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POPSThe Guatemala Genicide Case Among the witnesses was Jesus Tecú Osorio, survivor of the Río Negro massacre and winner of the Reebok Human Rights Award. Tecú was a child when the military began attacking the communities of Rabinal with increasing intensity during 1981 and into 1982. He was ten years old when he watched the Army and civil patrols (PAC) enter his village of Río Negro on March 13, 1982, and carry out the massacre that left 70 woman and 107 children dead, including his own mother and infant brother.
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POPSNeed a Job? $17,000 an Hour. No Success Required. John Kenneth Galbraith, the great economist, once explained: “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”
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POPSHealthcare Reform You Shouldn't Believe In
The most progressive way to fund such a system would be through an earmarked income tax, which would be more than offset by eliminating premiums and out-of-pocket expenses. This is not the same as Medicare for all. Medicare is embedded in our market-based entrepreneurial private system, and therefore experiences many of the same inflationary forces, including having to deal with profit-maximizing hospitals and physicians' groups. Doctors' fees are skewed to reward highly paid specialists for doing as many expensive tests and procedures as possible. As a result, Medicare inflation is almost as high as inflation in the private sector and similarly unsustainable. ...the private insurance industry has managed to convince many political leaders, including progressives, that a single-payer system is unrealistic. But what is truly unrealistic is anything else. My greatest concern about the Massachusetts plan is that when it unravels, people will draw the wrong lesson.
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POPSWall Street Shaken Over Health Insurers Profit Margins The nation's largest publicly traded health plans say they don't plan to temper premium increases for the sake of keeping members on their rolls -- particularly not while they are under pressure from Wall Street over what it sees as their disappointing earnings. Wall Street analysts were shaken over the long-term prospects of the health plan business after bellwethers WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group, the nation's two largest private-pay plans, reported less-than-expected profits from the first three months of this year. ...most say their risk-based commercial numbers -- representing traditional employer health benefits -- are declining or are not growing as quickly as anticipated. But health insurers say cutting premiums or reducing the rate of increase to keep customers would affect their bottom lines more than losing some members over premium hikes.
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POPSWake The Hell Up America! Enough Is Enough The broad ideological battle over the role of markets remains a basic dividing line and dominant theme in American health policy. The premise of what has often been called “managed care” is that in too many cases the wrong services are provided and that the right set of incentives or form of organization would lead to the right services provided to the right people at the right time. The theory of managed competition thus promised that a more market-oriented approach would increase value for money spent, by leading to better-informed or more prudent purchasing. Unfortunately, in order for any kind of “market-oriented” reform of American health care to have significantly positive effects on cost, access, and quality, it would have to include such substantial restrictions on the normal ways of doing business in U.S. markets that it would be barely recognizable as “market oriented."
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POPSS.E.C. Concedes Oversight Flaws Fueled Collapse The announcement was the latest illustration of how the market turmoil was rapidly changing the regulatory landscape. In the coming months, Congress will consider overhauls to the regulatory structure, but the markets and the regulators are already transforming it in response to events.
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POPSDesign and the Elastic Mind In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/118/
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POPSBill Moyers Journal: Impeachment This discussion presents the rationale for Impeachment of the president and the vice president better than any I've seen to date. Got to You tube and continue with part 2.
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POPSConservative businessmen sound out single payer Single payer healthcare could ultimately promote efficiency; improve pricing and quality-of-service transparencies; and reduce administrative costs and health-cost-related bankruptcies. Single payer health insurance could also ease the financial “burden” on big businesses by spreading the cost of healthcare across a wider pool of financial supporters who pay into the system. Also, healthier workers would mean fewer sick days and fewer sick days ultimately mean more profitable businesses.
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POPSMcCain/Palin Health Insurance Plan "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation." John McCain
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POPSThe $2 trillion Nightmare Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits.
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