Not about Amanda Knox, thankfully

[the_archfiend]

Let somebody else blog about that topic. The following two bits of non-fun are a bit more important in the overall scheme of things, in my opinion:

Considering that the SCOTUS is probably going to hear arguments on health care reform sometime in the near future, this isn't exactly the most reassuring thing to read on the subject of health insurance provider honesty:

A report released Monday by the Senate Finance committee lays out more than a
half-dozen strategies used by executives at Amedisys, LHC Group and Gentiva to
increase home care, even when patients may not have required extra attention.
Staffers for Senators Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa,
reviewed internal documents by the companies.

"Elderly patients in the
Medicare system should not be used as pawns to increase a company's profits,"
Baucus said in a statement. "Especially in these tough economic times, taxpayers
simply cannot afford for their dollars to be wasted on unnecessary
care."

Grassley said the government must "fix the policy that lets
Medicare money flow down the drain."

That's right: of all the people you'd expect to bitch about these practices, you wouldn't expect it to be Chuck "no public option, period" Grassley. But he did. Consider me surprised.

The company records show caregivers targeted their number of visits to trigger
bonus payments from Medicare. In one case, a company tasked a special team of
workers to develop the most profitable treatment regimens possible.

And these are some of the clowns who have done their damnedest to scuttle the Affordable Care Act, of course.

Consider me completely unsurprised on that one.

On the other hand, some of Big Insurance's allies in the world of political campaign funding may have engaged in some, oh, slightly unethical  practices to help their own bottom line:

In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.

“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova-Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”

She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.

By September of that year, the researchers had found evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France.

“Those activities constitute violations of criminal law,”Koch Industries wrote in a Dec. 8, 2008, letter giving details of its findings. The letter was made public in a civil court ruling in France in September 2010; the document has never before been reported by the media.

Fun stuff, huh?

As you'd expect, it gets better:

A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries -- in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the and the Middle East -- has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.

I'd go on, but the Bloomberg piece itself is just so much more fun to read. It's also more proof that if the Brothers Koch don't want to be seen as villains straight out of a James Bond film, they're doing a piss-poor job to refute that image.