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'Covered' through Obamacare: Las Vegas man owes $407,000 in doctor bills

Jennifer Robison
Las Vegas Review-Journal
Tue, 18 Mar 2014 20:49 UTC
Image
© Mark Damon/Las Vegas Review-Journal
Las Vegan Larry Basich paid the premium on his Nevada Health Link insurance plan in November, but as of Feb. 25, it wasn't clear who was covering Basich. The retired civil engineer had a triple bypass on Jan. 3 and now has $407,000 in medical bills.
The hospital bills are hitting Larry Basich's mailbox.

That would be OK if Basich had health insurance. But he doesn't.

Thing is, he should be covered. Basich, 62, bought a plan through the state's Nevada Health Link insurance exchange in the fall. He's been paying monthly premiums since November.

Yet the Las Vegan is stranded in a no-man's-land where no carrier claims him, and his tab is mounting: Basich owes $407,000 for care received in January and February, when his policy was supposed to be in effect. Instead, he's covered only for March and beyond.

Basich has begged for weeks for help from the exchange and its contractor, Xerox. But Basich's insurance broker said Xerox seems more interested in lawyering up and covering its hide than in working out Basich's problems. Nor is Basich the only client facing plan-selection errors through the exchange, she added.

Xerox, meanwhile, said it's working every day to fix Basich's problem, and its legal counsel is routine.
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Rose

News helicopter crashed near Seattle Space Needle: Casualties

Manuel Valdes and Phuong Le
The Sacramento Bee
Tue, 18 Mar 2014 22:57 UTC
Image
© KIRO-TV/AP
Smoke rises at the scene of a news helicopter crash outside the KOMO-TV studios near the space needle in Seattle on Tuesday, March 18, 2014.
A news helicopter crashed into a street and burst into flames Tuesday near Seattle's Space Needle, killing both people on board, badly injuring a man in a car and sending plumes of black smoke over the city during the morning commute.

The chopper was taking off from a helipad on KOMO-TV's roof when it went down at a downtown intersection and hit three vehicles, starting them on fire and spewing burning fuel down the street.

Kristopher Reynolds, a contractor working nearby, said he saw the helicopter lift about 5 feet off the low-rise building before it started to tilt. The chopper looked like it was trying to correct itself when it took a dive.

"Next thing I know, it went into a ball of flames," Reynolds said.

Witnesses also reported hearing unusual noises coming from the helicopter as it took off after refueling, said Dennis Hogenson, deputy regional chief with the National Transportation Safety Board in Seattle. They said the aircraft then rotated before it crashed near the Seattle Center campus, which is home to the Space Needle, restaurants and performing arts centers.

Mayor Ed Murray noted the normally bustling Seattle Center was relatively quiet at the time. Had it been a busier day, "this would have been a much larger tragedy," he said.
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Heart - Black

California women arrested in heinous child abuse case

Courtney Cherry
Fox 43
Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:33 UTC
child abuse suspects
© Fox News
Three starving children - including one who was chained to the floor to prevent her from getting food - were found last month in the squalid home of a Northern California couple, authorities said.

All three - two boys and a girl - were taken into protective custody, and one was hospitalized, Monterey County Sheriff Scott Miller said Friday.

Authorities discovered them in the Salinas, Calif., home on March 14 after two of the young people missed appointments, according to several published reports.

"It was a particularly heinous case," Miller told the Monterey Herald. The children had "hardly eaten for months."

The boys are 3 and 5 years old, and the girl is 8, authorities said, and they all exhibited bruises and signs of other physical as well as emotional abuse.

The girl, who appeared to have suffered the most extreme abuse, was chained to the floor to prevent her from getting any food, they said.

"It seems that the little girl was the major target of this abuse," Miller continued, adding that she looked "like a concentration camp victim."

The girl was in the hospital for about five days, he said, and seemed "traumatized."
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Powertool

Southern Baptists on unborn persons: The words 'zygote' and 'embryo' are tools of oppression

Eric W. Dolan
The Raw Story
Tue, 18 Mar 2014 09:51 UTC
Image
© SWBTS.edu
Words commonly used to refer to the developmental stages of an embryo - and even the word embryo itself - are used as a tool of oppression, according to the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Dr. Russell Moore made the comments last week during a prayer at the Susan B. Anthony List 2014 Campaign for Life Gala.

"Father God, as we see the tables cleared away tonight we know that tomorrow morning a young woman will probably be looking at two lines on a pregnancy test wondering what to do," Moore said.

"We know that tomorrow morning legislators in this city will be deciding whether or not to oppress the most vulnerable around us, not only with laws but also even before that with words, referring to persons you have created in your image as simply zygotes or embryoes or fetuses or crisis pregnancies rather than persons, neighbors, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters."
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Roses

Mick Jagger's partner found hanged in Manhattan, NY apartment - suicide

Jon Swaine and Rosie Swash
The Guardian
Mon, 17 Mar 2014 13:07 UTC
Image
© Enfremenino.com
L'Wren Scott, the designer, former model and partner of Sir Mick Jagger, was found dead at her home in New York on Monday morning in an apparent suicide.

A spokesman for Jagger told the Guardian in an email that the singer, who had just arrived in Australia on tour with the Rolling Stones, was "completely shocked and devastated by the news".

New York police sources said that Scott, 49, was discovered by her assistant at her apartment on 11th Avenue in Manhattan's Chelsea neighbourhood at about 10am. She is believed to have been found hanged.

Scott created acclaimed womenswear collections, and styled some of Hollywood's biggest names. She also worked as a designer and consultant for costumes on several major films. The most recent show for her eponymous collection was scheduled to take place in London during fashion week last month. However, it was abruptly cancelled, apparently because of "production delays".
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Chalkboard

Malaysia backtracks on when jet's communications were disabled

Keith Bradsher and Christopher Buckley
The Globe and Mail
Wed, 19 Mar 2014 17:13 UTC
Image
© US Navy/Reuters
Sailors inspect the flight deck of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Kidd in this U.S. Navy handout picture taken March 16, 2014. The Kidd will end its search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in a few days, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
The investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 took another confusing turn on Monday, as authorities here reversed themselves and offered yet another version of the sequence of events in the crucial minutes before ground controllers lost contact with the jet early on March 8.

As the search for the missing Boeing 777 jet stretched into a 10th day, two of the nations helping in the hunt, Australia and Indonesia, agreed to divide between them a vast area of the southeastern Indian Ocean, with Indonesia focusing on equatorial waters and Australia beginning to search farther south for traces of the aircraft. To the north, China and Kazakhstan checked their radar records and tried to figure out whether the jet could have landed somewhere on their soil.

Reuters also reported that Chinese authorities have begun searching Chinese territory, focusing on a northern corridor through which the aircraft could have flown.

Malaysian authorities said Monday that the plane's first officer - the co-pilot - was the last person in the cockpit to speak to ground control. But the government added to the confusion about what had happened on the plane by that time, withdrawing its assertion that a crucial communications system had already been disabled when the co-pilot spoke.
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Airplane Paper

Plane crash near Montrose, Colorado: No survivors expected


Voice of Russia
Sun, 23 Mar 2014 04:34 UTC
Colorado plane crash
© EPA
A small plane believed to be carrying five people crashed into a reservoir in southwestern Colorado and authorities say they don't think anyone survived.

The single-engine Socata TBM700 was flying from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to Montrose, about 180 miles southwest of Denver, when it went down Saturday, Ouray County spokeswoman Marti Whitmore said.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said the crash occurred just before 2 pm, but the cause was unknown. The aircraft went down in Ridgway Reservoir, about 25 miles south of Montrose.

Rescue efforts started in the afternoon and were suspected shortly after sundown until Sunday morning, Whitmore said. She said no one is believed to have survived, but no victims have been recovered.

The identities of the occupants were being withheld until relatives could be notified. The plane is registered to an Alabama corporation. Messages left for the company Saturday evening weren't immediately returned.
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Nuke

Radiation leaks 'force' transfer of nuclear waste from New Mexico to a private dump in Texas


RT
Sun, 23 Mar 2014 02:44 UTC
Nuclear valve
© AFP/ Barbara Sax
The cause of the radiation leaks at the United States' first nuclear waste repository are still under investigation, but in the meantime government officials have decided to move a stalled shipment of waste to a private dump in Texas.

According to Reuters, the shipment of approximately 1,000 barrels of radioactive leftovers to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, was put on hold when the facility began leaking radioactive material in February. On Thursday, the Department of Energy announced it would temporarily relocate those barrels to a rural site in western Texas.

Beginning in April, shipments from Los Alamos National Laboratory will commence as officials hope to remove the barrels - currently stored outside and potentially at risk of a wildfire - by the original June deadline. The waste includes items contaminated with low level radiation such as clothing, tools, soil, rags, and other items. These barrels will be held in Andrews County until the WIPP reopens.

"Removing waste from the mesa in Los Alamos before fire season is critical to ensure safety in the greater Los Alamos community," Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) said in a statement, according to the Associated Press. "I'm pleased we have a temporary solution that will ensure there will not be any significant disruption in cleanup efforts."

However, the move has not been greeted positively by Greg Mello of the watchdog Los Alamos Study Group, who dismissed the risk of wildfire to the AP and said shipping the barrels twice poses more of a danger.

Comment: Officials always say that the radiation does not pose a threat to public health. This is standard policy. The same has been said over and over in Japan, whereas facts on the ground have proven this not to be true.

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Stock Down

UK: More student loans won't be repaid, government believes


BBC News
Sun, 23 Mar 2014 02:37 UTC
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Around 45% of university graduates will not earn enough to repay their student loans, the government now believes.

If the figure reaches 48.6% experts calculate that the government will lose more money than it gained by increasing fees in England to £9,000 a year.

Students do not pay the fees upfront and only start repaying when they are earning at least £21,000 a year.

But a government spokesman said these were estimates based on long-term forecasts and could change.
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Ambulance

Facing mass eviction to save elites' financial interests, ordinary Spaniards protest in Madrid - 101 people injured as provocateurs turn things violent


RT
Sun, 23 Mar 2014 02:28 UTC
Demonstration in Madrid
© Reuters / Paul Hanna
Anti-austerity demonstrators crowd into Colon square as they take part in a demonstration which organisers have labeled the "Marches of Dignity" in Madrid, March 22, 2014
Protesters clashed with police in Madrid as thousands of people trekked across Spain to protest austerity which they claim is destroying their country. Under the banner "no more cuts!" the protesters called for an end to the government's "empty promises."

Police arrested at least 29 protesters following the clashes which took place after the march. According to emergency service, 101 people were injured - 67 of them police, El Mundo newspaper reports.

Protesters were seen throwing stones and firecrackers at police. According to witnesses, officers used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators.

Clashes broke out during a final speech at the demonstration when protesters tried to break through a police barrier. Riot police took charge by beating protesters with batons, AP reported.

"The mass rally was coming to an an end when reportedly a group of younger protesters, who had masks on their faces, started throwing rocks at the police. Police tried to push them away from the parameter that they organized around this area," RT's Egor Piskunov reported from the Spanish capital.

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