Plane tickets to Orlando? Check. Sunscreen? Check. Dad’s cholesterol medicine? Check. A disabled person to help the family cut the lines at all the rides at Disney World? Checkmate.
After all, how pathetically pedestrian would it be to have to wait on long lines with the unwashed 99% just to ride in the tea cups for a couple of minutes. No thanks. For those that wonder how the 1%, (actually more like the 0.01%) in Manhattan do Disney World, look no further. For a mere $130 an hour you can purchase a disabled person to help you jump ahead of your monetary challenged neighbors on rides throughout the park. From the New York Post:
Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.
The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.
The woman said she hired a Dream Tours guide to escort her, her husband and their 1-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter through the park in a motorized scooter with a “handicapped” sign on it. The group was sent straight to an auxiliary entrance at the front of each attraction.
Disney allows each guest who needs a wheelchair or motorized scooter to bring up to six guests to a “more convenient entrance.”
The Florida entertainment mecca warns that there “may be a waiting period before boarding.” But the consensus among upper-crust moms who have used the illicit handicap tactic is that the trick is well worth the cost.
Not only is their “black-market tour guide” more efficient than Disney World’s VIP Tours, it’s cheaper, too.
Disney Tours offers a VIP guide and fast passes for $310 to $380 per hour.
Not only do these folks want to cut the lines, but they want to get the best deal possible while doing it! Classy.
Passing around the rogue guide service’s phone number recently became a shameless ritual among Manhattan’s private-school set during spring break. The service asks who referred you before they even take your call.
“It’s insider knowledge that very few have and share carefully,” said social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin, who caught wind of the underground network while doing research for her upcoming book “Primates of Park Avenue.”
This seems like a good time to reread my 2010 article, Goodbye Disneyland, which is the first article I wrote after resigning from Bernstein that went viral on the web.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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Grooming their kids for their rightful position in society, I guess.
L.A. poised to go after Las Vegas hospital in patient-dumping cases
Years before a Las Vegas psychiatric hospital bused a homeless, schizophrenic man to Sacramento without arranging contacts or a plan for care, a different hospital ditched Gabino Olvera on Skid Row in Los Angeles.
Olvera, homeless and paraplegic, still dressed in his hospital gown and connected to a catheter bag, was found dragging himself along a gutter in 2007.
The case and others like it motivated the city of Los Angeles to adopt one of the toughest “patient-dumping” laws in the nation.
“It’s just an abhorrent practice,” said Gil Cedillo, a candidate for Los Angeles City Council and former state senator who played a role in shaping his city’s law. “You can’t just take someone from a facility and dump them downtown.”
Multiple agencies, including the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, are investigating whether Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada’s primary public mental health facility, has been systematically dumping patients across state lines for years.
A Bee investigation found that the hospital had bused roughly 1,500 psychiatric patients to cities across the nation over the past five years, a third of them to California. By policy, those patients were put on buses alone, with one-way tickets out of town, a small supply of medication and several bottles of Ensure nutritional supplement for the journey.
Nevada health officials maintain that the bulk of those patients were shipped to communities where they had family, friends or treatment waiting. Late last month, following The Bee’s report, the hospital revised its policy to require psychiatric patients bused out of state to be accompanied by a chaperone.
But questions linger about the safety of the busing practice – both for patients and the public – and whether Rawson-Neal was routinely sending patients out of town without arrangements for their care and treatment. That was the case with James Flavy Coy Brown, the 48-year-old homeless man who was bused to Sacramento though he knew no one in the city and had never visited.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/20/5432780/la-poised-to-go-after-las-vegas.html
Things will get worse….no stopping the power elite.
Dirty medicine
The epic inside story of long-term criminal fraud at Ranbaxy, the Indian drug company that makes generic Lipitor for millions of Americans.
The two men strolled into the hall to order tea from white-uniformed waiters. As they returned, Kumar said, “We are in big trouble,” and motioned for Thakur to be quiet. Back in his office, Kumar handed him a letter from the World Health Organization. It summarized the results of an inspection that WHO had done at Vimta Laboratories, an Indian company that Ranbaxy hired to administer clinical tests of its AIDS medicine. The inspection had focused on antiretroviral (ARV) drugs that Ranbaxy was selling to the South African government to save the lives of its AIDS-ravaged population.
As Thakur read, his jaw dropped. The WHO had uncovered what seemed to the two men to be astonishing fraud. The Vimta tests appeared to be fabricated. Test results from separate patients, which normally would have differed from one another, were identical, as if xeroxed.
Thakur listened intently. Kumar had not even gotten to the really bad news. On the plane back to India, his traveling companion, another Ranbaxy executive, confided that the problem was not limited to Vimta or to those ARV drugs.
“What do you mean?” asked Thakur, barely able to grasp what Kumar was saying.
The problem, said Kumar, went deeper. He directed Thakur to put aside his other responsibilities and go through the company’s portfolio — ultimately, every drug, every market, every production line — and uncover the truth about Ranbaxy’s testing practices and where the company’s liabilities lay.
Thakur left Kumar’s office stunned. He returned home that evening to find his 3-year-old son playing on the front lawn. The previous year in India, the boy had developed a serious ear infection. A pediatrician prescribed Ranbaxy’s version of amoxiclav, a powerful antibiotic. For three scary days, his son’s 102° fever persisted, despite the medicine. Finally, the pediatrician changed the prescription to the brand-name antibiotic made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Within a day, his fever disappeared. Thakur hadn’t thought about it much before. Now he took the boy in his arms and resolved not to give his family any more Ranbaxy drugs until he knew the truth.
What Thakur unearthed over the next months would form some of the most devastating allegations ever made about the conduct of a drug company. His information would lead Ranbaxy into a multiyear regulatory battle with the FDA, and into the crosshairs of a Justice Department investigation that, almost nine years later, has finally come to a resolution.
On May 13, Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to seven federal criminal counts of selling adulterated drugs with intent to defraud, failing to report that its drugs didn’t meet specifications, and making intentionally false statements to the government. Ranbaxy agreed to pay $500 million in fines, forfeitures, and penalties — the most ever levied against a generic-drug company. (No current or former Ranbaxy executives were charged with crimes.) Thakur’s confidential whistleblower complaint, which he filed in 2007 and which describes how the company fabricated and falsified data to win FDA approvals, was also unsealed. Under federal whistleblower law, Thakur will receive more than $48 million as part of the resolution of the case.
Fortune’s account of what occurred inside Ranbaxy and how the FDA responded to it raises serious questions about whether our government can effectively safeguard a drug supply that last year was 84% generic, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, much of that manufactured in distant places. More than 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients for all U.S. drugs now come from overseas, as do 40% of finished pills and capsules.
Fortune’s investigation yields the first comprehensive picture of how one under-policed and far-flung generics company operated. It is not a tale of cutting corners or lax manufacturing practices but one of outright fraud, in which the company knowingly sold substandard drugs around the world — including in the U.S. — while working to deceive regulators. The impact on patients will likely never be known. But it is clear that millions of people worldwide got medicine of dubious quality from Ranbaxy.
As the Ranbaxy story makes vividly clear, generic-drug makers intent on breaking the rules — especially those operating abroad — can easily do so. Drug applications work on the honor system: The FDA relies on data provided by the companies themselves. “We depend on that information to be truthful,” Gary Buehler, who headed the FDA’s office of generic drugs for 10 years, said in December 2009. (Buehler has since taken a position at the U.S. unit of the Israeli generic-drug company Teva.) The approval system “requires the ethical behavior of the applicant,” he said. Otherwise, “the whole house of cards will fall down.” GMAFB
Kumar had a PowerPoint presentation of 24 slides. It made clear that Ranbaxy had lied to regulators and falsified data in every country examined in the report. “More than 200 products in more than 40 countries” have “elements of data that were fabricated to support business needs,” the PowerPoint reported. “Business needs,” the report showed, was a euphemism for ways in which Ranbaxy could minimize cost, maximize profit, and dupe regulators into approving substandard drugs.
Thakur knew the drugs weren’t good. They had high impurities, degraded easily, and would be useless at best in hot, humid conditions. They would be taken by the world’s poorest patients in sub-Saharan Africa, who had almost no medical infrastructure and no recourse for complaints. The injustice made him livid.
Ranbaxy executives didn’t care, says Kathy Spreen, and made little effort to conceal it. In a conference call with a dozen company executives, one brushed aside her fears about the quality of the AIDS medicine Ranbaxy was supplying for Africa. “Who cares?” he said, according to Spreen. “It’s just blacks dying.”
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/15/ranbaxy-fraud-lipitor/
nice to see someone with a bad handicap make the hourly wages of a lawyer. Most resorts have VIP access part of the biz model, just check your local ski slopes!
The complete obliviousness and vacuity are breath-taking.
so what your saying is that those who qualify as “disabled” have found yet another way to expliot the “ADA”? and BTW carlos mencia has a hilarious bit based on his interactions with a down’s syndrome person at disney land in LA in wich he does exactly this same thing and dates back to like 2002 or so , so this is not even “new”.
class war fair HURTS the poor far more than it hurts the rich who have the resorces to ignore the reprecussions of that sort of STUPIDITY.
the luxury tax on yachts did not even register with the rich but it DESTROYED the lively hoods of american working class famlies who made there living off of that market the rich simply added the a plane ticket to the cost of there boat (wich was probably off set by cheaper labor over seas)
in this case what your saying is “screw the handycaped exploiters they dont deserve the extra income” wich might be true but THAT is what is at isue here , not that some one is paying them the “rich” can simply pay diseny to keep the rifraf out on certain days.