Before he took over the nation’s Medicare and Medicaid agency this summer, Dr. Donald Berwick retired from the nonprofit health care think tank he co-founded with a nearly $900,000 compensation package and a seven-figure executive retirement plan.
But Dr. Berwick is declining to say exactly who provided funding to the Massachusetts-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement in response to Republicans who question whether the new Medicare chief could have a conflict of interest if medical-device companies or health plans helped make his generous compensation package possible in the first place.
Last week, Dr. Berwick, who is administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), declined to release information about donors to the nonprofit group where he served as chief executive, saying he no longer worked there and had no authority to release information that was not public.
“You can be assured that I will comply with all of the recusal and other obligations contained in my ethics agreement,” Dr. Berwick wrote.
The Washington Times reported earlier this month that a review of some of the funding sources of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement show health care entities that don’t appear on Dr. Berwick’s financial disclosure or on the standard ethics agreement that officials use to root out potential conflicts of interest.
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained new documents from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding closed-door health care meetings with Vice President Joe Biden, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Obamacare Czar Nancy-Ann Min DeParle and union officials. The following are highlights from the documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on March 17, 2010:
An agenda for a January 13 meeting between union leaders and White House staff, including Vice President Biden. Importantly, this agenda (which focused on labor concerns) was redacted in the original batch of documents released to Judicial Watch and was sent later under separate cover. The document shows that the meeting was paused so that Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, could go up to Capitol Hill to meet with “progressive” House members.
A copy of Kathleen Sebelius’ schedule for the weeks of January 11-17, 2010, and January 4-10, 2010. Among other things, the schedule shows the attendees of several White House meetings that Sebelius attended, with a January 15 meeting specifically designated for a “POTUS MEETING ON HEALTH REFORM.” The meeting was scheduled from 1:30 pm to 4:00 pm in the White House Cabinet Room.
A list of all of the labor union leaders who attended a meeting with President Obama along with brief biographical information on each participant. The list included: Richard Trumka; Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union; and Jim Hoffa, President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, among other Big Labor leaders.
Elections have consequences. Words really do have meaning. The fools in the Blue States are learning these truths the hard way.
The Hope and Change crowd is getting some change, but not the kind they thought they were getting when they closed their ears and eyes and voted for a charlatan they knew nothing about.
The costs of ObamaCare, that many of us warned about, are already being felt in several states that voted for Barack Obama and the best part is the first victims out of the shoot are the unionized public employees.
In Iowa state employees using Blue Cross/Blue Shield are paying up to 11.2 percent more in premiums for the same or less health care thanks to the provisions of ObamaCare. The State of Iowa will pay an additional $17 million to cover its employee’s medical insurance as well.
In Washington State, another Obama stronghold, unionized State employees will have to ante up increased healthcare insurance premiums. Starting January 1st some will be paying 50 percent more for what they had before ObamaCare.
One of the side effects of socialized medicine is that the government must have access to the history and prognosis of all its patients. This Big Brother boon is coming to America.
The New York Timesreported over the weekend that the Obama administration is “rewriting” its rules governing who can look into medical records – and whether you are allowed to find out about it. Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s HHS secretary, drafted temporary rules last August, then unveiled “permanent” rules just last month, but they were so loose many on the Left could not agree to them. Under current rules, “No notification is required” if someone steals, tampers with, or otherwise accesses a patient’s medical records unless the hospital judges it would pose “a significant risk of financial, reputational, or other harm to the individual.”
Breaches of privacy are all-too-prevalent. The Times noted the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse “estimates that more than five million people have been affected by breaches of medical information in the last 18 months.” The Institute of Medicine documented tens of thousands of breaches in 2007-8. These include the loss of Social Security number, the crown jewel of identity theft.
The actions of the Obama administration will further compromise patients’ privacy while laying heavier burdens upon health care providers
Obama managed to sneak a provision into the 2009 stimulus bill to make medical records more readily transferable. Section 3001 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 sets aside $19.2 billion to digitize records, turning the traditional, overstuffed folders of papers into Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). Federal law authorized the “development of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure that allows for the electronic use and exchange of information.”
The records are to include, “at a minimum, diagnostic test results, problem list, medication list, medication allergy list, and procedures.” The EMRs should also list each patient’s “problem list,” consisting of such things as “(i) Diseases. (ii) Injuries. (iii) Impairments. (iv) Other health problems and their manifestations. (v) Causes of injury, disease, impairment, or other health problems.” CNSNews.com asked Dr. David Blumenthal, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, what if any information would not be stored for all to see. His answer seemed less than forthcoming.
The greater fear is the officials of ObamaCare will use this information to deny care to those they deem too weak or unworthy to live. Those fears were verified by Dr. Donald Berwick’s presence at the press conference announcing new “permanent” regulations last month. In any socialized medicine scheme, the State must pour over its subjects’ records to prioritize them for care – or to deny them care. As Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it, a government bureaucrat will gently whisper into an ailing grandmother’s ear, “We’re going to let you die.”
EMRs create the virtual infrastructure necessary for death panels. Perhaps that is why Obama is willing to pay for them. The stimulus funds offer doctors and hospitals incentive pay to digitize records, and threaten to reduce Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to those not using digital records by 2014, reducing payments by one percent a year beginning in 2015.
Federal tax dollars will defray the enormous cost of purchasing the equipment necessary for EMRs. Such systems run doctors an estimated $50,000, and hospitals can pay $50 to $100 million. However, The Washington Post reports the government will award a maximum of only $11 million per hospital.
This unfunded mandate will drive already skyrocketing medical costs even higher. The Miami Herald reported that Miami Hospital is paying $100 million. The paper quotes Dr. Tony Prieto, a local family practitioner who works alone, that the federal reimbursement “won’t even be close” to his expenses. It added even a local hospital facing “financial woes is upgrading its…system as part of the federal push.”
How increasing medical costs is supposed to decrease medical costs is a secret known only to Democrats such as Joe Biden, who believe, “We have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt.”
Sadly, losing our money pales in comparison to losing our privacy and, perhaps, our lives.
This week’s FDA approval of the five day morning after birth control pill may just well have driven the final nail into the continuation of American and Western European civilization and paved the way for Islam’s world takeover. A YouTube.com video reveals shocking changes in population trends that threaten the world as we know it and will deny our way of life to our children and grandchildren.
The video reveals that a country’s fertility rate of 2.11 is the bare minimum needed to sustain itself. “No economic model can sustain a culture” during the 80 to 100 years needed to reverse a fertility rate of 1.9 “A 1.3 fertility rate is impossible to reverse.” The United States at present has a fertility rate of only 1.6 but with the Latino population, our replicating ratio swells to 2.11, the lowest we can go to avoid our own extinction! “Islam is now the fastest growing religion, having just surpassed Catholicism,” say the video researchers. “The world we live in is not the world our children and grandchildren will live in.”
Because the birth rate of Muslims in Europe is more than EIGHT children per family, we are witnessing the rapid decline of the Western European civilization that birthed most of us and our own ancestors. In the south of France, traditionally the region with the most churches, “there are more mosques than churches.” The video predicts that in just 39 years, “France will be an Islamic Republic.” Even starker figures hold true for the Netherlands when “in 15 years 1/2 of the population will be Muslim” Birth rates of Greece and Germany at 1.3, England 1.6, Italy 1.2 and Spain at 1.1 are UNSUSTAINABLE!
From its very beginning the H1N1 “epidemic” had a certain smell of hustle about it. Now we have new evidence it was a very expensive scam from the start. This hoax appears to have been one of the largest in recent history because it was worldwide and had the weight of the Obama administration behind it.
How it unfolded
Last October the hysteria over a new “1918” type flu pandemic was in high gear. A survey of American attitudes toward the H1N1 commonly called the Swine Flu showed that 75% were concerned about being infected. In England a loony “expert” warned about the potential for 120 million H1N1 deaths worldwide.
Being far more temperate the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) said it saw 2 million deaths coming. Nevertheless, by January it was becoming clearer that this fake “epidemic” was a hoax. Last week the WHO conceded that worldwide just 18,500 people had died from the H1N1 flu.
What we suspected, what we have learned
Because of the money involved, it was not hard to image the whole thing was a scam. In preparation for this “pandemic” last October the Obama administration made plans to buy 250 million doses of vaccine to “protect” Americans. The WHO said the cost of these vaccinations would be between $2.50 to $20.00 per unit. Even granting that the buying power of the federal government could drive the price down to $2.50 each those vaccine units cost us at least $625 million.
As if 16 years of Bill and Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, and their corrupt advisers like James Carville and Karl Rove, in and around the White House were not enough to bring our nation to its knees, the last one and one half years of President Barack Obama’s reign have set new lows in leadership, to put it mildly. Here is my scorecard of the worst aspects of Obama’s ultra-leftist if not borderline communist rule, which has left the country on the brink of total disaster.
First, there is Obama’s huge “commitment” to insert government into every aspect of our lives. Rather than a belief in God, Bolshevik-style Obama and his sympathizers and supporters worship the “deity of government” rather than our actual savior. Whether it is trillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts of banks, socialized health care, phony regulation of the financial industry, proposed “cap-and-trade” and near total government control over the environment, the state is always involved. We have been told, and ultimately forced, to bow down to the altar of government.
Two, Obama and his black Muslim or radical friends like Louis Farrakhan, Rev. Wright and….
When Missouri voters attempted to stop ObamaCare at the ballot box via the initiative process, the national news media took notice. In the August 3 vote, 7 in 10 voters in the “Show Me State” supported Proposition C, which overturns government mandates requiring health insurance. Proposition C actually bars penalties against people who pay their own health bills without insurance.
On August 2, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled against a U.S. Justice Department request to throw out a lawsuit brought by Virginia against ObamaCare. Virginia is arguing in the lawsuit that the U.S. Congress had unconstitutionally exceeded its powers by forcing individuals to buy insurance.
Hudson wrote, “While this case raises a host of complex constitutional issues, all seem to distill to the single question of whether or not Congress has the power to regulate — and tax — a citizen’s decision not to participate in interstate commerce…”
Hudson continues by saying there is, “some authority arguably supporting the theory underlying each side’s position.” Hudson’s decision sets up the opportunity to have appellate and eventually the Supreme Court decide these issues.
But our personal favorite of the many lawsuits challenging ObamaCare is from Arizona. Yes, the land of immigration enforcement could also be the site of a major constitutional battle about ObamaCare. The citizens of Arizona are restless with their Washington, D.C. overseers.
The Goldwater Institute, a public policy outfit named for Arizona’s most famous son, is taking a different swing at the question.
Representing a local business owner, Nick Coons of Tempe, Ariz., the Goldwater Institute has built an intriguing legal strategy which will shake up the debate: “Mr. Coons pays for all of his medical care out of his own pocket and he wants to continue making his own health care decisions. Under the federal health care bill, Mr. Coons will face significant fines from the IRS if he doesn’t buy a health insurance plan that has been approved by the government by 2014.”
In announcing the lawsuit Coons complained, “The government is making me spend money on something that I don’t want. Is a stranger who works for the government in some other part of the country really going to know what I need? I am the best qualified to make these decisions for myself.”
The Goldwater Institute’s lawyer is well-known constitutional litigator Clint Bolick. Bolick argues, “The new federal law also violates Mr. Coons’ medical privacy by forcing him to disclose his medical records to an insurance company, and those records could be accessed by the federal government and others without his permission.”
We have always been disturbed by the arrogance of government officials that seem to believe they have a right to know the most intimate details of your discussions with your doctor. ObamaCare will violate the sanctity and privacy of the relationship you have with your physician.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution would be shocked by the manipulation we have recently experienced at the hands of Congress, Obama, and out-of-control federal judges. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli sums it all up when he said of ObamaCare’s attempts to regulate the behavior of doing nothing: “Even the king and the parliament acknowledged they didn’t have this power back before the Declaration of Independence.”
Democracy is breaking out all over the country, and some in Washington don’t like it one little bit.
The latest example occurred in Missouri Tuesday, where more than 70% of voters rejected ObamaCare. Actually what they did was pass Proposition C, which declares that the federal government cannot tell Missourians they must have health insurance or pay a fine if they don’t. That mandate to have health insurance is one of the most controversial provisions in ObamaCare.
When President Obama and the Democratic leadership pushed through the health care reform bill last March, a number of Democrats–along with virtually every Republican–questioned the wisdom of passing a bill so widely unpopular with the public, as evidenced by the unprecedented number of angry voters protesting the legislation at town hall meetings last August.
Missouri voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a federal mandate to purchase health insurance, rebuking President Barack Obama’s administration and giving Republicans their first political victory in a national campaign to overturn the controversial health care law passed by Congress in March.
“The citizens of the Show-Me State don’t want Washington involved in their health care decisions," said Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, one of the sponsors of the legislation that put Proposition C on the August ballot. She credited a grass-roots campaign involving Tea Party and patriot groups with building support for the anti-Washington proposition.
With most of the vote counted, Proposition C was winning by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1. The measure, which seeks to exempt Missouri from the insurance mandate in the new health care law, includes a provision that would change how insurance companies that go out of business in Missouri liquidate their assets.
"I’ve never seen anything like it," Cunningham said at a campaign gathering at a private home in Town and Country. "Citizens wanted their voices to be heard."
