Eideard

…The Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment. Many researchers have found evidence that such payments can influence doctors’ treatment decisions and contribute to higher costs by encouraging the use of more expensive drugs and medical devices…

The Times has found that doctors who take money from drug makers often practice medicine differently from those who do not and that they are more willing to prescribe drugs in risky and unapproved ways, such as prescribing powerful antipsychotic medicines for children.

Under the new standards, if a company has just one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to disclose all its payments to doctors other than its own employees. The federal government will post the payment data on a Web site where it will be available to the public.

Manufacturers of prescription drugs and devices will have to report if they pay a doctor to help develop, assess and promote new products…Royalty payments to doctors, for inventions or discoveries, and payments to teaching hospitals for research or other activities will also have to be reported…

Allan J. Coukell, a pharmacist and consumer advocate at the Pew Charitable Trusts, said: “Patients want to know they are getting treatment based on medical evidence, not a lunch or a financial relationship. They want to know if their doctor has a financial relationship with a pharmaceutical company, but they are often uncomfortable asking the doctor directly…”

Although the Congressional Budget Office does not predict immediate savings, it has said that, “over time, disclosure has the potential to reduce spending,” by reducing instances of overprescribing.

The law also requires drug and device companies to report the amount of “any ownership or investment interest” held by doctors or their immediate family members, other than holdings of publicly traded stocks.

The administration intends to apply the same disclosure requirements to doctor-owned companies that distribute medical devices. Such companies allow doctors to benefit financially from sales of devices they use in surgery.

The same political Sluggos who refused to support oversight of investment banks and sleazy sub-prime investments want us to presume that the ethics missing from Wall Street – are completely in place among millionaire doctors. Frankly, if you walk through their country clubs, I think you would have a hard time telling one from the other. Maybe the doctors have cleaner hands because it’s required of their craft.

But, corporate payoffs and kickbacks are not the sort of business practices that have ever inspired confidence in honesty in my lifetime.

Former Massachusetts House speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for his conviction on political corruption charges, the longest federal sentence handed out to an elected official in Massachusetts history, climaxing a years-long scandal that had captivated the state’s political establishment.

DiMasi’s codefendant, Richard McDonough, a well-known State House lobbyist, was sentenced to seven years in prison for taking part in the conspiracy to help a software company win state contracts in exchange for kickbacks.

US District Court Chief Judge Mark L. Wolf called the sentence appropriate, saying he balanced the ages of both men, 66, and consideration for their families, against the fact that they had betrayed the public’s trust by orchestrating the criminal scheme…

“You and Mr. McDonough devised a scheme to sell your office,’’ the judge told DiMasi, who was forced to stand as Wolf handed out the sentence. “You’re standing here today because you committed what I consider to be, what the law considers to be, a most serious crime…’’

US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said outside the courthouse…“Public corruption is a very, very serious crime, and it has a tremendous amount of impact on the citizens of this Commonwealth and the trust of the public,’’ Ortiz said. “The reality is that the core of this case was simply about how a high, powerful speaker of the House took kickbacks in exchange for using his political position to benefit himself and his friends…’’

In his remarks, Wolf said he was troubled by the fact that DiMasi was the third consecutive House speaker to be convicted in federal court. His predecessors were Thomas Finneran, who was convicted of obstruction of justice, and Charles Flaherty, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion. They did not serve prison sentences.

Some cases come up to legal standard. Some to American political standards. If that’s what they’re called?

A Mesa minister with a worldwide following has been arrested on charges that he orchestrated a $5.5 million mortgage-fraud scheme involving nearly a dozen Valley homes.

Clint Rogers and his wife, Angela Faith Rogers, were indicted this month by a federal grand jury that accused them of conspiring with three others to inflate the value of homes, obtain loans on the bloated price and then pocket the difference.

“They are the leaders,” said Patrick Cunningham, chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Arizona. “They got $2.5 million in alleged cash back. That is a tremendously high number.”

The couple’s home purchases were detailed in a 2009 investigation by The Arizona Republic, which found that they bought 26 homes in less than two years and that nearly all of them went into foreclosure…

Clint Rogers, head of Mesa-based Clint Rogers Ministries, conducts faith-healing events and other services at churches throughout the U.S., Africa, Asia, Europe and elsewhere.

According to the indictment, the ministry was used to launder money from the bogus real-estate transactions…

They obtained a total of $5.5 million in financing and in five months directed about $2.5 million of it into their own accounts, according to the indictment.

Good thing they’re Christian crooks. They’re guaranteed forgiveness and salvation. Right?

Meanwhile, they’ll find lots to keep them busy with faith healing in the slammer.

FBI Asst Director Shawn Henry, Eric Holder and Kathleen Sebelius behind him
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The U.S. government on Thursday charged 111 doctors, nurses and other defendants with Medicare crime schemes that exceeded $225 million in false billings, the largest health care fraud crackdown so far.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the charges in the latest of a series of cases brought by the Obama administration…

Medicare reform represented a key part of the sweeping year-old health care law championed by Democratic President Barack Obama, but opposed by many Republicans in Congress.

The latest charges covered defendants in nine cities. In addition to arrests, law enforcement agents also executed 16 search warrants.

The defendants were charged with various crimes, including conspiracy to defraud the Medicare program, false claims, kickbacks and money laundering, administration officials said.

They said the alleged schemes involved various medical treatments, tests and services, such as home health care, physical and occupational therapy and medical equipment…

A top FBI official, Shawn Henry, said 2,600 health care fraud cases were under investigation and that organized crime groups have been increasingly linked to the alleged schemes.

Sebelius said $4 billion was recovered last year, and the government’s Medicare Fraud Strike Force was recently expanded to nine cities, with the addition of Dallas and Chicago.

Go get ‘em! Throw a couple of insurance companies into the meatgrinder while you’re at it.

They deserve to be sorted out for their role in inflating healthcare costs. They could care less about phony costs when they know American taxpayers get stuck with the bill regardless of legitimacy.

Paul Magliocchetti, the once-powerful lobbyist whose PMA Group collapsed after being raided by federal agents two years ago, was sentenced to 27 months in prison on Friday for his role in one of the largest schemes to evade limits on campaign donations ever uncovered.

A federal judge for the Eastern District of Virginia, T. S. Ellis III, also sentenced Mr. Magliocchetti to two years of supervised release and fined him $75,000…

Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, vowed to “continue to bring to justice those who hide the source of campaign funds and thus damage the integrity of our election process.”

“Paul Magliocchetti spent half of a decade gaming the system,” Mr. Breuer said. “He concocted a massive scheme to secretly funnel money to political campaigns — all so that he could gain wealth and prestige. As today’s sentence makes clear, he must now pay a price.”

We have a Supreme Court stacked in favor of exactly the same crooked corporations Magliocchettii worked for. It ain’t going to get easier.

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Beckenbauer and Sepp Blather

The man who led Germany to a World Cup win both as a player and a coach admits he has lost faith in FIFA due to the way the voting process for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments was handled.

Franz Beckenbauer, a member of FIFA’s executive committee, criticized football’s governing body after the amount of votes each bidder received was made public.

Beckenbauer was one of the 22 FIFA members who voted in the process and claims he was assured that the details would remain private.

Yet soon after it was announced that Russia had won the right to host the 2018 competition, and Qatar had secured the 2022 version, media were reporting that two of the favorites, England and Australia, attracted just two votes and one vote respectively.

It led to an angry reaction from representatives of the England and Australia bid teams and Beckenbauer acknowledges his faith in FIFA has been shaken as a result.

“I am disappointed with the way FIFA dealt with the result. The seven losing countries were treated disgracefully, particularly England and Australia, Beckenbauer told German newspaper Bild…

“All of us ExCo members were told ahead of the ballot that neither we nor the public would ever know the exact number of votes for each country. After each round of voting we were told only which country had been ruled out.
“Then, a few hours later, I was hearing from journalists what the exact voting had been. It’s certainly affected my confidence in FIFA.”

There are thousands of ordinary fans who lost faith in FIFA years ago – as anything other than a club for self-seeking, greedy business-turds who happen to have some cachet inside the world of sport. Their opinions, decisions, reek of gold and gravy. They deserve about as much respect and deference as the average con artist on work-release from prison.

The official mascot for the Delhi Commonwealth Games is Shera, a cuddly cartoon tiger. But, 60 days before the largest sporting event to be held in India begins, Shera is in danger of being usurped by a toilet roll.

Indians may be inured to graft, but the scale and audacity of alleged corruption linked to the Games in recent days has shocked the most hardened onlookers. Among the allegations are that the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee planned to rent treadmills for 975,000 rupees ($23,080) apiece for 45 days – critics say that it could buy them for half the price – and that it spent 3,757 rupees ($89) on a roll of toilet paper.

Anil Khanna, the treasurer of the committee, resigned yesterday amid reports that his son had been granted a contract for laying 14 synthetic tennis courts said to be of substandard quality. Elsewhere, government officials have been charged with faking fire safety certificates for 5,000 buses to be used during the event.

Concerns over spending were also highlighted by the payment of $429,000 to a British company, AMFilms, to supply transport and portable toilets last October for the start of the Queen’s Baton Relay at Buckingham Palace, despite the absence of any formal contract.

In total more than 300 complaints of corruption have been made to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation…

The Games were meant to showcase a new India, a land of modern infrastructure and giddying economic growth. The old-fashioned corruption scandal is a major embarrassment for a Government already under attack for the event’s financial and human cost.

This is one of those events when the worldwide war against corruption looks like it should take a higher priority than all the other political wars popular with our demagogues.

A global supply manager working for Apple has been charged in a US federal grand jury indictment for wire fraud, kickbacks and money laundering, and is also facing a civil suit from Apple itself.

According to a report by the San Jose Mercury News, 37 year old Paul Shin Devine of Sunnyvale, California was named in the 23 count indictment along with Andrew Ang of Singapore.

The charges relate to an alleged fraud scheme that claims Devine used his security clearance at Apple to provide confidential information about upcoming products to Apple’s suppliers, including Ang. The indictment says those suppliers then used the secrets to negotiate favorable contracts with Apple and subsequently paid Devine kickbacks, which he shared with Ang…

The companies involved were not named in the indictment, but include suppliers for iPhone and iPod products and were said to be located in “various countries in Asia,” including China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan…

In addition to the criminal prosecution, Apple is also reportedly bringing a civil suit that claims Devine accepted more than a million dollars in “payments, kickbacks and bribes” over several years…

Apple has long worked hard to maintain secrecy in order to keep competitors guessing and to excite customers with flashy product releases, but the case also highlights threats the company faces in working with its own partners in the lucrative business of supplying parts and assembling new products.

And – as did the folks at Apple Insider – I wonder if this will affect the recent increase of apparently easy leaks on imminent Apple products.

The vendors these two worked with wouldn’t feel bound by the sort of non-disclosure agreements Apple requires – already working with crooks while chasing business.

The Senate on Wednesday voted to end mortgage kickbacks and so-called “liar loans,” two lending practices that played a role in the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market.

By a 63-36 vote, the Senate adopted a measure that would prohibit mortgage lenders from offering incentives to brokers who steer customers into more-expensive loans.

The amendment, which was added to a sweeping rewrite of financial regulations, also would end “liar loans” by requiring lenders to verify that borrowers have enough income to repay their mortgages.

Both practices were at the root of the subprime meltdown and the Great Recession. Both practices encouraged by the Republican-controlled government whose greatest delight was kissing corporate financial butt.

Liar loans allowed consumers to qualify for loans that they could not possibly repay. In exchange for a slightly higher interest rate, borrowers could opt to simply state their income or other assets rather than waiting for lenders to verify them.

Such incentives, known as “yield spread premiums,” averaged nearly $1,900 per transaction and could be found in 85 percent to 90 percent of all loans originated by brokers in the years before the subprime crisis, according to a Harvard University study.

Some borrowers were steered into risky, high-interest subprime loans even if their credit was good. BasePoint Analytics, a company that monitors real-estate fraud, estimates that 14 percent of subprime borrowers could have qualified for a regular loan with more favorable terms.

If you happened to notice – Congressional Republicans voted in favor of continuing this kind of theft and corruption.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The new mayor of New Orleans has asked the Justice Department to review the city’s embattled Police Department.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu asked Attorney General Eric Holder to assign a team from the department’s civil rights division to help the city address and prevent police misconduct, according to a letter from the mayor that the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper posted on its website.

“I have inherited a police force that has been described by many as one of the worst police departments in the country,” the letter says. “It is clear that nothing short of a complete transformation is necessary and essential to ensure safety for the citizens of New Orleans,” it says. “The police force, the community, our citizens are desperate for positive change.”

Sam Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, told CNN that Landrieu’s request could pave the way for much-needed reforms.

“The reputation of the New Orleans Police Department has been terrible for decades, for corruption and brutality and a lack of accountability,” he said.

It’s been decades since I lived in New Orleans, in the French Quarter, in the Irish Channel. It didn’t seem any more corrupt than, say, Chicago or Bridgeport – at the time.

But, the NOPD coppers have had plenty of time to practice since then.