Monday, December 31, 2012

President Obama was attempting to be helpful. He wants Congress to take this seriously.



This is a very difficult time for the majority of the country. They are not looking forward to paying more taxes after the stroke of midnight.

President Obama has his hand on the pulse of the people and want them to be heard. I don't know why this is always considered a political victory for the President. It is a victory for the people of the nation.

The GOP needs to be more accepting to his words and connectedness with the people of this nation. He has their loyalties in many ways. He does hold the nation's collective heart within the Oval Office.

He had to do this. It was not an option. He won his election. He is not conducting political agendas here. He is bringing attention to the words of many, many Americans he hears from everyday. He is simply passing along the way the nation feels at this time. The Republicans should take his words to heart as an advocate for the people they serve.

To prove how completely apolitical his actions are, he never asked Congress to decide about their pay raises.

By Nick Wing
Posted: 
Updated: 12/29/2012 9:47 am EST

President Barack Obama (click here) gave a New Year's gift to returning members of Congress, federal workers and Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday, signing an executive order calling for an end to a years-long pay freeze....

That doesn't mean anything? It shows a great deal of respect for those this Executive Order serves. It was signed before he convened 'The People's Voice' from the White House. Come on already. That's enough complaining. He's a nice guy. The trouble with him for the GOP is that he is honest. Seriously. Congress needs to be serious about protecting the incomes of the working poor, the Middle Class and entrepreneurial businesses that supply incomes to hard working Americans.

The smart approach to all this is for the GOP to be appreciative of 'The People's Voice' from the White House as a reminder to how important this is to them. A word of appreciation of the struggle of these people go a long way.

Congress needs to stop fussing with the budget, debt ceiling and national debt and move on to making a difference in immigration, gun control, education and the list goes on. The nation has many needs to be addressed. It is time the government work for the best outcomes for the nation and set aside political differences.

Come on, get over this already. President Obama is not a bad guy and he needs to continue to bring public displays of 'The People's Voice' again and again. It is his responsibility and we are lucky to have someone who cares this much.

The USA House of Representatives have sleeping accommodations in their offices. There is no reason to leave. They passed this responsibility to the Senate. They should at least be willing to move on the bill the Senate passes. Could they be any more difficult for the sake of being difficult?

Thank you, Governor Perdue, justice has been served.

Submitted by WWAY on Mon, 12/31/2012 - 2:15pm.
RALEIGH, NC (AP) -- Outgoing (click here) North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue has issued pardons to the Wilmington 10, a group wrongly convicted in a notorious Civil Rights-era prosecution...

..."I have decided to grant these pardons because the more facts I have learned about the Wilmington Ten, the more appalled I have become about the manner in which their convictions were obtained," Perdue said in a news release Monday....

$450,000 threshold to increased taxes is not acceptable.

$450,000 INCOME is not net worth. It is nearly half a MILLION in income. That is not WORTH. Taxes need to increase at a Quarter Million.

There are plenty of ways to reduce the National Debt and Deficit. Increasing taxes on incomes over a Quarter of a Million is one and removing fraud from the USA is another. Playing with entitlements is not an option.

Dialysis company accused of giant Medicare fraud (click here)
By Scott Bronstein and Drew Griffin, CNN Special Investigations Unit
updated 1:45 PM EST, Fri November 30, 2012

It started with a chance conversation between a doctor and a nurse several years ago. But that brief encounter may end up exposing what could be one of the largest Medicare frauds in U.S. history.
Dr. Alon Vainer, a medical director at dialysis clinics in Georgia, was discussing clinic procedures with one of the nurses, Daniel Barbir. The two men say they saw something they believed was very wrong: expensive medicine, and lots of it, was being tossed in the trash. And the clinic workers were being told to do it, the two men say.
"When we sat down and started talking about it and getting into details, we actually realized exactly what was going on," Vainer said.
The alleged waste was being carried out on a massive scale and, the nurse and the doctor said, they knew why almost immediately. They claim it was a way for their company, DaVita Inc., to defraud the government, overbill Medicare and Medicaid and make a fortune.
"We're talking in the hundreds of millions, easily," Vainer said. "The profit this company raked from those two schemes, only from those two drugs, was hundreds of millions of dollars."...

Life Care Centers of America, Inc. is such a patriot name, too. Congress, the USA House and Senate, better be doing everything they can do to preserve the entitlements while bringing them into the scope of legal expenditures. If there is any Congressman or Congresswoman supporting fraud within out entitlements by being silent and/or removing funding from the ability to prosecute these criminals they need to be removed from Congress immediately. They need to be brought up on ethic violations as well. 

"Looking the other way is not an option. Empowering criminals is not an option." There are legal medical facilities striving to thrive !!!
by Thomas M. Burton
December 3, 2012, 7:26 p.m. ET
A Tennessee-based nursing-care company systematically defrauded Medicare of millions of dollars by pressuring therapists to perform expensive, unnecessary treatments, according to a recently unsealed federal complaint.
The filing against Life Care Centers of America Inc. is part of an investigation by the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services into high-priced nursing care. The inspector general reported last month that Medicare loses about $1.5 billion annually from over billing by skilled-nursing facilities....

Allowing fraud and corruption, which was rampant under the previous Republican administration and congressional majorities, to preserve jobs is not an option. 

One of the complaints and worries of the Republicans in Congress since 2008 was the further collapse of the job situation as the Obama Administration was determined to stop the sapping of the entitlements for the benefit of faux economic development. Some of the economic strategy of the previous Republican majorities was to look the other way to allow jobs look better than was LEGITIMATELY permitted. One of the reasons they despise regulations is because they don't know how to grow the economy. They allow fraud and illegal dipping into 'vats of money' such as Medicare to make them look good. When the criminals are caught they are all over it, of course, but they don't do anything to end it in the first place. They rely on the citizen to report fraud. Right.

91 Are Charged With Fraud, Billing Millions to Medicare (click here)



The preservation of the Bush Tax Cuts has to end. Throwing a SYMBOLIC preservation limit at $450,000 is outrageous! It is corruption and it is political pandering by the Republicans. They need to rehab their images and their party's priorities; which won't happen so long as they continue to pander to the wealthy.

I am still trying to figure out how the GOP actually pulled this one off. A Florida Governor that scalped Medicare for a living. Amazing.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2008/08/03/627480/medicare-fraud-rampant-in-south.html#storylink=cp

Posted on Sunday, 08.03.08

JWEAVER@MIAMIHERALD.COM

First in a series
Whenever Alexander McCray lights up his crack pipe, U.S. taxpayers help pay for his habit.
McCray has defrauded Medicare by selling his government-issued health card number to private clinics in exchange for kickbacks of $150 to $300 a visit -- as often as three times a day, three times a week over seven years, according to federal records and his own admission.
McCray has signed off on phony infusion treatments for his HIV illness -- therapy that is medically obsolete -- and he has received thousands of dollars from Medicare-licensed clinics all over South Florida.
Money that he has used to buy crack cocaine.
Dozens of clinic operators have in turn filed more than $1.1 million in false claims for fabricated HIV-infusion treatments billed in his name, according to Medicare records reviewed by The Miami Herald. Some 90 doctors, including one indicted in May, appeared on the phony prescriptions written on behalf of McCray....

Scott's case was one of the largest in history. Yet, he wins governorship. The small fraud cases are at least as important as the huge ones. It is important those receiving Medicare as a benefit for health care pay attention to the monies being charged their insurance, too. The small ones add up. It is the small ones where it all begins as criminals learn what they can get away with. The huge fraud cases make the headlines and provide a political benefit to those enforcing the law, but, the small infringements of the laws of the USA are just as important.

May 20, 2010
By Sally Kestin, Sun Sentinel
It was and still is the biggest Medicare fraud case in U.S. history (click here) and ended with the hospital giant Columbia/HCA paying a record $1.7 billion in fines, penalties and damages.
Now the man who ran the company at the time wants to be Florida's governor.
Rick Scott was co-founder and CEO of Columbia/HCA in the 1990s, when the FBI launched a massive, multi-state investigation that led to the company pleading guilty to criminal charges of overbilling the government....

It has been difficult for Governor Scott to move the unemployment rate. It makes sense it has been difficult for him, since he never legitimately created any as a CEO.

I don't know why I would be astounded by Scott's election and lack of his ability to actually grow an economy; even with plenty of rehab money coming from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster; Cheney and Bush were Wall Street flunkies, too. They couldn't grow an economy either. It is a uniquely Republican dynamic guaranteed to Bubble and Bust the economy while destroying the American Dream. The Republicans, with some exceptions, are about money and not quality of life for Americans.

Florida sees positive October growth, but it still falls short of benchmark (click here)

Updated: Tuesday, November 27th, 2012
By Katie Sanders

...Scott celebrated the state's declining unemployment rate, which hit its lowest point in almost four years in October. At 8.5 percent, the rate is still higher than the national unemployment rate.

In a news release, he counted off several signs of growth, including increases in job postings, an uptick in consumer confidence and a trade surplus. He delighted in the creation of 12,100 private sector jobs and ignored the fact that government jobs got a 2,600-position boost....