The world's richest man is apparently making a lot of money off a government program aimed at helping the poor Americans.
Every time someone gets a phone through Lifeline, a government program that gives phones to low-income Americans, TracPhone, a company in which Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim has a controlling stake, nets $10, Fox News reports. The company's CEO, Frederick "F.J." Pollak, who is a major Obama donor, also makes a profit from the data plans and minutes beneficiaries of the Lifeline program buy.
The Lifeline program has been pushed into the spotlight recently after a video surfaced of an Obama supporter saying she would be voting for the president because he gave her a free phone. Though the woman credited Obama for her phone, the president didn't start Lifeline; it began in 1984 -- Ronald Reagan was president then, for your information -- as a landline-only program, and President Clinton expanded it to include cell phones in 1996, according to the Atlantic Wire.
After the "Obamaphone Lady" video was posted on The Drudge Report, some alleged that the video's widespread circulation was fueled by racism, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Regardless of the controversy over the phone itself, the allegations that Slim is benefiting off a program aimed at helping the poor may only fuel characterizations of the $69 billion man as a super-rich mogul who capitalizes on the woes of others. Slim's son noted in an interview with Bloomberg in May that his father was taking advantage of the "opportunities" provided by the European Debt Crisis.
Critics, including hundreds of protesters at George Washington University in May, have also accused Slim of making his money off the backs of the Mexican people, as well as off of stifling the country's economic development. Slim has additionally urged us normals to continue working until we're at least 70, arguing that it would help to boost the world's struggling economies.
Crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill washes ashore in Orange Beach, Alabama, in June 2010. Photograph: Dave Martin/AP 
I have featured some of Sean Gourley here before and you can view another of his videos on the left side of this blog. He talks about his company and how to take big data and visualize it. You may have seen something similar to this before but as he states when you get thousands of keyword responses from Google it’s going to take you a very long time to go through all of them. With visualizing you can find regions of information quickly. Even the novice can use a system as such. The WHO easily comes to mind for me when looking at health related items world wide. You could be looking at clinical trial results and be able to quickly drill down to where you want to go. 
With the improvements, even single cancer cells can be accurately detected and safely isolated from patient blood samples for continuous analysis. 
are performed along with any other type of risk numbers such as mortality rates, etc. and the results must be saying “dump the spouse” according to this article in Market Watch. This is pretty much talking about employer provided insurance. There are people out there that marry for this, well almost but it certainly is a big consideration, and maybe they really do. A couple years ago we had this story on the web. 
as $100 a month and depending on income that can be a big issue or an inconvenience. In 2014 we shall how this works as there will be exchanges for spouses to get insurance outside the company with the next provisions of the healthcare reform kick in. Some companies will only allow the spouse added on if they already have their own insurance. If plans are different and cover different doctors then both can’t see the same doctor. Risk assessments and costs are working on all budgets today. In some cases with Medicaid as this link below states, people get divorced to get coverage and it all comes back to income and how the numbers work out. This sure doesn’t do much for keep the American tradition of family together. BD 
Jon Stewart does a pretty good job with this serious topic. There are 3 parts to the interview. The point out that non-profits do make money. MRIs are one of the first topics discussed and that has been in the news of late with the various charges and prices you get. All the pricing is done with IT infrastructures that build on itself. They don’t even touch the Health IT expenditures and how some of that goes. I do that enough here. Today saw this article about start ups and almost everyone of them looks like it has a model to sell data. 
a lot of what I talk about government snowed by corporate USA business models and the complexities they build, to make money. If you want to see more about how it works, watch the videos in the left hand side of this blog or visit the “Algo Duped” page. 
We need cabinet heads that have a little tech in their background. I think the biggest problem is the perception that permeates in DC with what I see as “its for those guys over there” pass those laws, “for those guys over there’. Sometimes you see that in software development too with developers that don’t even touch their own consumer software they write, just in it for the money. Part of that too goes back to the Aneesh Chopra days with way too many talks about “write code and get rich” and at the time he was good cheerleader but the need changed and we have a better US CIO with some real tech knowledge now in place and boy does he have a big job to do as well. Watch the video below in just reading this blog post, don’t there’s some truth to Congress needing a bigger brain? 
at what happens…this allows consumers to get hurt because corporate USA uses items as such and creates models, formulas, etc. that take data out of context to make money. I’ve written about that for quite a while now and will provide a link below to where you can see a business discussion about “value” in the analytics being thrown out there today. Don’t get sucked in if it doesn’t sound right, ask questions. This may be a little technical but you can get something out out it for sure..it’s the math and models folks so listen up here if you can, the OMG soap operas aren’t getting you anywhere other than being entertained and frustrated. 
the news? Will they read up? Who knows. This week we have yet another issue with digital illiteracy making news…the next governor vying for “Governor Ultrasound” recognition. It’s digital illiteracy breaking out at the seems as we wouldn’t see stuff like this if they were not lost in the world of technology. It gives MSNBC a ton of material to work with as well. Don’t these guys ever think about how the “educated” world sees them? 
was the acquisition that put the company into the medical records business with the first system sold called MyWay. If you have kept up on some of the news you have probably read that the original EMR is not an ONC certified system and that Allscripts has offered free upgrades to those still using the original program. There are other vendors who are offering a free transfer of the records if they convert to their medical records system. Back in 2008 the link below will give you a few more details as the two companies merged and Allscripts was the decided marketing name. I used to compete with the original Misys system, back in the very early days. 
complex mode and this is where the trouble came with promising shareholders a date for release and it was not completed. As when you dig in with anything like this, you find plenty of things to repair, modify and rewrite so it all caught up. Sales were projected and based on this time element too. I read all the time about clients not getting their software when promised and it’s late, so just expect that if you want it to work correctly and be debugged properly before it is finally compiled. 
the old days with combining code and we all work with platforms today anywhere to where we are dependent on code written outside our immediate control, so get used to it. I said the same thing not too long ago trying to break it through HHS’s head as well as the news came out to rush. If you don’t have the “walk and chew code” mentality and knowledge at the top in organizations and in government today this is what you get, as I sometimes call it, “waiting for the Algorithm Fairy” to come in and fix everything. 
Mr. Tullman had but from how this has all developed, I seem to think he’s also one who never wrote a stick of code and that makes a difference, so compare him to CEO Judy at Epic who wrote the original software at Epic. All say they have a high priced product but they also had some high expenses and major code to write when they secured Kaiser and everyone else who purchased after that fact benefitted, so there was some recovery of cost with new engineering with the EMR modules in their system. 
