Health care reform hasn’t done anything about the skyrocketing costs of health care CEOs.
Case in point, Joel Gemunder, CEO of Omnicare, the nation’s largest supplier of drugs to nursing homes. At 71, Gemunder has stepped down as CEO and is walking away with one of the largest lump-sum pension payouts in history.
And was he worth it? Click here to read my column, which first appeared in The Wall Street Journal Sunday.
The average Joe has to fight for the health care he thinks he is due.
But this Joe is above-average, and he’s taking his case to federal court in Manhattan. He wants a 24/7 home health care attendant and believe his former company should pay.
Click here to read column. And click here to read the complaint filed by Joseph E. Brooks, former CEO of Lord & Taylor, against Macy’s.
Who says political activist can’t hit the broad side of a barn? They can North Dakota, you betcha.
I found these barns on the left and right of Valley City, N.D., along Interstate 94.
I sure hate to pick sides in such a heated debate. But I’ve just got to ask, if you got sick … Really, really sick. Which barn would you rather be in?
Wendell Potter was once a spokesman for a health insurance company. Now he’s an industry critic and a champion of health care reform. President Obama even cited Potter’s words in his health care address last week. Click here to read my column on what’s eating Potter about the health care industry. I also talk about his epiphany with David Asman on Fox Business.
OK, so instead of being sick as a dog, you may be sick as a pig.
Other than that, swine flu, or A(H1N1) is just another flu, say researchers at Stratfor Global Intelligence.
“The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believes that hospitalization rates and mortality rates for A(H1N1) are similar to or lower than they are for more traditional influenza strains,” Strarfor notes in an analysis released today.
“Influenza data are incomplete at best and rarely cross-comparable, so any assertions of the likelihood of mass deaths are little more than scaremongering bereft of any real analysis or, more important, any actual evidence,” the report said. “There is no indication that A(H1N1) will cause even a shadow of the disruption that the hysteria of months past suggested.”
The key distinctions to be made about swine flu is that affects people 24 and younger, and pregnant women, more than the elderly. And it comes from pigs. Oink!
I’ve been calling swine flu a media hype job since folks first started squealin’ about it last April. We’ve got to have something to write about besides the global economic collapse. And our sleight-of-hand government always needs to keep the people scared about the wrong things.
But hasn’t this swine flu hysteria played itself out already?
Here’s what I told David Asman on April 28 on Fox Business when the swine flu was new:
Town hall meetings on health care are not advancing the issue because nobody really understands what health care reform really means. At this point there are five bills winding their way through Congress. These bills are more than 2,000 pages long and containing legal language that
U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy wants to make all employers provide health care.
Too bad he can’t make all employers hire people.
We’re nearling 10% unemployment and he wants to make it even more expensive for some companies to hire.
(Click here for details on Kennedy’s draft bill.)
One of the first headlines I read about swine flu was on the ticker outside my employer’s headquarters in midtown Manhattan. It didn’t stop me from riding the subway.
There’s litttle you can do about swine flu, except wash your hands. If we, as a society, really cared about the potential for bugs like this to wipe a little humanity off the globe, there might be funding available for researchers like Dr. John Cheronis.
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