Officials at New Mexico’s largest jail want to end its methadone program. Addicts like Penny Strayer hope otherwise.
ALBUQUERQUE — It has been almost four decades since Betty Jo Lopez started using heroin.
Her face gray and wizened well beyond her 59 years, Ms. Lopez would almost certainly still be addicted, if not for the fact that she is locked away in jail, not to mention the cup of pinkish liquid she downs every morning.
“It’s the only thing that allows me to live a normal life,” Ms. Lopez said of the concoction, which contains methadone, a drug used to treat opiate dependence. “These nurses that give it to me, they’re like my guardian angels.”
For the last six years, the Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico’s largest jail, has been administering methadone to inmates with drug addictions, one of a small number of jails and prisons around the country that do so.
At this vast complex, sprawled out among the mesas west of downtown Albuquerque, any inmate who was enrolled at a methadone clinic just before being arrested can get the drug behind bars. Pregnant inmates addicted to heroin are also eligible.
Here in New Mexico, which has long been plagued by one of the nation’s worst heroin scourges, there is no shortage of participants — hundreds each year — who have gone through the program.
In November, however, the jail’s warden, Ramon Rustin, said he wanted to stop treating inmates with methadone. Mr. Rustin said the program, which had been costing Bernalillo County about $10,000 a month, was too expensive.
Moreover, Mr. Rustin, a former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania and a 32-year veteran of corrections work, said he did not believe that the program truly worked.
Of the hundred or so inmates receiving daily methadone doses, he said, there was little evidence of a reduction in recidivism, one of the program’s main selling points.
“My concern is that the courts and other authorities think that jail has become a treatment program, that it has become the community provider,” he said. “But jail is not the answer. Methadone programs belong in the community, not here.”
Mr. Rustin’s public stance has angered many in Albuquerque, where drug addiction has been passed down through generations in impoverished pockets of the city, as it has elsewhere across New Mexico.
Recovery advocates and community members argue that cutting people off from methadone is too dangerous, akin to taking insulin from a diabetic.
The New Mexico office of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes an overhaul to drug policy, has implored Mr. Rustin to reconsider his stance, saying in a letter that he did not have the medical expertise to make such a decision.
Last month, the Bernalillo County Commission ordered Mr. Rustin to extend the program, which also relies on about $200,000 in state financing annually, for two months until its results could be studied further.
“Addiction needs to be treated like any other health issue,” said Maggie Hart Stebbins, a county commissioner who supports the program.
“If we can treat addiction at the jail to the point where they stay clean and don’t reoffend, that saves us the cost of reincarcerating that person,” she said.
Hard data, though, is difficult to come by — hence the county’s coming review.
Darren Webb, the director of Recovery Services of New Mexico, a private contractor that runs the methadone program, said inmates were tracked after their release to ensure that they remained enrolled at outside methadone clinics.
While the outcome was never certain, Mr. Webb said, he maintained that providing methadone to inmates would give them a better chance of staying out of jail once they were released. “When they get out, they won’t be committing the same crimes they would if they were using,” he said. “They are functioning adults.”
In a study published in 2009 in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, researchers found that male inmates in Baltimore who were treated with methadone were far more likely to continue their treatment in the community than inmates who received only counseling.
Those who received methadone behind bars were also more likely to be free of opioids and cocaine than those who received only counseling or started methadone treatment after their release.
LOS ANGELES — To Philip Horn, the Braemar Country Club was not just a golf course, it was an extension of his office. Most weeks, Mr. Horn, a financial adviser at Wells Fargo, chatted up potential clients between holes at the upscale club set against the backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains.
“I always thought, ‘This is a great guy and a straight shooter,’ ” said Barry Zelner, one of several country club members who invested with Mr. Horn.
Now, those same clients are wondering what went wrong.
After Wells Fargo alerted him to account discrepancies, Mr. Zelner, a corporate lawyer, said he stormed onto the club’s rolling greens in April, accusing the broker of theft. “Tell them what you did, Phil,” the lawyer bellowed among a crowd of members.
A few months later, Mr. Horn pleaded guilty to defrauding more than a dozen clients and Wells Fargo.
While Mr. Horn is a relatively minor player in the pantheon of financial fraud, his actions highlight the persistent problems with policing the industry, even after the wave of rules enacted since the collapse of Bernard L. Madoff’s giant Ponzi scheme in 2008.
And the challenge of oversight is not becoming any easier, with the ranks of financial advisers swelling. As new regulations crimp profits, big banks like Wells Fargo are ramping up their brokerage businesses in an effort to make up for lost revenue.
Amid the renewed focus, banks have spent millions of dollars to beef up their compliance systems and improve their oversight. Regulators, too, have bolstered their efforts, increasing enforcement and adopting new measures.
Every month, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a Wall Street watchdog, penalizes more than 100 brokers for various actions, including unauthorized trading and fraudulent activities, as well as smaller violations.
“Theft, Ponzi schemes and other financial scams continue to happen at an alarming rate,” said Thomas Ajamie, a plaintiff’s lawyer who represents two of Mr. Horn’s clients.
For more than two years, Mr. Horn systematically executed and canceled trades in clients’ portfolios, pocketing the profits. To avoid detection, he limited his paper trail and made it appear that the trades originated in his own account, according to court documents.
“It’s simply unbelievable to me that this kind of fraud could happen for so long without Wells Fargo doing anything about it,” Mr. Zelner said. After meeting Mr. Horn on the golf course, Derek Brown invested more than $10 million with him in 2006, assured by the Wells Fargo name on his business card. “This wasn’t just Schlepper & Schlepper,” Mr. Brown, a retired pharmaceutical executive, said.
A Wells Fargo spokeswoman, Raschelle Burton, said the bank discovered the problems with Mr. Horn in October 2011 and immediately alerted law enforcement agencies. Wells Fargo also fired Mr. Horn. Mr. Horn is set to be sentenced on Monday. Prosecutors have recommended an 18-month sentence. A lawyer for Mr. Horn declined to comment.
Some of Mr. Horn’s clients are struggling to understand the extent of their losses. Mr. Brown and Mr. Zelner say that Wells Fargo has not let them review the trading records. Instead, they have had to rely on the bank’s analysis. “The firm believes it has provided appropriate information,” Ms. Burton said.
Prosecutors estimate the scheme’s damages at $732,000. But there are indications the losses could be higher. Last year, Wells Fargo, without explanation, transferred roughly $500,000 to an account that Mr. Brown has at Merrill Lynch. Mr. Brown said he planned to file a lawsuit seeking additional compensation.
While some clients still have concerns, Wells Fargo said the matter had been resolved and declined to provide further details. “In cases where his actions harmed the clients, the firm has either credited those accounts or reached another resolution with those clients,” Ms. Burton said.
On paper, Mr. Horn seemed like a model broker. After a short stint at Lehman Brothers in New York, he spent a decade at Citigroup in Los Angeles, moving to Wells Fargo in 2006. For much of his career, his regulatory record was clean, with few customer complaints.
At Wells Fargo, Mr. Horn, who worked in a team of brokers, seemed to land clients without an aggressive approach. He wooed clients slowly, often over many years. Between golf holes, he would casually mention winning trades, almost as an aside.
He nurtured friendships with clients. Norman Strang, an 80-year-old retired aerospace executive, said his wife regularly cooked dinner for Mr. Horn at the couple’s home in Pacific Palisades, Calif. “Here he was being this friendly guy, and yet he stole several thousands of dollars from our account.” Mr. Horn went to the weddings of both Mr. Brown’s children and planned to join him on a charitable trip to Israel and Morocco in the fall of 2011.
In 2011, Mr. Horn invited clients to his 50th birthday party inspired by the movie “Saturday Night Fever.” The tall and lanky Mr. Horn wore a white disco suit and handed out CDs with a cover that superimposed his head onto John Travolta’s body.
Given Mr. Horn’s gregarious nature, clients say they dismissed what should have been red flags. According to Mr. Zelner, Mr. Horn avoided meeting at his office, preferring the golf course. Between games, they would meet in the country club’s parking lot, where the broker would pull trading documents from his trunk.
“Phil would present his investments as if he was giving you something that would protect you,” said Mr. Zelner, adding that “he was also just a guy you wanted to drink with.”
Many clients trusted him. Each month, they received thick booklets detailing trading activity, but few pored over the trades. “If I had time to do that, I wouldn’t need a broker,” Mr. Brown said.
Amid hundreds of legitimate transactions, a dubious trade was also hard to spot. In one instance, Mr. Horn bought 1,000 shares of an exchange-traded fund for $77.93 apiece on Feb. 15, 2011, according to Mr. Brown’s bank statements. A month later, Mr. Horn canceled the trade. By then, the price had surged to $86. But the transaction was buried within more than 50 double-sided pages. It appeared as a canceled trade, which by itself was not alarming.
Mr. Brown and his wife did not know anything was amiss until they received a startling call from an executive at Wells Fargo. While the couple were celebrating the Jewish holidays in Toronto in October 2011, the bank executive told them about the problems with their account. Mr. Brown added, “He said we had a ‘six-figure problem.’ ”
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, right, and deputy commissioner Bill Daly speak to reporters in New York last month. (Mary Altaffer / AP Photo / January 6, 2013)
From the Associated Press
January 6, 2013, 3:29 a.m.
NEW YORK—
The NHL and the players' association said they reached a tentative agreement early Sunday to end a nearly four-month-old lockout that threatened to wipe out the season.
A marathon negotiating session that lasted more than 16 hours, stretching from Saturday afternoon until just before dawn Sunday, produced a 10-year deal that still must be ratified by the players.
After the sides stayed mostly apart for two days, following late-night talks that turned sour, federal mediator Scot Beckenbaugh worked virtually around the clock to get the sides back to the bargaining table.
This time it worked — on the 113th day of the work stoppage.
Time was clearly a factor, with the sides facing a deadline of Thursday or Friday to reach a deal that would allow for a 48-game season to start a week later. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman had said the league could not allow a season of fewer than 48 games per team.
All games through Jan. 14, along with the All-Star game, have been canceled, claiming more than 50 percent of the original schedule.
It is expected that teams will only play opponents within their conference this season.
Without an agreement, the NHL faced the embarrassment of losing a season due to a labor dispute for the second time, something that has never happened in another North American sports league. The 2004-05 season was wiped out while the sides negotiated hockey's first salary cap.
Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.
To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.
The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.
But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.
The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.
In 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).
Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up, he had still not looked into the question. Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.
In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.
In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.
It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”
Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.
Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.
After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.
But fearing that such measures would spread, that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.
The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”
It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.
In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.
The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition, all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.
There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”
But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.
In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.
It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.
Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The writers of controversial Osama bin Laden thriller “Zero Dark Thirty” and of the presidential drama “Lincoln” won nominations on Friday for the Writers Guild Awards, as momentum built in Hollywood ahead of the Oscars in February.
The screenplays for Iran hostage drama “Argo,” cult movie “The Master,” quirky comedy “Silver Linings Playbook,” and shipwreck tale “Life of Pi” also won nods from the Writers Guild of America for honors either as adapted or original movie screenplays.
The field of 10 feature film screenplays was rounded out by “Flight,” “Looper,” Wes Anderson‘s “Moonrise Kingdom,” and coming of age movie “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”
“Zero Dark Thirty” screenplay writer Mark Boal has come under fire from some U.S. politicians over the film’s depiction of the role torture may have played in the hunt for the al Qaeda leader, and for the origins of his source material in reconstructing the 10-year effort to track down and kill bin Laden in May 2011 by U.S. special forces.
The film makers have denied being leaked classified material and say the film shows that no single method was responsible for leading to the capture of bin Laden.
The Writers Guild Awards, a key indication of Hollywood sentiment ahead of the Oscars, will be handed out at simultaneous ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York on February 17, one week before the February 24 Academy Awards ceremony.
(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Vicki Allen)
Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times
Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner, said some insurance companies could raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.
In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.
The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.
Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations.
The review process not only reveals the sharp disparity in the rates themselves, it also demonstrates the striking difference between places like New York, one of the 37 states where legislatures have given regulators some authority to deny or roll back rates deemed excessive, and California, which is among the states that do not have that ability.
New York, for example, recently used its sweeping powers to hold rate increases for 2013 in the individual and small group markets to under 10 percent. California can review rate requests for technical errors but cannot deny rate increases.
The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that costs may increase just 7.5 percent next year, well below the rate increases being sought by some insurers. But the companies counter that medical costs for some policy holders are rising much faster than the average, suggesting they are in a sicker population. Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.
Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.
While Mr. Jones has not yet weighed in on the insurers’ most recent requests, he is pushing for a state law that will give him that authority. Without legislative action, the state can only question the basis for the high rates, sometimes resulting in the insurer withdrawing or modifying the proposed rate increase.
The California insurers say they have no choice but to raise premiums if their underlying medical costs have increased. “We need these rates to even come reasonably close to covering the expenses of this population,” said Tom Epstein, a spokesman for Blue Shield of California. The insurer is requesting a range of increases, which average about 12 percent for 2013.
Although rates paid by employers are more closely tracked than rates for individuals and small businesses, policy experts say the law has probably kept at least some rates lower than they otherwise would have been.
“There’s no question that review of rates makes a difference, that it results in lower rates paid by consumers and small businesses,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimated in an October report that rate review was responsible for lowering premiums for one out of every five filings.
Federal officials say the law has resulted in significant savings. “The health care law includes new tools to hold insurers accountable for premium hikes and give rebates to consumers,” said Brian Cook, a spokesman for Medicare, which is helping to oversee the insurance reforms.
“Insurers have already paid $1.1 billion in rebates, and rate review programs have helped save consumers an additional $1 billion in lower premiums,” he said. If insurers collect premiums and do not spend at least 80 cents out of every dollar on care for their customers, the law requires them to refund the excess.
As a result of the review process, federal officials say, rates were reduced, on average, by nearly three percentage points, according to a report issued last September.
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times
Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner, said some insurance companies could raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.
In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.
The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.
Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations.
The review process not only reveals the sharp disparity in the rates themselves, it also demonstrates the striking difference between places like New York, one of the 37 states where legislatures have given regulators some authority to deny or roll back rates deemed excessive, and California, which is among the states that do not have that ability.
New York, for example, recently used its sweeping powers to hold rate increases for 2013 in the individual and small group markets to under 10 percent. California can review rate requests for technical errors but cannot deny rate increases.
The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that costs may increase just 7.5 percent next year, well below the rate increases being sought by some insurers. But the companies counter that medical costs for some policy holders are rising much faster than the average, suggesting they are in a sicker population. Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.
Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.
“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.
While Mr. Jones has not yet weighed in on the insurers’ most recent requests, he is pushing for a state law that will give him that authority. Without legislative action, the state can only question the basis for the high rates, sometimes resulting in the insurer withdrawing or modifying the proposed rate increase.
The California insurers say they have no choice but to raise premiums if their underlying medical costs have increased. “We need these rates to even come reasonably close to covering the expenses of this population,” said Tom Epstein, a spokesman for Blue Shield of California. The insurer is requesting a range of increases, which average about 12 percent for 2013.
Although rates paid by employers are more closely tracked than rates for individuals and small businesses, policy experts say the law has probably kept at least some rates lower than they otherwise would have been.
“There’s no question that review of rates makes a difference, that it results in lower rates paid by consumers and small businesses,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimated in an October report that rate review was responsible for lowering premiums for one out of every five filings.
Federal officials say the law has resulted in significant savings. “The health care law includes new tools to hold insurers accountable for premium hikes and give rebates to consumers,” said Brian Cook, a spokesman for Medicare, which is helping to oversee the insurance reforms.
“Insurers have already paid $1.1 billion in rebates, and rate review programs have helped save consumers an additional $1 billion in lower premiums,” he said. If insurers collect premiums and do not spend at least 80 cents out of every dollar on care for their customers, the law requires them to refund the excess.
As a result of the review process, federal officials say, rates were reduced, on average, by nearly three percentage points, according to a report issued last September.
A powerful earthquake sparked a tsunami warning for hundreds of miles of Alaskan and Canadian coastline, but the alert was canceled when no damaging waves were generated.
The magnitude 7.5 quake did generate a tsunami, but the Alaska Tsunami Warning Center said the waves didn't pose a threat.
The temblor struck at midnight Friday (1 a.m. PST Saturday) and was centered about 60 miles west of Craig, Alaska, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The tsunami followed minutes later and was eventually expanded to include coastal areas from Cape Fairweather, Alaska, to the northern tip of Vancouver Island, Canada — an area extending more than 700 miles.
A center had warned that “significant widespread inundation of land is expected,” adding that dangerous coastal flooding was possible.
In its cancellation statement, the center said that some areas were seeing just small sea level changes.
“A tsunami was generated during this event but no longer poses a threat,” the center said.
After one community reported seeing just a small wave, the police in the coastal town of Cordova said they had no reports of any problems.
The Alaska Earthquake Information Center said the quake was widely felt but it received no reports of any damage.
In addition to the warning, a tsunami advisory was briefly in effect for some Alaska coastal areas to the north of the warning zone, as well as to the south of the zone, from the Washington state border to the northern tip of Vancouver Island.
A tsunami warning means an area is likely to be hit by a wave, while an advisory means there may be strong currents, but that widespread inundation is not expected to occur.
Galileo false-color image of the Mare Tranquillitatis and Mare Serenitatis areas of the Moon. The picture was made from four exposures taken during Galileo's second Earth/Moon flyby.
The colors are enhanced to highlight compositional differences.
Mare Tranquillitatis at left appears blue due to titanium enrichment. Orange soil in Mare Sarenitatis at lower right indicates lower titanium. Dark purple areas at left center mark the Apollo 17 landing site, composed of explosive volcanic deposits.
Red lunar highlands indicate low iron and titanium. Mare Serenitatis is roughly 1300 km across and North is at 5:00. The 95 km diameter crater Posidonius, centered at 32 N, 30 E, is at the middle of the bottom of the frame.
LONDON (Reuters) – Three sisters from Los Angeles producing fun and infectious folk-pop could be the tonic that chart music needs to lift it from what some experts are calling a creative slump.
As music channels, journalists and record labels step up their search for the “next big thing” in 2013, the Fleetwood Mac-inspired Haim sisters have appeared in a growing number of lists produced at the start of each year.
They include MTV‘s “Brand New for 2013″ survey, the band topped BBC’s “Sound of 2013″ poll on Friday decided by over 200 experts and also appeared on the cover of music magazine NME’s new music edition out this week.
Matt Wilkinson, New Bands Editor at NME, was upbeat about indie music in 2013 because up-and-coming acts like Haim had the attitude to succeed unlike more “reluctant” stars of the past.
“The difference (from recent times) is that they want to be pop stars, want to be on the front of NME, want to create their own scene and want to be No. 1,” he told Reuters. “It’s been quite a long time since bands really wanted to do that.”
Haim is made up of Este, Alana and Danielle, all in their early- to mid-20s – as energetic as they are photogenic and signed to the Polydor label in Britain.
Dorian Lynskey of the Guardian praised their “fantastic, inventive songs”, and said they were part of a revival from “the current sickly condition of chart pop” dominated by familiar faces like Rihanna and producers David Guetta and Calvin Harris.
RETURN OF GUITAR HEROES?
Sharing NME’s new music cover with Haim is Palma Violets, a London-based indie quartet also longlisted on the BBC’s annual survey whose past winners include chart queen Adele and 50 Cent.
The death or otherwise of indie guitar rock has been discussed almost obsessively by the British music press over the years, but George Ergatoudis, head of music on BBC’s Radio 1, bravely predicted: “Rock and alternative guitar acts are going to find public taste swinging their way” in 2013.
If that is true, those set to benefit include two Birmingham acts – quartets Peace and Swim Deep – two London bands – female post-punk foursome Savages and alternative rockers Bastille, and two Irish acts, Kodaline and Little Green Cars.
As in previous years, one area with the biggest potential for topping charts around the globe is the single female act.
Whether or not inspired by the likes of Gaga, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and beyond, a new crop of female performers-with-attitude has emerged ready to take on the world.
Creating the biggest stir so far is Angel Haze, a U.S. rapper whose sexually explicit lyrics and self assertive manner have put her on a path to stardom, helped by the success of her EP “Reservation” which draws on her Native American heritage.
“I will say to anyone’s face I am the best out there right now,” she said in a recent interview, with typical bluntness.
At the other end of the musical spectrum comes Gabrielle Aplin, a singer-songwriter who built up an online following by posting acoustic covers before signing to a major label.
Underlining the increasing crossover between merchandising and musical success, Aplin has already scored a No. 1 single hit in Britain with her cover of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love” which was used in a John Lewis commercial.
Somewhere in between falls Laura Mvula, whose powerful voice has earned comparisons from acts as diverse as Billie Holiday and Adele, and MTV has selected Ebony Day as its unsigned artist to watch this year.
There are precious few single male artists on the radar in early 2013.
Tom Odell appears on MTV‘s Brand New list, the BBC’s Sound Of survey and won the BRITs Critics’ Choice award for up-and-coming talent, while London rapper K Koke is included on Digital Spy’s “Ones to Watch” column and MTV.
ACCENT ON AUTHENTICITY
Duos are de rigueur in 2013 with British brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence of Disclosure delighting with their house music including new single “Latch”, and MS MR from New York the enigmatic pair who have music critics drooling.
“Prepare to be blown away,” wrote Paul Lester in the Guardian. “This duo could be the first superstars of chillwave.”
London electro pop pair AlunaGeorge have been championed by the same newspaper and were runner-up in BBC’s poll this year.
The surveys have a patchy track record in predicting chart success, and are crammed with dozens of acts already signed to record labels and so well on the way to success.
But they are closely watched by a music industry facing falling sales and desperate to spot the next Rihanna, Lady Gaga or One Direction.
While no one is suggesting the chart reign of Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift is over, there is growing optimism about a new crop of acts who have commercial ambition as well as musical ability and originality.
“I think across all genres there is a thirst from the audience for authenticity, whether it’s from folk acts or rappers or dance artists,” said David Mogendorff, digital media director of talent and music at MTV International.
He was involved in drawing up the music channel’s “Brand New” list of 10 artists destined for greatness overseen by Anna Karatziva, head of talent and music at MTV UK. Voting for the winner is open at www.mtv.co.uk/brandnew from January 14-31.
Outside Britain and North America, K-pop sensation Psy will seek to build on his global hit “Gangnam Style” which became the first video on YouTube to reach one billion views last month.
Whether he can prove more than a one-hit wonder in the West remains to be seen, while other South Korean acts including Girls’ Generation are gearing up to follow in his footsteps.
NME has singled out Australia’s indie-dance duo Jagwar Ma for special attention, while Russian-German dance music producer Zedd has begun to make inroads in the U.S. market.
(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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