Medicare Proposal Could be a Real Killer, my Forbes.com piece
By Michael Fumento
Medicare is speeding toward insolvency , and only major fundamental changes can save it. But beware the "tweakers" - those who say that little things can add up to a lot. Usually what they're pushing is of little benefit to Medicare, but of much benefit to them.  | | Medicare's problems won't be solved by tweaks. |
As I write at Forbes. com, we that in a new study, paid for by the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists and seemingly applauded without dissent in the media - maybe because most of the articles are clearly rehashes of the accompanying press release.
The report in the August issue of Health Affairs says complications and deaths during surgery are equally low regardless of whether certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) or physician anesthesiologists are used. It also says there was no difference whether or not the nurse anesthesiologist was supervised by a surgeon.
Therefore we can safely drop the Medicare rule requiring either an anesthesiologist or physician supervision of a CRNA when anesthesia is administered, it concluded. And though CRNAs are among the best-paid nurses, their time is still cheaper than a doctor's. So while Medicare currently reimburses at the same rate regardless of who's doing the administering, we could change that and save money.
But as the study's own data show - sans spin - we could also lose lives.
August 26, 2010 11:27 AM · Permalink ·
Health Care
WHO "ends" pandemic that never was, my Philly Inquirer piece
By Michael Fumento
Hallelujah, the disaster has been averted! The World Health Organization last week declared the H1N1 swine flu pandemic over.
Except for one little thing: It never happened. That is, as I write in today's Philly Inquirer, the WHO had no business labeling it a "pandemic." It did so purely for its own interests, wreaking worldwide havoc.
Meanwhile, the world has wasted billions of dollars that could have been spent on diseases like tuberculosis, which each year kills 70 times as many people as swine flu did, according to the WHO. Now add in the "crying wolf" factor, which means many people will ignore public-health warnings when a truly nasty disease comes along, and you'll see how much damage was done by the swine flu disinformation campaign.
August 20, 2010 10:08 AM · Permalink ·
Swine Flu
"A license to kill," my NYPost piece on "Toyota Defense"
By Michael Fumento
The "Toyota defense" just sprung a killer from prison. Ironically, it did so just days after a whistleblower revealed that the government is sitting on powerful evidence undercutting the whole "the throttle made me do it" excuse.  | | Javis Adams Jr. |
As I write in the New York Post, four years ago, Koua Fong Lee sped down a St. Paul, Minn., freeway off-ramp at between 70 and 90 mph in his 1996 Camry. He hit two vehicles waiting at a stop light, instantly killing Javis Adams, 33, and his son Javis Jr, 10. Another passenger, Devyn Bolton, age 6, was paralyzed and later died from her injuries.
Lee claimed he was "stepping on the brakes as hard as possible," but mechanical engineers examined the car on behalf of both the state and the defense -- and, according to the prosecutor, both found the brakes were operating and there were no problems with the accelerator. Plus, there were no skid marks.
Lee was convicted of criminal vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to eight years in prison. But ultimately he served only 2-and-a-half.
Get ready for your blood to boil. And start thinking about the ramifications if everybody is simply allowed - with evidence as scant as this - to simply blame their car for the accidents that kill almost 40,000 Americans on our roads each year.
August 10, 2010 10:23 AM · Permalink ·
Automobile Safety
~ Toyota
Mike on Neil Cavuto on Toyota tonight
By Michael Fumento
I'm scheduled to be the lead guest on Neil Cavuto on the Fox Business Channel at 6pm tonight.
 | | Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum . . . |
Subject: The news that NHTSA is withholding exculpatory evidence regarding "alleged death" Toyota sudden acceleration accidents. And perhaps the guy in Michigan convicted of manslaughter who is the first to use "The Toyota Defense," that he hit the brakes and therefore the car accelerated. I've written about the "I'm sure I hit the brakes!" issue previously, in my piece "Why Do Toyotas Hate the Elderly?
August 5, 2010 11:40 AM · Permalink ·
Automobile Safety
~ Toyota
A tort reform advocate's dream, my article in Forbes.com
By Michael Fumento
It's a tort reform advocate's dream - meaning a defendant's worst nightmare.
As I write in my Forbes.com article "California Trial Lawyers Find A Geezer Goldmine," the class action suit was based entirely on wording so tortuous that the nine members of the Supreme Court would have 10 different interpretations. An earlier case in the same state was tossed out because of that wording. Yet this defendant was slammed with a massive $671 million penalty, vastly beyond its ability to pay. And punitive damages are still pending. And the decision caused the defendant's stock value to plummet 75%.  | | "Thar's gold in them thar nursing homes!" |
Oh, and just one other thing. The very size of the verdict effectively prevents an appeal. But besides all that . . .
This is the inner layer of hell in which Skilled Healthcare California LLC finds itself. The nation's 10th largest nursing care provider, it has 14,000 workers in California alone, making it one of the largest employers in a state with the third-worst jobless rate in America.
They won't be better off because of this decision, and may well be much worse off.
What horrors did the company inflict on those poor seniors to deserve the highly penalty awarded by any court this year? Convert them to Soylent Green? Actually no showing of harm was required - a blessing for the plaintiffs' attorneys because the California Nursing Home Directory has received over a thousand complaints but none regarding Skilled Healthcare.
This is the most amazingly awful court decision I have ever written about - which is saying a lot.
July 29, 2010 09:33 AM · Permalink ·
Regulation
The phony "Toyota deaths database." My article in Forbes magazine
By Michael Fumento
In the Toyota witch hunt, nothing has been more damning than those deaths we're told Toyota sudden acceleration "allegedly caused" or, depending on whom you read, DID cause.
As I note in my just-published Forbes magazine article, "93 and Counting," the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration insists on the term "allegedly." But U.S. News & World Report blog-post headline proclaimed: "NHTSA: 89 Deaths Caused by Unintended Acceleration in Toyota Vehicles." The Los Angeles Times stated in a headline that sudden acceleration "led to" the deaths. A New York Post headline earlier declared that faulty Toyotas "have killed" 52 people. A CBS News Web headline (over an Associated Press story) similarly said the acceleration car fault "has killed" 89. | | Toyota doesn't look so bad after all! |
In any case, the NHTSA "complaint database," available on its website to anyone (yes, including the mainstream media), is hooey. So I found when I actually looked at the complaints. (Now there's a novel idea!) Anybody can enter anything. An entry filed by someone named "Damnable Liar" from Holy Toledo! Ohio claimed his car accelerated to the moon because of a child seat problem. That was mine. But the ones citing 99 deaths in one vehicle? Not mine.
Three of the alleged fatal accidents never took place, which DID take sleuthing on my part. So did finding that, after the frenzy began, seven entries comprising ten deaths originally blamed on other aspects of the cars were refiled as unintended acceleration.
But at a glance you can see many simply deduce that since investigators found no cause other than driver error, then the accelerator must be responsible. Or they make the illogical deduction that since the brakes weren't applied, it was sudden acceleration. And so on.
And then there was the lady whose son, while sloshed and after smoking dope, killed his best friend in a Toyota Scion. After entering a NHTSA complaint blaming her boy's accident on sudden acceleration she entered seven more Scion complaints comprising 12 deaths that she'd merely pulled out of news reports and labeled as sudden acceleration. She's covering for her son.
Yes, THESE are the "alleged" or "Toyota-caused" deaths we keep hearing about!
No, NHTSA didn't blame all Toyota's troubles on driver error
By Michael Fumento
I can't count how many people sent me items about how NHTSA says the whole Toyota Tempest has now been determined by the government to have been driver error. Hallelujah! Case closed!
Wrong.
The ruckus began with a Wall Street Journal pieces with the unfortunately ambiguous titles: "Crash Data Suggest Driver Error in Toyota Accidents" and "Early Tests Pin Toyota Accidents on Drivers."
It stated:
The U.S. Department of Transportation has analyzed dozens of data recorders from Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles involved in accidents blamed on sudden acceleration and found that the throttles were wide open and the brakes weren't engaged at the time of the crash, people familiar with the findings said. The early results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyotas and Lexuses surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes.
Of course they found that. I wrote about the mistaken pedal issue months ago. It's been know about since the 1980s and especially plagues the elderly.
More important was the Journal's quote from scientist with the National Academy of Sciences, which has been studying the problem. "'In spite of our investigations, we have not actually been able yet to find a defect' in electronic throttle-control systems."
And they never will. Even though that's the pet theory of the media and trial lawyers, there's nothing wrong with Toyota's electronic throttles.
But consider this statistic:
In the first half of last year, about 100 people reported sudden unintended acceleration in Toyotas. In the first half of this year, it was about 5,000. Do you think that's all "driver error," much less all those people stomping the wrong pedal all of the sudden?
Stay tuned!
Note to Mel Gibson: One day facial hair like this may come back to haunt you
By Michael Fumento
 | | "Come on! Is this the face of a woman beater? |
July 13, 2010 12:40 PM · Permalink ·
Fun
Volunteer help wanted for short but fun job regarding The Toyota Terror
By Michael Fumento
I need a volunteer to scroll through a section of NHTSA complaints to come up with about 100 truly bizarre ones. I'll send the file in Excel format, which can be read in Excel, Apple's spreadsheets, or in Open Office which is free. I'll give more guidance on what I'm looking for. But I promise you, you'll find this a real eye opener! It's a jungle in there! And this is for a very important purpose.
July 13, 2010 10:16 AM · Permalink ·
Fumento
"Cell Phone Fear in San Francisco," my article in Forbes.com
By Michael Fumento
The king is dead. More accurately, Larry King is hanging up his suspenders after 25 years on TV interviewing essentially everybody who was anybody. His secret? A studio that "felt less like a hot seat than a warm bath," as one critic put it. But by letting his guests spout off unchallenged, leaving the impression they were telling the truth, he has occasionally caused lasting damage.  | | It's easy to see why Larry finally decided to step down... |
So we saw just recently in San Francisco's decision requiring retailers to prominently post cellphone radiation emission levels, tantamount to warning labels. In a 10-1 decision that the mayor has said he'll sign into law, the board of supervisors is making the city the first U.S. jurisdiction to label cellphones in any way.
The board expressly stated its desire to get the rest of the nation to follow suit. And it all started when a guest on King's show in 1993 announced he was suing a cellphone maker for giving his wife a fatal brain tumor. The media ran with the story, cellphone makers’ stocks plummeted, and all over America phones, however briefly, clicked off.
Wait until you read in my Forbes.com investigative report WHAT that guest said that set off the hysteria and how specifically San Fran came to its decision. If you don't audibly groan, I'll double your money back.
No incidentally, much of the article came from my January report "Celling Fear: The Cell Phone Fear that Refuses to Die."
July 7, 2010 10:00 AM · Permalink ·
Cancer
Automakers' new problems - vampires and bears
By Michael Fumento
Toyota complaints keep pouring in to the National Highway Safety Administration, and some are pretty darned bizarre. But most are less so than a Colorado woman's woman's claim that a vampire attacked her Chevy Blazer.  | | Subaru killed my mommy! |
The 58-year-old woman, whom police said appeared to be drug- and alcohol-free said smashed her SUV into a canal while escaping from one of the undead. "Authorities told KKCO-TV that the driver claimed she spotted the bloodsucker while driving on a dirt road outside Fruita, Colo., on Sunday - so she threw the car into reverse in an attempt to escape" and rolled into a ditch.
No word yet on whether DOT Secretary Ray LaHood will propose making as mandatory equipment on all new cars both crucifixes and containers for holding fresh garlic. And mind, ye cynics, we know events transpired as she said because nobody would ever lie about why they got in an accident.
In a more "grizzly" accident, the driver of a 2006 Subaru Impreza submitted multiple complaints to NHTSA stating:
I HIT A BEAR AT 55MPH WITH THE CRUISE CONTROL ON. THE BEAR LEAPED OFF THE BANK IN DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF THE VEHICLE. THE CRASH THAT RESULTED IN THE BEAR BEING KILLED INSTANTLY, ABOUT 600 LBS. OF BEAR. THE CAR CAME TO AN INSTANT HALT WITH THE FRONT END BEING PUSHED BACK, LIGHTS,GRILLE,FENDER, HOOD, ECT. NO AIR BAGS DEPLOYED. AFTER CALLING SUBARU OF AMERICA, I WAS ADVISED TO LET MY INSURANCE HANDLE IT, BUT AFTER MUCH ARGUMENT WAS ASSIGNED A CASE NUMBER OF 1020805 BY SUBARU. THIS IS NOT A INSURANCE PROBLEM, THIS IS SUBARU PROBLEM.
Actually, it sounds like the party with the biggest problem was the poor bear. Aside from that, the air bag failure is cause for concern but the focus on the cruise control and blaming Suburu generally would seem . . . well, actually would seem pretty typical these days.
But I cheated; actually the accident was reported in 2007. Right about when the bear that played "Gentle Ben" went missing . . .
"Cold-Blooded Murderers Can Still Make A Killing," my article in Forbes.com
By Michael Fumento
When will we fully accept that highly talented writers, even if convicted murderers, should never be in jail? Didn't we see that with the killer Norman Mailer helped spring, who just a month later stabbed ... Uh, never mind.  | | Celebrity murderer Wilbert Rideau, living the good life |
I had my own personal experience regarding such a sprung celebrity murderer, Wilbert Rideau, who has just published his autobiography: In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance. Ted Koppel called it "a breathtaking and, ultimately, triumphant story of rehabilitation through endurance and courageous journalism" in a book jacket endorsement. Likewise, when Rideau got out five years ago, newspapers worldwide proclaimed Lady Justice had prevailed!
But no, she wept bitterly. For Rideau remains what he was when I knew him 22 years ago—a highly intelligent, highly literate, extremely tricky, cold-blooded killer.
Health Warning: Persons with high blood pressure should get a note from their doctor before reading my article on a terrible miscarriage of justice.
June 14, 2010 10:08 AM · Permalink ·
Crime
My article: "Purveying Pig Flu Panic at the Post"
By Michael Fumento
"Panic is what we want," Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote last May of swine flu. "Panic is good," she said, also labeling the disease a "pandemic" five weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) did.  | | The Post's rational response to swine flu |
Yet flu season is now officially over and we've had about 12,500 total flu deaths, or a third the usual number according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
Still, say what you will about the Post Opinions page coverage of swine flu, it was consistent. It kept on promoting panic, notwithstanding they knew they were wrong, that indeed one of their contributors was outright lying. I know because I repeatedly kept them informed. Read my article about those estimates of 207,000 American dead and nine million worldwide that Opinions foisted on us - in the name of spreading panic.
June 13, 2010 03:54 PM · Permalink ·
Media
~ Swine Flu
"'Denialism' has no place in scientific debate," my letter in Nature Medicine
By Michael Fumento
The key sentence in the letter is this, "'Denialist' is an ad hominem argument, the meaning of which is defined entirely by the user, intended to discredit the accused without evidence."
The "anti-denialism" campaign is, to use a word I rarely employ, a literal conspiracy - albeit something of an open one in that it's openly pushed by Chris Mooney. The purpose is two-fold.
1) Brand those with the "wrong" scientific views not just as "kooks" or "nuts" but as literally pathological. This from a recent article in The New Scientist:
"Instigators of denialist movements have more serious psychological problems than most of their followers. 'They display all the features of paranoid personality disorder [according to one quoted "expert"]' "including anger, intolerance of criticism, and what psychiatrists call a grandiose sense of their own importance." The "expert" goes on to say, "Ultimately, their denialism is a mental health problem. That is why these movements all have the same features, especially the underlying conspiracy theory."
2) Lump those whose ideas you wish to defame with people who truly are whacko. Thus there's no difference between not accepting the party line on global warming and believing vaccines cause autism or HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
It is truly insidious and we're going to be hearing a lot more from these people.
June 10, 2010 06:12 PM · Permalink ·
Ponderings
Obama exploits oil spill to boost support for climate bill
By Michael Fumento
"President Obama tried Wednesday to channel public outrage about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill into support for a climate-change bill, seeking to redefine an issue that threatens to tarnish his presidency," according to the Washington Post.
I've written on how absolutely anything, and I do mean anything, can and has been used to show the ill impact of global warming, including:  | | "That does it! We've got to ram that global warming bill through!" |
Brain-eating amoebae, brothels struggle, cannibalism, circumcision in decline, Earth to explode, earth upside down, football team migration, Garden of Eden wilts, invasion of king crabs, Italy robbed of pasta, killer cornflakes, Loch Ness monster dead, mammoth dung melt, opera house to be destroyed, seals mating more, spiders invade Scotland, squid larger, squid tamed, UFO sightings, Vampire moths, violin decline, witchcraft executions.
Now it appears absolutely anything can be used as an excuse to pass climate change legislation. I think we should all help our president by coming up with even more reasons! I'll start it off and you can send your contributions, which I can then post and subsequently hand deliver to our Chief Executive. The best will probably be those that relate in some way specifically to Obama.
- The pet dog, Boa, piddled the carpet in the Oval office.
- "Those idiot birthers just won't quit!"
- "30 Rock" last night was a rerun.
- Obama saw a cloud formation that looked just like global warming.
- His organic bread turned green overnight. (No, wait! That happened to me!)
- "Those damned "v1agra" and "V!agra" emails are getting through the spam filter.
- Michelle had "a headache" last night.
- To honor veterans of the Seminole Indian War.
- Obama had the strangest dream in which cute little bunnies became man-eating snails.
- They've released another DVD edition of The Wizard of Oz.
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