Category Archives: Health Care

May 14, 2012

ObamaCare’s Muslim Exemption

Muslims may claim a religious exemption that is denied Christians and Jews. Since Islam believes insurance is haraam (forbidden) and likens insurance to gambling, the religion is excluded from requirements, mandates, or penalties set forth in the bill. Others who fall into this category are the Amish, American Indians, and Christian Scientists. Although the U.S. Constitution grants all Americans equal protection of the law, some Americans are more equal than others.

Laws almost always create unanticipated consequences. This is certainly likely to be the case when politicians bend over backwards to accommodate the currents of political correctness.

ObamaCare uses the Social Security language of the Internal Revenue Code to determine who is eligible for “religious conscience” objection to the insurance mandate. Specifically, the law provides exemptions for adherents of “recognized religious sects” that are “conscientiously opposed” to accepting benefits from any insurance, public or private.

As a consequence of this provision, Muslims may claim a religious exemption that is denied Christians and Jews. Since Islam believes insurance is haraam (forbidden) and likens insurance to gambling, the religion is excluded from requirements, mandates, or penalties set forth in the bill. Others who fall into this category are the Amish, American Indians, and Christian Scientists. Although the U.S. Constitution grants all Americans equal protection of the law, some Americans are more equal than others.

ObamaCare is specifically written not to apply equally to everyone. It is in most respects a law intended to discriminate — what some might call an extended Jim Crow law. If this seems exaggerated, consider: Jim Crow laws were based on racial discrimination, while ObamaCare is predicated on religious discrimination. Government acted based on a preconceived and arbitrary understanding of what is right.

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Original source.


May 10, 2012

Obama using health care law to court Latinos

In a press release announcing the ads, the Obama campaign boasted that the health care law would make affordable health care available by 2014 to up to 9 million Latinos who previously lacked it and will allow 736,000 Latinos to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans.

Bucking conventional wisdom that Obamacare is a political liability in November, President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign on Tuesday unveiled three new ads targeting Latino voters and putting the controversial health care law front and center. The 30-second spots will run in Colorado, Florida and Nevada.

“For our president, health care reform is a reflection that we are all one united family,” Obama campaign volunteer Daniella Urbina says in the Colorado spot.

“For working families, health care reform means peace of mind,” Obama campaign volunteer Ernesto Apreza says in the Nevada spot.

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Original source.


May 5, 2012

L.A. program offers healthcare for illegal restaurant workers

A restaurant workers’ group and an L.A. clinic have partnered in a program to provide inexpensive healthcare coverage for illegal immigrants and other uninsured food service workers.

A restaurant workers’ group and a Los Angeles community clinic have launched a unique cooperative to provide health coverage to a group of people excluded from federal healthcare reform — illegal immigrants.

The pilot program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, offers preventive and primary care to low-wage, uninsured workers in the restaurant industry. Legal immigrants and other restaurant workers who don’t meet the criteria or cannot afford coverage under the healthcare law are also eligible.

About 75,000 restaurant workers in Los Angeles don’t have access to insurance because of their immigration status, Mariana Huerta of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Los Angeles, or ROC-LA, said Wednesday.

“Restaurant workers are preparing, serving and cooking our food,” Huerta said. “So many of these workers reported that they go to work sick. That is a public health hazard for consumers.”

Under the program, called ROC-MD, uninsured workers pay $25 a month so they can go to one of several clinics run by St. John’s Well Child and Family Center for physicals, basic dental care and treatment for common illnesses. The program started last fall, but organizers formally announced it Wednesday and are now recruiting more participants.

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Original source.


May 1, 2012

Savage Licked Doorknobs To Infect Gary Bauer With Flu

Back in 2000, the White House’s favorite bully, Dan Savage, was hired by Salon.com to infiltrate the Gary Bauer presidential campaign. He became so frustrated with Bauer’s religiosity that after contracting the flu, he decided to go around the office licking doorknobs in order to infect the other staffers, including Bauer.

In my Sudafed-induced delirium I decided that if it’s terrorism Bauer wants, then it’s terrorism Bauer is going get — and I’m just the man to terrorize him. Naked, feverish and higher than a kite on codeine aspirin, I called the Bauer campaign and volunteered. My plan? Get close enough to Bauer to give him the flu, which, if I am successful, will lay him flat just before the New Hampshire primary. I would go to Bauer’s campaign office and cough on everything — phones and pens, staplers and staffers. I even hatched a plan to infect the candidate himself. I would keep the pen in my mouth until Bauer dropped by his offices to rally the troops. And when he did, I would approach him and ask for his autograph, handing him the pen from my flu-virus incubating mouth.

My plan was a little malicious — even a little mean-spirited — but those same words describe the tactics used by Bauer and the rest of the religious right against gays and lesbians.

And Savage carried out his plan:

I went from doorknob to doorknob. They were filthy, no doubt, but there wasn’t time to find a rag to spit on. My immune system wasn’t all it should be — I was in the grip of the worst flu I had ever had — but I was on a mission. If for some reason I didn’t manage to get a pen from my mouth to Gary’s hands, I wanted to seed his office with germs, get as many of his people sick as I could, and hopefully one of them would infect the candidate.

So, much as it pains me to confirm a hateful stereotype of gay men — we will put anything in our mouths — I started licking doorknobs. The front door, office doors, even a bathroom door. When that was done, I started in on the staplers, phones and computer keyboards. Then I stood in the kitchen and licked the rims of all the clean coffee cups drying in the rack.

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Original source.


April 26, 2012

Kagan’s Handwritten Notes to Bell on Critical Race Theory

As Solicitor General, Kagan cheered when Obama seized a national “crisis” to pass unrelated legislation whose goal is to create an effective right to health care. She has not recused herself from the subsequent Obamacare case, as she has from today’s suit over Arizona’s immigration law, in which her “skillful lawyering” played an important role.

Breitbart News has discovered previously unknown handwritten notes from Elena Kagan to radical professor Derrick Bell, sent to Bell as Kagan worked on his seminal 1985 article on Critical Race Theory in the Harvard Law Review (99 Harv. L. Rev. 4).

The notes, which were not among materials presented to the Senate during Justice Kagan’s confirmation hearings, are preserved among Bell’s papers at the New York University archives.

Kagan’s work on Bell’s article was revealed in 2010 by Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, after President Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court. Ogletree cited her “phenomenal edits” on Bell’s “classic” article.

Bell’s article, “The Civil Rights Chronicles,” combined exposition and fiction to argue that the Constitution was–and remains–tainted by white supremacy, and that the United States awaited “a common crisis that will overcome racism” through radical constitutional reform.

Unlike then-Harvard Law Review president Carol Steiker, who corresponded with Bell via typed letter (apparently on a 1980s-vintage dot matrix printer), Kagan chose to write to Bell exclusively on yellow notepad paper. She did not explain her choice to write by hand, save to suggest in one note on Aug. 30, 1985 that she was pressed for time.

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Original source.


April 21, 2012

5.4 Million Join Disability Rolls Under Obama

By April there were 10.8 million people on disability, according to Social Security Administration data released this week. Even after accounting for all those who’ve left the program — mainly because they hit retirement age or died — that’s up 53% from a decade ago.

A record 5.4 million workers and their dependents have signed up to collect federal disability checks since President Obama took office, according to the latest official government data, as discouraged workers increasingly give up looking for jobs and take advantage of the federal program.

This is straining already-stretched government finances while posing a long-term economic threat by creating an ever-growing pool of permanently dependent working-age Americans.

Since the recession ended in June 2009, the number of new enrollees to Social Security’s disability insurance program is twice the job growth figure. (See nearby chart.) In just the first four months of this year, 539,000 joined the disability rolls and more than 725,000 put in applications.

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Original source.


April 15, 2012

Are We Facing The Biggest Bubble Since Housing? (Video)

“We’ll either have to raise taxes or increase budget deficits in order to finance it. And it will crowd out other things. Already we’re starting to see it impact education and infrastructure spending,” Citigroup economist Steven Wieting said.


Citigroup economist Steven Wieting

We had the “dot com” bubble and then we had the housing bubble. You‘d think we’d learn our lesson, right? Apparently not.

Due to constantly rising healthcare costs, Citigroup economist Steven Wieting says the healthcare industry will be the cause of the next big bubble. And as if his analysis wasn’t scary enough, he also suggests it will be bigger than anything we’ve seen before.

“It’s not a single asset price that’s about to pop (like housing) and it doesn’t have a cyclical component,” he explains during a live interview on CNBC’s Fast Money.

“It’s a fundamental bubble that will have a large impact on the economy,” he added.

Watch Wieting explain the possible new bubble (via CNBC):


April 12, 2012

Mayor Greets Illegals With Promise of Free Healthcare

“To encourage this further pressure on an already overstretched service is an absolute disgrace and will be greeted with anger by UK taxpayers,” said Sir Andrew Green, Migration Watch chairman.

A new booklet issued by the Mayor of London detailing how groups including illegal immigrants and foreign visitors can access the NHS – whether or not they are entitled to use it – has been branded an ‘absolute disgrace’ by think-tank Migration Watch UK, which is demanding its immediate recall.

It is estimated that there are some ½ million illegal immigrants in London and the number of foreign visitors to Britain is nearly two million of whom many, of course, come to London. Most of them come on six-month visas which is plenty of time for free medical treatment.

The booklet was issued by the Mayor of London in March 2012 and purports to inform people how to access primary care. It is available online in nineteen languages.

The weasel words are the clue: “Sometimes general practices ask for proof of address or proof of ID. If you do not have any documents, they can still register you”.

Later the pamphlet says, “overseas visitors do not legally have to prove their identity or immigration status to register with a practice”.

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Original source.


April 10, 2012

Utah data breach 10X worse than originally thought

“The victims are likely to be people who have visited a health care provider in the past four months,” the statement said. “Some may be Medicaid or CHIP recipients; others are individuals whose health care providers were unsure as to their status as Medicaid recipients.”

The scope of a data breach involving a Medicaid server at the Utah Department of Health is much worse than originally thought. State officials now say that close to 280,000 Social Security Numbers may have been exposed in the incident instead of 25,000, as originally believed.

Less sensitive personal data such as names, birth dates and addresses of another 500,000 people may have also been compromised in the breach, state officials said today.

Today’s announcement marks the second time in three days that Utah state officials have upped their estimates of a March 30 intrusion into a server containing Medicaid claims data on Utah residents.

According to the Utah Department of Technology Services (DTS) and the Utah Department of Health (UDOH), the breach stemmed from a configuration error at the user authentication layer. The error allowed attackers, believed to be operating out of Eastern Europe, to bypass the network, perimeter and application level security controls that were in place to protect the server.

Initially, state officials said the intrusion had allowed improper access to about 24,000 claims records. Each record could include Social Security Numbers, names, birth dates, addresses, tax identification numbers and treatment codes.

On Friday, the two organizations released another statement saying forensics investigations showed the breach to be larger than initially thought. In addition to Medicaid data, the breached information included data about recipients of the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Plans (CHIP). And rather than 24,000 claims, the hackers had actually accessed 24,000 files, each one of which potentially contained personal data on hundreds of individuals.

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Original source.


April 9, 2012

Million-Dollar Nurses Show California’s Struggle to Cut Payroll

“California taxpayers should be outraged,” said Lanny Ebenstein, an economics lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and president of the California Center for Public Policy.

[Note: This article was originally posted on December 19th, 2011. The IFNM website was attacked by hackers and many articles are now gone from the archives. As a public service, IFNM is now reposting said articles.]

California has paid Lina Manglicmot $1.5 million since 2005, an average of $253,530 a year, to work as a prison nurse in the agricultural town of Soledad.

Manglicmot is one of 42 state nurses who each made more than $1 million in those six years, mostly by tapping overtime, according to payroll data compiled by Bloomberg News. Together, those nurses collected $47.5 million. In 2008, Manglicmot was paid $331,346, including $211,257 in overtime.

The extra pay that allows some nurses to triple their regular compensation underscores a broader trend in California, where government workers are paid more than in other states for similar duties and civil-service job protections hamper efforts to close budget gaps. Governor Jerry Brown said this week that revenue will fall short of expectations, triggering $1 billion in cuts to school busing, libraries and care for children, the elderly and the disabled, among other programs.

“California taxpayers should be outraged,” said Lanny Ebenstein, an economics lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and president of the California Center for Public Policy, a research institution critical of public-sector compensation. “Taxpayers should insist that this is no longer acceptable because what government does is important and it’s important that government run effectively.”

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Original source.