Inside Operation Gold Rush, the largest healthcare fraud bust in US history
The 73-year-old retired engineer received a statement last year that Medicare, his health insurance provider, had been billed US$15,500 ($25,432) for urinary catheters – but his doctor had never ordered them, and Quindry never wanted nor received them.
Quindry complained to Medicare.
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NZ Herald
a day ago
- NZ Herald
Inside Operation Gold Rush, the largest healthcare fraud bust in US history
Gerald Quindry was facing a quandary. The 73-year-old retired engineer received a statement last year that Medicare, his health insurance provider, had been billed US$15,500 ($25,432) for urinary catheters – but his doctor had never ordered them, and Quindry never wanted nor received them. Quindry complained to Medicare.
The Spinoff
2 days ago
- The Spinoff
Inside the rise of injectables and the new age of cosmetic tweaks
From TikTok facelifts to 'baby Botox', cosmetic fixes are booming. What's driving the quest for perfection, asks Catherine McGregor in today's extract from The Bulletin. An age-old industry, a new face Devoting a Bulletin to cosmetic procedures might seem a bit left-field, but with Alex Casey's cover story on Botox leading The Spinoff this morning, it's the perfect chance to take stock of how – and why – so many New Zealanders are choosing to change their faces. From a few discreet units of 'baby Botox' to the full ordeal of a surgical lift, cosmetic medicine is broader and more accessible than ever. Just look at the global fascination with Kris Jenner's new face, or the TikTok shockwaves caused by Michelle Wood, the American woman who recently went to Mexico for a frankly incredible face lift that cost her just US$14,000 (NZ$23,000). It's no wonder 'cosmetic tourism' is booming, with places like Thailand luring New Zealanders seeking cheaper fixes than they can get at home. But as plastic surgeon Chris Adams told The Project in 2023, bargain shopping for your face comes with serious risks. 'I have seen patients who've come back, who've had much greater costs managing complications than they would've had if they'd funded the surgery in New Zealand,' he says. Is everyone using Botox? While a Mexican face lift is a step too far for most of us, Botox is firmly in the mainstream – as Alex discovered firsthand. At 33, she's decades away from needing (or wanting) major surgery, but the sight of lines starting to etch themselves onto her face led her to a cosmetic nurse's office. 'Also, every day on Instagram I see women twice my age with foreheads that look 10 years younger than mine and it makes me feel insane so yeah, no wonder I have fucking frown lines,' she writes. In her piece, Alex talks to women who swear by injectables, women who recoil from them, and women – like herself – who feel both tempted and furious about the prospect. As she leaves the injector's office, 'I am bubbling with an incandescent fury that I don't know where to direct,' she writes. 'I am angry at the nice nurse for hurting my feelings, but I am angrier at myself for asking her to.' Selfies, filters and 'Instagram face' What's driving this collective obsession? Part of the answer is in our pockets. As Julia Coffey wrote for The Conversation, selfie-editing apps like FaceTune and FaceApp give people a glimpse of a new and improved version of themselves with smoother skin, bigger eyes or sharper cheekbones. Cosmetic procedures offer a chance to make that fantasy self a reality. And as Jia Tolentino explored in The New Yorker (paywalled), all those subtle digital edits are helping to create a new beauty monoculture: 'Instagram Face', which Tolentino described as 'a single, cyborgian face… young … of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips … it's distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic.' What began with the Kim Kardashians of the world has trickled down through celebrities, influencers and selfie-editing apps to become an achievable (if expensive) aesthetic standard for women everywhere. Social media – or something else? While social media is an easy villain, the real driver could be more basic: it's simply easier than ever to buy a better face. As Martha Gill puts it in The Guardian, 'it is more affordable, more widespread and more advertised. Another huge barrier to treatment is meanwhile falling away: stigma.' That new openness is something Alex's piece lays bare. For many women she spoke to, the deciding factor wasn't a celebrity's wrinkle-free forehead, but a friend's. One got her first injections after complimenting a pal: 'She said, 'thanks, I get Botox' – then I looked into it and started getting it too.' One user summed up how many of us feel: 'So many of my friends get it, and it makes you feel like you're in this race against time – and everyone else.'
1News
3 days ago
- 1News
WHO fails to find a definitive answer for how Covid-19 began
An expert group charged by the World Health Organization to investigate how the Covid-19 pandemic started released its final report, reaching an unsatisfying conclusion: Scientists still aren't sure how the worst health emergency in a century began. At a press briefing Marietjie Venter, the group's chair, said that most scientific data supports the hypothesis that the new coronavirus jumped to humans from animals. That was also the conclusion drawn by the first WHO expert group that investigated the pandemic's origins in 2021, when scientists concluded the virus likely spread from bats to humans, via another intermediary animal. At the time, WHO said a lab leak was 'extremely unlikely'. Venter said that after more than three years of work, WHO's expert group was unable to get the necessary data to evaluate whether or not Covid-19 was the result of a lab accident, despite repeated requests for hundreds of genetic sequences and more detailed biosecurity information that were made to the Chinese government. 'Therefore, this hypothesis could not be investigated or excluded,' she said. 'It was deemed to be very speculative, based on political opinions and not backed up by science.' ADVERTISEMENT She said that the 27-member group did not reach a consensus; one member resigned earlier this week and three others asked for their names to be removed from the report. Venter said there was no evidence to prove that Covid-19 had been manipulated in a lab, nor was there any indication that the virus had been spreading before December 2019 anywhere outside of China. 'Until more scientific data becomes available, the origins of how SARS-CoV-2 entered human populations will remain inconclusive,' Venter said, referring to the scientific name for the Covid-19 virus. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was a 'moral imperative' to determine how Covid began, noting that the virus killed at least 20 million people, wiped at least US$10 trillion (NZ$16.5 trillion) from the global economy and upended the lives of billions. Last year, the AP found that the Chinese government froze meaningful domestic and international efforts to trace the virus' origins in the first weeks of the outbreak in 2020 and that WHO itself may have missed early opportunities to investigate how Covid-19 began. US President Donald Trump has long blamed the emergence of the coronavirus on a laboratory accident in China, while a US intelligence analysis found there was insufficient evidence to prove the theory. Chinese officials have repeatedly dismissed the idea that the pandemic could have started in a lab, saying that the search for its origins should be conducted in other countries. ADVERTISEMENT Last September, researchers zeroed in on a short list of animals they think might have spread Covid-19 to humans, including racoon dogs, civet cats and bamboo rats.
