Clipmarks | masbury's clips

Nader: Pay-or-die health care - unique to the USA

Sun, 11 May 2008 04:45:47 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: Insurance too little, hospital demands cancer patient pay $105,000 before being admitted. Yet hospitals making record profits.

Clip Source: www.counterpunch.org

This is a tale of pay or die that recurs again and again all over our country and only in our country in the entire western world.

Advised by her physician to go to M.D. Anderson for urgent treatment of her leukemia, Mrs. Lisa Kelly was told she had to pay $105,000 up front before being admitted. The hospital declared her limited insurance unacceptable.

Sitting in the business office with seriously advanced cancer, she asked herself – “Are they going to send me home?” “Am I going to die?”

net income per bed at non-profit hospitals tripled to $146,273 in 2005 from $50,669 in 2000.

huge pay packages awarded hospital executives.

Lisa Kelly. She and her husband returned with a check for $45,000.

the hospital oncologist urged admittance quickly.

Then the hospital demanded an additional $60,000

In a particularly grotesque incident, she was hooked up to a chemotherapy pump, but the nurses were not allowed to change the chemo bag until Mr. Kelly made another payment.

Tags: healthcare, insurance, politics, news

Why HRC must not be VP

Sun, 11 May 2008 04:37:20 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: "Hillary as a war drum thumper, marching shoulder to shoulder with John McCain, shouting that she’s the candidate of the white people."

Clip Source: www.counterpunch.org

There’s talk of Mrs Clinton telling Obama that the price of concession is that he settle her campaign debt and take her on the ticket. He’s got the money though he should for worthier purposes. As for the number 2 spot, what does it take to keep the Clintons clear of the White House? A stake through both their hearts? An Aztec priest with a really sharp piece of obsidian? If ever a campaign disclosed low moral and political fiber, it was this one. Bill ended up as a petulant sleazeball and Hillary as a war drum thumper, marching shoulder to shoulder with John McCain, shouting that she’s the candidate of the white people.

There’s no better paradigm of the corruption of the Clintons than the pardon handed by Bill to billionaire Marc Rich in the dying seconds of the Clinton administration.

“Bill and the Rich Women” is must reading, as is the view taken by Rich’s powerful lawyers that Hillary Clinton was key to the pardon.

Tags: clinton, mccain, politics, elections, obama

RAND: 101,000 American casualties PER YEAR in Iraq/Afghanistan

Sun, 11 May 2008 04:33:33 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: Time for outrage: Look what neocons and passive congresses have done to us! How can we write off responsibility for the deaths and wounds of half a millions Americans and live with no accountability whatsoever? How can we be so immoral as to shrug our shoulders and just elect someone else? Where is justice? (and we haven't even begun to touch the enormity of the losses to innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Clip Source: www.counterpunch.org

Dr. Ira Katz, top mental health official at the Department of Veterans Affairs

e-mailed an aide, “Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities.”

Here’s how the figures add up, just for Americans. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have thus far produced 300,000 psychological casualties, 320,000 brain injury casualties, plus 35,000 (probably understated) officially reported “normal” casualties. This adds up to 655,000 US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an average of just under 101,000 Americans killed or wounded every year since the wars began.

Tags: iraq, war, foreign policy

US urged to reform foreign aid

Sun, 11 May 2008 04:23:53 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: to deal with root causes of poverty

Clip Source: www.commondreams.org

WASHINGTON, May 8 (OneWorld) - More than 800 development and human rights activists are gathering here this week, developing and calling on Congress to implement new strategies to tackle world poverty and hunger.

The Forum is unique in bringing together an extremely diverse group of nonprofit workers — from Capitol Hill lobbyists to African field workers — to not only discuss but also take action on a new, holistic approach to international development.

“Our interest is to deal with the root causes [of poverty], to partner with institutions on the ground to make a greater difference; ultimately, this [Forum] is a recognition of a need for the greatest reform of U.S. foreign assistance since the Kennedy administration,” InterAction CEO Sam Worthington told OneWorld Wednesday.

to build “a more integrated, holistic approach” to alleviating poverty from the grassroots level up

Tags: poverty, foreign policy, news

Bernstein: Clinton will angle for VP spot

Sun, 11 May 2008 03:51:21 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: Looking for a way to "land the plane"

Clip Source: edition.cnn.com

(CNN) -- Friends and close associates of both Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are now convinced that, assuming she loses the race for the presidential nomination, she is going to fight to be the vice presidential nominee on an Obama-for-president ticket.

"Obama has got a terrible situation. He marches to a different drummer. He won't want to take her on the ticket.

One other factor

how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

It is difficult to overstate the negative effect this remark has had on superdelegates, party leaders and her Democratic colleagues in both houses of Congress. "That's not a way to land the plane," one of her key supporters said. "If you were a superdelegate, you'd say, 'We have to shut this down right away.' "

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, an old Clinton friend, said Friday that she had made an important mistake in suggesting "that hardworking Americans are white people."

Tags: clinton, obama, elections, politics