Keo Capestany, 73, got stung twice, first by a bee and then by a hospital. Danny Westneat, a columnist for the Seattle Times, reports that Capestany ate a piece of steak at a picnic, not noticing that "a yellow jacket was clinging to the bottom side. It stung or bit him right on the tongue."
Capestany's tongue got swollen, and he worried that it might obstruct his breathing. So he went to the Harborview Medical Center. After almost a day on a Benadryl drip, doctors gave him a clean bill of health and sent him home from the hospital:

Two weeks later, though, he got stung again: The bill was $8,200. The IV costs alone were $2,469. The emergency room fee: $2,822. The pharmacy tab ran to $964. . . .

Capestany found out that though he spent about 22 hours there in a room, his treatment is considered "outpatient."

His insurance (Medicare Part A and his wife's policy) only give broad coverage for inpatient hospitalizations, not outpatient visits. . . .

Harborview couldn't discuss Capestany's bill with me, but said it's Medicare that sets the rules on whether someone is an inpatient or out.

In fact, Medicare puts out a six-page guide--with charts--on how to tell which is which. It's so complicated, they advise that if you're ever in a hospital for more than a few hours, you better ask about your status. I wonder: Would staff even know the answer?

It seems Capestany is stuck with the bill. And here is the lesson columnist Westneat draws from the story:

I sure don't know what would work. A single-payer system, competing insurance exchanges, health savings accounts--all seem better than what we have now.

Yet some say no, slow down. Leave health care until we repair the economy.

At $8,200 for a bee sting, health care could become all that's left of the economy.

If only the federal government ran health care, we wouldn't have to worry about Medicare rules. Brilliant!

Times to City: Drop Dead 
The Obama administration appears to be backing away from one of its most grievous mistakes, the New York Post reports:

The trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed won't be held in lower Manhattan and could take place in a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, sources said last night.

Administration officials said that no final decision had been made but that officials of the Department of Justice and the White House were working feverishly to find a venue that would be less expensive and less of a security risk than New York City.

The back-to-the-future Gitmo option was reported yesterday by Fox News and was not disputed by White House officials.

The Guantanamo detention facility, of course, was supposed to have closed a week and a half ago. So much for that. MSNBC.com quotes Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, repeating a threat Obama himself once made:

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to meet justice and he's going to meet his maker," said President Barack Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs. "He will be brought to justice and he's likely to be executed for the heinous crimes that he committed in killing and masterminding the killing of 3,000 Americans. That you can be sure of."

A few years ago, we asked then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales why the Bush administration had placed such emphasis on trying terrorists for war crimes, as opposed to detaining them to keep them off the battlefield. He gave us an unsatisfying answer--something about how the families of terrorism's victims wanted to see the perpetrators "brought to justice." It occurred to us later that he might have been obliquely referring to the prospect of an execution--something he couldn't mention explicitly because it would create the appearance that the U.S. was running show trials.
It seems the Obama administration wants people to think it is running show trials.
The New York Times predictably denounces the administration for failing to stick to its insane position. The editorial titled "It Happened in Our Backyard"--in fact, the Times offices are miles away from Ground Zero and the federal courthouse where the trials would have taken place--begins with the assurance that "we sympathized with the concerns about security and inconvenience raised by the Justice Department's plan to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed" in Manhattan.
No such sympathy was evident, though, in the original editorial praising the decision in November. Here is what the paper said back then about critics of the administration's plan: "Republican lawmakers and the self-promoting independent senator from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman, pounced on the chance to appear on television." The Times is as ideologically zealous as ever, but at least its editors now feel obliged to give lip service to New Yorkers who live in the real world.

"All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming," he says in the tape, which has not been verified but is thought to be Bin Laden, according to the BBC. "This is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that." He added that "Bush the son, and the [US] Congress before him, rejected this agreement [the Kyoto protocol] only to satisfy the big companies."

The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests. We did.

The Continuing Global-Warmist Crack-Up 
London's Mail on Sunday reports on the latest climate-science scandal:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report's chapter on Asia, said: "It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

"It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in."

London's Times, meanwhile, reports that the IPCC's head, Rajendra Pachauri, "admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report":

"I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I'm in no mood to oblige them," he told The Times in an interview. "It was a collective failure by a number of people," he said. "I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It's best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip."

The Sunday Times turns up more errors:

The United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny--and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

But politicians have picked up on these false claims:

Ed Miliband, the [British] energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods--such as those in Bangladesh in 2007--could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent."

We are supposed to believe the politicians when they warn us about global warming because they have the authority of scientists behind them. The more we learn, however, the more it seems that scientists are merely playing politics.

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