Keystone
Courtesy Marquil at EmpireWire.com
Nora Šitum: Coming to America
After all that money had been raised so quickly, Croatian media reported yesterday that the Hospital had informed Nora’s family that the charge would actually be just over $834,000. That’s aside from the fact that her family and caregivers have been working feverishly to work through the complicated Croatian and American bureaucracies involved with transporting a little girl from a non-visa-waiver country to the US for medical treatment. The process to obtain such a visa is more difficult than just getting a tourist visa – you also need to establish that travel to the US is necessary because the proposed treatment is unavailable in Croatia, and the applicant must be seen by an Embassy physician. You also need to prove that you have an appointment and the financial means to pay the bill.
Obviously, the United States Embassy in Croatia and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are unable to comment about specific ongoing cases, but I did manage to speak with people close to the situation who agreed to discuss the case on condition of anonymity.
Under the Croatian national health care scheme, people are able to apply for payment of medical treatment undertaken abroad, and 75% of such requests are approved on an average year. However, the stem cell treatment that Nora is scheduled to undergo in Philadelphia is classified as “experimental”, and as such, the government health care plan will not cover any of it – the family has to come up with cash.
The Šitum family has been in close touch with the US Embassy’s consular staff, and visas for Nora and her family were expected to be issued Wednesday afternoon. The Embassy has been in close touch with both the hospital and the Croatian Ministry of Health to coordinate the issuance of visas and doing “whatever it takes” to ensure that Nora and her family can travel to the US for these treatments.
While it is true that the hospital quoted $590,000 as the cost of the experimental leukemia treatment that Nora is expected receive in Philadelphia, it is also true that an additional $270,000 is to be paid over the course of a two year follow-up treatment. The Croatian government indicated that it would waive collection of the value added tax on any monies donated for Nora’s treatment, and the Mayor of Zagreb promised that the city would pay the difference into the accounts collecting funds for Nora’s treatment. At a press conference Wednesday, Nora’s mother announced that they had collected in excess of the entire amount the hospital in Philadelphia had quoted to them.
The treatment Nora is expected to receive is truly revolutionary – it involves injecting a harmless mutation of HIV into the child’s system, tricking her immune system into fighting the cancer.
To perform the treatment, doctors remove millions of the patient’s T-cells — a type of white blood cell — and insert new genes that enable the T-cells to kill cancer cells. The technique employs a disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells. The new genes program the T-cells to attack B-cells, a normal part of the immune system that turn malignant in leukemia.
The altered T-cells — called chimeric antigen receptor cells — are then dripped back into the patient’s veins, and if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer.
The T-cells home in on a protein called CD-19 that is found on the surface of most B-cells, whether they are healthy or malignant.
Nora’s father wrote a message thanking supporters and people who had so quickly donated money for Nora’s treatment, adding,
Thank God we live in Croatia – a country with a “junk” credit rating – and sent a message around the world.Maybe we are small and poor, and perhaps we don’t have the same living standards as the West, but for our children, we will empty our pockets of every last penny, because we have a heart and soul bigger than Switzerland’s credit rating.
UPDATE: The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia issued the following statement:
CHOP treats thousands of children each year, from throughout the region, the country and the world and cares about the health of all children. We know how invested the family, friends, and the community at large is in ensuring CHOP provides the best possible care for all of its patients.
While patient privacy prohibits us from commenting specifically on any individual’s medical condition without consent, we want the public to understand the pricing protocols we follow for all international families.
How the International Medicine Process Works:
· CHOP’s process estimates the costs of treatment in advance and seeks payment at the time treatment begins. Additional follow-up clinical treatments are sometimes necessary and can be administered over several years, either at CHOP or back in the patient’s home country. CHOP does not charge for this follow-up clinical treatment at the time of initial treatment. If the child is not further treated at CHOP, CHOP will never charge for the follow-up treatment. However, CHOP does explain those potential costs to patient families at the outset so they understand the financial issues they may be facing.
· We try to ensure that all international families understand the difference between the initial costs of treatment charged by CHOP, which does not change, and the potential future costs which will depend on future clinical treatments.
Foreign contributions can be made on Nora’s behalf using the following information: Udruga Hrabro dijete (Brave Child Association) OIB 58243364080 and through the Zagrebačka Banka at IBAN: HR0423600001102209843 SWIFT CODE: ZABAHR2X
Who is Sergio?
Nothing will quite so starkly upset the Buffalo Republican establishment as Sergio Rodriguez’s announcement of his run for Mayor, set to take place at 1pm in Niagara Square. For WNY Republicans, Buffalo is a tool used to suppress the Democratic turnout for countywide candidates; Sergio Rodriguez, for instance, is Stefan Mychajliw’s worst nightmare. Our new county comptroller – who quite literally press releases a new crisis every. single. day. – won last November by a narrow enough margin that the outcome wasn’t formalized until weeks after Election Day. With a proper big-ticket race on the marquee, Mychajliw’s path to a full term becomes hypothetically more difficult. The hypothesis is contingent, of course, on Democrats coming up with a competitive candidate.
Whether Rodriguez’s run will gain much traction is an open question. He ran for a seat on the Council before, and he is very active with veterans’ causes. He is a nice guy – too nice for politics, at first glance – but he’s also a Marine, so it would be foolish to put some real toughness past him. The big problems Rodriguez faces are his city-toxic party affiliation and his utter lack of money in the face of Byron Brown’s tsunami of cash. They are possibly insurmountable, unless Rodriguez can get creative with a bespoke party line (the likelihood of the Conservative Party or Independence Party jettisoning Brown is remote), and can raise some serious money, fast. Since he won’t be running in a primary, he’s got until September to get the money situation together in earnest.
What is good for the city and region is that Byron Brown will have a challenger in November for the first time since 2005; a challenger who is, significantly, not a mere placeholder. But Rodriguez will have to build his own army from scratch, as it’s doubtful that establishment Republicans will help him canvass, raise money, or collect petition signatures. None of those activities can happen quietly, and the risks of reprisal are real. Rodriguez might conceivably find support among the grassroots / tea party type Republicans, but they’re few, far-between, not based in the city, and too preoccupied with Adolf Cuomo and Josef Obama taking their guns by force.
The issues and problems that the city faces are tough and they are plenty, and the city has cursed itself with a mayor who doesn’t really want the job, whose concern for politics far outweighs his concern for policy, whose City Hall is corrupt and dirty, and who has no vision or overriding agenda for any of the social, economic, or development issues facing the city. Take any serious controversy that has come up in the city in the last few years, and you’ll be extraordinarily hard-pressed to remember what the mayor had to say or think about it.
Sergio Rodriguez’s announcement is at 1pm at Niagara Square – can he do it? Is he the future of the city? Let’s listen.
Assemblyman Says Cuomo is like Hitler, Mussolini
Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin likens Governor Cuomo’s use of “messages of necessity” to Hitler and Mussolini.
Under Article III, Section 14 of the New York State Constitution, a bill must be printed and on members’ desks in final form at least three (3) legislative days before it can be voted on for passage, unless the governor issues what is called a “message of necessity”. To do so, the governor certifies that an immediate vote is necessary on the bill once it reaches members’ desks in final form. No amendments are allowed, and a vote is to take place immediately.
In 2011, McLaughlin voted 17 times in favor of bills sent up as messages of necessity. In 2012, he did so on four of the five messages sent up by Cuomo, including the Tier VI pension plan, redistricting and an expanded DNA database for criminals.
In 2011, Cuomo issued 29 messages of necessity and used it five times last year, according to NYPIRG—the fewest number of times in recent history.
Nothing about the message of necessity takes away the legislature’s right to act, to debate, or to vote as a representative, deliberative body on the bill. The Brennan Center has targeted unnecessary messages of necessity as being ripe for criticism, noting that between 1997 – 2001, almost 30% of bills received one.
However, criticizing an overused constitutional provision for the fact that legislators have inadequate time to review and amend bills is one thing. Likening that to the horrors of National Socialism and fascism is a completely different thing, altogether.
Watch this, and note WNY Assemblywoman Jane Corwin’s reaction.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAyi6No42io]
How many messages of necessity did Hitler sign, anyway?
Perhaps not as dumb as he seems, McLaughlin apologized later in the day.
The Dollar Coin
Canada long ago abandoned its dollar bill and now has Loonies and Toonies instead. It’s easier to buy a soda from a vending machine or feed a meter with coins in larger denominations than a Quarter. Our neighbors across the river are now in the process of eliminating a coin – the penny is being phased out of circulation in Canada, and transactions will hitherto be rounded up or down, as appropriate. In Canada, it costs 1.6 cents to make each penny, so money will be saved.
Here in the US, recent efforts to introduce dollar coins (Susan B. Anthony, Sacajawea) have failed because we did not concomitantly withdraw dollar bills from circulation. The Dollar Coin Alliance argues that doing so would save the government billions. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded,
We estimate that replacing the $1 note with a $1 coin would provide a net benefit to the government of approximately $5.5 billion over 30 years, amounting to an average yearly discounted net benefit of about $184 million. However, this benefit would not be achieved evenly over the 30 years. In fact, as shown in figure 3, the federal government would incur a net loss during the first 4 years. Yearly net benefits begin to accrue in the fifth year of our analysis, and in the tenth year (2020), the initial start-up costs are paid back and overall net benefits begin to accrue.
And that estimate might be low. Consider,
In 1985, for example, the Canadian House of Commons estimated that the conversion to a $1 coin would save the government $175 million (Canadian) in total over 20 years because it would no longer have to regularly replace worn out $1 notes. Canadian officials later determined that the Canadian government saved $450 million (Canadian) between 1987 and 1991.
Dollar bills have a short shelf life – they remain in circulation for about 22 months before they are shredded and recycled or sent to landfills. Coins can be melted down and recycled indefinitely. Dollar coins don’t jam in the vending machine. The GAO has recommended this switch consistently for 22 years, and Washington hasn’t yet gotten with the program.
Eliminating dollar bills and pennies would save billions and reflect economic reality; we don’t have 5-and-dimes anymore.
An extremely simple step that would save the government billions of dollars at no additional cost. The only question is why it hasn’t been done already. Write your Federal Representatives via this link.
Groundhog Day
Koch at the Pearly Gates
On Liberty
David Wheeler, father of 6 year-old Sandy Hook victim Benjamin Wheeler:
We lost our son, Benjamin, the morning of December 14 to an unstable, suicidal individual who had access to a weapon that has no place in a home.”
Right now, professionals in every area pertaining to this crime, from mental health to parenting to school safety, are unable to connect the necessary dots to prevent this from happening again.”
A far more comprehensive system of identifying and monitoring individuals with mental distress is required and needs to be implemented. That a person with these problems could live in a home where he had access to among the most powerful firearms available to nonmilitary personnel is unacceptable.”
It doesn’t matter to whom these weapons were registered. It doesn’t matter if they were purchased legally. What matters is that it was far too easy for another mentally unbalanced suicidal person who had violent obsessions to have easy access to unreasonably powerful weapons.”
The inability of agencies to share information regarding at-risk individuals’ mental states, personal histories, proximity to firearms – this contributed to the senseless murder of my six-year old son, 19 other children, and seven adults. This is where you must focus your efforts…
…Thomas Jefferson described our inalienable rights as life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness – the rights with which we are endowed, for the protection of which we have instituted governments. I do not think the composition of that foundational phrase was an accident. I do not think the order of those important words was haphazard or casual. The liberty of any person to own a military-style assault weapon and a high-capacity magazine, and keep them in their home, is SECOND to the right of my son to his life – his LIFE; to the right to live of all of those children and those teachers, to the right to the lives of your children, of you, of all of us – all of our lives – it is second. Let’s honor the founding documents and get our priorities straight. Thank you.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xGdjsNafU0]
Mayor Ed Koch
It’s being reported that former New York City Mayor Ed Koch died this morning at the age of 88 from congestive heart failure. Koch served as Mayor from 1978 until 1989 and quite literally helped save the city from the brink of financial ruin, helped to restore its greatness, and reversed years of decline.
Koch was a tough-as-nails political centrist who suffered no fools, and always remembered who he was and why he was there – his signature quip was to greet people with a “how’m I doing?”
While Giuliani is remembered as “America’s mayor” thanks to his leadership during 9/11 at the end of his term, and because of his focus on quality of life crimes, he famously got rid of the squeegee guys and the panhandlers, but Koch was always New York’s mayor. A mensch.
Thanks, Mayor Koch.
Liberty and Such As
Here’s how yesterday went.
1. A survivalist in Alabama shot and killed a school bus driver, kidnapped an autistic 6 year-old boy, and absconded with him to his homemade bunker, where a standoff continues. He committed the murder and kidnapped the boy in order to “air his grievances.” Neighbors told reporters that he was a strange person who seemed ready to snap at any time. No word on whether gun enthusiasts in Alabama have come out in support of a comprehensive public mental health scheme yet. I’m sure there will be a well-attended and angry meeting in a suburban library to demand better mental health and improved background checks, right? Or is this just another episode where a well-regulated militiaman liberated a tyrannic bus driver from his life, and protected a 6 year-old boy from the tyranny of his home.
2. While former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords dramatically addressed the Senate Judiciary Committee as a spokesperson for reasonable gun control measures, a workplace shooting took place in Phoenix, AZ.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOhDNfyvRc]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfTr2ZlwW2E]
Arizona and Alabama have comparatively no gun control whatsoever, and are theoretically populated by “good guys” who are armed to the teeth. It is that possibility of any prospective victim being armed that is supposed to deter crime, say gun control opponents.
3. Why can’t you just own a bazooka?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAWggN2Ovm0]
4. 91% of NRA members agree that the mentally ill should not be allowed to buy or own guns – I’d like to meet the 9% who think it’s ok. Yet when asked yesterday about background checks, NRA spokeszombie Wayne LaPierre suggested that, because we aren’t prosecuting people who try to buy guns despite being denied due to a bad background check, we should dispense with them altogether. The logic here is non-existent, and it underscores the fact that, in the end, the NRA is just a shill for the gun manufacturers. This is all too reminiscent of past hearings where tobacco company executives rejected science which showed that smoking is a major form of cancer and other diseases.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlqvzETVbWM]
5. Another responsible gun owner/patriot bravely defended his liberty against the tyranny of a person whose GPS got him lost.
Rodrigo Diaz, 22, was driving around with his girlfriend and two friends when he pulled into a driveway, thinking they had arrived at another friend’s house, his brother says. But instead he pulled into the driveway of Phillip Sailors, 69, who thought his home was being robbed, his lawyer says. Sailors then shot Diaz, according to the police report, citing what Sailors told officers at the scene. Diaz later died after surgery.
“Basically, what happened is they were looking for one of my brother’s girlfriend’s friends,” says his brother David E. Diaz-Valencia, 23. “The guy came outside and my brother’s girlfriend said he was screaming, ‘Get off my property!’ and he shot into the air. My brother was backing out fast because he was scared and he rolled down the window to say he was sorry and he was not doing anything wrong. Then the guy shot him in his head.”
6. Yesterday, it was announced that the economy unexpectedly shrunk by .1% in the 4th quarter of 2012. At first blush, this is bad news, but if you look at the data, the reason for the contraction has to do with a 22% drop in defense spending. Imagine that – reduced government spending in the economy has the ability to contract the economy; government spending has the ability to grow the economy. People who oppose the economic stimulus and Keynesian economics, however, usually dummy up when it comes to military Keynesianism.
Paired with evidence of how the austerity imposed by Cameron’s Tories in the UK is leading to a triple-dip recession, while stimulus spending in the US has managed to help keep the economy moving quite well.
Maybe that Krugman guy knows what he’s talking about.