Rev. Danny Fisher

This from the National Association of Social Workers:

ACTION NEEDED
Please contact your Senators today and urge them to sign the Specter, Harkin, Roberts, and Wyden Dear Colleague letter, asking President Obama to rescind the hospice rate cut regulation. This letter is similar to the House letter being submitted to President Obama, which garnered 169 signatures under the leadership of Representatives Van Hollen and Brown-Waite and with the support of NASW members. Without additional action, the moratorium on hospice rate cuts will expire later this year.

BACKGROUND
A CMS regulation to reduce Medicare reimbursement to hospices by phasing out the hospice Budget Neutrality Adjustment Factor (BNAF) over a three-year period took effect on October 1, 2008. Fortunately, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included a provision to delay implementation of the rule until September 30, 2009, thereby allowing hospice programs to continue providing high-quality and compassionate end-of-life care to more than 1.4 million individuals and families each year.

When the moratorium expires this autumn, however, the hospice rate cuts will be phased back in at an even greater magnitude for the next fiscal year. These cuts will cause many small, rural hospice programs to close their doors permanently, severely hindering patient access to essential services. Senators Arlen Specter, Tom Harkin, Pat Roberts, and Ron Wyden are circulating a letter to President Obama, asking him to rescind the hospice rate cut regulation immediately and enable hospices nationwide to continue fulfilling their crucial mission.

Send your messages here.

Image via Time Magazine.
This from the U.S. Campaign for Burma:

Aung San Suu Kyi’s 64th birthday is June 19th 2009.

Help us work to free her and all the people of Burma. Make a donation of $64, $640, or $6,400 — today.

Your donations make our work possible.

Donate here.

A young Osel Hita Torres (left) with His Holiness the Dalai Lama (right) more than a dozen years ago.
The Guardian has a piece on Osel Hita Torres, the young man who was identified as the reincarnation of Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition founder Lama Thubten Yeshe.

According to the foundation biography, another leader suspected Torres was the reincarnation of the recently deceased Lama Yeshe when he was only five months old. In 1986, at 14 months, his parents took him to see the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The toddler was chosen out of nine other candidates and eventually “enthroned”.

[...]

He is now studying film in Madrid and has denounced the Buddhist order that elevated him to guru status. “They took me away from my family and stuck me in a medieval situation in which I suffered a great deal,” said Torres, 24, describing how he was whisked from obscurity in Granada to a monastery in southern India. “It was like living a lie,” he told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

Formerly known as Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche, Torres’ story is recorded in Vicki Mackenzie’s very popular book Reincarnation: The Boy Lama.

[UPDATE: Over at The Worst Horse, our buddy Rod Meade Sperry offers an intriguing critique of this story, which is certainly only in the early stages of unfolding.]

Here’s the video version of a New York Times piece I posted about a couple days ago: