Category: News

We’ve covered the lawsuit over comments on the site AutoAdmit for the past couple years. The quick summary is that AutoAdmit is an online forum for law school students where, like many online forums, sometimes the conversations get pretty mean. Two female Yale law students sued the site and a bunch of anonymous commenters, after they posted some mean things about them. There’s no denying that the comments were pretty obnoxious, though it’s not clear that, given the context, anyone took them seriously. The women claimed that they had trouble getting jobs because of the comments, but there was little evidence to support that either. Still, you had a bunch of law students angry with each other, so of course lawsuits were filed — some very badly (such as against one of the guys who helped run the site and was clearly protected from liability).

Some were hoping that this lawsuit would create new rules concerning online defamation or other “mean” content online. For example, there’s been a push for a DMCA-style “takedown” system that would require sites to take down such content. However, in this case, it looks like no precedent will be set at all, as the parties have all settled and the terms of the settlement are confidential (found via Thomas O’Toole).

The issue is a tough one, certainly. It’s no fun to be on the receiving end of such speech — but should it be illegal or should there be an automatic takedown system on such content? That seems extreme and questionable when it comes to the First Amendment issue. In the end, I think the context of the content remains important — and content in such a forum, where it was pretty obviously ridiculous, is the sort of thing that’s better left ignored, rather than filing a lawsuit over it.

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(NaturalNews) New York State Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines announced today that public health workers will no longer be required to receive swine flu vaccinations. The state had been sued by the Public Employees Federation to stop the vaccine mandate, and a state judge had granted the group a temporary restraining order against mandatory vaccine injections (http://www.naturalnews.com/027259_health_flu_vaccine_vaccines.html). The follow-up hearing was scheduled for October 30 to determine whether the temporary restraining order would be overruled.

The New York Dept. of Health had vowed to fight the restraining order and force all health care workers to be vaccinated, even against their will. Those refusing to be vaccinated faced losing their jobs or being denied pay increases.

The decision to abandon the swine flu vaccine mandate had nothing to do with the debate over the vaccination of health care workers, claims Richard Daines. Instead, he says, it was all caused by the shortage of vaccines. While the CDC had promised states that 120 million doses of swine flu vaccine would be available by the end of October, the reality is that thanks to vaccine production failures, only about 28 million doses will be available (roughly one-fourth the original estimate).

“The CDC acknowledged that New York would only receive approximately 23 percent of its anticipated vaccine supply,” Gov. David Paterson said in a story published by CNN. “As a result, we need to be as resourceful as we can with the limited supplies of vaccine currently coming into the state.”

The real reason behind the shift
The vaccine shortage has handed New York a convenient way to squirm out of an embarrassing situation that made the state look a lot like a Big Brother medical police state. This decision to back off the vaccination mandate also avoids the loud public protests that were planned by NY health care workers leading up to the Oct. 30 court date. It keeps the health care workers silent and avoids the uncomfortable airing of protests on the evening news.

In effect, it allows New York to back off the mandate while saving face. Just blame the vaccine makers for the shortage!

And yet, technically speaking, their reasoning doesn’t hold water if they really believe in the vaccine. Even though swine flu vaccines are in short supply this month, the CDC has informed people that by the end of November, supplies will be so large that vaccines will be available to everyone who wants a shot. Technically, New York could have kept the mandate and just moved it to Dec. 15th.

The vaccine shortage isn’t permanent, after all. If New York really believed in mandatory vaccinations of its health care workers, the state could have kept the mandate and just changed the date. So clearly, this decision to reverse itself on the mandate has nothing to do with the vaccine shortage but everything to do with saving face and avoiding looking like complete tyrannical idiots when the public protests ramp up.

Chalk this one up as a temporary victory for New York state health care workers. It’s a victory for the People; a victory of common sense over police state tyranny.

New York still doesn’t believe in health freedom
But there’s a problem with this victory: Because this case isn’t going to court right now, New York could reinstate the requirement at any time. Once vaccines are back in full supply, they could just reverse themselves again and mandate vaccines with a short deadline.

You see, since a permanent court decision has never been handed down on this issue, New York hasn’t been forced to abandon this idea of requiring swine flu vaccinations for health care workers. So it could conceivably reinstate it at any time, without warning.

So stay on your toes, New Yorkers. Watch out for Big Brother and his needle. The state has not surrendered on this issue, they’ve just chosen to bide their time and attack again on another day.

Remember this above all else: The State thinks it owns your body and can tell you what to do with it. That position is obvious in the fact that in backing away from these mandatory swine flu vaccines, New York didn’t say, “We were wrong to force this upon people, and it should really be an individual decision.” No, the state essentially said, “We just ran out of vaccine, so we don’t have enough supply to force everyone to take it yet.”

Those two different explanations reveal completely different underlying philosophies on freedom (or the lack thereof).

Sources for this story include:

CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/23/new.york.flu.vaccine/index.html

UPI
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2009/10/23/New-York-relaxes-vaccine-mandate/UPI-54321256302789/

(NaturalNews) The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine was awarded jointly to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak for their discoveries into cell division and into how chromosomes can be copied without degradation. The key was found in maintaining healthy telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes, by reigniting the growth of telomerase, the enzyme that forms them. Certain astragalus molecules have been found to contribute to telomere growth, effectively reversing the aging process.

When cells divide to repair, renew, and maintain the body, the DNA molecules that contain the body’s genetic code are copied in order to reproduce a new, identical cell. The telomeres on the ends of the chromosomes act as protective coverings to guard the cells’ delicate sequences from degradation as they are copied. The telomerase enzymes continue to form new telomeres in order to facilitate this constant process of rejuvenation by maintaining these protective ends.

Because this process does not operate optimally, the body ages over time. Geneticist Leonard Hayflick discovered in 1965 that most cells only divide a certain number of times before they die, illustrating the existence of a biological clock of sorts that limits cell division and instigates the gradual slowing of cell replication.

The journal Nature published an article in 1990 that further explained this process through an understanding of cellular telomere. While acting to protect the ends of DNA strands, telomere shorten ever so slightly each time a cell divides. Early in a person’s life, telomerase enzymes work to replenish the diminishing telomeres, but later in life the telomerase enzymes cease to be produced within the genes and the telomeres gradually recede, leading eventually to death.

Thanks to tortuous research into telomeres, doctors and scientists interested in anti-aging therapies have been able to make significant inroads into the discovery of viable therapies for jump-starting the gene that produces telomerase enzymes.

The astragalus root contains cycloastragenols and astragalosides, two powerful molecules that have been implicated in activating telomerase enzyme production. Research suggests that large doses of these molecules have the potential to not only prevent telomere depletion but to actually rebuild the telomere that has been already lost.

While a patented form of the highly-concentrated extract called “TA-65” is available through a proprietary regimen, other extracts and derivative formulas are hitting the supplement market that contain potent levels of these isolated molecules as well. Certain specific varieties of astragalus root naturally contain high levels of these powerful molecules and the extracts can be purchased inexpensively in bulk powders or in capsules.

Heavy doses of astragalus extract that is rich in astragalosides are said to have the same effect as TA-65 in rejuvenating telomere growth and increasing the amount of telomere base pairs. In other words, the extract is capable of turning back the age clock. Jim Green, a scientist out of Wichita, has been experimenting with various forms of astragaloside-rich astragalus and has seen amazing anti-aging results which he has documented on his website.

Further research into this amazing subject is sure to reveal more as time progresses. In the meantime, certain steps can be taken to reverse the effects of aging. One step suggested by Al Sears, MD is to have one’s homocysteine levels checked to make sure they are not too high. High homocysteine levels increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, impotence, and heart disease. He suggests supplementing with B vitamins in order to keep homocysteine levels in check, as well as trimethylglycine (TMG). Astragaloside-rich astragalus is also a worthy contender that is both inexpensive and demonstrably efficacious in reversing the effects of aging.

Sources:

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009

Anti-Aging Pioneer Al Sears, M.D. Brings Nobel Prize Winning Discovery to Millions – Life Extension

Finally, the First Step Toward Agelessness has Come! – Al Sears, MD

Astragalus Extract Program 2 Year Point – Jim Green

About the author
Ethan Huff is a freelance writer and health enthusiast who loves exploring the vast world of natural foods and health, digging deep to get to the truth. He runs an online health publication of his own at http://wholesomeherald.blogspot.com.

(NaturalNews) There’s a new vaccine for nicotine addiction, and another one for drug addiction. There’s an AIDS vaccines (which doesn’t work) and a vaccine for cervical cancer that’s been approved for use on boys (boys don’t have a cervix). Through the pharmaceutical industry, the big push for vaccines is on!

But why, exactly? Is there suddenly a new rash of epidemic disease requiring vaccine treatments? No, not really. What’s new is the way Big Pharma is latching on to these diseases as new opportunities to sell more drugs.

There’s a huge shift underway from drugs designed for sick people to a whole new class of drugs manufactured for healthy people. The new paradigm is that people need drugs before they get sick, as a sort of “protection” against sickness. Drugs, in essence, are being positioned as nutrients — things the human body needs in order to be healthy. And from the moment you’re born, you’re considered deficient in these drugs. That’s why babies are injected with vaccines within minutes after being born. There’s a strong belief in the medical industry that babies are born deficient in vaccines and that such deficiencies must be “corrected” as soon as possible.

This simple but powerful shift in the marketing strategy of Big Pharma has expanded the potential customer based from a subset of the population (people who are sick) to the entire world population. Now, everybody needs a vaccine for something say the drug companies. All that’s necessary for the financial success of these scheme is to convince sick people that they need more drugs (or vaccines), and that’s easily accomplished through disease mongering campaigns (like the current fear push over H1N1 swine flu).

Bypassing the need for scientific evidence
There’s another important shift taking place alongside the big vaccine push: A shift away from “evidence-based medicine” to a new medical paradigm of “dogmatic belief.”

Medicines that treat sick people, you see, have to be proven to work. There have to be clinical trials, and some percentage of those sick people (only 5% or so, typically) have to show some sort of improved response after taking the medicine. This is the so-called “gold standard” of modern medicine. But with vaccines, no proof of efficacy is required. No placebo-controlled studies need to be conducted at all. Vaccines can be openly marketed and prescribed without any evidence that they actually work.

This is the new “free pass” for Big Pharma — a class of medicine that requires no proof! They merely need to be injected into a few hundred people who are observed for as little as two weeks to see if anybody died or collapses into a coma. That’s all the testing that’s required (and sometimes even less). No long-term safety tests are required or pursued, and, importantly, there is no requirement that the vaccine proves it actually works to reduce flu infections (or HPV infections, etc.).

In essence, by pushing for a vaccine approach to virtually everything, including nicotine addictions, the pharmaceutical industry has transformed itself from a small industry that only served sick people with scientifically-proven medicines to a huge global industry that sells vaccines to everyone and needs no proof that they even work. By any assessment, it’s a brilliant strategy for increasing pharmaceutical profits.

At the same time, it’s a hazardous approach to public health. Even while vaccines provide little or no benefit to the people who get them, they do present very real risks of serious harm. Teen girls have died horrible deaths following HPV vaccine injections (http://www.naturalnews.com/027151_cancer_cervical_cancer_Natalie_Morton.html), and routine vaccines for children continue to inject them with levels of mercury so high that even the EPA considers vaccine liquids to be toxic waste (http://www.naturalnews.com/027293_flu_vaccine_swine.html).

Meanwhile, billions of dollars are being spent on seasonal flu vaccines and H1N1 vaccines without a shred of evidence that they actually work. The profitable sale of these vaccines to world governments was so easy and so lucrative that it’s gotten the attention of drug companies. We’re onto something! Vaccines are Big Pharma’s new gold. They rake in the big dollars, they need no proof that they work, and as an added bonus, drug companies have been granted full legal immunity against all side effects by the U.S. governments!

From the point of view of the drug makers, there’s no risk involved in vaccines. There’s no risk of scientific failure since no studies are being done to even question the efficacy of the vaccines. And there’s no risk of being sued over side effects since these companies enjoy blanket immunity. It’s all pure profit with no downside. This is the real reason why drug companies are looking for more vaccines to push.

A vaccine for boredom?
Ten years ago, the idea of mandating a cervical cancer vaccine to teenage girls would have seemed ludicrous. But today, it’s the law in many states. It’s easy to push, too, since they can always say it’s being done for “public benefit.” (Although, in reality, the primary beneficiary is Big Pharma.)

Now, the drug companies are pushing theories that diseases like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are caused by a virus or that prostate cancer is caused by a virus. These are attempts to establish a justification for future vaccines against such conditions. If drug companies can convince the medical authorities that a virus is responsible for heart disease, or cancer, or diabetes, then they can promote vaccines for those things, too.

Before long, every human being will be targeted with a hundred or more vaccines for diseases they don’t even have!

It’s only a matter of time before Big Pharma decides to start pushing vaccines for psychiatric disorders. Feeling bored? There will be a vaccine for boredom. Having trouble concentrating? Watch for a vaccine to be announced for ADHD. Afraid of public speaking? You’ll probably see a vaccine promoted for “social anxiety disorder” sooner or later.

Although this sounds utterly ridiculous right now, don’t discount the ability of the pharmaceutical industry to reshape the entire dialog about mental disorders and vaccines. They’ve already proven their ability to turn normal human experiences into psychiatric disorders requiring pharmaceutical intervention, and most conventional health professionals have bought into it. Pushing vaccines for psychiatric disorders is the next great untapped market for drug companies. All that’s required is to first convince the public that viruses or chemicals are involved in brain disorders.

Believe or it not, this line has already been crossed with the recently announced nicotine vaccine. Nicotine isn’t a virus, obviously. So how can drug companies claim a vaccine works to stop the nicotine habit?

It’s easy: Instead of targeting a virus, the nicotine vaccine targets a molecule (the nicotine molecule). So now, drug makers can claim their vaccines can grant immunity to virtually any chemical or substance. And since psychiatric disorders are already blamed on “chemical imbalances in the brain,” the groundwork has already been laid for the pushing of vaccines for such “chemical imbalances.”

In fact, to take this one step further, keep in mind that according to the psychiatric disease “bible” (the DSM-IV), the very act of defying conventional wisdom is, all by itself, a psychiatric disorder. It’s called “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” or ODD. (I’m not making this up.) You can be diagnosed with ODD simply by arguing with your psychiatrist over the validity of whether the disorder itself actually exists. If you frequently disagree with authorities (like the FDA), you might also be labeled ODD.

If the current health regime is allowed to continue in America, I can easily imagine a day when anyone who disagrees with vaccinations is immediately “diagnosed” with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and injected with a psychiatric vaccine designed to “cure” the “disorder.” Effectively, it will be a chemical lobotomy.

To fully understand where this can lead, I urge you to visit CCHR’s museum called Psychiatry An Industry of Death (http://www.cchr.org/psychiatry_an_industry_of_death_museum/) where you’ll tour the horrific history of so-called “psychiatric medicine.” It’s free. Just tell ’em you’re a reader of NaturalNews and Mike Adams sent you. Reserve about 2 hours for the tour, and don’t eat much beforehand because you just might lose your lunch. When you see what psychiatrists have done to human beings in the name of medicine, you’ll be absolutely outraged. The street address of the museum is 6616 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, California 90028. Call 1-800-869-2247 to make a reservation for yourself or a group.

Vaccines are the new holocaust. And just as drug companies were once involved in the Nazi-era experiments conducted on human beings, those same companies are now engaged in poisoning humans for profit.

Watch for Big Pharma to place even more emphasis on vaccines in the next decade. For them, it’s easy money. But for public health, it’s a disaster.

(NaturalNews) What do you get when you combine a good operating system with a bad burger? Burger King’s news “Windows 7 Whopper,” made with 7 beef patties and sold for ¥7.77 (Yen).

The seven-decker processed beef burger clocks in at 1,000 calories, reports FoxNews. It’s offered only for 7 days as part of a publicity stunt to publicize the launch of Windows 7, the new PC operating system from Microsoft.

Stacked five inches high, it’s not yet clear whether customers will be able to shove this burger down their throats in the way Microsoft did with Vista a few years back, but at least with Windows 7, Microsoft has reportedly overcome its failed Vista launch by creating a new operating system that accomplishes what Vista promised. It even features faster application load times and faster reboot speeds.

Speaking of rebooting, eating a 7-layer burger in one setting just might give customers their own “blue screen of death” gastronomical event requiring a complete digestive reboot. You might need 7 anti-diarrhea pills and 7 days of rest just to recover.

Even if your stomach can handle the Whopper 7, there’s a larger question of whether the planet can: The factory production of beef requires enormous quantities of fresh water. According to the Water Education Foundation, a quarter-pound hamburger requires roughly 1,300 gallons of fresh water to produce (by the time you factor in all the water the cows drink, the water for the crops fed to cows, etc.).

This Windows 7 Whopper might be estimated at five times larger than a typical quarter pounder. Thus, if you do the math, this 7-layered Whopper could be using 7,000 gallons of water to produce (give or take, depending on the size of the patties). In a world running out of fresh water supplies (fossil water), that’s a huge quantity to plow through in one meal.

And this doesn’t even take into account the CO2 emissions from the transportation and production of the beef, nor the climate-harming effects of the methane produced from all the cow farts (cows fart 7 times each hour, I’ve been told). In all, the environmental destruction caused by the fast food hamburger industry is at least 7 times worse than what burger munchers might have ever suspected.

Don’t have a cow, man!
What’s really astonishing about this is why Microsoft would want to tie their reputation to the fast food burger industry. When you think of what’s really involved in manufacturing burger beef — hormone and antibiotics injections, cows standing knee-deep in fields of feces, grotesque slaughterhouses where diseased but alive cows are dropped into processing equipment with the help of forklifts — it’s not exactly the kind of thing a corporation would normally want associated with their high-tech product.

Maybe it’s all part of a series of new slogans, such as:

“Windows 7 – We slaughter the competition!”

“Windows 7 – Now you can destroy the (computing) environment!”

“Windows 7 – Junk food for your PC.”

“Windows 7 – We bet you’re dying to try it!”

One can only imagine what deranged thoughts must have been bouncing around the heads of these Japanese Microsoft marketing executives. Perhaps for the launch of Windows 8, they’ll team up with death row inmates and have “Windows 8 sponsors 8 days of capital punishment featuring 8 murderers who each raped and killed 8 people!”

That would only be slightly less offensive than sponsoring a 7-layer burger at Burger King.

But I suppose, in the end, the stunt worked. They got press on NaturalNews, after all, and even we can’t deny that the Windows 7 operating system appears to be rock solid. But your stools won’t be if you eat a 7-layered Whopper, probably.

If you look at how our radio spectrum is allocated today, you discover that TV broadcasters have a huge chunk of spectrum (that chart doesn’t directly display how much spectrum is actually included — I remember seeing another chart, which I can’t find now, that shows proportionally how much more spectrum broadcasters have). This was given to them — entirely for free — years ago, when spectrum wasn’t used for much. These days, however, spectrum is precious for so many different things, and certainly much of it could be put to better use. Of course, the broadcasters aren’t thrilled with giving up any of their windfall. For years, they dragged their feet, kicking and screaming, about switching from analog to digital broadcasting, which was needed to reclaim some spectrum. More recently, they’ve been fighting attempts to use “white space” spectrum — which is spectrum that’s unused, but close to used spectrum. The broadcasters insist there will be interference, while technologists insist the technology is good enough to block interference.

So, it’s interesting that, just as we’re hearing of the first tests of white space networks, the FCC is also talking to broadcasters about other ways to reclaim some spectrum and put it to use on something more useful and productive. Apparently, the plan on the table right now would be for broadcasters to give up the spectrum in return for a cut of the revenue the government would get in auctioning off the spectrum for wireless use. Of course, some may find it distasteful that public spectrum that was given to these companies for free can then get sold off with at least some of the money going to those who never bought or truly “owned” the spectrum in the first place. But, given that the FCC set things up in a way where it basically created a de facto ownership structure of the spectrum, it’s difficult to see any reasonable way to get that spectrum back without paying for it.

In the link above, Adam Thierer suggests we just give the current holders property rights in the spectrum, and assume that they’ll then sell it off to those who can do something more innovative with it (or change and do something more innovative themselves). I’ve long been a proponent of giving up the ridiculous idea of having the government decide how each slice of spectrum must be used. Why not let the companies who control the various slices of spectrum make use of it as they see fit? It seems more likely that we’d get more efficient uses of the spectrum. So, it’s good to see more thinking about ways to put some of that spectrum to better use, but it would be nice if we allowed the market, rather than the government, to figure out how to best use it.

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Cruising Craigslist usually brings up some interesting things. And this is definitely one of the most terrible and yet oddly funny posts I’ve seen in a while.

When doing the Empire Strikes Back costume of Chewbacca, most people would just get a few C3PO parts and throw them over their back. One resident of Austin, Texas however, wants to take it the next step. This guy is looking for:

A double amputee (someone missing both legs – preferably at the hip) to accompany me as C3PO for the evening. We should meet ahead of time so that we can work out the backpack/harness system. There are a few parties that I want to hit and I think we will be the hit of any event we attend.

Hey, dude’s upfront about it. If you’ve always wanted to be everybody’s favorite protocol droid, but you’re missing a few appendages, this might be for you.

When Cablevision first bought Newsday, Charles Dolan admitted the company knew very little about the newspaper business, but promised to consult widely with newspaper experts in coming up with a plan. That seemed like a really really bad idea, since all the newspaper experts we’ve seen don’t seem to even recognize what business they’re really in. But, it looks like that’s exactly what Dolan did. Back in February, the company announced that it was going to put up a paywall for its content. Since there had been no update or any action since then, I’d actually begun to wonder if the company was rethinking that idea. No such luck. Apparently it just took a bit of time to fully plan out Newsday’s self-destruction.

The company has announced that it will start charging a whopping $5/week (not month, but week) to access the website unless you’re an existing paper newspaper subscriber and/or a Cablevision subscriber.

Let’s be absolutely clear what this is. It is not a plan to build a 21st century news organization. It’s a plan to try to reduce churn elsewhere, by putting up a slight hurdle for Cablevision cable customers and Newsday newspaper customers to prevent them from leaving. Cablevision’s customer base and Newsday’s subscriber base overlaps quite a bit, so for plenty of those folks there will be no change at all. But this won’t do anything to actually help the news organization grow. Those who don’t subscribe to the paper edition or who use a competitor for broadband (like Verizon Fios which is pushing hard in Cablevision’s market) will simply go elsewhere. While the NYC papers don’t cover Long Island news quite as completely, they do a pretty good job with the basics, and other local news sources will fill in the rest. Cablevision is basically saying that it’s giving up in the online news business. It’s an admission that it doesn’t know how to compete. This won’t help it sign up new customers, and may only barely help it prevent old customers from leaving.

It’s basically a suicide play for Newsday. This is really a disappointment, since Cablevision — amazingly — had actually been one of the most forward thinking cable companies out there in terms of offering real value on the broadband side of things. But apparently it bought Newsday as an asset to let it wither away.

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As lawmakers continue to shape a health care overhaul bill to increase the number of Americans with insurance while driving down costs, one group is being deliberately barred from receiving any government benefits associated with the effort: undocumented immigrants. This brief explainer looks at some of the questions surrounding immigrants and health care in the United States. 

How many are there and what is the law now?

There are nearly 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. In 2007, almost 60 percent of the adults had no health insurance, more than double the proportion of uninsured adults among legal immigrants and four times the share among U.S.-born adults, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Undocumented immigrants are barred from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) – the federal/state government programs for the poor. However, everyone – including illegal immigrants – have access to emergency room care through the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which ensures public access to emergency health services regardless of an individual’s ability to pay.

How do undocumented immigrants get medical care now? 

Low-income immigrants — both legal and undocumented — are less likely than citizens to receive primary or preventive care, and they have lower rates of emergency room use than those of citizens, according to a 2007 policy brief by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is a program of the foundation.) But low-income non-citizens turn to health centers and clinics at a significantly higher rate than insured low-income citizens, with six in 10 relying on clinics and health centers as the place to go when they need medical help. 

Who pays for their care?

Undocumented immigrants who seek care at health centers and clinics are typically billed on a sliding scale based on their ability to pay.

If illegal immigrants cannot pay their bills, hospitals and other providers first look to the federal government and charities for help in covering their uncompensated costs. The federal government, through the Disproportional Share Hospital program, allotted about $20 billion in 2009 to help hospitals and providers cover the costs they incurred treating uninsured patients, including citizens, legal immigrants and the undocumented.

But those government funds are generally not enough to cover the costs, and hospitals raise their fees for other patients to help provide the revenues needed to treat the uninsured.

Researchers estimate the cost of all uncompensated care was roughly $56 billion in 2008, according to a recent study published in the journal Health Affairs. However, because hospitals cannot inquire whether a patient is in the country illegally, it is difficult to tease out the cost of uncompensated care attributed to illegal immigrants.

How will reform proposals affect illegal immigrants?

All of the bills specifically exclude undocumented immigrants from qualifying for Medicaid or CHIP.

Neither the House bill nor Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee bill restricts illegal immigrants from being eligible to purchase coverage through a health insurance “exchange” or gateway set up in the legislation. However, the House bill explicitly states that undocumented immigrants would not be eligible to receive government subsidies to buy insurance, regardless of income. The Senate Committee Bill is much tougher and bars illegal immigrants from purchasing health insurance through the exchange.

Baucus’ proposal also includes verification requirements to ensure that illegal immigrants are blocked from receiving federal subsidies or entering the exchange — an effort to quell Republican concerns that loopholes would allow illegal immigrants to benefit from receiving health insurance at a reduced rate.

The Senate and House proposals also call for reducing the federal DSH payments to hospitals for uncompensated care on the assumption that health care reform would provide insurance to more people. 

None of the bills would change the requirement that hospitals offer emergency services to all patients, including illegal immigrants.

Sources

Affordable Health Choices Act, Senate HELP Committee bill, section 171

America’s Affordable Health Choices Act House bill H.R. 3200, sections 246, 1704

America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009, Senate Finance Committee bill 

Covering The Uninsured In 2008, Health Affairs

Disproportionate Share Hospital Allotments for FY 2009, U.S. Health and Human Services

Five Basic Facts on Immigrants and Their Health Care, Kaiser Family Foundation, March 2008

Health Insurance Coverage and Access to Care for Low-Income Non-Citizen Adults, Kaiser Family Foundation, June 2007 

Immigrants’ Health Coverage and Health Reform: Key Questions and Answers, Kaiser Family Foundation, September 2009 

Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital Payments, National Policy Forum, June 15, 2009

Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants, Pew Hispanic Center, 2009 

Treatment of Noncitizens in H.R. 3200, Congressional Research Service, August 2009

Dr. Antonio Falcon, a physician in the border town of Rio Grande City, Texas, considers himself to be the “luckiest family doctor in the world.” In his nearly 30 years of practice, he has worked in the emergency room as well as the operating room and has delivered at least 6,000 babies. Currently, he says he is a geriatrician, aging along with his patients.

Falcon, a member of the Texas Medical Association and the United States-Mexico Border Health Commission, is concerned about several health threats facing border communities, including tuberculosis, diabetes, obesity and the H1N1 virus that causes swine flu. He says the current efforts to overhaul the nation’s health system will benefit both the Hispanic community, which has the highest rate of uninsured of any ethnic group; and Texas, which consistently fares among the worst for state health care measures. Still, he worries that lawmakers in Washington are failing to address several important border health issues, including illegal immigrants’ health care.

KHN’s Jessica Marcy recently spoke with Falcon, who warned that failure to recognize the high, unreimbursed costs of caring for this population could undermine hospitals and providers along the border and open the door to public health risks for the entire nation. Edited excerpts of the interview follow.

Q: Since you began practicing medicine in 1980, how has the health delivery system’s approach to illegal immigrants’ health care changed? What impact has the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) — which requires hospitals to provide emergency services regardless of a patient’s ability to pay — had on health care in border communities?

A: Back in the 1980s, the patient from Mexico was usually the best paying patient because in order to get care here, they would have to pay for their deliveries up front. It was a system that worked very, very well. When EMTALA [was enacted], it basically caused a very large influx of patients from Mexico … because labor and delivery became an emergency and patients had to be seen whether they paid or not. What happened in a lot of communities along the border, where the Mexican patient was the best paying patient, [they] became a huge liability because they were no longer paying for their care. So all of a sudden, these hospitals and providers were faced with this huge volume of uncompensated care. After several years of struggle, Emergency Medicaid [which helps pay for such emergency treatment of immigrants] came in … [and] alleviated some of the burden.

Interestingly enough, it seems that nobody can answer the question of what’s going to happen to border providers and hospitals if illegals aren’t covered under a new health care bill. If they’re not covered and EMTALA continues to exist and providers and hospitals are going to have to provide the care without compensation, it’s going to cause a catastrophic situation along the border, which already has a very fragile health care system.

Q: What do you think about provisions in some health overhaul measures that would prohibit illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance on proposed exchanges?

A: The biggest risk is the financial failure of [border] health care institutions. If illegal immigrants are not going to be covered under a national health plan, then there must be a mechanism for reimbursement for the care of those patients. If that doesn’t happen, then all of a sudden border hospitals and providers have to take a 35 percent cut in their gross income and they’re not going to make it.

As it is, the border area already has a much higher percentage of Medicaid patients than other areas in the country. Providers and hospitals are strapped with the bare minimum of financial resources because of the reimbursement mechanism that exists. I would venture to bet that one-fourth to one-third of the hospitals along the border would close and you would see an exodus of providers in a system that already has very, very poor ratio of patients to providers. Right now, as far as I know, there isn’t a discussion on how to make up for the losses that would be incurred by border institutions.

Q: Do you think there are any other specific health risks from excluding illegal immigrants from the health care system and reform?

A: I think [the risk is] the spread of any infectious disease, especially tuberculosis. TB is actually on the rise along the border. I think that 70 to 80 percent of these cases we’re seeing now are related to immigrants. It’s a very high percentage. That, together with the fact that we’re seeing more multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, causes an enormous amount of concern. If those patients are not going to get any treatment then public-health-wise we have a huge problem.

Q: What advice would you give to lawmakers in Washington about illegal immigrants’ care and health reform?

A: Illegal immigrants live among us all over the country. We should have learned from H1N1 that the potential door for emerging illnesses could exist through the Mexican-American border. To allow something to come in that is not attended to because somebody in Washington didn’t play close attention to border health issues would be lamented for a long time. We need to look at the border as a portal of entry for any of a number of diseases, including bioterrorism.

It seems like policy makers want to isolate [the issue of] illegal immigrants’ care as something that’s kind of standing out there on its own and it’s not. It’s mixed in with the rest of the soup. Like it or not.

A couple stories Friday examine just how Americans ended up with a system where employers pick up the tab for health insurance and which groups will end up paying more for health reform.

NPR on the history of the employer-based system: “The evolution of the American health care system began in the 1920s, when choices boiled down to which crazy cure you preferred.” Potions were the norm where health care for a year cost the equivalent of today’s $100. But advances in medicine created the need for health insurance as costs rose. “By the late 1920s, hospitals noticed most of their beds were going empty every night. They wanted to get people who weren’t deathly ill to start coming in.” So insurance was created that allowed people to pay a little bit every month to pay for health care. World War II and tax-free incentives on health care from employers added to the explosion in care (Blumberg and Davidson, 10/22).

BusinessWeek reports on the future — if health reforms are enacted — and that insurers and taxpayers will likely foot the bill for the system’s changes, and that doctors will feel the least pain. “It’s safe to say doctors will give up the least, pharmaceutical and medical device makers will fall somewhere in the middle, and insurers will be the big losers.” Consumers will foot the bill if they have too generous a plan — called “Cadillac” plans — while pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers and insurers will also lose (Sasseen and Arnst, 10/22).

The guys from Hotelsinus Sound Design has released the first test version of TonesynthDS, a matrix-based synth sequencer for the Nintendo DS. This pub…

Microsoft unleashed Windows 7 onto the public today, and the company’s Bing team has released some downloadable wallpaper things for the operating system. The themes are based on the images that the search engine uses on its homepage.

"A lot of people ask us for desktop versions of our images," says Stephanie Horstmanshof of Bing. "And now you (and your friends, and your family, and your casual acquaintances) can get them!"

Whether or not you are a fan of Bing as a search engine, there’s no denying that there are some visually pleasing images that appear there. Here are some of the wallpaper options:

The themes are more than just wallpaper images though. The themes are a combination of pictures, colors, and sounds for the computer. They include desktop backgrounds, screen savers, window border colors, and sound schemes. Some include icons and mouse pointers.

Microsoft reminds users that they can also integrate Bing right into the operating system by:

1. Downloading the Bing OpenSearch description document.

2. Double-clicking the downloaded document to add the Bing "Search Connector" on your machine.

3. From Windows explorer use the Search Box, type the terms for which you want to search and get the power of Bing into Windows.

"You can perform Windows actions on the search results, such as Open, Send to, and so on," says the Bing API Team.

So much for that new Obama administration “transparency” claim, huh? After three unsuccessful attempts at stalling a court order to release documents concerning who lobbied for telco immunity in warrantless wiretapping lawsuits, the administration has succeeded in its fourth attempt, delaying the release of the documents at least until next year. Of course, by the time this is decided, it should be long after Congress is done debating the whole warrantless wiretapping issue… so that’s convenient. I’m still trying to figure out who or what the administration is trying to shield. It seems pretty obvious that the telcos would lobby for immunity, so that’s not revealing much. So what’s so important to keep secret?

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 The latest round of update for the US PlayStation Store is now available. This weeks lineup includes the usual game add-ons, a few price drops, …

There are some men who pride themselves in their prowess at the gaming table or in bed and there are others who brag about being able to pick the winning horse at a racetrack. But how many men can write long, detailed posts about Moleskine notebooks, offering advice to the other Moleskine fans about how to best handle your Moleskine experience.

There is only one man who does that. His name is some dude who runs InkyJournal.

That’s right. InkyJournal. The site seems to be dedicated to Moleskin hacks including how to decide on the best notebook for the best activity and how to add tabs to tabless notebooks. He even reviews a pen holder for Moleskins.

I fell in love with Moleskine in Paris (where else?) when I bought my first one from a stationary store right by Breguet’s old workshop. While I love using them, I haven’t gone to the lengths we find on this dude’s site. However, that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

Lexar announced their new 600x compact flash cards today. It’s not unexpected that the faster speed memory cards are coming out, given the UDMA requirements of cameras like the Canon 7D.

The new Lexar cards have a amazing 90MB/s transfer rate when used in a device that supports the new UDMA 6 protocol. This is particularly important for the generation of cameras that shoot video, since the write speed is critical when you are shooting in HD.

The new cards are available in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB sizes. The 8GB and 16GB cards are available now, the 32GB should be available in November. The 8GB version sells for $149, the 16GB version sells for $249. There isn’t any pricing available for 32GB version, but you can safely assume it will not be cheap.

You can read the press release here.

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