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Monday, March 26, 2007 |
NYTimes: "Tens of thousands of elderly Americans have received life-prolonging care as a result of their long-term-care policies. With more than eight million customers, such insurance is one of the many products that companies are pitching to older Americans reaching retirement.
Yet thousands of policyholders say they have received only excuses about why insurers will not pay. Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult - if not impossible - for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state."
Christopher Buckley has written a 'comedy', Boomsday. I'd rather call it a biting satire.
USA Today: "Set in the nation's capital in the very near future, the novel imagines the coming fiscal Armageddon when 77 million baby boomers start wanting their Social Security checks instead of their MTV.
Intergenerational warfare ensues, pitting selfish boomers against their angry offspring, who refuse to devote their paychecks to supporting their elders. Politicians bray, the media hyperventilate and mad mirth ensues after the novel's heroine, a 29-year-old blogger, comes up with a solution: tax breaks for baby boomers who kill themselves at 65. 'Voluntary transitioning' is her term. Their kids reap the sizable financial benefits."
Christopher Buckley (a Republican, before the 2006 elections): "'The trouble with our times,' Paul Valéry said, 'is that the future is not what it used to be.'
This glum aperçu has been much with me as we move into the home stretch of the 2006 mid-term elections and shimmy into the starting gates of the 2008 presidential campaign. With heavy heart, as a once-proud - indeed, staunch - Republican, I here admit, behind enemy lines, to the guilty hope that my party loses; on both occasions.
There were some of us who scratched our heads in 2000 when we first heard the phrase 'compassionate conservative'. It had a cobbled-together, tautological, dare I say, Rovian aroma to it. But OK, we thought, let's give it a chance. It sounded more fun than Gore's 'Prosperity for America's Families'. (Bo-ring.)
Six years later, the White House uses the phrase about as much as it does 'Mission Accomplished'. Six years of record deficits and profligate expansion of entitlement programs. Incompetent expansion, at that: The actual cost of the President's Medicare drug benefit turned out, within months of being enacted, to be roughly one-third more than the stated price. Weren't Republicans supposed to be the ones who were good at accounting? All those years on Wall Street calculating CEO compensation...
Who knew, in 2000, that 'compassionate conservatism' meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research?
A more accurate term for Mr. Bush's political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism."
11:21:53 AM 
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Telegraph: "Police officers investigating the cash-for-honours scandal wanted to interview Tony Blair under caution but backed off after being warned that it could lead to his resignation, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
Allies of Mr Blair indicated to Scotland Yard that his position as Prime Minister would become untenable if he were treated as a suspect, rather than simply as a witness.
Detectives have spent a year looking into allegations that Labour promised peerages in return for £14 million in secret loans to fight the 2005 general election. The inquiry has widened to investigate claims that senior aides were involved in a cover-up in which they sought to pervert the course of justice.
Officers have interviewed more than 100 people and arrested four, including two senior party aides: Lord Levy, Labour's chief fund-raiser, and Ruth Turner, the head of government relations."
11:04:12 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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