Warning: Anti-Depressants Causing Birth Defects, Miscarriages

Friday, November 2, 2012

Lisa Garber | Activist Post

Pharmaceutical companies regularly embellish the benefits and downplay the dangers of anti-depressants, and all medications for that matter—but this time, their profits could be inadvertently endangering and even killing unborn infants. Senior doctors know it and are finally raising their voices.

Tufts University School of Medicine’s Dr. Adam Urato decries the practice of prescribing SSRIs to pregnant women. “Study after study shows increased rates of newborn complications in those babies who were exposed to SSRIs in-utero,” he says. These complications include greater risk of autism, lung and bowel diseases, and more.

Doctors Failing to Properly Warn of Risks

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are the most common form of anti-depressants, many of which are prescribed to pregnant mothers by “general practitioners, not psychiatrists,” according to Dr. Alice Domar of Harvard Medical School. “You come in and you say I’m not feeling very well, I’m feeling lethargic so the physician writes a prescription.”

Urato says that although not proven, the outcomes of over 40 studies linking SSRIs to the endangerment of an unborn child are troubling enough to warrant further research. Family doctors must also properly caution pregnant women about the risks involved in taking SSRIs during pregnancy. (Many doctors prescribe them anyway because, if the SSRI works to improve the mother’s mood, it would lead to “a better pregnancy result.”)

Urato says “there really is not a shred of evidence” supporting the benefits of anti-depressants for pregnant women.

Big Pharma Just Wants to Get Paid

Urato unapologetically points to Big Pharma. “It is a fact that these antidepressants have been very lucrative for the pharmaceutical industry…. It stands to reason to me that the drug makers would rather that the risks of these agents in pregnancy not receive widespread attention as that would be a reason for many women to not take the drugs in the first place or to stop taking them—both of which are not good for sales of the product.”

Downplaying the risks of drugs is hardly a new game for Big Pharma. In the name of profit, GlaxoSmithKline paid celebrity doctors—like Dr. Drew—to push and make off-label claims of drugs. It’s also been found that 70 percent of advisors to the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies.

Not even the government is immune to funding. Although the Food and Drug Administration admits that antidepressants can worsen depression and increase risk of suicide, the public and private sectors alike push ineffective and harmful antidepressants on patients. This will likely continue despite an increasing number of studies linking SSRIs to pulmonary hypertension and cardiovascular malformations in newborns.

Be wary of taking medication during pregnancy, especially anti-depressants. “If you add up all the potential risks,” Domar says, “a lot of people would say they are unacceptable.”

Additional Sources:
The Telegraph
PubMed

The 'War on Terror' Guarantee: Profit and Destruction

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Adnan Al-Daini

 

US President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961 warned us about the military-industrial complex with these words:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.  We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Fifty years later, these words have more resonance in today’s world than at any time since.  We now have the security-industrial complex to add to the corporate military-industrial complex.  The idiotically named “war on terror” led by the United States, with Britain acting as its outrider is being fought globally, supposedly to make us, in the West, safe (not).

Stephen Vizinczey in an article in the Telegraph entitled “Afghanistan is an unwinnable war, and our leaders know it” writes:

“The most hollow justification for the Afghan war is that unless we fight the terrorists in Afghanistan and other foreign places we will have to fight them at home. But, as the convictions of terrorists in Britain demonstrate, it is only at home that terrorists can be fought effectively. No atrocity has succeeded here for quite some time, which is certainly not the case in Afghanistan. And it is difficult to believe that the Government's main concern is to prevent terrorism at home, when it intends to cut the budget of the security services.”

This begs the question of why Bush and those around him were determined to convince the American public, by deception and distortion of intelligence, particularly with the war on Iraq, that wars in faraway places were the appropriate response to the horror of 9/11.  I believe that the anger and grief of the populace after 9/11 was exploited by the unscrupulous and powerful around a weak and uninformed president to enrich themselves and their corporations through arms sales, providing security services in those faraway places, and gaining oil concessions, the very scenario prophetically foreseen by President Eisenhower.

 

The ensuing decade of wars have caused death, injury and misery to millions of innocents with a final bill of up to $4.4 trillion to western tax payers, but have they made us any safer?  The former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller’s testimony to the Chilcot Iraq war inquiry, was reported in the Guardian thus:   

“How she had warned about what sensible – but mostly frightened to speak out – senior Whitehall officials believed in 2003: that the invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat to the UK.  More than once, the former head of MI5 emphasised to the Chilcot inquiry that the invasion exacerbated the terrorist threat to the UK and was a "highly significant" factor in how "home-grown" extremists justified their actions. "Our involvement in Iraq radicalised a few among a generation of young people who saw [it] as an attack upon Islam," she said.  Manningham-Buller said she was therefore not surprised that UK citizens were involved in the 7/7 suicide attacks in London or by the increase in the number of Britons "attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden" who saw the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their co-religionists and the Muslim world. The invasion of Iraq "undoubtedly" increased the terrorist threat in Britain, she said.  There was no evidence of any link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida – not even the CIA believed that – Manningham-Buller reminded the inquiry, as she pointed to the alternative agenda-driven "intelligence service" set up at the Pentagon by Donald Rumsfeld”.

Putting aside the immorality, the suffering, and sheer inhumanity of these wars, they have been a gigantic fraud on American and British taxpayers. The industry of manufacturing weapons of death and destruction is a peculiar one; its continued profitability is dependent on wars and conflict.  Democratic societies need to be vigilant to the danger of it becoming a monster beyond the control of government and the democratic process, the very danger President Eisenhower warned us about.

What’s Good for Apple is Not Good for the Country

Apple Economics: Maximizing Profit, Minimizing Employment

by MATT VIDAL

 

Apple Inc. is the largest technology company in the world, in terms of both revenue and profit. Yet, the California-based company has just 47,000 workers on its payroll in the United States.

Apple recently released a report in which it claimed responsibility for “indirectly” creating an additional 257,000 American jobs in industries that are part of its supply chain, a claim that was “disreputable,” in the words of MIT labor economist David Autor – as if Apple’s suppliers did not have any other customers. Or, as Wharton labor economist Peter Cappelli noted, as if the consumers spending their money on an iPad would not have purchased another product in its absence (see a New York Times article on debates over the report here, including comments from Autor and Cappelli).

While Apple’s claim to have created jobs for UPS and FedEx employees is questionable, however, there is some truth to the argument that Apple is responsible for the employment – and working conditions – at its key suppliers, particularly manufacturers for which Apple is the main customer. This may be the case for some Corning employees in the US (supplying glass for iPhones) and is very likely the case for, tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of employees at Foxconn in China, which presumably has entire lines or buildings dedicated to Apple.

A recent report by political economist and accountant Karel Williams and his research team at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester looked at the Apple Business Model and its employment effects. They cite a study which found that Chinese workers add $6.50 in value to each iPhone 3, just 3.6% of the phone’s shipping price.

In a counter-factual exercise based on the average wage for electronics workers in the US ($21 per hour) and assuming 8 hours labor per phone, the CRESC team shows that Apple could assemble the phone in the US and still make a gross margin of $293 per phone, which is down from its current gross margin of $452, but still an impressive 46.5% margin.

Assembling the phone in the US would have added benefits for the US economy in terms of direct job creation and multiplier effects – in contrast to the current business model, which decreases US employment and increases the US trade deficit. But healthy profits are not enough, so Apple continues to make superprofits to the detriment of the US economy. What is good for Apple is not good for the US.

But what about Chinese workers? The CRESC team analyzes the financial aspects of the Apple supply chain and argues that, unlike in the Japanese and Korean cases, Chinese suppliers under the Apple model do not have good prospects of moving up the supply chain. Japanese and Korean producers originally had competitive advantage in the international market because their domestic supply chains had a low ratio of labor’s share of value-added. In the context of national supply chains, even suppliers were able to continually upgrade to higher-value added locations in the supply chain.

The story for China is different because it remains at the end of a global supply chain dominated by US firms like Apple, which are able to successfully subordinate their Chinese suppliers through contracts that leave little profit for the latter. As a result, funds for reinvestment are limited and corporate strategy may thus remain defensive.

There is a question, which the CRESC team does not consider, of whether the Chinese suppliers will be able to develop their own R&D capabilities from their own manufacturing operations. For now, most electronics R&D remains firmly embedded in the US, Japan and Korea. But there does remain an open question of whether R&D and manufacturing can remain geographically separate, with the former retaining vibrancy and the latter subordinated to the second- or third-tier via contract. Nonetheless, the CRESC report does crystallize some important questions and provide some provocative answers.

Finally, it must be noted that it is somewhat misleading to call this the Apple business model. The business model of maximizing profit and minimizing domestic employment though global subcontracting was pioneered by many corporations in the 1970s and even earlier, among them Nike, which has always been a brand without its own manufacturing capabilities.

But this model has become a normative business logic among manufacturers since then, and it does, as the CRESC team points out, present fundamental employment problems for home countries of corporations, like Apple, Nike and many others, who take it to its extreme. What was good for GM may have been good for the US, but that was another time, when vertical integration was a normative logic of business.

In contemporary globalized capitalism, maximizing profit is often equated with minimizing (domestic) employment. Is it time yet to get over our collective obsession with sanctifying profit?

Bank CEOs Gain as Millions Lose Dreams, Retirement to Foreclosure

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 by The Newark Star-Ledgerby John Cavanagh and Scott Klinger


Inside and outside of Wells Fargo’s annual meeting in San Francisco yesterday, thousands of angry protesters decried the bank’s leading role in the loss of millions of American homes to foreclosure.

If you want to know why the protesters are so angry, consider this double standard. For most Americans, retirement security lies in the value of their homes. Millions of these people have been losing that security as the nation’s largest banks have foreclosed on them. Yet the CEOs of these banks are reaping giant pay packages and padding their own retirement security with profits squeezed from ordinary people.

For many American families, a paid-off home is part of the dream of a secure retirement. The roof over their heads has long comprised the largest element of most families’ net worth. The housing crisis brought to us by the country’s biggest bankers has stolen the dreams of the nearly 4 million families who have lost their homes to foreclosure since the housing crisis began in 2007.

Of those who continue to live in their homes, more than a quarter have lost so much equity that they now owe more on their mortgage than their residence is worth. Even those who have never missed a payment on these underwater mortgages have found it all but impossible to refinance their loans to take advantage of record low rates that would cut hundreds of dollars from their monthly payments.

As American families struggle with their shrinking equity, Wells Fargo is enjoying record profits. Its earnings clocked in at more than $4 billion during the first quarter of 2012.

Wells Fargo and Bank of America are the country’s two largest mortgage servicers. Over the past three years, the number of homes foreclosed upon by the two giant banks has steadily grown. At the end of 2011, they reported to federal banking regulators that they held $22.5 billion and $19 billion worth of foreclosed houses, respectively.

While foreclosures have devastated the financial security of millions of American families, the CEOs of Wells Fargo and Bank of America have seen their retirement packages balloon.

The pension assets of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf stand at $16 million, according to the company’s proxy statement. The vast majority of these assets came from a special plan available only to the company’s top executives. As high as Stumpf’s retirement assets have soared, they’re exceeded by those of another Wells Fargo executive. Mark Oman oversees the company’s consumer lending division, where most of its ill-fated subprime loans were made and where many customers have lost their homes to foreclosure. His retirement assets top $17 million.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan’s pension assets now total $6.8 million. His nest egg came mainly from a special "supplemental" pension plan.

It’s long past time that banking regulators stopped these dream-stealers from laughing their way to their gold-plated retirements. Protesters are insisting that the corporate funds diverted to prop up the lavish lifestyles of those responsible for upending the lives of the millions of American families who have lost their homes be redirected toward principal relief for homeowners devastated by these banks’ actions.

The Wells Fargo action was just the start. Don’t be surprised when thousands more protesters show up when Bank of America shareholders gather on May 9 in Charlotte, N.C.

Health Insurers Sacrifice Americans for Profit

Monday, August 1, 2011 by PR Watch

by Wendell Potter

 

Three of the biggest health insurers have announced quarterly earnings in the past few days. If Americans were able to eavesdrop on what executives from those firms tell their Wall Street masters every three months, they would have a better understanding of why premiums keep going up while the number of people with medical coverage keeps going down.


It only takes three words, when you get right down to it, to describe the real of those folks: profits over people.

CIGNA and Humana are scheduled to report earnings this week. The three companies that have already spoken -- UnitedHealth, WellPoint and Aetna -- earned a combined $2.51 billion from April through the end of June, more than analysts expected. On a per share basis, their earnings were up more than 17 percent on average compared with the second quarter of 2010.

Those results were no anomaly. The big for-profit health insurers have been blowing analysts’ expectations out of the water for several quarters in a row, even as the country struggles to recover from the recession and the number of Americans without coverage -- one out of every six of us -- continues to rise.

Based on their strong performance during the first half of this year, UnitedHealth, WellPoint and Aetna have all have raised their profit forecast for 2011. In other words, they expect to earn far more this year than last year and far more than even the most hopeful investors and analysts had anticipated.

This has made Wall Street very happy indeed, as reflected in the breathtaking increase in the companies’ share prices over the past year. Since the end of July 2010, investors have bid up the stock by more than 50 percent at four of the big five. WellPoint, the laggard, saw its stock price increase by a still-impressive 35 percent.

One of the secrets to achieving these results is what the insurers euphemistically call “medical management.” That often translates into denied claims and denied coverage for doctor-ordered care. The fewer claims you pay and the more procedures you refuse to pay for, the moremoney is left over for investors to put in their pockets.

Another important way they’ve been able to sustain such a string of impressive earnings results is to shift more and more of the cost of care to their policyholders. An increasing percentage of these companies’ policyholders are enrolled in plans that require greater cost sharing. Those policyholders pay more for care out of their own pockets than ever before while their insurers are paying much less.

The insurers are loathe to admit this, and have been making up a host of incredible excuses to explain why they are paying so much less for care than investors and analysts had expected and so much less on a percentage basis than in previous years.

Unending Excuses to Duck the TruthAt the end of 2010, executives told Wall Street that the “utilization” of medical services was lower than in 2009 because the flu season last year was less severe. They assured investors utilization would return to more normal levels during the first quarter of 2011.

When it didn’t, the bad winter weather was to blame. Insurance executives wanted us to believe that people were not getting the care they needed because it was colder and snowier than usual.  They assured us that medical spending would jump again as soon as the weather improved and the ice and snow melted.

Surprise! It’s August and people are still not going to the doctor or picking up their prescriptions or checking into the hospital as much as they usually do.

And what’s the excuse this time? It’s the economy, they say -- even though the recession officially ended more than a year ago.  At least UnitedHealth’s executives ackowledged that, as AP reported, “health plans that make patients more aware of the cost of care may be having an impact.”

May be? Give me a break. And stop the double-speak. What we’re so aware of is that we’re simply unable to get the care we need because of the often sky-high deductibles of today’s health plans, which insurers mislabel  “consumer-driven.”

Insurers' Code Words
Insurance industry executives are experts at talking in code, which makes it difficult to understand just how much they value profits over people. Occasionally, though, they slip up, as Aetna’s chieffinancial officer, Joseph Zubretsky, did last Wednesday during his company’s conference call with analysts.

Clearly concerned that investors might think Aetna was willing to grow by adding people to its rolls who might have substantial medical needs, Zubretsky disabused Wall Street of that notion.
“We would like to have both profit and growth, but if you have to choose between one or the other, you take margin and profit and you sacrifice the growth line,” Zubretsky said.

Whether he knew it or not, he was channeling WellPoint CEO Angela Braley. In a 2008 conference call with financial analysts, Braley had to acknowledge that her company had spent more on medical care during the previous three months than she and Wall Street had expected.

In the future, she promised, “We will not sacrifice profitability for membership.”
That was exactly what Wall Street wanted to hear.

WellPoint and Aetna and other insurers have demonstrated repeatedly that while they will do all they can to avoid sacrificing profitability for membership, they are quite willing to sacrifice their members -- and the American public -- for profits.

Obama Plans Corporate Tax Cut In Year Of Record Profits

Thursday, May 5, 2011 by The Nation

by Allison Kilkenny

 

As nationwide budget protests continue this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is prepared to unveil the Obama administration’s plan to lower the top corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent to less than 30 percent, and as low as 26 percent.

In order to pay for the cuts, the proposal calls for closing loopholes and slashing exemptions. Politico reports that Geithner has already begun meeting privately with CEOs, academics, labor unions, and liberal and conservative think tanks, and his aides say he is “encouraged by the response.”

Part of that optimism stems from the fact that Democrats and Republicans are both allies of the business world.

One top business lobbyist, speaking on condition of anonymity, said corporate tax reform should be “the easiest piece” of a complex fiscal bargain “because you have people in both parties in the business community.”

Meanwhile, the number of people who filed new applications for jobless benefits leaped 43,000 last week to 474,000, the highest level in almost nine months.

The surge in unemployment comes at a time when U.S. corporations are more profitable than ever. The end of 2010 saw some of the biggest gains in the business world, according to data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. Corporations reported an annualized profit of $1.68 trillion in the fourth quarter, up from the previous record of $1.65 trillion in the third quarter of 2006.

In the first quarter of 2011, Exxon-Mobil, the world’s biggest and most profitable corporation, raked in $10.7 billion. That’s a 69 percent increase over the same quarter last year, and the highest quarterly profit since 2008. This is happening during a time when citizens are searching underneath the couch cushions to scrape together enough change in order to fill their gas tanks so they can go file for unemployment benefits.

Exxon also happens to be one of US Uncut’s top targets. The oil giant uses offshore subsidiaries in the Caribbean to avoid paying taxes in the United States. The company paid zero U.S. income tax in 2009, while enjoying billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies and its CEO’s total compensation reached over $29 million.

Now, in addition to raking in record profits by sheltering revenue in foreign tax havens, Exxon and its Fortune 500 comrades, rest on the brink of enjoying more sweeteners in the form of tax breaks.
Of course, tax havens are only one part of a rigged system that allows corporations to make bank during economic recession. There are also the practices of government subsidies, (read: taxpayer subsidies) outsourcing jobs, and buying off politicians that allow top corporations and their CEOs to flourish while one in four American children survives on food stamps.

While I was watching CNN this morning, a talking head made the comment that the corporations were forced to “go lean” during the recession, but now that the economy is recovering, they refuse to hire simply because they like being lean! Why wouldn’t they? Corporate America is enjoying record profits, so there are no incentives to hire an expensive American worker (with their pesky unions’ minimum wage demands, rational work schedule, and health benefits) when they can outsource the same job for cheap labor overseas.

Another alternative is to just bust unions and treat workers like they’re employed in the third world, a path chosen by Wal-mart, which secured a spot at the top of the Fortune 500 list released today.
Then there’s the problem of corporate lobbying and bribery. Corporate America dominated Washington’s lobbying spending in the first quarter of 2011, according to a report from the Center for Responsive Politics. The US Chamber of Commerce spent just over $17 million in the three-month period. Next was General Electric (the “King of Tax Dodgers”) with just over $9 million, and AT&T with spending just over $6.8 million.

Corporations learn to grease the wheels early, which is why their financial support of political candidates is so bipartisan. Before the presidential election, John McCain received three times more money from the oil industry than President Obama. However, Obama received more in campaign cash than McCain from the employees of some of the biggest oil companies: Exxon, Chevron, and BP, three companies that routinely grace the top echelons of the Fortune 500 list.
It’s no wonder that the big companies with the most money buy the most access and win the most favorable pieces of legislation.

The Obama administration is considering these corporate tax cuts during a time when almost every state is experiencing some kind of budget cut protest. Teachers, police, fire-fighters, unions, students, and their supporters have occupied state Capitols and campuses to demand a one-tier America where everyone (citizens and corporations, alike) sacrifice during times of fiscal crisis.

The Bogus $100 Billion Medicare / Medicaid Fraud Claim

The Real Problem is Profiteering
By DAVE LINDORFF

President Barack Obama is out and abroad stumping like mad for his embattled health insurance “reform” plan, claiming now that his administration will “crack down” on $100 billion in annual “waste and fraud” in the Medicare and Medicaid systems.

This new tough rhetoric is meant to win over some of the conservative opposition that sees all government programs as inherently wasteful, inefficient and corrupt.

But the claim itself is bogus.

The figure comes from a study done annually by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and that study makes it clear that it is not looking at fraud, but at errors. And there are two things that can be said about those errors, most of which appear to involve problems like illegible signatures on doctors’ orders, or lost paperwork needed to document that a treatment being billed for actually happened.

The first point to make here is that such errors are equally prevalent in the private sector, only the chances are that in the private sector, the errors more often lead to shortchanging or denying care to the patient, while in the public sector, they as often lead to somebody or some institution getting paid more than they deserve for treating a patient.

Second, the errors in the Medicare program (there has been no systematic study, according to a spokesman at CMS, of error and fraud in the Medicaid program, much of which is funded and managed by the various states), cut both ways, with some errors leading to an overpayment or a payment for a service that wasn’t actually provided, and some errors leading to an underpayment for a service that was provided. Also not reported at all are errors that led to a person’s being improperly denied care altogether. (The same is true for the Veteran’s Administration, by the way, which is notorious among veterans for improperly denying claims of service-connected disabilities.)

According to the latest CMS report, the error rate for Medicaid parts A and B--the hospital and physician part of the program, was 7.9 percent or approximately $24 billion. Of this, $23 billion was said to involve overpayments, and $1.1 billion was said to involve underpayments. The underpayment figure looks suspicious, because in prior years, when the overpayment figure was roughly $9-$10 billion annually, the underpayments came in at about $1 billion also. It seems unlikely that overpayment errors in 2009 would more than double, while underpayment errors would stay the same.

Nearly all the underpayment errors--$800 million worth in 2009--were for inpatient care. This compared to $6 billion in overpayment errors. In other words roughly two out of every 15 errors involved the patient or the patient’s physician or hospital being shorted by Medicare.

CMS claims that the estimated error rate for Medicaid in 2009 was 8.7% for the federal government and 10.5% for the states and counties that administer the program locally. That would be $39 billion of the $98 billion in errors and fraud found in both programs combined for the year by CMS, and cited by President Obama in his “$100 billion in waste and fraud” claim.

But bear in mind that unlike Medicare, Medicaid is a welfare program, which means that the bias is towards denying benefits to applicants, as anyone who has had experience with Medicare can tell you. Furthermore it is a program administered by both state and federal bureaucrats.

Back in 1977, when I was county government bureau chief for the Los Angeles Daily News, I got an urgent call from my editor, telling me to hop on a story based upon a release by the L.A. County Department of Social Services claiming to have discovered that 5.83 percent of welfare recipients were being overpayed because off errors and fraud, and that a campaign was being implemented to attack the problem, which was costing the county millions of dollars a year. Naturally, the editor saw this as a page one piece, perhaps a banner headline, for the next days edition. I called the head of the Department of Social Services and asked a simple question: What is the error rate in the other direction? What percent of welfare applicants and recipients were being undercompensated because of errors? After a little investigation, she returned and informed me that the underpayment error rate was exactly the same: 5.83%! When I reported this back to the City Desk, there was an audible groan on the phone. The story had lost all importance to the editor. And yet, I thought, wasn’t an underpayment of welfare benefits to a poor family of far greater consequence than an overpayment is to the taxpayers? Getting shorted $100, or even $20, for a family living on, or below, the edge, would be catastrophic.

My guess is that a good study of underpayments and overpayments in the Medicaid program of the federal government and the states would more than likely give the same kind of result: an error rate in terms of underprovision of benefits that is equal to in percent and dollar amount the overpayment of benefits. And in fact, with welfare type programs like Medicare, there is also an unmeasured or unmeasurable problem, which is people who are wrongly denied benefits at all. They aren’t underpaid because they are simply turned away from public assistance for health care when they are actually eligible.

The point here is that if there is an error rate of about 9.5% in Medicaid (I’m averaging the federal and state error rate estimates for 2009), then either half of that $39 billion is probably underpayment errors, or, if they are only counting overpayment errors, there is almost certainly another $39 billion that should have been paid out for care of poor families that was not paid out.

Either way, the president’s incendiary claim that there is $100 billion in waste and fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid program is way off the mark.

If the president were serious about the problem, he would call for an honest investigation to make certain that everyone potentially eligible for medical coverage and assistance in both programs gets the full benefits to which they are entitled, to minimize inadvertent overpayments to providers, and to prosecute to the full extent of the law those who defraud either program.

That would be fine and appropriate. But at the same time, the president is also disingenuous in the extreme when he just attacks fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid, as though there is not massive fraud and waste in the private insurance industry and the rest of the medical industry. Indeed, much of the fraud in the Medicare program is in that part of it that is contracted out to the private insurance firms that offer the so-called MediGap insurance policies. Nearly all the rest of the actual fraud is perpetrated by private physicians, private hospitals and by other medical industry firms and pharmaceutical companies, which submit false invoices and charge for services and goods not delivered. And as CBS’s “60-Minutes” program and other news organizations have reported, there has been little or no effort devoted to prosecution of such fraud, though it totals in the tens of billions of dollars per year.

That’s not a problem with “government-run health care”--a bogeyman that the president regularly pulls out to pillory--but with private healthcare.

The president knows this, but since his whole “reform” proposal is built around the private insurance sector, he’s not going to say that.

Then again, what political strategist guru in the White House came up with the idea that attacking alleged “waste and fraud” in “government health care” would be a good way to win support for Obamacare?