For some reason I missed the connection in Ellroon’s Friday Blog Sprinkles. At the end there is a story that seems to trace back to Brian Krebs of the Security Fix blog at the Washington Post site about a crack of the server at the Virginia Department of Health Professionals. A data base of drug prescriptions was stolen, and the original and several back-ups were apparently deleted. The cracker [the computer type, not the cowboy type] is demanding $10 million for the return of the data base.

It finally clicked that at the end of April Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, Aneesh Chopra, was selected as the first Federal Chief Technology Officer [CTO], despite having only public health degrees.

It gets worse. The Washington Examiner reports:

The Virginia agency recently attacked by a hacker has yet to receive a computer security upgrade ordered five years ago, a spokeswoman for Gov. Tim Kaine told The Examiner.
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[Read more →]

Despite rather checkered results in the past, Rook’s Rant has once again upgraded to a new version of MT without a total meltdown.

Over at Bloggg there is a totally new look, and a switch to WordPress, that went relatively smoothly.

Actually, both actions were probably total hemorrhoids, but people don’t want to go into that after the sucker finally works.

The “medical-industrial complex” has come forth with their latest con: saving $2 trillion in health care costs.

While Krugman thinks it is nice that they have decided to get involved with the process, this paragraph is all I need to know it’s a con [my emphasis]:

The signatories of the letter say that they’re developing proposals to help the administration achieve its goal of shaving 1.5 percentage points off the growth rate of health care spending. That may not sound like much, but it’s actually huge: achieving that goal would save $2 trillion over the next decade.

So, they say that costs were going to grow at $400 billion a year, but they only grew at $200 billion a year, so they saved us $200 billion. Yeah, right.

How are they going to achieve these savings? Why, by screwing around with people’s health care, of course. The Republicans don’t want “government bureaucrats” making health care decisions, but don’t have a problem with insurance company bureaucrats doing it. The problem for the Republicans is that people on Medicare already know that doctors make health care decisions, not “government bureaucrats”.

Single payer saves $350 billion a year by dumping these parasites, so let’s save the additional money.

[More on this from Lambert at Corrente.]