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WOOKIE.....
FROM A 45 YEAR NJ VET TO A PRESENT NJ GUY ....WE ARE ALL GOOD ...
MY FRUSTRATION DOES GET THE BETTER OF ME SOMETIMES ..... GLTY
GO PPHM
In Obama’s White House, the Buck Stops Nowhere
What does it take to get fired from a job in the Barack Obama administration?
Only in this White House could a Cabinet Secretary get not just one but two public presidential statements of confidence as internal documents emerge showing that an agency knew about fraud, and left the problem to such an extent that people died while waiting for medical care.
This administration has long had trouble holding itself accountable for its failures, perhaps especially for the more spectacular disasters. When Health and Human Services spent $400 million and took three years to build a web portal for the Affordable Care Act – a technological feat that insurers have managed to accomplish a decade or more ago with far fewer resources – HHS under the direction of Secretary Kathleen Sebelius delivered a bug-ridden flop that still doesn’t meet its original specifications.
Related: A Million Americans Get Wrong Obamacare Subsidies
Despite her failure to oversee the Obama administration’s central domestic policy achievement and to know that it would not be ready by its launch date, neither Sebelius nor anyone else lost their job over the debacle. Sebelius retired last month after more than five years on the job.
At least in that failure, no one died. When the State Department ignored months of warnings about the vulnerability of its consulate in Benghazi to terrorist attacks, as well as an escalating string of attacks on Western interests in the eastern Libyan city, four Americans died in the assault that took place on the anniversary of 9/11.
For reasons that are still unexplained, neither the State Department nor the Department of Defense were prepared to respond to an attack on an obvious date in a location where the now-murdered ambassador had repeatedly requested more security – and whose requests were repeatedly denied by State Department officials. Even though four Americans lost their lives during an hours-long attack with no assistance from supposedly unprepared US forces, including the first ambassador killed in the line of duty since the Jimmy Carter administration, not a single person in the State or Defense Departments lost their jobs, or even a single paycheck.
Related: New Benghazi eMails Could Derail Clinton in 2016
Now we have a scandal in which at least forty veterans have allegedly died while waiting for medical care in one VA facility in Phoenix, which hid their long wait times by falsifying records. Whistleblowers have come forward in seven more locations alleging the same kind of wait list fraud. Even though the Inspector General of the Department of Veteran Affairs has been probing these problems for months, the White House tried claiming last week that President Obama only found out about them through news reports over the whistleblower allegations, the same way Obama supposedly found out about the IRS targeting of his political opponents.
On Wednesday, Obama had plenty of opportunity to demonstrate leadership in the face of this expanding scandal. He called VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, who has served in that role since January 2009, to the White House for an unusual face-to-face meeting. The last such meeting took place in July 2012, not exactly a high level of presidential engagement on Veterans Affairs.
At the same time, the press office hastily scheduled a press conference for the President that would start 45 minutes after Shinseki arrived. Given the details revealed over the previous week, including a memo that warned VA headquarters of wait-list fraud in 2010, the stage was set perfectly for Obama to act as a competent executive and dole out consequences for tragic failure.
Instead, Obama put the man who had presided over five years of ineffective leadership in charge of investigating his own department. “Nobody cares about our veterans more than Ric Shinseki,” Obama assured reporters. “I want to know the full scope of this problem, and that's why I ordered Secretary Shinseki to investigate.”
That’s absurd on at least two levels. First, as Obama also noted in his remarks, the Inspector General has an open investigation into the wait-list fraud. The IG should be independent of VA executives, including Shinseki himself, and that investigation may well end up making Shinseki’s performance a subject for the probe. Having Shinseki run his own investigation parallel to an IG probe is problematic at best, and potentially a conflict of interest.
More to the point, though, the issue of wait-list fraud had been known since before Obama took office. He campaigned for his first term as President on the issue of substandard care at the VA. During the 2008-9 transition prior to Obama’s inauguration, he and Shinseki were briefed on allegations that appointment data was being manipulated to hide long wait times. The 2010 memo confirmed those suspicions. Since then, Congress has increased the annual VA budget by 78 percent, and per-patient spending rose 27 percent at the VA – double the national rate of increase, and almost triple the rate of increase at Medicare of 10 percent.
Related: Veterans Say Enough Is Enough—VA Head Must Resign
Eric Shinseki had more than five years and plenty of additional resources to solve this problem, or even to “investigate” it. Yet the White House claimed this week that it was so shocked by the scandal that it hadn’t heard anything about wait-list fraud until news media began reporting on dying veterans languishing on faked appointment schedules. In any other organization, that kind of executive incompetence would get a subordinate fired. In the Obama administration, it gets the subordinate a televised statement of confidence and control over the investigation into his own lack of action.
This time, though, Shinseki’s position and Obama’s shrug may prove untenable. Two House Democrats, Georgia Reps. David Scott and John Barrow, followed Obama’s breezy business-as-usual speech by demanding Shinseki’s resignation. Rep. Tammy Duckworth – herself a disabled veteran – demanded that Obama provide “his personal attention” rather than relying on Shinseki. CNN’s Drew Griffin summed up the disappointment from veterans groups to the non-action of the Commander in Chief by reporting that what “they did not want to hear is we're going to wait for, yet again, another investigation, office of inspector general report, or some fact-finding mission.”
At the moment, though, Obama refuses to make his subordinates accountable for their own failures. A lot of incompetent bureaucrats will sleep easier tonight with this object lesson on accountability and leadership in the federal government from President Obama. Too bad our veterans won’t be able to join them.
THE 21 YEAR STATEMENT IS VERY REAL WOOK ....
I KNOW KING WASN'T THERE THE WHOLE TIME BUT HE STILL HASN'T IMPRESSED ME ANYMORE THAN ED LEGURE AND JOHN BONFIGLIO DID...THE SCIENCE IS THERE , WE ALL KNOW THAT BUT ISN'T IT ABOUT TIME ALL THE "WE ARE IN TALKS" THAT HE HAS BEEN SPOUTING ALL THESE YEARS START SHOWING SOME PPS RESULTS ?? GLTY ALWAYS
VOLGOAT ...........
AFTER 21 PLUS YEARS HERE I LOOK AT THE PPS AND KING HASN'T DONE A THING TO MAKE ME MORE EXCITED ..... WE HAVE BEEN IN TALKS FOR MORE YEARS THAN I CARE TO REMEMBER ......SHOW ME THE MONEY .......GLTY
AS THE ROCK GROUP SANG..
SAME AS IT EVER WAS ..........
NOTHING CHANGES ........
Woman's Cancer Wiped Out By Enormous Dose Of Measles Virus In Landmark Mayo Clinic Trial
The Huffington Post | by Sarah Klein
Stacy Erholtz Measles Virus Cancer Multiple Myeloma Measles Stacy Erholtz Multiple Myeloma Multiple Myeloma Mayo Clinic Measles Cancer Stacy Erholtz Measles Cancer Stacy Erholtz Measles Cancer
After 10 years battling the incurable blood cancer called multiple myeloma, Stacy Erholtz, of Pequot Lakes, Minn., has now been disease-free for over six months -- thanks to the measles virus.
Erholtz and one other multiple myeloma patient were part of a recent experimental trial conducted by Mayo Clinic researchers demonstrating that cancer cells can be killed with injections of a genetically-engineered virus through a process known as virotherapy. The findings were published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
"This is the first study to establish the feasibility of systemic oncolytic virotherapy for disseminated cancer," study author Dr. Stephen Russell, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic hematologist and co-developer of the therapy, said in a statement. "These patients were not responsive to other therapies and had experienced several recurrences of their disease."
Erholtz said the results were almost immediate. "I had a [tumor] right here on my forehead the size of a golf ball," she told USA Today, "and within 36 hours it was gone."
Virotherapy dates back to the 1950s, according to the Mayo Clinic, and thousands of cancer patients have been treated with a host of various viruses. "However, this study provides the first well-documented case of a patient with disseminated cancer having a complete remission at all disease sites after virus administration," according to the Mayo Clinic statement. Because multiple myeloma patients often have weakened immune systems, the measles virus can work in this way even if patients have been vaccinated, the Star Tribune reported. The treatment requires an enormous dose -- enough to inoculate 10 million people, according to Minnesota's KARE 11.
"It's a landmark," Russell told the Star Tribune. "We've known for a long time that we can give a virus intravenously and destroy metastatic cancer in mice. Nobody's shown that you can do that in people before."
The second patient did not respond as well to the treatment, with the cancer returning nine months after the trial, KARE 11 reported. But Russell still sees the finding as cause for a larger clinical trial, and hopes for FDA approval of the treatment in the next four years.
"It's the way of the future," Erholtz told USA Today, "and I'm so excited for other people to experience this."
SOMETHING ROTTEN GOING ON HERE ?????????
In the span of a few weeks, an energy firm little-known inside the United States added two members to its board of directors — scoring connections to Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden in the bargain.
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On April 22, Cyprus-based Burisma announced that financier Devon Archer had joined its board. Archer, who shared a room in college with Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, served as national finance co-chair for the former senator’s 2004 presidential campaign.
Then, on Monday, the firm announced that Biden’s younger son, R. Hunter Biden, would join the board of directors.
Why would the company, which bills itself as Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, need such powerful friends in Washington?
The answer might be the company’s holdings in Ukraine. They include, according to the firm’s website, permits to explore in the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the country’s eastern regions, home to an armed pro-Russian separatist movement. They also include permits to explore in the Azov-Kuban Basin of the strategic Crimean peninsula, annexed earlier this year by Moscow.
It’s not clear what will happen to energy firms, like Burisma, that aim to explore and exploit potential deposits in those areas. Neither the Archer nor the Biden announcement explicitly mentions the unrest, and it’s not clear exactly when their discussions to join the board began. In an April 23 Q&A, the transcript of which appears on Burisma’s website, Archer said he had been approached “a few months ago” about the opportunity to consult for the oil company. The announcement of his directorship came less than a month after the disputed vote in Crimea to rejoin Russia.
The White House and the vice president’s office denied there was anything untoward about Biden’s appointment.
“Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the Vice President or President,” said President Barack Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney. “But I would refer you to the Vice President’s office.”
“Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer,” the vice president’s press secretary, Kendra Barkoff, said in a statement. “The vice president does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company. For any additional questions, I refer you to Hunter’s office.”
The person who answered the telephone at Biden’s office in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday cheerfully declared that Biden was traveling, that his return date was unknown, and that his assistant was also out of pocket.
An email to Burisma’s public relations department did not elicit a reply.
But Archer coyly acknowledged the potential benefits of having him on the board in the April 23 Q&A.
Question: “In the American media you are often linked to the immediate circle of the U.S. Secretary of State Mr. John Kerry and the Vice-president of the United States Mr. Joe Biden.”
Archer: “American journalists really think so (smiles). I do know them.”
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN is a big supporter of pipelines in Eastern Europe, but totally opposed to Keystone. Coincidence?
Vice President Joe Biden’s brother, James Biden, has received a cozy deal from Hill International, a firm that builds homes in the Middle East. James was hired as executive VP of the company in 2010. Six months later, Hill won a contract from the federal government worth some $1.5 billion to build homes in Iraq. The Iraqi government is supposed to provide the cash for the deal.
3 ways America should be more like Canada
By Rick Newman 21 hours ago Daily Ticker
Its middle class is thriving, its people are universally liked and its government actually works.
Fifty years ago, this description might have fit the United States. But not now. America’s middle class is shrinking and its global reputation is spotty. Congress, meanwhile, creates more problems than it solves.
So for guidance on how to fix America, why not look north to Canada, where the mood is upbeat and life appears to be getting demonstrably better? The New York Times recently reported the Canadian middle class is now the world’s richest, surpassing the U.S. for the first time. In the 2014 “better life index” recently published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Canada outscored the United States in 9 of 11 categories, including education, safety and overall life satisfaction.
The poverty rate is lower in Canada, and every Canadian citizen has government-provided health insurance, which might explain why Canadians enjoy longer life expectancy than Americans and are considerably less obese. As for the government, Canada’s national debt amounts to about $18,000 per person, compared with $55,000 in America.
So what is Canada doing right?
It has a more stable banking system. Canada has virtually never experienced a financial crisis, and there were no bailouts north of the border in 2008 when the U.S. government committed $245 billion to save dozens of U.S. banks. The differences between the two countries are somewhat accidental. In the United States, distrust of a strong central government all the way back in the founders’ days led to a system of state-chartered banks vulnerable to political meddling, and therefore riskier than the big, nationally chartered financial institutions that operate in Canada.
“In the United States, instability was permitted by regulators because it served powerful political interests,” Prof. Charles Calomiris of Columbia University wrote in a 2013 paper for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “In Canada, the banking system was not used as a means of channeling subsidized credit to a favored political constituency, so there was no need to tolerate instability.” The legacy of that today is a malleable U.S. banking system that, among other things, was deregulated in the late 1990s at the behest of banks themselves — which contributed to the 2008 collapse.
The financial crisis and the abuses that led to it are still holding back the U.S. economy. Shoddy lending standards were a major cause of the housing bust, which has whacked $3 trillion off the value of Americans’ real-estate assets — even with the year-long recovery in the housing market. That’s a huge loss of wealth that continues to hold back U.S. spending. And it’s just part of a 25-year debt binge Americans are still working off. With far fewer lending excesses, Canada didn’t really have a housing bust or a credit crisis to recover from.
Money doesn’t dominate politics. Canada has much stricter rules governing campaign contributions than those in America, where campaign-finance laws are getting weaker on account of recent Supreme Court rulings striking down limits on spending. Tougher limits in Canada give people and businesses with money to spend less influence over laws and regulations. “Every single one of my voters thinks that is terrific,” says former journalist Chrystia Freeland, now a Canadian member of parliament, representing a district in Toronto. “There is a lot less influence of the really wealthy and single-issue interest groups. A regular person has a much bigger voice.”
Many members of the U.S. Congress report spending half their time, or more, raising money for reelection efforts rather than legislating. Freeland estimates she spends less than 5% of her time doing that. There’s virtually no chance the United States will ever adopt a Canadian-style parliamentary system, but Congress could pass new laws or amend the Constitution in order to limit the corrupting influence of Big Money in politics. Were that to happen, however, it would probably make incumbent politicians more vulnerable to challengers. Maybe next century.
There’s less hostility toward immigrants. Canada, like the United States, has limits on the number of foreigners it allows into the country to work. But the whole issue of immigration is far less politicized, and there’s a broad understanding that skilled foreign workers help the economy. Canada actually recruits immigrants, part of a deliberate effort to attract talented foreigners most likely to contribute to economic growth. In the United States, the quota for skilled immigrants is far below the number U.S. firms would hire if they could get them. Despite appeals from many businesses, Congress is paralyzed on reforms that would let more skilled immigrants in, partly because that issue gets conflated with separate reforms aimed at stemming the flow of unskilled illegals.
Canada has its own problems, needless to say. Its government-run healthcare system draws complaints of long wait times for care and trailing-edge medical technology. Some economists think a housing bubble may be forming, for instance, and trends such as rising income inequality affect Canada just as they do every other industrialized country. Plus, it's cold.
In the Land of Moderation, however, such challenges seem manageable. “We’re less anxious because we didn’t have the financial crisis,” says Freeland, “but Canadians should guard against smugness.” Now there's something you're unlikely to hear an American politician say.
Apple ..........
Apple is building a team of senior medical technology executives, raising hackles in the biotechnology community and offering a hint of what the iPhone maker may be planning for its widely expected iWatch and other wearable technology.
In the past year, Apple has snapped up at least half a dozen prominent experts in biomedicine, according to LinkedIn profile changes. One prominent researcher moved two weeks ago, and Apple is recruiting other medical professionals and hardware experts, although the number of hires is not clear, said two people familiar with the hiring, who declined to be named.
Much of the hiring is in sensor technology, an area Chief Executive Tim Cook singled out last year as primed “to explode.” Industry insiders say the moves telegraph a vision of monitoring everything from blood-sugar levels to nutrition, beyond the fitness-oriented devices now on the market.
“This is a very specific play in the biosensing space,” said Malay Gandhi, chief strategy officer at Rock Health, a San Francisco venture capital firm that has backed prominent wearable-tech startups, such as Augmedix and Spire. He was aware of several of the moves.
Apple is under pressure to deliver on Cook’s promise of new product categories this year. The company has not introduced a new type of product since the iPad in 2010, a fact that weighs on investors’ minds: Its stock remains well off its highs despite a series of buybacks and dividend payouts.
Investor Carl Icahn tweeted his approval of Apple’s quarterly results and buyback plans on April 23. “Believe we’ll also be happy when we see new products,” he added.
Apple has registered the trademark “iWatch” in Japan. Several Apple patents point to wrist-worn devices, and in February, Apple filed a patent for a smart earbud that could track steps and detect gestures of the head.
One mobile health executive, who asked not to be named, told Reuters he recently sat down with an Apple executive from the iWatch team. He said the company has aspirations beyond wearable devices and is considering a full health and fitness services platform modeled on its App Store.
Apple spokesman Steve Dowling declined to comment on the company’s health-tech plans or its recent hires.
The med-tech community is betting on Apple to develop the App Store-style platform so startups can develop their own software and hardware mobile medical applications.
“There’s no doubt that Apple is sniffing around this area,” said Ted Driscoll, a Silicon Valley-based partner at Claremont Creek Ventures, which specializes in digital health and medical devices. He said Apple seemed primarily focused on recruiting engineers with experience in “monitoring the body’s perimeters.”
Apple has poached biomedical engineers from companies including Vital Connect, Masimo Corp., Sano Intelligence, and O2 MedTech.
Masimo is best known for its pulse oximetry device, which noninvasively measures patients’ oxygen saturation, an indicator of respiratory function. Vital Connect focuses on tracking vitals like heart rate and body temperature. O2 Med Tech also is experimenting with biosensors and developing new devices.
A LinkedIn search shows Masimo Chief Medical Officer Michael O’Reilly; Cercacor Chief Technology Officer Marcelo Lamego; and Vital Connect’s Ravi Narasimhan, vice president of biosensor technology, and Nima Ferdosi, an embedded sensors expert, are among those who have moved over to the Cupertino company.
One source said Alexander Chan, a former biomedical engineer at Vital Connect, has also defected. His LinkedIn profile states he now works at a “technology company.”
Apple has also hired hardware experts Nancy Dougherty, formerly of wearable sensor company Sano Intelligence, and Todd Whitehurst, vice president of product at Senseonics, a glucose-monitoring company, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
And most recently, Divya Nag, founder of StartX Med, a Stanford-affiliated startup accelerator, joined an Apple research and development team two weeks ago to focus on an unspecified healthcare product, two people familiar with the matter say. Nag did not respond to requests for comment.
Attempts to contact the people on LinkedIn were not successful, except for Ferdosi, who declined to comment. Sano and Vital Connect declined to comment, Masimo and Cercacor confirmed the departures, Senseonics did not return an email requesting comment, and O2 MedTech could not be reached.
“Just buying people”
Singularity University’s Daniel Kraft, who chairs the FutureMed program that explores developing technologies and their potential in biomedicine, said the first version of the iWatch might track blood pressure and heart rate, among other vitals.
Eventually he expects Apple to release a device that could continuously monitor glucose levels without requiring a blood draw.
“Some of the talent (Apple recruited) has access to deep wells of trade secrets and information,” said Joe Kiani, chief executive officer of medical device firm Masimo, who lost his chief medical officer to Apple in mid-2013.
Kiani said that Apple was offering sizeable salaries with little indication of what researchers would be doing. “They are just buying people,” he said. “I just hope Apple is not doing what we’re doing.”
FDA question
Apple may face regulatory hurdles if it aims for devices that do more than monitor fitness. In January, The New York Times reported that Apple executives, including O’Reilly, met with senior officials at the Food and Drug Administration, including Bakul Patel, who drafted the FDA’s final guidance for mobile health.
In fall of 2013, the FDA announced that it would focus on regulating applications that attempt to turn a smartphone into a medical device, or that are intended to be used as an accessory to a regulated medical device. That might include apps and attachments to measure lung function or to analyze urine, for instance, but not devices such as Nike’s FuelBand, which tracks your steps but does not offer medical recommendations.
Apple also has witnessed rivals trying, and failing, to produce devices that reach a mass market. Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch was panned by critics, and consumer reviews have been tepid at best.
A report from Endeavour Partners found that one-third of American consumers who have owned a wearable ditched it within six months. Key challenges include battery life, style, usefulness, and medical relevance, it said. And this month, Nike confirmed to Re/code that it had laid off some of its FuelBand team.
Meanwhile, Google is taking a different approach. In March, it pre-empted Apple by unveiling Android Wear, a version of its Android software tailored for wearable devices. Like Apple, it’s shown interest in medical technology: It is exploring contact lenses that can monitor glucose levels in tears.
(Editing by Edwin Chan and Peter Henderson.)
A CLASS ACT AT A YOUNG AGE ............
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/high-school-student-takes-great-grandmother-to-prom-200838206.html
YOUR CORRECT GWEN.
THE PATTERN HAS BEEN UP IN PRE MARKET THEN DOWN IN REGULAR SESSION ..IT HAS FOLLOWED THIS PATTERN MORE OFTEN THAN NOT ....
Keystone Pipeline Clogged by Massive Fecal Mass!
The Solar thing just got a little more
interesting... REALLY!
The Tonopah Solar Company in Harry Reid's Nevada is getting a $737 million loan from Obama's D.O.E.
The Project will produce a 110 Megawatt Power System, and employs l45 Permanent Workers.
That's costing us just $16 million per Job.
One of the Investment Partners in this endeavor is
Pacific Corporate Group (PCG).
The PCG Executive Director is Ron Pelosi, who
is the brother to Nancy's Husband.
EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW HOW THEIR MONEY IS BEING STOLEN
BHO.....
BHO proudly announced the Democrat Party now has 8 million more voters due to Free Health Care. It is comforting to know that OUR tax dollars are being wisely spent to provide mediocre healthcare for lazy, poorly educated, freeloaders.
P-P-H-M sing dis song, DOO-DAH, DOO-DAH...
HONESTABE ...........
I WAS FIRING FROM THE HIP (BOTH BARRELS) ...I DIDN'T SEE THE SECOND POST SO LETS SMOKE THE PEACE PIPE.......
THE TRUTH IS $1.84 = 0.3680 PRE SPLIT !!!!!!!!
Bill Clinton
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Restrictions on voting rights in conservative states endanger the core of the U.S. civil rights movement and force Americans to recreate "a yesterday we're better off done with," former President Bill Clinton said on Wednesday.
Speaking to a crowd of students and activists in Austin, Texas, Clinton slammed new voting laws that require photo IDs, make voting harder for students, or otherwise tighten up access to the polls.
To get anything handed out by the government (welfare, earned income, social security, etc) you have to have ID. You can't vote 6 times in 6 different locations, as was done by a friend of Obama (who is now in jail). This ID does not stop you from voting and most DMV's will provide ID for those who don't have any. The last election, as they are checking all the votes currently, had a lot of Obama votes by a voter multiple times. Dead people voted and illegals voted. No wonder the democrats don't want anything changed.
THEY SURE DO KNOW HOW TO PICK THEIR FRIENDS.....
PHILADELPHIA – A former Philadelphia police officer who was hailed as a hero and sat next to Michelle Obama at a presidential address will stand trial on charges he raped two prostitutes at gunpoint.
The November trial comes after 28-year-old Richard DeCoatsworth withdrew a plea to reduced charges Tuesday.
DeCoatsworth has experienced a long slide since he was shot in the face pursuing a suspect in 2007 and attended the president's State of the Union address in 2009.
CLAY TRADER IS HERE .
AUTOMATIC THAT STOCK GOES DOWN .............
I LIKE THE WAY YOU THINK BUT YOU HAVEN'T BEEN RIGHT YET .......
'The debate over repealing this law is over': Obama boasts 7.1 MILLION have signed up to Obamacare - but study shows just 858,000 newly insured Americans have paid up!
President took a major victory lap and took political shots at Republicans, but ignored shortcomings in his administration's official numbers
Press secretary Jay Carney will only say 'we're aggregating a lot of data' when asked how many enrollees have paid for coverage
Carney dodged questions about damning study that showed very few Obamacare customers were uninsured before the law took effect
Percentages from a hush-hush RAND Corporation study suggest barely 858,000 previously uninsured Americans have enrolled and paid premiums
HHS Secretary Sebelius met a televised challenge Monday about 'unpopular' Obamacare with lengthy awkward silence
A triumphant President Barack Obama declared Tuesday his signature medical insurance overhaul a success, saying it has made America's health care system 'a lot better' in a Rose Garden press conference.
But buried in the 7.1 million enrollments he announced in a heavily staged appearance is a more unsettling reality.
Numbers from a RAND Corporation study that has been kept under wraps suggest that barely 858,000 previously uninsured Americans – nowhere near 7.1 million – have paid for new policies and joined the ranks of the insured by Monday night.
Others were already insured, including millions who lost coverage when their existing policies were suddenly cancelled because they didn't meet Obamacare's strict minimum requirements.
Still, he claimed that 'millions of people who have health insurance would not have it' without his insurance law.'
'The goal we’ve set for ourselves – that no American should go without the health care they need ... is achievable,' Obama declared.
The president took no questions from reporters, but celebrated the end of a rocky six-month open-enrollment period by taking pot shots at Republicans who have opposed the law from the beginning as a government-run seizure of one-seventh of the U.S. economy.
'The debate over repealing this law is over,' he insisted. 'The Affordable Care Act is here to stay.
The president also chided conservatives 'who have based their entire political agenda on repealing it,' and praised congressional Democrats for their partisan passage of the law without a single GOP vote.
'We could not have done it without them, and they should be proud of what they've done,' Obama boasted, in a clear nod to November's contentious elections in which Republicans are expected to make large gains on an anti-Obamacare platform because of the law's general lack of popularity.
In the end,' he warned the GOP, 'history is not kind to those who would deny Americans their basic economic security. ... That's what the Affordable Care Act represents.'
'“The bottom line is this,' said Obama: 'The share of Americans with insurance is up, and the growth in the cost of insurance is down. There’s no good reason to go back.'
Republicans will differ with that assessment as Election Day nears. They need to gain a net total of six Senate seats in order to reclaim the majority and control both houses of Congress, a goal that appears reachable since two-thirds of the seats being contested are held by Democratic incumbents.
No national political analyst has predicted a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives.
White House press secretary Jay Carney stopped short of saying 'I told you so,' but chided a sparse press corps in the briefing room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for ever doubting that the Obamacare system would enroll more than 7 million Americans.
At midnight last night we surpassed everyone's expectations,' he boasted, 'at least everyone in this room.'
While he took great pains to emphasize that the total would grow – saying 'we're still waiting on data from state exchanges' – he dodged tough questions about other statistics that reporters thought he should have had at the ready.
Those numbers included how many Americans have paid for their insurance policies, and are actually insured. Also, he had no answer to the thorny question of how few signups represented people who had no insurance before the Affordable Care Act took effect.
Aside from the issue of the numbers' likely decrease when non-paying enrollments are taken into account, administration officials have been coy about the RAND Corporation study, which suggests that relatively few Obamacare enrollees were previously uninsured.
'What I can tell you is that we expect there to be a good mix of people who were previously uninsured who now have insurance,' Carney said Monday.
'Certainly, there’s a significant number who now have qualified for Medicaid in those states that expanded Medicaid who will have insurance who didn’t have it before.'
In addition to his claim of 7.1 million enrollments, Obama also announced that 'three million young people' under age 26 have gained coverage as add-ons to their parents' policies. and 'millions more ... gained access through Medicaid expansion,' he said.
Those totals – young adults attached to their parents' insurance and new taxpayer-funded Medicaid subscribers – far exceed the 7.1 million number the White House trumpeted on Tuesday.
The Affordable Care Act carried with it the promise of covering 'every American,' and it appears to have fallen tremendously short.
The unpublished RAND study – only the Los Angeles Times has seen it – found that just 23 per cent of new enrollees had no insurance before signing up.
And of those newly insured Americans, just 53 per cent have paid their first month's premiums.
If those numbers hold, the actual net gain of paid policies among Americans who lacked medical insurance in the pre-Obamacare days would be just 858,298.
Obama's Rose Garden speech included an acknowledgement that the Affordable Care Act 'has had its share of problems,' and has at times been 'contentious and confusing ... That's part of what change looks like in a Democracy.'
But 'there are still no death panels,' he joked amid laughter. 'Armageddon has not arrived.'
A standing ovation greeted him after his speech. A White House aide said the crowd consisted of '"organizations and stakeholder groups who helped lead the enrollment and outreach efforts, as well as Hill lawmakers and staff from HHS, CMS and other agencies involved in implementing the ACA.'
Not among them: Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathlen Sebelius, the administration official most responsible for the Obamacare program's implementation. She also did not appear in the White House press briefing room earlier in the afternoon.
But Carney and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough distributed donuts to reporters in the press center on Tuesday morning – presumably without checking with the first lady – and eagerly pitched talking points to journalists writing about the milestone day.
Questions remain about the effectiveness and affordability of Obama's plan, which he sold to congressional Democrats and the American people as a scheme to cover the uninsured, and about how the law is contributing to the spiraling cost of medical care.
As information about the chasm between Obamacare's promises and its reality have reached the public, the program has become more and more unpopular – a fact that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius met with awkward silence during a Monday television interview in Oklahoma.
'At last check, 64 percent of Oklahomans aren't buying into the healthcare plan; they don't like Obamacare, and they've been pretty vocal about it,' a KWTV-9 reporter told her.
'Now that's going to be – still continue to be a tough sell, but we'll see how that plays out over the coming months.'
Sebelius, a deer trapped in TV's headlights, offered only a blank stare. Asked if she had lost the audio feed, the icy secretary responded, 'I can hear you. But I – thanks for having me.'
Hours earlier, she tooted Obama's horn during a fawning Huffington Post interview, claiming that healthcare.gov saw a surge in traffic when the president appeared on the gonzo show 'Between Two Ferns' on the Funny or Die website.
Obamacare 'definitely saw the Galifianakis bump,' she said, referring to the show's host Zach Galifianakis.
'As a mother of two 30-something sons, I know they're more likely to get their information on "Funny or Die" than they are on network TV,' she added.
Americans who missed the online broadcast still knew enough to queue up Monday for panic-induced sign-ups. Crushed with traffic, healthcare.gov crashed twice.
On its way to 7 million, the Obama administration has never answered some key questions about the open enrollment period.
The White House has instead kept to its talking points.
'What I can tell you is that we expect there to be a good mix of people who were previously uninsured who now have insurance,' Carney said Monday.
'Certainly, there’s a significant number who now have qualified for Medicaid in those states that expanded Medicaid who will have insurance who didn’t have it before.'
The midnight deadline for enrollment has become a temporary formality, as the Obama administration has offered extensions to anyone willing to claim they tried in earnest to sign up in time.
Sebelius promised Congress weeks ago that there would be no extension.
The White House has compared it to voters who are permitted to cast ballots if they are in line when the polls close. But conservative opponents note that ballot officials won't accept voters' claims the day after an election.
California has also extended its deadline through April 15.
NO SUPRISE THERE STONY..........
SOMETHINGS JUST NEVER , EVER CHANGE WITH PPHM ....
GOING BACK TO THE REVERSE SPLIT 2 OR 3 YEARS AGO, WE ARE JUST A 0.36 CENT STOCK ...SOME GOOD THAT SPLIT DID HUH ?
P-P-H-M sing dis song, DOO-DAH, DOO-DAH...
AREN'T YOU THE SAME GUY THAT SAID THIS????
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=99217676
China censors remarks by Michelle Obama.....
YOU THINK THE DUMB ASS WOULD LEARN THE CUSTOMS BEFORE GOING ...
POST OF THE DAY !!!!!!
Ukraine Fallout: Putin Hands The Pentagon A Rationale For New Nuclear Weapons
There’s a plausible case to be made that Russia’s reabsorption of Crimea after 60 years of being attached to the Ukraine isn’t all that important, and the West is over-reacting. Well don’t expect to find anybody in Washington pushing that view. Today’s Washington Post features a lead editorial entitled, “A Dangerous Russian Doctrine,” and all four essays on the op-ed page explore the ominous implications of what Vladimir Putin has done. The persistent drumbeat of disquieting coverage and commentary about Ukraine reminds me of a term I used often when I taught nuclear strategy at Georgetown — overkill.
The North Atlantic Alliance isn’t likely to do anything direct or meaningful about Putin’s fait accompli, but the wheels are already turning within defense ministries and military think tanks about what indirect steps might be taken to deter further adventurism by Moscow. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where this debate will end up in Washington: the delicate balance of terror — the nuclear balance — is back on the table as an active concern. Why? Because the White House was already reorienting (no pun intended) America’s military posture to East Asia, where both of our prospective adversaries possess atomic weapons, and now the world’s other nuclear superpower, Russia, has muscled its way back into U.S. military calculations.
As chance would have it, this strategic shift occurs at precisely the moment when modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has become a major issue among military planners. Washington hasn’t done much to renew its deterrent since the Cold War ended a quarter-century ago. Plans to build 132 stealthy B-2 bombers capable of chasing down Russian mobile launchers in a nuclear war were pared to a mere 20 planes when the Berlin Wall fell, the number of ballistic-missile submarines has been reduced, and so has the number of Minuteman III ballistic missiles sitting in silos across the upper Midwest. The Obama Administration has not built a single new nuclear warhead since it entered office, and has retired more warheads than China has in its entire arsenal.
The U.S. can’t stay on this vector indefinitely without seeing its deterrent whither, because most of the nuclear bombers were built during the Kennedy Administration, the subs are due to start retiring around 2027, and the Minuteman missiles aren’t certified for operation beyond 2030. And then there’s the fact that tritium, the hydrogen isotope that boosts fission reactions to thermonuclear scale, has a radioactive half-life of only a dozen years (unlike plutonium, which pretty much lasts forever). The Pentagon has plans for developing new subs and bombers before the current arsenal has to be retired, but funding is problematic — particularly with spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.
Although President Obama has not interfered with these plans, he has been more focused on arms control as a solution to the nation’s nuclear security. Obama first began advocating a world free of nuclear weapons when he was in college, and he carried that theme into his presidency. An arms agreement concluded during his first term would reduce the number of strategic warheads — warheads readily deliverable over long distances — to 1,550 by 2018, and he subsequently elicited support from the military for a further reduction to 1,000 warheads. The administration’s 2010 nuclear posture review called for reducing reliance on such weapons and endorsed “a multilateral effort to limit, reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide.”
"XX-34 BADGER" atmospheric nuclear t...
With the U.S. facing nuclear-equipped rivals in Asia and Europe, the delicate balance of terror — the nuclear balance — has reentered U.S. strategic calculations.
However, the same posture review stated that Washington needed to “strengthen deterrence of regional aggression and reassure allies and partners of U.S. commitment to their defense.” That goal looks a bit more demanding now that Moscow has accomplished the first forcible change in European borders since World War Two, and it is inevitable that Pentagon officials will use the Ukraine crisis to build political support for their nuclear plans. Providing better air and missile defenses for Eastern European partners is a start, but when it comes to deterring nuclear attack, there is no substitute for possessing a secure capacity to respond in kind. Survivable second-strike forces have been the centerpiece of U.S. nuclear strategy since the 1950s.
What that means for the Navy is winning White House support of special appropriations to begin building a dozen new ballistic-missile submarines in the next decade. The subs are already being designed by the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics, which has been constructing undersea warships since 1900. The Navy wants to commence building the first replacement of current Ohio-class missile subs in 2021 and then buy one per year starting in 2026, but it hasn’t figured out how to fit the $5 billion boats into a shipbuilding plan that only averages $15 billion annually. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert warned the House Armed Services Committee last week that without some sort of special funding mechanism, his service would have to choose between nuclear deterrence and its myriad conventional missions.
What it means for the Air Force is keeping a secret “long-range strike bomber” on track, and perhaps accelerating the pace at which that airframe is equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. The Air Force wants to begin operating 80-100 of the stealthy bombers in 2025, but had hoped to avoid the cost of equipping them for nuclear operations until the venerable B-52 cruise-missile launcher starts retiring in 2040; if concern about a resurgent Russian threat persists, though, it may move up the date when the new bomber can contribute to nuclear deterrence. The Air Force also needs to decide how it can maintain its silo-based Minuteman missiles beyond 2030. The U.S. arm of British military behemoth BAE Systems recently won a long-term contract to sustain the Minuteman force, but major investment in upgrades or new missiles will be needed to keep the force ready and reliable beyond 2030.
Collectively, these three types of nuclear systems — long-range bombers, land-based ballistic missiles and sea-based ballistic missiles — comprise what U.S. military planners call the strategic “triad.” The different characteristics of the three weapons types are thought to assure a secure retaliatory force because it is too difficult for any adversary to wipe out all three in a surprise attack; knowing that, a rational adversary will be deterred from attacking in the first place. But preserving a credible deterrent requires funding a number of other costly items too, like airborne command-and-and control aircraft, and industrial complexes for refurbishing warheads. The Congressional Budget Office pegs the cost of sustaining the nuclear deterrent at $355 billion over the next ten years.
The most important military consideration that Vladimir Putin overlooked in mounting his annexation of Crimea is how it would bolster the resolve of western nations to maintain their defenses. At a crucial moment in deliberations over the future of the U.S. nuclear force, Putin has reminded Washington that Moscow’s future behavior toward its neighbors cannot be predicted, and that it may take more than “boots on the ground” to deter an aggressor possessing thousands of atomic weapons (not just long-range ones, but also tactical systems stored near Ukraine). Many people in Washington might have been prepared to forego spending money on a new generation of nuclear weapons before Putin made his move, but he has now changed the strategic calculation.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2014/03/20/ukraine-fallout-putin-hands-the-pentagon-a-rationale-for-new-nuclear-weapons/?partner=yahootix
DO IT , DO IT ...........
I'M ALL FOR IT ...........
BLEEDING THE USA ....
MOOCHELLE , HER KIDS , MOTHER , AND HER ENTOURAGE ARE OFF TO CHINA ON TAX PAYER MONEY AGAIN .......THEY DO KNOW HOW TO BLEED THE SYSTEM VERY WELL......
I'M IN 21 YEARS AND HAVE SEEN EVERYTHING AND MOST OF IT HASN'T BEEN GOOD FOR THE SHAREHOLDER..WE HAVE BEEN KEPT IN THE DARK ABOUT TOO MANY THINGS OVER THE YEARS .........
SEC IS USELESS ...THEY DON'T GIVE A DAMN ........
OR LIKE BOB SEGAR SAYS ........
"HE'S GOT THE FIRE DOWN BELOW "
After Hours Time (ET) After Hours Price After Hours Share Volume
16:50 $ 2.25 Low 600
16:36 $ 2.2703 High 1,418
16:28 $ 2.27 9,422
16:20 $ 2.2683 24,152
16:00 $ 2.2601 100
16:00 $ 2.27 2,269
Read more: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/pphm/after-hours#ixzz2wG5V3VZf
Great stock for 2014, but next move won't be until late May or June.
HAHA..... I HAVE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR THE LAST 21 YEARS ...
SIERRA LIKE A POPUP IS SPAM .NOTHING MORE
$20.00 GETS ME ALL I WILL EVER NEED ...
HOPE YOUR FEELING WELL PETER ...... YOU LOOKED GOOD ON TV LAST WEEK ..KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK ..
Obamacare's problem: You can't fix stupid
Published: Friday, 14 Mar 2014 | 8:00 AM ET
By: Jake Novak | Supervising Producer for “The Kudlow Report”
It was supposed to be the most burning crisis in America: the 30 million, 40 million, or even 50 million of us, (depending on which politician was screaming the loudest), who didn't have health insurance and were clamoring to get it in order to avoid everything from bankruptcy to death.
So the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress, gave us the Affordable Care Act. And they did it with such urgency that they didn't care that not a single Republican in Congress voted for it, and they didn't care that it took legislative chicanery to pass it despite the Democrat super-majority. Nope, the millions of uncovered Americans desperate for affordable health insurance just couldn't wait any longer.
(Read more: House GOP: How many have paid for Obamacare?)
So when the Obamacare exchanges finally opened for business in October, of course the tens of millions of insurance-starved Americans stampeded over each other to sign up and finally get covered.
Except they didn't.
The reality has been shocking even to the biggest Obamacare detractors. A McKinsey Report estimates that just 10 percent of the roughly 4 million enrollees in the ACA are people that did not previously have health insurance. Just 1 in 10!
Those 40 million to 50 million Americans just clamoring for health coverage that the Democrats have been telling us about since the 1940s have turned into just about 400,000 people who have bothered to sign up so far. And how much do you want to bet that those 400,000 will end up making up the lion's share of the up to 900,000 enrollees who have failed to actually pay for their new coverage?
(Read more: Who are these people? Insurers scope out new enrollees)
The experts have come up with several good explanations for the lack of interest among the uninsured. They point to the expensive premium and deductible prices, confusing rules, and of course the failed Healthcare.gov website launch.
But here's something no one seems to be addressing, and it's truly the elephant in the room when it comes to people who refuse to get covered now, refused to get covered before Obamacare, and will continue not to get covered forever: You can't fix stupid.
We spend a lot of tax money in this country trying to stamp out stupid with varying degrees of success. But no matter how much we spend and how hard we try, millions of Americans will still smoke, drink to excess, drink and drive, eat unhealthy food, and refuse to be responsible enough to tend to their health and health coverage. And there isn't any website, commercial, or funny viral video on Earth that will change their minds.
So we should stop trying so hard.
(Read more: Obamacare ha-ha: So Obama walks into an interview with Galifianakis...)
The universal individual mandate has always been the weakest operational and theoretical aspect of the ACA, so much so that Chief Justice John Roberts had to come up with the crazy idea of reclassifying the entire thing as a tax just to keep it alive. It's a ruling most Americans and Roberts himself will regret for decades to come.
Our Constitutionally guaranteed freedom in this country isn't just a slogan. It means the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail. The freedom to be smart, and the freedom to be stupid. And just because you can't fix stupid, it doesn't mean we should try to fix or amend freedom.
Unfortunately, that's just what Obamacare does by taking money from the responsible portion of society in an attempt to force feed responsibility to another. That's the thing about responsibility: It can't be imposed or transferred from one to another.
President Obama has unilaterally changed the rules of the ACA several times in the past 12 months. There will be more changes to come, including a possible long delay or outright abolition of the entire individual mandate. When — and if — that happens, don't pay attention to all the inevitable excuses that will address everything from blaming bad websites to anti-tea party conspiracy theories.
The real reason will be that the government can't fix stupid without killing freedom. And, as far to the left as America has drifted lately, we haven't quite gone off the deep end.
— By Jake Novak
Jake Novak is supervising producer of "The Kudlow Report." Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.