee, the study’s lead researcher and a doctor and associate professor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Women at a normal weight who consume a normal diet can beat middle-age weight gain by working out intensely for 30 minutes a day, whether by running, cycling, swimming laps or working out at a gym. Weight gain can also be prevented with 60 minutes of moderate activity, such as walking, a leisurely bike ride or playing catch.
The federal guidelines of 150 minutes a week of moderate-to-intense exercise are designed to prevent disease and obtain other health benefits. However, a 2002 report by the Institute of Medicine suggested 60 minutes a day, or 420 minutes a week, are needed to prevent weight gain.
Dr. Lee said because the basis of IOM’s findings have been questioned, she and other researchers decided to look at the issue within the group of women participating in the federal Women’s Health Study. She also said the goal was to look at women who weren’t dieting and were consuming a normal diet to see what impact physical activity has on weight.
The study looked at 34,079 healthy U.S. women who consumed a usual diet from 1992 to 2007. The women were all age 45 or older at the start, with an average age of 54. They were given a questionnaire about the amount of exercise or activity they engaged in per week at the start of the study and then at three-year intervals. Their activity was tracked for an average of 13 years while weight changes were tracked over a three-year period.
Overall, women gained an average of 5.7 pounds in the study. However, those who were normal weight, with a body-mass index of less than 25, maintained their weight if they exercised for 60 minutes a day. Women who exercised less generally gained weight. Dr. Lee said for overweight or obese women, 60 minutes of exercise a day wasn’t enough to maintain weight, suggesting calories need to be cut.
Click here for the full report.
