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It was just a few weeks ago that Google was on the receiving end of a fairly big phishing scam, one that targeted Google Docs users with real-looking emails. The scam was only live for a short while before Google squashed it, but the risk remains and anyone can fall victim. Here to help protect its users is Google and … Continue reading

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Another Amazon patent related to drone deliveries has surfaced, this one describing possible methods the company’s future delivery drones may utilize to get packages to customers. One big question regarding drone deliveries is how, exactly, the package will go from the drone in the sky to the person on the ground. The patent details one method — a package label … Continue reading

A nationwide analysis of medical bills shows that hospitals typically charge uninsured emergency room patients four times what they’re willing to accept from Medicare for the same service, U.S. researchers say.

That’s more than double what those same hospitals charge for services performed in other parts of the hospital, the authors report in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The new study found, for example, that for a $100 treatment in the emergency room, some hospitals were charging patients up to $1,260.

“It points to the practice of price gouging by hospitals because patients often can’t pick their doctors in the emergency department,” lead author Dr. Tim Xu told Reuters Health in a telephone interview. “It’s a system that needs help.”

The extra cost is borne by people who don’t have health insurance and by insured patients who inadvertently – or out of necessity – get their treatment from doctors and hospitals that are not in an insurance company’s network of providers.

Even when a person is covered and insurance pays part of the bill, the patient may be responsible for paying the amount the insurance company considers unreasonable, a practice known as balance billing.

A few states, such as New York, ban the practice of issuing these “surprise medical bills.” They all should, said Xu, who did the study at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

“Unfortunately, only a handful of states have that kind of law. So patients really get struck in the crossfire and get these enormous bills that they really don’t expect,” he said.

Medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the U.S.

The study examined charges by 12,337 emergency medicine physicians and 57,607 internal medicine physicians based in the same 3,669 hospitals.

When the Xu team compared charges within the same hospital and what Medicare was willing to pay for them, they found that internal medicine services were typically charged at twice the Medicare allowance. But charges for services performed in the emergency room were typically 4.2 times higher, with some hospitals charging 12.6 times more.

Uninsured patients, or people treated outside their insurance company’s preferred network, were charged seven times the Medicare payment to repair a cut, six times more for interpreting an electrocardiogram to check heart function and 5.4 times more to insert an intravenous tube.

Those prices, they found, could vary widely. An uninsured patient could be expected to pay from 1.6 times more to as much as 27.7 times more to have an emergency department read a CT scan of the head.

When Medicare was paying $34 to read that electrocardiogram, hospitals typically charged patients $62 if it was read by an internal medicine physician and $96 if it was read by an emergency department physician.

People usually can’t plan for an emergency room visit “so hospitals take advantage of that. They’re more likely to set their prices higher,” Xu said.

Patients who ended up at a for-profit hospital faced the highest markup for getting emergency department services. They were charging, on average, 5.7 times what Medicare allowed.

Nationally, the markups were highest in the southeastern United States at 5.3-fold higher than the rest of the country, the researchers found.

Hospitals serving a large African American population or a large proportion of uninsured patients also charged more than average at five times the Medicare rate.

The group used 2013 price information collected through Medicare because “there’s not a lot of data out there about what hospitals charge. There’s a real lack of transparency,” Xu said. 

What should consumers do?

“Some pay this amount even though it’s egregious, Xu said. “Patients need to know they do have rights in this case. Often if they negotiate with the hospital they can get a discount, but that’s not solving the problem. This practice can continue because there’s no law stopping them.”

A better solution, he said, would be to get states and the federal government to ban balance billing.

SOURCE: bit.ly/2s9ScyW JAMA Internal Medicine, online May 30, 2017.

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“Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology, the ideology of a retarded culture.” Islam is “like a malignant cancer.” “I think Islam hates us.”  

These are just a few of the outlandish statements made by Western voices of political influence in recent times, one of whom is the president of the United States of America.

Such rhetoric that dangerously conflates Muslims and terrorists, and seeks to inflame the idea of a “clash of civilizations,” is nothing new. But it has made it especially difficult to be a Muslim today in America and Europe. In 2016 alone, the U.S. saw at least 385 instances of documented Islamophobia, many in the form of hate crimes and slandering. Only a few days ago, a crazed white man brutally killed two heroic men as they attempted to prevent him from harassing two young women, one of whom was wearing a hijab, on a train in Portland, Oregon. And Europe is experiencing a surge of anti-Muslim incidents as well.

I hope that this initiative ― the sharing of Western Muslim convert stories throughout Ramadan ― can begin to change the conversation.

Meanwhile, acts of terror committed in the name of a distorted version of Islam ― from Orlando and Paris to Manchester and Baghdad ― continue to dominate the news. Groups like the so-called Islamic State claim responsibility, and onlookers become ever more fearful of “the other.” In the West’s climate of Islamophobia, this “other,” more often than not, takes the form of a usually non-white immigrant Muslim who has an apparent deep hatred for Western society and its culture. It doesn’t matter to many that the statistics paint a much more nuanced picture, that a significant amount of those who end up carrying out attacks are not immigrants but Western natives who might not even be religious or that not all Muslims come from an Arab or South Asian ancestry. Or even that the vast majority of the people killed by these terrorists outside of the West are Muslims themselves.

But it should. And I hope that this initiative ― the sharing of Western Muslim convert stories throughout Ramadan ― can begin to change the conversation.

It is against a backdrop of the likes of U.S. President Donald Trump that we need actions like this more than ever. Efforts that ostensibly promote unity, such as Trump’s recent speech in Saudi Arabia to Arab and Muslim leaders, or his statement to mark the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, almost always fall flat, focusing on terrorism instead of the actual values of the faith ― piety, peace and compassion, to name a few.

As an American Muslim with American children and grandchildren, I am drawn to projects such as this in part because I understand the risks posed to families like my own if we don’t speak up. As a scholar of Islam committed to building bridges, I am also all too familiar with the many misconceptions we must eliminate in order to help heal this disconnect between Muslims and the West. It’s the ignorance and misunderstanding that fuels the violence directed towards “Middle Eastern-looking” men or women, including non-Muslims such as Hindus and Sikhs. Innocent lives lost as a result mean that it’s not just enough to understand the hatred or to know the statistics. We must seek out the stories of those who showcase the religion’s diversity and explicitly turn the stereotypes on their head.

Islam is a religion, not a skin tone or ethnicity. Its adherents range from Middle Eastern, to Bosnian, to African, to East Asian and everywhere in between. Your white neighbor could be a Muslim. A Muslim can also be someone not born into the religion but who decided to adopt it later on ― a convert. And while there are reports of Muslim converts turning to terrorism, those who take that route are tiny in number.

In fact, in my journeys across much of the Western world, I have found that Western Muslim converts present a unique perspective in the quest to understand Islam’s complex identity. They are often aware of both the strengths of Islam, such as its great respect for knowledge, learning and compassion, as well as the problems in the Muslim community and the stereotypes associated with the faith. As a result, converts are sometimes placed in the awkward position of being seen as somehow compromised Westerners in their native society and incomplete Muslims in the Muslim community. But it is precisely this position of the person in the middle that can allow them to play an important role in bridge building. They are able to communicate what it was in Islam in the first place that attracted them to it ― and their stories resonate far easier with those with whom they can relate in both appearance and experience.

Western Muslim converts present a unique perspective in the quest to understand Islam’s complex identity.

It is an unfortunate reality that this is where we are ― that in order to help those who fear Muslims understand the humanity of people of one of the world’s largest religions, it’s necessary to find examples of people who look like them and speak like them and have a shared history. That we must convince people in the West that people who worship like I do can be white, blonde and have never stepped foot in the Middle East. But I believe there is a lot of power in realizing that people of different backgrounds practice the same faith and follow the same rituals, even if it means acknowledging the uncomfortable reality that white Muslims may not face the same kind of discrimination for their “Muslim-ness” as non-white Muslims.

One of the ways I believe we can begin to turn the tide is to start by educating people about the diversity within Islam. I am an immigrant Muslim with a Pakistani background living in the U.S., and so I do fit in part the stereotype many in the West may have of Muslims. But there are others not like me ― born in the States or Europe, different in color from me, not even second-generation immigrants ― who are just as Muslim. These are the Western converts to Islam. Because they don’t fit the bill of “Muslim” and may not be immediately “otherized,” they may be just the perspective those wary of Muslims need to hear in order to understand that we’re just like anyone else. 

I met some of these distinguished converts to Islam while conducting fieldwork for “Journey into Europe,” a project on Islam in Europe and its place in European history and civilization. The converts that appear in this Ramadan series also appear in my feature-length documentary film (included below) and forthcoming book, Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity. 

This Ramadan, I hope to close the empathy gap with these stories of Western Muslim converts that I will be releasing throughout the month in this series. Ramadan is a time to look out for each other with compassion and care, to recognize and embrace our common humanity as we strive to be better humans in a better world. In sharing these stories of people who have chosen to adopt my faith, I hope to challenge your perspective of Islam.

If we start here and shake up people’s perceptions of Muslims and Islam, then perhaps we can turn the corner. It only takes one spark or one conversation to do it, and there could be no better time to unite as a global community than during Ramadan. I challenge you to be a part of this journey. If nothing else, consider these extraordinary profiles of Western Muslim converts as my gift towards peace in this blessed month.

Stay tuned for the stories.

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