HomeUncategorized6/12-15 News Roundup and Open Thread

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Aint Supposed to Die A Natural DeathEyeRoundorlbucfanBennywi64 Recent comment authors

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wi65

20 questions with a average GQP voter;

Do you think a liar should be President? No.
Do you think a rapist should be President? No.
Do you think a thief should be President? No.
Do you think a draft-dodger should be President? No.
Do you think a felon should be President? No.
Do you think a person who likes to barge into dressing rooms full of underage girls should be President? No.
Do you think a threat to the security of the United States should be President? No.

Do you think Donald Trump should be President? Yes.

Sums up on how strong the cult is…

orlbucfan

The last question ought to be:
**do you know how stupid tRump voters are? 😂

Benny

I know a few of them. I wish I could call their voting decisions stupid, but I think they are gullible. I tell one of them that I don’t understand why they vote against their own economic interests when they are living near the poverty line and depend on the government for assistance.

orlbucfan

Believe me, that fact has stumped many respectable political analysts, Ms. Benny.🙄

wi65

I given up on trying to figure that out Benny,its like banging your head against a concrete wall..

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

Personally, I believe that the rethugs have been successful in implementing their 50-year plan to deliver our govt to the corporations and the oligarchy by cultivating the “it’s the fault of minorities” cult. The cult needs to assuage their hate more that they need their jobs that have moved abroad, clean air and water, safety net for their children, protection from an out-of-control gun culture, etc, etc, etc.

orlbucfan

I’ve been writing a very similar fact for quite sometime on here. It’s outlined in the Powell Memo which came out around 1971 before Trick the Prick was kicked out of office. Started around 1965 after LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964.

Benny

CEO of WaPo Will Be Leaving to Lead Nonpartisan center at Reagan Presidential Foundation

Fred Ryan, the publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post for most of the decade since it was bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, will leave the company in August, he announced Monday.

Ryan, 68, will lead the newly formed nonpartisan Center on Public Civility at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.

Patty Stonesifer, the founding chief executive of the Gates Foundation and more recently the director of the Amazon board, was named the interim CEO of The Post on Monday, starting immediately, and is leading the search for Ryan’s replacement.

In an interview, Ryan said he has long been passionate about the issues at the core of the center’s mission, saying “the decline in civility is threatening the foundation of our democracy.” A former Reagan administration official, Ryan called it “a bookend for something I did early on in my career.”

If you go to the Reagan Library (which I did about two weeks before COVID appeared in CA), you can see a hagiography that is undeniably partisan. According to this same article, Bezos fronted some of the money for this new center.

The Reagan Library did a good job of finding the best spot for Nancy & Ronnie to lay their bones – the monument/tombstone faces west and the view is beautiful almost all year round. .

orlbucfan

No wonder WAPO ain’t worth reading anymore. I knew Bezos was a POS. This proves it.🤮💩

Benny

Why Are Corporate Healthcare Fraudsters Being Handed “Get Out of Jail Free Cards”?

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that oversees those national health care programs, has the dubious distinction of being light years ahead of other government regulators in excusing fraudulent conduct. CMS doesn’t just allow healthcare companies to repeatedly commit fraud and abuse with fines amounting to a tiny fraction of the profit; CMS goes much further.

CMS formally authorizes the violation of anti-corruption laws by granting “fraud and abuse” waivers to the corporate entities involved in experimental programs within its Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI or Innovation Center).

It’s true. CMS has an official webpage named “Fraud and Abuse Waivers” that lists the programs entitled to their absolution.

The Innovation Center plans continue because they serve a different purpose—an unnamed purpose. They serve the privatization of the Medicare program.

CMS regularly issues “Fraud and Abuse Waivers” to the healthcare industry giants that participate in its Innovation Center programs impacting millions of people. If it’s an Accountable Care Organization (ACO), the new form of the hated, managed-care organizations (HMOs) of the 1990s infamous for drive-through mastectomies, it won’t be held accountable to the laws of the land.

How can this be possible? The Affordable Care Act of 2010, among its many provisions, set up the Innovation Center within CMS to promote experimental models in Medicare that would save money while maintaining or improving quality, or that would cost the same while improving the quality of care. Models approved by CMS can be automatically implemented into Medicare without congressional approval.

The Innovation Center models are not working to accomplish the stated purposes of quality and cost savings. “The majority have not saved money, and several are on pace to lose billions of dollars,” reports Bill Frist, former senator and owner of the giant hospital chain HCA. The majority of models do not show significant improvements in quality, says Brad Smith, former Innovation Center director. The models are neither saving money nor improving care, but the Innovation Center has $10 billion dollars to spend each decade and keeps churning out new models, the latest on June 8.

The Innovation Center models are the ones to which CMS grants the Fraud and Abuse Waivers. Let’s take for instance Medicare Advantage plans that are advertised to offer cash back on your Social Security check or up to $900 a year in grocery money. Those offers would logically be a violation of the law that forbids the offer of inducements to buy a certain plan. But these plans operate under the Innovation Center experiment called “Medicare Advantage Value Based Insurance Design (VBID) Model.” That model has the “get out of jail free card” from CMS. For the plan year 2023, the VBID Model has 52 participating Medicare Advantage Organizations with a total of 9.3 million people projected to be enrolled.

CMS waives the Beneficiary Inducements Civil Monetary Penalty (CMP) and the Federal anti-kickback statute to allow Medicare Advantage VBID plans to provide these cash, grocery, and other incentives. The excuse is that these payments are contributing to equity by ending disparities. The reality is that such plans provide incentives for seniors and the disabled to choose the for-profit plans rather than traditional Medicare. That’s convenient for the Medicare Advantage companies that are using the Medicare Trust Fund as their cash cow. Medicare Advantage plans cost the nation more than traditional Medicare yet deny, delay, and limit care. So why is CMS promoting the growth of these plans?

Among the long list of accountable care organizations (ACOs) and other models that CMS excuses from obeying the law is the Vermont All-Payer ACO Model Vermont Medicare ACO Initiative which is called OneCare ACO Vermont. The League of Women Voters of Vermont and the Physicians for a National Health Program of Vermont, among others, urged an end to the Innovation Center’s One Care ACO experimental model stating that the for-profit OneCare ACO, by design, does nothing to improve access to care and that the ACO was supposed to reduce costs, but, instead, spending continues to rise even faster than established targets.

The Vermont organizations issued a press release and listed eleven reasons why the program should be ended, including the assertion that both hospitals and primary care are suffering from the program. “It is time to redirect wasteful administrative spending on the ACO to actually providing health care, especially as the coronavirus pandemic exposes and exacerbates inequities in our system,” the Vermont organizations concluded.

That Vermont experiment by the Innovation Center has the fraud and abuse waivers. The for-profit OneCare Vermont is exempted from the federal physician self-referral law and the anti-kickback law. The program is scheduled to continue through the end of 2024 despite the community’s protests over the damage that OneCare Vermont has done to the health care of the state.

The privatization of Medicare, through Medicare Advantage and Innovation Center models, requires the freedom of corporate medical and insurance entities to collect overpayments, escape oversight, avoid regulation, and violate anti-corruption laws without penalty.

The Innovation Center granted the fraud and abuse waivers to the Direct Contracting model and to its successor program ACO REACH. ACO REACH currently has 132 participants in states across the country and places seniors and the disabled who chose traditional Medicare into for-profit, private Medicare ACOs. Seniors are assigned, without their consent, to ACO REACH plans owned by private equity, venture capital, and insurance companies which can take upwards of 25% of the Medicare money for profit and overhead. In addition, ACO REACH creates an incentive that increases profits with the denial or restriction of care.

The Innovation Center models are not working to produce cost savings and quality. CMS continues them anyway ignoring a storm of protest by health care advocates. The Innovation Center plans continue because they serve a different purpose—an unnamed purpose. They serve the privatization of the Medicare program. All of these plans have private managers, middlemen intervening between patients and their physicians or other caregivers.

Why would a government agency issue waivers for fraud and abuse? Why would that agency give venture capital, private equity, and health insurance entities the freedom to violate anti-corruption laws without penalty? What possible good can come from this and why should the Innovation Center be allowed to continue to exist?

The privatization of Medicare, through Medicare Advantage and Innovation Center models, requires the freedom of corporate medical and insurance entities to collect overpayments, escape oversight, avoid regulation, and violate anti-corruption laws without penalty. CMS allows massive overpayments, bribes, and denials of care, as it places our cherished Medicare into private hands. As CMS issues waivers of fraud and abuse laws, the privatization is unleashed on an unsuspecting population.

orlbucfan

It’s called legalized BRIBERY, and it started with Trick the Dick Nixon before Watergate kicked him out of office. 💩💩💩💩

Benny

Speaking of podcasts, here’s one by RFK Jr’s interview of Matt Taibbi:

orlbucfan

I might try to listen to it. Taibbi isn’t as progressively incisive like he was in his early Rolling Stone days, so I don’t know..?

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

I’ll probably listen to it. I’m interested to know what real people problems he intends to address as president other than too many vaccines and too much censorship. Hopefully, they discuss those issues too.

EyeRound
EyeRound

Thank you for posting this, Benny! When you read how the MSM and establishment Dems are trying to discredit RFK Jr by throwing “conspiracy” bombs at him, and that these are attempts to divide the public against one another,–it’s a corrective to hear Taibbi’s excavations with the Twitter files. It’s not that RFK doesn’t believe in conspiracy, it’s that conspiracy really exists and for this conspiracy (CIA, pols, social media corporations) Taibbi has hard evidence. Not to mention WMD! If conspiracy can be uncovered people 1) lose trust and 2) are justified in looking more closely to see if it can also be found elsewhere.

orlbucfan

I do not like TWITter, never registered on it, and despise Elon Musk. There’s been rumors that he’s been cozying up with RFK, Jr. Now, again, the emphasis is rumors.

Benny

He’s not cozying up to anyone in particular except Biden (who likely doesn’t wish to be associated with him). I would imagine if Marianne Williamson wanted a twitter interview, she’d probably get one.

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

I’ve totally lost all respect for Taibbi. And now that RFK Jr is cuddling up with Taibbi, the racist South African Elon Musk, and his weaselly response to the usually weaselly Glenn Greenwald regarding his unquestioned support for Israel he has my thumbs down.

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

Glenn is good in this interview and JFK Jr is despicable.

EyeRound
EyeRound

“Despicable” is a strong word. The Israel issue is so complicated that it becomes the third rail in any conceivable political campaign. You can’t fault either Waters or RFK Jr, as far as I can see. I think we need to be cautious about the political activity of forces like AIPAC and their take-down’s of left-leaning political players. They have all but eliminated Jeremy Corbin in Britain, and taken down Nina Turner here. The only thing “simple” about this issue is that RFK Jr is probably trying to avoid becoming a US version of Corbyn. Greenwald may be thinking that he’s aiding RFK by this interview, but really he’s just fueling the “antisemite” furor. It’s clear that RFK’s twitter actions do no harm to either Waters or BDS. The tweet-issue regarding what RFK Jr does with his tweets, needs to die a peaceful death.

orlbucfan

ER: Not sure if you know this, but Glenn Greenwald has been a 21st century Libertarian for quite sometime. His Brazilian husband just recently died, too. Take those facts for what they’re worth.

orlbucfan

T and R x 4, jcb!! ☮️🙂👍Is the air clearing up your way? How about the Canadian wildfires?

Benny

Benny

Revolving door…of unproductive lobbyists.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4046061-biden-names-former-dnc-chair-a-senior-adviser/

President Biden on Monday announced that former Democratic campaign head, Tom Perez, will serve as a White House senior adviser, assistant to the president, and director of Intergovernmental Affairs.

Perez will replace the former director and senior adviser, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, who is now serving as the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign manager.

Perez served as chairman of the Democrat National Committee during the 2020 cycle, from February 2017 until January 2021. Before that, he was Labor secretary under former President Obama, having been confirmed in a 54-46 party-line vote. Perez unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Maryland in 2022 and lost to now-Gov. Wes Moore (D).

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“He brings decades of experience to my team, having served in local, state and federal government,” Biden said in a press release.

“His perspective and relationships as a former county councilman, a top civil rights attorney, and Secretary of Labor will be invaluable as we implement our Invest in America agenda and continue to make our government work for the people and for communities across the country,” the president added.

Biden named Rodriguez his campaign manager when he officially launched his reelection bid in late April. She is also an Obama-Biden administration veteran and is the granddaughter of Latino labor leader Cesar Chávez.

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

smdh

orlbucfan

Only ‘talk radio’ I listen to are Tampa Bay Bucs games. 🏈 The others bore me to tears.

Benny

If I am in the car with Mr Benny and he wants to hear scores of athletic events, I’m fine with it. I find podcasts very boring in general to listen to. Much prefer to read the transcript.

Benny

Benny

Benny

I heard about this flyer on TYT. It’s for the well-armed GQP who wish to take a bus down to the courthouse in Miami. Somone pointed out the “bring snacks” on the flyer (not to mention departures start from Wal-Marts) but I found something else, which is on the right lower corner.

Freedom Road Trip Screenshot 2023-06-12 175454.jpg
orlbucfan

Word down here is a lot of annoyed and po’ed folks who are sick and tired of the orange maggot. Miami’s Hispanic leaders warned him and his followers about pulling any crap. So far, no reports of violence.

Benny

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

Yep. Looks like some delusional POC got paid.

orlbucfan

They’ve been warned by various civic leaders to keep it peaceful.

Benny

Why would POC wear a t-shirt that reads “Blacks for Trump” if they were going on their own? Wouldn’t the campaign, if it weren’t so racially based, just have “Floridans for Trump” to blend in?

orlbucfan

tRump doesn’t care who or what color, etc., his cult followers are. Aint makes a very important point in her comment about them being paid delusional POC.

wi65

The cults only care about sucking every last dime from your pocket book,race dont matter

Benny

Asdf..

Trump or Jesus.jpg