utorak, 17.11.2009.
Report: Bill would reduce senior care
A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending -- one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama's proposed overhaul of the nation's health-care system -- would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for ED Hardy swimsuit illions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.
The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.
Congress could intervene to avoid such an outcome, but "so doing would likely result in significantly smaller actual savings" than is currently projected, according to the analysis by the chief actuary for the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid. That would wipe out a big chunk of the financing for the health-care reform package, which is projected to cost $1.05 trillion over the next decade.
More generally, the report questions whether the country's network of doctors and hospitals would be able to cope with the effects of a reform package expected to add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the insured, many of them through Medicaid, the public health program for the poor.
In the face of Women's ED Hardy slipper reatly increased demand for services, providers are likely to charge higher fees or take patients with better-paying private insurance over Medicaid recipients, "exacerbating existing access problems" in that program, according to the report from Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Though the report does not attempt to quantify that impact, Foster writes: "It is reasonable to expect that a significant portion of the increased demand for Medicaid would not be realized."
The report offers the clearest and most authoritative assessment to date of the effect that Democratic health reform proposals would have on Medicare and Medicaid, the nation's largest public health ED Hardy Sunglasses rograms. It analyzes the House bill, but the Senate is also expected to rely on hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare cuts to finance the package that Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) hopes to take to the floor this week. Like the House, the Senate is expected to propose adding millions of people to Medicaid.
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petak, 06.11.2009.
Polygamist Sect Leader Convicted of Sexual Assault
ELDORADO, Tex. — One of the leaders of a polygamist sect was convicted Thursday night of Ugg Ultimate Tall Braid exually assaulting an under-age girl whom the church elders had assigned to him as one of his nine wives.
A jury of seven men and five women deliberated 2 hours 20 minutes before returning a verdict of guilty in the first trial of a dozen members of the Yearning for Zion Ranch just outside this rural hamlet in West Texas.
The defendant, Raymond M. Jessop, 38, seemed unperturbed as Judge Barbara Walther of State District Court read the verdict. Mr. Jessop was immediately handcuffed and taken into custody by the Schleicher Ugg Tall ounty sheriff. He smiled and nodded to several other men in his religious group, who sat grave-faced as he was led away.
Mr. Jessop will be sentenced after a second hearing before the jury on Monday. He faces penalties ranging from 2 years’ probation to 20 years in prison.
His lawyer, Mark Stevens, declined to say if he would appeal, though the defense had argued in hearings before trial that the state illegally seized the church documents that were crucial to the case during a raid on the ranch in April 2008.
Mr. Jessop is one of the most prominent members of a breakaway sect that has at least four other communities in Arizona and Utah. He is close to Warren S. Jeffs, the self-styled prophet and leader of the sect.
Mr. Jeffs has been convicted in Utah as an accomplice to rape, a charge related to his role in ordering the “spiritual marriage” of an under-age girl Ugg Tasmina o one of his followers. He is in jail in Arizona awaiting trial on similar charges and has been charged in Texas with sexual assault and bigamy.
The trial of Mr. Jessop offered a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a group that split from the Mormon Church. Followers believe polygamy brings heavenly rewards and treat Mr. Jeffs as a modern-day prophet.
The ranch first came to national attention a year and a half ago when the Texas authorities descended on it, seeking a girl who had complained in a telephone call to a San Angelo women’s shelter that she was being sexually abused. The girl was never found, and the Texas Rangers acknowledge that the tip was a hoax.
But in the course of executing search warrants, social workers and the Rangers uncovered evidence that at least a dozen girls had been coerced by church elders to serve as wives to older men. Seven had borne children.
The prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Eric Nichols, put several Rangers on the stand along with a former member of the church to introduce several church documents seized from a vault on the ranch.
Since the woman said to be the victim, who is now 21, did not testify, Mr. Nichols used the documents, along with her photo album, to prove she lived with Mr. Jessop as one of his wives and was impregnated by him when she was 16.
The state’s case also rested heavily on genetic evidence that showed there was a Ugg Tasman .9 percent chance Mr. Jessop was the father of the child, who is now 4.
In his closing argument, Mr. Nichols attacked the theory that the teenager had consented to be Mr. Jessop’s wife. “Any act of sexual assault is a horrendous crime,” he said, “but an act of sexual assault on a child is of such an extreme nature we don’t even consider whether the victim was able, much less did, consent.”
One of the most damning pieces of evidence presented in court was a written record of Mr. Jeffs’s instructions in August 2005 not to take the girl to a hospital even though she had been struggling in labor for three days at a clinic on the ranch.
“I knew the girl, being 16 years old, if she went to the hospital, they could put Raymond Jessop in jeopardy of prosecution as the government is looking for any reason to come against us there,” Mr. Jeffs was quoted as saying.
Some of the most revealing testimony came from another witness for the prosecution, Rebecca Musser, a former member of the church who had been married to Rulon T. Jeffs, the sect’s founder and the father of Warren Jeffs. She left the church in 2002 after the elder Mr. Jeffs died.
Ms. Musser testified that Mr. Jeffs had controlled every aspect of the women’s lives, including how they dressed and what they ate. He also controlled whom they married and when.
“Age was not a factor,” she said. “It was when the prophet deemed she was worthy.”
Mr. Stevens mounted a technical defense, arguing that the state could not prove the crime had taken place in Texas since the evidence it had was purely circumstantial. He did not present any witnesses.
“It’s dangerous when we start trying to convict people based on documents and we are not sure where those documents came from,” he said.
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srijeda, 04.11.2009.
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- 08:09 -
petak, 16.10.2009.
Social Security stop-gap debate revs up
WASHINGTON — President Obama's plan to send $250 checks to more than 50 million Social Security recipients who won't get cost-of-living Ugg Boots adjustments in January is gathering support in Congress, but outside experts and budget watchdogs say the payments are unjustified.
The Social Security Administration announced as expected Thursday that there will be no adjustment, or COLA, for the first time since automatic boosts were instituted in 1975. That's because inflation was negative for the past 12 months.
Obama's proposal would include seniors, people with disabilities, veterans and retired railroad workers, bringing the total cost to between $13 billion and $14 billion.
Experts on Social Security blasted the plan, both as a replacement for the COLA and as a way to stimulate the economy. Seniors don't deserve the money without inflation, they said, and don't need it as much as those laid off in the recession.
"We've gotten so used to dispensing hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't think now before spending $13 billion," said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. "I see no intellectual reason for this payment."
Seniors' groups argued the one-time payments are justified because, although inflation has been flat, medical costs have risen by more than 3%. "Seniors aren't buying iPods," said Barbara Kennelly, president of the Panodra Jewelry National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. "They're staying healthy by buying prescription drugs."
Thursday's announcement came as no surprise. By law, cost-of-living adjustments are tied to inflation, which declined as fuel costs dropped. Last year's COLA was 5.8%.
Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue defended the payments as a wedge against medical costs that he said have risen "at a rate of inflation much higher than any other commodity."
The $250 would equal what was sent to Social Security beneficiaries in spring as part of the two-year, $787 billion economic stimulus law. Workers got $400 tax credits — $800 for couples — for 2009 and 2010, but seniors got one-time payments.
Obama has been seeking other ways to stimulate the economy short of a second major stimulus package, and Astrue said this is one way to do it. "Both in theory and in practice, you send money out to this group, they are going to spend it," he said.
Democratic leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed the payments. Republicans such as House GOP leader John Boehner said the Wholesale Watches funds should be paid for rather than added to the deficit.
That scenario is unlikely, said Sen. Judd Gregg, top Republican on the Budget Committee: "It's a terrible idea if it's not paid for, because it goes right toward the debt."
- 09:21 -
petak, 09.10.2009.
Fate of Astor Fortune Remains Uncertain
The spectacle of the Brooke Astor trial owed much of its public fascination to celebrity and circumstance — a son accused of greedily exploiting his Pandora Jewelry aging mother, a beloved philanthropist who had dedicated much of her life to charity.
Yet the conviction of Anthony D. Marshall on charges that he stole from his mother, Brooke Astor, has done little to resolve the uncertain fate of the $180 million estate at the heart of the discord. So even as Mr. Marshall awaits sentencing and a possible appeal, another dramatic legal showdown looms.
As the public watched the criminal trial unfold over the last five months, a small army of lawyers, including those for a dozen charities, spent their time reading the tea leaves for some sense of how it could alter the jockeying over the Astor fortune. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, the two main beneficiaries of Panodra Beads Mrs. Astor’s largess, even sent observers to the trial.
The expected contest — which could be sidestepped by a settlement — is in Westchester County Surrogate’s Court, and centers on whether Mrs. Astor’s assets should be distributed according to her most recent will, from 2002, or an earlier version, which directed more money to charity.
At the core of this issue is whether Mrs. Astor was mentally competent when she signed the 2002 will, which was amended in late 2003 and again in early 2004. Those revisions gave her son more control over her estate, and in the process she reduced the amount of money she left to the New York universities, libraries, parks and museums she Wholesale Watches had spent so much of her life supporting.
The sweeping verdict against Mr. Marshall may provide a significant boost to their push to have the recent will thrown out as invalid, lawyers say. “It’s very unusual and directly relevant to the issues before the surrogate because both cases concern her mental capacity,” said Paul C. Saunders, a lawyer for Annette de la Renta, who was Mrs. Astor’s court-appointed guardian and is a party in the surrogate case. “Clearly the jury believes she didn’t have the capacity to understand what she was doing.”
The maneuvering began almost immediately after Mrs. Astor’s death on Aug. 13, 2007, with a dispute over who should be named administrators of the estate (the court eventually named JPMorgan Chase & Company and a retired judge). The case began to move quickly Ugg Boots toward a will battle, though no formal objection has yet been filed.
If the most recent will is upheld, many charities will lose millions of dollars, with the Met and the library — both of which declined to comment for this article — losing out on an estimated $10 million each. The Surrogate’s Court case was postponed pending the resolution of the criminal case, and it remained unclear whether it would resume if Mr. Marshall appealed his conviction, as he has pledged to do. The court is scheduled to discuss the civil case again on Nov. 4.
Because there is little precedent for criminal charges to be brought in a will dispute, legal experts said it was difficult to predict how the voluminous testimony gathered during 19 weeks in court or the criminal convictions of Mr. Marshall and Francis X. Morrissey, a lawyer who did estate work for Mrs. Astor, would affect the outcome. However, the standard of proof in criminal court (beyond a reasonable doubt) is higher than in civil court (a preponderance of the evidence), so a criminal conviction would appear to be unfavorable for Mr. Marshall. The jury found that Mr. Marshall had conspired to defraud his mother by tricking her into altering her will twice and that Mrs. Astor’s signature on one of those codicils was forged by her Mens Watches lawyer, Francis X. Morrissey Jr. While the criminal case did not include charges regarding the 2002 will or the first amendment, guilty verdicts on other charges not directly related to the will changes suggest that the jury believed that questions about Mrs. Astor’s competency predated them.
In the past, Kenneth E. Warner, a lawyer who is representing Mr. Marshall in both cases, has accused Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, of consciously influencing the civil case by bringing criminal charges — a decision that could swing the civil battle toward an outcome more favorable to some of the most influential institutions in the city.
Before the civil case was put on hold in late 2007, the judge overseeing the case said the dispute was close to being settled. However, participants in Silver Jewelry those discussions said no specific settlement offer was ever made, the criminal verdict on Thursday could significantly alter any previous negotiations.
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petak, 02.10.2009.
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