CNN found a good candidate: One wheelchair — one lesson of problems in health care reform

SACRAMENTO, California (CNN) — Debbie Brown used to process medical and dental forms for a living before a debilitating illness forced her into early disability retirement and left her in a simple, no-frills wheelchair — a rented wheelchair that has cost taxpayers about $1,200.

Brown says the public should be outraged about her wheelchair.

Why? She says she could buy a comparable wheelchair on the Internet for $440 if she had the money. It sounded hard to believe that her rented, $1,200 taxpayer-funded wheelchair could be bought for $440, so CNN decided to check — and instead found an even better deal.

CNN went to the same company that charges Medicare for Brown’s chair, Apria Healthcare, and bought it for $349 — about a fourth of what taxpayers’ have paid for Brown’s rented wheelchair.

It is the same for almost everything that Medicare leases from these companies. I know because my Mother is on Medicare and they paid to lease a nebulizer for a month. My Mother thought the $75 was too much, so she asked me what it would cost to buy one. I found one made by the same company that was smaller, quieter, and more compact for $50 plus $5 shipping and bought it so she could turned the leased machine in before the month was out. She doesn’t use one every day, it is only necessary if she gets a bad cold. Paying $75/month was outrageous, but you can’t buy a serious nebulizer from anyone in town.

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The capitol bureau for the Pensacola News Journal reports on local races: Senate race wide open

TALLAHASSEE — The Panhandle will join the campaign frenzy of an unprecedented 2010 political season with wide-open state legislative races.

A state Senate seat and three House spots representing Northwest Florida are open next year because of term limits. There already are plenty of contenders — at least for Republicans — in the heavily GOP districts. Those races will be part of an election cycle with four open statewide Cabinet campaigns and a high-profile U.S. Senate contest.

State Sen. Durell Peaden, a Republican from Crestview, will end a 16-year legislative career — with a decade spent in the Senate — when he is term-limited out next year. The race to succeed him now includes two House members hoping for promotion to the upper chamber and a political neophyte seeking to upset the race for the Republican nomination.

Current House member Greg Evers from Baker [North Okaloosa county] calls himself a farmer. House member Dave Murzin of Pensacola admits to being involved in real estate and property management. Also from Pensacola, Mike Hill is an insurance agent. I would give Evers the edge in the district based on his address. The district is predominately rural, and it’s hard to get more rural than Baker.

People seem unaware that the moon landing was an international effort, as the ABC reminds people in their article, Fond memories of ‘the dish’ for moon-landing veterans.

If the moon landing had been faked, as PZ Myers noted that a CNN poll indicates some people seem to believe, it would have been an international conspiracy that would have had to include the Russians, because the signal from the surface of the moon was available for anyone with the proper receiver, which includes the Russians and certain people flying funny airplanes around with antennas all over them. All you needed was to be in a position to see the moon at the time of the transmission, something Australia could do, but the sites in the US couldn’t.

In his remembrance of Walter Cronkite, Mustang Bobby included the video of the Apollo 11 Landing on 20 July 1969 at 15:17:40 CDT.

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