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BUSH WAR PROFITEER AND MAJOR OBAMA DONOR, SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN
LOOTS MEDICARE. THERE’S NOT MUCH THAT HAPPENS IN WASHINGTON THAT FEINSTEIN
AND HER PIMP HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM DON’T PROFITEER FROM.
FEINSTEIN, ONE OF THE MOST CORRUPT POLITICIANS IN AMERICAN
HISTORY, HAS AMASSED A STAGGERING FORTUNE FROM DEALS HER HUSBAND COOKS UP AND
FEINSTEIN AND BARBARA BOXER PUSH IN THE SENATE.
FEINSTEIN HAS LONG HIRED “CHEAP” LABOR ILLEGALS AT HER S.F.
HOTEL, ONLY MILES FROM HER $16 MILLION DOLLAR WAR PROFITS WHORE MANSION.
http://californiainmeltdown.blogspot.com/2013/02/war-profiteer-and-obama-donor-sen.htm
Husband's investments entangle Feinstein
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LATEST FLAP OVER MEDICARE
PAYMENT DENIALS
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By David WhitneyMcClatchy
NewspapersSan Jose Mercury News
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WASHINGTON - California lawmakers are questioning whether an auditing
company in which San Francisco investor Richard Blum, the husband of Sen.
Dianne Feinstein, has a major financial stake is rejecting Medicare claims at
California rehabilitation hospitals in order to reap millions of dollars in
profits at the expense of patient care.
The company, PRG-Schultz
International, has a contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, the overseer of the Medicare program, to check payments in
California for mistakes. Its only pay is a bounty of up to 30 percent on the
"overcharges" it identifies.
The California Hospital
Association first raised concerns in November that PRG-Schultz was targeting
rehabilitation hospitals that cared for Medicare patients after knee or hip
replacement surgery. The hospital association said PRG-Schultz has reviewed
thousands of cases dating as far back as 2002 and has rejected nearly all as
medically unnecessary. Melinda
Staveley, president of the 38-bed Rehabilitation Institute at Santa Barbara,
said more than 100 such cases from her non-profit institution had been
rejected. The facility could face having to repay more than $2 million.
Elderly patients
As difficult as that would
be financially for a small hospital with a $12 million annual budget, she
said the bigger concern is future patient care. The frail and elderly surgery
patients with compound medical problems no longer will have access to
rehabilitation hospitals and will have to rely on home or outpatient
services.
"This is
devastating," Staveley said of the audits.
Her husband's business
interests in PRG-Schultz have proved awkward for Feinstein, the state's
Democratic senior senator, as the hospital association turns to Congress for
relief.
This is not the first time
Blum's business interests have collided with his wife's job. Blum Capital
Partners is a major investor in Northwest Airlines, which in 1995 won the
first contract by an American air carrier to fly to Beijing. Feinstein had
been friends with a former Chinese political leader since she was mayor of
San Francisco.
More recently, concerns have
been raised in Republican circles about some of Blum's investments benefiting
from defense contracts at a time when the senator was serving on the Senate
military construction appropriations committee.
Feinstein's press aide,
Scott Gerber, said the senator played no role in the legislation creating the
auditing program and did not intervene with program administrators to help
PRG-Schultz get the three-year contract in 2005.
Serious concerns
“
On Thursday, after questions
from McClatchy Newspapers, Feinstein sent a letter to the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services that called the hospital association's
concerns "potentially serious." She asked program administrators to
investigate, saying the concerns are spreading beyond its determinations on
rehabilitation hospitals to other aspects of Medicare-financed
hospitalizations for the elderly, including short-stay hospital admissions.
Feinstein made no mention of
her husband's interest in PRG-Schultz, which she lists in her annual
financial disclosure reports. According to PRG-Schultz, Blum's investment
companies own 10.5 percent of its outstanding common stock, 53 percent of its
outstanding preferred stock and 28 percent of its notes and securities.
California House members
soon will follow with a joint letter of their own asking for an
investigation.
Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa
Barbara, is taking the lead among Democrats. Her press aide, Emily Kryder,
said 15 members - more than a quarter of the state's congressional delegation
- have agreed to sign the letter so far.
"The review and
collection practices of PRG-Schultz threaten access to rehabilitation
services in California," the letter said. "We urge you to examine
the actions taken by PRG-Schultz International, Inc."
The auditing program was set
up as a demonstration project initially focusing on the three highest-cost
Medicare states - California, New York and Florida. Separate contractors are
used for each state. PRG-Schultz is the only for-profit contractor among
them, and Medicare administrators believe it has been the most controversial
because it alone has been zeroing in on rehabilitation hospitals.
Highly lucrative
On the brink of financial
collapse when it won the contract two years ago, PRG-Schultz has found the
job to be enormously lucrative. Government figures indicate that it had
rejected $105 million in California Medicare overcharges as of Sept. 30, the
end of the 2006 fiscal year.
Medicare managers said they
could not release figures for how much PRG-Schultz was claiming as
commissions for finding the alleged overcharges, saying the information was
proprietary. But based on bounties of 28 percent that were used in
establishing the program, PRG-Schultz's entitlement could be as much as $29
million.
The California Hospital
Association said in a letter to Medicare administrators in November that
PRG-Schultz should be suspended for improperly applying Medicare rules and
using unqualified personnel.
PRG-Schultz declined to
comment. But officials of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
steadfastly defended PRG-Schultz, saying it's applying rules on medically
necessary admissions that probably have been ignored in California for years.
PRG-Schultz "coming to
town is probably the first real look at these hospitals in many, many
years," said Melanie Combs, senior technical adviser for the federal
program.
"These rules have been
on the books since 1985," Combs said. "Maybe it's possible some
have been overlooking them. Maybe there have been consultants out there
helping hospitals to, quote, maximize reimbursements. And maybe perhaps some
of that has entailed looking the other way."
A call to Blum Capital Partners
- of which Blum is board chairman - asking for comment was not returned.
PRG-Schultz reported a
first-quarter profit this year of $1.5 million, compared to a $10 million
loss for the same period in 2006.
*
HE HAS WORKED HARD FOR HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS. HIS
ADMINISTRATION IS INFESTED WITH THEM. OBAMA HAS PROMISED THEM ENDLESS
NO-STRING BAILOUTS, MASSIVE BONUSES AS WELL AS NO PRISON TIME.
NOT ONE CRIMINAL BANKSTER HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH A CRIME OR
EVER WILL. AS IS ALWAYS THE CASE OF WALL STREET’S WAVE OF CRIMES, THERE WILL
BE A FEW PALTRY FINES, AND THESE WILL BE PAID OUT OF BAILOUT MONEY.
NEXT TO BANKSTERS, OBAMA WORKS HARD FOR HIS LA RAZA PARTY
BASE of ILLEGALS. NEXT TO BANKSTERS, HIS ADMIN IS INFESTED WITH LA RAZA
SUPREMACIST.
CONGRESS AND OBAMA ARE NOW HANDING OVER OUR BORDERS TO
OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATE AND LA RAZA SUPREMACIST JANET NAPOLITANO. OBAMA HAS
SQUANDERED BILLIONS PROTECTING THE BORDERS OF MUSLIM DICTATORS OVER THERE,
WHILE PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN WIDER WITH NARCOMEX.
WIKILEAKS and ALIPAC HAVE EXPOSED OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS
AGENDA… IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED.
OBAMA’S UNAUTHORIZED PRE-ELECTION GRINGO-PAID DREAM ACT
HANDED MILLIONS OF JOBS OVER TO ILLEGALS, AND COST AMERICANS HALF BILLION
DOLLARS. MORE TO COME… MUCH MORE! WE ARE MEXICO’S WELFARE, JOBS, PRISONS, AND
COLONY FOR LOOTING!
White House zeros in on Medicare
4 February 2013
Both President Obama and a top economic adviser have confirmed
that Medicare, the federal program that underwrites the cost of health care
for more than 50 million elderly and disabled people in the United States, is
a prime target in the budget-cutting negotiations now going on behind the
scenes in Washington.
While talks continue on social program cuts that will affect tens
of millions and ultimately the majority of the American people, public
attention is being diverted to a serious of secondary issues, such as
prospective gun legislation. There was, for example, enormous media attention
given to a photograph of Obama shooting skeet with a shotgun at Camp David,
including a protracted debate over when the photograph was taken and whether
the president could be said to be a hunter.
The real business of the Democrats and Republicans, however, is
laid out in the Saturday radio addresses by Obama and a spokeswoman for the
congressional Republicans, both of them calling for substantial cuts in
domestic social spending.
Obama’s address repeated his empty claims of an economic
recovery. He failed to note the radical divergence between the boom in
business profits, stock prices and corporate CEO pay and the disastrous state
of the job market, with workers’ wages and benefits continuing to decline.
Obama then turned to the question of the deficit, with his usual
mixture of doubletalk and demagogy, declaring, “We all agree that it’s
critical to cut unnecessary spending. But we can’t just cut our way to
prosperity.”
In a passage from the brief address that was not quoted in media
accounts, Obama continued, “Already, Republicans and Democrats have worked
together to reduce our deficits by $2.5 trillion. That’s a good start. But to
get the rest of the way, we need a balanced set of reforms. For example, we
need to lower the cost of health care in programs like Medicare that are the
biggest drivers of our deficit, without just passing the burden off to
seniors.”
The last phrase is typical of Obama speechmaking, and of all the
declarations by big business politicians in Washington. First, you signal to
your corporate masters what you plan to do, i.e., make drastic cuts in
Medicare. Then you reassure the victims of this policy that they aren’t
really the target.
In truth, that is exactly what the White House and congressional
Democrats and Republicans are planning. They will impose the burden of the
fiscal deficit on the backs of the most vulnerable sections of the working
class: the elderly, the disabled, young people and the poor.
There is, as Obama emphasizes, general agreement in ruling
circles that such cuts will be made. The only question—about which there is
heated debate—is what mechanism to use and how to disguise, as much as
possible, the real significance of the measures now being discussed behind
closed doors in the US capital.
Gene Sperling, head of the Obama’s National Economic Council,
underscored the centrality of Medicare cuts to the deficit-reduction process
in a speech Thursday to a health care group. Sperling began by declaring that
the administration was opposed to any cuts in Medicaid, the entitlement
program that underwrites health care for the poor and nursing home care for
millions of elderly people.
This is not out of any concern for the impact of such cuts on
the poorest Americans. Quite the opposite. Since extending Medicaid
eligibility is a central feature of the Obama health care overhaul, which
goes into full effect at the end of this year, it is necessary to keep
Medicaid afloat at least that long so as to sustain the fiction that health
care “reform” is aimed at expanding access to care and conceal its real
purpose—to cut the overall cost of health care for corporations and the
government.
Moreover, most Medicaid cuts are implemented at the state level,
and state governments, led by Democratic as well as Republican governors,
have cut back on benefits and eligibility across the country.
“Medicaid cuts, from this president, from this administration,
are not on the table,” Sperling said. But since “we’ve made a tough choice”
to rule out Medicaid cuts, he continued, “It means we will have to look
harder for Medicare savings.”
Neither Sperling nor any other White House spokesman has spelled
out exactly what cuts in Medicare are envisioned. But the failed budget
agreement of 2011, reached by Obama and Republican House Speaker John
Boehner, gave a glimpse. It called for raising the age of eligibility for
Medicare from 65 to 67, which would force millions of retiring workers to pay
for private health insurance for those additional years. It also called for
increased means testing, a step towards turning Medicare into a welfare
program reserved for the poor, like Medicaid, and undermining its
universality.
The Washington consensus that entitlement program cuts are
unavoidable is justified on the grounds that, as countless big business
politicians declare, “There is no money.”
This is the mantra in the richest country on the planet from
representatives of a ruling elite that is gorging itself on speculation,
profit-gouging and outright swindling. The American financial aristocracy is
raking in trillions while begrudging every penny spent on retirement income
or health care for working people who have labored all their lives.
The claim that there is no money is a lie. The resources exist
in abundance, but the wealth produced by the labor of working people must be
taken out of the hands of the financial parasites and billionaires and the
major banks and corporations placed under democratic control and public
ownership.
Patrick Martin
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