Michael Moore’s documentary “Sicko” is up for an Oscar award.
    But the controversial film about problems with U.S. healthcare gets a mixed review from Dr. Barry Straube, a physician who also happens to be the chief medical officer at the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 
    CMS runs the government health plans for tens of millions of people, mostly the elderly and low income.
    “I used to work at a health plan (insurance company) and I think that documentary had some gross exaggerations that were off the wall,” Straube told the annual Reuters Regulation Summit, when asked about the film. The doctor emphasized that he was speaking for himself and not the agency.
    But certain aspects of the movie did hit close to home for him.
    Straube, who specialized in nephrology and transplantation, said the documentary was correct in raising concerns about insurance companies looking for ways to remove high risk patients from their health plans.
    “Quite honestly, when I was at a health plan level I think people had processes (regarding high risk patients) that went further than they probably should,” Straube said.

  (Contributed by Ayesha Rascoe) 
   

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the Democrat who heads the U.S. Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, says he hopes to get legislation passed soon that would ban the use of offshore tax havens used by American companies and investors to avoid paying an estimated $100 billion annually in taxes. ”They are using the Caymans in ways to avoid taxes and that is just totally unacceptable,” Levin told the annual Reuters Regulation Summit.

Rep. John Dingell, chair of the committee that oversees the Federal Communications Commission, told the Reuters Regulation Summit that he was less than impressed — to put it mildly — with the FCC’s management of a key piece of the airwaves being auctioned by the U.S. government. 

A top U.S. banking regulator told the annual Reuters Regulation Summit that he is not aware of any pending deals involving Washington Mutual Inc., the largest U.S. savings and loan.  John Reich, director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, also said he expected fewer mergers and acquisitions in the thrift industry in 2008.

Wall Street analysts say WaMu might be a takeover target after mortgage defaults and write-downs that led to a $1.87 billion fourth-quarter loss.

The U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision said it had “no formal enforcement action” pending against Countrywide Financial Corp. before the January announcement that Bank of America would buy the subprime mortgage lender. 

OTS Deputy Director Scott Polakoff, speaking at the annual Reuters Regulation Summit, responded to a question about Wall Street rumors last month that Countrywide was on the verge of seeking bankruptcy protection before the BoA deal was announced. 

The U.S. thrift industry was forced to write down loan losses and goodwill in the 2007 fourth quarter due to the subprime mortgage crisis, but the institutions remain fundamantally strong and will rebound in 2008, the head of the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision told the Reuters Regulation Summit.

John Reich, whose agency supervises savings and loan institutions, said the current situation is vastly different from the thrift crisis of the late 1980s when many institutions were hit by commercial real estate problems. “Once we get past the credit quality issues, these institutions are basically profitable institutions,”  Reich said. More than 1,000 savings and loan institutions failed during the thrift crisis two decades ago, which was blamed in part on unsound commercial real estate lending.

Taking a two-week holiday may seem impossible in the hard-driving world of securities traders at big global banks. But such a vacation is a “fundamental audit principle” that all banks should follow because it can help expose any rogue traders, according to Mark Olson, head of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. French-based Societe Generale recently disclosed the loss of billions of dollars it blamed on a trader.

Olson spoke at the annual Reuters Regulation Summit. The PCAOB was created by Congress in 2002 to help protect investors after the Enron corporate accounting scandal.

What if several U.S. airlines announced merger plans in short order, giving just three airlines control over travel by hundreds of millions of American passengers?  Thomas Barnett, the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, told the Reuters Regulation Summit that regulators would not pre-judge such a possibility and would talk to airline customers before deciding whether to approve such a series of mergers.

U.S. banks are taking a closer look at their own internal risk controls and trying to figure out how to prevent the kind of huge trading losses that French-based Societe Generale recently disclosed, according to John Dugan, Comptroller of the Currency. Dugan spoke at the annual Reuters Regulation Summit.

John Dugan, U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, says American banks have “learned the hard way” that they must do their own due diligence and not rely solely on credit rating agency information about securities. Dugan, whose office regulates most of the largest U.S. banks, spoke at the annual Reuters Regulation Summit.