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Obamacare backfires: Insurance companies seek to hike up premiums in 2016


SputnikNews
Tue, 07 Jul 2015 00:32 UTC
obamacare
© AP Photo/ Carolyn Kaster
American health insurance companies are seeking to increase rates by 20 to 40% or more, while federal officials looking to calm outraged customers say they will work to scale back requests for such steep rate hikes.

Many companies are claiming that new customers who enrolled under the Affordable Care Act (AAC) - commonly referred to as "Obamacare" - turned out to be sicker than expected, leading to increased costs to insurers.

Now, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association - which provides insurance to over 100 million Americans - wants to increase its rates by an average of 23% in Illinois, 25% in North Carolina, 31% in Oklahoma, 36% in Tennessee and 54% in Minnesota, the New York Times reported.

In Oregon, insurance commissioner Laura N. Cali approved 2016 rate increases for Moda Health Plan (a 25% increase) and LifeWise (a 33% increase). Moda and LifeWise, which are the largest and second-largest plans in the state, respectively, combine to cover more than 220,000 people.

Jesse Ellis O'Brien, a health advocate at the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, told the Times:

"Rate increases will be bigger in 2016 than they have been for years and years and will have a profound effect on consumers here. Some may start wondering if insurance is affordable or if it's worth the money."

Some experts say there was an initial rush for services under Obamacare, and they expect rates to decline over the next few years.

"People are getting services they needed for a very long time," Marinan R. Williams, of the Scott & White Health Plan in Texas, told the Times. "There was a pent-up demand. Over the next three years, I hope, rates will start to stabilize."
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Play

South Front foreign policy diary: Instability zone Caucasus - Gladio 2.0 in progress


South Front
Mon, 06 Jul 2015 21:57 UTC
south front
ISIS has been increasing its presence in the Caucasus. On June 23, 2015 ISIS announced the creation of a new governorate, called Wilayat Qawqaz in Russia's North Caucasus, after several senior militants in the area pledged allegiance to ISIS. ISIS has been setting up conditions to establish this governorate in support of its regional expansion campaign since at least January 2015. A declaration of Wilayat Qawqaz followed the circulation of a Russian-language audio statement on Twitter on June 21, in which supporters of ISIS in the regions of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia and Kabarda, Balkaria and Karachay pledged allegiance to ISIS's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. These areas represent four of the six subdivisions that constitute the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus terrorist network. Militants in these four most frequently conducted domestic attacks in support of the IEC's stated goals of establishing a Caucasus emirate under sharia law and waging global jihad. The two IEC subdivisions where supporters have not formally pledged to ISIS are Cherkessia and Nogay steppe.

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Laptop

Hacking Team breach reveals a global spying firm run amok

Andy Greenberg
WIRED
Mon, 06 Jul 2015 10:26 UTC
skull
© thehackernews.com
Data dump, Hacking Team not hacking it.
FEW NEWS EVENTS can unleash more schadenfreude within the security community than watching a notorious firm of hackers-for-hire become a hack target themselves. In the case of the freshly disemboweled Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, the company may also serve as a dark example of a global surveillance industry that often sells to any government willing to pay, with little regard for that regime's human rights record.

On Sunday night, unidentified hackers published a massive, 400 gigabyte trove on BitTorrent (peer-to-peer file sharing) of internal documents from the Milan-based Hacking Team, a firm long accused of unethical sales of tools that help governments break into target computers and phones. The breached trove includes executive emails, customer invoices and even source code; the company's twitter feed was hacked, controlled by the intruders for nearly 12 hours, and used to distribute samples of the company's hacked files. The security community spent Sunday night picking through the spy firm's innards and in some cases finding what appear to be new confirmations that Hacking Team sold digital intrusion tools to authoritarian regimes. Those revelations may be well timed to influence an ongoing U.S. policy debate over how to control spying software, with a deadline for public debate on new regulations coming this month.

Comment: The spyware in question is a Western-made surveillance tool sold to police and intelligence agencies that's "so powerful it can turn on webcams and microphones and grab documents off hard drives," according to the findings of a study published by the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs' Citizen Lab. Invasive? Despicable? How about the Stuxnet computer worm, which damaged centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear plant, that was jointly developed by the U.S. and Israel, according to the New York Times. Weaknesses are "open doors." Do you trust your government?

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Light Saber

Greece made to fail by the banks and other parts of the story you are not being told by the media

Chris Kanthan
Nation of Change
Sun, 05 Jul 2015 00:00 UTC
Image
© Unknown
According to mainstream media, the current economic crisis in Greece is due to the government spending too much money on its people that it went broke. This claim however, is a lie. It was the banks that wrecked the country so oligarchs and international corporations could benefit.
Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can't pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

Except that it is a big fat lie ... not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.

Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek government and deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery.

Comment: As we now know, Greece did it. They voted no to austerity, took the proverbial bull by the horns, and stood up for themselves in a major way. But the geopolitical drama is still unfolding as the troika must now respond, and Greece must stand steadfast in defying the yoke of slavery that the international banks have sought to thrust upon them.

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Horse

A Trojan Horse in the home of austerity

Pepe Escobar
Sputnik News
Mon, 06 Jul 2015 15:06 UTC
Trojan Horse
© Flickr/Stowe Boyd
Greece invented democracy. Greek mythology forged the way the West looks at itself. Greece even invented the denomination of this Eurasian annex - "Europa".
"For it is only criminals

who presume to damage other people nowadays

without the aid of philosophy."

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.
Odysseus/Ulysses took ten years to go back home after the Trojan War. His descendants are now making history in the original home of democracy. And they are not going anywhere. They have already placed their Trojan horse in the home of intolerance and austerity. There's no turning back from restoring dignity. And if the Muses rule it, it will be back to the drachma.

The so-called EU "institutions" - along with cosmically mediocre politicians of wealthy EU nations — behaved like barbarians all along, proving, graphically, how the whole Kafkaesque EU construction hates democracy with a vengeance.

Brussels and Berlin proved they are in the regime change business. Updating the exceptionalists on Iraq in 2003, they were advocating the destruction of a democratically elected government via economic Shock and Awe. Their subsequent wet dream was to impose renewed austerity on an interim, unelected technocratic government.
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Info

Euclid Tsakalotos to be appointed as new Greek finance minister


RT
Mon, 06 Jul 2015 17:23 UTC
Euclid Tsakalotos
© Reuters / Alkis Konstantinidis
Euclid Tsakalotos has been appointed as the new Greek finance minister following the resignation of Yanis Varoufakis, Greek presidency official said. Greek media reported he will be sworn in at an official ceremony at 20:00 local time (17:00 GMT).

Tsakalotos "will be sworn in with the political oath as finance minister," the presidency official told Reuters.

Tsakalotos was previously the deputy foreign minister responsible for international economic relations.
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Treasure Chest

Say what? US to pay salaries of Governor Saakashvili's team in Odessa


RT
Mon, 06 Jul 2015 16:57 UTC
Mikhail Saakashvili
© Reuters / Kevin Lamarque
The US government will pay the salaries to the staff of Georgia's former President Mikhail Saakashvili, who is now serving as a new governor of Odessa Region, Ukraine, Saakashvili said, adding that California police will also train Odessa's officers.

"Within the framework of Odessa's anti-corruption pressure, the US government agreed to provide funds for the salaries of the new team of [Mikhail] Saakashvili," Saakashvili wrote on his Facebook page after the meeting with Geoffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine.

He added that American police officers from California "will train new Odessa police."

Comment: Unbelievable, we the US taxpayers are going to pay for Saakashvili and his cronies. This is just absurd and we have no say in the matter.

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Target

Greece: Bankers planning 'bail-ins' by seizing customer's bank accounts

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
Mon, 06 Jul 2015 14:00 UTC
alpha bank
Chaos and economic disaster are still stirring up in Greece, with a sharp rejection of foreign control of their troubled affairs.

More austerity and new rounds of loans? Voters in Greece's emergency referendum were overwhelmingly against it. Whatever happens next, they stood up to the authoritarian tactics of the European Union. Hurrah.
Greeks voted overwhelmingly to reject creditors' proposal of more austerity measures in return for rescue loans, in the country's first referendum in 41 years Sunday.

The referendum "will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage," Varoufakis said. (source)
Now signal the panic. Collapse may be impending. Then doom. Contagion could spread to America, too, and trigger global market implosion and derivatives meltdown.
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Eye 1

Washington's 'dangerous game' with Russia


Sputnik News
Mon, 06 Jul 2015 14:15 UTC
Image
© Flickr / Glenn Pope
US hawks want Washington to shape its Russian policy around mounting military and economic pressure along with tough rhetoric thrown in. President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations Leslie H. Gelb calls this a "dangerous and losing strategy."

Anti-Russian sanctions and NATO's military buildup "merely invite Russian toughness and intransigence. That's the story of the last two years," he pointed out in an article titled America's Losing Russia Strategy.

Apparently, this approach is not working. Russia has long called the restrictive measures counterproductive (with many European countries echoing this sentiment) and slammed the enhanced military presence on it borders as jeopardizing European peace and security.

Comment: Washington is waging a world war aimed against Russia and China, and its greatest weapon is plausible deniability. Also see:

Putin's phone call to Obama and its significance

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Quenelle - Golden

Putin, Tsipras meet to discuss outcome of Greek referendum


Sputnik News
Mon, 06 Jul 2015 13:42 UTC
Greece Russia Putin
© AP Photo
Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the outcomes of the Greek referendum with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Monday, and expressed his support to the Greek people in overcoming the future difficulties in the country, Kremlin press service said.

On Sunday, more than 61 percent of Greek voters rejected the lenders-proposed bailout plan, which stipulates spending cuts and tax increases in exchange for further financial assistance to the country.

The referendum was preceded by several rounds of talks between Athens and its major international creditors — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Eurogroup that ended without a deal.

Comment: Also see: Greece votes no: Let the chaos begin

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