Here's what was going on: Insurance companies determine reimbursement for out-of-network care based of what's called "usual, customary and reasonable rates" or UCR.

Those rates are determined by a firm called Ingenix. It turns out, Ingenix is owned by United Health Group, one of America's biggest insurance providers.

On Tuesday, New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo called it a conflict of interest that lowballs a medical provider's average fee by as much as 28 percent.

"These companies that have been involved with Ingenix, there is a very strong case that they were perpetuating consumer frauds," Cuomo said.

In a decision with national implications, United Health agreed to pay $50 million to establish an independent rating agency and shut down Ingenix.

"We regret that conflicts of interest were inherent in these Ingenix database products," said United Health Group attorney Mitchell Zamoff.

Call for Papers: Teaching women's and gender history with legal sources

Journal of Women's History Roundtable Forum

How can legal sources give evidence of women's lives, experiences, and voices? How do these sources represent, clarify, and obscure gender roles? How do students negotiate and interact with these sources and what sorts of teachable moments do they stage in the classroom? What challenges do legal sources present for teaching women's and gender history and how can one avoid misperceptions and misunderstandings? We seek essays (1000 words) that engage the problems and opportunities presented by legal sources in the undergraduate classroom.

This just serves to remind us of the changes we can enact in the world if we (and our allies) set our minds to it.

"But if the acid attack against Shamsia and 14 others -- students and teachers -- was meant to terrorize the girls into staying home, it appears to have completely failed.

"Today, nearly all of the wounded girls are back at the Mirwais School for Girls, including even Shamsia, whose face was so badly burned that she had to be sent abroad for treatment. Perhaps even more remarkable, nearly every other female student in this deeply conservative community has returned as well -- about 1,300 in all.

""My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed," said Shamsia, 17, in a moment after class. Shamsia's mother, like nearly all of the adult women in the area, is unable to read or write. "The people who did this to me don't want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things."

"In the five years since the Mirwais School for Girls was built here by the Japanese government, it appears to have set off something of a social revolution. Even as the Taliban tighten their noose around Kandahar, the girls flock to the school each morning. Many of them walk more than two miles from their mud-brick houses up in the hills.

Shaking and crying, Don Johnson turned to the lawmakers in front of him, produced an urn holding his daughter's ashes and begged them to pass a bill mandating carbon monoxide detectors in new homes and apartments.

"This is my daughter today!" he screamed. "That's all that's left of her!"

"And what's the difference? What's the difference? There it is. Twenty bucks," he said, holding up a bill to show what it would have cost for a detector that could have saved his daughter's life.

Lauren Johnson, 23, died last week after the lethal gas infiltrated her apartment. "Don't you dare not pass this bill. Please. Please."

He motorcaded to a house in Maryland this evening, and if the press pool report is accurate, he is breaking bread with William Kristol and David Brooks.  (If Brooks and Kristol seem to be unusually briefed about Obama's thinking, you'll know why.)

CBS News's Dan Raviv tells the pool that the house, on Grafton Street in Chevy Chase, belongs to George Will. (Unless he's moved.)

Tomorrow, I hear Obama has another private meeting with non-Republican opinion columnists.

Ellen Moran, the incoming White House communications director, set these meetings up.

Again -- establishment opinion matters to the Obama communications team.

Hamas has agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza based on Egypt's proposal, Arab sources told Ynet Wednesday. The conditions for the truce have not been published at this time.

Emmy-winning actor Patrick McGoohan, best known for starring in cult 1960s TV show The Prisoner, has died at the age of 80.
He died in Los Angeles after a short illness, his film producer son-in-law Cleve Landsberg told Associated Press.

The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.

A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series. One attorney general was quick to criticize the group's report.

On hand for "reading historical passages" will be actors Jamie Foxx, Queen Latifah and Denzel Washington, as well as Martin Luther King III. The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson will give the invocation at the event.
The selection of Robinson may be an effort by the Obama team to blunt the anger expressed in the gay community after he tapped Rev. Rick Warren, an opponent of gay marriage, to give the invocation at his Jan. 20 inauguration. Robinson, in contrast, the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion.

link via FP