Can you provide me with any of the relevant info regarding Nortel’s American employees on LTD that are going to be bailed-out by Erisa? It’s my understanding the the US plan was self-funded, and I also understood that your ERISA provides the exemption in the same way that our crappy provincial legislation exempts benefits not covered by insurance contracts. I need to understand how ERISA is being used to save the NORTEL LTD people in the U.S. so I can shove it into the faces of our apathetic politicians!

Could you help please? Thanks so much.

Well the GOA had this to say about tort reform:

“But even large savings in premiums can have only a small direct impact on health care spending–private or governmental–because malpractice costs account for less than 2 percent of that spending.”

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=4968&type=0#t3

And of course there is Tillinghast-Towers Perrin (the company that provides risk management for the insurance and reinsurance industry).

According to the actuarial consulting firm Towers Perrin, medical malpractice tort costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, the last year for which data are available. We have a more than a $2 trillion health care system. That puts litigation costs and malpractice insurance at 1 to 1.5 percent of total medical costs. That’s a rounding error. Liability isn’t even the tail on the cost dog. It’s the hair on the end of the tail.

Of that 1 to 1.5 percent what portion of that is “frivolous”

http://www.towersperrin.com/tp/getwebcachedoc?webc=USA/2008/200811/2008_tort_costs_trends.pdf (Page 10)

Tort reform is a red herring. It is unfortunate that everyone is so willing to give up their right to sue with such a small cost to society. If that is the case then maybe we should have death panels for the elders.

He likely prefers to be paid in cash to avoid taxes altogether. He likely comes to work at noon nursing a hangover.

Never fear, a satisfying, comprehensive solution is within reach: the Megamerge Dissolution Solution. Simply dissolve the border along with the failed Mexican government, and megamerge the two countries under U.S. law, with mass free 2-way migration eventually equalizing the development and opportunities permanently, with justice and without racism, and without threatening U.S. sovereignty or basic principles.

Click the url and read about the new paradigm for U.S.-Mexico relations.

Apparently, his Tenth Circuit appointment was such an impediment to his moonlighting gigs (writing books and teaching at not one, but three universities in his “spare time”), that he decided to “officially” convert to full- time with Stanford, where he will be a law professor and director of its constitutional law center.

As y’all already know, McConnell was acclaimed as a runner-up for a Supreme Court nomination. Stanford Law School dean Larry Kramer noted, “Michael McConnell is one of the nation’s most accomplished scholars . . . During the past two decades, he has been the preeminent legal scholar writing about the religion clauses of the United States Constitution, not to mention a leading authority on separation of powers, federalism, originalism, and any number of other subjects in constitutional law.”

You bet he is! McConnell personally mentored me on elusive constitutional dogmas that trump even the Fourteenth Amendment in our two-tier justice system, such as selective access to the court by judicial fiat and the venerable Because-I-Said-So doctrine. (Of course, nothing of either secret doctrine is taught in law schools, but both have their roots as long ago as when decision-making over controversies was delegated to judges). These two doctrines are applied through the practice of “private judging,” better known as unpublished opinion practice. McConnell, like Nottingham, reserved his scholarly efforts for high-profile cases (and, in the appellate context, published opinions), whereas everyone else gets the one or two-page memdispo written by a first-year law clerk.