Free Republic

For more than two weeks, a cyberattack has disrupted business at health care providers across the United States, forcing small clinics to scramble to stay in business and exposing the fragility of the billing system that underpins American health care. “We’re hemorrhaging money,” said Catherine Reinheimer, practice manager at the Foot and Ankle Specialty Center in the suburbs of Philadelphia. “This will probably be the last week that we can keep everybody on full-time without having to do something,” she told CNN. The center is considering taking out a loan to keep the lights on. The cyberattack disrupted the computer...

Harry M. Reid needed money, and lots of it. Last spring, the Senate majority leader was looking ahead to a tough reelection fight. Polls showed that the voters back home in Nevada who sent him to Washington four times had tired of him. Republican Party fundraisers had all but declared him their No. 1 target for defeat. Taking them on would be expensive, and he wasn't drawing nearly enough cash from contributors inside Nevada. So Reid did what politicians in his position do: He picked up the phone. The senator began dialing old and new friends across the country,...

Retail health clinics are adding treatments for chronic diseases such as asthma to their repertoire, hoping to find steadier revenue, but putting the clinics into greater competition with doctors' groups and hospitals. Walgreen Co.'s Take Care retail clinic recently started a pilot program in Tampa and Orlando offering injected and infused drugs for asthma and osteoporosis to Medicare patients. At some MinuteClinics run by CVS Caremark Corp., nurse practitioners now counsel teenagers about acne, recommend over-the-counter products and sometimes prescribe antibiotics. ... Walgreen, the second-largest pharmacy chain by stores, plans to start a pilot program for managing diabetes in coming...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/03/02/Sebelius-at-HHS/ THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 1:11 pm Sebelius at HHS Overhauling our health care system is going to take the will to fight entrenched special interests and lobbyists, the patience to work across party lines, and a little Kansas common sense. "Kathleen Sebelius has a remarkable intellect, unquestioned integrity, and the kind of pragmatic wisdom you’ll tend to find in a Kansan," President Obama said as he announced the Kansas Governor as his choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. "I know she...

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will open its first in-store medical clinics under its own brand name after leasing space in dozens of stores to outside companies that operate the quick-service health stops. The world's largest retailer said Thursday it will open "The Clinic at Wal-Mart" as a joint venture with local hospital systems in Atlanta, Dallas and Little Rock, Ark., starting in April. Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart is among several U.S. supermarket and drug store chains that in the past couple of years have begun opening store-based health clinics, which are staffed mostly by nurse practitioners or physician assistants and offer quick...

Criticized for failing to offer substantial remedies for California's healthcare problems, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today will propose installing new medical clinics in as many as 500 elementary schools, his aides said. The multimillion-dollar plan is related to an election-year decision by the Republican governor to embrace healthcare as an issue. Schwarzenegger's aides said he also hopes to propose ways to cut medical costs industrywide. California already has 140 school medical clinics. Schwarzenegger would add to those and use them, in part, to enroll more children in government insurance programs such as Healthy Families and Medi-Cal, which are used by low-income...

USAID Undercuts U.S. Global HIV/AIDS Initiative   This May, President Bush signed into law the Global HIV/AIDS bill (HR 1298). Over the course of the next few years, $15 billion will be spent on new programs designed to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS, and to provide life-extending care to millions infected with the disease. The law mandates that 55% of the overall funding will go for basic medicaltreatment. Even more importantly, 33% of the overall prevention funding must go to abstinence programs. No money would go to groups that advocate the legalization of prostitution. Oversight of the U.N. Global Fund...

VISIT TO AN AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL FROM HELL-OBERVATIONS OF A MAD DAD! My teenager & I recently made a visit to a local public high school, McCann Technical School, North Adams, MAss., (413)-664-9424, www.mccanntech.org. This is what we found, and why my child will not be sent to a public school in America today up in old New England. A poster I noted in the guidance dep't, "Evolution may take millions of years, but..." The theory of evoution is scientifically impossible. The very increadible order of every part of the physical world testifies to the clear presence of intelligent design....