aidelbi

[aidelbi @aidelbi]

@ulisestaveras @bballilluminati

[Emad Hamdeh @EmadHamdeh]

I am happy to finally share that The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Reform has finally been published.

This project took five long years and brings together over 55 scholars to show the full range of responses, attempts, and understandings of Islamic reform.

[İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي @iyad_elbaghdadi]

There's been lots of debates over the years about who controls whom - does the US control Israel, or does Israel control the US?

Here's some thoughts on the US imperial system, its rise and its decline. To do this best I'll have to expand the frame to include the Gulf & its oil 🧵

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

"Do you support Israel's 'right to exist'?"

It's a 'gotcha' queston and I debunk all the BS surrounding the 'right to exist' propaganda right here:

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare. The largest for-profit hospital system in the United States.

One hundred and eighty-two hospitals. Twenty states.

I oversee a spreadsheet called the chargemaster. It has 42,000 line items. Each line item is a price. The prices are not real.

I need to be precise about that. They are not estimates. Not approximations. Not market rates. They are anchors. An anchor is a number you set high so that every negotiated discount feels like a victory. No relationship to cost. No relationship to value. A relationship to leverage.

My team sets the anchors. That is the job.

The price is correct.

Take a drug. Keytruda. Immunotherapy. Treats sixteen types of cancer. The manufacturer charges approximately $11,000 per dose. That is the acquisition cost. What the hospital pays.

My team enters it into the chargemaster. They do not enter $11,000. They enter $43,000.

That is the gross charge. The gross charge is a fiction. No one pays it. No one is expected to pay it. The gross charge exists so that when Blue Cross negotiates a 68% discount, they pay $13,760, and the contract says "68% discount" and both parties feel the transaction was rigorous.

A 68% discount on a fictional price produces a real price that is 25% above acquisition cost. That margin is where I live. My 2025 compensation was $26.5 million. Eighty percent of my bonus is tied to EBITDA. Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. It is also earnings before the patient opens the bill.

Same dose of Keytruda at the hospital across town. Gross charge: $12,000. Blue Cross rate: $10,200. Same drug. Same dose. Same needle. Same cancer. Different spreadsheet.

The CMS transparency data showed the ratio between the highest and lowest negotiated price for the same drug at the same hospital can reach 2,347 to one. Not 2x. Not 10x. Not 100x. Two thousand three hundred and forty-seven to one. For the same thing. In the same building. On the same Tuesday.

The price is correct.

Every drug in the chargemaster has twelve prices. Twelve.

Gross charge. Medicare rate. Medicaid rate. Blue Cross. Aetna. Cigna. UnitedHealth. Humana. Workers' comp. Tricare. Auto insurance.

And the self-pay rate.

The self-pay rate is for the person without insurance. It is the gross charge. The fictional number. The anchor. The person without insurance pays the number that was designed to be negotiated down from. They pay the ceiling because they have no one to negotiate on their behalf. Same drug. Same chair. Same nurse. They pay the price that no insurer in the country would accept.

I maintain a file. CDM line item 637-4892-PKB. Saline flush. Sodium chloride 0.9%. Acquisition cost: $0.47. We charge $87. That is an 18,410% markup.

The saline flush is used before and after every IV infusion. A chemo patient receiving twelve cycles will be charged $87 for saline fourteen times per visit. I know the math. My team built the math. The math is the job.

The price is correct.

In 2021, the federal government required hospitals to publish their prices. The Hospital Price Transparency Rule. Machine-readable file. Gross charges. Discounted cash prices. Payer-specific negotiated rates.

We complied. We posted the file.

The file is a 9,400-row CSV on our website under "Patient Financial Resources." Four clicks from the homepage. Column F: "CDM_GROSS_CHG." Column J: "DERV_PAYERID_NEGRATE." My team designed the column headers. They designed them to comply. They did not design them to communicate.

CMS reported 93% of hospitals now post a file. Compliance. But only 62% of the posted data is usable. That gap is where we operate. We are compliant. The data is published. The data is incomprehensible.

A researcher downloaded our file. She spent three weeks cleaning it. She called the billing department for clarification on 340 line items. They transferred her four times. The fourth transfer was to a voicemail box that was full.

She published her analysis anyway. Cardiac catheterization lab charges: $8,200 to $71,000 for the same procedure depending on the payer. The report received eleven views on our press monitoring dashboard. I saw it. I did not forward it.

On April 1, a new CMS rule takes effect. Hospital CEOs must personally attest — by name, encoded in the machine-readable file — that the pricing data is "true, accurate, and complete."

My name. Sam Hazen. In the file. Attesting that 42,000 fictional anchors are true, accurate, and complete. They are complete. I will give them that. Forty-two thousand line items is nothing if not complete.

A new analyst read the transparency data. She asked why the same MRI costs $450 for Medicare and $4,200 for Aetna in the same building on the same machine.

I told her the rates reflect negotiated contractual agreements between the payer and the facility. She said that doesn't explain the difference. I told her the difference IS the contractual agreement. She said that sounds like the price is arbitrary.

I told her the price is the result of a rigorous, multi-variable analysis that accounts for acuity, case mix, regional market dynamics, and payer contract terms. She asked if I could show her the analysis.

I told her the analysis is proprietary.

The analysis does not exist. The analysis is my team, in Q4, adjusting the chargemaster upward by the percentage the CFO wrote on a sticky note. The sticky note this year said "6-8%." They chose 7.4% because it is between six and eight and it has a decimal, which makes it look calculated.

She stopped asking.

The price is correct.

My insurance. The executive health plan. Not in the chargemaster. Administered separately.

I do not pay the gross charge. I do not pay the negotiated rate. I pay a $20 copay for services at our own facilities. Gross charge for my treatment: $14,200. Insured rate for our largest commercial payer: $8,600. I pay $20.

The executive health plan was designed by the Chief Human Resources Officer and approved by the compensation committee. I was not on the compensation committee. I was a beneficiary of it. That is a different thing.

I benefit from the system I price. I price the system I benefit from. These are two separate facts that happen to involve the same person.

HCA Healthcare was named the Most Admired Company in our industry by Fortune magazine for the twelfth consecutive year. That was February. The same month I sold $21.5 million in company stock and purchased zero shares. Fortune did not ask about the chargemaster.

I am Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare. I have 42,000 prices in a spreadsheet across 182 hospitals. None of them are real. All of them are charged.

Same drug: $12,000 or $43,000. Depends on which spreadsheet. Which building. Which contract. Which page of which PDF.

The patient who has no contract pays the most. The researcher who found the discrepancy got a voicemail box that was full. The analyst who asked why stopped asking. The executive who prices the system pays $20.

On April 1, I will personally attest that this is true, accurate, and complete.

The price is correct. The price has always been correct. I am the price.

[Ilhan Omar @IlhanMN]

Just so that we are clear, Israel drops criminal charges on five Israeli soldiers who were caught on camera sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee. But Israel will keep kids in prison for decades because they were throwing rocks? Make it make sense 🤦🏽‍♀️

[Senator Chris Van Hollen @ChrisVanHollen]

There is a growing sickness in the Republican Party that spawns this virulent hatred.

Replace 'Muslims' with any other faith & this man would be run out of Congress.

Their tolerance for this bigotry is a cancer in their ranks. Hate, in all its forms, should find no refuge here.

https://t.co/DZCvniUNoL

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

For Mahmoud Khalil, this past year has been marked by profound hardship—and by profound courage.

A year ago, Mahmoud was walking home through our city after sharing an iftar with his wife Noor when he was detained by federal agents, flown to Louisiana, and then held in an ICE facility for months. In that time, he was forced to miss the birth of his first child. All of this for exercising his First Amendment rights in protesting the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

And yet, even in the face of that cruelty, there has also been beauty. New Yorkers raising their voices in solidarity. A city refusing to look away. Mahmoud won his freedom, and a father was finally reunited with his child.

Last night, as we marked the one year anniversary of his detention, Rama and I were honored to welcome Mahmoud, Noor, and their son Deen to Gracie Mansion to break our fast together.

Mahmoud is a New Yorker, and he belongs in New York City.

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

Racists don’t belong in American society.

White nationalism is a lie.

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

Your tax dollars are being used to bomb other people’s hospitals instead of helping you afford getting healthcare at your own.

[Muhammad Jalal @jalalayn]

Many things can be true at once. You can condemn this naked US/Israeli war on Iran, and their aim to destroy a state that has obstructed Zionism and at the same time recognise the failed sectarian strategy of Iran as it attempted build bloodied proxies that killed innocents across the region, in Iraq, Syria and Yemen - a strategy that made it waste $30 bn on forces that can no longer provide it strategic defence.

Both can be true. And we can hate what ordinary Iranians are going through today and show solidarity in the face of this unjust war.

[Saagar Enjeti @esaagar]

3 days ago it was an antisemitic conspiracy theory to say Israel was dragging the US into war with Iran

Today the Secretary of State said Israel was going to strike no matter what and that the US had to join the war

[Senator Andy Kim @SenatorAndyKim]

The death of Nasrallah Abu Siyam, a 19-year-old American citizen from our region, is a tragedy and there must be an independent investigation into this incident.

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

Ramadan starts on Tuesday. This will be Gaza’s third Ramadan under a genocide our tax dollars are paying for. We cannot look away.

[Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari @RepYassAnsari]

If anyone said something this vile in any workplace, they’d be fired.

Randy Fine has repeatedly dehumanized Muslims without consequence. It’s unacceptable and should not be normalized by Congress.

@SpeakerJohnson should reprimand him immediately. And if Fine cannot meet the most basic standard of human dignity, he should resign.

[Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish]

Palestinian Columbia protester Leqaa Kordia says she was chained to a hospital bed in “dehumanising” conditions after having a seizure in ICE custody and was kept from her lawyers and family for days.

Advocates say authorities are going to “extraordinary lengths” to detain her.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Three European governments accuse me - based on statements I never made -with a virulence and conviction that they have NEVER used against those who have slaughtered 20,000+ children in 858 days.

[aidelbi @aidelbi]

Decades of Islamophobia have fostered a culture where a sitting congressman can say something this grotesque and racist with full impunity.

[Congressman Randy Fine @RepFine]

If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.

[Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani]

If any member of Congress said that Israeli or Jewish was a synonym for evil I’m pretty sure the ADL would trigger a black hole that subsumed them and dragged them into an alternate dimension, but let’s remember they have a Mamdani Monitor.

[CAIR National @CAIRNational]

Leqaa Kordia was hospitalized on February 6, 2026, and her family and legal team still have no information about her condition. Contact your Members of Congress today and urge them to demand that DHS and ICE disclose her location and medical status, end administrative stays, and release her immediately. Take action here: https://t.co/RJd90SVRob