The Center for Public Integrity

Creating digital medical records for every American within the next five years – a key provision of President Obama’s stimulus package — could cost more than twice the $19.5 billion figure that has been cited by federal officials.

Most rich people hoping to influence federal policy are content to write checks to fund political campaigns or shuffle cash to advocacy groups that lobby for their causes. But not Raymond Ruddy.

The man who would be known as Patient No. 1 emerged from routine open-heart surgery at Columbia University Medical Center in stable condition. Then he began to bleed uncontrollably.

Smuggling cigarettes in America has become a multi-billion-dollar business, robbing states of desperately needed tax money and fueling organized crime. Yet the federal response to all this is, well, pretty lackluster, according to a newly released report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Standing in a medical exam room, a neurosurgeon in a white lab coat stares solemnly into the camera and warns that President Obama’s health care plan “will hurt our seniors” and “end Medicare as we know it.”

Data on how often insurance claims are denied — and for what reasons — is collected and analyzed by the insurance companies themselves. But except in California, the companies aren’t required to provide those records to any state or federal agency.

Free-market cheerleaders have long relied on the flowchart to push their notion that government intervention makes a hash of things. Republican flowcharts helped knock the wind out of Clinton’s proposed health care reforms in the 1990s. And so it’s no surprise that opponents of President Obama’s health care reforms are once again pulling out charts.

A Miami man pleaded guilty Friday in the U.S. Southern District Court of Florida in a cigarette smuggling case with ties to the Real Irish Republican Army, a Northern Ireland militant group that uses terrorist tactics.

On a sunny Saturday at the county fairgrounds in this Appalachian community, the gaps in the American health care system were on vivid display.

ICIJ’s story “The Montenegro Connection” on the ties of Montenegro’s Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic to one of Europe’s largest ever cigarette smuggling and money laundering rackets made news across the Balkans for a week in early June. It prompted Djukanovic to write a lengthy response to the investigation, which also had revealed that his family has amassed a fortune of about $200 million.