Medical Debt And Your Credit Score

Medical Credit Score

Til Debt Do Us Part #3

By Melvin J. Howard

Do ever wonder why you have a low credit score or why you never seem to qualify for the lowest interest rates on home, car, or other loans, the problem may be medical debt. This is true even if you paid an overdue medical bill. The Federal Reserve has shown that more than half of all collection accounts that negatively impact credit reports are medical debt. This is a result of the fact that health care costs are on the rise and tens of millions are uninsured. But it is also because medical debt is treated differently from other kinds of debt. Private health insurance reimbursement is incredibly cumbersome. Different benefits are often covered by different companies and at different rates, leading to a lengthy, circuitous billing process that often leaves patients holding the bag. If you have ever received a medical bill that you didn’t understand or that you thought your insurance was supposed to cover, you have been caught up in this system. If you have ever received a letter from a health care provider stamped with the notice “This Is Not A Bill,” or if you have signed a form at a doctor’s office promising to pay anything your insurance fails to cover, you have been an unwitting victim in the tangled web of medical billing, an industry that thrives on patient and health care provider confusion.

One study found that nearly one-third of respondents let a medical bill go to a collection agency because they did not understand the bill or explanation of benefits statement. Another study estimated 14 million American adults said that a medical bill was sent to a collection agency because of a billing mistake.

Confusion keeps the medical collections industry turning. It’s hard not to think that billing “mistakes” may not be mistakes at all but part of an intentional strategy to keep patients in the dark and in the red. In addition to patient confusion, medical debt is more likely to end up in collection because hospitals routinely sell medical debt to debt collectors after 60-90 days of nonpayment, far less than the customary 180 days for other kinds of debt. Health care providers rarely report paid medical bills to the credit reporting agencies. So, even if you are billed in error, your health care provider may send your bill to a collection agency before you can dispute the charge. Once in default, a medical debt stays on a credit report for up to 7 years, even if you pay the bill. Research by the Commonwealth Fund shows that, in 2010, 9.2 million people wound up in default on a medical bill because of a billing mistake.

These mistakes have serious consequences. A single paid medical bill can lower a consumer credit score by as many as 80 points. That means you will pay a higher interest rate for almost anything else you want to buy on credit, including a home or a car. The fact that a relatively small medical bill can end up costing thousands in interest charges down the line demonstrates the obscene power of the credit rating agencies. No other companies have more power over the American consumer than the top three credit reporting agencies, Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian.

If patients are powerless, so are many health care providers. It’s important to note that your doctor may be just as confused as you are. Talk to any health care worker around the country, and they tell you that they are as frustrated as patients when it comes to medical billing. Why do insurance companies and ratings agencies have so much power over our lives? Why do we live in such perpetual confusion?

The Medical Debt Relief Act attempts to prohibit credit reporting agencies from listing medical debts on credit scores. Yet, even this minor reform has little chance of passing because the credit rating agencies and insurance companies are a powerful lobby in Washington. And even if the MDRA were to make it through the Senate, it only applies to paid medical bills. Indeed, the evidence actually indicates that if we don't act things will get worse for patients and debtors before they get better. FICO has begun developing a special ratings system to rank potential patients on how likely they are to pay their medical bills. Like having a barcode tattooed on your forehead, we could be looking at a brave new world in which your credit rating determines not only whether you can obtain a credit card but whether you receive medical care when you get sick.

Nonprofits are losing out to Privatizers that has got to stop forthwith

After years of welfare reform there is evidence that privatization has been successful, not for the people who were supposed to be moved out of poverty, but for corporate profiteers.

By Melvin J. Howard

An unintended consequence of welfare “reform” has been the transformation of the nonprofit sector particularly the better-funded national organizations from community assets to market-based competitors. The traditional distinction between nonprofits investing in people and communities, and for-profit entities that make money for their owners, is becoming blurred. In some areas, for-profits and nonprofits are now in direct competition; in others, they are creating partnerships to secure government contracts. In the Harvard Business Review, William P. Ryan, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based consultant to foundations and nonprofit organizations, looks at the changing landscape for nonprofits forged by government willingness to contract with for-profit corporations to administer government services. Ryan points out: “By playing in the new marketplace, nonprofits will be forced to reconfigure their operations and organizations in ways that could compromise their missions. The danger,” writes Ryan, “is that in their struggle to become more viable competitors in the short term, nonprofit organizations will be forced to compromise the very assets that made them so vital to society in the first place.”

One of the most insidious consequences of the San Francisco County’s welfare-to-work program is that local nonprofits and private businesses are able to “steal jobs from low-wage workers, for whom these jobs no longer exist.” This short sighted pitting of low-wage workers against welfare workers threatens to create a new group of unemployed workers, who may find themselves applying for welfare benefits.

To compete in the marketplace, nonprofits are adapting to its new realities in a myriad of ways, “from subcontracting to partnership to outright conversion to for-profit status,” writes Ryan. He points to the YWCA of Greater Milwaukee, which although “large and sophisticated by any nonprofit standard…could not go it alone.” In order to deal with the “demand of a comprehensive, $40 million welfare-to-work contract, it created a for-profit limited liability corporation [called YW Works], with two for-profit partners.”

In addition to unleashing predatory corporate forces, and the ongoing transformation of nonprofit organizations into high stakes competitors for government contracts, the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996 contains the first enactment of a concept known as “charitable choice.” Far from expanding anyone’s choices, “charitable choice” mandates that state and local governments include religious organizations in their pool of bidders for service-delivery contracts.

On the face of it, this is nothing new. As Cathlin Siobhan Baker, Co-Director of the Employment Project, explains, for years religious organizations have received government funding for emergency food programs, child care, youth programs, and the like. However, they were expressly prohibited from religious proselytizing. Now, Baker writes: “Gone are the prohibitions regarding government funding of pervasively sectarian organizations. Churches and other religious congregations that provide welfare services on behalf of the government can display religious symbols, use religious language, and use religious criteria in hiring and firing employees.”

President George W. Bush has been a big-time supporter of charitable choice and faith-based initiatives. If his faith-based initiative, announced to great fanfare in late January, ever gets back on track, it will allow for a bunch of social services to come under the control of faith-based organizations. During the presidential campaign, Bush repeatedly called for “armies of compassion” fielded by “faith-based organizations, charities and community groups” to help aid America’s poor and needy. In a USA Today opinion piece he laid out his plan for taking “the next bold step in welfare reform,” proposing $80 billion over 10 years in tax incentives to “help our nation’s most heroic armies of compassion.” He also proposed a federal initiative to “support community and faith-based groups that fortify marriage and champion the role of fathers.”

Welfare is no longer a question of poverty or the economic inequities in our society. Charitable choice frames the debate within such time-honored moral hodgepodge as the proverbial “epidemic of out-of-wedlock births,” or the “lack of personal responsibility”—behaviors that conservatives claim, contribute to the general moral breakdown of our society.

Since 1996, responsibility for welfare services has shifted from the federal government to the states and the states have contracted many services out to for-profit corporations and non-profit organizations. Under President Bush’s faith-based initiative, religious organizations have become a major player in the service provider mix. However, in addition to the bevy of objections raised by liberals and conservatives that have stalled the implementation of Bush’s faith-based plan, many people of faith do not believe that they can shoulder such a burden.

In Religion-Sponsored Social Service Providers: The Not-So-Independent Sector, independent researchers Jim Castelli and John McCarthy of Pennsylvania State University, conclude that it is mistaken to believe that faith communities can take on the burden of expanding their provision of social services as a substitute for government efforts. “Not only is there no infrastructure at the national, state, or local levels to administer programs and large amounts of funding, but such expansion would require faith communities to wholly change their funding priorities in order to build their capacity.”

Privatization as the engine powering welfare reform was supposed to replace federal and state bureaucracies with streamlined, cost-effective corporate service providers. Privatizers believed that private companies would administer welfare regulations more stringently and accurately, deliver services more efficiently, and focus on only those who really deserved benefits. Saving the taxpayers money was another appealing promise. Companies competing for contracts assured states that they would dramatically reduce the welfare rolls.

Has the privatization of welfare delivered on its promises? Have private companies and enterprising nonprofits transformed the old welfare system with the outcome of long-term employment with decent pay for former welfare recipients? Max Sawicky, economist at the Washington, DC-based Economic Policy Institute, is troubled by the fact that the so-called “success [of welfare privatization] was announced before the results are in.”

In a 1997 speech, Lawrence W. Reed, President of the conservative Midland, Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, touted privatization as the wave of the future: “The superiority of [privatization]…is now approaching the status of undisputed, conventional wisdom: the private sector exacts a toll from the inefficient for their poor performance, compels the service provider or asset owner to concern himself with the wishes of customers, and spurs a dynamic, never-ending pursuit of excellence - all without any of the political baggage that haunts the public sector as elements of its very nature.”

·         While welfare privatization has delivered drastic reductions in caseloads and welfare rolls, it has not moved recipients from the “underclass” to the working class. Privatization is not efficiently delivering job training and support services to those who need them.

·         The financial bonuses privatizers receive for reducing caseloads create an incentive to terminate clients’ benefits, not to assist them in climbing out of poverty.

·         As in the case of Curtis and Associates, staff working for private companies often have neither the credentials nor the training to handle their caseloads. Consequently, clients do not receive services they need, and to which they are entitled, such as childcare, transportation subsidies and medical care.

·         As Wisconsin, New York, and Texas have learned to their chagrin, companies like Maximus and Lockheed Martin blithely spend public money from other jurisdictions to wine, dine, and pay off decision-makers in the pursuit of new contracts.

·         The states and local governments that contract with corporations for welfare services have not instituted any form of systematic oversight. Because information about large private contractors is not centralized, it is not unusual for a company in hot water one place to pick up new contracts at the same time in another state—or in another county in the same state. Ultimately, for-profit corporations are accountable to their shareholders, not to the communities they are hired to serve.

Spurred by revelations of Maximus’s questionable activities, Milwaukee-area Democratic Congress- people Jerry Kleczka and Tom Barrett, are hoping the federal General Accounting Office will fully investigate the practices of private companies hired to manage welfare services. As we move closer to welfare reauthorization, the GAO needs to vigorously take on the Congresspeople’s request. In the meantime, corporations will continue prospecting for gold among the poor.                                      

MAXIMUS INC CONTRACT UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

Medicaid and Medicare Poverty and Wealth the money train

There is money to be made off the poor:
Til debt do us part #2
By Melvin J. Howard

In 2007, MAXIMUS agreed to pay $30.5 million to resolve an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) into False Claims Act allegations.  In a deferred-prosecution agreement, the company admitted responsibility for causing the District of Columbia to request Medicaid reimbursement as if the city‘s foster care agency provided reimbursable services to every single foster child when, as Maximus then well knew, that was not true. The DOJ described the settlement as demonstrating strong commitment to vigorously pursuing those companies that defraud the Medicaid program. However, both before and during the course of the litigation, MAXIMUS was almost inextricably linked to federal and state government agencies through contracts to provide services in Medicaid, Medicare, and other aid programs. Thus, the available sanction of exclusion from continued participation in federal aid programs was explicitly avoided as part of the settlement. Within two months of the settlement regarding allegedly fraudulent Medicaid claims, MAXIMUS won a five-year contract with the state of New York to provide Medicaid fraud-consulting services talk about the fox watching over the hen house. Within three months, the District of Columbia extended the same Medicaid revenue maximization contract with MAXIMUS that resulted in the alleged false claims. From the time of the settlement through the end of 2008, MAXIMUS entered into or extended contracts related to Medicaid or Medicare worth more than $240 million, including millions of dollars in contracts directly with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) the federal agency to which the allegedly fraudulent claims had been submitted. Then, one year after the DOJ settled its possible claims against MAXIMUS, the company won a contract to insert its services within the DOJ itself, to provide investigative and analytical support, consulting, technical services, financial management, and case-related professional support during the investigation and prosecution of criminal cases.

In addition to tax and debt instruments for raising revenue, intergovernmental grants are a primary tool for different levels of government to carry out their respective roles, and thus are a key application of fiscal federalism theory. In the United States, intergovernmental grants typically take the form of federal grant-in-aid programs, such aid programs has been to devolve more discretion and control to the states and local governments. The grant programs generally fall into three categories: matching programs such as Medicaid and Title IV-E Foster Care where state spending is required at a certain percentage match to receive additional federal funds; block grants like the current welfare cash assistance program (Temporary Aid to Needy Families, or TANF), which require states to maintain a certain level of state spending to receive the full federal block grant; and programs that are fully funded by the federal government but administered by the states, such as the Food Stamps Program.

Total federal spending on two of the largest matching grant programs, Medicaid and Title IV-E Foster Care, is projected to reach almost $320 billion in 2014. The programs are frequently targeted for contractor operational and consulting services and have been the subject of increased federal scrutiny into revenue maximization strategies. The programs provide an excellent example of intended fiscal federalism structure and the transformative effects that occur as the poverty industry‘s relationships with both the state and federal governments continue to grow. Numerous private companies have not only recognized the money to be made from poverty programs, but have concentrated on that niche as the core of their business offerings. With a mission of helping Government Serve the People, MAXIMUS provides operational and consulting services for almost all aspects of government health and human services programs. The poverty industry thrives on bad times. While many companies‘stocks were diving, MAXIMUS announced increased cash dividends to its shareholders. MAXIMUS also noted in its 2008 fourth quarter earnings call that there are more unemployed people and they look for job opportunities, and that plays right into the sweet spot for our welfare to work programs.

The depth and scope of the poverty industry‘s role in federal grant-in-aid programs and funds is striking, spurred in part by lobbying efforts, campaign contributions, and a revolving door of personnel between private industry and government leadership. The poverty–industrial complex has grown to the point where seemingly any task regardless of possible conflicts or limitations regarding inherently governmental functions can be contracted out.

 Pay-to-Play

A few years before former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich faced impeachment for allegedly trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat, he faced media scrutiny for his dealings with MAXIMUS. In 2005, The Chicago Sun Times reported on possible links between the company‘s receipt of state contracts and campaign contributions to Governor Blagojevich made by MAXIMUS and the company‘s lobbyists. According to the paper, MAXIMUS initially contracted with the state to develop a new plan to maximize federal aid dollars, and the company was then ―handed a waiver from state contracting rules by Blagojevich‘s administration so it [could] bid on the lucrative contract proposal it helped the state develop. The company had apparently given Blagojevich‘s political fund $25,500, and the company‘s lobbying firm—which employed the governor‘s former congressional chief of staff—donated another $80,300 to the governor.

Such scrutiny then reached to the west coast. According to the Los Angeles Times, when MAXIMUS faced the risk of losing a $32 million welfare-to-work contract with Los Angeles County, the company reacted by outspending its competitor on lobbying efforts by eight to one. The county‘s Department of Public Social Services concluded another company‘s bid was better, and a review panel and the auditor–controller upheld the decision on appeal. But after MAXIMUS spent $200,000 in lobbying fees and thousands more in campaign contributions, the paper explains, Los Angeles‘s five county supervisors voted to ignore the year-long review process and re-bid the contract to give MAXIMUS another chance.

Revolving Door

In addition to the influence of money and lobbying, there is a continuous flow of leadership between the ranks of government agencies and private contractors involved in federal grant-in-aid programs. While Governor of Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson was on the national forefront of the charge to privatize welfare and other poverty programs and he took his championship of privatization to the national stage as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. When he left his federal post, Thompson was rewarded with multiple positions in the private sector. Simultaneously, Thompson joined Deloitte Consulting, leading the firm‘s Center for Health Solutions; became a partner with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, where he focused on developing solutions for clients in the health care industry, as well as for companies doing business in the public sector; joined former U.S. House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt as a member of the board of directors for Centene Corporation, a company that provides Medicaid managed care services in several states; became the board chairman of Logistics Health Incorporated and joined the boards of directors of several private companies in the healthcare field.

As states increasingly view federal grant-in-aid funds as a source of general revenue rather than a means to enhance program services. Once the bipartisan pick for Commerce Secretary in the Obama Administration, U.S. Senator Judd Gregg has since become a critic of the Administration‘s increased spending on federal aid programs to address the economic downturn and budget difficulties faced by states. However, when Senator Gregg was governor of New Hampshire and faced a growing state budget deficit, he initiated a process of claiming additional federal Medicaid matching funds, but with no additional net outlay of state funds. Then, rather than using the additional funds for Medicaid-related services, Gregg created a new general revenue line item in his state budget called ―Medicaid Enhancement Revenue. Gregg converted additional federal Medicaid payments into general use rather than using the federal dollars for Medicaid programs and services. The strategy led to such an increase in federal funds that the new general revenue line item accounted for 28% of New Hampshire‘s total general fund revenue in 1994.Gregg balanced the state‘s budget—indeed, to the point of a surplus by converting federal funds intended to aid the poor into general state revenue.

The Medical Debt Market

Til Debt Do Us Part #1

By Melvin J. Howard

Over the next few entries I will be writing about the medical debt industry. I have a unique vantage point in commenting about this issue because of my background in health finance and a unique perspective of living with different healthcare systems. America is one if the only country that have such a market. Today, virtually every single American is one really bad day from financial ruin. Did you know that the vast majority of people that go bankrupt due to medical bills actually have health insurance?  Meanwhile, there are a significant number of people that are becoming fabulously wealthy off of this system.  Our “health care industry” has turned large numbers of individuals and company executives into multi-millionaires. The healthcare industry in the United States has been so corrupt and so greedy for so long that we don't even know what a legitimate medical system even looks like anymore something has got to change. People without insurance must privately finance health care. Less well understood, however, is that medical debt is not only a problem for those without coverage. One in five adults who are privately insured struggles to pay medical bills. Even more scandalous is the fact that Americans are paying more for weaker coverage (“Shorter Lives”). According to the Commonwealth Fund, the cost of insurance has outpaced wage increases for the last ten years. Employers are shifting these costs to employees and their families. Premiums increased 62% from 2003 to 2011. For at least ten million Americans, deductibles are so high that their insurance plans are little more than illusions, providing a false sense of security in hard times. The cost of health care has also risen faster than inflation. As a result, over the last few years, families have had little choice but to accept lower wages to hold on to benefits that, in the case of a serious illness or accident, may not protect them from financial disaster.

Almost every American is affected by medical debt. 

The healthcare industry is designed to benefit a few at the expense of the rest. Debtors and non-debtors alike are forced to pay out-of- pocket for everything from basic care to life-saving operations. The minute you walk into a doctor’s office or a hospital where you get ready to open your wallet to make an upfront payment called a co-pay, before seeing a doctor. The costs can start piling up from there, even if you have insurance. If you have a serious illness or accident, it’s unlikely that your insurance will cover all or even most of the care you need. What insurance doesn't pay, you’re responsible for remember that document you singed in the doctor’s office? Predictably, medical debt discriminates along familiar lines. According the Commonwealth Fund. Among the working-age population, 39% of women have medical bill problems, compared with just 25% of men. More than half of working-age African Americans (52%) report medical bill problems, in contrast with 34% of Hispanics and 28% of whites. 

Although medical debt affects some more than others, it cuts across lines of class, race, and gender. In fact, rates of medical indebtedness are comparable for people with and without insurance (“Consequences”). Insurance companies make a profit by denying claims. Private health insurance is akin to a life raft with holes in it. It simply sinks when you most need it. Americans spent $300 billion on out-of-pocket costs in 2010; a figure over and above the cost of health insurance premiums.Who is paying the price for our profit- based system? It may be obvious that low-income people pay a higher percentage of their income for health care. But the young are also at a high risk for incurring medical debt. This is because those from the ages of 19 to 29 are more likely to lack health insurance than older Americans. Many low-wage employers that hire young adults do not provide coverage, and since the 2008 financial crisis, new college graduates have disproportionately high rates of unemployment and underemployment. Through a toxic combination of college loans, medical debt, and a recession caused by banks, many people’s financial lives are ruined before they are even out of their twenties.

The link between medical debt and bankruptcy also shatters the myth of personal responsibility that makes many of us feel as if we are to blame if we can’t afford basic needs. According to a report in the American Journal of Medicine, most people who declare bankruptcy as a result of medical debt had insurance at the time they incurred the debt. Furthermore, the majority of medical debtors who declared bankruptcy attended college, owned their own home, and had middle-class jobs. They did everything “right,” yet they were still financially devastated when a member of their family got sick or had an accident.

If you have ever needed medical care but didn't have insurance, you most likely went to a public hospital or clinic. There are approximately 1,131 public hospitals in the US. These institutions, which serve 75% more uninsured patients than their private counterparts, are a vital resource for low-income and uninsured patients. Yet, public hospitals are disappearing. Like public schools, they have been swept up in a wave of privatization. The madness extends beyond the walls of the hospital. In 2012, the Minnesota Attorney General began an investigation of Accretive Health, one the largest medical debt collection firms in the country. Documents reveal that debt collectors were allowed into hospitals where they were indistinguishable from regular hospital staff. According to the New York Times, such collectors routinely demand [that patients] pay outstanding bills and may discourage them from seeking emergency care at all.” This is a violation of a federal law requiring hospitals to provide care to anyone who needs it.

TO BE CONTINUED:

THE QUANTUM EFFECTS ON THE MENTAL HEALTH OF SOCIETY

THE SCIENCE OF ECONOMICS AND THE HUMANITY IT SOMETIMES OVERLOOKS

By Melvin J. Howard

Einstein’s “E=Mc2” everybody has heard of this famous equation there are few others that are just as important but why does E=Mc2 stick out. Because the equation connects intangibility and tangibility by making them equivalent, it joins them as one. Energy, Mass and the speed of light that brings them together. Energy is everywhere and energy makes things happen and every object has mass. In 1905 Einstein did some of his best work what was Einstein’s reason for his quest after a Grand Unification Theory? Would it be fair to conclude that he hoped to better the living conditions of mankind? Did he want to cast light on a new view of Economics? Whether Einstein actually wanted to apply his thinking to Economics is beside the point. We can see in his search the desire to provide a path for such an inquiry. The economy as I observed are the laws of nature at work in the formulas governing the behavior of energy and mass a method for understanding the universe. Let’s see if we can bring energy mass and economics into the same expression of thought.

George Bernard Shaw once penned, “If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.” Shaw was frustrated because Economics is so difficult to understand. The study of human relations is called sociology. However, even though a study of Economics can involve mathematics, it is not a discipline bound up in numbers. William L. Anderson writes in the February 2002 issue of The Free Market: “Modern Economics fails at the very heart of analysis, that being the attempt to make Economics into a branch of mathematics instead of a systematic way of examining human action.” Economics is about human beings and how they relate to each other. It is about people in social groupings.

At the heart of the study of society is Economics, the study of how we meet the needs of each other. The aim of Economics is to create conditions that allow people to prosper. Today’s physicists have not erected an altar of stone to the God they seek. They have, however, opened themselves with honest vulnerability to that God by seeking the “Grand Unification Theory.” Their microscopic study into Quantum Physics and their macroscopic discoveries involving space-time have driven them to the edge of their ability to discover. On this cliff overlooking a clear understanding of as much of the universe as it is ours to analyze, they have let it be known that they seek the great unifying principle. The Unknown — they declare — must become known. They admit, in the words of Silvan S. Schweber, “.. the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws [of physics] leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. Does that speak to human intelligence recognizing it cannot grasp the full implications of the infinite? Yet, if the infinite is infinite, then He is also within the finite. His imprint should be visible to us, if not the extent of His presence and influence.

If science ever recognizes a “Grand Unification Law,” that law must be inter-disciplinary. It must not be limited to cosmology, chemistry, astronomy or mathematics. Further, it cannot be content with ignoring pre-Big-Bang considerations. Why is Quantum theory so important because it touches every part of our lives? From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed Quantum is happening. As scientists gained the technology to measure with greater precision, strange phenomena was observed. The birth of quantum physics is attributed to Max Planck's 1900 paper on blackbody radiation. Development of the field was done by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and many others. Ironically, Albert Einstein had serious theoretical issues with quantum mechanics and tried for many years to disprove or modify it. What's Special About Quantum Physics? In the realm of quantum physics, observing something actually influences the physical processes taking place. Light waves act like particles and particles act like waves (called wave particle duality). Matter can go from one spot to another without moving through the intervening space (called quantum tunnelling). Information moves instantly across vast distances. In fact, in quantum mechanics we discover that the entire universe is actually a series of probabilities. One of the most exciting discoveries of quantum physics is the realization that our thoughts affect the world around us. In the quantum realm--far smaller than protons and neutrons--quantum scientists have conducted numerous experiments with the smallest particles known.

In these quantum physics studies, it was discovered that the thoughts and expectations of the experimenter were actually causing the experiment's outcome! For instance, if the experimenter thought the particle would spin a certain way, it would! Scientists witnessed that a person's thoughts were actually causing the reaction of matter--at the quantum physics level.

The implications of this and other quantum physics studies has lead quantum scientists to understand that we have a direct effect on the world around us--our thoughts are affecting the physical world in which we live. In fact, they are discovering that the power of thought literally creates your world. I must admit for years I was lost in the mechanical world not open to thought. Just doing what everybody else was doing or as having the same thoughts as the people before me. Now I know life is about probabilities and possibilities. Probabilities are determined by variables for example if you toss a coin you have a 50% probability that you would get heads or tails. But if you take in to account the force at which you tossed the coin. Let’s not forget wind speed the direction you are standing and so forth would give you more of a chance of predictability. I am saying in essence if you knew all the variables that would affect the outcome you could predict with certainty 100% probability. Not only in economics but in real world life situations so open you mind to the possibilities do not limit yourself to old beliefs. Wealth is a state of mind to be picked up and pulled apart and studied. Thought is very important I am not just talking about surface thoughts. I am talking about deep inner core thoughts about your life and the interactions with it. You should remember just by you being born you have set a ripple effect in the world you have caused it to change in one form or another. Just like in the movie The Matrix when Morpheus is talking to Neo. This is your last chance after this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends; you wake up in your bed and believe what you want to believe. You take the red pill you stay in wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Neo takes the red pill, discovers that his entire life and the lives of everyone he has ever known have been an illusion. What pill do you want to take I took the red and can never go back.