BREAKING:
Hartford Courant is reporting that in Connecticut “About 3,900
customers were told that they qualified for government-funded Medicaid coverage
when, in fact, they did not”. Were you
affected?
Read
the complete article at …..
Access Health CT To Contact
Thousands About 'System Error' Affecting Tax Credits
By MATTHEW STURDEVANT, msturdevant@courant.com
The Hartford
Courant 6:43 p.m. EDT, July 10, 2014
Access Health
CT says it will start calling thousands of
customers Friday to tell them that they were assigned an incorrect tax credit,
creating problems with their medical coverage. Continue reading at ….. http://www.courant.com/business/hc-access-health-ct-dropped-customers-20140710,0,2651392.story
Also check out below
Alleged
Healthcare Fraud, Federal Judge’s Order to IRS, Lawsuit re Government’s
Suspicious Activity Database, Yankee Institute reports on State Employee Perk, Rowland’s
Troubles Escalate, Why the State and Local Pension Problem Will Get Worse,
Stockton May Reduce Pension Plans to Ease Bankruptcy Burden, and Courts Pummel
Public Sector Unions
July 11, 2014
From: The Federation of
Connecticut Taxpayer Organizations
Contact: Susan Kniep, President
Website:
http://ctact.org/
Email: fctopresident@aol.com
Telephone: 860-841-8032
A
new study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reveals
Corruption, fraud and bureaucracy cost
US healthcare system up to $272 billion annually, as
Access Health CT CEO Kevin Counihan has now revealed that
5,700 Dropped From ACA Plans In
Connecticut
Although
Counihan wrote in a June 18 letter to Senator Fasano and
House Minority Leader Lawrence
Cafero “I appreciate your raising this issue to us as
we have as yet to receive no such complaints of this sort”. Read more on this issue at http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/archives/entry/5700_dropped_from_aca_plans_in_connecticut/
In a Forbes Editorial Merrill
Matthews wrote
Government Programs Have Become One Big Scammer ...
Fraud Fest
The feds themselves put
Medicare and Medicaid fraud at approaching 10 percent of the programs’
budgets, or about $100 billion a year for the two programs.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2014/01/13/government-programs-have-become-one-big-scammer-fraud-fest/2/
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US Judge Orders IRS to Explain Lost Emails
Wall Street Journal - By JOHN
D. MCKINNON July 10, 2014 2:10 p.m. ET
Magistrate Judge Named to
Seek Other Sources for Missing Documents
WASHINGTON—A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Internal Revenue
Service to explain how it lost two years' worth of a former official's emails,
and tapped a magistrate judge to find out whether the documents can be obtained
from other sources.
At a hearing in a conservative group's lawsuit, U.S.
District Judge Emmet Sullivan gave the IRS until Aug. 10 to provide a sworn
declaration explaining how the email loss occurred. The IRS previously has said
that the emails were lost because the top agency official's computer crashed in
2011, and backup tapes were routinely reused after six months. http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-judge-orders-irs-to-explain-lost-emails-1405015820
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Yankee Institute Reports:
DOC supervisors get ‘lump sum
payments’
Perk applies only to top-of-pay-scale
employees
Connecticut’s longevity pay for state employees – $13.8 million in April – is
no secret, but a small group of state employees also get “lump sum payments” equal to
2.5 percent of pay. Check it out at http://www.raisinghale.com/2014/06/12/correctional-supervisors-lump-sum-payments/
******************
Five plaintiffs sue after being targeted in US 'suspicious
... activity' database
Spencer Ackerman in New York, theguardian.com,
Thursday 10 July 2014
Excerpts
from article: Suspicious activity
reports – over 35,000 of which have been generated as of 2013,
according to the government – go from their locations into terrorism databases
like the FBI's eGuardian. There, they are visible not
only to federal agents but to state and local police around the country through
the Department of Homeland Security's controversial fusion centers. Reports on
people like Prigoff reside there for up to 30 years.
Generating
them requires observers to have neither probable cause nor reasonable suspicion
of criminal activity – merely the law enforcement equivalent of the "see
something, say something" vigilance mantra post-9/11. Read entire article
at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/10/civil-liberties-groups-lawsuit-suspicious-activity-database#start-of-comments
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As Rowland
Loses Effort To Dismiss Indictment “charging
him with conspiracy, obstruction and other crimes for trying to set himself up
as a secret consultant to congressional campaigns” the Hartford Courant is reporting that it is alleged by Prosecutors: Rowland Used Radio Show For Political Gain
noting that “they intend to tell a jury that when
former Gov. John G. Rowland
sold his political consulting services, he was secretly selling the muscle
behind his long-running political talk show on WTIC-AM radio”. The Hartford Courant further reports that
“The witness who the government said can make its case is Andrew Roraback,
a former state representative and state senator from northwest Connecticut, who
now is a Superior Court judge. “Roraback, if allowed
to testify, is expected to say that he wound up in Rowland's crosshairs because
he was one of the candidates competing against Wilson-Foley in the 5th
Congressional District Republican primary in 2011 and 2012.”
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Why the State and Local Pension Problem Will Get Worse
(Steven Malanga / City Journal)
Detroit’s cost-saving
plan isn’t possible elsewhere.
9 July 2014 Steven Malanga
When unions agreed to a deal last month with
Detroit city government to freeze the city’s underfunded pension system and
create a new, less expensive one, some experts hailed it as a model that other
troubled cities might adopt. News reports prominently mentioned governments
with deep retirement debt, including Chicago and
Philadelphia,
as candidates for similar reforms. But the agreement came about under a Michigan emergency law that applies to struggling cities
like Detroit,
which is in bankruptcy. In many states, by contrast, local laws and state court
rulings have made it virtually impossible to cut back
retirement benefits for current government employees, even for work that they
have yet to perform. These state protections, which go far beyond any
safeguards that federal law provides to private-sector workers, are one reason
why so many states and localities are struggling to dig themselves out of
pension-system debt, amid sharp increases in costs. It will take significant
reforms to state laws—or bigger and more painful bankruptcy cases—to make a
real dent in the pension crisis. Continue reading at …. http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0710sm.html
Stockton May End Up Reducing Pension Payments to Retirees to
Ease Bankruptcy Burden (Tim Lantz / KFBK Radio News)
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Courts Pummel Public Sector Unions
|
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Court ruling that Personal Care Attendants in Illinois Cannot Be Forced to Join Union could Impact Connecticut. Review
Other Court Rulings.
The Federation of - CT
Taxpayer Organizations - June 30 2014
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