http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/crime/2010/03/04/simon.ca.taser.troubles.cnn?hpt=C2

Interesting case on a man who is charging a taser company for his short term memory loss.
Case of negligence? What do you think?

Thousands Mourn Chelsea King's Passing

SAN DIEGO - The Rancho Bernardo home of John Gardner's mother was vandalized overnight. Gardner is under arrest on suspicion of raping and murdering Poway teen Chelsea King.

Large red letters were painted on the garage door at his mother's house that read "Chelsea's blood is on your hands. Move out."

Here is the link of the story of Chelsea King and her murderer.

Link

Don't Shoplift!

Woodland cheese shoplifter gets 7 years 8 months in prison

By Hudson Sangree
hsangree@sacbee.com

Published: Tuesday, Mar. 2, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 2B

Last Modified: Tuesday, Mar. 2, 2010 - 8:09 am

A Yolo County judge on Monday sentenced a man who walked out of a store with a package of cheese in his trousers to seven years and eight months in prison.

Prosecutors had originally sought a life sentence for Robert Ferguson under the state's "three strikes" law. They dropped that bid last month, saying a psychological report had convinced them that a life sentence wasn't warranted.

At Monday's hearing, Deputy District Attorney Clinton Parish urged Judge Thomas Warriner to consider at least one of Ferguson's prior strikes – one for burglary and another for assault with a deadly weapon – and to sentence him to a lengthy term.

Parish said Ferguson was a career criminal who wouldn't change. He had 13 prior convictions and had spent 22 of the past 27 years behind bars, yet still would not obey the law, the prosecutor said.

In 1994, Ferguson had escaped a three-strikes sentence, "Yet here we are again," Parish said.

Defense lawyer Monica Brushia told the judge that Ferguson's six prior burglary convictions occurred 30 years ago. His misdemeanor assault conviction was for throwing a soda can at one of his siblings when he was a teen, she said.

No weapons or injuries were associated with his crimes, Brushia told the judge.

She argued a psychologist's report had concluded Ferguson was bipolar and had trouble controlling impulses to steal during manic phases.

His latest crimes were so petty that they hardly merited a prison sentence, she argued. "We're talking about a pack of cheese," she said.

On Jan. 6, jurors convicted Ferguson of two counts of petty theft for snatching a woman's wallet from the counter of a 7-Eleven store and for stuffing a bag of Tillamook shredded cheese worth $3.99 into his pants at Woodland's Nugget Market.

The Yolo County District Attorney's Office charged the thefts as felonies.

When it came time to sentence Ferguson on Monday, Judge Warriner chose a middle ground. He accepted a probation department recommendation to disregard the prior strikes and to sentence Ferguson to the upper term for petty theft with priors.

The judge gave Ferguson 825 days of credit for his time in jail awaiting trial and said Ferguson would be required to serve half his sentence in prison. He will be eligible for parole in less than three years.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

BusinessWeek Healthcare Debate

Universal Health Care: No Sick Joke

Small businesses—and large—have trouble attracting the best job candidates because of the high price of health care. Entrepreneurship demands nationalized medical insurance. Pro or con?

Pro: Cure for the Uninsured

by Katherine Swartz, Harvard School of Public Health

Since 2000, employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have risen by an average of 73%. For small firms, they’ve more than doubled. This rapid run-up in costs, plus pressures from an increasingly globalized economy, is causing firms of all sizes to pull back from offering health benefits. In 2000, 67% of nonelderly Americans had employer-sponsored health insurance. Just 63% do today.

Large companies increasingly hire workers on a contingency basis through contract houses, temp agencies, or contracts with self-employed people. This allows companies to reduce the number of workers with benefits. Small firms have always faced higher premiums per person than large firms and so have been far less likely to offer health coverage. Since many are new, they feel especially reluctant to provide a fringe benefit that’s more than doubled in cost in just the last six years.

Moreover, many startups exist as virtual companies: They’re groups of self-employed associates, rather than employees. This means they must find health insurance on their own, which costs even more than employer-group coverage.

For 20 years, the services sector, where small firms are the norm, has generated employment growth in the U.S. This, plus employer resistance to rising premiums, has transformed who’s uninsured. Today, almost 60% of the U.S.’s 46 million uninsured are 19 to 45 years old. Significantly, a quarter of all 25- to 34-year-olds and one-fifth of all 35- to 44-year-olds are uninsured. Both those figures have doubled in the last 25 years.

We need to recognize this sea change and create a universal coverage plan. The real question is: How will we finance it? A starting point is to recognize that universal coverage involves a social compact—and individuals should be required to enroll.

Second, individuals and companies should contribute; firms reap large benefits from having a healthy workforce. The federal government would raise funds to subsidize lower-income households and cover most of the expenses of people with extremely high medical costs. Universal coverage can easily include private health plans. But unless we reconfigure the financing, private health insurance will soon exist only for a fortunate, small minority.

Con: No Right to “Free” Health Care

by Onkar Ghate, Ayn Rand Institute

The cause of the U.S. health-care mess is governmental interference. The solution, therefore, is not more governmental control, whether via nationalized medical insurance or a government takeover of medicine.

Health insurance costs so much today because the government, on the premise that there exists a “right” to health care at someone else’s expense, has promised Americans a free lunch. When a person can consume medical services without needing to consider how to pay for them—Medicare, Medicaid, or the individual’s employer will foot the bill—demand skyrockets. The $2,000 elective liver test he or she would have forgone in favor of a better place to live suddenly becomes a necessity when its cost seems to add up to $0.

As the expense of providing “free” health care erupts accordingly, the government tries to control costs by clamping down on the providers of health care. A massive net of regulations descends on doctors, nurses, insurers, and drug companies. As more of their endeavors are rendered unprofitable, drug companies produce fewer drugs, and insurers limit their policies or exit the industry.

Doctors and nurses, now buried in paperwork and faced with the endless, unjust task of appeasing government regulators, find their love for their work dissipating. They cut their hours or leave the profession. Many young people decide never to enter those fields in the first place.

What happens when demand skyrockets and supply is restricted? The price of medicine explodes. What was once to serve as a free lunch for everyone becomes lunch for no one.

The solution? Remove all controls. Recognize each citizen’s right and responsibility to pay for his or her own health care, and return to insurers the entrepreneurial freedom to come up with innovative products.

True freedom would bring health care into the reach of the average U.S. citizen again—just as it has done for other goods and services, such as computers, cell phones, and food.

Opinions and conclusions expressed in the BusinessWeek Debate Room do not necessarily reflect the views of BusinessWeek, BusinessWeek.com, or The McGraw-Hill Companies.

Skewed Statistics

Here is one of the reasons why America has a "high" infant-mortality rate. This information was taken from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) website.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/29/52/36960035.pdf The pertinent information is at the bottom of page 2.

Interesting Case

Pittsburgh vows changes after man dies waiting on EMS

By Evan Buxbaum, CNN

February 18, 2010 8:05 p.m. EST

(CNN) -- During 30 anxious hours as a blizzard raged, 10 calls went to 911 from one Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, house to get an ambulance for a sick man. But the ambulance never arrived, and the man died.

Now Pittsburgh officials are vowing to implement a series of changes to the city's emergency response system as a result of the death of 50-year-old Curtis Mitchell.

Mitchell's girlfriend, Sharon Edge, told CNN affiliate WTAE that she placed frequent 911 calls on the night of February 5, explaining repeatedly that Mitchell couldn't walk or move, and had to lie down with stomach pains. Mitchell made the initial calls himself, then Edge took over for him.

"And I kept calling back. Every half hour, I kept calling back," she said.

But even after three separate ambulance dispatches, emergency personnel failed to reach Edge and Mitchell at their home. One ambulance stopped just across a bridge, approximately two to four blocs from the house. By the time an ambulance was dispatched for a fourth time, Mitchell was dead.

Weather was a factor in the response, said Pittsburgh Medical Examiner Dr. Ron Roth, who also serves as the medical director for city's Emergency Operations Center. The city was in the midst of a blizzard, with nearly 2 feet of snow piling up in a relatively short period, Roth said in a report.

"The poor road conditions resulted in challenges to emergency vehicles responding to calls. ... EMS requests more than doubled the average, which coupled with the snow, significantly hindered their capacity," Roth said in the report.

But at a news conference Wednesday, Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Michael Huss said the actions of EMS workers in the case were simply "unacceptable," and Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl declared such situations "won't be tolerated."

Joanna Doven, spokeswoman for the mayor, said that hazardous road conditions immobilized three of the city's 13 ambulances as they became stuck in the snow. Recognizing this, EMS responders asked if Mitchell could venture out to meet them, she said.

"Asking patients to walk to the ambulance is a relatively unusual request," said Roth in his report. But due to the inclement weather, "asking callers to walk to the truck became a viable alternative that worked on many calls," he said.

Huss, the public safety director, also addressed that situation at the news conference on Wednesday, saying that Pittsburgh invests a lot of resources in its public safety department.

"You get out of the damn truck and you walk to the residence. That's what needed to happen here," Huss said.

"Short-term changes" have already been made in the emergency response system and the city will continue to work on long-term solutions, Ravenstahl said.

Huss said an administrative investigation will continue and determine what actions, if any, will be taken against employees involved.

Officials are currently in the process of "reviewing all the 911 calls, all the radio transmissions, and all the phone calls associated with the incident," Huss said.

The process will take time because the incident occurred over more than 30 hours. "Once a thorough investigation is done, action will be taken," he said.

Roth's report contained more than two dozen recommendations for improving EMS procedures and ensuring that this situation does not repeat. Proposals include reviewing call cancellation policies, promising first responders for all emergency requests, and re-evaluating "levels of emergency" during the call screening process.

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Chief Forensic Investor Edward Strimlan told CNN that an autopsy has been completed on Mitchell, but results can take anywhere from eight to 20 weeks, and an official cause of death remains pending.

Meanwhile, Mitchell's girlfriend, Edge, would like somebody held responsible, whether it be the city or the paramedics involved. "He shouldn't have had to die the way he died, because he was suffering," she said.

"It hurts, I'm all alone now. Somebody that I love is gone and I can't do nothing about it."

CNN's Allan Chernoff, Edmond DeMarche, and Jen Rizzo contributed to this report.

Video: The Health Care Session in 4 Minutes By BEN WERSCHKUL

This includes 4 minutes of highlights of the 6 hour health care summit at the Blair House. Since we were having a discussion of American health care, I thought that this video would be helpful to watch as many of us have not been staying up to date on this issue and this is a good summary.

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/video-the-health-care-session-in-4-minutes/