Month: March 2023

In Health Care, Freedom Is The Biggest Shortage

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BY: DEANE WALDMAN

doctors working on a patient in a health-care setting

These data should convict the USA governement’s bureaucracy for it’s incompetence.

Americans cannot make their own medical decisions or decide how to spend their health-care dollars — bureaucrats do that.

The news is filled with stories about a U.S. health care system “plagued with shortages” of money for care, access to care, and doctor time. What they do not mention is the shortage of freedom.

Americans are not free to select their preferred physician or choose the medicines they take into their bodies. Government bureaucrats, not physicians on the scene, triage critically ill patients based on “crisis standards of care”: non-physicians applying a checklist to decide who will live and who will die. Patients cannot choose who will operate on them, where, when, or even if. And of course, Americans cannot decide how to spend their health-care dollars — nameless, faceless bureaucrats do that. This is medical tyranny.

Doctors are equally un-free. Your assigned physician (assuming there is one) does not choose your medications, a pharmacy benefits management (PBM) program does. Operations are performed where the health plan instructs, and by whom they choose. Providers for Medicare and Medicaid patients must simply accept the federal payment (“reimbursement”) schedule.

Supporters of Biden’s Anti-Inflation Act of 2022 proudly announced the act empowered Medicare to “negotiate” drug prices. This brings to mind a soldier (provider) with a handgun negotiating with an M-1 battle tank (federal government as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service, CMS.) CMS dictates the payments, telling providers to take it or leave it. As providers are bound ethically to care for their patients, they must simply accept whatever payment schedule Medicare and Medicaid announce.  

Both patients and providers live under medical tyranny. For providers, this creates an intolerable ethical conundrum. Medical ethics require a physician to provide the best possible care for the patient. Patients believe (wrongly) the provider has the authority commensurate with their responsibility. This is not reality. Doctors can only prescribe drugs the PBM allows. Surgery is done in the cheapest hospital, not the one with the best results.

Death by Queue

Single-payer health-care systems, the acme of government medical tyranny, are in danger of collapse in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Spain. Some experts warn of a similar breakdown here.

Health-care systems exist to make and keep people healthy, and to save lives through timely medical care. The best demonstration of system failure is death by queue: dying waiting in line for technically possible care that is not provided in time, measured by wait times.

Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed, the average maximum wait time to see a primary care doctor was 99 days. After the ACA, wait time had increased to 122 days.

This author’s wife waited seven months to see her primary doctor for chronic abdominal pain. It was inoperable pancreatic cancer. She died 22 months after diagnosis. Might things have been different if she had received timely care?

An internal Veterans Affairs audit concluded “47,000 veterans may have died” waiting in line for medical care. In Illinois in 2016, 752 Medicaid enrollees died waiting for treatment.

Despite having the most advanced technology and many of the best-trained physicians and nurses, U.S. health care fails to deliver care in time.

Read more here.

What is Wokeness?

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Thank you Robby Starbuck for your answer!

Wokeness is an ideology that seeks to destroy all of our shared norms, language, and understanding while replacing it with new norms (example: opening doors is sexist), language (ex: Latinx), and understandings (ex: men can get pregnant).

Wokeness spreads like a virus largely from far-left universities with full support from the Democratic Party. Major corporations have become enforcement agents for this ideology as woke college graduates climb the ranks of the corporate executive ladder (think ESG investing, equity hiring, etc).

The media and Hollywood have acted as the PR arm of this effort. Their PR job was simple: They pushed an unpopular ideology of wokeness in hopes of convincing people that it was actually popular. Despite these gargantuan efforts, wokeness is absolutely hated by the vast majority of people who hunger for a return to normalcy, sanity, and safety.

If you’re wondering why I said safety, again, it’s very simple. Wokeness has begun to destroy our “justice” system via woke District Attorneys who’ve reduced consequences for or outright refused to prosecute violent criminals. This is all for “racial justice” of course. This leads to a rise in violent crime that then ironically hurts minorities the most.

Wokeness is a ridiculous, dangerous, hateful ideology of victimhood and oppression that’s being forced on us by self-important ideologues who are far less impressive than our pet bunny that my wife trained to use a litter box.

Afghanistan Withdrawal

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Veterans give searing testimony on US withdrawal from Afghanistan at hearing

Military members and veterans of the Afghanistan war offered harrowing eyewitness testimony of the chaotic and deadly withdrawal from the country’s longest conflict, during an hours-long congressional hearing on Wednesday. They also pleaded with Congress to help the Afghan allies left behind.

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In searing, sometimes graphic detail, several witnesses recounted their experiences as active-duty service members sent to assist with the evacuation of US troops and civilians from Afghanistan as the Taliban swept to power in August 2021. The hearing was the first in what is expected to be a multi-part investigation by Republicans into the Biden administration’s handling of the evacuation from Afghanistan.