100,000 Federal Employees Owe $962 Million in Back Taxes

March 18, 2010

ABC News

By: Devin Dwyer

Working for Uncle Sam comes with some great perks, like job stability, posh benefits packages, and in many cases, average salaries that are higher than what the same job pays in the private sector.

That’s why Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, is irked that nearly 100,000 civilian federal employees owe the IRS $962 million in back taxes. He thinks they should pay up or be fired.

Chaffetz has introduced a bill that calls for the federal government to “ferret out” civilian employees who have “seriously delinquent tax debt” and prevent the hiring of other tax delinquents.

More than 3 percent of the 2.8 million federal civilian employees owed the Treasury unpaid federal income taxes in 2008, according to the IRS. If you include retirees and military service members, the numbers go from nearly 100,000 up to 276,000 current or former workers who owe $3 billion in taxes.

“If you get to the point where the government is putting a lien on their property and they’ve exhausted their appeals& the right thing to do is fire them as a federal worker,” said Chaffetz. “If you’re going to take federal tax dollars, you should be paying your federal taxes.”

Currently, only IRS employees can be terminated for non-payment of federal income taxes — a measure Chaffetz wants extended to all federal agencies. The IRS has the lowest level of tax delinquency among its employees than at any other federal agencies, according to the most recent statistics.

But skeptics of Chaffetz’s plan argue firing the delinquents en masse circumvents due process and could only hamper efforts to recoup the cash.

Firing federal employees as soon as a lien is imposed by the IRS would be “prior to any due process hearing,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on the federal workforce.

“We have a system that’s in place. For a federal employee, we have the [IRS] garnish their pay at 15 percent — which is higher than for the regular taxpayer,” he said. “We’re getting the money back.”

Wade Morrow, assistant general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employees union, said workers should be held to account for back taxes but that Chaffetz’s rule would not accommodate the complexities of individual cases.

“There may be other facts and circumstances that you should consider,” he said, adding that some individuals may have become delinquent due to sickness or divorce complications or due to a mistake in tax filings. Morrow also said the most serious offenders could face termination under existing guidelines if the tax delinquencies interfere with their jobs.

“Getting them to pay back what they owe is preferable to having them all fired, in which case you’re not going to get anything at all,” said Morrow.

Chaffetz: Firing Federal Employee Tax Delinquents Aligns With Obama in Principle
Chaffetz conceded the terminations would probably make it harder for the individuals to pay their tax bills and said employees appealing to the IRS or “making a good faith effort” to repay them should be spared.

But he said a broad purge of tax delinquents is still justified and consistent with a principle laid out by President Obama for contractors employed by the federal government.

Earlier this year, Obama ordered federal agencies to terminate contracts with companies who don’t pay federal taxes.

“It’s simply wrong for companies to take taxpayer dollars and not be taxpayers themselves,” the president said Jan. 20. “We need to insist on the same sense of responsibility in Washington that so many of you strive to uphold in your own lives, in your own families and in your own businesses.”

Democrats in both the House and the Senate have introduced legislation codifying new rules for federal contractors who don’t pay their taxes. Chaffetz is the first and only Republican so far to co-sponsor the House version.

“I think the president’s right in the case [of companies] and now I’d like it expanded to federal workers as well,” he said. “If you’re going to take federal tax dollars, you should be paying your federal taxes.”

The bill is currently under consideration by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Click here for the full report.

Obama Seeks to Vilify Health Insurers, Give Them $336 Billion Check

March 10, 2010

ABC News

ABC’s Z. Byron Wolf reports: President Obama and Democrats launched a campaign to vilify insurance companies in the final stretch of their health reform effort.

Republicans, meanwhile, pointed out that those very same insurance companies would get huge checks from the government if health reform is enacted.

“(Health Insurers) will keep on doing this for as long as they can get away with it. This is no secret,” the president said. “They’re telling their investors this – ‘We are in the money.  We are going to keep on making big profits even though a lot of folks are going to be put under hardship,’” the President told supporters at a stop in Pennsylvania today.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, wrote to insurance company executives demanding that they justify premium hikes.

Neither mentioned that the Senate health reform bill, which is the basis for Democrats’ last best chance at comprehensive reform, would give the insurance companies millions of new customers required by law to buy health insurance. It would also require insurers to cover everyone, regardless of age, gender or pre-existing condition.

To help pay for the new insurance requirements the government would give to people money to buy insurance – $336 billion over the next ten years. That money, ultimately, would have to go to… drum roll… insurance companies.

People without employer-sponsored insurance who make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and less than about $88,000 for a family of four, would get tax credits to help them buy insurance on the open market. But the payment of the tax credits would be made, point out Republican researchers, directly to insurance companies. See page 37 here of the Senate Finance Committee’s exhaustive explanation of the plan:

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, then-Senator Obama criticized a proposal by Sen. John McCain because it would send government help for people to buy insurance directly to insurance companies.

“But The New Tax Credit [For Health Insurance] He’s Proposing? That Wouldn’t Go To You. It Would Go Directly To Your Insurance Company – Not Your Bank Account,” said Obama in October on the Campaign trail.

And yet that’s exactly what Democrats’ proposal would do and why so many would prefer public insurance option to compete with the private market. Supporting the Senate bill will be tough for many liberal Democrats in the House.

To the Republicans’ (and Obama’s on the campaign trail) point about the payments going directly to insurance companies, remember that people with employer-sponsored insurance or current federal medical benefits do not usually get a separate check to buy insurance either. They pay premiums directly to the insurance company and so does their employer. The Senate proposal would create a similar relationship between people who don’t have employer-based insurance and the government.

So why do Insurance companies, if they’re set to receive more than $330 billion in government subsidies to insure people without insurance now oppose the Senate bill?

“Health plans proposed more than a year ago robust insurance market reforms and new consumer protections to guarantee coverage for pre-existing conditions. Much more needs to be done in the current legislation to address the skyrocketing cost of medical care, which is making health care coverage unaffordable for working families and small businesses,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman from America’s Health Insurance Plans, in a statement today.

He argued that health insurers should not be targeted by the President and their profits are lower by margin than other sectors in the health industry.

“For every dollar spent on health care in America, less than one penny goes towards health plan profits. The focus needs to be on the other 99 cents,” he said.

Click here for the full report.

Sales Tax Rates Hit Record High

March 10, 2010

Forbes.com

By William P. Barrett

While President Obama’s push to raise federal income taxes for the wealthy gets lots of attention, the continuing upward creep in the sales tax rates imposed by state and local governments has gotten less notice.

But Vertex Inc., which calculates sales tax for Internet sellers, reports that the average general sales tax rate nationwide reached 8.629% at the end of 2009, the highest since the Berwyn, Pa., company started tracking data in 1982. That was up a nickel on a taxable $100 purchase from a year earlier and up nearly 40 cents for the decade. The highest sales tax rate in the country now stands at 12%.

During 2009 seven states and the District of Columbia raised sales tax rates, with one jurisdiction — North Carolina — actually doing it twice. Only four states hiked rates in 2008 and only one in 2007. Given state budget problems, the 2009 state sales tax increases aren’t surprising. States have also been raising income tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations and boosting excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. With states now facing record budget shortfalls, more tax increases seem likely.

State level sales tax generally accounts for only about two-thirds of the total sales tax bill. The rest comes from levies assessed by counties, municipalities, Indian tribes and special-purpose taxing districts funding mass transit, urban renewal and even stadiums. Among lower level jurisdictions such as counties and towns, Vertex counted 649 new or increased sales tax rates during 2009 and just 192 reductions.

The result is a wide range of combined sales tax rates across the country. At the bottom: 0%, found in all of Delaware and New Hampshire, and most of Montana, Oregon and Alaska. The country’s highest rate now is 12%, in the tiny portion of tiny Arab, Ala., (population 7,500) sticking into Cullman County. The rest of the northern Alabama town, in no-sales-tax Marshall County, pays just 8%.

Right now Chicago has the highest big-city rate, 10.25%. But in a move forced by Cook County lawmakers, the rate is scheduled to drop on July 1 to 9.75%, matching that of Los Angeles. In New York City the total bite is 8.875%. Other high big-city rates include San Francisco and Seattle(9.5%), New Orleans (9%), Houston, Dallas and Charlotte (8.25%), Las Vegas (8.1%) and Philadelphia and Atlanta (8%).

In Arizona, voters will go to the polls May 18 to pass judgment on a 1% rise in the state’s 5.6% rate for three years. If approved, the rate in Phoenix would jump from 8.3% to 9.3%.

Some of the highest sales taxes in the nation are designed to grab dollars from tourists. The New Orleans International Airport has a special 10.75% rate, while Snowmass Village, the ski resort in Colorado, levies a 10.4% sales tax. (Many locales also impose special higher taxes on services purchased by tourists, such as rental cars and hotel rooms.)

Nationally, sales taxes in 2008 generated more revenue for state and local governments — about $450 billion, a recent Government Accountability Office report suggests — than did either property taxes ($411 billion) or personal income taxes ($310 billion).

At the federal level and in some states, the income tax is progressive, with higher rates imposed on upper-income taxpayers. But rich and poor pay the same sales tax rate. In many states, however, there’s no sales tax on food or medical prescriptions.

The combined local sales rate is what local merchants charge for in-person customers. Through a parallel system called the use tax, it’s also what residents in a given jurisdiction are supposed to pay on purchases over the Internet from out-of-state sellers, but such payments are widely flouted. Congress has declined to pass legislation that would require large Internet only sellers like Amazon.com and Overstock.com to collect sales taxes for all states. (Currently, they only have to do so for states in which they have some physical presence.)

Many big online merchants, including Wal-Mart, Dell, Office Depot Inc. and Staples Inc., collect sales taxes from Internet buyers. Some states, with New York in the lead, have adopted new “Amazon” laws designed to force the Web giant and others to collect their taxes. More such laws are likely this year.

West Virginia adopted the country’s first sales tax in 1921. Periodically, the federal government has considered a national sales tax, but such proposals have never gotten traction.

In Canada, which has a national 5% sales tax, all but two of the provinces (Alberta and Saskatchewan) have combined sales taxes of 12% or higher. The highest is the 15.5% hit on Prince Edward Island.

To continue reading this report, click here.

Deepening Debt Crisis

February 3, 2010

Global Research

By Michael Hudson

If the economy deteriorates in the L-shaped “hockey-stick” rut that many economists forecast, what political price will President Obama and the Democrats pay for having returned the financial keys to the Bush Republican appointees who gave away the store in the first place? Reappointing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may end up injuring not only the economy but also the Democratic Party for years to come. Recognizing this, Republicans made populist points by opposing his reappointment during the Senate confirmation hearings last Thursday, January 27 – the day after Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address.

The hearings focused on the Fed’s role as Wall Street’s major lobbyist and deregulator. Despite the fact that its Charter starts off by directing it to promote full employment and stabilize prices, the Fed is anti-labor in practice. Alan Greenspan famously bragged that what has caused quiescence among labor union members when it comes to striking for higher wages – or even for better working conditions – is the fear of being fired and being unable to meet their mortgage and credit card payments. “One paycheck away from homelessness,” or a downgraded credit rating leading to soaring interest charges, has become a formula for labor management.

As for its designated task in promoting price stability, the Fed’s easy-credit bubble has made asset-price inflation the path to wealth, not tangible capital investment. This has brought joy to bank marketing departments as homeowners, consumers, corporate raiders, states and localities run further and further into debt in an attempt to improve their position by debt leveraging. But the economy has all but neglected its industrial base and the employment goes with manufacturing. The Fed’s motto from Bubblemeister Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke has been “Asset-price inflation, good; wage and commodity price inflation, bad.”

Here’s the problem with that policy. Rising prices for housing have increased the cost of living and doing business, widening the excess of market price over socially necessary costs. In times past the government would have collected the rising location rent created by increasing prosperity and public investment in transportation and other infrastructure making specific sites more valuable. But in recent years taxes have been rolled back. Land sites still cost as much as ever, because their price is set by the market. Land itself has no cost of production. Locational value is created by society, and should be the natural tax base because a land tax does not increase the price of real estate; it lowers it by leaving less “free” rent to be paid to the banks.

The problem is that what the tax collector relinquishes is now available to be paid to banks as interest. And prospective buyers bid against each other until the winner is whoever is first to pay the land’s location rent to the banks as interest.

This tax shift – to the benefit of the bankers, not homeowners – has made Mr. Obama’s hope of doubling U.S. exports during the next five years ring hollow. This is the upshot of “creating wealth” in the form of a debt-leveraged real estate and stock market bubble. Labor must pay more for debt-financed housing and education, not to mention payments to health insurance oligopoly and higher sales and income taxes shifted off the shoulders of financial and real estate.

Once the Republicans were certain which way the vote would go, they were able to voice some nice populist sound bites for the mid-term elections this November. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Sam Brownback of Kansas voted against Mr. Bernanke’s confirmation. Jim deMint of South Carolina warned that reappointing him would be “The biggest mistake that we’re going to make for a long time.” He added: “Confirming Bernanke is a continuation of the policies that brought our economy down.”

Among Democrats running for re-election, Barbara Boxer of California pointed out that by spurring the asset-price inflation, the Fed’s pro-Bubble (that is, pro-debt policy) has crashed the economy, shrinking employment. The Fed is supposed to protect consumers, yet Mr. Bernanke is a vocal opponent of the Consumer Finance Products Agency, claiming that the deregulatory Fed alone should be the sole financial regulator – seemingly an oxymoron.

Mr. Obama supports Mr. Bernanke and his State of the Union address conspicuously avoided endorsing the Consumer Financial Products Agency that he earlier had claimed would be the centrepiece of financial reform. Wall Street lobbyists have turned him around. Their logic was the same mantra that Connecticut insurance industry’s Sen. Chris Dodd repeated at the confirmation hearings: Mr. Bernanke has “saved the economy.”

To continue reading this report, click here.

Dick Morris: Obama Will Never Get Another Major Piece of Legislation Passed

January 21,2010

Prison Planet

By Paul Joseph Watson

Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris told Fox News yesterday that the election of Scott Brown was such a momentous event that it has killed all prospects of President Obama ever getting another major piece of legislation passed during his time in office.

Although Morris said that a watered down version of the health care bill would probably sneak through, he characterized the result as “absolutely incredible,” adding, “Nothing will ever be the same”.

“Let’s just stop for a second and understand the magnitude of the earthquake that hit Massachusetts….ultimately this is the end of the Obama ascendancy, he will never get another major piece of legislation passed,” said Morris.

However, as Alex Jones has warned, we heard similar noises when the Democrats seized control of the House and Senate back in 2006, and yet the wars, the big government and the attack on freedom only gathered more pace.

Indeed, despite the fact that Brown’s victory is being hailed as a crushing blow for the government, and there’s no doubt that it does represent a massive rejection of the Obama agenda, the fact remains that the Democrats hold a sizable majority in both the House and Senate, with the Senate majority being considerably larger than that enjoyed by Republicans during George W. Bush’s second term.

It’s therefore somewhat baffling as to why Democrats have manufactured talking points focused around the notion that, “It is mathematically impossible for Democrats to pass legislation on our own.”

Click here to read the full report

There Is No Economic Recovery Happening

January 11, 2010

The Market Ticker

By Karl Denninger

Look folks, this is really quite simple.

Economic Stability and Recovery = Credit Expansion.

We cannot recover until we purge the excess debt from the system, and the longer we take to do that, the longer the pain will last and the worse it will be.

President Obama and Tim Geithner know this – that’s why they are constantly harping on banks to “lend more.”

Well, they may want banks to lend more but the people are fed up with being debt slaves and are borrowing less.

Today, we got the latest from The Fed on this subject:

Consumer credit decreased at an annual rate of 8-1/2 percent in November. Revolving credit decreased at an annual rate of 18-1/2 percent, and nonrevolving credit decreased at an annual rate of 3 percent.

Non-revolving debt (basically auto loans) has pretty much stabilized since mid-year.  But consumer revolving debt – credit cards – continues to accelerate in its rate of decline.

These rates of decline are unprecedented and they are not slowing down.

The drop in credit card debt outstanding is on the largest on record since The Fed started keeping those records in 1943!

Consumer recovery?

There is none!

It is axiomatic that you can pump yourself full of speedballs (e.g. government spending) and stay up for days at a time.  It is also true that if you do too many speedballs you will have a heart attack and die, and there is no way to know precisely which is the “one too many” until you shoot it – at which point it’s too late to change your mind!

The so-called “recovery” has been driven by pump-priming, which has had at its root one primary intent – to drive citizens into herd behavior and get them to spend more and more (that they don’t have!)

But at the same time this has been the message credit card rates have been ramped and lines slashed.  So now Joe Six Pack is faced with a 30% interest rate on his credit card – if he has any open line left!

There is no possible way for this program to work, since the entire problem originally – what began this recession – was people that were unable to make their debt payments in the first place!

Small business will not hire until their debt load comes down to a reasonable level.  This will take literal years if we don’t quit trying to prevent the contraction of both asset prices and credit levels.  In the mean time millions of Americans will remain in destitution!

There is no way to avoid the bankruptcy of those firms and individuals who are over-levered.  The best solution (take the pain now!) will not prevent the bankruptcies, but it will get them over with and let the nation begin to emerge from the morass within 12-18 months.  For every month we keep trying to prevent the liquidation of insoluble debt we add months of additional time to that required to resolve the bust and deepen the amount of pain that must be suffered, since all we are doing is adding more debt upon existing debt.

It is time for Washington DC, including The Fed and Congress along with President Obama to embrace the facts – we must finish the de-leveraging that is necessary to return the citizens and corporations of this nation to fiscal health.  At the same time the government must stop spending twice what it takes in in taxes.

We have consumed too many speedballs, our heart rate is now 160, and if we don’t cut it out the bond market is telling us that we are about to have a fatal heart attack.

Click here for the full report.

Europe’s Looming Demise

January 6, 2010

Washington Times

By Pamela Geller

“The Europe as you know it from visiting, from your parents or friends is on the verge of collapsing,” Geert Wilders said in a speech in the United States last year.

The leader of the Netherlands’ populist Party for Freedom added: “We are now witnessing profound changes that will forever alter Europe’s destiny and might send the Continent in what Ronald Reagan called ‘a thousand years of darkness.’ ” And not just Europe, but America as well.

Been to Europe lately? Thought it was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The passage of the Lisbon Treaty, hailed by President Obama, nailed the coffin shut on national sovereignty in Europe. The people of Europe fought it, but were overwhelmed by their political elites and the lack of American leadership in this age of our rather Marxist, collectivist U.S. president.

Come Jan. 1, 2010, a disastrous and suicidal pact called the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (Europe/Mediterranean) goes into effect with little fanfare or examination. It boggles the mind that such a consequential and seismic cultural shift could be mandated and put into play without so much as a murmur from the mainstream media.

Why should Americans care about this? Americans have to care because this global gobbledygook is coming to our shores, thanks to our globalist president.

The European human rights group called Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE) has been working tirelessly to expose the mass Muslim immigration plan of the Euro-Med Partnership.

A statement on the SIOE Web site criticizes the secrecy of the process: “It was shocking to hear about the plans and at the same time knowing that Danish politicians and a [cowardly] Danish press – who is otherwise proud to be critical – has told nothing to the Danish people about this project which begins in January.

This also showed clearly at the conference. Only very few politicians showed up and no media. Those politicians who showed up had obviously never heard about the Euro-Mediterranean project.

The goal of the Euro-Mediterranean cooperation is to create a new Greater European Union encompassing both Europe and North Africa, with the Mediterranean Sea becoming a domestic Eurabian sea. The goal is to establish a “comprehensive political partnership,” including a “free trade area and economic integration”; “considerably more money for the partners” (that is, more European money flowing into North Africa); and “cultural partnership” – that is, importation of Islamic culture into post-Christian Europe.

According to the SIOE, in the Euro-Med plan “Europe is to be islamized. Democracy, Christianity, European culture and Europeans are to be driven out of Europe. Fifty million North Africans from Muslim countries are to be imported into the EU.”

Skeptical? It’s already happening. The British newspaper the Daily Express reported in October 2008 on “a controversial taxpayer-funded ‘job centre’ ” that opened in Mali at that time as “just the first step towards promoting ‘free movement of people in Africa and the EU.’ Brussels economists claim Britain and other EU states will ‘need’ 56 million immigrant workers between them by 2050 to make up for the ‘demographic decline’ due to falling birthrates and rising death rates across Europe.”

To offset this decline, a “blue card” system is to be created that will allow card holders to travel freely within the European Union and have full rights to work – as well as the full right to collect welfare benefits.

A Muslim population from Africa moving freely into Europe threatens America. On Christmas Day, a Nigerian Muslim flew from Amsterdam to Detroit and tried to explode a bomb on the plane – after he was allowed to board the plane without a passport. The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership will make jihad attacks like this one all the easier.

And once in Europe, Muslims have already begun demanding special privileges and accommodations. IslamOnline reported on Dec. 21 that “Muslims activists from 26 European countries have come together to launch the first rights council to enlighten European Muslims about their rights, monitor rising Islamophobia and defend Muslim rights in European courts of law.”

Ali Abu Shwaima, a Muslim leader in Italy, explained: “We think European human rights groups are not doing enough to defend the rights of Muslims. Therefore we thought that we need this new council, especially that all laws and constitutions in Europe respect freedom of religion and oppose all forms of discrimination and racism.”

“Islamophobia,” “discrimination” and “racism” are all terms Muslims in Europe and America use to confuse people into thinking that the perpetrators of Islamic terrorism are the real victims. And it is working: Mr. Wilders is going on trial in the Netherlands, instead of all the Islamic hate sponsors he is fighting against. It has to be this way, to increase harmony among the Muslim and non-Muslim member states of the Euro-Med Partnership.

This internationalism is already destroying what has made Europe free and great. And now Mr. Obama seems to want to do the same to America.

Click here for the full report.

Mayo Clinic To Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients in Arizona

January 6, 2010

Bloomberg.com

By David Olmos

The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.

More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.

Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.” Mayo’s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.

“Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,’” said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. “If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”

Medicare Loss

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.

Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said.

“We firmly believe that Medicare needs to be reformed,” Yardley said in a Dec. 23 e-mail. “It has been true for many years that Medicare payments no longer reflect the increasing cost of providing services for patients.”

Mayo will assess the financial effect of the decision in Glendale to drop Medicare patients “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona,” he said.

Nationwide, doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007, a payment gap that has remained stable during the last decade, according to a March report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a panel that advises Congress on Medicare issues. Congress last week postponed for two months a 21.5 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements for doctors.

National Participation

Medicare covered an estimated 45 million Americans at the end of 2008, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency in charge of the programs. While 92 percent of U.S. family doctors participate in Medicare, only 73 percent of those are accepting new patients under the program, said Heim of the national physicians’ group, citing surveys by the Leawood, Kansas-based organization.

Greater access to primary care is a goal of the broad overhaul supported by Obama that would provide health insurance to about 31 million more Americans. More family doctors are needed to help reduce medical costs by encouraging prevention and early treatment, Obama said in a June 15 speech to the American Medical Association meeting in Chicago.

Reid Cherlin, a White House spokesman for health care, declined comment on Mayo’s decision to drop Medicare primary care patients at its Glendale clinic.

Medicare Costs

Mayo’s Medicare losses in Arizona may be worse than typical for doctors across the U.S., Heim said. Physician costs vary depending on business expenses such as office rent and payroll. “It is very common that we hear that Medicare is below costs or barely covering costs,” Heim said.

Mayo will continue to accept Medicare as payment for laboratory services and specialist care such as cardiology and neurology, Yardley said.

Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said physicians’ claims of inadequate reimbursement are overstated. Rather, the program faces a lack of medical providers because not enough new doctors are becoming family doctors, internists and pediatricians who oversee patients’ primary care.

“Some primary care doctors don’t have to see Medicare patients because there is an unlimited demand for their services,” Berenson said. When patients with private insurance can be treated at 50 percent to 100 percent higher fees, “then Medicare does indeed look like a poor payer,” he said.

Annual Costs

A Medicare patient who chooses to stay at Mayo’s Glendale clinic will pay about $1,500 a year for an annual physical and three other doctor visits, according to an October letter from the facility. Each patient also will be assessed a $250 annual administrative fee, according to the letter. Medicare patients at the Glendale clinic won’t be allowed to switch to a primary care doctor at another Mayo facility.

A few hundred of the clinic’s Medicare patients have decided to pay cash to continue seeing their primary care doctors, Yardley said. Mayo is helping other patients find new physicians who will accept Medicare.

“We’ve had many patients call us and express their unhappiness,” he said. “It’s not been a pleasant experience.”

Mayo’s decision may herald similar moves by other Phoenix- area doctors who cite inadequate Medicare fees as a reason to curtail treatment of the elderly, said John Rivers, chief executive of the Phoenix-based Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association.

“We’ve got doctors who are saying we are not going to deal with Medicare patients in the hospital” because they consider the fees too low, Rivers said. “Or they are saying we are not going to take new ones in our practice.”

Click here for the full report.

U.S. Spends More On Afghanistan Than Airport Security

January 5, 2010

The Huffington Post

The botched Christmas airliner attack, followed by a steady stream of alarming reports about the vulnerability of airports, has prompted questions about the budgetary priorities that underline U.S. national security.

First and foremost is a fairly straightforward query: why is the U.S. spending so heavily in Afghanistan and Iraq, when a terrorist who nearly blew up an aircraft over Detroit journeyed from Nigeria to London to Yemen, all the while apparently being managed by al Qaeda in Pakistan?

The numbers indeed are sobering. In fiscal year 2009, the Transportation Security Administration was allocated $7.99 billion, $5.74 billion of which was earmarked for aviation security (Page 154). Only $128 million of that total was geared towards “enhancements at passenger checkpoints to improve the detection of prohibited items, especially weapons and explosives” which is roughly $100 million less than the tax break granted to Alaska fishermen in the stimulus package passed early this Congress.

Contrast those numbers with the dollars being poured into the two wars. A report released in September by the Congressional Research Service estimated that $94.8 billion was spent in Iraq in FY09. Another $55.2 billion is going to Afghanistan (more than ten times the amount spent on aviation security) with the number rising to $72.9 billion in 2010. That total, does not include the expected $30 billion that will be required to pay for additional troops.

For some national security experts, the imbalance is cause for concern. Not because one activity is being funded at the cost of another. But, rather, because homeland security requires attention and resources that more closely parallel overseas military operations.

“Yes, I think we are under-funding [airport security],” said Larry Korb, a defense analyst at the Center for American Progress. In late December, he and his organization released a report, which called on the Obama administration to pay for its escalation in Afghanistan through strategic cuts to the defense budget — specifically to obsolete weapons programs. That money could also be used to fill in the appropriate holes when it comes to domestic security operations.

“Obviously we are putting far more of our resources into offensive action as opposed to defense or development,” said Korb.

Not everyone is alarmed about the prospects that the United States is too bogged down in Afghanistan to handle the global threat of terrorism. In an interview with the Huffington Post last week, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen (D-M.D.) said that there was no disputing the notion that the failed airliner bombing had “transnational connections.”

Click here for the full report

Healthcare Bill Supports Corrupt Conventional Medicine

January 5, 2010

Natural News

By Mike Adams

Even if Obama’s health care reform bill becomes law, mandating that all Americans buy health insurance policies for a failed system of “sick care”, I will refuse to comply. I’ve read the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, and nowhere in that document do I find that the federal government has the power to force consumers to purchase for-profit insurance products from private companies.

The very basis of the health care reform bill is, at its core, unconstitutional. If this mandate is allowed to stand, it sets a dangerous precedent for the U.S. government to require us to purchase other products and services from whatever industries it chooses to support. What’s next? Will the government pass a law forcing us to buy pharmaceuticals at thousands of dollars a year? Will it force us to purchase U.S.-made automobiles in order to boost the automobile industry? Is our economic free choice now centrally planned by our own government operating like Communist China?

This is a serious question that Constitutional scholars will no doubt be debating in the months ahead. But who am I kidding anyway? The U.S. government has long since abandoned the U.S. Constitution and no has any intention of abiding by it. Want proof? Read just one amendment: the 10th amendment.

Our right to choose has been stolen away
In addition to the very serious legal problems with government-mandated private health insurance, this health care reform law strips away my right to choose what type of medicine I wish to be treated with. I don’t find any credibility in the drugs-and-surgery approach to health care. The pharmaceutical industry is riddled with scientific fraud, quackery, corruption and criminal behavior — much of it documented right here on NaturalNews.com. Its drugs are approved by a corrupt, dishonest regulatory agency (the FDA) that has abandoned science in its quest to push more drugs onto the people. Why should I, as a “free” American, be forced to pay money to a system that I know to be largely based on fraud?

If I had a choice, I would prefer to buy into a system of naturopathic care, where doctors respect the healing ability of the human body and try to work with the patient instead of assaulting him with chemicals and surgeries. But Obama’s health care reform bill gives me no such choice. I cannot choose to direct my money into a system of medicine that I trust and respect. Instead, I am being forced to pay money into a system that is morally corrupt and scientifically fraudulent. It is a system that will only bring more harm and suffering to the people while enhancing the profits of the greed-driven corporations behind this medical scam.

Click here for the full report

Next Page »