Author: kimi

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Cigna guilty in teen client’s death?

The family of a California teenager plan to sue her health insurer which refused to pay for a liver transplant until hours before and she died on Thursday night.  

Her family . . . will ask the Los Angeles district attorney to press murder or manslaughter charges against Cigna HealthCare, arguing that the firm “maliciously killed” Nataline Sarkisyan by its reluctance to pay for her treatment. Although she was fully insured and had a matching donor, Cigna refused to pay . . . . 

The company recently posted figures for its third-quarter performance this year, which showed profits up 22%. Next year it expects to earn an income of up to $1.2bn. read more

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Making it isn’t all about hard work.

The myth is simply this: that if an individual will work hard, follow the rules, and be patient that they can be successful. . . The truth is that in accumulating wealth hard work plays a very small role . . . no group has worked harder than the slaves that built this country, the Chinese that built the railroad, or the Mexicans that continue to do the menial labor that drives our information society.

Today, as Tim Wise writes in “The Mother of All Racial Preferences” white baby boomers are benefiting from the largest transfer of wealth in American history as they inherit their parents’ estates. Some of that wealth dates back to the years of slavery, when Blacks were forced to work for free while their white owners and the American economy accumulated the benefits of their toil. Another large category of the transferred wealth is land, much of it stolen by the American government from Native Americans and Mexicans and sold for a pittance to white settlers. For the average white family, however, some of the largest sources of wealth are the result of racial preferences in government policies that were started in the 20th century. read more

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E-waste trash problem. Chemicals are entering our air!

[Rogers], too, addresses obsolescence’s worst form of fallout, e-waste, and provides some arresting numbers: In 2004, “about 315 million working PCs were retired in North America.” Most went “straight to the trash heap.” As did more than 100 million cell phones in 2005, creating 50,000 tons of e-waste. These all add up to a “toxic time bomb,” . . .

How did we come to this almost surreal conjuncture? The first phase involved “psychological obsolescence,” the carefully choreographed arousal of dissatisfaction with the old and irrepressible desire for the new and fashionable. It didn’t take carmakers long to discover that cosmetic changes induced consumers to “trade up for style, not just for technological improvements, long before their old cars wore out.” The fashion imperative, the need to have the latest thing, has worked with any number of products over the years. Slade relates amazing lore regarding the success of disposable razors, the invention of the wristwatch, the cutthroat battle for the radio market and the advent of the calculator, the gadget that jump-started the electronics revolution. read more

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The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush

The next president will have to deal with yet another crippling legacy of George W. Bush: the economy. A Nobel laureate, Joseph E. Stiglitz, sees a generation-long struggle to recoup.

by JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, December 2007

The American economy can take a lot of abuse, but no economy is invincible.

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance. read more

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Kids’ toy putting kids in coma

Aqua-dots, which were supposed to be the latest and greatest kid toy, are putting kids in coma and their lives at risk.

The toys were supposed to be made using 1,5-pentanediol, a nontoxic compound found in glue, but instead contained the harmful 1,4-butanediol, which is widely used in cleaners and plastics.
 
The Food and Drug Administration in 1999 declared the chemical a Class I Health Hazard, meaning it can cause life-threatening harm.
 
Both chemicals are manufactured in China and elsewhere, including by major multinational companies, and are also marketed over the Internet.   read more

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Adobo [dry seasoning/rub] for meat

Adobo – rub over meat and let it sit for a while or overnight before cooking.

Adobo Paste
2 t olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 t oregano
juice of 1/2 lime
2 t sea salt
1/2 t fresh ground black pepper

From Daisy Martinez

Adobo Seco [Dry Adobo]
Makes 1 cup
6 tablespoons salt
3 tablespoons onion powder
3 tablespoons garlic powder
3 tablespoons ground black pepper
1 ½ teaspoons ground oregano

Place all ingredients in a jar with a tight fitting lid. Shake well and store for up to 2 months in a cool dry place.
You can add 1 teaspoon of any or all of the following to customize your dry adobo: Ground cumin Dried citrus zest (orange, lemon, or lime) Saffron Achiote powder. read more

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Verizon tinkers with dns & search settings

Overrides Internet Searches With Its Own Results

by Martin H. Bosworth, November 3, 2007

Subscribers to Verizon’s high-powered fiber-optic Internet service (FiOS) are reporting that when they mistype a Web site address, they get redirected to Verizon’s own search engine page — even if they don’t have Verizon’s search page set as their default.

“It was the very first thing I noticed when Verizon finally got FiOS installed here the other day. Very annoying and hardly in the spirit of net neutrality, eh?,” wrote one Webmaster World user, who originally had Google set as his default search engine. read more

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Are candidates telling the truth?

If you want to know, look it up at Politifact

PolitiFact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly to help you find the truth in the presidential campaign. Every day, reporters and researchers from the Times and CQ will analyze the candidates’ speeches, TV ads and interviews and determine whether the claims are accurate.

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Mr. Huckabee! 1 out of 56 isn’t ‘most’.

In a Republican presidential debate in Orlando on Sunday, October 21st, 2007, Republican candidate Mike Huckabee stated, “The signers of the Declaration of Independence were “brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen.” ”

Politifact.com says that’s not true. Here’s the real truth:

Mike Huckabee said he believes one of the defining issues facing the country is the sanctity of human life. Arguing that the issue is of historical importance, he invoked the Declaration of Independence . . . and said that most of the signers of the declaration were clergymen. read more

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More profound than chocolate

Vanilla has converted a new addict.

The truth is, I bought my very first vanilla bean only last week when I was making rice pudding. It’s not that I didn’t know how fantastic they are in all of their clarity of flavor and little-goes-a-long way charm, I was just both too cheap to buy them, and too afraid to go down that slippery slope whereby no extract would do ever satisfy me again . . .

This hasn’t kept me from feeling despicably posh in the week since as my worst fears were quickly confirmed: nothing else will ever do, ever. Fine, brownies don’t need freshly-scraped vanilla speckles, and maybe not banana bread either. Apple pie can do without and, yes, butter cream frosting as well. But custards, creams, puddings and, for certain, white cakes just hit the big time because, sweet mercy, fresh vanilla is a flavor more profound than chocolate. More profound. Than chocolate. Hold me. read more

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Human Services directors spread misinformation about kids’ healthcare programs

Four regional directors of the Department of Health and Human Services signed their names on copycat letters sent to editorial pages across the country, spreading misinformation about opposing children’s health insurance proposals.

All four somehow managed to come up with identical wording for the same dishonest points.

For example:
The President supports reauthorizing this important program for low income children [the State Children’s Health Insurance Program] with enough new funding to ensure that no one currently enrolled loses coverage. read more

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Dem candidates present a reasonable health care reform package

Senator Clinton delayed a long time before coming out with her own healthcare plan . . . Still, this week she did deliver a plan, and it’s as strong as the Edwards plan — because unless you get deep into the fine print, the Clinton plan basically is the Edwards plan . . .

The Edwards and Clinton plans as well as the slightly weaker but similar Obama plan achieve universal-or-near-universal coverage through a well-thought-out combination of insurance regulation, subsidies and public-private competition. These plans may disappoint advocates of a cleaner, simpler single-payer system. But it’s hard to see how Medicare for all could get through Congress any time in the near future, whereas Edwards-type plans offer a reasonable second best that you can actually envision being enacted by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president just two years from now. read more

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One more for the House oversight committee

On Election Day in 2002, when New Hampshire voters were going to the polls in a hotly contested Senate race, the phone lines in Democratic get-out-the-vote offices were jammed. . .

The Bush administration has spent a lot of time talking about mythical cases of voter fraud and election improprieties, but the New Hampshire phone jamming case was the real thing. Republican operatives hired an Idaho telemarketing firm to jam the lines to prevent people who needed help in voting from getting through. The scheme was a direct attack on American democracy. read more

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From Migrant Worker to Neurosurgeon

by Stephen J. Dubner, August 9, 2007

There is an incredibly interesting and moving first-person article in the current New England Journal of Medicine. It’s called “Terra Firma — A Journey from Migrant Farm Labor to Neurosurgery,” by Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, who is the director of the brain-tumor stem-cell laboratory at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He came to the U.S. illegally from Mexico in the mid-1980’s, as a teenage migrant worker who didn’t speak English. Through a long series of hard jobs, accidents, inspiration, and mentorship, he wound up attending Berkeley and then Harvard Medical School. It isn’t a long article; “go read it, now. read more

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Jail political opponents – the new election strategy

Selective Prosecution, August 6, 2007

One part of the Justice Department mess that requires more scrutiny is the growing evidence that the department may have singled out people for criminal prosecution to help Republicans win elections. The House Judiciary Committee has begun investigating several cases that raise serious questions. The panel should determine what role politics played in all of them.

Putting political opponents in jail is the sort of thing that happens in third-world dictatorships. In the United States, prosecutions are supposed to be scrupulously nonpartisan. This principle appears to have broken down in Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department — where lawyers were improperly hired for nonpolitical jobs based on party membership, and United States attorneys were apparently fired for political reasons. read more