In his weekly “Stories I’d like to see” column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com.
1. Pinning the $ on the politicians:
Much of the press covering the testimony of Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO, before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs last week about his bank’s $3 billion trading loss said Dimon got off easy. Some accounts, like this one in Politico cited a money connection: Dimon, Politico reported, “fielded mostly softball questions from a panel of senators who’ve taken thousands of dollars in contributions from his firm.”
Pointing out the money connection makes sense, but I wish the press would take the trouble to give us more. Why not put a parenthetical next to any senator who is mentioned in an article like this, detailing how much money he or she got from Dimon or JPMorgan-associated PACs in the last five years?
As in “said Tennessee Republican Bob Corker ($64,000)”?
Or: “explained Democrat and committee chair Tim Johnson of South Dakota ($38,995).”
There are several sources, such as OpenSecrets.org, run by the Center for Responsive Politics, where this information can be gathered quickly, and from which I gathered these real Corker and Johnson JPMorgan-linked dollar tallies in about two minutes.
In fact, at a time when most Americans are appalled at the role money plays in politics, why not take advantage of these databases and post the dollar tallies whenever any politician is written about as taking one position or another on an issue? As a standard form, just have a parenthetical that reports the amount of contributions received from interests on one side or the other of the issue the senator or congressman (or maybe even a state legislator) is depicted in the article as addressing.
There could be a note added if the contribution was from an interest whose side the politician didn’t appear to take, and an additional note if he or she took money from both sides.
And if the newspaper or website lists the actual votes of legislators, why not put the same parenthetical dollar sign next to each vote?
At major news organizations, compiling this information - linking politicians and money from major interest groups, businesses and unions so that reporters covering these stories would have it at the ready - seems like a great job for a summer intern.
Would all these parenthetical dollar signs next to the names of our elected officials look smarmy? You bet. That would be the point.
2. Cancer Treatment Centers of America: Leading the way, or luring the vulnerable?
The Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) has been running a ubiquitous ad campaign pitching its hospitals as the best answer to the health crisis facing families that have been suddenly confronted with a C-word diagnosis.
Its website - featuring “Care That Never Quits” as a registered trademark and describing a network of “all-digital” hospitals, whatever that means - boasts on its “results” page a slew of impressive cure rates: for example, 88 percent for breast cancer detected within one year, versus a national average cure rate (according to the National Institutes of Health, the website says) of 60 percent. Or 30 percent versus 11 percent for pancreatic cancer.
Is that true? If it’s not true, or if the statistics are spun deceptively to CTCA’s advantage, what are the rules, if any, governing that?
The one relatively recent news clip[$] I found about the company (at least, I think it’s a for-profit company) says that it features flat fees for treatment of major cancer types, such as $10,000 for prostate cancer and $14,500 for lung cancer.
That’s right: flat, manageable fees instead of the usual pile-it-on fee-for-service regime that is bankrupting patients and taxpayers. Plus, high cure rates. And thrilled patients, as evidenced by the testimonials that fill the website. If that’s all real, this could be a great story about a breakthrough in healthcare.
Another thread found in a Google search pointed me to a blog article saying that Cancer Treatment Centers of America founder Richard J. Stephenson is a member of the board of FreedomWorks, the conservative organization that helped propel the Tea Party, and that he is also the president of International Capital and Management, “an organization specializing in making hospitals more efficient and cost-effective.” A subhead in the same blog post says that in 1996 “CTCA Settled With FTC After Allegations Of Making ‘False and Unsubstantiated Claims’ About Treatments.” The blog’s link to an FTC press release appears to substantiate this account.
Again, if CTCA has truly cleaned up its act since then, that’s a story worth telling, especially given the prominence of its ad campaign. However, given the desperate mindset of people who are most likely to respond to those ads or other promotions, or come to this website, if some of its promises and success stories are not true, we need to know that, too. And either way, I’d love to know who the investors are behind this increasingly visible healthcare venture.
3. The European Union: What were they thinking?
Maybe it’s just me, but I remain confused about what political leaders and economic officials in Europe were thinking about their inconsistent economies and approaches to fiscal policy when they introduced the European Union’s common currency in 1999. How, if at all, did they address the possibility that some of the member countries would be so fiscally irresponsible (or economically challenged, depending on your view) that in a broad recession they could drag every other country down unless the strongest - in this case Germany - chipped in billions of its taxpayers’ money to rescue even the most recalcitrant of the weakest?
Can’t some smart newspaper or magazine (or maybe 60 Minutes or CNBC) go back to 1999 and tell us how these potential problems were discussed and who convinced everyone else not to worry.
With the euro crisis in mind and as an offshoot to the stories like this one over the weekend about banks holding “fire drills” to deal with the outcome of the Greek elections, I bet that last weekend there were also a half-dozen or so lawyers scattered at elite firms across the world whose arcane specialty is, or has become, currency provisions in loan documents and similar contracts. It would be fun to see a story of how they worked through the weekend huddling with hundreds of jittery clients, proving once again that even the worst events produce economic winners (usually the lawyers). Who are they? And who came up with the most creative potential solutions for clients worried about being stuck with drachmas?
On the Euro, what they were thinking was that monetary integration would lead to economic and political integration. The idea was you can't make war on people who hold the same bucks as you and that the global economy could overwhelm the local economy of a small country, but that a large EU economic union would be able to stand amongst the Americas and the Asias and compete. There were also many that saw the monetary union as a means to roll back local welfare states since internal EU market competition would make the less efficient countries uncompetitive.
And, as discussed by Krugenstein, there were critics at that time that warned of asymmetric shocks and their effect on a country's ability to effectively deal with them.
On the Jamie Dimon front, has anybody been checking out Bernie Sanders lately?
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=3cbb0ca8-b025-406a-a669-aa89bec0b4e4
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 19 Jun 2012 at 03:00 PM
In other news, you may remember a few posts back how I mentioned that we're seeing some weird patterns in what is labeled a government obligation and what is labeled a private one.
It's become an obligation of government to incentivize business by building their facilities and giving them tax breaks.
At the same time, due to budget constraints, public infrastructure building and maintenance is becoming more the duty of hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and private equity.
Weird eh? So a while back, I put up a story about how the Koch brother's were putting conditions on their contributions to Florida's public university - they get to veto the staff choices. And since the state is hard up for cash, and the university is harder up for cash since they can't increase tuition without crashing enrollment, they are compelled to agree with the conditional philanthropy.
Well, it's not just Florida no more.
"On Thursday night, a hedge fund billionaire, self-styled intellectual, “radical moderate,” philanthropist, former Goldman Sachs partner, and general bon vivant named Peter Kiernan resigned abruptly from the foundation board of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He had embarrassed himself by writing an email claiming to have engineered the dismissal of the university president, Teresa Sullivan, ousted by a surprise vote a few days earlier...
Both the Kiernan letter and Dragas’ shallow statements discuss the climate facing the university and all public universities in the United States. The problem is, everyone seems to discuss the fact that universities have too little money as if it actually were a matter of climate.
It’s not. It’s a matter of politics. States have been making policy decisions for 20 years, accelerating remarkably since the 2007 recession, to cut funding severely, shifting the costs to students and the federal government. Adjusted for inflation, state support for each full-time public-college student declined by 26.1 percent from 1990 to 2010. Meanwhile, faculty and staff salaries have been plummeting and security evaporating. This is especially true at the University of Virginia, where state support per student is far lower than at comparable state universities such as North Carolina.
So as tuition peaks and federal support dries up, the only stream still flowing is philanthropy. Our addiction to philanthropy carries great costs as well as benefits to public higher education in America. We are hooked on it because we have no choice. Either we beg people for favors or our research grinds to a halt and we charge students even more. I am complicit in this. I enthusiastically help raise money for the university. And my salary is subsidized by a generous endowment from board member Tim Robertson, son of the Rev. Pat Robertson.
The reason folks such as Dragas and Kiernan get to call the shots at major universities is that they write huge, tax-deductable checks to them. They buy influence and we subsidize their purchases. So too often an institution that is supposed to set its priorities based on the needs of a state or the needs of the planet instead alters its profile and curriculum to reflect the whims of the wealthy."
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 19 Jun 2012 at 03:38 PM
Kevin Drum had a post about the condition of public universities, which to a hedge fund, may be categorized as leverage (in the sense of negotiation):
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/06/public-vs-private-universities-reply-trenches
"People who think it is true probably aren’t aware of just how much public universities have cut, or else aren’t aware just how intensive an education private universities provide. (What I’m going to say covers the humanities and social sciences; I’m less familiar with science and engineering.)
Public universities still have excellent faculties. Their scholarship is often first-rate, and their lecturing skill is probably no worse, on average, than it is in the Ivy League. The problem is that while lecturing is cheap and easily scalable, developing writing and critical thinking skills is expensive because it’s labor intensive. For students to really engage with the material they’re reading in books and hearing about in lectures, someone smart and knowledgeable has to lead a small-group discussion. For them to learn how to make an argument and defend it against objections, they have to write lots of papers, be able to work on them with someone who knows how to write and also knows the subject matter, and have them graded by someone in a position to make serious comments so they can do better next time...
But at the University of California these days — and I’m told it’s been like this at Michigan for decades — graduate and undergraduate funding cuts mean that most upper-level courses have no discussion sections and no teaching assistants. In other words, the real teaching doesn’t take place at all. Papers, if they're assigned at all — and increasingly they're not — are graded by "readers" paid so poorly that they can only spend a few minutes on each paper, are not available for writing assistance, and can't even be required, given their meager pay for long hours, to attend the lectures in the classes they're grading for. There's no way readers can grade papers carefully in such circumstances: they put check marks in the margin when something of substance is mentioned, and pass pretty much everyone through. As for professor-led seminars, never that plentiful, they’ve all but vanished: they simply cost too much."
What will become of academic freedom when the people with the checks start using their veto on scholarship that can't say no?
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 19 Jun 2012 at 03:48 PM
Mr. Brill:
Thank you for highlighting Cancer Treatment Centers of America as one of the stories you’d most like to see. At CTCA, our first priority is our patients.
We would be honored to have you or anyone else interested in CTCA as our guests at one of our regional hospitals, where you can learn first-hand about how our doctors, clinicians and patients are changing the face of cancer care. There’s a reason our Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores are among the highest of any hospital and that our patients and their caregivers become our greatest advocates.
For the record, there are a couple of points here that need clarification:
- Where you mention “cure rates,” what we actually measure and show on our website is Survival Rates. They’re also not the only statistic, we measure and display: Quality of Life, Patient Experience and Speed of care -- all clearly laid out on CancerCenter.com.
- The “flat fee” you discuss is not a flat fee for treatment; it is a single, fully inclusive price for a comprehensive evaluation and treatment plan. The actual cost and course of treatment are different for every patient and every cancer. Our innovative CareEdge program offers a complete evaluation and treatment plan in five days or less through a process convenient for the patient.
As I mentioned above, CTCA’s story -- from our founding to our Patient Empowered Care model and our vision for quality-based, patent-centered cancer care -- is well worth your attention. We’d be pleased to welcome you for a visit at your convenience. We look forward to speaking with you and can be reached at (847) 342-6471.
Andrew Welhouse – Public Affairs Manager, CTCA
#4 Posted by Andrew Welhouse, CJR on Tue 19 Jun 2012 at 07:18 PM
You remember when I was mentioning about how states are having trouble collecting their revenues?
One of the reasons why is because, according David Cay Johnston, the companies who are collecting the revenues from their employee paychecks are keeping the money.
http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2012/04/12/taxed-by-the-boss/
"Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers – and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.
The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid...
Why do state governments do this? Public records show that large companies often pay little or no state income tax in states where they have large operations, as this column has documented. Some companies get discounts on property, sales and other taxes. So how to provide even more subsidies without writing a check? Simple. Let corporations keep the state income taxes deducted from their workers’ paychecks for up to 25 years."
W. T. Filed under 'Really?'
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 19 Jun 2012 at 09:48 PM
The claim about CTCA is disingenuous. According to your link, the FTC did not prove any wrongdoing on CTCA's part; it merely coerced CTCA into placing disclaimers on its ads. In any case, a truly brave and conscientious journalist would instead pursue the FTC, which, like any armed gang, will bully you and try to silence you if you make it widely known that you are easily outperforming the State. (Needless to say, bullying and silencing are just about the only things the State does better, and more prolifically, than private actors.)
#6 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 04:04 AM
Ooo, this is interesting. Looks like we've got a fight a brewing. You see, Obama was an idiot when he took over, "Don't look back, look forward." Didn't like it when Boston was singing it, sure as hell hated it when it came to constitutional violations of privacy, torture, incarceration without trial, lying to congress for wars of pleasure, turning the justice department into an empowered political ops outfit, etcetera..
So now Mr. Issa, a saintly figure who's never committed a single fraudulent act (lotsa people increase their warehouse insurance coverage from a 100,000 to 400,000 shortly before a fire burns everything down... stop looking at him like that!), is going after Eric Holder. Now Mr. Covington and Burling has his own issues "Fraud? I don't see no fraud!" wise, but he's gotten annoyed at Florida's regular vote purge during election season, so it's time to fire up the scandal machine which has been rather quiet up until this point since the bipartisanship has been working for the banks who kind of call the shots on this kind of thing.
But it looks like the rules of one sided civility have broken down. It looks like the republican tits are finally getting some tat. Cont..
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 06:58 PM
If the republicans really want to play the "Look what we found in the attic!" game, Barack may just decide to play along.
"[L]ost in said duckhunt are some rather more important documents that got themselves released to the invaluable folks at the National Security Archive. Among other things, the documents reveal in rather startling detail that the last president de-prioritized the CIA's efforts to put Osama bin Laden out of business for "budgetary" reasons — translation: the money went somewhere else — and that the members of that administration have at best been barbering the truth about their own various derelictions of duty ever since. In brief, on this particular historic atrocity, Richard Clarke was right and Condoleezza Rice should not be believed as far as you can throw One World Trade Center."
I really don't like Obama's assertions of executive power, persecution of leaks and whistleblowers, and eroded civil liberties record.
But if the republicans push him on this just before an election, I will sit back with my popcorn and enjoy the injuries.
I may quibble with Obama, but I won't be getting nostalgic for those days of conservative rule any time soon. Go injuries!
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 07:16 PM