April 9 - Sticker Shock from the Release of Medicare Payment Information; Time to Try Something Else Than the Israeli / Palestinian Peace Process; Is America Rigged for the Rich?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the release of Medicare payment information that has been blocked since 1979 that reveals $26 million in payments to an ophthalmologist in Florida for seeing 900 patients and a cardiologist who got $23 million in Medicare payments in 2012, 80 times the average billing for cardiologists. Max Richtman, a former staff director of the Senate Committee on Aging and President and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare joins us to discuss how much this alarming data will be used as ammunition for those wanting to cut Medicare and how much could be saved by going after these apparent fraudsters.

Part 2

Then we  go to Doha, Qatar to speak with Clayton Swisher, the Manager of Investigative Journalism for Al Jazeera who is the author of “The Truth About Camp David” and “The Palestine Papers: The End of the Road”, which is based on the 1,600 files of leaked confidential records of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks entrusted to him and published by Al-Jazeera and The Guardian in 2011. We discuss his article at The Huffington Post “Isn’t it Time to Try Something Else” and assess the possibility of using the latest collapse of the Israeli/Palestinian peace talks as an opportunity to try a different approach to the bankrupt decades-long peace process, that has been all about process, but not peace.

Part 3

Then finally Eric Liu, the founder of Citizen University who served as a White House speechwriter and policy advisor for President Clinton, joins us to discuss his article at CNN “How America is rigged for the rich”. We  look into how Paul Ryan, whose budget wants to cut the top tax rate from 39.6% to 25%, has the wrong focus when he asserts that we have a culture of poverty in America when it appears we have a culture of concentrate wealth, and that picking on the poor misses the point that the playing field is increasingly rigged against those who aspire for the American Dream.