Every Monday on Global Comment, we share the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need but that it’s easy to miss in our busy world. We distil the best of the web and recommend just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads.
Here are this week’s recommendations:
‘We don’t know his real name’: George Santos’s unravelling web of lies (David Smith / The Guardian)
Santos wrote on Twitter that his mother was killed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York but subsequently said she died on 23 December 2016. A review of his mother’s employment record found no evidence of her ever working at or near the World Trade Center, while her immigration history suggests that she was not even on American soil on 9/11.
Last October, Santos told the USA Today newspaper: “I am openly gay, have never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade, and I can tell you and assure you, I will always be an advocate for LGBTQ+ folks.” It subsequently emerged that he had been married to a woman, whom he divorced in 2019.
Santos claimed to have briefly attended Horace Mann, an elite private preparatory school in New York, but the school has no record of him. He said he has academic degrees from New York University and New York’s Baruch College and was even a star player on the Baruch volleyball team – again, there is no record of him having studied at either institution or playing volleyball.
How Hospice Became a For-Profit Hustle (Ava Kofman / The New Yorker)
Some hospice firms bribe physicians to bring them new patients by offering all-expenses-paid trips to Las Vegas night clubs, complete with bottle service and private security details. (The former mayor of Rio Bravo, Texas, who was also a doctor, received outright kickbacks.) Other audacious for-profit players enlist family and friends to act as make-believe clients, lure addicts with the promise of free painkillers, dupe people into the program by claiming that it’s free home health care, or steal personal information to enroll “phantom patients.” A twenty-nine-year-old pregnant woman learned that she’d been enrolled in Revelation Hospice, in the Mississippi Delta (which at one time discharged ninety-three per cent of its patients alive), only when she visited her doctor for a blood test. In Frisco, Texas, according to the F.B.I., a hospice owner tried to evade the Medicare-repayment problem by instructing staff to overdose patients who were staying on the service too long. He texted a nurse about one patient, “He better not make it tomorrow. Or I will blame u.” The owner was sentenced to more than thirteen years in prison for fraud, in a plea deal that made no allegations about patient deaths.
Dr Eric B. is a little confused
@dr.eric.b #covid #covid19 #pandemic #vaccine #fyp #medicine #healthcare ♬ original sound – Eric
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