Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
U.S. cancer case the best? It is if you can pay for it…
Angela Kegler McDowell thought she was doing everything right.
A 38-year-old small business owner, she had bought her own personal health insurance and kept paying her premiums, even as they rose from $293 a month to $804 a month.
The insurance company said it had to raise her premiums when her breast cancer came back and she was forced to undergo expensive chemotherapy.
“When the renewal came up in January, they told me I was a high risk to insure and they were dropping my insurance,” McDowell told Reuters in an interview. “Even if I had a million dollars a month to pay for insurance, I couldn’t get it.” See her on video here in a related story, young adults.
McDowell has been lobbying her members of Congress to ask them to make sure the healthcare reform plan ensures that private insurance — sure to be part of any reform package –cannot drop patients if their coverage becomes too expensive.
Plans also need to be more affordable, says McDowell, who estimates she spent $42,000 out of pocket on her 20 percent co-pays and wiped out her family’s life savings even before her insurance company dumped her.
McDowell was struggling to hold her company together, battle cancer, and fight with her health insuance company– which she doesn’t want to name because she is still negotiating to be reinstated. “It was truly more than a medical battle. It was a financial battle,” she said.
from Africa News blog:
South Africa’s unions flex their muscles
After South Africa’s unions came close to blocking the listing of mobile phone group Vodacom, new President Jacob Zuma may want to keep a closer eye on his left wing allies.
The attempt to sink the $10 billion bourse debut of Vodacom, which went ahead on Monday after an 11th-hour court ruling, hurt the rand currency and revived investor concerns over Zuma.
There was no doubt the bid had undermined Zuma's strenuous efforts before last month's election to assure business and investors that there would be no policy shift towards his left wing allies once he took office.
Lawyers for the government opposed union federation COSATU's attempt to stop the listing in court and made clear the Zuma administration stood by what had been agreed already.
But investors still want reassurance from Zuma that other deals would not face similar challenges by his allies.
COSATU, which has 1.8 million paid-up members in the country of nearly 50 million, said it was angry and disappointed at the court allowing the listing to go ahead and called on South Africans to boycott Vodacom.
But by taking a strong stance on the Vodacom listing, the labour federation may be positioning itself to play a bigger role and could intensify its protest action against other businesses.
President Zuma has shown leadership in this issue by backing the business up and should continue to strke that balance between partisan gains and the interests of the country. He now is in office and should not be led by threat from unions or whatever organisations that supported him. He has to show leadership in involving them in his vision for the country
Tsunami of anger over financial crisis
Today’s European edition of the International Herald Tribune is fronted by a photo montage of the presidents of Senegal, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Argentina, France and Brazil.
They have two things in common – all are attending this week’s United Nations General Assembly in New York and all see a global threat from the financial crisis that began on Wall Street and, in the words of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines, has moved “like a terrible tsunami around the globe”.
Some of the strongest words were directed at Washington lawmakers, Wall Street speculators and market regulators.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for those responsible for the crisis to be punished. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has said to the United States and Britain: “I told you so”.
Her finance minister, Peer Steinbrueck, believes the United States has lost its financial superpower status.
Bolivia’s President Evo Morales has been quoted as saying: “There is an uprising against an economic model, a capitalistic system that is the worst enemy of humanity.”
How does this fit with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s assurance that the world still has confidence in the United States?
Well might McCain rush back to Washington to fix the American finance system-after all, he’s one of the ones who broke it through deregulation. He’s also the fellow who told the world a week ago that the American economy was fine. On one hand, American voters can choose a man with a doctorate in law who graduated from an eminent university magnum cum laude, on the other hand, a man who was in the bottom 1% of his class. Doesn’t it seem that the current challenges call for the most intelligent leadership?
Why’s everyone claiming that Medicare [in the U.S.] doesn’t/can’t work? Everyone over the age of 65 in the U.S. is on Medicare, as I am. It works quite well, I use Kaiser HMO Senior Advantage which requires paying an extra supplement. Through my work pension, what I pay extra also includes Dental and Vision. [My family had been using Kaiser for about 40 yrs. already.] My sister has Medicare without any extra supplement. The only difference is co-pays & prescriptions cost more, and there’s some difficulty in finding doctors which will take on new Medicare patients since they get paid less per visit by Medicare than they do otherwise. My brother, a veteran, uses Tri-Care, and is able to use any doctor.I agree with the previous poster who talked about folding all U.S. citizens into the same Govt. health program that congressmen, servicemen, and presidents use.I also agree with the person who said the Pres. should take the Govt. employees’ health care away, forcing Congress to find their own insurance until they solve the Health Care problem!MF