How Medicare helpd health-care providers get rich at your expense Dr. Jerome Feldman’s mental-health center was well-known to local authorities when they arrived at his South Orange Blossom Trail office last June and finally shut it down. The building where he sheltered low-income, mentally ill patients already had been condemned, and parts of it still…

Lawrence Budd

Upping the AIDS ante

With more than $1.2 million in federal funding, Central Florida’s AIDS Resource Alliance and Hope & Health Center helped manage the care of financially strapped area residents with HIV/AIDS, while Central Florida Unified AIDS Unified Resources (CENTAUR) used $130,000 to provide some of the same people with groceries and personal-care items last year.;;This year, these…

Lawrence Budd

Clear-cut logic for taking down trees

The federal government lost far more than trees in allowing private companies to log in three national forests in Florida in 1996; it also managed to lose more than half a million dollars. That figure is contained in a study released this month by The Wilderness Society, an environmental organization that ranked Florida 57th among…

Lawrence Budd

BellSouth fights for its rights

Within minutes of President Clinton signing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, BellSouth’s cellular subsidiary logged its first cellular long-distance call — albeit between two company executives. “This is truly the dawn of a new day,” Bell South Mobility President Odie Donald is quoted as saying in a news release issued on Feb. 8, 1996. Not…

Lawrence Budd

A revolt ‘Made in the USA’

There’s a wise bumper sticker that proclaims: “When the people lead, the leaders will follow.” Well, America’s corporate and governmental leaders recently tried to lead us down a rabbit path of deceit, but “we the people” balked â?¦ and, instead, the leaders had to turn around and follow the people. The issue was whether or…

Jim Hightower

Gripping reminders of slavery’s hold on South

“Before Freedom Came”. Orange County Historical Museum, Through March 8, 1998 This weekend, the Smithsonian Institution’s gripping display “Before Freedom Came” opens for a six-week run at Orange County Historical Museum. The exhibit arrived here in 20 black trunks — fittingly somber repositories for a record of America’s saddest social genealogy: the everyday life of…

Dee Rivers