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SAN FRANCISCO -- Physicians could face dramatic financial challenges for treating patients who receive health coverage through the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) exchanges starting next year. Insurance companies will not process claims on patients who haven't paid their premiums in 3 months, leaving doctors on the hook to recoup payment directly from the patients. The ACA provides a 3-month grace period to individuals who haven't paid their premiums, and the provision could prove problematic for physicians, said Elizabeth McNeil, vice president of federal government relations at the California Medical Association (CMA) in Sacramento. Plans will hold off on processing claims...

Talk to an investment guy, talk to a real estate gal, talk to a banker and you will hear that there's scads of money 'on the sidelines' pending the election. Conventional wisdom amongst most of the money folks is that a Romney win will be a quick and clear signal for people to invest again in the private sector. I hope it's true. It feels true. But there is something no one is talking about, and that's the 'sideline doctors'. Every single physician in this country is watching this election with keen interest. For many it will be the deciding...

Luckily for Barack Obama the corrupt media is too busy attempting to rescue the President from his "you didn't build that" comments to report on things like our faltering economy or the nearly half-foot of documents the CIA whoops-there'd under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Judicial Watch: The Central Intelligence Agency recently discovered a "4 to 5 inch stack" of documents that relate to the spy agency's cooperation with the makers of a forthcoming Hollywood film on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, according to a new court filing. The documents about CIA dealings with the...

Many conservatives and even some liberals have complained about Obama’s penchant for appointing “czars” in order to avoid accountability under law. One of his most notorious is the Consumer Czar, Elizabeth Warren, who was appointed by Obama to help set up and, many fear, to eventually run the monstrous new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). We recently uncovered documents indicating the CFPB has been intensely involved in a 50-state settlement discussion underway with the nation’s largest mortgage lenders regarding alleged improper foreclosure procedures. (Anti-business zealots in the Obama administration and state attorney general offices are trying to extract a $20...

UPDATED 1/17/11 New analysis of Democrat Party's official 2008 Certification of Nominations for Obama reveals that reasons for his sudden trip to Hawaii in October, 2008 were to visit more than just his sick grandmother. Hawaiian election laws, media accounts and post-dated documents reveal he may have attended a private hearing with the Hawaiian Chief Elections Officer regarding his disqualification from the Hawaiian ballot due to lack of certified Constitutional eligibility. by Pen Johannson Editor, The Daily Pen Honolulu, Hawaii - At the center of the war over Barack Obama’s illegitimacy as president are a series of deep seated, unanswered...

Barack Obama says the 'documents don't reveal any issues that haven't already informed our public debate on Afghanistan'. But he went on to say the material highlighted the challenges that led him to announce a change in strategy late last year that involved sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The thousands of documents... dealt mainly with the conduct of the war during the Bush administration. "We failed for seven years to implement a strategy adequate to the challenge," Obama said today.... That is why we have increased our commitment there and developed a new strategy," he said...

Expect this story from the New York Times to restart the discussion on U.S. policies and strategies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Under the headline “Pakistani Spy Service Aids Insurgents, Reports Assert,” a team of Times reporters summarize and analyze a huge batch of secret U.S. intelligence reports on the war in Afghanistan. Those reports show, in compelling detail, that Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) has been actively – and regularly – aiding insurgents fighting Americans in Afghanistan. The Times reports: The documents, to be made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States,...

Obama Attacks Docs and Cops President Obama spent most of his press conference tonight denying what President Kennedy famously affirmed -- that to govern is to choose. Obama promised us health care this is at once better and cheaper, with both more regulation and more freedom to choose, featuring an assurance that government won’t limit our care and a commitment to a government panel that will save money by restricting care. The juvenile happy talk reached its peak with this presidential statement: “If there's a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A senior administration official says billions of dollars to raise fees for doctors treating Medicare patients are not covered by President Barack Obama's pledge to pay for health care legislation. Budget Director Peter Orszag said Tuesday that's because the administration always assumed the money would be spent to prevent a cut of more than 20 percent in doctor fees.

Health authorities in Sweden have decided not to punish two doctors who mistakenly stitched a 65-year-old patient’s bladder to his large intestine. The faulty operation took place in January at Malmö University Hospital on a patient who had previously had surgery for an inflamed rectum following treatment for prostate cancer.

  Morale "terrible" among doctors LONDON (Reuters) - More than half of doctors questioned in a poll said morale within the profession is "poor" or "terrible", blaming government targets and reforms for the downbeat atmosphere.A total of 54 percent of the 1,442 online survey respondents said morale within the profession was at a low, with more than two-thirds saying it had worsened during the past year. Just 2 percent said morale was "excellent" in the survey carried out by the magazine "Hospital Doctor".Nearly 70 percent said they would not recommend a career in medicine to friends or relatives.Factors behind...

'DOCS IN SOCKS' BERGER RAPPED By DEBORAH ORIN September 7, 2005 WASHINGTON — The feds yesterday recommended that former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger get at least a year's probation and do community service — but no jail time — for stealing top-secret memos and lying about it. Berger pleaded guilty last April to taking the documents — and reportedly hiding them in his pants and socks — from the National Archives while vetting them to refresh his memory before testifying before the 9/11 commission. He's to be sentenced tomorrow. The memos were versions of a report that Berger...

WASHINGTON - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill received 140 sensitive documents that should have been marked classified, the Treasury Department’s inspector general said Monday. The report found that while the department’s review system for classifying documents needed improvement, no federal laws had been broken in the incident. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Associated Press and other news media, the Treasury Department’s inspector general released several hundred pages covering its investigation of how O’Neill received some 19,000 documents that were used to write a book highly critical of President Bush. The new report found...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

Fawaz Zureikat, George Galloway's Jordanian partner who claims not to be involved in oil deals, is closely associated with a company that has traded Iraqi crude valued at millions of pounds, according to United Nations documents seen by The Daily Telegraph. Mr Zureikat has dismissed as a "forgery" an Iraqi intelligence report identifying him as the front man for Mr Galloway's secret contracts to buy Iraqi crude and sell humanitarian supplies under the UN's oil-for-food programme. The Jordanian businessman has repeatedly insisted that he does not deal in oil, although he does sell food and other civilian supplies to Iraq....

Nicole Martin shows a confidential handwritten memo found in the rubble of the looted Iraqi foreign ministry to the man who used to arrange the dictator's scheduleSaddam Hussein's former head of protocol said yesterday that the document found by The Daily Telegraph saying that George Galloway received substantial payments from the Iraqi regime was "100 per cent genuine". Haitham Rashid Wihaib, who fled to Britain with his family eight years ago after death threats, said he had no doubt that the handwritten confidential memorandum addressed to the dictator's office apparently detailing how the Labour MP benefited from Iraq's oil sales...

A Jordanian business man, Fawaz Zureikat, whose name was revealed yesterday as an allegedly business intermediary between Labour member of Parliament George Galloway and Saddam Hussain's regime, has been detained in Amman. George Galloway MP, a familiar face to Arab public, is at the top of the news once again, but this time as having been, allegedly, on the pay-roll of Saddam Hussain's regime, at least since 2000. The allegations, claimed to have been uncovered in "secret documents" found by a reporter in two charred boxes at the first floor of the looted foreign ministry in Baghdad are many and...

From leaky roofs to secret agents: how the files I found in Iraq's looted foreign ministry cast light on the paranoid world of Saddam Hussein How many Iraqi officials does it take to fix the leaky roof of a diplomat's house in London? How long does a skilled translator need to convert one of George Galloway's parliamentary speeches into Arabic? In almost 1, 000 pages of Arabic prose, each stamped with the Eagle crest of Iraq, the files found inside the foreign ministry in Baghdad cast a somewhat surreal light on the questions that turned the bureaucratic wheels of Saddam...

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) - Some Florida State University professors have been circulating a parody map showing the campus of the future, with a new Bigfoot Institute, a School of Astrology and a Crop Circle Simulation Laboratory. It's a not-so-subtle jab in a growing debate over a proposal to build a chiropractic college on this campus - the first such school at a public university in the United States. More than 500 professors, including the university's two Nobel laureates, have signed a petition opposing the school and a handful have even threatened to resign rather than teach alongside what they consider...

Kerry Might Reconsider USFK Reductions: Sandy Berger WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Sandy Berger, former White House National Security Advisor and key foreign policy and security advisor to Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry, hinted Wednesday that should Kerry win the U.S. presidential election in November, it was possible that the decision to reduce U.S. troops in Korea would be reconsidered. In a keynote address for an international symposium entitled "Regionalism in Northeast Asia: Opportunities and Challenges," hosted by Johns Hopkins University and the Maeil Business Newspaper, Berger said USFK reductions were inappropriate, claiming that pulling 12,000 troops out of Korea at...