Kaiser-Permanente Congratulates Itself on Terrible Consequences of its own FRAUD, LOL

[Kathleen]

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Subject: Kaiser-Permanente Congratulates Itself on Terrible
Consequences of its own FRAUD, LOL

Date: Oct 16, 2011 1:22 PM

HILARIOUS ARTICLE BELOW
=====================

Yes, thanks very much, Kaiser,
for collusion with the Yale
and SmithKline criminal gang
and plopping a forward base in
New England in response to the
global warming/VBDs pandemic:
http://www.actionlyme.org

With AIG, Mort Zuckerman, and...
Nestle?
http://www.actionlyme.org/ALDF_BOARD.htm

And we thank you for getting
rid of the CDC for us. After all,
they were working for you all these
years. You and SmithKline, in cahoots
as in several incidents before where
you were fined for DEFRAUDING UNCLE SAM...

How's that TLR2-agonist, MRSA-inducing
vaccine working out for ya these
days?

Oh:
http://thegazette.com/2011/10/14/research-findings-could-help-combat-dangerous-superbug-infections/

You've increased the threat of
a pandemic, says the NIH and
Rockefeller University:
http://www.actionlyme.org

And you've murdered millions along
the way. And *you* handed the biowarfare
advantage to China.

You and your slimy buddies at Yale.

KMDickson

=====================================

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2011/October/16/Health-Programs-Face-Sharp-Automatic-Cuts-If-Super-Committee-Deadlocks.aspx


Many Health Programs Face Sharp Automatic Cuts If Super Committee
Deadlocks

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Topics: Public Health, Politics, Health Reform

By Marilyn Werber Serafini and Mary Agnes Carey

KHN Staff Writers

Oct 16, 2011

This story was produced in collaboration with wapo

Federal funding for medical research, disease prevention and a host of
public health initiatives could be sharply reduced if the
congressional super committee fails to agree on a deficit-reduction
package, triggering automatic cuts.

Public attention has largely focused on possible cuts to the huge
entitlement programs for seniors and the poor, Medicare and Medicaid,
but health advocates are raising an alarm about many other smaller
programs they say need to be protected.

The bipartisan panel is charged with cutting at least $1.2 trillion
over 10 years. If it can't overcome the enormous political obstacles
to a deal, automatic cuts would kick in as of 2013, half coming from
defense, the other half from domestic spending. Congress laid out this
scenario – dubbed "sequestration" in legislative lingo – when it
created the committee in August as part of a deal to raise the debt
ceiling and avoid the first U.S. default in history.

While the committee can chop Medicaid and Medicare as part of a
negotiated agreement, automatic cuts would not affect Medicaid
funding; there would be a 2 percent reduction in Medicare payments to
hospitals and other providers. That would make the hit to many other
programs all the more severe.

"I don't know if a lot of people have appreciated how big a hit the
discretionary health programs" could take if there are automatic cuts,
said Richard Deem, senior vice president of advocacy for the American
Medical Association. "I think a lot of people are going to wake up to
that too late."

At stake is federal money that, among other things, helps HIV patients
pay for lifesaving medication, funds biomedical research and helps
prevent and respond to food borne illnesses and disease outbreaks.

Automatic reductions, for example, could translate into less staff to
handle food contamination, said Georges Benjamin, executive director
of the American Public Health Association. Recently, Colorado
cantaloupes sickened 116 people in 25 states with listeria, killing
23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Someone has to go into stores and make sure the stuff has been taken
off the shelves. I am very worried about what [automatic cutting] does
to the public's capacity to be safe."

If the full $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts go into effect, funding
for non-defense discretionary programs in 2013 would face reductions
of 7.8 percent, dropping each year to 5.5 percent in 2021, according
to Congressional Budget Office estimates. Richard Kogan, a senior
fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, places the first
year's hit at over 9 percent, however.

Health advocates fear deep cuts will harm the public by reducing
services and investment in several areas, including:

* Public health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is
particularly vulnerable because it was hit hard in the last round of
budget cuts, according to Benjamin. In fiscal year 2011, federal
funding for the CDC declined by $740 million. "They’ve already cut
deeply into the bone at CDC," he said.

The agency plays an important role in detecting and responding
to emergencies such as tornadoes, hurricanes, food-borne illnesses,
and infectious disease outbreaks. It also helps fund state and local
public health departments and labs, which Benjamin said is extremely
important as states struggle with massive budget deficits. Since 2007,
he said, 44,000 jobs in local and state health departments have
disappeared. "What ultimately happens is you do less things. You
inspect restaurants less. You inspect wells less."

The CDC also subsidizes the cost of vaccines for uninsured and
underinsured children. The prices of standard childhood vaccines are
rising, Benjamin said. "The more vaccines we require kids to have, the
less money we have to pay for it. If we discovered tomorrow a
marvelous new vaccine, we probably wouldn’t have the resources to put
that into place."

* Medical research. U.S. investment in biomedical research is
beginning to lag behind some other nations, namely China and India, at
a time when robust funding could help with job creation, NIH Director
Francis Collins said at a May hearing of the Senate Appropriations
subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education.

Collins said at the hearing that the BGI genome center in
Shenzhen, China, "is capable of sequencing more than 10,000 human
genomes a year. The capacity of that one Chinese institution now
surpasses the combined capacity of all genome sequencing centers in
the United States."

"This critical area of scientific innovation stimulated by the
U.S.-led Human Genome Project is now being developed more aggressively
in China than it is here -- a sobering story indeed and one that I
hope would inspire our nation to redouble its efforts on the research
front."

Congress in recent years has given NIH small increases that
haven’t kept pace with medical inflation, advocates claim. Funding
actually declined in 2006. Lawmakers are still negotiating funding
levels for fiscal year 2012, which began Oct. 1. House appropriators
are considering a small increase in NIH funding, while their Senate
counterparts are contemplating a small reduction. Reductions in NIH
funding "will lessen the chance of research breakthroughs in cancer.
It will interrupt clinical trials at the National Cancer Institute,"
said Dick Woodruff, vice president of federal relations and strategic
alliances at the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network.

* HIV/AIDS. About 500,000 HIV-infected people currently get help
with expensive care and lifesaving medication through the Ryan White
HIV/AIDS Program. Ronald Johnson, vice president of policy and
advocacy at AIDS United, says that automatic cuts would be
devastating.

Ryan White help is a last resort for many people who are low-
income, uninsured or underinsured. On average, a year's worth of
medication costs about $15,000 to $20,000, and total care for an
infected person can run about $100,000, according to Johnson.

He also fears cuts to federal funding that help states provide
free or subsidized HIV testing. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention sent $800 million to states in fiscal year 2011.

While the programs' cost may be significant, they have decreased
the spread of AIDS, said Johnson. "If a person gets on treatment early
and adheres to it, that person on the whole is less infectious, so the
chance of transmission is reduced significantly."

* Disease prevention. Prevention funding in the health law is
already under fire, by both Democrats and Republicans. Republicans
have pushed to repeal the funding and President Barack Obama said
recently that he would support decreasing it by $3.5 billion over 10
years.

The prevention fund has provided money for programs aimed at
reducing obesity and tobacco use, among other public health
priorities.

Reductions are short-sighted, said Jeffrey Levi, executive
director of Trust for America's Health. "The irony here is that there
is so much focus on health care costs, yet there is significant
evidence that the kind of prevention programs that the [health law] is
supporting can have a positive impact on health care utilization and
costs," he said.

While the House and Senate appropriations committees would decide the
initial 2013 funding levels for each agency and program, across-the-
board cuts in sequestration would occur on top of the initial funding
decisions and apply equally to all non-exempt, non-defense programs
within an agency, Kogan said.

Many lobbyists, representing all sectors of the mammoth health care
system, say they doubt that the committee of 12 lawmakers will be able
to reach consensus on issues that have stumped Congress for decades,
including overhauling the tax code and reining in fast-growing
entitlement spending. The committee's deadline for action is Nov. 23,
after which Congress would have until Dec. 23 to approve any deal.

The committee's task is made even harder by a divided Congress,
ongoing battles about federal health program funding for fiscal year
2012, and a presidential campaign season that is already in full
swing. Whatever Congress cuts this year could be restored in whole or
part in the future.

Benjamin says lawmakers should look for acceptable savings in the big
spending Medicaid and Medicare programs. If they don't, "There will be
all kinds of unanticipated and unintended consequences" from automatic
cuts, he said. "The tradeoff will be having to cut something that you
really don’t want to cut."

Marilyn Werber Serafini is the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Robin Toner
Distinguished Fellow based at Kaiser Health News. The fellowship
honors the late Robin Toner, The New York Times' long-time health and
politics reporter whose work often framed the public debate on health
issues. KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.


KMDickson