– Doctors limit new Medicate patients. The rationing starts:
WASHINGTON — The number of doctors refusing new Medicare patients because of low government payment rates is setting a new high, just six months before millions of Baby Boomers begin enrolling in the government health care program.Recent surveys by national and state medical societies have found more doctors limiting Medicare patients, partly because Congress has failed to stop an automatic 21% cut in payments that doctors already regard as too low. The cut went into effect Friday, even as the Senate approved a six-month reprieve. The House has approved a different bill.
An Israeli cargo ship arriving in Oakland today was forced to sit idle and not offload its containers when longshoremen joined forces with a coalition of communist and Islamist groups who picketed the port in protest against the recent violent incident off the coast of Gaza.
The ship, owned by Zim Lines, was not carrying any controversial cargo, nor is Zim involved in politics in any way; it was targeted simply because the shipping company is based in Israel.
Oh, but protest #fail: it wasn’t an Israeli ship, it was Chinese.
– Janet Napolitano: “All your base are belong to me”:
“The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet,” Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
If you squawked about the Patriot Act you better squawk about this too – don’t cherry-pick and rail against one invasion of privacy and liberty but sanction via silence another simply because it comes from your guy. Be consistent or don’t be at all.
– Lovely: 51% won’t get to stay in their employer health plan.
