Ed Huntress wrote:
"CaveLamb" wrote in message
m...
That looks an awful lot like IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano...
But, of course, it could be a left wing plot...

About five or ten seconds of interview clipped out of a much longer one..
And you have to suspect it's Breitbarted -- cut to make it say what they
want.

Look, here's where I got suspicious about the whole thing. Palmisano says he
can cut $900 billion of fraud from the health care system. Even assuming
he's talking about all of the privately insured health care as well as all
of the publicly insured, something is seriously whacky here. The outside
estimate for fraud in Medicare plus Medicaid, by industry experts, not the
government, is around $60 billion. And the organization most knowledgeable
about it (and most likely to inflate the number), the National Health Care
Anti-Fraud Association (NHCAA), says it's as high as $100 billion for the
whole US health care system, private and public combined.

Why would Palmisano say something like that if he is "serious," as the
conspiracy theorists on Fox said?

Well, if you watched the WSJ video, you saw something else: Palisano was now
talking about saving $200 billion in fraud, and the other $700 billion was
unspecified -- although part of it apparently involved requiring discounts
from pharma companies. That's illegal for the federal government to do under
present law. Then, when asked by WSJ why it didn't fly, he says that it
"didn't align with the administration's priorities." At that time, the
priority was to extend health care to everyone.


And have some other fool pay for it, right?



http://online.wsj.com/video/viewpoin...ORDS=palmisano


Hrump. I couldn't get your video to play...

I didn't get a sense of what time frame that was for.
I seriously doubt it was one year...



My feeling is that IBM's proposal included a lot of things that are unstated
here, or you couldn't get anywhere near $900 billion. It may be that they
would require new legislation, such as changing the law for negotiating with
pharma companies. And the government already had a full load of health care
legislation on their plate.

And in my gut, I think the administration didn't believe them. You know I
spent some years working in health care writing and promotion. *I* don't
believe them when they say they can save $900 billion. That's 1/3 of the
total costs of all US health care. If they had something like that, the WSJ
would have it in 70-point screaming type on the front page, not buried in a
business video.

It's fishy.



If you think so.
I think the whole health care bru-ha-ha is fishy.

We have a serious financial collapse - and the president wants
to give everybody bandaides?

It's fishy all right...
--

Richard Lamb
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~cavelamb
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~sv_temptress