Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – The U.S. government will likely make a $15.1 billion profit from bailing out insurance giant American International Group Inc., according to a congressional watchdog panel’s report.

The Government Accountability Office report came out on Monday. The GAO said the size of the profit depends on several factors. They include the long-term financial health of AIG (Fortune 500), the timing of the Treasury’s sale of the stock and AIG’s share price at the time of sale.

AIG showed signs of becoming more stable and profitable in 2011 with a net income of $18.5 billion, the GAO noted.

Taxpayers have an exposure through the U.S. Treasury for the government aid provided to AIG in 2008. However, that exposure has been significantly reduced from the original $180 billion committed to the bailout. The Treasury announced it was selling about $5 billion in common stock, which will bring the remaining investment down to $30.7 billion.

Government officials decided to bail out AIG because of its exposure to the troubled mortgage market after the housing bubble burst in 2008. AIG was deemed too big to fail

The bailout from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and the Federal Reserve was one of the federal government’s largest investments in a private sector institution, the GAO said.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Milk, bananas, bread, paper towels, mortgages. Yup, add mortgages to your Costco shopping list. It’s true; the USA’s largest warehouse membership chain now offers mortgages.

After a year of testing the waters, Costco is launching a full service mortgage lending program on its website in partnership with New Jersey based commercial bank First Choice Bank, and 10 other lenders.

To date, under the program, Costco partners have issued over 10,000 mortgages. The numbers is expected to soar as the warehouse retailer markets the service more aggressively to its millions of loyal customers in its myriad stores and in its widely circulated publication Connection.

Like others, Costco’s mortgage lending site gathers quotes from a variety of lenders. But, unlike others in the industry, under the Costco program, the borrower’s identity is revealed only after they formally choose the lender.

Costco makes no profit on the lending itself, but it does get paid to market the service.

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United States (KaiserHealth) – Twenty thousand physicians in four Midwest states received a glimpse into their financial future last month. Landing in their e-mail inboxes were links to reports from Medicare showing the amount their patients cost on average as well as the quality of the care they provided. The reports also showed how Medicare spending on each doctor’s patients compared to their local peers in Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska.

The “resource use” reports, which Medicare plans to eventually provide to doctors nationwide, are one of the most visible phases of the government’s effort to figure out how to enact a complex, delicate and little-noticed provision of the 2010 health care law: paying more to doctors who provide quality care at lower cost to Medicare, and reducing payments to physicians who run up Medicare’s costs without better results.

Making providers routinely pay attention to cost and quality is widely viewed as crucial if the country is going to rein in its health care spending, which amounts to more than $2.5 trillion a year. It’s also key to keeping Medicare solvent. Efforts have already begun to change the way Medicare pays hospitals, physicians and other providers who agree to work together in new alliances known as “accountable care organizations.” This fall, the federal health program for 47 million seniors and disabled people also is adjusting hospital payments based on quality of care, and it plans to take cost into account as early as next year.

But applying these same precepts to doctors is much more difficult, experts agree. Doctors see far fewer patients than do hospitals, so making statistically accurate assessments of doctors’ care is much harder. Comparing specialists is tricky, since some focus on particular kinds of patients that tend to be more costly.

Plus, properly assessing how a doctor affects costs must include not just the specific services she directly provides, but also care other providers may give, either because the patient was referred to them or because the original doctor didn’t take the right preventive steps to avoid more expensive treatments later on. And without properly adjusting for patients’ health problems, paying bonuses to physicians who use fewer Medicare resources might encourage doctors to stint on care or shun patients with expensive-to-treat ailments.

“It may be the most difficult measurement challenge in the whole world of value-based purchasing,” said Dr. Donald Berwick, the former administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS. “We do have to be cautious in this case. It could lead to levels of gaming and misunderstanding and incorrect signals to physicians that might not be best for everyone.”

Dr. Michael Kitchell, a neurologist and chairman of the board at the McFarland Clinic in Ames, Iowa, one of the state’s biggest multi-specialist practices, predicted the Medicare reports “will be a huge surprise to almost every physician.” That’s because the calculations of how much those doctors’ patients cost Medicare include not just the services of the individual doctor but of all the doctors that provided any treatment to the patient. Kitchell said his own patients saw on average 13 other physicians besides himself.

“You’re a victim or a beneficiary of your medical neighborhood,” Kitchell said. “If the primary care doctors are doing the preventative screening tests, you’ll get credit for that, but if you’re in a community where the community doctors are doing a poor job, you’re going to look bad.”

Medicare officials are trying to refine the way they judge doctors as they follow the health care law’s directive to phase in the new payment system, called a Physician Value-Based Payment Modifier, starting in 2015. It will initially apply only to physician groups and some specialists selected by the government, but by 2017 the payment change is supposed to apply to most if not all doctors.

The assessment “is a very important change we’re putting into place, one where we’re going to need a lot of feedback and deliberation,” said Jonathan Blum, CMS’s deputy administrator. “We’re not blind to the challenges that are coming toward us.”

Although the program is still being devised, it will become reality for many doctors starting in January, because CMS plans to base the 2015 bonuses or penalties on what happens to a doctor’s patients during 2013.

As the nation’s biggest insurer, Medicare’s adoption of this approach would be “a game changer” in terms of making physicians directly accountable for costs, said Anders Gilberg, senior vice president at the Medical Group Management Association, which represents physicians groups. Medicare is “going to be shifting money from … physicians who are deemed to be high cost relative to their peers to low-cost physicians. That’s going to create all kinds of new incentives in fee-for-service.”

Private insurers may follow Medicare’s lead, said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a Washington think tank. The formula Medicare ultimately designs to judge and pay doctors, Ginsburg said, could become “a valuable asset for private insurers, with a tool that will be somewhat bulletproof, that physicians won’t attack because they’ve been part of the process of developing them.”

But getting physician support may not be so easy, said Margaret O’Kane, president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a nonprofit in Washington. “Doctors are a very powerful political segment,” she said. In addition, she added, “Patients are not behind this agenda. The public is very scared about managing costs.”

In the reports, Medicare measures the average payments it made for each doctor’s patients, as well as subgroups of patients with common chronic conditions, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes and heart failure. Medicare adjusts the costs to take into account differences in patients’ age, gender, poverty and history of medical conditions.

For the resource reports, CMS has come up with a preliminary method to determine how central a role a doctor played in a patient’s care. If a doctor was responsible for at least 35 percent of a patient’s evaluation and management services, they are presumed to have “directed” the beneficiary’s care. If they didn’t direct the care but accounted for at least 20 percent of the physician fees billed for the beneficiary, they are considered to have “influenced” the care. And if they did less than that, they are considered to have “contributed” to the care.

But that method is widely considered so crude that few expect CMS will ultimately use it in payment. CMS is trying to develop more refined methods to compare physicians’ parsimony or extravagance with Medicare dollars using software programs called “episode groupers.” These programs determine the combined cost for all the services—including doctors, labs, hospitals and pharmaceuticals—that were used to treat a distinct medical situation, such as urinary tract infection or hypertension attack, over a set period of time.

Initially, Medicare attempted to use existing programs devised by commercial insurers but found they didn’t work with Medicare data, according to a report from the General Accounting Office. “It is not clear that all the problems identified with the commercial groupers can be solved by a Medicare specific grouper and the timeline for its development is challenging,” the report said.

Dana Gelb Safran, who oversees quality measurement for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, says she doubts it will be possible for the government to judge individual doctors. She predicts CMS will ultimately have to find ways to evaluate doctors as parts of groups- either formal affiliations as part of group practices or informal affiliations among doctors who refer to each other.

“There really are very few measures that we can reliably evaluate on the individual doctor level,” she said. “When they move forward with the value-based modifier, there is going to have to somehow allow physicians to identify other physicians with whom they say they practice and who they say they share clinical risk for performance.”

jrau@kff.org

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – E-books are encouraging more American adults to read.

New research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that about one-fifth of U.S. adults have read an e-book in the past year.

If the data is expanded to include Americans over the age of 16 who have used an e-reading device or app to read news articles or magazine style features, the figure soars to 43 percent.

Among findings in the Pew study, e-book users tend to read more often than those who only read print material. In particular, they tend to read more books overall.

A typical e-book user read 24 books in the past year, compared with the 15 books reported by typical non-e-book users. A third of people who read e-content say they now spend more time reading than they did before e-books.

What’s more, the news just might be good for the economy. Pew found that e-book readers were more likely to buy books than borrow them. Also, e-readers and tablets were among the best sellers during the past crucial holiday retail season.

That’s not such good news for bricks and mortar book stores, but Pew notes that print books remain the most popular choice when people want to borrow or lend a book.

The survey also found that a tad more people surveyed said they prefer e-books over print for reading in bed

Nearly 20 percent of Americans 16 and older say they have a physical or health condition that makes reading difficult or challenging, another plus for e-readers, which employ technology that adjusts size, font and color, and text-to speech.

As the price of e-readers continues to decline, this trend is only expected to grow.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – The U.S. Justice Department plans to extend the length of time intelligence agencies can retain records on private citizens, even if there is no evidence they are involved in terrorism.

The guidelines Attorney General Eric Holder signed this week for the National Counterterrorism Center are raising complaints from privacy advocates.

Until now, private information on Americans could be retained for no more than 180 days by the center.

The new guidelines allow them to be kept for five years.

In addition, intelligence officials will be able to make copies of the personal data and use it for data-mining, which refers to using algorithms that find patterns indicating a propensity toward terrorism.

The National Counterterrorism Center is a clearinghouse for intelligence agencies organized by Congress under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. It brings together efforts of the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. military, the National Security Council and other agencies.

“We have been pushing for this because NCTC’s success depends on having full access to all of the data that the U.S. has lawfully collected,” Rep. Mike Rogers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told The Washington Post. “I have not seen these DOJ guidelines yet, but I will review them carefully to ensure that no walls remain that block NCTC’s access to this information. I don’t want to leave any possibility of another catastrophic attack that was not prevented because an important piece of information was hidden in some filing cabinet.”

The new rules are partly an outgrowth of the attempted Dec. 25, 2009 airline bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, also known as the underwear bomber.

He was stopped by passengers and crew of a flight close to landing in Detroit when he tried to detonate explosives packed into his underwear.

The subsequent investigation showed that communications intercepted from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula hinted at an attack by Abdulmutallab. In addition, the U.S. Consulate in Nigeria received a report on the attacker.

However, the information never reached U.S. authorities who could have data-mined it to stop Abdulmutallab before the attack.

National Counterterrorism Center officials declined to identify what kind of personal information they are collecting on Americans.

However, previous testimony to Congress by intelligence officials about the George W. Bush administration’s “Total Information Awareness” program gives a hint at the data they use.

It included records on travel, credit card transactions, phone calls and visa applications.

Congress shut down part of the program following complaints by privacy advocates.

The non-profit Center for National Security Studies is raising the same kinds of complaints this week. Officials from the center say the Obama administration should have made the draft guidelines available for public comment before finalizing them.

Justice Department officials say they are taking precautions to ensure privacy is protected.

They plan to do audits to ensure agencies accessing personal information use the data appropriately to search for terrorist activity.

The guidelines fall within restrictions of the Privacy Act of 1974, which limit government authority to probe private information of citizens. The guidelines also do not alter the FBI’s terrorism watch lists of suspicious persons.

The new rules only modify the previous regulations for use of private information set by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey in 2008.

In general, the old rules allowed government agencies to search through private information only if a specific piece of information was needed for an investigation.

The new regulations allow broader searches that can include reproducing a database to analyze the information.

Replicating an entire database allows intelligence officers to clean up data that might otherwise be overlooked, according to the agencies.

In the case of the underwear bomber, Abdulmutallab was spelled differently in two sets of records of his transactions. Searching through entire databases could help identify discrepancies that might lead to a pattern, according to Justice Department officials.

In addition, the growth of data in the past decade means old methods of searching for specific data is less effective than data-mining it for patterns, they said.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Gold futures fell Wednesday in the aftermath of the Fed’s policy decision on Tuesday.

In early afternoon trading, gold futures for April delivery sank $49.50, or 2.9 percent, to $1,645 a troy ounce. The yellow metal is on track for its third straight session of losses. Market participants have returned to equity markets as the risk appetite for stocks has been stoked.

Gold traders acted negatively to Tuesday’s Federal Reserve policy statement and its modest, yet upbeat, assessment of the U.S. economy.

The Fed’s statements on Tuesday squashed any hopes of more monetary easing in the short term, and took away one of gold’s main pillars of support. A reduced likelihood of additional monetary stimulus is viewed as a negative for gold, which is seen as safe haven and a store of value when inflation rears its ugly head.

The recent losses in gold have removed the commodity from its peach as the most expensive precious metal, temporarily anyway.

Platinum, historically more expensive than gold to mine and rarer to obtain, had been trading more cheaply than gold since mid 2011. In addition to being the rarer metal, platinum also had industrial uses

On Tuesday platinum fell along with the other metals, some $27, to $1,674.70.

Silver, poor man’s gold, slid in sympathy. On Wednesday, the gray meat lost $1.34, or 4 percent, to $32.25 an ounce.

Gold analysts see support for the shiny metal around $1,600, and are poised to pounce at that level.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – Mortgage rates dipped in the week ending March 1 and hovered just above record lows set a few weeks back.

Mortgage giant Freddie Mac reported Thursday that the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage dropped to 3.90 percent from 3.95 percent. This time last year the average rate stood at 4.87 percent.

The 15-year fixed rate also inched down to 3.17 percent from 3.19 percent. A year ago it was at 4.15 percent.

While both averages are below the historic record lows set in early February, they are still well below where they were to start the year, which has helped the ailing economy.

Housing data released this week showed home prices fell 4 percent year-over-year to their lowest mark since 2002. A separate report revealed that foreclosures accounted for 23 percent of home purchases in 2011.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Stocks rallied Tuesday and propelled the Dow above the psychologically important 13.000 level. It was the first time the Dow surpassed the mark since May 2008.

Buoying markets was news that eurozone finance ministers had inked a deal for a second Greek bailout. Industrials lead the broad-based rally

Chevron, Alcoa, McDonalds, Home Depot and Bank of America were among the movers. Just before noon, the Dow had given back some gains, but was still up some 35 points to 12,986.43

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the NASDAQ also advanced, led by energy, materials and consumer staples.

European shares steadied after hitting seven-month highs in the previous session.

Global markets were cheering the Greek deal that staved off what would have been a messy and chaotic default.

With little on the economic calendar for Tuesday, investors traded off the overseas news.

Commodities also enjoyed gains. Oil was up $1.54 to $104.78. Gold soared $31 to $1,756 a troy ounce, platinum jumped $40, palladium gained $15 and silver was up 55 cents.

On Wednesday, traders will be looking at mortgage applications, existing homes sales and a five-year note auction. On Thursday market participants will weigh in on jobless claims, a report on the FHFA home price index. oil inventories and Apple’s shareholder meeting. On Friday, moving markets will be a report on consumer sentiments and new home sales.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – The CIA website stayed inaccessible hours after the first reports of the outage on Friday as an elusive group of hackers claimed responsibility in tweets.

“CIA TANGO DOWN” read an Anonymous-affiliated Twitter account. According to defense pundits, the expression is military-speak for eliminating a hostile force.

Earlier media reports cited Anonymous taking credit for crashing the websites of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which was quickly revived, and the FBI.

With the CIA site still down, another tweet from Anonymous affiliated accounts noted the reasons of the attack: “We do it for the lulz,” referring to the popular online abbreviation “for laughs.”

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Boston, MA, United States (AHN Sports) – Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick doesn’t agree with Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas’s decision not to attend a meeting with President Obama at the White House.

President Obama welcomed the Bruins to Washington earlier this week to honor the Stanley Cup champions. Thomas chose not to attend saying he was protesting a federal government that had “grown out of control, threatening the rights, liberties, and property of the people.”

Governor Patrick said Thomas was entitled to his views but said he was disappointed in his decision not to go to the White House on the “Ask the Governor” show on WTKK-FM.

“He’s a phenomenal hockey player and he’s entitled to his views, but it just feels to me like we’re losing in this country basic courtesy and grace,” Patrick said. “I didn’t think much of President Bush’s policies – two wars on a credit card, prescription drug benefit that we couldn’t afford, deficit out of control – but I always referred to him as ‘Mr. President.’ I stood when he came in the room,”

Thomas helped the Bruins win their first Stanley Cup in 39 years last season with a victory over the Vancouver Canucks in the finals.

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