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President Trump with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price in the Oval Office.
(Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) Attorneys general from 15 states and the District of Columbia filed a motion Thursday to intervene in a long-running lawsuit over a core part of the Affordable Care Act.
In their legal filing, the attorneys general say they can't trust the Trump administration to defend their interests, because health insurance for millions of Americans has become “little more than political bargaining chips” for the White House.
The lawsuit is challenging how billions of dollars of federal payments were made to health insurers.
Those payments are critical to the stability of the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, which are designed to help individuals buy government-subsidized health coverage.
The attorneys general want to step in to defend the payments, saying there is a “sharp divide” between the administration's goals and those of states.
For months, health insurance companies have been trying to get a solid answer from Congress and President Trump's White House on the future of the payments, called cost-sharing reductions, that help lower-income Americans afford their deductibles and co-payments.
Their calls for certainty have grown increasingly urgent as they face deadlines to decide whether to offer plans in states and how much to charge.
The lawsuit over the payments was originally brought by House Republicans against the Obama administration.
House Republicans won the lawsuit, which was appealed.
Now, it has been inherited by the Trump administration, which has been unclear about whether it will defend the payments.
A status update on the case is due on Monday.
Trump and Congress have sent mixed signals about whether the payments will continue on an almost weekly basis.
[Health insurers asked the Trump administration for reassurance on Obamacare.
They didn’t get it.]
The repercussions of discontinuing the payments have been made clear by insurance executives, who warn that if the funding disappears, insurers could leave markets altogether or raise their premiums significantly.
CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, the largest insurer in the Mid-Atlantic, requested rate increases of more than 50 percent in Maryland's marketplaces, and chief executive Chet Burrell warned earlier this month that if cost-sharing reduction payments were to end, rates could increase by another 10 to 15 percentage points.
Anthem chief executive Joseph Swedish said in an April earnings call that the company was filing its preliminary rates with states under the assumption the cost-sharing reductions would be made.
If there isn't a commitment to make the payments, Swedish said the company would change its plans.
“Such adjustments could include reducing service area participation, requesting additional rate increases, eliminating certain product offerings or exiting certain individual ACA-compliant market altogether,” Swedish said.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners sent a letter this week to senators and to White House budget director Mick Mulvaney stressing the importance of the payments.
“This is not a theoretical argument — carriers have already left the individual market in several states, and too many counties have only one carrier remaining,” the association wrote to Mulvaney.
“The one concern carriers consistently raise as they consider whether to participate and how much to charge in 2018 is the uncertainty surrounding the federal cost-sharing reduction payments.” The motion to intervene was filed by the attorneys general of New York and California, and was joined by Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia.
“The President has increasingly made clear that he views decisions about providing access to health insurance for millions of Americans — including the decision whether to continue defending this appeal — as little more than political bargaining chips,” the attorneys general wrote in their motion to intervene in the case, saying they could not depend on the White House to represent states' interests.
“The number of uninsured Americans would go back up, hurting vulnerable individuals and directly burdening the States,” they wrote.
“The wrong decision could trigger the very systemwide 'death spirals' that central ACA features, such as stable financing, were designed to avoid.” Read More: The future of Obamacare will be written by insurers like this one Iowa Obamacare program on verge of collapse as congressional uncertainty takes its toll Free-standing ERs offer care without the wait.
But patients can still pay $6,800 to treat a cut.
Less than three months ago, Facebook Live experienced its first verifiable viral hit when more than 800,000 people tuned in to watch two BuzzFeed employees burst a watermelon using only rubber bands.
But explosive fruit was just the beginning.
Now, Facebook has reportedly inked well over 100 deals with a wide array of partners ranging from digital publishing outfits to celebrities, 17 of which come with million-dollar price tags.
Facebook Live, the live-video service that began rolling out to users in the fall of last year, is the centerpiece of C.E.O.
Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the future of Facebook.
(Earlier this month, Facebook executive Nicola Mendelsohn predicted that within five years, the social network could be “all video.”) And paying high-profile content-creators to make video that people actually want to watch is the crux of that plan.
According to a document obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook will pay almost 140 parties to create live video for the burgeoning service.
The list of partners includes a number of media companies, including CNN, The New York Times, Vox, Tastemade, Mashable, and The Huffington Post.
(Condé Nast, Vanity Fair‘s parent company, has ongoing partnerships with Facebook that include a number of different business and revenue models.)
Kevin Hart, Gordon Ramsay, Deepak Chopra, and Russell Wilson are among the celebrities that have signed on, the Journal reports.
While the total price tag for the deals tops $50 million, the partnerships differ widely in value.
Buzzfeed, which saw early success with its watermelon-exploding video, landed the biggest contract among its publishing competitors with a $3.05 million contract to create live video between March 2016 and March 2017.
The New York Times nabbed second place, with a $3.03 million 12-month contract, and CNN rounded out the podium players with a $2.5 million deal, the Journal reports.
The outlet did not report how much individual celebrities will pocket by partnering with Facebook for the initiative.
Zuckerberg and friends are reportedly still figuring out how to monetize Facebook Live—pre-roll ads, presumably, are in our future—but by landing high-profile names to create its content, Facebook is undoubtedly one step closer to a sustainable live-video revenue model.
During a Facebook town hall at the end of February, Zuckerberg said that live video was one of the things he was “most excited about.” This newest report makes it clear he sees it as a moneymaker, too.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel sentenced an Arab citizen to 30 months’ imprisonment on Monday for endangering national security by briefly joining Syrian rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
Hikmat Massarwa (R), a member of Israel's Arab minority, attends a remand hearing at the Central District Court in Lod, near Tel Aviv April 25, 2013.
REUTERS/Baz Ratner Hikmat Massarwa’s case was unprecedented, and the relatively light penalty handed down to him as part of a plea bargain reflected Israel’s indecision about who - if anyone - to back in its northern neighbor’s civil war.
Massarwa was arrested on March 19 upon returning via Turkey from Syria, where he had spent a week at a rebel base.
Israeli prosecutors accused him of undergoing small-arms training by radical Islamists there who asked him to carry out a suicide attack in Israel - although, by all accounts, he declined.
Those charges carried a maximum 15-year jail term.
But prosecutors appeared unable, from the outset, to throw the book at Massarwa because of Israeli haziness about the Syria crisis.
“There’s no legal guidance regarding the rebel groups fighting in Syria,” Judge Avraham Yaakov said at a session of the trial at Lod district court, south of Tel Aviv, in May.
Massarwa, a 29-year-old baker, at first denied wrongdoing, saying he had gone to Syria to seek a brother missing since joining the insurgency.
He also argued that the Western-backed anti-Assad rebels should not be regarded as a danger to Israel.
But, changing tack on Monday, Massarwa confessed to unlawfully travelling to a hostile state and meeting what prosecutors designated a “foreign agent”.
In turn, they dropped the count against him of illicitly receiving military training.
Under the plea bargain, Massarwa acknowledged his actions “had potential to threaten the security of the state of Israel”.
Technically at war with Syria, Israel enjoyed decades of stable ceasefire while the Assad family ruled unchallenged in Syria.
It fears that, if Damascus falls to the Islamist-dominated rebels, jihadis among them will have a Syrian springboard for striking at the Jewish state.
Such concern has been stoked in recent months by Syrian gunfire and shelling into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, incidents in which Israel has routinely shot back.
Israel took the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.
Arabs, most of them Muslim, make up around 20 percent of Israel’s population.
They seldom take up arms with its enemies.
Yet some Israeli officials privately described Massarwa’s trial as a bid to deter other Arab citizens from going to Syria and possibly acquiring the Islamist agenda and fighting savvy that could drive them to turn to violence once back home.
“The prosecution were definitely looking for a deterrent effect here, and they got it, even though they scaled down the penalty,” Massarwa’s lawyer, Helal Jaber, told Reuters.
But he added that Israeli Arab volunteerism for the Syrian civil war was “hardly a phenomenon.
We are talking about two or three people - bad apples.
The overwhelming majority of the community are loyal to the state of Israel”.
(This story is refiled to add dropped letter in penultimate paragraph quote)
This article is over 7 years old Major rights holders claim search engines make it 'difficult' for people to find legal music and films online Google and Bing accused of directing users to illegal copies of music Google and other search engines "overwhelmingly" direct music fans to illegal copies of copyrighted tracks online, a coalition of entertainment industry groups has told the government.
In a confidential document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, lobbying groups for the major rights holders claimed Google and Microsoft's Bing are making it "much more difficult" for people to find legal music and films online.
The private document, obtained by the free speech campaigners Open Rights Group and shared with the Guardian, urges the government to introduce a voluntary body that would remove rogue websites from internet search results.
The proposals were made to the culture minister Ed Vaizey as part of a series of consultations on internet piracy between rights holders, search giants and the government in November last year.
The nine-page document was submitted on behalf of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK body for the music majors, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the Premier League, the Publishers Association and the Pact, the film and TV independent producers' trade body.
Privately, rights holders said there is a "spirit of optimism" between the entertainment groups and search engines as they attempt to usher in more legal media sites, including Google's own fledgling music service.
Google has in the past year stepped up efforts to remove copyright-infringing content, launching a fast-track removal requests form and filtering terms "associated with infringement".
However, the rights holders claim in the document that "as time goes on, the situation is getting worse rather than better".
"Consumers rely on search engines to find and access entertainment content and they play a vital role in the UK digital economy," the rights holders state.
"At present, consumer searching for digital copies of copyright entertainment content are directed overwhelmingly to illegal sites and services."
The entertainment groups want Google to "continuously review key search words" and "effectively screen" mobile apps on Android smartphones in an effort to combat illicit sharing.
The document claims that 16 of the first 20 Google search results for chart singles link to "known illegal sites", according to searches by the BPI in September.
In an attempt to persuade the government to clamp down on search engines, the groups claim that 41% of Google's first-page results for bestselling books in April last year were "non-legal links" to websites.
"Much of the illegal activity in the digital economy is facilitated and encouraged by money-making rogue sites," the document claimed.
"Intermediaries, unwittingly or by wilfully turning a blind eye (or in some cases, by encouraging such activity), play a key role in enabling content theft and often even profit from it.
Only a comprehensive approach can address this issue."
The entertainment bodies call for search engines to: • Assign lower rankings to sites that "repeatedly" make available copyright-infringing material • Prioritise sites that "obtain certification as a licensed site" for music and film downloading • Stop indexing sites that are subject to court orders • Stop indexing "substantially infringing websites" • Improve "notice and takedown" system • Ensure that users are not directed to illicit filesharing sites through suggested search • Ensure search engines do not advertise around unlawful sites or sell keywords associated with piracy or sell mobile apps "which facilitate infringement" The chief executive of BPI, Geoff Taylor, said on Thursday: "The vast majority of consumers want search engines to direct them to legal sources of entertainment rather than the online black market.
"As search engines roll out high-quality content services, like Google Music, we want to build a constructive partnership that supports a legal online economy.
We hope that Google and other search engines will respond positively."
A spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association added: "If you look for film or music via a search engine you usually find websites providing access to pirated films or music at the top of the list of results.
"This is confusing for consumers, damages the legal market and legitimises copyright theft.
We are in dialogue with search engines, ISPs [internet service providers], advertising networks and payment processors about a code to deal with the escalating problem of online copyright theft which threatens the growth of the entire creative industries sector.
This paper is a result of that dialogue and we appreciate government's continuing efforts to help bring about a more responsible internet".
A spokesman for Google said: "Google takes the fight against online piracy very seriously.
Last year, we removed over five million infringing items from Google Search.
We have made industry-leading efforts in this field, investing over $50m (£32m) in fighting bad advertisements and over $30m on Content ID software, giving rights holders control over their YouTube content.
"We continue to work in close partnership with rights holders to help them combat piracy and protect their property."
Peter Bradwell, campaigner for the Open Rights Group, said the proposal contained "some dangerous ideas".
He said: "It's another plan to take on far too much power over what we're allowed to look at and do online."
Fingerprint riddle leads to new call for Dr David Kelly inquest Found in woods: Dr David Kelly's possessions did not have any fingerprints on them Fresh information casting doubt on how weapons inspector Dr David Kelly died has been sent to the Government by campaigners trying to secure an inquest into his death.
Attorney General Dominic Grieve was presented with legal papers on Monday arguing that because there were no fingerprints on five items found with Dr Kelly’s body – including the knife he supposedly used to kill himself – a coroner’s inquest must be held to determine how he died.
The information, covering dozens of legal and scientific points, was submitted by a group of doctors who believe Dr Kelly’s death has never been investigated properly.