Map Shows If You've Been Screwed by Data Breach

Now, here's an innovative use of the interactive nature of Web sites these days.

On Jan. 20, 2009, Heartland Payment Systems (HPY), the sixth largest payment processor in the nation, revealed that its databases had been breached.

So far, 447 banks have stepped forward to admit that they use HPY (why the Y?), including Union Bank of California (UBOC) in San Francisco. The thing I want to know if UBOC is isolated to one branch in San Francisco, or to all its branches in the state. My guess is the latter, meaning I may be screwed.

Anyway, you can go to this U.S. map and click on your state to see if your bank account may have been compromised.

Analysis Correct, But What Aren't They Telling Us?

A group calling itself Physicians for National Health Program (PNHP) has issued a press release revealing the failure of Hillarycare as it was resurrected in Massachusetts by former Governor Mitt Romney (who somehow has now seen the light of his transgressions from Republican orthodoxy).

Costs are up, services are hard to get, the state is going broke, and what was once free for the indigent now costs them money--that's the Massachusetts health care plan implemented in 2006.

So far, so good--these are the inevitable results of government interference in the free market. (Watch for higher costs and more rationing coming down the pike soon.)

However, PNHP then advocates the adoption of a single-payer national health care system "while maintaining the private delivery system." This plan is embodied in H.R. 676, the so-called United States National Health Care Act.

The group claims implementation of H.R. 676 would save Massachusetts alone "about $8 billion to $10 billion a year in reduced administrative costs," but it fails to say how except that it would eliminate (now, really?) the 31-percent administrative fees built into private insurance plans. Eliminate some admin costs, yes, but all, no, but PNHP never goes into detail.

Also, how does this differ from just putting everyone on Medicare? No clue in the press release.

What H.R. 676 really amounts to is a massive "fee-for-service" cash grab by the physicians of America who, once they got their hands on an "unlimited" federal money spigot, would open the valve as wide as possible with a) more patients and b) more services for every patient they see.

Unless they can provide better details than this crappy press release does, these physicians need to go back to the drawing board--and figure out how they can see more patients for the same, or less, than they do now.

Otherwise, it's just more greedy pigs lining up at the federal trough (see banks, the Big Three, the states, housing, unions, etc.).

Watch What You Say, Young Man

The International Longevity Center and Aging Services of California have issued a media guide for writing about older people, which lists acceptable (PC) words and unacceptable (non-PC) terms.

However, it really depends on the audience reading what's written to define acceptable. Readers in their 20s or 30s said in a survey they would take no offense at reading "senior citizen," for example. In fact, "senior citizen" is viewed as a neutral term by those under 54 but offensive by those 55 and older. Hmmmm....

Likewise, "retiree" is okay with those 54 and under, but disliked by those 55 and older. "Veteran" is acceptable to both groups, but that would seem to apply only to people who've served in the military, not generally to old coots. Oops, that's a no-no that never should be used. My bad (even though I do qualify as an old coot).

Some terms to be avoided at all costs include “golden years," “feisty,” “spry,” “feeble,” “eccentric,” “senile” and “grandmotherly.”

This is useful information for the workplace as well, so as to avoid EEOC and DOL inquiries and potential legal disputes over ageism or hostile environments.

Get your copy of Media Takes: On Aging.

AHRQ: The (Scary) Little Agency That Thinks It Can

Can do the impossible, that is, which to prescribe which medicines and medical procedures are both most efficacious and most cost-effective. So far, I can find little proof of AHRQ's accomplishing anything near this goal on the site of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

AHRQ is in the news since it just got a whole new set of fangs in the Obama stimulus plan (aka the Tom Daschle stealth strategy for health care reform). Rush Limbaugh and the Washington Times have equated the new powers of AHRQ to Hitler's program of euthansia for the old, infirm and disabled of any age. These people are not productive, so why treat them and waste resources? Get rid of 'em.

Daschle, of course, is not prescribing euthansia per se, but he wants a federal agency (which is now the AHRQ, ironically started under Dubya in 2004) to determine, among other things, when someone in the last stages of life should be denied services and asked to give up the ghost. Daschle says that seniors should gladly accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” except when it comes to pols like himself who will get the gold standard of cradle-to-grave health care. (Can you imagine Ted Kennedy's being denied brain-tumor surgery last year even when a majority of doctors proclaimed it a waste of time and money, which they actually did?)

I keep bringing up Daschle's name because it was his prescriptions for a federal agency to determine most cost-effective treatments and to track everyone's health care through electronic records that was slipped into the stimulus bill under the innocuous-sounding name of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act--and then rushed into law before anyone had a chance to thoroughly read it.

Except Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York who's been tracking health care matters, when she did read it and warned that you can "Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan," especially if you're a senior citizen.

Is the AHRQ really that scary and powerful? Not yet. I read through some of its Web site pages and found nothing revolutionary. In fact, it looks to be an impossible task for any person or agency to make valid health care cost-containing assessments. The best AHRQ could do was to compare findings of 61 studies on treating hypertension and to conclude that both angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs) and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) are equally effective, though the former have generic brands available while the latter don't, yet.

Which means that the best anyone is going to do in measuring effectiveness in health care is to rule out quackery--and then just to rule out high-cost medicine, with a few rare exceptions (Daschle and company). Which is where it all really gets scary--down the line in the future when Obama and others call it a "health care crisis" and "we have to act now." Wham, bam, no more angioplasties (fill in the blank) after age 62 (fill in the blank) and so on.

What really got me scared came when MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who's never gotten any fact or issue correct in his life, felt compelled to devote a whole show to "debunking" the charges by Limbaugh and McCaughey.

McCaughey's response? "Let's hold a debate."

Problem is, people like Olbermann don't won't a debate--they want a crisis, real or imagined.