Corporations

CMD's Senior Fellow on Health Care, Wendell Potter, spoke at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles about the ongoing struggle over the implementation of the new health care legislation. Coverage of the new law has been minimal lately, pushed off the front pages by the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but a lot has been going on behind the scenes. Even though Congress passed, and the president signed the new healthcare legislation, we still don't know how it's going to be implemented, because the legislation only lays out Congressional intent. Numerous regulations must now be written to govern the business of healthcare in America. Parts of the new law could still be invalidated by the courts, or repealed by future members of Congress. So what is going on behind the scenes, anyway? Big insurers are quietly working very hard to preserve the status quo, just as the big banks are doing with financial reform.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson questions BP's widespread application of oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico, as does everyone else. According to Jackson, the government is "uncharted waters" with the use of dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico. "The amount of dispersant being used at the surface is unprecedented," Jackson says. BP is also applying the chemicals in the sub-sea environment. In addition, dispersant is stopping oil from collecting on water surface, where it can be more easily controlled.

BP's Web site gives the impression that dispersants "clean and control" ocean oil spills by putting the oil in a state where "it becomes a feast for the naturally-occurring microbes that inhabit the ocean." But dispersants do not clean the water, nor do they remove oil at all, but rather re-arrange where it exists, and change where it goes.