Moral collapse in the medical profession

 

At American Thinker, Stella Paul has described some horrifying reports about what went on in hospitals during the COVID “plandemic.” If you’ve followed this blog, some of this will not be news, but the cumulative instances of malpractice and moral collapse are overwhelming. Here are some extracts:

Hospitals should be places you can trust to provide comfort and healing when you’re most vulnerable. But that trust may have been shattered by brutal COVID protocols that critics claim turned many hospitals into hellscapes of systematic medical murder.

. . .

It’s almost impossible to comprehend the magnitude of this moral collapse. How did doctors and nurses who spent years studying so they could help people all of a sudden turn into ruthless sadists, presiding over enforced deaths? How did hospitals metastasize from places of healing into chambers of horror? According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), the answer is quite simple: money. The federal government incentivized this protocol with massive payouts to the hospitals. AAPS writes, “Our formerly trusted medical community of hospitals and hospital-employed medical staff have effectively become “bounty hunters” for your life.”

. . .

If you want to understand the enormity of the government money gusher, here’s AAPS on what the hospital payments included:

* A “free” required PCR test in the Emergency Room or upon admission for every patient, with government-paid fee to hospital.

* Added bonus payment for each positive COVID-19 diagnosis.

* Another bonus for a COVID-19 admission to the hospital.

* A 20 percent “boost” bonus payment from Medicare on the entire hospital bill for use of remdesivir instead of medicines such as Ivermectin.

* Another and larger bonus payment to the hospital if a COVID-19 patient is mechanically ventilated.

* More money to the hospital if cause of death is listed as COVID-19, even if patient did not die directly of COVID-19.

* A COVID-19 diagnosis also provides extra payments to coroners.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans may have died due to these protocols, and we urgently need an investigation into this butchery. Who designed this protocol, which forbade safe drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and incentivized known toxins like remdesivir? Who enforced it? . . .

And there’s more horrifying information at the link here. 

RELATED:  At Discern Report, Dr Joseph Mercola has screenshots of some of the actual evidence ("Doctors Were Bribed for Covid Jab Coercion"); click here.  

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Four Health Care Whoppers

Betsy McCaughey's analysis of Democrat candidates' proposed healthcare "plans" is at Real Clear Politics:

When it comes to health care, Democrats are selling snake oil. Americans are grappling with rising medical costs. But if they fall for the phony solutions the left is offering, they'll pay with exorbitant taxes and shorter lives.

Whopper 1: Obamacare is affordable. Joe Biden's running a television ad in Iowa pledging to stand by Obamacare because "every American deserves affordable health care." Iowans aren't going to buy that. They're not hayseeds.

Truth: In Iowa, 90% of Obamacare customers who paid their own way in 2014 have dropped their coverage. Obamacare is affordable only if you qualify for a subsidy. Middle-class people who earn too much to get taxpayer-funded help can't afford to stay enrolled. They "have taken it on the chin," reports Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Why is the number of uninsured in America suddenly rising again? Blame Obamacare for pricing the middle class out of insurance.

. . .

Pols are scapegoating drug companies and insurance companies. Here's what they're not telling you: Medical costs in the United States are rising just as fast in other developed countries. Major culprits are the obesity epidemic and inactive lifestyles, not America's capitalist health system.

Health costs are a top issue in the 2020 election, and every candidate has a "plan." These plans are mere shell games, shifting the costs from one group of people to another. No one wins but the pols.

For all 4 Whoppers, click here.

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Repealing Obamacare: again

YouTube: Right Side Broadcasting

Following President Trumps’s brief speech today (above) in a last-ditch effort to get the Uniparty RINOs to keep their promise to repeal Obamacare, it’s timely to review a couple of reasons why Congress should repeal:

• Medicare is not the answer. Here is today’s horror story about a 91-year old needing treatment but getting rejected by the system.
• Single-payer systems put the state, not the individual in charge of medical decisions. Here’s Mr. Vodkapundit (Stephen Green) on the final chapter in little Baby Gard’s life, and the tragic situation with his parents.

Yet Congress is so used to end-running rules, breaking campaign promises, and disregarding their constituencies that it will be a miracle if they do the right thing on healthcare. How do they keep getting away with it? Here’s an essay by Angelo M.Codevillaon at the American Greatness blog about what “regular order” in the legislative process is supposed to look like. 

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Scotland votes no: any lessons for Gov. Kasich?

art credit: zazzle.com

On Breitbart London, James Delingpole commented on yesterday's vote in Scotland for or against independence from Great Britain. 

With hindsight, we can all tell ourselves that last night's victory for the "No" vote was inevitable. With almost the entire British political establishment - including three prime ministers - behind it, not to mention an exceedingly rare and unlikely union of the left and right media (and The Daily Mail shall lie down with The Guardian and the BBC...), as well as three hundred years of history, the continuation of the Union ought to have been a foregone conclusion.

But that is certainly not how it has felt in the last fortnight. Hence the unseemly scramble we witnessed in the last few days as Cameron and co headed north to grovel and abase themselves on broken glass promising Scotland anything and everything just so long as it remained in the Union.

And so it has come to pass: a small tactical victory has been gained at the expense of a massive strategic defeat.

. . . 

Great Britain could emulate the federal system of the US, with its newly Balkanised states granted the freedom to set their own local tax levels, either running themselves into the ground on the high-tax, overregulated, socialistic California model or emulating the can-do spirit of Texas and become thriving models of free-market capitalism.

Gov. Kasich: are you paying attention? Where is your “can-do spirit” to get off the federal dole and lead the effort to turn Ohio into a thriving model of free-market capitalism? Ohio can’t get there with Common Core, Obamacare, and expanded Medicare dragging it down.  

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Art credit: amsimaging.com

Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Gov. of New York, author, and frequent columnist and TV news guest. In the months preceding the passage of Obamacare in Congress, McCaughey was one of the critical resources for patriots across the country, who relied on her analyses to prepare for visits to their Representatives and Senators, calls to the congressional switchboard, etc. She published another analysis the other day in the New York Post about the latest document dump of ... over 1,200 pages of NEW regulations on Obamacare. Here is her complete article: 

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ObamaCare: Death by paperwork 

On July 3, with Americans preparing to celebrate freedom, the Obama administration reduced freedom by adding 1,296 pages of new regulations to ObamaCare.

It was a classic pre-holiday document dump, publishing the mind-numbing rules in the Federal Register on the eve of Independence Day, when few were likely to be watching. So much for transparency.

ObamaCare regulations compel doctors and their office staff, business owners, local officials and virtually everyone else subject to the law to spend hours filling out paperwork with no pay for their labor. It’s a colossal theft.

Now four years old, ObamaCare imposes 159 million hours of paperwork a year on the public. That’s the administration’s own estimate, undoubtedly a lowball.

Even so, it’s up by 48 million hours over last year, when fewer regulations had been rolled out. And there’s more to come.

Among the July 3 rules is one that compels doctors who take Medicare to report 18 different clinical measurements on their patients, such as whether they are overweight and have been counseled about weight control.

Doctors who fail to do it will get whacked with lower payments starting in 2015.

The regulators estimate that this single report could take as long as 108 minutes per patient and consume 5.4 million hours a year nationwide. That’s time that could be spent treating patients or calling them to remind them to take their meds.

Instead, the federal bureaucracy is confiscating those hours to serve its own ends.

Small-business owners get hit hard, too. Notably, restaurateurs face 622,000 hours of work to comply with ObamaCare’s menu-labeling rules.

The American Action Forum, a public-policy organization, notes that ObamaCare is in a class by itself, imposing almost three times as much paperwork as the notoriously complex Dodd-Frank financial regulations, and more than 10 times as much as under the Sarbanes-Oxley financial-reform law.

The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, is the biggest culprit, responsible for 90 million hours a year of ObamaCare paperwork chores. Most are foisted on hospitals, doctors, insurers and local governments.

Because it includes the IRS, Treasury is the No. 2 culprit, with paperwork requirements up 23 percent this year. The IRS is ObamaCare’s chief enforcer; paperwork misery will continue to soar, especially if and when the employer mandate goes into effect.

ObamaCare gives the IRS 46 new functions, including collecting new taxes and exchanging information about you, your family and your income with HHS and state insurance exchanges.

For example, the IRS requires employers to report the value of insurance you get through work in a new box on your W-2, even though it’s not taxable (yet).

And dealing with the IRS is no longer a once-a-year affair. Have a baby, change jobs or get a divorce, and the IRS will be recalculating your insurance compliance and eligibility for premium subsidies.

“It’s unprecedented in recent history, the amount of responsibility the IRS is being given in an area that most people don’t think of as an IRS function,” J. Russell George, a tax official, told Congress last March.

The administration plainly doesn’t want to tell the truth about these burdens.

For example, it claims that people who are uninsured or lose coverage will spend 12.6 minutes a year to comply with the individual mandate. Preposterous: Even when the Web sites work, it takes far longer to shop for insurance and report to the IRS that you’re compliant.

On July 4, 1776, when American patriots signed their Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, they recounted the crimes of the tyrannical British king: “He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

Nearly 2½ centuries later, our own government is eating out our substance with mandatory paperwork.

Not to mention the drag on our economy.

According to the Heritage Foundation’s 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, America is the only country to have lost economic freedom for seven straight years, now ranking 12th behind Hong Kong,
Singapore, Australia, Canada and seven other nations.

“Burdensome and redundant regulations are the most common barriers to the free conduct of entrepreneurial activity,” Heritage cautions.

But some benefit from this out-of-control regulatory state.

“Government bureaucracies like complexity because it keeps them busy and funded,” warns Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard. She laments that “as a result of these regulations on steroids, innovation, business creation and job growth are being stifled.”

Government bureaucrats are stealing our time, our economic growth and our liberty. Don’t count on Washington to fix the problem.

In the end, only an outraged public can put a stop to this regulatory oppression.

Betsy McCaughey is the author of “Beating ObamaCare 2014.”