Free Republic

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced that his administration is moving forward with new rules meant to push insurance companies to increase their coverage of mental health treatments. The new regulations, which still need to go through a public comment period, would require insurers to study whether their customers have equal access to medical and mental health benefits and to take remedial action, if necessary. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act requires that insurers provide the same level of coverage for both mental and physical health care — though the administration and advocates argue insurers' policies...

As the title suggests, something's been bothering me about the photo of "classified documents" released by the DOJ in their response filing for the special master request by Trump's legal team. The cover sheets are all wrong. I've had access to Top Secret/SCI material for over 40 years, working with it on a daily basis. I have never seen cover sheets with a solid color border that say "SECRET/SCI" or "TOP SECRET/SCI." Those would be OK if they were just SECRET or TOP SECRET collateral information (not sensitive compartmented information - SCI). The cover sheets for SCI documents have striped...

NEW YORK — The euro has fallen below parity with the dollar, diving to its lowest level in 20 years and ending a one-to-one exchange rate with the U.S. currency. It's a psychological barrier in the markets. But psychology is important, and the euro's slide underlines the foreboding in the 19 European countries using the currency as they struggle with an energy crisis caused by Russia's war in Ukraine. Here's why the euro's slide is happening and what impact it could have: WHAT DOES EURO AND DOLLAR PARITY MEAN? It means the European and American currencies are worth the same...

The dollar’s upward march has sent the euro currency to its lowest level in 14 years, easing the financial pressure on traveling Americans but giving European exporters a boost. The euro, used by 19 countries, was down 0.1 percent at $1.0390 late-afternoon Tuesday, having earlier fallen to $1.0352, its lowest level since early 2003. Over recent days, the euro’s descent to the psychologically important level of one euro per dollar, has accelerated. A major factor has been the prospect of more interest rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve following a quarter-point increase in its benchmark rate last week. Higher...

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday from opposing legal counsel on the HHS contraception mandate cases. The media consensus appears to be that the justices were hard on the mandate and appear likely to issue a narrow ruling exempting “closely-held” corporations, which both of the plaintiffs are, while leaving open the question of whether or not publicly-traded corporations have First Amendment rights. The distinction is relevant since closely-held corporations are directly operated by their owners and are fairly limited in the number of shareholders they typically have, while public corporations have hundreds or thousands of shareholders. The...

This image was posted on the MSNBC tumblr this week: Not just in the spirit, in the practice. So Wagner thinks that our laws should create gender parity in Congress. I wonder what those laws would be. Would she have men barred from running for Senate in a state that already has a male Senator? What about in congressional districts? What about people who run unopposed? Or perhaps she'd rather have the laws create parity after the election. Once we see who got elected we just, what, have a committee pick gender appropriate replacements for the incorrectly elected? And what...

Australia's dollar has blasted through parity against the US dollar after the country raised interest rates a quarter point to 4.75pc to fight inflation. The long-awaited moment of "triple parity" seems imminent. The Swiss franc is already worth more than a greenback, and the Canadian dollar is seemingly poised to break through as well. The surging "Aussie" - widely seen as a play on the China growth story and used by traders as a proxy for the Chinese yuan - captures the shift in the world's economic centre of gravity to the Pacific region. The currency was worth half a...

Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history. The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since 2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and...

Sempra Energy is reporting today in the Los Angeles Times that its new solar farm near Nevada has achieved price parity with coal power at about 7.5 cents per kilowatt hour. This is good news except for the fact that the Times merely regurgitated a Sempra public relations release puff piece and left some stuff out; like the cost of back-up coal fired electricity when the sun isn't shining bright enough. Another apparent cost left out is the cost to buy land. The small 10 megawatt solar farm that Sempra has recently built is apparently on land Sempra owns next...

A strong currency reflects booming commodity exports and sound public finances. But not everyone is cheering. IT HARDLY came as a surprise when, on September 21st, the Canadian dollar crossed a symbolic threshold and overtook its American counterpart in value for the first time since 1976. Since January 2002, when Canadians needed C$1.61 to buy a greenback, the loonie (so nicknamed after the aquatic bird depicted on the dollar coin) has been pushed up by world demand for Canada's commodities. Yet even hard-bitten currency traders cheered out loud as the loonie inched towards parity, and then beyond. David Watt, a...

General Yury Baluyevsky-Russia's #2 man in Defense-is unhappy over the American's missile defense system. What good is it to have 927 ICBMs if they can be destroyed in flight ? Details at: http://insidestraight.typepad.com/the_inside_straight/2006/08/us_and_russia_h.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Aided by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, insurance companies successfully have blocked legislation to make them provide equal coverage for mental and physical illnesses if their policies include both. President Bush endorsed the concept two years ago. Today, supporters of the bill are willing to settle for a scaled-back version they hope Congress will pass in 2004. < -snip- > The bill would expand a 1996 law prohibiting health plans that offer mental health coverage from setting lower annual and lifetime spending limits for mental treatments than for physical ailments. The proposed legislation also would require equal treatment...