Category Archives: Health Disease

Schumer Breaks Ranks on Obamacare

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Obamacare Will Cost 2.9 Million or More Jobs a Year

Obamacare Facts & Figures

  • The law cuts an estimated $716 billion from Medicare over ten years. However, these “savings” are not set aside to preserve Medicare’s future, instead they are used to fund new spending created by the law.
  • Nearly one-third of all seniors rely on Medicare Advantage, the private health care option in Medicare. Despite the program’s growing enrollment and beneficiary satisfaction, Obamacare makes deep cuts to the program that jeopardize its viability in coming years.
  • In addition to payment cuts, Obamacare imposes new taxes on drug companies and medical device makers, and new regulations that will make health care more costly for seniors.

So, what is the real reason that Senator Chuck Schumer now opposes Obamacare?

Chuck Schumer Flip-Flops on the Politics of Obamacare

2:20 PM, Nov 25, 2014 • By JOHN MCCORMACK

Chuck Schumer, the high-ranking Democratic senator from New York, gave a speech today at the National Press Club in which he said that it “made no political sense” for Democrats to focus on passing the Affordable Care Act. The New York Times reports:

“Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them,” Mr. Schumer said, according to his prepared remarks. “We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem – health care reform.”

Mr. Schumer’s calculus could seem coldly political. He points out that only a third of the uninsured population is even registered to vote. “To aim a huge change in mandate at such a small percentage of the electorate made no political sense,” he said. “So when Democrats focused on health care, the average middle-class person thought ‘the Democrats are not paying enough attention to me.’”

Back when the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, Schumer was singing a different tune. The weekend after the law was enacted, Schumer claimed on Meet the Press that it “really does deliver for the middle class” and confidently predicted that by November 2010 “those who voted for health care will find it an asset, those who voted against it will find it a liability.”

“I think as people learn about the bill, and now that the bill is enacted, it’s going to become more and more popular,” Schumer said. “The lies that have been spread, they vanish because you see what’s in the bill. We had ‘death panels’ in the summer. People are going to see there are no death panels. ‘Illegal immigrants are going to get health care,” it’s clear that’s not true in the bill. And the number one lie that bothers people is ‘You’ll lose your insurance if you have it now and you’re pretty happy with it.'”

Of course, Democrats were blown out in 2010 after the bill passed and again in 2014 after it was implemented and millions of Americans learned that what Schumer called “the number one lie that bothers people” was actually true.

When Schumer was asked during his 2010 Meet the Press appearance about polling that showed the middle-class opposed the Affordable Care Act, he replied:

Well, it really does deliver for the middle class. But, as I said, there are lots of, lots of misinformation. That firefighter in Rockville Centre, and you could repeat that with tens of millions of families, are worried. People ask themselves, particularly at a time of recession, “How is it going to affect me?” They’ve been told by special interests that are against the bill that they will lose their coverage. People who have coverage now, whether through an employer or Medicare, will keep it and it will get better, actually, because the waste and the duplication will, will be cut back greatly. They’ll keep it longer, they’ll keep it better, they’ll pay less. So this is a bill aimed at the middle class. And my point being, if you look at a snapshot poll today, some of them show–there was one that was 49-40 in favor of health care, this one’s against it. But I would predict to you, and I feel very, very strongly about this and firmly about this, that as people learn what’s actually in the bill, that six months from now, by election time, this is going to be a plus because the parade of horribles, particularly the worry that the average middle-class person has that this is going to affect them negatively.

That Schumer, arguably the Democrats’ top political strategist in Congress, would now publicly admit that the politics of Obamacare has been terrible for Democrats is remarkable. It should send chills down the spines of the law’s supporters.

U.S. Constant State of Emergency

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From the White House on National Security:

Progress

Guiding Principles

The President’s highest priority is to keep the American people safe. He is committed to ensuring the United States is true to our values and ideals while also protecting the American people. The President is committed to securing the homeland against 21st century threats by preventing terrorist attacks and other threats against our homeland, preparing and planning for emergencies, and investing in strong response and recovery capabilities. We will help ensure that the Federal Government works with states and local governments, and the private sector as close partners in a national approach to prevention, mitigation, and response.

The National Security Strategy, released May 27, 2010, lays out a strategic approach for advancing American interests, including the security of the American people, a growing U.S. economy, support for our values, and an international order that can address 21st century challenges.

But the last time a National Security strategy was addressed in total was 2010.

Meanwhile, see below.

The United States is in a state of emergency – 30 of them, in fact

By Christopher Ingraham

The United States has been in an uninterrupted state of national emergency since 1979. Here in 2014, we’re not dealing with just one emergency – there are currently 30 of them in effect.

That’s according to data on presidential declarations of emergency compiled by Gregory Korte of USA Today. “Those emergencies, declared by the president by proclamation or executive order, give the president extraordinary powers — to seize property, call up the National Guard and hire and fire military officers at will,” Korte writes.

President Obama has declared nine so far, eight of which are currently in effect — they primarily deal with preventing business with people or organizations involved in global conflicts or the drug trade. Obama has also renewed many of his predecessors’ orders — just last week he renewed our ongoing state of emergency with respect to Iran for its 36th straight year.

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush took a light touch on declarations of emergency – they invoked only a handful, none of which remain in effect. But Bill Clinton proclaimed 16 emergencies and George W. Bush declared 14, 13 of which are still in effect today.

Blocking business transactions with various interests may not seem like national emergency material. But the language underlying these declarations is often nearly apocalyptic. Obama’s recent continuation of a Bush-era emergency relating to “the property of certain persons contributing to the conflict” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo states that “this situation continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States.”

The Obama administration also maintains that “the actions and policies of certain members of the Government of Belarus and other persons continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

You may wonder why the president needs to declare a state of emergency to deal with what appears to be fairly routine instances of corruption in far-flung corners of the world. Korte notes that Congress provides little oversight on emergency declarations, even through it’s mandated to do so by law. In an era when tussles over executive power are a near-daily occurrence, this is a strange incongruity.

“What the National Emergencies Act does is like a toggle switch, and when the president flips it, he gets new powers. It’s like a magic wand. and there are very few constraints about how he turns it on,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton professor interviewed by Korte.

In the absence of a crisis, there’s little compelling reason for a government to adopt a permanent crisis stance. The danger is that a public desensitized to claims to extraordinary circumstances could be more likely to allow excesses of authority performed in the name of those circumstances.

As Korte writes, “A post-9/11 state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush — and renewed six times by President Obama — forms the legal basis for much of the war on terror” — a war which has so far seen a rise in terrorism around the globe.

Hey Obama, the VA is Still Broken

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Congress, do your job on VA scandal

The Obama administration wants to be clear: they’re very, very angry over the dysfunctional state of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), where reports of falsified wait lists and delayed care at VA medical centers are growing into a national scandal for the executive branch.

Specifically, administration officials say they’re “mad as hell.” That’s how VA Secretary Eric Shinseki described his response to the scandal in testimony to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee last week.

 On Sunday, the White House chief of staff told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that President Obama, not to be outdone, is “madder than hell” about the VA’s failures.

Of course, what’s lost in this contrived and cynical display of outrage from the president and his VA secretary is the fact that they’re the ones responsible for the agency’s performance. If the VA isn’t working, they should be working to fix it—not telling us how angry it makes them, like a pair of passive observers to the scene.

If anyone should be “madder than hell” right now, it’s the veterans and their families who are suffering from VA’s poor service and performance.

We also now know that these problems were raised with the administration during the presidential transition in 2008.  The president and Sec. Shinseki knew about the problems then – red tape, wait times, uneven care – and yet did not fix the problems.  Instead, together they made the problem worse; exploding the VA budget without demanding commensurate improvements in performance.

We’re beyond the point when expressing outrage, or long drawn-out investigations, at VA can be considered a constructive response. We know what the problems are; it’s time for action.

This week, members of Congress will have an opportunity to set the department on the right course, by voting for the VA Management Accountability Act of 2014 (H.R. 4031). They should waste no time in passing this necessary reform.

The bill’s aim is simple — to restore accountability to a department where the leadership and bureaucracy have come to show an alarming indifference to their mission of timely and quality service to veterans. By empowering the VA secretary to fire and replace those executives who fail to perform, the VA Management Accountability Act is an important step toward righting the ship. Right now it’s nearly impossible to fire bad managers at VA, and therefore nearly impossible to hold leaders accountable.

It’s difficult to overstate the seriousness of the problems at VA.

In recent weeks, we’ve learned that officials at various VA medical facilities around the nation have been falsifying patient wait lists, essentially “cooking the books” to make it appear that veterans are receiving timely care. In reality, patients were waiting months for appointments—and in many cases, dying while waiting on “secret lists.”

In Phoenix, where the scandal broke, the retired VA doctor who blew the whistle on the fraud estimates perhaps 40 veterans died while waiting for care on the secret wait list. An investigation is in progress, and criminal charges for VA officials involved in the alleged fraud are a real possibility. Regardless of criminal charges and investigations—both of which should happen—we know this: the system is infected and needs systemic reform.

It’s against this backdrop that the need for stronger accountability controls at VA has become clear. While the department has suffered a string of scandals and performance failures, the current leadership has taken no steps to shake up the leadership team and force change. (The ritual sacrifice on May 16 of Dr. Robert Petzel, VA undersecretary for health care, was a sham—Petzel had already announced he was planning to retire in a few months.)

Greater accountability will serve as a spur to improved performance at VA. The department suffers from a “widespread and systemic lack of accountability,” Rep. Jeff Miller, said when he introduced H.R. 4031 in February. But he also noted that the department has many able and professional employees, who would benefit from stronger accountability controls to weed out poor performers.

“While the vast majority of VA’s more than 300,000 employees and executives are dedicated and hard-working,” Miller said, “the department’s well-documented reluctance to ensure its leaders are held accountable for mistakes is tarnishing the reputation of the organization and may actually be encouraging more veteran suffering instead of preventing it.”

The bill now has significant bipartisan support in the House of Representatives, with 118 members signed on as co-sponsors. That’s a good start, and other members of Congress should now join in supporting the bill’s passage. It’s time.

If anyone deserves to be “madder than hell” right now, it’s the veterans and their families who are suffering from VA’s poor service and performance. In the absence of leadership from the executive branch, it’s put up or shut up time for Congress. It’s time to do right by our veterans by restoring accountability to VA.

Pete Hegseth is a Fox News contributor. He is the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America and the former executive director of Vets for Freedom. He is an infantry officer in the Army National Guard and has served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. Learn more at: www.concernedveteransforamerica.org.

WASHINGTON — More than 600,000 veterans — 10% of all the Veterans Affairs patients — continue to wait a month or more for appointments at VA hospitals and clinics, according to data obtained by USA TODAY.

The VA has made some progress in dealing with the backlog of cases that forced former secretary Eric Shinseki to retire early this year. For instance, the VA substantially cut the overall number of worst-case scenarios for veterans — those who had waited more than four months for an appointment. That figure dropped from 120,000 in May to 23,000 in October. Much of that improvement occurred because patients received care from private providers.

Since May, the VA has been reduced the number of veterans waiting longest for care — its top priority — by 57%, according to James Hutton, a VA spokesman. From June to September, the VA completed 19 million appointments, an increase of 1.2 million compared with the same time last year.

“VA’s goal continues to be to provide timely, high-quality healthcare for veterans,” Hutton said in a statement. “Veterans and VA employees nationwide understand the need for reform, and VA is committed to putting these reforms into place. And while we have significantly improved capacity and access to care, we have not yet achieved our intended state — systemic and timely access across the board. It will be an ongoing and significant effort to reach our goals.”

To recruit more health care providers, VA Secretary Robert McDonald has proposed pay hikes for VA doctors and dentists, Hutton said. McDonald announced a restructuring of the VA on Nov. 10.

The new data show that dozens of hospitals and clinics leave a quarter or more of all their patients waiting 30 days or more for an appointment.

• Some facilities still have extremely long wait times for basic care, including 64 that have average wait times over 60 days for new patients seeking primary care. They include major facilities, such as hospitals in Baltimore; Jacksonville, Fla.; Temple, Texas, and Atlanta. All have at least 30,000 pending appointments.?

In Jacksonville, the average new patient is left waiting 77 days, a fact that previously obscured in the VA’s data because it was averaged into the much-better performance of the nearby Gainesville hospital. Jacksonville only sees two-thirds of its patients within 30 days, the worst rate of any major facility in the VA system.

The VA is hiring more staff to deal with those delays, Hutton said.

• Ten facilities reported waits of more than three months for a new patient to see a specialist. At the top of the list: the Westmoreland, Pa., clinic, where patients are waiting 174 days — nearly six months — for a specialty appointment.

Thirty-three facilities have kept new patients seeking a mental-health appointments waiting for at least two months. Among those are large hospitals in Martinsburg, W.Va., Amarillo, Texas, and Tuskegee, Ala. And 10 clinics and hospitals kept established patients waiting at least three weeks longer than the patients wanted for mental health appointments.

• Some small locations have big waiting times, too. The Wagner, S.D., clinic near the Nebraska state line, has only 155 total appointments of any type pending — and its new patient wait time is 153 days.

The data looks at nearly 6 million appointments until Oct. 1 and scheduled through Veterans Health Administration.

Members of Congress continue to express dissatisfaction with the delays in disciplining VA employees involved in covering up the long wait times.

“The events of the last year have proven that far too many senior VA leaders have lied, manipulated data, or simply failed to do the job for which they were hired,” said Rep. Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican and chairman of House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, during a hearing Thursday. “It is also clear that VA’s attempt to instill accountability for these leaders has been both nearly non-existent and rife with self-inflicted roadblocks to real reform.”

Assad’s Bloody Regime, the World Ignores

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Just remember the U.S. and the Barack Obama coalition against Daesh is fighting against al Nusra and Khorason which are all al Qaeda, effectually aiding the Assad regime who has used chemical weapons countless times. It should also be mentioned again that Assad continues to get support from Iran, Kerry’s new Middle East ally and Russia as Putin commits deadly hostilities against Ukraine and is moving into the Baltic States. So in effect, the United States has no more enemies but what is below is being ignored by the world. Shameful. Look carefully and ask yourself where is the ubiquitous United Nations Human Rights Council? Where is anyone on this?

Syria’s ‘hospital’ of horrors

By Abd Doumany

A medic stitches the head of a wounded boy at a makeshift clinic after a mortar fired by Syrian government forces fell in the besieged rebel town of Douma, in the outskirts of Damascus, on November 11, 2014 (AFP Photo Abd Doumany)

A medic stitches the head of a wounded boy at a makeshift clinic after a mortar fired by Syrian government forces fell in the besieged rebel town of Douma, in the outskirts of Damascus, on November 11, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

DOUMA, Syria, November 12, 2014 – Douma, where I live, is a Syrian rebel bastion. A city of 200,000 just northeast of Damascus, it has been under siege for more than a year by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. We are hit practically every day by artillery fire and air and ground raids. It is also located in the Gouta area, which is held by the Free Syrian Army and which was attacked with chemical weapons by the regime in August 2013.
An injured girl is treated at a makeshift hospital in the besieged rebel bastion of Douma, northeast of the Syrian capital Damascus, on September 24, 2014, following reported airstrikes by government forces (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

September 24, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

 

The “hospital” where I took these pictures is a makeshift clinic set up in the basement of a building, managed by the Unified Medical Office of Douma, which was created in 2013 to coordinate private medical care in the area. The hospital treats the war wounded from throughout Gouta and serves as something of a triage unit, with mild to serious cases handled on site and the worst injuries, including those requiring surgery, sent elsewhere.
An injured man waits to be treated at a makeshift hospital in the besieged rebel bastion of Douma on September 24, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

September 24, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

 

I head to the hospital each time an intense bombing or air raid hits Douma to document the attacks. At times when I arrive, it is as if I’ve entered a nightmare, with 50 or more injured crammed into the small clinic in an atmosphere of anger and fear. It is very difficult to take pictures at those times. Sometimes I stop. The scene before me is simply too awful.
A wounded Syrian reacts to the pain at a makeshift hospital in the besieged rebel bastion of Douma, northeast of the Syrian capital Damascus, on October 3, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

October 3, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

 

The hospital badly lacks medicine and equipment. Doctors and nurses push on against the odds, struggling to maintain a minimum standard of hygiene. They are constantly exhausted since the wounded never seem to stop arriving. During the bloodiest attacks, they can work 48 hours straight without sleeping.
A wounded Syrian boy sits at a makeshift clinic in the besieged rebel town of Douma on November 11, 2014 (AFP Photo Abd Doumany)

November 11, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

 

Among all the victims I’ve photographed in recent months, the one who most stands out to me is Ahmad. He was 17 years old and arrived with a badly wounded hand. Doctors thought there was no option but to amputate his fingers, but he refused. He said he still had hope that his hand would heal and he would be able to use it again — that he would again be able to write. His hand has since been hit by gangrene, and amputation may indeed be inevitable.
A Syrian girl is treated at a make-shift hospital following a reported regime air raid on November 7, 2014, in Eastern al-Ghouta, Syria (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

November 7, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

 

Each time I return to the hospital, I come away with different feelings. Sometimes fear predominates; sometimes it’s sadness. It is impossible to get used to seeing such scenes. The injured are brought in and they are often similar, but the shock of seeing them is always disturbing. There are times when I spend hours in silence after returning home, unable to speak to anyone. It depresses me, and the horrible images remain stuck in my head for hours.
A young Syrian volunteer treats a wounded man at a makeshift hospital in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma following a reported air strike by government forces on November 11, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

November 11, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

 

What hits me hardest is seeing the pain of those who have lost loved ones. Usually I avoid photographing those scenes out of respect for them. I know exactly how they feel: I’ve lost one of my brothers in this war.

 

Abd Doumany is a freelance photographer and an occasional AFP contributor based in Douma, Syria.
A Syrian boy cries as he looks at his wounded father at a makeshift hospital in the rebel-held town of Douma near Damascus on September 9, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

A Syrian boy cries as he looks at his wounded father on September 9, 2014 (AFP Photo / Abd Doumany)

Meanwhile,

The Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra: A Looming Grand Jihadi Alliance?

Posted by Aymenn Al-Tamimi on Friday, November 14th, 2014

By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

The international coalition- led by the U.S.- against the Islamic State [IS], with additional American airstrikes targeting the ‘Khorasan’ al-Qa’ida group in Syria (in reality just al-Qa’ida veterans from the Afghanistan-Pakistan embedded with Syria’s al-Qa’ida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra [JN])- has prompted media speculation of a wider truce, alliance or even merger between IS and JN. For example, on 28 September, Martin Chulov of The Guardian cited a “senior source” claiming “war planning meetings” held between JN and IS leaders.

Read more here.

Death of Speech ‘Truthy Project’

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Alright, it has been proven that the NSA is mining our data, that includes friends, purchases, internet activity and more. Now sadly the government is providing earmarked money for data mining on thoughts and categories of thought and opinion.

A friend that I have had as a guest on radio show, C. Steven Tucker who is a subject matter expert on healthcare and most especially Obamacare had his Twitter account deleted under the ‘Truthy Project”. There were several more accounts that met with the same thought demise. What happened to Freedom of Speech, whether it is true and proven in words with evidence or even partially true or perhaps even false due to misunderstandings or poor assumptions? Demerits and deletions abound in all cases.

What has happened to America and how did we get here?

House Committee Demands Answers on Truthy Project  

Taxpayer-funded initiative collected 600,000 political tweets in its ‘database,’ bragged about having conservative Twitter accounts suspended
BY:

The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee sent a letter to the head of the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Monday, demanding answers about the origins of the nearly $1 million taxpayer-funded project to track “misinformation” on Twitter.

The Truthy project, being conducted by researchers at Indiana University, is under investigation for targeting political commentary on Twitter. The project monitors “suspicious memes,” “false and misleading ideas,” and “hate speech,” with a goal of one day being able to automatically detect false rumors on the social media platform.

The web service has been used to track tweets using hashtags such as #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter), and was successful in getting accounts associated with conservatives suspended, according to a 2012 book co-authored by the project’s lead researcher, Filippo Menczer, a professor of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University.

Menczer has also said that Truthy monitored tweets using #p2 (Progressive 2.0), but did not discuss any examples of getting liberal accounts suspended in his book.

“The Committee and taxpayers deserve to know how NSF decided to award a large grant for a project that proposed to develop standards for online political speech and to apply those standards through development of a website that targeted conservative political comments,” wrote Chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas) in a letter to NSF Director France Cordova.

“While some have argued that Truthy could be used to better understand things like disaster communication or to assist law enforcement, instead it appears Truthy focused on examples of ‘false and misleading ideas, hate speech, and subversive propaganda’ communicated by conservative groups,” he said.

Smith is asking for the original application for the study, and “every internal and external e-mail, letter, memorandum, record, note, text message or other document” sent or received by the NSF about Truthy since the study began in 2011.

Smith’s letter references a publication co-written by Menczer which explains how the project was used to track tweets before the 2010-midterm elections.

In “Abuse of Social Media and Political Manipulation,” a chapter for the book The Death of the Internet, released in 2012, Menczer writes how his team successfully had Twitter accounts suspended.

“With the exploding popularity of online social networks and microblogging platforms, social media have become the turf on which battles of opinion are fought,” the chapter begins. “This section discusses a particularly insidious type of abuse of social media, aimed at manipulation of political discourse online.”

Truthy tracked up to 8 million tweets per day in the run up to the 2010 midterms, and stored 600,000 political tweets in their database, contrary to Menczer’s claim that Truthy does not “have a database.” This section of the Truthy website was recently deleted, following an editorial by FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai warning the project could be misused.

“The streams provided our system with up to 8 million tweets per day during the course of the study,” the paper said. “These were scanned in real time by our system. In total, our analysis considered over 305 million tweets collected from September 14 until October 27, 2010.”

“Of these, 1.2 million contained one or more of our political keywords; detection of interesting memes further reduced this set to 600,000 tweets actually entered in our database for analysis,” the paper added.

“We don’t have a database,” Menczer said when attacking the Washington Free Beacon’s initial story on Truthy.

The database was used to identify “several Truthy memes, resulting in many of the accounts involved being suspended by Twitter,” the chapter said.

Truthy was able to suspend the account of C. Steven Tucker, a health insurance broker, who often used the hashtag “American Patriots,” or #ampat, from his two Twitter accounts.

“This activity generated traffic around this hashtag and gave the impression that more people were tweeting about it,” the chapter said. “These two accounts had generated a total of over 41,000 tweets.”

Another account, @PeaceKaren_25, was suspended after tweeting in support of Speaker of the House John Boehner (R., Ohio) over 10,000 times in four months. “A separate colluding account @HopeMarie_25 retweeted all the tweets generated by @PeaceKaren_25 supporting the same candidates and boosting the same websites,” the paper said.

Smith said it is troubling that the project was able to delete and suspend Twitter accounts.

“Whether by amazing coincidence or on purpose, it appears that several social media accounts highlighted by Truthy were subsequently terminated by the owners of the social media platforms, effectively muzzling the political free speech of the targeted individuals and groups,” he said. “In presenting and publishing the findings of their work, the Truthy research team proudly described how the web service targeted conservative social media messages.  Their presentations featured examples of what they found to be online political speech ‘abuses’ by supporters of these groups.”

A spokesman for Indiana University said that they are “aware of the letter but have no comment.”

Pathetic condition in America without so much as a whimper from informed patriots.