US citizens: call on the Senate NOT to confirm Republican nominee Demetrios Kouzoukas as Medicare Trustee: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-the-senate-dont-confirm-kouzoukas-for-medicare-trustee He has a conflict of interest involving a private company that hopes to profit from his decisions.
@rms Surely that has to be illegal, as it's obviously corrupt?
(Mind you, many British #Conservative MPs have similar conflicts of interest, especially with regards to health care).
@simon_brooke as usual, this is a special interest spinning a tale and probably looking to get some donations by upsetting people.
I wish people would stop buying into this nonsense. But they get fooled over and over and keep going back to such sources.
@simon_brooke There's an eternal problem with governance in that often enough the people with expertise in any industry are already involved in the industry, so you end up having to face the choice of whether or not to bring in someone with expertise, even if it allows articles like this to throw dirt.
That the guy is a member of the board of directors means that he might know what he's talking about.
There's not necessarily a conflict of interest here, but there is like I said the normal issue of how to govern if we are to avoid having anyone involved who knows what they're talking about.
@volkris @rms if someone who is a director of a company that is taking money from medicare is also a member of the supervisory body that's controlling how medicare dishes out money, that's corrupt and it doesn't matter how expert he is.
Ye cannae dae that. It's not how honest business works. Not in any country.
Again, the difficult question is one of how to run governance if we exclude anyone who knows about the thing being governed.
And again, are we to give up governing by people who know what they're talking about when they don't?
@volkris @rms Kouzoukas is definitely a member of the boards of several healthcare companies, including an insurance company doing business with MediCare:
https://investors.cloverhealth.com/board-member/demetrios-kouzoukas
https://team8.vc/team/demetrios-l-kouzoukas/
So he has a conflict of interest. So he should not be appointed to a public body overseeing Medicare's financial relationships with private companies.
Surely there's nothing in the least bit controversial about that?