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Amy Goodman interviews Stacie Ritter, whose twin daughters are being denied coverage by CIGNA for the followup care they need from the side-effects of cancer treatment:

STACIE RITTER: Hi. Thank you, Amy. Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Stacie. Tell us your story.

STACIE RITTER: Well, it’s a rather long one, so I’ll try to make it as brief as I can.

Our issues with insurance companies have been going on now for quite a while. It didn’t start with CIGNA, though, until April Fool’s Day of 2008. That’s when my husband’s employer switched insurers to CIGNA, which, again, as far as healthcare is concerned, you don’t have a choice. When your employer switches insurers, you get what they give you. And unfortunately, we were given CIGNA.

My girls are cancer survivors. They had pituitary and hypothalamus gland damage as a result of chemo and total body radiation to treat their cancer as part of the stem cell transplant that they had when they were four years old. And a lot of times when a child has that issue, they end up on growth hormone. Many years later, once the oncologist notices a—like a plateau in their growth, which mine did back in 2005, so she referred us to an endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, and he monitored them. And they didn’t start growth hormone until 2007. So that was two years of monitoring to make sure, you know, that it wasn’t just a little lax in their growth and that it was really a damaged pituitary and hypothalamus.

And once they started the growth hormone under our previous insurer, which was Aetna, they did very, very well. And so, our doctors said, well, then, that’s—their positive response to the medication is proof that it was damaged, then, the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. So that was great, so we’ll continue to do this until their bones start to fuse and they no longer need growth hormone.

But unfortunately, CIGNA does not feel the same way that our previous insurer and our world-renowned expert doctor felt. So they claim to have had two endocrinologists look at our case, and both of their endocrinologists deemed that my girls just suffer from idiopathic short stature, which means short stature of unknown origin. But quite to the contrary, we know the origin. We have lots of documentation and proof of the origin.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was—you say that was the radiation that they were exposed to to deal with their rare cancer.

STACIE RITTER: Yes. And chemotherapies, too, are very toxic, and also depends on the child’s age at the time, and even the sex has a lot to do with it. So, the younger the child, especially under five, which mine were—they were four at the time—and the sex—females tend to suffer more damage than males for some reason from the total body radiation. Not all children with cancer have these kind of late-term effects. It’s only children who have had radiation to the brain area, which mine did.

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From Democracy Now--ACORN Head Bertha Lewis Vows Action on Employee Misconduct, But Warns Group Targeted by “Modern-Day McCarthyism”. The Lou Dobbs, Glenn Becks and other right wing screechers of the world should be so proud. We need a few more Amy Goodmans and a few less of them to cut through the propoganda attacking one of the only groups out there advocating for poor people and minorities that don't have much of a voice in our society.

AMY GOODMAN: The anti-poverty group ACORN is coming under a firestorm of criticism after the group’s workers were caught on camera appearing to offer advice to a pimp and prostitute. The video was a major strike for conservatives, who for years have accused ACORN of voter registration fraud during presidential elections. Republicans are calling for a complete cutoff of all federal funding to the group, which helps poor people fight foreclosures, fix tax problems, and register to vote. We speak with ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis.

[....]

AMY GOODMAN: Yet the video came out, and you had some of your biggest supporters in Congress actually voting against ACORN, saying you shouldn’t get funding, because they were appalled by what they saw. How do you put—

BERTHA LEWIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —these two together?

BERTHA LEWIS: Well, first of all, we are suffering from a modern-day type of McCarthyism. You know, have you now or have you ever been associated with ACORN? This has been repeated in the right-wing Republican echo chamber, that somehow or another we are to be discredited.

We are the largest membership-based community organization of low- and moderate-income people of color, black and brown folks, in this country. We have been around for forty years. We’ve saved thousands of homes. We’ve helped raise the wages of tens of thousands and now hundreds of thousands of people. And also, we have been able to make sure that millions of disenfranchised black and brown folks in this country actually vote and they are actually counted.

So, for us, we know that there is a race element to trying to stop us. I mean, look at what’s happened with Van Jones and Eric Holder and Judge Sotomayor. We know that we have been used as a surrogate to attack President Obama. The teabaggers have had signs with ACORN at teabag parties, and we never even were around or there.

And it’s not going to stop. We understand that. And our work is not going to stop. So, the relative ten percent of our entire funding that would come through the government, sure, we are going to fight back against this, because we know that this is an unfair attack. And it’s been going on from the Republican side and the right-wing side. However, our core work will never stop.

And we know that—being the largest organization of black and brown folks, people of color, in this country, we know that we are a target. But we meet that challenge. And if you were to hear the racist, sexist, just horrible vitriol that are visited on our offices and on the phone, in emails, threats left at our door, hate mail letters sent, you know, it is very clear that people on the right, and Republicans in particular, are very upset that ACORN is effective and that it’s been around for forty years and that we are a powerful organization.

Full transcript at Democracy Now.

I know we'd all like to think there are ways to protect our privacy online, but there really aren't any - at least, any we have access to. And as long as Congress is too afraid of seeming "soft on terror," it's unlikely that legislation protecting our privacy will be passed. From Democracy Now!:

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Josh. Explain what they’re doing in Iran and then how the same technology is being used here.

JOSH SILVER: Well, yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Iranian government had secured this system from a German and Finnish company that will look through everything, both land line telephones, mobile telephones, email, websites, looking for keywords and actually monitoring the entire traffic going through one chokepoint in Iran. It’s been disputed by the European company, but the validity of the report seems solid.

What’s scary about this is that this technology that monitors everything that goes through the internet is something that works, it’s readily available, and there’s no legislation in the United States that prevents the US government from employing it. And that’s what’s really the cautionary tale here.

AMY GOODMAN: Your report is called “Deep Packet Inspection: The End of the Internet as We Know It.” Why does it threaten the internet, overall?

JOSH SILVER: Well, the problem is, is that, you know, if you look back to the 1930s, when telephone service became ubiquitous around the United States, lawmakers realized then that there was this new communications infrastructure and there needed to be consumer protections so that the government and others could not unlawfully or unethically monitor and listen in to the private conversations of American citizens. They established laws that prevented that from happening. In those laws, it made it so that the government requires a legitimate warrant, issued by a judge, that lets them do such monitoring.

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