Archive for November, 2010

Would Wikileaks leak your HIPPA records?

At most companies that have even a modicum of network security, were you to stick a thumb drive into your hard drive’s USB port you’d immediately set off network alarms and would likely be shortly thereafter locked out of that PC, and your manager would receive a call from your network operations group. But not at the US Army!

Apparently the United States government doesn’t knew about this kind of software… Worse, the leaker was a private first class, hardly some kind of high-ranking “your eyes only” official.

[UK Guardian] The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.

At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated “secret” – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.

These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, also reveal Washington’s evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.

These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan’s growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.

And these same federal jack-a$$es want to run your health care? If top secret cables can so easily be made public I don’t think HIPPA rules would mean much.

Comments off

Stimulus money for the dead.

Here’s the Washington Examiner:

Perhaps government is more like a zombie than a parasite. Especially given that about $1 billion in taxpayer money goes to 250,000 deceased individuals (according to a review of reports by the Government Accountability Office, inspectors general, and Congress itself). How, might you ask? According to Sen. Tom Coburn’s, R-Okla., office:

  • The Social Security Administration sent $18 million in stimulus funds to 71,688 dead people and $40.3 million in questionable benefit payments to 1,760 dead people.
  • The Department of Health and Human Services sent 11,000 dead people $3.9 million in assistance to pay heating and cooling costs.
  • The Department of Agriculture sent $1.1 billion in farming subsidies to deceased farmers.
  • The Department of Housing and Urban Development overseeing local agencies knowingly distributed $15.2 million in housing subsidies to 3,995 households with at least one deceased person.
  • Medicaid paid over $700,000 in claims for prescriptions for controlled substances written for over 1,800 deceased patients and prescriptions for controlled substances written by 1,200 deceased doctors.
  • Medicare paid as much as $92 million in claims for medical supplies prescribed by dead doctors and $8.2 million for medical supplies prescribed for dead patients.
  • Congress has established HIV/AIDS funding distribution based on historic numbers of deceased HIV/AIDS patients, while many individuals living with AIDS desperately wait for medical care.

So it must be good to be dead right? (We will check into whether they count among the nation’s unemployed.) Well, the great benefit-receiving undead couldn’t possibly continue to receive benefits under this scheme:

In June, the administration announced new steps to stop itself from making these payments: Agencies are now supposed to check their payees against the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Death Master File (DMF). But SSA admits its records are fraught with errors, with Commissioner Astrue explaining “it is extremely expensive and may even be impossible to determine if a person is alive or dead particularly if the person died many years ago.”  So the administration’s new process cannot ensure the payments will end or improperly deny live, eligible Americans their benefits.

That’s right people: Government so effective that it can’t tell the dead from the alive. And because they don’t want to err on the dead side, money will keep coming.

Think of it as a government subsidized zombie horde.

Comments off

Will: Mr. President, you’re no Lincoln.

An entire commentary of sarcasm by George Will:

Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012. Trying to preemptively drain the election of its dangerous (to Democrats) meaning, all autumn Democrats described the electorate as suffering a brain cramp, an apoplexy of fear, rage, paranoia, cupidity – something. Any explanation would suffice as long as it cast what voters were about to say as perhaps contemptible and certainly too trivial to be taken seriously by the serious.

It is amazing the ingenuity Democrats invest in concocting explanations of voter behavior that erase what voters always care about, and this year more than ever – ideas. This election was a nationwide recoil against Barack Obama’s idea of unlimited government.

The more he denounced Republicans as the party of “no,” the better Republicans did. His denunciations enabled people to support Republicans without embracing them as anything other than impediments to him.

He had defined himself as a world-class whiner even before Rahm Emanuel, a world-class flatterer, declared that Obama had dealt masterfully with “the toughest times any president has ever faced” – quite a claim, considering that before the first president from Illinois was even inaugurated, seven of the then-34 states had seceded. Today’s president from Illinois, a chronic campaigner and incontinent complainer who is uninhibited by considerations of presidential dignity, has blamed his difficulties on:

George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Supreme Court, a Cincinnati congressman (John Boehner), Karl Rove, Americans for Prosperity and other “groups with harmless-sounding names” (Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” redux), “shadowy third-party groups” (they are as shadowy as steam calliopes), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and, finally, the American people. They have deeply disappointed him by being impervious to “facts and science and argument.”

How’s that enlightened progressive superiority thingy working out for you, Mr. President?

Comments off