by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
The Meyers Report hears a huge national drug store chain is preparing to sell its Pharmacy Benefits Management (PBM) operations to make itself a prettier acquisition target. The firm’s profits are flat-to-declining after a long strategy of deliberate overgrowth to eliminate competition, a planthat is backfiring. To save [...]

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
Almost like clockwork every 10 years for the last 30, claims of a “medical malpractice” or “lawsuit” crisis are voiced by the insurance industry. They did this in 1975, 1985 and 1995. It is a repeating pattern that  goes away as soon as legislation is enacted to drastically [...]

by Gary S. Meyers
The late Senator William Proxmire used to announce his “Golden Fleece” awards to highlight wasteful government spending. One year he cited the defense department for paying $800 for an ordinary hammer. Another year he gave an award to the National Science Foundation for spending $84,000 to study why people fall in love. [...]

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt

General growth in 2010.
· GDP to grow at a rate of 4.5% to 5.25%.
· Unemployment should fall to 9.00% to 9.5% this year. It won’t be a great improvement and it will not come before the second half of the year.
· The Consumer Price Index (CPI) will hold [...]

A lawsuit still winding its way through the courts charges that KBR, a division of Halliburton, knowingly exposed U.S. troops in Iraq to hexavalent chromium—the same poisonous material described in the movie “Erin Brockovich”—as part of “receiving billions of dollars of no-bid contracts for work in Iraq in 2003.” Though begun in 2003, the jurisdiction of either US or Iraqi law is being debated now.

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
No sane person in our country today should be opposed to fixing our healthcare system, particularly its high costs. In the richest nation on earth, life or death decisions should not be predicated on a person’s ability to pay. But that is the system we have at present—a [...]

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
In the latest legislative go round, Democrats (this time) in the Senate are threatening to force votes of large portions of their legislative agenda, healthcare reform in particular, under the so-called “reconciliation” rules—taking those rules beyond their originally intended scope.
Originating with the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, “Reconciliation [...]

by Gary S. Meyers and L. Steven Platt
This week we are touching on a few random questions that keep coming up in the healthcare debate.
Who is opposing health care reform?
Answer Conservatives for Patients Rights have been spending millions on ads opposing health care reform. They’ve hired a conservative public relations firm called CRC, the same [...]

Any form of change can create fear. This is especially true if it is about either Congress or healthcare. Combine the two and you can have a prescription for panic and misinformation.
There is a running gag in the Garfield comic strip that might just as well apply to internet blogs about socialized medicine. Every time [...]

Give those without health insurance the same program that Congress has for themselves. It is in place and works and will not create fear of havoc. Two Republican Representatives who are moderates on health care, Darrell Issa  (R. CA) and Jack Kingston (R. GA), made this statement publically on August 7.  Issa, who earned a [...]