Hospital bills are being audited as the U.S. tries to identify whether new electronic records were used to “game the system” and overcharge the Medicare health program.
Some hospitals may be “cloning” patient records and “upcoding” their bills -- charging for higher intensity services than are given -- to raise payments from the government, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter yesterday to five trade associations. Hospitals caught misusing the electronic systems may be prosecuted for fraud or lose Medicare payments, the officials said.
On September 13th, Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) won an award he’d probably love to be able to decline. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a non-profit legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials accountable for their actions, gave Issa a Dishonorable Mention in its 8th annual Most Corrupt Members of Congress report.
CREW cites Issa for illegally revealing confidential information from a sealed wiretap in the Congressional Record — while leading a politically-motivated witch hunt intended to hurt Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder — and then shielding himself from reproach and censure by claiming that he, as a member of Congress, had constitutional protections for his unethical actions.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Iran's president called Israel a nuclear-armed "fake regime" shielded by the United States, prompting Israel's U.N. ambassador to walk out of a high-level U.N. meeting Monday promoting the rule of law.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also accused the U.S. and others of misusing freedom of speech and failing to speak out against the defamation of people's beliefs and "divine prophets," an apparent reference to the recently circulated amateur video made in the U.S. which attacks Islam and denigrates the Prophet Muhammad.
“I went to Wall Street and told them to get their snout out of the trough because they are some of the worst offenders when it comes to bailouts and carve-outs and special deals.”
That was Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota, just over a year ago while running for president, railing against big banks.
When we last looked in on Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and federal appellate judge Richard Posner, they were insulting each other. That continues.
In a recent post, I focused on Posner's review in the New Republic of a new book Scalia cowrote with Bryan Garner: Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Text. The book champions Scalia's favored approach to interpreting law—textual originalism. And it offers 57 "canons of construction"—principles that should guide judges as they do their interpreting. Posner was not impressed.
Last week the mainstream media hailed QE3 as the "quick fix" that the U.S. economy desperately needs, but the truth is that the policies that the Federal Reserve is pursuing are going to be absolutely devastating for our senior citizens. By keeping interest rates at exceptionally low levels, the Federal Reserve is absolutely crushing savers and is systematically destroying Social Security. Meanwhile, the inflation that QE3 will cause is going to be absolutely crippling for the millions upon millions of retired Americans that are on a fixed income. Sadly, most elderly Americans have no idea what the Federal Reserve is doing to their financial futures. Most Americans that are approaching retirement age have not adequately saved for retirement, and the Social Security system that they are depending on is going to completely and totally collapse in the coming years. Right now, approximately 56 million Americans are collecting Social Security benefits. By 2035, that number is projected to g
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