There’s a lot of good IJ going on these days, like this:
Some hospice firms bribe physicians to bring them new patients by offering all-expenses-paid trips to Las Vegas nightclubs, complete with bottle service and private security details. (The former mayor of Rio Bravo, Texas, who was also a doctor, received outright kickbacks.) Other audacious for-profit players enlist family and friends to act as make-believe clients, lure addicts with the promise of free painkillers, dupe people into the program by claiming that it’s free home health care or steal personal information to enroll “phantom patients.” A 29-year-old pregnant woman learned that she’d been enrolled in Revelation Hospice, in the Mississippi Delta (which at one time discharged 93% of its patients alive), only when she visited her doctor for a blood test. In Frisco, Texas, according to the FBI, a hospice owner tried to evade the Medicare-repayment problem by instructing staff to overdose patients who were staying on the service too long. He texted a nurse about one patient: “He better not make it tomorrow. Or I will blame u.” The owner was sentenced to more than 13 years in prison for fraud, in a plea deal that made no allegations about patient deaths.
A medical background is not required to enter the business. I’ve come across hospices owned by accountants; vacation-rental superhosts; a criminal-defense attorney who represented a hospice employee convicted of fraud and was later investigated for hospice fraud himself; and a man convicted of drug distribution who went on to fraudulently bill Medicare more than $5 million for an end-of-life-care business that involved handling large quantities of narcotics.
Once a hospice is up and running, oversight is scarce. Regulations require surveyors to inspect hospice operations once every three years, even though complaints about quality of care are widespread. A government review of inspection reports from 2012 to 2016 found that the majority of all hospices had serious deficiencies, such as failures to train staff, manage pain and treat bedsores. Still, regulators rarely punish bad actors. Between 2014 and 2017, according to the Government Accountability Office, only 19 of the more than 4,000 U.S. hospices were cut off from Medicare funding.
Because patients who enroll in the service forgo curative care, hospice may harm patients who aren’t actually dying.
Why America Doesn’t Have Enough EV Charging Stations
Gas stations spar with utility companies, rural areas predict years of losses on chargers, spotty equipment threatens reliability: The U.S. EV charging network is a mess.
Around 1% of U.S. drivers own EVs, but wait lists are growing and auto makers including General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. are expecting EV sales to keep rising. To overcome “range anxiety”—the fear that EV drivers will run out of power while traveling long distances—industry experts say the U.S. needs plentiful fast chargers. Fast charging can take 20 minutes to an hour depending on the vehicle.
There are more than 145,000 places to refuel a gas-powered vehicle. So far, the U.S. has 11,600 points where any EV can charge quickly, according to the research group Atlas Public Policy.
In 2020, Swedish sociology professor Göran Adamson published a crime study showing an unmistakable link to immigration. It concluded that from 2002 to 2017, 58% of criminal suspects in Sweden were immigrants. That figure rose for murder, attempted murder, and manslaughter, where immigrants were identified as suspects in 73% of the cases, and robberies, in which immigrants were suspects in 70% of the cases.
And this, on our side of the pond:
“Our sponsors typically are not citizens. They’re not permanent residents. They don’t have a legal presence,” she said.
“The sponsor can hold up an ‘Order of Deportation’ to a [migrant] child and say, ‘This is your Order of Deportation. If you do not do what I say, when I say, I’m going to call ICE on you myself.’ We are paying to put children in the hands of criminals.”
Pandemic controls imposed by Chinese authorities around, and possibly inside, the apartment building had delayed the fire response, neighbors and family members of those killed have said. That would mean that the death toll, which many believed was much higher than the official tally of 10, was ultimately in part a product of China’s strict, already widely detested zero-tolerance Covid policy. The government denies all that.
This story is interesting to me. Visited a while ago a relative in a hospice in Hawaii run by non profit Japan-American org, it was nice like to resort hotel with nice nurses. Shocked some people have put up with for profit ones, your link is shocker to me and sad to see another side of American health care.
The Hibernator’s Guide to the Galaxy
Scientists are on the verge of figuring out how to put humans in a state of suspended animation. It could be the key to colonizing Mars.
The abortions mostly were carried out without the person’s consent – and often without their prior knowledge, according to the witness accounts. The women and girls ranged from a few weeks to eight months pregnant, and some were as young as 12 years old, interviews and records showed.
Nigerian military leaders denied the programme has ever existed and said Reuters reporting was part of a foreign effort to undermine the country’s fight against the insurgents.
I guess I’m displaying my privilege here, but I sort of don’t understand how it’s possible for a third of adults to be (functionally?) unable to read. I get that for adults it’s hard to learn, but what happened to them as children? Can a school really be so underresourced that it can’t teach reading?
The article only seems to give one example, of someone who never really went to school. But that can’t be common, can it?
No books at home. Watch TV. No school. No obligation or incentive from illiterate parents to motivate their kids coupled with patterns of entrenched poverty, displacement, nothingness …
What else? Society is fractured between those who can do because they have a leg up from the beginning, and those who don’t even know what a book is… I guess…
No, although I posted the international English link, for some reason it displays the preview in German, lol. Either way, it will show you the English version if you go to it…
It shouldn’t have taken more than a reporter’s quick look around the FTX conference table, with the Caribbean ocean view off in the distance, to wonder what, exactly, SBF was up to. He’d carefully courted officials from the regulatory offices meant to oversee his business, bringing in Mark Wetjen and Jill Sommers from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to serve as his head of FTX U.S. regulatory policy and as a member of his FTX U.S. derivatives board, respectively. There were red flags in his Washington connections just the same. In March 2022, the so-called Blockchain Eight―a group of four Republican and four Democratic House representatives―sought to stall a new SEC probe into FTX and several other crypto firms. Of those eight officials, five had received donations directly from FTX staff, including more than $500,000 to North Carolina’s Rep. Ted Budd from a super PAC started by a top deputy of SBF’s at FTX, Ryan Salame. Though SBF has been described as a major donor to progressive candidates, he was giving lavishly to both sides of the aisle. Between SBF’s donations through dark money groups and those passed on by Salame, FTX contributed more than $60 million to Republican candidates this past election cycle.
