WellCare, which had earnings of $139.2-million in 2006, gets all of its nearly $4-billion in revenues from state or federal governments. Profits come from the difference between the amount received from the government and the amount spent on overhead and medical care for its members. [...]
WellCare was a slow-growing Florida company until 1992 when its owner, Dr. Kiran Patel, sold it to a New York investment group led by financier George Soros. The bankers hired Todd Farha, an aggressive Harvard MBA, to transform the company. Under his leadership, WellCare's earnings have increased eight-fold and the company's investors and executives like Farha have profited handsomely from appreciation in its stock.
In an interview last year, Farha credited WellCare's success with hard work, attractive member benefits and close attention to the basics. But he has also nurtured the kinds of relationships invaluable to a company dependent on government funding.
WellCare and its affiliates have given the Republican Party of Florida some $105,000 in contributions this year, according to state election records. They've also given the Florida Democratic Party $5,000 this year. In 2006, WellCare's PAC gave $66,000 to federal candidates, all Republicans.
Commenters at the St. Petersburg Times article above are typing things like "I pray to God that they can get some kind of criminal charges against George Soros" and "I hope they prosecute that worm GEORGE SORROS. He is behind everything wrong with America!! Check him out on the web.He supports the ACLU and the Homosexual agenda and much much more SLIME!!" and "This will be a, great time to bring down that creep, George Soros." Apparently they are unaware that Soros hasn't been involved with WellCare since last year, having sold off his interests, and they also seem oblivious to the fact that Farha and his senior management were responsible for the GOPCare, not George Soros.
All of which just goes to show once again that the mere mention of the name "Soros" — relevant or not — wakes the right-wing zombies.
We eagerly await Republican Gov. Crist's pronouncement of "it's all Soros's fault."
NEW YORK -- WellCare Health Plans Inc.'s market value was cut in half when the stock reopened Thursday following news of a government raid of the manager-care provider's Florida headquarters.
On Wednesday, state and federal law-enforcement agents armed with a federal search warrant raided WellCare's headquarters in Tampa, Fla. [...]
At midday Thursday, WellCare shares were at $49, down $66.17, or 57%, on brisk volume. [...]
It isn't clear what information or materials authorities were seeking in the criminal investigation. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Health and Human Services Department and the Florida attorney general's Medicaid fraud unit participated in the raid.
Much of WellCare's revenue comes from Medicare, the federal health program for the elderly and disabled, and Medicaid, a state-federal health program for the poor. By offering managed-care alternatives to traditional Medicare and Medicaid benefits, the company acts as a middleman between government payers and health-care providers; about a third of Medicaid beneficiaries receive care through private insurers.
Interestingly, the editorial skew of the article is revealed when it concludes with this irrelevant factoid: "A private-equity fund that included George Soros as an investor last year finished selling its WellCare stake, purchased for $220 million, for a total of $870 million."
This is media bias at work. The Journal manages to sneak in an imaginary association of WellCare Chief Executive and Chairman Todd Farha with George Soros, but not with George W. Bush, to whom Farha has contributed the maximum amount.
UPDATE: A little more digging shows just us exactly how Bush-lovin' the WellCare crooks really are (Robert Trigaux, St. Petersburg Times, 2004):
Bush has raised $14.7-million, making Florida his third biggest money state after Texas and California. [...] Here's a brief look at Tampa Bay's biggest money raisers for Bush:
* Todd S. Farha. Never heard of him? You will. He emerged on the Tampa Bay scene in 2002 when the former executive with Oxford Health Plans led a New York investor group in the purchase of Tampa's privately held WellCare HMO (FYI, one of Farha's investment partners in that venture is George Soros, the billionaire who's spending a ton of money to defeat Bush). Last month, Farha took WellCare Health Plans Inc. public on the New York Stock Exchange. The company depends heavily on government contracts to run Medicare and Medicaid HMOs in Florida and five other states. Last spring, Florida House Speaker Johnnie Byrd flew home from campaign fundraising on a private jet chartered by WellCare at the same time the HMO was pushing legislation potentially worth millions of dollars to the company.
* David Hart. As finance director at WellCare Health Plans, Hart and Farha not only share the same executive suites but the same political interests. Two Pioneers in a pod.
Again interestingly, this article also offers a mention of right-wing nemesis George Soros — but at least it's in the proper context as a direct contrast to Farha's deepest and truest political affections.
Farha has already fallen pretty far (ha!), despite having been selected by Business Week as recently as last year as a top CEO under the age of 40. It turns out he was only a top crony under 40.
UPDATE 2 — Oct 26: Now it gets weirder. I've just had a visit from Jeb Bush's Charlie Crist's office doing a Google search for "george soros and wellcare":
IP Address 204.115.188.# (Executive Office of the Governor) ISP Executive Office of the Governor
Country : United States (Facts) State : Florida City : Tallahassee Lat/Long : 30.4629, -84.2446 (Map) Language English (U.S.)
Operating System Microsoft WinXP Browser Internet Explorer 6.0
Time of Visit Oct 26 2007 12:24:25 pm Last Page View Oct 26 2007 12:24:25 pm Visit Length 0 seconds Page Views 1 Referring URL http://www.google.co...&hl=en&start=10&sa=N Search Engine google.com Search Words george soros and wellcare Visit Entry Page http://skimble.blogs...-medicaid-fraud.html [i.e., this post just before this update] Visit Exit Page http://skimble.blogs...-medicaid-fraud.html
Governor Charlie Crist, like his predecessor, is a Republican. We can now expect Jeb's Charlie's office to paint this whole Medicaid fraud thing as the fault of the rich left-wing Jew, despite Soros having sold his investment in WellCare in 2006.
Washington Wire was a little stunned to receive a press release today hawking disgraced former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown as “available for interviews” to discuss the wildfire crisis in Southern California.
Brown, who became the face of government mismanagement following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and was ultimately forced out of the job following a national uproar, is now director of corporate strategy for Cotton Cos., a “leading provider of disaster recovery services,” according to the release. It’s a regular practice in Washington for companies and public relations firms to promote their internal experts to the media for interviews on the issues of the day.
Whether Brown is an expert on disaster preparedness is open for debate. “Mr. Brown can speak to the turmoil being caused by the California wildfires as well as to some of the new processes in disaster relief efforts that will help to restore California communities. He can offer advice to residents and businesses on proper relief and recovery efforts and provide suggestions for future disaster preparedness,” the press release states.
In a particularly nervy move, the release also draws parallels between the California fires and the 2005 hurricane that devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast — and tagged then-FEMA Director Brown as incompetent and unqualified. “Currently, the brush fires are affecting hundreds of local businesses and have forced more than 500,000 people out of their homes. Of these 500,000 people, an estimated 10,000 of them have taken shelter at the local NFL stadium, Qualcomm, vaguely reminiscent of circumstances of Hurricane Katrina evacuees two years ago.”
Brown, who never worked in disaster preparedness before he was chosen for the FEMA job by President Bush, had this to say: “The agency has learned some hard lessons regarding the handling of mass evacuations especially in regard to the bureaucratic red tape that is involved in such a process.” He went on, “This is a tragic time for many of the people of California, and Cotton Companies is working to ensure that normalcy is restored and that businesses and organizations are back up and running as soon as possible.”
Commenter KDM has this gem to add: "This would be like Larry Craig making himself available as an expert on meeting new friends. Sort of the Dale Carnegie of the men’s room."
The jokes write themselves. Thanks to the Bush administration, we're all Jay Leno now.
...when water is used for golf courses it can become the greatest water usage in a region. It has been estimated that a single average mid-western US golf course is equivalent to a population of 50,000 residents in water usage. (Thus, in areas where there are 20 golf courses the load is that of one million residents, as found in tourist areas such as Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, and the famed 100 courses of Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs, California use the equivalent of 5,000,000 resident consumers' water.) Some governments have labelled golf course usage as agricultural in order to deflect environmentalists' charges of water waste.
Earlier this year, a certain father of the president collapsed in Palm Springs on the golf course. Leave it to a soft and coddled anti-environmentalist to have a fainting spell in the midst of his flagrant display of waste, i.e., desert golf.
How much farther from Palm Springs can you get? Try Kennebunkport!
I find it difficult to believe that a billboard has any dampening influence on the sexual behavior of teenagers. So, for sheer ineffectiveness, this goofy hip-kid-abstinence image and its idiotic placement on a secondary highway amount to a fantastic waste of money for some fool.
Except that I am that fool. It's especially disturbing that I financed this billboard through my taxes — as witnessed by the website's listing of the program's federal grantees.
When right-wingers tag me with the scarlet letter of liberalism and insist that I hate America, this is one of the top reasons why they're correct. Because I hate American stupidity, especially very expensive and very harmful American stupidity, of which there are thousands of examples in the last seven years alone.
(And you know what, kids? Indiana is wrong. Sex shouldn't wait. You're not worth it. You're just like the rest of us and nothing special. So go ahead and fuck like everyone else who has ever been on earth since the beginning of time. God connected your genitals to the pleasure center of your brain, your hypothalamus — it would be a sin not to use them. Too bad the state of Indiana won't help you learn how to do it right — free of disease and unwanted pregnancy.)
The chart accompanies a long article by Glenn R. Simpson that characterizes the no-bid yellow-ribbon slime who are feeding American troops and starving American taxpayers (WSJ):
Prominent American food companies are under scrutiny in a federal probe of possible fraud and corruption in the military's food-supply operations for the Iraq war.
The inquiry is focused on whether the food companies set excessively high prices when they sold their goods to the Army's primary food contractor for the war zone, a Kuwaiti firm called Public Warehousing Co. A related question is whether Public Warehousing improperly pocketed for itself refunds it received from these suppliers. Public Warehousing bought vast amounts of meat, vegetables and bakery items from the food companies, and delivered them to U.S. troops.
Public Warehousing's dealings are the subject of "a very large and active investigation into criminal and civil fraud involving amounts in the hundreds of millions of dollars," Justice Department lawyer Brian Mizoguchi told a judge in Federal Claims Court in Washington, D.C., on June 12. Public Warehousing, which receives more than $1 billion annually to feed troops in Iraq and Kuwait, denies wrongdoing. [...]
A key figure in the probe is David Staples, a top procurement official at the Army who formerly worked at Sara Lee's Jimmy Dean sausage unit. Records show Mr. Staples required Army food contractors to purchase products from certain suppliers rather than allowing the contractors to shop around. [...]
In one of the most striking examples of the agency's selectivity, Tyson Foods Inc., one of the world's largest chicken producers, has been virtually shut out in the competition to supply the troops for the Iraq conflict. Much of the chicken supplies for Iraq and Kuwait are provided by Perdue and a ConAgra unit called Pilgrim's Pride Inc. That is in line with a recommended menu on a spreadsheet issued by Mr. Staples's agency. The spreadsheet lists foods and recommended suppliers such as "turkey thigh roast, raw, netted, 8-10 lb avg" next to "Sara Lee."
In an April 3, 2007, letter to the Pentagon, a lawyer for Tyson complained that "elements within the military" were providing sole-source contracts "to certain companies employing former military personnel."
So much for the glory of competition and the inherent wisdom of the free market. I guess all of that routine Republican faux-capitalist blathering is as much bullshit as its reasons to go to war.
If we're spending $2.4 million per month on lobster tails, and the war has been going on for 55 months since March 2003, that would put the total American lobster tail cost for fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq at about $132 million. (Discounting, of course, the effect of any lobster tail "surge.")
In effect, what the Republicans are saying with their lobster tail budget is "Fuck you, uninsured American children! Fuck you, Iraqi civilians! The lobster tail supply in Iraq is more imporant than any of you, according to the inhuman financial priorities of our chickenhawk American leadership."
But a hundred million dollars speak louder than any words.
Let's look at the nominal growth in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq stock indexes during the George W. Bush presidency: DJIA, up an average of 4.3% a year, or a cumulative 33.0% total; the S&P 500, up 2.3% per year, 16.4% total; the Nasdaq, up 0.2% per year, 1.5% total. [...]
Revise the three indexes' returns to account for both the value of the dollar in euros and Europe's harmonized index of consumer prices and you get an even worse picture. Using this approach, the DJIA lost an average of 3.9% a year, declining a total of 23.3%; the S&P 500 dropped 5.8% annually, for a loss of 32.9% in all; and the Nasdaq forfeited 7.7% a year, or 41.5% in total.
In other words, a euro-based investor in the Dow has, after adjusting for European inflation, lost 3.9% (excluding dividends) per year in real terms during the Bush presidency. In a global economy in which America depends on foreign investment, this relationship is untenable.
These rates of return are far more ominous when adjusted using the cost of either oil or gold instead of the inflation-adjusted euro value of the dollar. The annually compounded rate of return on the Dow Jones Industrials since January 2001 (excluding dividends) has been -9.8% when adjusted for the price of oil and -10.5% when adjusted for the price of gold.
Many would argue that the market's recent volatility is, in part, the consequence of efficient-market forces trying to reconcile these imbalances. It is reasonably certain that a sinking currency and rapidly rising commodity prices will ultimately lead to substantially higher prices and/or higher interest rates, which will further weaken the domestic equity markets.
The U.S. dollar has enjoyed a pre-eminent international position for most of the last century. The economic forces unfolding before us have the power to undermine that authority and to inflict grave financial hardship upon us as a nation.
When we think about the upcoming presidential election, we should listen carefully to what the candidates are saying -- if anything -- about the collapse of the American equity markets. Our future depends upon the health of those markets, and no candidate should receive our vote if he or she doesn't recognize the problem we face and show a willingness to correct the great damage that has already been done.
We are not better off today than we were seven years ago.
One mo' time: Adjusted for oil prices, the stock market has lost 10 percent a year since Bush-Cheney stepped into the White House.
These are the same people who tried to privatize Social Security — yet that political strategy might at least have made economic sense under Clinton, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained a total of 350 percent over his two terms. This is worth repeating as often as necessary — under Bush, national wealth was lost; under Clinton, national wealth skyrocketed. As we have seen time and time again, Democrats are good for business in reality, as opposed to in soundbites.
If you think of the American economy as a portfolio, then Bush has been a complete and utter failure as a portfolio manager. Pro-business Republicans everywhere should be ashamed of having given him their support, for he has not only destroyed their credibility as a party for the positive potential of capitalism, but he has also literally erased principal out of their investment accounts. Negative ten percent a year, to be exact, thanks to oil prices. It turns out that holding hands with Saudi princes doesn't make you any more effective when it comes to managing oil prices — it obviously makes you less so — but starting Middle Eastern wars based on false premises sure messes up the stock markets.
For American voters who want a better economy, there is no other choice. The Democratic Party is now the party of business — they have won the title by default.
The richest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and underlining the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers.
The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.
The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000. [...]
Mr. Rauh said "it's hard to escape the notion" that the rising share of income going to the very richest is, in part, "a Wall Street, financial industry-based story." The study shows that the highest-earning hedge-fund manager earned double in 2005 what the top earner made in 2003, and top 25 hedge-fund managers earned more in 2004 than the chief executives of all the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, combined.
Meanwhile, Democrats are so fucking smart — they just gave hedge fund managers a huge tax break. Congressional Democrats, through the wisdom of their preemptive surrender, will ensure that "incredibly rich fund managers are paying lower tax rates than school teachers and firefighters."
Texas has long viewed itself as a conservative bastion, but the Lone Star State ranked third in the nation between 2000 and last year in receipt of federal dollars, raking in aid and contracts worth more than $1.2 trillion. [...]
Texas ranked third among all states between 2000 and this year in the dollar amount of federal contracts, about $200 billion, as well as direct financial aid, which exceeded $1 trillion over that period.
In direct federal financial support, Texas trailed just two states, Florida — whose federal aid is boosted by a large number of senior citizens who qualify for Social Security and Medicare — and California. [...]
From 2000 to 2006, Texas Education Agency received the most federal aid of any state agency in Texas, taking in $20 billion, followed by the Transportation Department, which got $14 billion.
Texas, Florida — what kinds of dynastic sibling governors might those states have had?
The Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday charged an ex-MetLife broker with swindling a 9/11 widow out of $250,000.
In 2004, Kevin James Dunn Jr., 28, the former broker, told the widow (not identified by the SEC) to invest the $2 million she received from the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund with MetLife, and to allow him to manage the investment.
The widow’s husband was a Port Authority police officer who died in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.
Initially, the widow purchased $1.25 million in shares of some tax-exempt mutual funds through her MetLife brokerage account.
The rest of the money went toward a MetLife annuity contract, according to the SEC.
He also raked in a fraudulent $23,157 commission when he transferred proceeds from the mutual funds to the annuity contract.
Beginning in Sept. 2005, Mr. Dunn misappropriated $248,000 from the widow by fraudulently creating a fund in both their names and forging her signature on wire transfers from the joint account, the SEC alleged in its complaint.
Mr. Dunn also lied to the widow about the status of her investments, tricking her into giving him blank checks, which he put in his own account, according to the suit.
This February, Mr. Dunn was fired from MetLife but continued swindling money from the widow, the SEC said.
The SEC is ordering the ex-broker to repay the misappropriated cash, plus interest, and civil penalties.
Mr. Dunn is also facing an indictment from federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York.
He faces mail and wire-fraud charges and may do up to 20 years in prison if he’s convicted, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
By a nearly two-to-one margin, Republican voters believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy, a shift in opinion that mirrors Democratic views and suggests trade deals could face high hurdles under a new president.
The sign of broadening resistance to globalization came in a new Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll that showed a fraying of Republican Party orthodoxy on the economy. While 60% of respondents said they want the next president and Congress to continue cutting taxes, 32% said it's time for some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to reduce the budget deficit and pay for health care.
If you drill down to the poll numbers, you see that only 32 percent of today's Republican voters (i.e., about 11 percent of the US voting population — see the post below) call themselves "very" conservative. Only 5 percent self-identify as liberal, but a whopping 61 percent call themselves "moderate" or only "somewhat conservative."
This calls for an elegiac prayer:
O mighty Christian Lord, no matter how piously hypocritical your followers, one out of ten Americans is too few to maintain your holy grasp on the American sceptre of power. Thus endeth the failed experiment carried out by the soldiers of the Republican Christian Revolution, in which genuine economic greed was devoured by fake moral sanctimony. May they all rest in the shallow graves they had dug for others of lower class and of pigmented skin. Amen.
Pew found that between 1987 and this year, for example, support for "old-fashioned values about family and marriage" had dropped 11 percentage points. The percentage of those who said gay teachers should be fired dropped 23 points, Pew said. Support for U.S. global engagement and "peace through military strength" also shrank.
But the number of Americans who share some classic Democratic concerns has risen. Three-quarters of the population is worried about growing income inequality, Pew found, while two-thirds favor government-funded health care for all. Support for a government safety net for the poor is at its highest level since 1987, Pew said.
"More striking," Pew concluded, was the change in party identification since 2002. Five years ago, the population was evenly divided -- 43% for each party. This year, Democrats had a 50% to 35% advantage.
A fifteen point shift in five years? That's buh-bye.
