1.)
One justification the Supreme Court gave in Citizens United for treating corporate political spending as "speech" was the belief that shareholders could monitor where CEOs were directing a corporation's political expenditures.
But, under the Citizens United precedent, any law regulating a corporation's political speech would likely be deemed unconstitutional-- despite the belief in shareholder control, the Court treated a corporate entity as an "individual" for first amendment purposes, rather than a bundle of shareholders.
Besides, Congress hesitates to interfere with business operations, particularly corporate governance.
However, active and engaged shareholders CAN apply pressure to corporations. See [http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1013-corporate-funding-20101012,0,3549097.story this article] from the LA Times. It would be interesting to see whether socially conscious investors and pension fund managers could push corporations to pass "shareholder approval" resolutions.
2.)
In short, donor disclosure falls under the mandate of the FEC and/or IRS (depending on how the group running ads is registered or incorporated). The FCC can require that the group sponsoring the ad disclose their identity, and if it costs over a certain amount and reaches a certain number of people, the FCC will report the group to the FEC.
The FCC's mandate regarding political advertising mostly relates to "fair access" to the airwaves-- all ads directly sponsored by candidates must be charged the lowest unit price, and if one candidate appears on the station or runs an ad, all other candidates must also be permitted equal access.
However, for ads not directly sponsored by a candidate (such as those from "outside interest groups" such as American Action Network or Committee for Truth in Politics), a station has more discretion-- "no censorship" provisions only apply to ads directly sponsored by candidates. An individual station <em>could</em> condition acceptance of an ad on its sponsor fully disclosing its donors; whether it would turn down paid advertisement, though, is another story.
Marketing campaigns to sell and profit are all around us. For example, Campbells Soup, which expects to make 8 billion in sales in 2011, offers "coupons for education" to make consumers feel good about their product. They encourage volunteers from schools to set up tables outside supermarkets to try to get shoppers to buy cans of soup and stop at the table afterward to hand over the coupon, which is worth 10 cents to schools. But Campbells gets free promotion via parent volunteers which is far more profitable than the coupons. In reality, Campbells cares about education in the same way that the alcohol industry cares about breast cancer.
While I'm a HUGE supporter of the healthcare reform laws as passed and the resulting consumer protections that come from them, there IS a problem with ICD-10 that needs more HHS attention.
ICD-10 is a world health standard when it comes to diagnostic coding and as a result, there are many good translations between ICD-9 and ICD-10 that allows us to have the advantage of now tracking the extra information that the ICD-10 standard supports without losing the meaning and history of all the old data gathered in ICD-9.
Unfortunately, the world health standard does not apply to ICD-10 Procedures. Each country in the world created their own standard and the US invention of ICD-10-PCS is a nice framework but the HHS has yet to provide general equivalence mappings from ICD-10-PCS back to ICD-9.
HHS has been doing a great job in getting the word out about ICD-10 diagnostic coding including classes/training for clinical coders and IT professionals. Using wikipedia as a measure of how well the information is being communicated you can see great progress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10-CM
BUT if you look at the ICD-10-PCS that has not been the case. HHS has delivered very few classes, there is much confusion, and as I mentioned come 10/1/2013 when it is to be implemented it really looks like we'll lose any ability to analyze/track what was previously done to a patient because General Equivalancy Mappings are still missing. Take a look at it's wikipedia page and you can see that it's far from a complete picture of an intended standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10_Procedure_Coding_System It's not HHS's job to update wikipedia but the fact that no one can fill in the blanks of what the standard is supposed to be should be a red-flag.
ICD-10-PCS is the system that truly tracks medical costs. Every procedure, study, x-ray, operation, and doctor's visit is going to get an ICD-10-PCS code. Anyone who truly wants to understand how costs are changing before/after medical reform is enacted needs to have a method of looking at data spanning both ICD-9 and ICD-10. I'm horrified at this point at the lack of progress on the ICD-10-PCS implementation to date by HHS.
I'm often skeptical of the profit motives of insurance companies but they do play a very important role in our reform plans by monitoring these costs and how they change over time. Since HHS is mandating the change to ICD-10 but not giving them what is needed to fill this important role they have every right to be warning us and in this particular instance we should be agreeing with them.
Medicare runs at 3% overhead because of how large the medical costs are (Seniors use 4x to 5x the services of normal commercial business, so the admin percent looks dramatically lower), not because it is so much more efficient. Using the Admin percent is not a good way to measure efficiency. If you looked at real dollars, Medicare is less efficient than the private sector...it's costs for the same functions of private insurers are less efficient.
As for all the complainers about insurers making a 2-5% margin on their business, since when is that excessive? Where is your complaining about Pharma which makes on average 20% margins, Medical device makers are near 10-15%, and provider organizations which are substantially higher too. Why be selective only with the insurer with your outrage?
The US Social Security Administration has a "Shopping Cart" with which it judges inflation for SS cost of living adjustments. For 2 years running there has been no adjustment. I'll bet if they weighed and measured this "Cart""in ounces, inches, etc, it would be a lot smaller.
Do we have recourse ?
The US Social Security Administration has a "Shopping Cart" with which it judges inflation for SS cost of living adjustments. For 2 years running there has been no adjustment. I'll bet if they weighed and measured this "Cart""in ounces, inches, etc, it would be a lot smaller.
Do we have recourse ?
Pages