Because of its massive drop in value, controversial hi-tech goods maker Foxconn, falls out of Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Two funds have filed a lawsuit against British bank Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation for profiting from hedge fund Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

Alpha Prime Fund and Senator Fund filed a claim against HSBC before a New York bankruptcy court on Friday. The two funds said HSBC served as custodian of Madoff’s funds and failed in its duty to monitor the discredited banker.

It is the second claim filed against HSBC after Madoff trustee, lawyer Irving Picard, filed a lawsuit against HSBC and several feeder funds for $9 billion in December. Picard charged that the bank and funds should have spotted Madoff’s fraud.

Irving claimed that HSBC asked accountancy firm KPMG twice to investigate the bank’s suspicion that Madoff’s investment company was involved in fraud, but the bank had a strong financial incentive to take part in the scheme by being silent about it.

HSBC previously said that KPMG did not conclude in its two reports that fraud was being committed by Madoff’s firm. The bank claimed lack of knowledge about the Ponzi scheme and cited a $1 billion loss as proof that it , too, was a victim of Madoff. HSBC previously asked a New York district court judge to dismiss Picard’s lawsuit.

Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence in a North Carolina federal prison, confirmed that HSBC went over his company’s books twice, but missed things.

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United States (ProPublica) – by Charles Ornstein

A Pittsburgh hospital informed patients earlier this year that they may have received unneeded angioplasties and stents, the tiny mesh tubes inserted to keep arteries open.

A Towson, Md., cardiologist faces a hearing on the fate of his medical license after being accused of implanting stents unnecessarily in more than 500 patients.

And this week, a new study found that more than half of patients with stable heart disease who received angioplasty and stents didn’t first receive medications, as scientific guidelines recommend.

While a host of lawsuits and research studies has raised questions about the overuse of stents, the group that represents cardiologists who implant them relies heavily on income from the makers of these devices.

The Society for Cardiac Angiography and Interventions (SCAI) received 57 percent of its revenues in 2009 from medical device and pharmaceutical makers, according to financial information on the group’s website.

Industry contributions to the society’s budget covered $4.7 million of the $8.2 million it received that year.

The group’s biggest funders are the companies with the biggest share of the stent market: Cordis Corp. (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson), Boston Scientific, Abbott Laboratories and Medtronic.

Researchers who study conflicts of interest in medicine say medical societies that receive a lot of industry support are susceptible to taking positions that either promote their sponsors’ products or downplay their risks.

ProPublica reported last week that the Heart Rhythm Society, which gets nearly half its revenues from drug and device makers, had sometimes left out or downplayed information about the risks and limitations of cardiac devices and procedures.

SCAI’s immediate past president, Dr. Larry Dean, said industry funding has no influence on the group’s medical positions or treatment guidelines and that it supports proper use of stents.

Asked about doctors accused of implanting unnecessary stents in patients, Dean said his group is not a “policing agency” but takes the issue seriously and would expel any doctor found guilty of inappropriately implanting them.

Stents are big business.

From fiscal 2004 to 2009, Medicare paid about $25.7 billion for inpatient hospital stays in which a patient received a cardiac stent. From calendar years 2005 to 2009, Medicare paid doctors approximately $1.3 billion for 248,116 procedures, government records show.

This week’s study about stent use in the Journal of the American Medical Association did not look at the role SCAI or other medical societies played in treatment decisions. One of the authors, however, said such groups need to play a role in ensuring that doctors practice medicine in line with the best scientific evidence.

“Our study should be viewed as … an important stimulus to societies, providers, physicians and health care organizations to try to optimize medical therapy,” said Dr. Alvin Mushlin, chairman of the public health department at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “I think there are plenty of opportunities to do more.”

Dean said the study doesn’t demonstrate the influence of industry on practice but rather “how difficult it is to educate the masses of cardiologists out there in practice.” Other studies, he said, have shown that the vast majority of stents have been implanted properly, particularly for patients with acute heart problems.

“I don’t think industry is driving the delivery of health care,” Dean said. “The companies that make stents don’t drive it either.”

A report released last year by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee suggests that the field of interventional cardiology has done little to discourage overtreatment.

The committee’s report cited an internal document from Abbott Laboratories describing a medical advisory board meeting in October 2007. Among the topics mentioned was a large clinical trial that recommended patients with stable heart disease be given drugs before receiving angioplasty and stents.

One of the “key takeaways” of the board meeting was that panelists “revealed candidly that they’re profession has done a better job promoting PCI than policing it and that some of these practices have alienated their fellow cardiologists,” the senate report quoted the Abbott document as saying.

SCAI receives a significantly higher proportion of industry funds than the American College of Cardiology, which last year took in less than a third of its revenues from drug and device makers.

Dean said his group would like to have a similar ratio of industry funding. But without raising dues or registration fees, he said, that could be tough.

About 20 percent of SCAI’s industry money is passed along to hospitals that run training programs for interventional cardiologists. Other funds are used to provide educational programs for doctors and raise awareness of heart disease among the public, he said.

Industry funding “has allowed us to do a lot of things that we would not have been able to do otherwise,” Dean said.

Membership societies, representing every specialty of medicine, play a critical role because they help set treatment guidelines used by physicians across the country, lobby for Medicare coverage and research funding, and provide information about diseases and treatments to the public.

Experts said that while many societies are eager to discuss the latest advances in their fields and ways in which drugs and devices may be underused, they spend less time talking about possible overuse.

In 2008 and 2009, Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Herb Kohl, D-Wis., targeted another cardiac group, the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, which holds annual gatherings to show off advances in stents and heart catheters.

The senators accused the research group’s leaders of failing to disclose millions of dollars they received from industry to Columbia University, with which the foundation is affiliated.

Columbia told the senators that the doctors received some of the money before they became employees and therefore did not have to disclose it. The university adopted a new policy on financial conflicts of interest in research in 2009.

– Provided by ProPublica.org

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Sacramento, CA, United States (KaiserHealth) – Now comes the hard part.

California, which has had a long, sometimes-tortured history of trying to overhaul its health care markets, beat every other state last year when it passed a law creating a health insurance exchange – an online marketplace where millions of uninsured residents will be able to get insurance.

Now the board overseeing the exchange must ensure that coverage on the exchange, which must be up and running in 2014, is affordable and easy to buy. It also must figure out how to administer federal subsidies to help lower-income people buy policies and make sure that the exchange attracts healthy as well as sick people. And the board must get its work done at a time when resources are extremely tight due to the state’s multi-billion-dollar budget deficit.

“The state has no money,” Kimberly Belshe, a member of the board and secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency under former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently told reporters. The exchange board has hired an acting administrator and is applying for grants and working on reports with help from consultants hired by private foundations.

Board members are determined to press forward.

“If California succeeds, it will lead the nation on health care reform,” Susan Kennedy, who served both as chief of staff to Schwarzenegger and as a top aide to former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, said at the panel’s first meeting in April. “If it fails, we’ll precipitate the failure of health care reform across the nation.”

The federal health care law calls for the formation of state-based exchanges, where individuals and small businesses – those with fewer than 100 workers — can compare insurance policies on cost and quality and buy coverage. Under the law, the federal subsidies, in the form of tax credits, will be provided to lower-income individuals In California, officials have said, about 3 to 4 million people initially will be eligible for the exchange, with the number potentially doubling in coming years.

The law gives states considerable latitude in setting up the exchanges – in deciding, for example, whether the exchange is essentially a passive body that allows all insurers to participate or an active group that sets rules and enforces standards involving value and quality. Massachusetts set up an exchange, called the Connector, years before the federal health care law was enacted. Jon Kingsdale, who spearheaded the effort, is now advising the California exchange board. Utah, in 2009, created a different type of exchange – one that takes much more of a “hands’ off” policy in dealing with insurers.

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Related FAQ

Health Insurance Exchanges Already Making Waves

In California’s case, the state law setting up the board called for an “active purchaser.” It empowered the exchange board to select insurance plan requirements and to decide which companies will be permitted to sell on the exchange and to negotiate prices with plans bidding for business.

“We have been very clear that it does not mean another regulator,” said Belshe, But she added that many questions remain unresolved – including how to decide which insurers should be allowed to participate in the exchange. “Is it the exchange’s place to really drive to the lowest rock-bottom price possible?” she asked. “Is it to reform the marketplace?”

In 2007, Schwarzenegger proposed a $14.7 billion overhaul to the state health care system, but the effort failed. Still, it brought together health policy experts from both parties to develop strategy to revamp the market, and many are involved in the current effort.

Several states besides California have taken steps to set up exchanges this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, including Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Indiana, Washington, Hawaii, Colorado, North Dakota and Vermont. Indiana’s exchange was established in January by executive order. Meanwhile, Washington legislators are waiting for Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire to sign their exchange bill. New Mexico’s legislature passed a bill that Republican Gov. Susana Martinez recently vetoed.

When California’s new exchange directors took their seats for their first meeting recently, there was one member of the five-member board missing – the yet unnamed appointee of the state Senate. Besides Kennedy and Belshe, the other members are Diana Dooley, interim chair and Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, and Paul Fearer, senior executive vice president and director of human resources at Union Bank and board chairman of Pacific Business Group on Health.

The board members, who are unpaid and serving four-year terms, got good reviews from the health policy players who attended the meeting. But Ellen Wu, the executive director of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, which advocates for health equity, griped about the board’s lack of diversity.

“We were instrumental in advocating for language that calls for diverse representation on the exchange board,” she said. “This is critical, as studies show that 65 percent of Californians who will benefit from subsidies in the exchange will be people of color and 32 percent will speak English less than well.”

Although different interests want different things from the board, most agree on one concept – the board must take steps to ensure that the exchange has a balance of healthy and sick people. If sick people predominate and healthier people drop out, premiums will rise to reflect the higher average costs of the group and the coverage will become unaffordable.

The antidote is “to get millions of people enrolled and start drawing down federal dollars on Day One,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition. “The game changer here is that the exchange gives consumers the bargaining power that they lack as individuals. Right now, they’re left all alone at the mercy of the big insurance companies. This provides them bargaining power to negotiate for the best price, value. But once they’re in, on whose behalf is the board negotiating? Will the exchange be the HR department for the rest of us? We have to be vigilant.”

Meanwhile, now that the exchange is a reality, previous foes, such as health insurance brokers and underwriters, say they’ll keep a close watch on its progress.

“Our trade association is committed to making this a success,” said Steven Lindsay, lobbyist for the California Association of Health Underwriters, which represents 2,500 insurance agents and brokers. “No matter what happens with national health reform, we will have this exchange in California. Change is here.”

But he is pessimistic. More exchanges have failed than succeeded, said Lindsay.

“We do not believe that the exchange website will get significant numbers of users,” he said. “The vast majority of people who will be in the exchange don’t have a college education. Health insurance is not in their cultures. They pay for care when needed. Now we go out and say to these folks, ‘You have to give us between 3 and 9 percent of your income for insurance.’ They might not even use computers.”

He also said that the board must figure out how to get as many people as possible enrolled in the exchange, and should provide financial incentives to agents and community groups to help with the enrollment. “If you don’t get enough people to sign up,” he said, “it will fail.”

Health exchanges “can work,” said former state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, whose single-payer proposals passed the legislature twice, but were vetoed by Schwarzenegger. But, she said, the problem is that “health exchanges still leave the insurance companies in charge.”

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

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Bolstered by soaring crude oil prices, BP reported a 17 percent increase in first-quarter profits and sought to convince investors that it was coping with the costs of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

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India’s top power producer National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) will sell power to Orissa’s state-run GRIDCO Ltd rom its solar power projects in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, the companysaid.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN Sports) – Standout linebacker Von Miller isn’t going to let a legal matter stop him from attending the NFL draft.

The former Texas A&M All-American will attend the NFL draft even though he’s a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the league to put an end to the lockout.

There has been talk of the NFL Players Association trying to organize a boycott of the draft by high-profile rookies, but Miller will be at Radio City Music Hall.

Miller is part of the 10-player antitrust suit filed against the NFL on March 11 in a Minnesota court. The only college player among the plaintiffs, Miller joined Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees among others as plaintiffs.

“I’m honored to get an invitation and I plan on being there,” Miller told ESPN.com. “It’s always been a dream of mine, having my name called and being able to walk across the stage and shake the hand of the commissioner.”

Miller felt there was no conflict in attending the draft despite the stance he is taking by being a part of the lawsuit.

“It doesn’t change my stance with current NFL players,” Miller said. “This is just separating the personal from the business. Personally, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fulfill a dream that my mom and dad, myself and my family can enjoy a very emotional day. But I still plan on being there for the players in trying to get this lockout lifted.”

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The crippling polio disease may be eradicated from India within the next two-three years, billionaire-philanthropist Bill Gates said Thursday.

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Manhattan, NY, United States (AHN) – The trustee appointed by the court to run after hedge fund operator Bernard Madoff’s millions told the court Tuesday that the bank account of Madoff’s wife, Ruth, received at least $14 million from the fraud.

Irving Picard, based his claims on monthly bank statements, canceled checks and other financial records of the Madoff couple from January 2002 to December 2008.

Picard said the money that was deposited in Ruth’s personal bank account came from the companies established by her husband.

When the Ponzi scheme of Madoff collapsed in 2008, the funds become property of Madoff’s clients, Picard argued when he filed a lawsuit in 2009 against Ruth.

Ruth, who is scheduled to respond to the lawsuit on March 31, gave up houses, jewelry and bank accounts to the U.S. government in June 2009.

According to reports, she has severed ties with Bernard and no longer visits him in jail after their son Mark took his life late last year out of shame.

She has moved to Florida from New York and lives a more frugal life. Friends of Ruth said she barely spends and lives in a house in Boca Raton loaned to her since the government also seized Madoff’s home in Palm Beach, Florida and a yacht.

Ruth got a $2.3 million deposit in her Bank of New York account that came from a Madoff brokerage firm used to buy the yacht, Picard disclosed. Most of the deposits were masked as interest payments on loans made to Madoff’s companies.

Aside from the 2009 lawsuit Picard filed against Ruth to recover $44.8 million profit from the Ponzi-like fraud, the trustee included her in another $1-billion lawsuit he filed against owners of the Mets baseball team – Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz – who were also partners in Sterling Equities where the Madoffs invested $12 million.

Ruth reportedly dyed her hair red and uses her maiden name of Alpem as part of her attempt to maintain a low-profile life in Florida. She drives a 14-year-old car and has been seen renting $1 DVDs from a kiosk at a Publix grocery.

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