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Family with health insurance billed $53,000 for newborn's air ambulance

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

LOVELAND, Colo. (KDVR) -- Mattias Spiegel is a healthy 18-month-old toddler. But on the day he was born, Sept. 17, 2021, breathing issues convinced hospital staff at the Medical Center of the Rockies that he needed to be airlifted by helicopter to Children's Hospital Colorado in Aurora."So they just hand a tablet and say, 'Will you sign this?' You know, for Children's (Hospital) to take care of him, and they're like, 'The helicopter's already in the air,'" Matthew Spiegel, Mattias' father, said. Family’s $2,500 hospital charge reduced after Problem Solvers get involved Spiegel told FOX31 he felt like he didn't have much choice in the matter, but he never guessed the bill for the 49-mile air ambulance trip from Loveland to Aurora would be $61,557.His health insurance provider, Anthem, paid Global Medical Response the in-network rate of $8,186 toward the bill. But because the air ambulance company is out-of-network, Spiegel was told he was on the hook for the remaining $53,370. "Pre...

$739 surprise medical bill for family, despite No Surprises Law

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo. (KDVR) -- Anita Gulati didn't even know about the No Surprises Act when she contacted the Problem Solvers about a $739 medical bill that was definitely surprising.The Greenwood Village mother had taken her son, Cyrus, to the emergency room at Sky Ridge Medical Center in Lone Tree on June 15."Feeling like sharp abdominal pain in my lower abs, and it was pretty painful. And it's like it was going on for like three or four days," Cyrus Gulati said. The 19-year-old remembered being evaluated by a surgeon at the hospital and remembered how brief the visit was. $1,525 facility fee highlights medical measure at Capitol to limit facility fees "He just felt around my stomach and said, 'You're good,' and walked away. And I was, 'Huh, sweet,'" he said.What wasn't so sweet was the $739 medical bill from the surgeon after his parent's insurance, UnitedHealthcare, paid the in-network hospital."'You are responsible for this, and it's going to go to collections if you don...

Knicks pull away late without Randle to beat Heat 101-92

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Immanuel Quickly scored 24 points, Quentin Grimes had 23 and the New York Knicks moved closer to a postseason berth with a 101-92 victory Wednesday night that sent the Miami Heat closer to the play-in tournament.Josh Hart added 13 for the Knicks, who overcame the loss of Julius Randle to a sprained left ankle to win their second straight and remained firmly in fifth place in the Eastern Conference. They are 2 1/2 games ahead of the Brooklyn Nets and opened a four-game gap over the seventh-place Heat.The top six teams are guaranteed postseason spots. The Heat’s third straight loss dropped them 1 1/2 games behind the Nets.Jalen Brunson returned from a two-game absence with a sprained left hand with 12 points, and RJ Barrett also finished with 12 after shaking off a 0-for-8 start. New York visits Cleveland on Friday in what could be the preview of the 4-5 matchup in the East.Gabe Vincent scored 21 points and Tyler Herro had 16 for the Heat, who faded down the stre...

Montour scores in OT, Panthers beat Maple Leafs to snap skid

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

TORONTO (AP) — Brandon Montour scored 1:41 into overtime and the Florida Panthers rallied to beat the Toronto Maple Leafs 3-2 on Wednesday night, snapping a four-game skid.Anton Lundell and Sam Reinhart also scored to help the Panthers get their first win since snapping a 6-0-1 stretch in a loss at Philadelphia on March 21st. Alex Lyon stopped 38 shots as Florida pulled one point behind Pittsburgh for the second wild card in the Eastern Conference.Zach Aston-Reese and Auston Matthews scored for the playoff-bound Maple Leafs, and Ilya Samsonov had 26 saves.In overtime, Aleksander Barkov brought the puck up the left side on a 2-on-2 rush and sent a cross-ice pass to Montour who quickly fired it past Samsonov for his 14th.The Panthers trailed 2-1 until Reinhart tied it with 1 minute left in regulation on a power play as he got a pass from Aaron Ekblad and fired a one-timer from above the left circle through traffic and past Samsonov. It was his 28th.Matthews had given Toronto the lead ...

Heavy rain causes flooding near SR 395 in Miami, triggers flood advisories in parts of Miami-Dade and Broward

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

Periods of heavy rain have triggered flood advisories in parts of Miami-Dade and Broward counties and led to extensive flooding on and near Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami.7News cameras captured standing water off Biscayne Boulevard near the exit ramp from the MacArthur Causeway, just after 10 p.m., Wednesday.City of Miami Police officers were seen blocking part of the flooded roadway to prevent drivers from becoming stuck.A car was seen stalled out near Northeast 11th Terrace and Biscayne.Drivers were seen turning around in an attempt to take Northeast Second Avenue as an alternate route.Two flood advisories remain in place in Miami-Dade: one near Miami International Airport until 11:15 p.m. and another for Miami Beach and Biscayne Bay until 11:45 p.m.A flood advisory remains in place for Central Broward until 10:45 p.m.The heaviest precipitation was recorded near MIA with 1.84 inches and Lauderdale Lakes with 1.80 inches.Most of the heavy rain has since moved off shore and wa...

It’s Groundhog Day for EU fiscal rule reform

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

Sander Tordoir is a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. Jasper van Dijk is the head of research for the Instituut voor Publieke Economie in the Netherlands.A desperately needed reform of the EU’s fiscal rules is finally underway.The current rules are too complicated — they impose unrealistic demands on some countries, and they lead to overspending in economic booms and austerity in recessions. Unsurprisingly, member countries barely adhere to them, and they just mandated the European Commission table legislation to address these flaws.For a long time, the European Union pretended that enforcing fiscal rules was a technocratic exercise, hiding political questions behind technical details. But the Commission’s original proposal, tabled in November, opened the door for more workable rules and better enforcement. It did away with rules that took little account of macroeconomic conditions or political realities, and it replaced them with multi-year debt-reduction pl...

It’s Rishi Sunak’s ‘green day.’ Just don’t mention net zero 

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

LONDON — Britain used to shout about its net zero targets. Not anymore.Worn as a badge of honor by previous Conservative governments — Theresa May made Britain the first major economy to enshrine a net zero target into law, while Boris Johnson was a vocal advocate of environmental policies — the pledge to eliminate carbon emissions now finds itself taking a back seat to Rishi Sunak’s tougher-sounding promise of “energy security” for the nation.To that end, Sunak and his energy security secretary, Grant Shapps, will travel to a location outside London Thursday to unveil a mish-mash of decarbonization initiatives badged collectively as an “energy revolution.” The push had originally been dubbed “green day” in Whitehall, according to Bloomberg, and was intended to reveal more details of the U.K.’s response to green subsidies under U.S. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.But British government officials have since been desperate to play this down, with one i...

The EU’s Mr. Aviation finds emergency exit

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

BRUSSELS — Henrik Hololei just wanted to say a big thank you to the airlines.Through an uncharacteristic stutter in his otherwise keynote-ready bombast, the EU’s aviation chief told the audience of industry figures — with a slight quiver in his voice — how grateful he was for their backing.At the time, just a week ago, Hololei was still fighting to keep his job as head of DG MOVE, the European Commission’s transport policy department. He was speaking almost a month after POLITICO first revealed that he had accepted free Qatar Airways flights while his team struck an open skies deal with the Gulf state. The strain was growing. An internal inquiry into his actions was under way following alarm from transparency campaigners and politicians. Commission officials scrambled to tighten the rules on free trips, and there was pressure from some of Hololei’s own colleagues to step aside. Aviation had been his one true love while in his role, according to advisers a...

Kyiv says Big Oil should pay to rebuild Ukraine’s shattered infrastructure

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

BRUSSELS — Major international energy companies that raked in bumper profits because of price spikes over the course of the war should pour some of that cash into rebuilding Ukraine’s shattered power infrastructure, Kyiv’s Energy Minister German Galushchenko told POLITICO. In a wide-ranging interview, Galushchenko also argued the West needed to close sanctions loopholes on Russian energy sales to prevent an “endless war” in Ukraine, and said Kyiv could provide alternative nuclear fuel so some EU countries could wean themselves off their dependence on Russian supplies. “A lot of energy companies get enormous windfall profits due to the war. So we estimated this at more than $200 billion,” Galushchenko said on a visit to Brussels. “They get this money because we are fighting, because of the war.” “I think it would be fair to share this money with Ukraine. I mean, to help us to restore, to rebuild the energy sector,” he added...

UK goes light-touch on AI as Elon Musk sounds the alarm

Published Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:32:42 GMT

LONDON — As Elon Musk urged humanity to get a grip on artificial intelligence, in London ministers were hailing its benefits.Rishi Sunak’s new technology chief Michelle Donelan on Wednesday unveiled the government’s long-awaited blueprint for regulating AI, insisting a heavy-handed approach is off the agenda.At the heart of the innovation-friendly pitch is a plan to give existing regulators a year to issue “practical guidance” for the safe use of machine learning in their sectors based on broad principles like safety, transparency, fairness and accountability. But no new legislation or regulatory bodies are being planned for the burgeoning technology.It stands in contrast to the strategy being pursued in Brussels, where lawmakers are pushing through a more detailed rulebook, backed by a new liability regime.Donelan insists her “common-sense, outcomes-oriented approach” will allow the U.K. to “be the best place in the world to build, test and use AI technology.”Her department’s ...