I think I've always known this. I remember watching the early seasons of "The Waltons" and my Dad, who remembered the Great Depression, refusing to watch. "It's a lie," he'd say.  "They want to show you this family closing ranks and prospering despite their poverty, but the reality is that being poor tears families apart." Late I encountered Ruby Payne's work on the culture of poverty, and it reinforced what my Dad had said; everything I saw there matched to everything I saw in the real world. But now it turns out that there may be measurable cognitive deficit associated with being in poverty. Here's what a Princeton study recently published in Science shows : In a series of experiments, the researchers found that pressing financial concerns had an immediate impact on the ability of low-income individuals to perform on common cognitive and logic tests. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop i...

From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette : Highmark Inc. has not accumulated "excess profits" in violation of state law, and its executives make a "reasonable" salary, according to a judge's dismissal of a lawsuit that had been filed against the insurer.   The state's largest health insurer was sued two years ago by Philadelphians Herman Wooden and Thomas Logan, both former nonvoting "lay" members of a since-disbanded Highmark advisory committee serving the company's  board of directors .   Both of the plaintiffs argued that the $1.2 billion in profits that Pittsburgh-based Highmark had earned from 2005 to 2009 was excessive.   This month, Philadelphia Court of  Common Pleas Judge  Patricia McInerney also rejected arguments that Highmark shouldn't be able to reinvest money in its  for-profit  subsidiaries and that the company awarded improper bonuses to its executives.   In an Aug. 8 order, the judge wrote that the "plaintiffs' ...

... because US military intervention ALWAYS makes it better ...

Seriously?  Yes. Because this issue is big enough, and far enough beyond partisanship, that Senators Carper and Coons, as well as Congressman Carney, need direction from us. And if they don't follow those directions, there need to be consequences. First, here is the most sane thing I have read on the subject, by my friend Jess McVay (and you could have voted for him for Governor last year on the Libertarian ticket): I'm not in a position to know all the facts about Syria. Neither are you. None of the players can be trusted, including (especially?) the US government. So what do you do? Read as much as you can. Read all sides. Learn from all of it. Trust none of it. Then make up your own mind. No one's claims deserve the benefit of the doubt. No one deserves the expectation that we defer to their experience or their more seasoned judgement. It is particularly important to stay grounded in that understanding of just how little we can trust our own government.  We know...

Apologies to those accustomed to regular reading here (both of you). Blogging has been light for the past week because real life keeps intervening. The semester started at DSU on Monday, and the older I get the more that first week kicks my ass. But there are also elements of personal activism outside the blogosphere that intervene to keep me away from this keyboard. Several I can mention: 1.  I am working with Rep. Paul Baumbach and the Certified Midwives of Delaware on an informal task force that seeks to revise the criminalized situation of midwives and home birth created by the passage of HB 194 last session. 2.  I am not just writing about the issue of Highmark in Delaware, but am also engaged in working with the local Medical Aid Units to help keep them in business against what appears to be a State-supported (or at least State-condoned) attempt to create a virtual monopoly for Highmark and MedExpress. 3.  I have been representing special needs childre...

I have, of course, been going into great detail to explain t he relationship between Highmark and MedExpress , and to lay out what appears to be the Highmark plan for establishing a monopoly on health insurance and even health care in Delaware . This is apparently worrisome to some of the leaders of Highmark Delaware, who appear to have become new followers of this blog, like President/CEO Timothy Constantine and (this title is not only a mouthful but quite unintentionally revealing) Senior Vice President for Provider Strategy and Integration Paul Kaplan . Well, I always welcome new readers, even aggrieved new readers. It is important right now to step back and take an even broader look at the overall Highmark empire, to include specifically the parts of that empire that impinge on Delaware. I will warn you at the outset that this is a long, LONG post, but if you actually care about free-market competition, monopolistic business practices, or government corruption, you need to...

... when Highmark follows through with its current strategy of imposing a health insurance/health care monopoly. This is what has happened to University of Pennsylvania Medical Centers after Highmark not only drove most competing urgent care clinics out of business, but then purchased its own hospital chain ... That's right--documents filed with the state indicate that in order to make its own hospital chain viable, Highmark has to use its clout as the state's largest insurance company to drive 41,000 patients away from UPMC hospitals. The situation is grave enough now in PA that even conservative Governor Tom Corbett has entered the fray : Corbett further said he has directed the state's insurance and health departments to create a task force to monitor the Highmark and UPMC ads and "maintain the state's role in protecting consumers." A task force to monitor Highmark's activities and protect consumers? Here in Delaware we can't even get t...

Maybe if we say it again and again, education "reform" advocates appear to think, people will finally believe that the most dysfunctional part of our public education system is not the US Department of Education, not No Child Left Behind, not Race to the Top, not Wall Street data coaches, not Vision 2015, not tests that don't actually employ reliability and validity, not inadequate funding models, not the withdrawal of School Resource Officers, not the elimination of the Minner Reading Teachers, not the failure to fund special education, not the creation of a charter "slush" fund, not the emphasis on high-stakes testing that lacks any real research base ... Nope. None of those. Once again the News Journal editorial page places the blame squarely where it belongs: It's all the teachers' fault. Who knew that nice Ms. So-and-so who spent all those extra hours working with your son who can't quite read up to grade level was really plotting to l...

... is already being played out in Pennsylvania. Read this , and realize that today Highmark and MedExpress are after a monopoly on the urgent care market, but that tomorrow ... ... Christiana Care and BayHealth ... They are coming after you. Funny, I thought the point of having an Insurance Commissioner, an Attorney General, a Governor, and a General Assembly--you know, all those instruments of GOVERNMENT--was to protect the citizens of Delaware from predators like Highmark.

Not what you think. The DSP actually held hearings and went through the process to throw a bad cop off the force, only to be over-turned by Secretary of Safety and Homeland Security Louis J. Schiliro . I want you to stop and think for moment, in a state where indiscriminate use of tazers and head-stomping are considered acceptable police work, how bad does it have to be  for the Delaware State Police to get rid of one of their own? And let's not forget that Mr. Schiliro has now had nearly five years of watching the DSP operate under his supervision to figure out that something is not quite right. Maybe the trooper in question did not need to go, but Mr. Schiliro certainly does.

Why? Because citizens having access to lots of information makes it difficult to govern, apparently: “Well, folks,” he said, “ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.   “It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest,” said Kerry. And here you thought having an informed opinion was just your civic duty. You evil twit.

I can't yet verify that MedExpress is the only urgent care clinic in Delaware with this neat new practice, but I'm pretty sure that the partly owned functional subsidiary of Highmark introduced it. When you go to a MedExpress and give them your insurance card, you also have a co-pay, right? So you pay your $10 or $25 co-pay for the visit with your credit or debit card. What you probably don't know is that you are also signing a pre-authorization agreement that allows them to bill the full cost of the visit from that card if the insurance company turns down the claim. Without any further notice to you ... Now we aren't talking after the insurance company turns down the claim and you appeal it and then they turn it down again. No, as soon as MedExpress receives the first turn-down they charge your card. If you want the money back, then you have to collect it from the insurance company yourself. This is particularly convenient when the largest insurer in th...

Dogs are now being trained in a pilot program to sniff out ovarian cancer.

Actually, two interesting points: 1.  The silence is deafening from the Insurance Commissioner's office.  Not only has Nancy Willing inquired at least five times regarding any investigation of this mess, Senator Petersen requested an Insurance Commissioner's inquiry when I sent her the materials, and Dr. Vince Schaller, Medical Director of the Lantana/Hockessin Walk-in Clinic has filed multiple complaints and inquiries. From Karin Weldin Stewart's office: ... crickets ... 2.  This has also been an ongoing primer in who does and doesn't respond to real inquiries from citizens and constituents.  I live neither in Petersen's district, nor in John Kowalko's.  Both responded almost instantly when I asked.  I also always get quick responses from legislators like Paul Baumbach, Brian Bushweller, and Ernie Lopez--again:  I live in none of their districts. On the other hand, I have sent all the same information (repeatedly) to Senator Greg Lavelle and...

Of course, according to this handy info-graphic, missing out on orgasm is an all-too-common problem these days.

Ah, remember that the sequestration was going to gut our national defense? Now Chuck Hagel has formally announced he found enough pork in the Defense Department budget to reduce furlough days for civilian employees from 11 down to 6, and if you read carefully he may not be done yet. Somehow dear old Chuck managed to find a way to offset over half the $30 billion in cuts imposed by the sequestration. But, of course, it's still awful there in Defense Department land, with the largest military budget on the face of the planet ... Since Chuck's this good, what say we test him out with a $100 billion cut next year?

Don't get me wrong:  I love free market competition. But the current incestuous relationship between Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield and MexExpress urgent care clinics is a classic example of government utterly failing at "regulating" a market. To begin with, let's go back and recall that Senator Patti Blevins and Insurance Commissioner Karin Weldin Stewart teamed up to exempt Highmark from the Attorney General's authority to require the insurance company to set aside $175 million in reserves for a foundation to benefit taxpayers. This was Highmark's condition for entering the Delaware market--$175 million plus multiple other exemptions and exceptions to existing insurance law.  If you bother to go look at either Blevins' or Stewart's campaign donation pages at the Delaware Commissioner of Elections page , and you take the 2-3 hours necessary to trace down the bewildering array of PACs and healthcare related donations that each woman received in...

... and you usually don't hear ME saying that. Delaware is one of the states in which, if you are arrested, the Delaware Code is currently silent on whether or not law enforcement may seize and examine everything on your cell phone without a warrant. The Florida Supreme Court recently ruled that such searches are not appropriate with a warrant: “We refuse to authorize government intrusion into the most private and personal details of an arrestee’s life without a search warrant simply because the cellular phone device which stores that information is small enough to be carried on one’s person.”  Given that, in Delaware, we already know that law enforcement is prone to invading your cell phone without your foreknowledge or permission [the DIAC "See something, say something" APP that converts your phone into a device to spy on you], it is not unreasonable to believe that our police are routinely examining the cell phones of people they have stopped or arrested. [Iro...