It began like by accident. A minor every day matter many of us encounters. It was about weeds, yes weeds, taking over our yard on all sides. My wife, Lillie, and I had been able to deal with it with Roundup. But this year neither of us found ourselves physically capable of coping with those weeds.

Carolene Endersby, a friend, happened to mention we should contact Reverend Ron Fairbairn who was working with some kids trying to earn some money over the summer. I e-mailed the good pastor If you have kids available and that want to earn some money during the summer, we’d like to make arrangements to have them pull our weeds.

He emailed back I have given them your name and address and phone, they will be contacting you soon. I had no idea who “them” were. Then Ron e-mailed I forgot to mention, there is no charge!!! You cannot pay them Sir.

No charge! I thought, Why would these kids be willing to work in the hot sun to rid my yard of weeds and not be paid? I couldn’t figure it out.

The answer came by e-mail from a man I’ve never heard of…Loyd Platson. He wrote:

I am responding to your request to have youth pull weeds at your house. We do have youth available to do this as well as other odd jobs that you may have. The youth work through the NyE Communities Coalition (NyECC) under a program geared towards helping them develop positive work related behaviors and attitudes. I coordinate the Youth Workforce Development Program for NyECC.

Fortunately I hadn’t deleted the e-mail from Mr. Platson from among the scores of e-mails I receive daily. I wondered, just what is this Youth Workforce Development Program for NyECC?

Then Tom Waters asked me if I had heard anything about my yard weeds yet. I filled him in. He offered to make a phone call, which I declined.

Then came a phone call from Ken Gonzales asking if he could come by and take a look at our yard to see what needed to be done. I didn’t know Ken either. He arrived, surveyed the yard, and informed me he had a crew of kids scheduled to undertake the project two days later.

I awoke early (around 6:00 a.m.) and frankly had forgotten about Ken’s visit. I stepped onto our patio. I saw a man clipping bushes. He was part of the work crew. I looked around and saw 14 people all over the front, back and side yards quietly and diligently removing our weeds. I was absolutely shocked and amazed. They had been at it since 5:00 a.m.! By 11:00 a.m. the weeds were gone.

The work crew consisted of: Ken Gonzales (supervisor), Terri Gonzales (supervisor), David Balien, Rocky McLennan, Alex Glynn, Brian Bostain, Reece Trstensky, Jeffrey Yang, Justin Yang, Jonathan Isaccks, Andrew Gonzales, Stephen Yang, Daniel Liebig and Sharina Sheppard. A stellar group exemplifying there is positive hope in our Pahrump community.

The whole thing is part of the Nye Community Coalition. Remember Hillary Clinton’s book, It Takes A Village? That the concept is alive and well in Pahrump.

Lillie’s and my humble thank you goes out to Carolene Endersby, Ron Fairbairn, Loyd Platson, Tom Waters, Ken Gonzales, all those kids in the Youth Workforce Development Program for NyECC.

You are welcome to read more about this and other matters on the Nye-Gateway to Nevada’s Rurals blog at http://nyegateway.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Featheriver.

The Daily Beast

A few days ago I blogged a post about March being the month in which outstanding women are featured. Today The Daily Beast has a featured article about

Women in the World, will showcase the stories of outstanding women leaders fighting sex trafficking, child marriage, and other challenges holding back women and girls. Featuring Meryl Streep, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Her Majesty Queen Rania, and activists from across the globe, it will be a live event—live-streamed on The Daily Beast—that focuses in depth on powerful human stories about women. The gathering will include women pioneers in government, media, social activism, business, and the arts. It’s shaping up to be an incredibly exciting three days of provocative political discussion, dramatic presentations, and fiery debate, including such terrific participants as former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright; Thomas L. Friedman; Katie Couric; Meryl Streep; Prajwala founder and anti-trafficking activist Sunitha KrishNan; Chouchou Namegabe, the Congolese anti-rape activist and journalist; Kakenya Ntaiya, the founder of girls’ schools in Kenya; Afghan women’s activist Suraya Pakzad; Barbara Walters; Christiane Amanpour; French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde; Nora Ephron; Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett, former British first lady and human-rights lawyer Cherie Blair; and many, many more. To get involved with this remarkable and important event, email us. Connect with the Women in the World Summit on Facebook, Twitter, and our own Social Engagement Site.

A tip of my hat to The Daily Beast for calling such an array of women leaders to our attention.

Insurance Exec Turned Whistleblower Wendell Potter Speaks Out Against Healthcare Industry.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed Wendell Potter, former Vice President of Cigna. (Click the Democracy Now link to see the video) As the debate over healthcare reform intensifies on Capitol Hill, we spend the hour with a former top insurance executive who’s now exposing the industry’s dirty secrets. Wendell Potter once served as the head of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies. We speak to Potter about his own transformation from industry mouthpiece to whistleblower, the healthcare industry’s extensive PR and lobbying machine, the campaign to discredit Michael Moore’s film Sicko, and the insurance industry’s most pressing task: the fight against a public option, let alone a single-payer system. [Read more →]

Submitted by Wendell Potter on July 1, 2009 – 8:29am. [PR Watch.Org]

I’m hoping President Obama realizes that some of the folks who’ve been currying favor with him are not, as they claim, bringing “solutions” to the health care reform table. Most Americans — especially those who voted for him — want nothing to do with the kind of “reforms” they are peddling.

If you watched the president’s televised Q&A on ABC last Wednesday night, you probably noticed that one of the people in the audience was Ron Williams, the chairman and CEO of Aetna, Inc., the nation’s third largest health insurer, and currently one of the most profitable. But there are a few things that you should know about Williams.

Back in the ’90s, Aetna set out on an acquisition binge in its quest to become the biggest health insurer in the country. It got there by the end of the decade after spending billion of dollars for several competitors. By 1999 it had 21 million health plan members, the most any insurer had ever had at the time.

But, as often happens after buying sprees, Aetna soon came down with a bad case of buyers’ remorse. As it turned out, some of the customers it had paid top price for were not as profitable as Wall Street analysts and the big institutional investors who owned most of Aetna’s stock expected. When they took a closer look at what Aetna had bought, investors started deserting the company in droves. As a result, the company found its stock price in a free fall.

As the Wall Street Journal reported on August 13, 2004, Aetna’s pretax profits as a percentage of revenues began falling dramatically after peaking at about 12 percent in 1998. By 2001 the company was a basket case as far as Wall Street was concerned. It had to do something, and fast.

Probably the most important thing it did to turn itself around was recruit Williams from rival WellPoint, the ambitious for-profit company that was gobbling up Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans from coast to coast.

As the Journal reported, Williams promptly ordered a $20 million revamp of Aetna’s data systems. Health care analyst Joshua Raskin told the Journal that the new system that emerged from that investment, which Aetna dubbed the Executive Management Information System (EMIS for short), was “the single largest driver of the Aetna turnaround.” Why? Because it helped Aetna “identify and dump unprofitable corporate accounts.” How did it do the dumping? By jacking up premiums to unaffordable levels.

By the time the dumping — or purging, as it is frequently called in the industry — was done, Aetna had shed eight million of its 21 million members. It shrank so much that by the time it emerged from the Ron Williams-led turnaround, it had fewer members than when the company started out on its multi-billion dollar buying binge.

While Aetna was shedding those eight million men, women and children, by the way, it also reportedly shed 15,000 of its employees. Wall Street likes it when insurers dump employees, too, because the workers who don’t get the ax have to assume the responsibilities of their laid-off colleagues. That theoretically boosts productivity, which Wall Street likes. And reducing the payroll leaves more money for profits.

The health insurance industry and its allies are working hard right now to convince you that the creation of a public insurance option would put a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor. As the 2004 Wall Street Journal article makes it clear, however, EMIS was at its heart a system that put corporate bureaucrats between people and their doctors. Here’s what it said:

Mr. Williams says EMIS helps him ferret out creeping costs so Aetna can react quickly. Sitting in his first-floor office in Hartford overlooking the Aetna parking lot, he taps on his keyboard to see whether some of the health insurer’s members are visiting emergency rooms too much for nonemergency reasons, such as for the flu or a sprained ankle.

Did that send a chill up your spine like it did mine? And know this, if Aetna’s CEO can keep an eye on your trips to the doctor, so can the CEOs of all the other big insurers.

The insurance industry claims that this time it really and truly supports legislation to reduce the number of people without insurance, that they’ve changed so much since 1994 — when they said the same thing but did everything they could behind the scenes to kill reform — that you can and should believe them now.

The next time you hear someone from the industry talking about how much they are committed to reform, remember that just a few years ago, the CEO of one of the biggest health insurers was the mastermind behind a business strategy that cost thousands of workers their jobs and millions of other people their insurance coverage. That’s the real “solution” the industry is bringing to the table — and the kind of reform Wall Street can really get behind.

Ron Williams has been richly rewarded by Aetna’s board of directors for leading the company back to a level of profitability suitable to Wall Street. They tapped him to succeed Jack Rowe as CEO when Rowe retired in 2006. And they rewarded him with compensation totaling nearly $65 million over the past two years.

(Rowe, by the way, was paid $22.2 million in 2005, his last full year as CEO. He played a big role in hawking the high-deductible plans that Aetna and the other big insurers are now trying to push us all into. He claimed that Americans enrolled in managed care plans have been too sheltered from the real costs of health care and that we need to have more “skin in the game,” by which he meant that we should have to pay a lot more out of our own pockets when we go to the doctor and pick up our prescriptions, even if we have health insurance. The median family income in the United States is just $50,000, which means that most of us already have a lot more skin in the game than Dr. Rowe and Ron Williams will ever need to.)

The insurance industry’s two biggest lobbying groups — America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association of America — warned members of Congress in a joint letter a few days ago that the creation of a public insurance option would unravel the country’s employer-based system.

As they say where I come from, that dog won’t hunt.

It is the insurance company executives — in their never-ending quest to meet Wall Street’s profit expectations — who are doing the unraveling by purging employers whose workers have the audacity to file claims when they get sick or injured.

A final point about Ron Williams: Not only are he and his fellow CEOs trying to kill the idea of a public health insurance option — a central part of candidate Obama’s health care proposal — but he is the leading advocate of an idea Obama rejected and which differentiated his proposal from Hillary Clinton‘s — the imposition on all of us of an “individual mandate.” Many insurance executives were wary of such a mandate because they don’t like the government mandating anything, especially those pesky state mandates that force them to include certain benefits in the policies they sell. Advocates of an individual mandate eventually brought the skeptics, including many of AHIP’s board members, around to their way thinking by persuading them that insurers could make billions more in profits if every American had to buy an insurance policy from them. Now you know the real reason behind AHIP’s shift from neutrality on the issue to full-fledged support. It’s all about the money.

With almost 20 years inside the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter saw for-profit insurers hijack our health care system and put profits before patients. Now, he speaks with Bill Moyers about how those companies are standing in the way of health care reform.

Who is Wendell Potter, you ask? Glad you did.

Wendell Potter is former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the United States’ largest health insurance companies. In June 2009 he testified against the HMO industry in the US Senate as a whistleblower.

Potter began his journey towards resigning and becoming a whistleblower in July 2007, when he saw a touring free clinic run by Remote Area Medical in rural Virginia. “What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.”

Potter resigned in 2008 and became an active voice on health care reform in 2009 as it became clear to him that the insurance industry and its allies were having a distorting effect on the national debate. Now a fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy, he has appeared in high profile interviews with Bill Moyers and various others.

Go to the PBS site and watch the fascinating video of the interview by Bill Moyers of Wendell Potter or watch it below. Note: it is a 37 minute long video.

Following is a transcript of Moyer’s interview of Wendell Potter. We all owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Potter for speaking up. Potter is a former executive of Cigna. I have created links to additional information about people mentioned by Mr. Potter to assist you in keeping it all in perspective.

As I watched it I thought back to the individuals I saw yesterday protesting against healthcare reform. How uninformed they are and so willing protest against something they have little knowledge about and how they have been duped by the insurance industry and the Republican leadership in Congress. Potter explains it all.

I’m satisfied that those opposing protestors will never see the folly of their position. They choose, for a myriad of reasons, to close their eyes to reality. Those protestors probably never read a newspaper or a blog and choose close mindedness. Victims of conservative right wing propaganda. [Read more →]

The following is from TruthDig:

The public option in health care reform has been slain, and the murder weapon may be a truckload of greenbacks. The Obama administration caved in recently amid slipping support for the option in Congress, where some members enjoy a very profitable relationship with big players in the health insurance industry. It appears that once again money talks, loudly

Have any other members of Congress received money tied to the health insurance industry? I’m glad you asked. Here are some illuminating figures from Open Secrets (see the link near the bottom of the Open Secrets page). Below are other members of the present Congress who have figures above $200,000. The champ of the list, by far, is from neither the Senate nor the House, but rather the executive branch—one Barack Obama, at $1,427,180.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) $767,841
Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) $737,260
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) $697,351
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) $684,787
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) $680,184
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) $655,899
Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) $611,554
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) $522,546
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) $520,327
Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) $490,098
Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) $477,620
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) $461,850
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) $449,066
Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) $448,938
Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) $425,378
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) $422,149
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) $382,880
Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) $366,828
Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) $361,750
Sen. Jon L. Kyl (R-Ariz.) $350,968
Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) $350,873
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) $339,330
Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) $320,071
Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) $316,414
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) $314,823
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) $309,500
Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.) $304,900
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) $285,900
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) $284,830
Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) $250,750
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) $248,175
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) $247,686
Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) $247,437
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) $243,595
Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) $237,750
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) $236,725
Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) $233,950
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) $232,220
Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) $227,808
Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) $224,050
Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) $222,196
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) $219,854
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) $216,250
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) $204,200
Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) $203,450
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) $203,050

The total for these 46 members of Congress is more than $17 million. That’s enough to take a few trips to visit the constituents.

This partial list of those who received industry contributions is not presented to suggest that any of the congressional members have been “bought” by the health insurance industry. But what flesh-and-bone human being would not at least be influenced by such largesse?

It is possible that the public option will arise, Lazarus-like, but the United States of 2009 is likely to turn out to be a land of Mammon, not miracles.

Alex Castellanos is a Republican Party media consultant and strategist. He wrote the following in The American Conservative Union Foundation. He makes some sense too. Here is his article in full for your thoughtful consideration.

With every passing day, Barack Obama is ensuring his own reelection — but at a bloodcurdling cost for Democrats on the ballot without him in 2010.

President Obama speaks with power and grace.  He is gifted with that alchemical political material, Teflon.  He exudes even-handed comfort, assuring all sides that this President understands their argument.  His smile is an embrace that disarms, displaying the confidence of a young leader certain his intellect will prevail. [Read more →]

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, will extend the same benefits to partners of gay and lesbian American diplomats as their heterosexual counterparts enjoy. [CNN]

“Historically, domestic partners of Foreign Service members have not been provided the same training, benefits, allowances and protections that other family members receive,” the notice says. “These inequities are unfair and must end.”

Kudos to Mrs. Clinton. Equal rights and benefits should extend to all persons. There is enough intolerance in the world. Human beings are human beings. We all deserve respect and equal treatment. So do same-sex partners.

“The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $7,129 per capita. Yet our system performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 45.7 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered.” [Physicians for a National Health Program]

[Note: Physicians for a National Health Program is a single issue organization advocating a universal, comprehensive single-payer national health program. PNHP has more than 16,000 members and chapters across the United States. They have been advocating for healthcare reform since 1987.]

This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $350 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.

Currently, the U.S. health care system is outrageously expensive, yet inadequate. Despite spending more than twice as much as the rest of the industrialized nations ($7,129 per capita), the United States performs poorly in comparison on major health indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates. Moreover, the other advanced nations provide comprehensive coverage to their entire populations, while the U.S. leaves 45.7 million completely uninsured and millions more inadequately covered.

The reason we spend more and get less than the rest of the world is because we have a patchwork system of for-profit payers. Private insurers necessarily waste health dollars on things that have nothing to do with care: overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay. Doctors and hospitals must maintain costly administrative staffs to deal with the bureaucracy. Combined, this needless administration consumes one-third (31 percent) of Americans’ health dollars.

These “for-profit” payers are, of course, health insurance companies. I should, I suppose, point out that, as a former trial lawyer, I have learned not to trust any insurance company. My experience with them is that they are in the business of taking in premium payments from their insureds and exert every effort not to pay claims of their insureds. They are in the business, not for your health, but their financial health. Re-read that paragraph just above. If the doctors are right about that 31%  being spent spent on corporate overhead, then it is obvious that continuing to maintain the current health care system in the United States does not make sense.

Single-payer financing is the only way to recapture this wasted money. The potential savings on paperwork, more than $350 billion per year, are enough to provide comprehensive coverage to everyone without paying any more than we already do.

Under a single-payer system, all Americans would be covered for all medically necessary services, including: doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug and medical supply costs. Patients would regain free choice of doctor and hospital, and doctors would regain autonomy over patient care.

Physicians would be paid fee-for-service according to a negotiated formulary or receive salary from a hospital or nonprofit HMO / group practice. Hospitals would receive a global budget for operating expenses. Health facilities and expensive equipment purchases would be managed by regional health planning boards.

A single-payer system would be financed by eliminating private insurers and recapturing their administrative waste. Modest new taxes would replace premiums and out-of-pocket payments currently paid by individuals and business. Costs would be controlled through negotiated fees, global budgeting and bulk purchasing.

Those of you that want to dig further into the detail of the Physicians’ statements should go on to here and read what is there.

A few days ago I posted Republicans Fight Healthcare Reform. If you missed that post I recommend you go back and read it. The Republican Party does not want healthcare reform at all. They are virtually in the pocket of  the big insurance companies.

Read the “talking points” devised by Dr. Frank Luntz for Republicans to use to relieve the public pressure for healthcare reform. Remember what Hillary Clinton said during the presidential campaign about whether there was enough political will now to get healthcare reform passed. That political will refers to the American public—that’s you and me—if we start wavering there will be no healthcare reform. So, keep that in mind.

You might also compare the single-payer plan the Physicians are advocating for with the healthcare reform plan President Obama seeks. See also the President’s Healthreform site for details.

The Republican Party, you remember them, the party of “no.”  Remember the Democrats want to reform healthcare so that all Americans can receive it instead of just those who can afford insurance?

Remember how much you were for universal health care during the Presidential campaign? Remember how Hillary Clinton told you about the scars she sustained when she tried to achieve universal health care as First Lady?

And, remember her telling everyone during the Presidential campaign that the only way healthcare reform will be achieved is if the American people demand and insist on it? That is, to maintain the Political Will to get it, else we never will.

[Read more →]