Former Bain Capital Partner Edward Conard Outs Romney

A former Bain Capital partner acknowledged Sunday that Mitt Romney "legally" remained the head of the private equity firm until 2002, contradicting Romney's claims that he left the company in February 1999.

During an appearance on MSNBC's "Up w/ Chris Hayes," Edward Conard, who worked at the private equity firm during Romney's tenure as CEO, noted that Romney remained "legally" in charge of the company for at least two years after the former governor says he left to take over the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.

"Mitt's names were on the documents as the chief executive and sole owner of the company," Conard said. Conard served as managing director of the firm from 1993 to 2007.



MSNBC reports:

Despite Romney's statements that he left in 1999, Conard's new remarks suggest that, in fact, Romney's continued ownership of the firm enabled him to negotiate a better exit deal. "We had to negotiate with Mitt because he was an owner of the firm," Conard said.The legal transfer of ownership dragged on for three years after Romney's informal departure to run the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Conard said, because Romney was aggressively negotiating his retirement package and compensation with executives and lawyers at the company.

"He'd created a lot of franchise value, and we were going to pay him for that," Conard said, adding: "We had a very complicated set of negotiations that took us about two years for us to unwind. During that time a management committee ran the firm, and we could hardly get Mitt to come back to negotiate the terms of his departure because he was working so hard on the Olympics."

Conard's comments are the latest in a growing pile of evidence that contradicts Romney's repeated claims that he ended his active role at Bain in 1999. On Sunday, The Huffington Post reported on a corporate document filed in December 2002 that lists Romney as a "managing member" of Bain Capital Investors. Earlier reports show Romney listed as CEO on 2002 Securites and Exchange Commission filings, attending board meetings for Bain-affiliated companies after 1999, and receiving an at least $100,000 salary from Bain in 2001 and 2002.

The discrepancies between these documents and Romney's account of his departure have become the focus of the presidential campaign, as President Obama's team raises questions about the Republican candidate's truthfulness. Beyond the issue of honesty, there are deeper implications for Romney if he was involved in the company after 1999, as Bain's outsourcing activity during that time has raised concern.

Obama addressed the controversy on Saturday, telling DC-based ABC affiliate WJLA that Romney should come clean on his record.

"Ultimately, I think, Mr. Romney is going to have to answer those questions because if he aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is you're ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations," the president said.

Obamacare Will Cut Deficit...

CBO: Health reform to cut deficit by $50 billion more than we thought... Republicans lie about health care. See them get busted.

http://www.washingto...gPSES_blog.html

I’m getting a lot of e-mails quoting articles like this one, by John Ransom, that say something like, “In a wholly predictable development, it turns out the cost for Obamacare will end up being twice the original price that the Democrats said.” Ransom also writes that I was “w-w-w-wrong” to say, back in January 2011, that the law “cuts enough spending and raises enough taxes to more than pay for itself.”

Actually, no, I wasn’t. That statement, in fact, is even truer today than it was then.

But let’s back up. The occasion for this dust-up is a set of updated cost estimates for the coverage provisions of the health-care law. The new estimates reflect a couple of factors. The Congressional Budget Office lists them:

- An increase of $168 billion in projected outlays for Medicaid and CHIP;

- A decrease of $97 billion in projected costs for exchange subsidies and related spending;

- A decrease of $20 billion in the cost of tax credits for small employers; and

- An additional $99 billion in net deficit reductions from penalty payments, the excise tax on high-premium insurance plans, and other effects on tax revenues and outlays—with most of those effects reflecting changes in revenues.

You’ll notice something about the above list: It appears to add up to a net reduction in the cost of the health-care law. And, sure enough, here’s CBO: “the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of just under $1.1 trillion over the 2012–2021 period—about $50 billion less than the agencies’ March 2011 estimate.” You would get the opposite impression reading Ransom.

The problem for Ransom and others is that they didn’t read this analysis closely, or, if they did, they didn’t understand it.

Ransom quotes CBO saying “those provisions will increase deficits by $1,083 billion,” but he either didn’t notice or didn’t choose to include the CBO’s warning that this analysis does “not encompass all of the budgetary impacts of the ACA because that legislation has many other provisions, including some that will cause significant reductions in Medicare spending and others that will generate added tax revenues.”

As it says right in the title, this is just a look at “the insurance coverage provisions” of the Affordable Care Act. That is to say, it’s a look at the spending side of the bill. So it doesn’t include the Medicare cuts, or many of the tax increases, that pay for the legislation. It’s like reading only the “outlays” side of the budget and ignoring the “revenues” part. Of course that would make the deficit look huge.

But those other parts of the bill aren’t a secret. They’re mentioned right there in the analysis. Quoting again: “CBO and JCT have previously estimated that the ACA will, on net, reduce budget deficits over the 2012–2021 period; that estimate of the overall budgetary impact of the ACA has not been updated.”

It’s easy to do at least some of the update ourselves. This analysis shows the net cost of the coverage provisions will be about $50 billion less than previously estimated. That implies the law will cut more, not less, from the deficit than previous estimates suggested. In other words, this estimate says the bill is more, not less, fiscally responsible than was previously reported.

One other thing that’s confused some people is that this estimate is looking at a different timeframe than the original estimates. The CBO’s first pass at the bill looked at 2010-2019. But years have passed, and so now they’re looking at 2012-2021. That means they have two fewer years of implementation, when the bill costs almost nothing, and two more years of operation, when it costs substantially more.

But it also means that the included cuts and taxes, which grow with time, are larger. That’s why, when House Republicans wanted to repeal health reform in 2011, the estimated increase in the deficit was $230 billion, rather than the $130 billion that would have been expected from the 2010-2019 analysis. As you extend the analysis, the bill both costs more and saves more, and the savings grow more quickly than the costs.

There are a few other interesting things in the CBO report: It says, for instance, that the bill is now expected to cover 30 million Americans, rather than 33 million Americans. It doesn’t give a reason for the revision.

Glenn Beck On Health Care Reform

A Compliation of FDA Corruption

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBeXPYah6yw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6eGQDuU88E&feature=related

Hear Doctor/Congressman Ron Paul Explain It!

Shocking Facts About FDA Corruption

Chris Rock Doctors and Drugs

Think about what he's saying. There have been damn few cures in the past 40 years. I think Hib Disease has a minimally effective vaccine and Chicken Pox had a vaccine in 1974. Medical greed keeps people sick.

Checkout Medical Holocaust

The FDA's Long History of Corruption

Going as far back as the 1950s -- and likely even much earlier than that -- the FDA has made it routine practice to ignore and even deny the dangers associated with drugs and medical devices when approving them. In the case of the Upjohn Company, for instance, which unveiled the antibiotic drug Panalba back in 1957, the FDA ignored many years of complaints about the drug's safety in order to protect the company's profits.




At the time, data showed that as many as 20 percent of patients taking Panalba had suffered severe allergic reactions to the antibiotic, and yet the FDA did nothing. Even Upjohn's own research studies on Panalba showed that the drug was less effective and less safe than alternative drugs on the market, and still the FDA did nothing, effectively sheltering Upjohn's enormous profits from Panalba, which represented 12 percent of its overall profit earnings.



Sadly, the same is true today, as the drug industry and the FDA essentially work in tandem to get dangerous, but highly-profitable, drugs and medical devices to market. It is a win-win situation for both groups as the FDA gets kickbacks in the form of exorbitant new drug and medical device application fees, and the drug industry rakes in billions of dollars for blockbuster drug and device products that would never have been approved had science and facts been legitimately factored into the equation.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/035641_corruption_FDA_Big_Pharma.html#ixzz1xuTGyyFa

Statistics prove prescription drugs are 16,400% more deadly than terrorists

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/009278.html#ixzz1wKkcCLpM

America was rudely awakened to a new kind of danger on September 11, 2001: Terrorism. The attacks that day left 2,996 people dead, including the passengers on the four commercial airliners that were used as weapons. Many feel it was the most tragic day in U.S. history.
Four commercial jets crashed that day. But what if six jumbo jets crashed every day in the United States, claiming the lives of 783,936 people every year? That would certainly qualify as a massive tragedy, wouldn't it?

Well, forget "what if." The tragedy is happening right now. Over 750,000 people actually do die in the United States every year, although not from plane crashes. They die from something far more common and rarely perceived by the public as dangerous: modern medicine.

According to the groundbreaking 2003 medical report Death by Medicine, by Drs. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, 783,936 people in the United States die every year from conventional medicine mistakes. That's the equivalent of six jumbo jet crashes a day for an entire year. But where is the media attention for this tragedy? Where is the government support for stopping these medical mistakes before they happen?

After 9/11, the White House gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security, designed to prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Since its inception, billions of dollars have been poured into it. The 2006 budget allots $34.2 billion to the DHS, a number that has come down slightly from the $37.7 billion budget of 2003.

According to the study led by Null, which involved a painstaking review of thousands of medical records, the United States spends $282 billion annually on deaths due to medical mistakes, or iatrogenic deaths. And that's a conservative estimate; only a fraction of medical errors are reported, according to the study. Actual medical mistakes are likely to be 20 times higher than the reported number because doctors fear retaliation for those mistakes. The American public heads to the doctor's office or the hospital time and again, oblivious of the alarming danger they're heading into. The public knows that medical errors occur, but they assume that errors are unusual, isolated events. Unfortunately, by accepting conventional medicine, patients voluntarily continue to walk into the leading cause of death in America.

According to a 1995 U.S. iatrogenic report, "Over a million patients are injured in U.S. hospitals each year, and approximately 280,000 die annually as a result of these injuries. Therefore, the iatrogenic death rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality rate of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined." This report was issued 10 years ago, when America had 34 million fewer citizens and drug company scandals like the Vioxx recall were yet to occur. Today, health care comprises 15.5 percent of the United States' gross national product, with spending reaching $1.4 trillion in 2004.

Since Americans spend so much money on health care, they should be getting a high quality of care, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Of the 783,936 annual deaths due to conventional medical mistakes, about 106,000 are from prescription drugs, according to Death by Medicine. That also is a conservative number. Some experts estimate it should be more like 200,000 because of underreported cases of adverse drug reactions.

Americans today are used to fixing problems the quick way – even when it comes to their health. Thus, they rely heavily on prescription drugs to fix their diseases. For every conceivable ailment – real or not – chances are there's a pricey prescription drug to "treat" it. Chances are even better that their drug of choice comes chock full of side effects.

The problem is, prescription drugs don't treat diseases; they merely cover the symptoms. U.S. physicians provide allopathic health care – that is, they care for disease, not health. So, the over-prescription of drugs and medications is designed to treat disease instead of preventing it. And because there are so many drugs available, unforeseen adverse drug reactions are all too common, which leads to the highly conservative annual prescription drug death rate of 106,000. Keep in mind that these numbers came before the Vioxx scandal, and Cox-2 inhibitor drugs could ultimately end up killing tens of thousands more.

American medical patients are getting the short end of a rather raw deal when it comes to prescription drugs. Medicine is a high-dollar, highly competitive business. But it shouldn't be. Null's report cites the five most important aspects of health that modern medicine ignores in favor of the almighty dollar: Stress, lack of exercise, high calorie intake, highly processed foods and environmental toxin exposure. All these things are putting Americans in such poor health that they run to the doctor for treatment. But instead of doctors treating the causes of their poor health, such as putting them on a strict diet and exercise regimen, they stuff them full of prescription drugs to cover their symptoms. Using this inherently faulty system of medical treatment, it's no wonder so many Americans die from prescription drugs. They're not getting better; they're just popping drugs to make their symptoms temporarily go away.

But not all doctors subscribe to this method of "treatment." In fact, many doctors are just as angry as the public should be, charging that scientific medicine is "for sale" to the highest bidder – which, more often than not, end up being pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical industry is a multi-trillion dollar business. Companies spend billions on advertising and promotions for prescription drugs. Who can remember the last time they watched television and weren't bombarded with ads for pills treating everything from erectile dysfunction to sleeplessness? And who has ever been to a doctor's office or hospital and not seen every pen, notepad and post-it bearing the logo of some prescription drug?

Medical experts claim that patients' requests for certain drugs have no effect on the number of prescriptions written for that drug. Pharmaceutical companies claim their drug ads are "educational" to the public. The public believes the FDA reviews all the ads and only allows the safest and most effective drug ads to reach the public. It's a clever system: Pharmaceutical companies influence the public to ask for prescription drugs, the public asks their physicians to prescribe them certain drugs, and doctors acquiesce to their patients' requests. Everyone's happy, right? Not quite, since the prescription drug death toll continues to rise.

The public seems to genuinely believe that drugs advertised on TV are safe, in spite of the plethora of side effects listed by the commercial's narrator, ranging from diarrhea to death. Patients feel justified in asking their physicians to prescribe them a particular drug they've seen on TV, since it surely must be safe or it wouldn't have been advertised. Remember all those TV ads heralding the wonders of Vioxx? One might wonder how many lives could have been spared if patients didn't see the ad on TV and request a prescription from their doctors.

But advertising isn't the only tool the pharmaceutical industry uses to influence medicine. Null's study cites an ABC report that said pharmaceutical companies spend over $2 billion sending doctors to more than 314,000 events every year. While doctors are riding the dollar of pharmaceutical companies, enjoying all the many perks of these "events," how likely are they to question the validity of drug companies or their products?

Admittedly, not all doctors reside in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies. Some are downright angry at the situation, and angry on behalf of an unaware public. Major conflicts of interest exist between the American public, the medical community and the pharmaceutical industry. And although the public suffers the most from this conflict, it is the least informed. The public gets the short end of the stick and they don't even know it. That is why the pharmaceutical industry remains a multi-trillion dollar business.

Prescription drugs are only a part of the U.S. healthcare system's miserable failings. In fact, outpatient deaths, bedsore deaths and malnutrition deaths each account for higher death rates than adverse drug reactions. The problems run deep and cannot be remedied without drastic, widespread change in the system's money and ethics.

The first issue – money – is the main reason the medical industry cannot seem to change. Prescribing more drugs and recommending more surgeries means more profits. Getting more drugs approved by the FDA, regardless of their safety, means more money for the pharmaceutical industry. As the healthcare system stands today, physicians and drug companies can't seem to pass up earning loads of money, even if a few hundred thousand people lose their lives in the process. Even in drastic cases of deadly drugs, everyone involved has a scapegoat: Drug companies can blame the FDA for approving their product and the doctors for over-prescribing it, and doctors can blame the patients for wanting it and not properly weighing the risks.

What ultimately arises is a question of ethics. In layman's terms, ethics are the rules or moral guidelines that govern the conduct of people or professions. Some ethics are ingrained from childhood, but some are specifically set forth. For example, nearly all medical schools have their new doctors take a modern form of the Hippocratic Oath. While few versions are identical, none include setting aside proper medical care in favor of money-making practices.

On the research side of the issue, "Death by Medicine" cites an ABC report that says clinical trials
funded by pharmaceutical companies show a 90 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective, whereas clinical trials not funded by drug companies show only a 50 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective. "It appears that money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you any 'scientific' result you want," writes Null and his team of researchers.

The government spends upwards of $30 billion a year on homeland security. Such spending seems important. Since 2001, 2,996 people in the United States have died from terrorism – all as a result of the 9/11 attacks. In that same period of time, 490,000 people have died from prescription drugs, not counting the Vioxx scandal. That means that prescription drugs in this country are at least 16,400 percent deadlier than terrorism. Again, those are the conservative numbers. A more realistic number, which would include deaths from over-the-counter drugs, makes drug consumption 32,000 percent deadlier than terrorism. But the scope of "Death by Medicine" is even wider. Conventional medicine, including unnecessary surgeries, bedsores and medical errors, is 104,700 percent deadlier than terrorism. Yet, our government's attention and money is not put into reforming health care.
Couldn't a little chunk of the homeland security money be better spent on overhauling the corrupt U.S. healthcare system, the leading cause of death in America? Couldn't we forfeit the color-coded threat system in favor of stricter guidelines on medical research and prescription drugs? No one is attempting to say that terrorism in the world is not a problem, especially for a high-profile country like the United States. No one is saying that the people who died on 9/11 didn't matter or weren't horribly wronged by the terrorists that day. But there are more dangerous things in the United States being falsely represented as safe and healthy, when, in reality, they are deadly. The corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and in America's healthcare system poses a far greater threat to the health, safety and welfare of Americans today than terrorism.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/009278.html#ixzz1wKl1bZKd