Saturday, December 15, 2012

Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., December 15 & 16, 2012


Hmm... an exclamation one won't often hear comin' out of my mouth...

YOU GO, GIRL...!!!

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7 comments:

William R. Barker said...

* THREE PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)

* FOLKS... IT'S MARK STEYNE... ALWAYS WORTH READING!

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335709/doctor-won-t-see-you-now-mark-steyn

A few years ago, my small local hospital asked a Senate staffer if she could assist them in obtaining federal money for a new building. So she did, expediting the process by which that particular corner of northern New Hampshire was deemed to be “under-served” and thus eligible for the fed gravy.

At the ribbon-cutting, she was an honored guest, and they were abundant in their praise. Alas, in the fullness of time, the political pendulum swung, her senator departed the scene, and she was obliged to take a job out of state.

Last summer, she returned to the old neighborhood and thought she’d look for a doctor.

The sweet old guy with the tweed jacket in the neatly painted cape on Main Street had taken down his shingle and retired.

Most towns in the North Country now have fewer doctors than they did in the 19th century, and the smaller towns have none.

The Yellow Pages lists more health insurers than physicians, which would not seem to be an obvious business model.

So...

(*DRUM ROLL*)

...she wound up going to the health center she’d endowed so lavishly with your tax dollars just a few years earlier.

They gave her the usual form to fill in, full of perceptive inquiries on her medical condition: Do you wear a seat belt? Do you own a gun? How many bisexual men are you now having sex with? These would be interesting questions if one were signing up for eHarmony.com and looking to date gun-owning bisexuals who don’t wear seat belts, but they were not immediately relevant to her medical needs. Nevertheless, she complied with the diktats of the Bureau of Compliance, and had her medical records transferred, and waited . . . and waited.

That was August.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

December 15, 2012 at 10:40 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)

She has now been informed that she has an appointment with a nurse-practitioner at the end of January.

My friend pays $15,000 a year for health insurance. In northern New Hampshire, that and meeting the minimum-entry requirement of bisexual sex partners will get you an appointment with a nurse-practitioner in six months’ time.

Why is it taking so long? Well, because everything in America now takes long, and longer still. But beyond that malign trend are more specific innovations, such as the “Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology,” which slipped through all but unnoticed in Subtitle A Part One Section 3001 of the 2009 Obama stimulus bill. Under the Supreme National Coordinator, the United States government is setting up a national database for everybody’s medical records, so that if a Texan hiker falls off Mount Katahdin after walking the Appalachian Trail, Maine’s first responders will be able to know exactly how many bisexual gun-owners she’s slept with, and afford her the necessary care.

This great medical advance is supposed to be fully implemented by 2014, so the federal government is providing incentives for doctors to comply.

Under the EHR Incentive Program, if a physician makes “meaningful use” of electronic health records, he’s eligible for “bonuses” from the feds — a mere $44,000 from Medicare, for example, but up to $63,750 from Medicaid. If you have a practice at 27 Elm Street and you’re treating the elderly widow from 22 Elm Street, she’s unlikely to meet the federally mandated bi-guy requirement, but you can still qualify for bonuses by filing her smoking status with Washington. For medical facilities in upscale suburbs, EHR is costly and time-consuming, and, along with a multitude of other ObamaCare regulatory burdens, helping drive doctors to opt out entirely: My comrade Michelle Malkin noted the other day that her own general practitioner has now switched over to “concierge care,” under which all third parties (whether private insurers or government) are dumped and a patient contracts with his doctor solely through his checkbook. Some concierge docs will even make house calls: Everything old is new again! (For as long as the new federal commissars permit it.)

But in the broken-down rural hinterlands, EHR and other novelties make it more lucrative for surviving medical centers to prioritize federal paperwork over patient care.

For example, there’s a lot of prescription-drug abuse in this country, and so the feds award “meaningful use” bonuses for providing records that will assist them in determining whether a guy with a prescription for painkillers in New Hampshire also has a prescription for painkillers with another doctor over the Connecticut River in Vermont. So in practice every new patient in this part of the world now undergoes a background check before getting anywhere near a doctor. It doesn’t do much for your health, but it does wonders for an ever more sclerotic bureaucracy.

Hence the decay of so many “medical” appointments into robot-voiced box-checking. At the doctor’s a couple of months back, the nurse was out to lunch, and so the receptionist-practitioner rattled through the form. In the waiting room. “Are you sexually active?” she asked. “You first,” I replied.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

December 15, 2012 at 10:41 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)

But don’t worry, it’s totally secure. Carl Smith Jr. was the first physician in Harlan County, Kentucky to introduce EHR. “Because of this technology,” Dr. Smith says, “we can send the patient’s prescription electronically by secure e-mail to pharmacies.” Wow! “Secure e-mail”: What a concept! It’s a good thing the e-mail is secure at American pharmacies because nothing else is. Last Christmas, while guest-hosting at Fox News in New York, I had a spot of ill health and went to pick up a prescription at Duane Reade on Sixth Avenue. The woman ahead of me was having some difficulties. She was a stylish lady d’un certain age, and she caught my wandering eye. After prolonged consultation with the computer, the “pharmacist” informed her (and the rest of us within earshot) that her insurer had approved her Ortho but denied her Valtrex. I was thinking of asking her for cocktails at the Plaza, when I noticed the other women in line tittering. It seems that Ortho is a birth-control pill, and Valtrex is a herpes medication.

(So good luck retaining any meaningful doctor-patient confidentiality in a system in which more people — insurers, employers, government commissars, TSA Obergropinführers, federal incentive-program auditors — will be able to access your medical records than in any other nation on earth.)

No foreigner can even understand the American “health care” debate, which seems to any tourist casually surfing the news channels to involve everything but health care. Since the Second World War, government medical systems have taken hold in almost every developed nation, but only in America does the introduction of governmentalized health care impact small-business hiring practices and religious liberty, and require 16,500 new IRS agents and federal bonuses for contributing to a national database of seat-belt wearers. Thus, Big Government American-style: Byzantine, legalistic, whimsical, coercive, heavy on the paperwork, and lacking the one consolation of statism — the great clarifying simplicity of universal mediocrity.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, ObamaCare governmentalizes one-sixth of the U.S. economy — or the equivalent of the entire French economy. No one has ever attempted that before, not even the French. In parts of rural America it will quickly achieve a Platonic perfection: There will be untold legions of regulators, administrators, and IRS collection agents, but not a doctor or nurse in sight.

December 15, 2012 at 10:41 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324640104578165683785829580.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

The federal government's Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) independent actuary estimated last month that the FHA will lose $2.8 billion this fiscal year on reverse mortgages, and in the worst case $28.3 billion with the losses stretching through 2019.

(As HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan delicately put it to Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, the FHA's reverse-mortgage business is an "important" issue that the agency needs "to make changes on.")

For those who haven't seen former Senator Fred Thompson's TV ads, reverse mortgages are a type of home-equity loan for Americans age 62 and older who have mostly or fully paid off their mortgage. If the borrower can pay real-estate taxes, insurance and other fees, he can borrow against the home and stay in it until death. Then the lender demands repayment with interest.

The problem is that taxpayers, via the FHA, insure lenders against the funds they advance plus accrued interest, and borrowers can also borrow to pay the fees.

FHA did fewer than 50,000 reverse-mortgage deals a year until 2006, when the housing mania went galactic. By 2007, the agency was insuring more than 100,000 reverse mortgages, and by 2009 the average FHA-backed reverse mortgage reached $262,763, often paid in a lump sum.

At least FHA guarantees for home purchases foster Congress's professed goal of homeownership — though we've seen in the housing bust how that misallocates capital. But guarantees for reverse mortgages go to people who are already homeowners who want to cash out of a real-estate asset. That's fine if they want to do it at their own risk. FHA's guarantees are essentially a subsidy for older Americans to spend down their savings[!]

The FHA's analysts didn't foresee an extended period of house price declines and didn't price mortality risk properly. Many loans are now worth more than the house itself and heirs decided to walk away.

FHA has to foot the bill for selling the house and make good on the shortfall between the net proceeds and what lenders are owed on the insurance.

Taxpayers are ultimately on the hook.

December 15, 2012 at 10:58 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/dec/12/rep-king-benghazi-10-times-bigger-watergate-iran-c/

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said Wednesday that the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is 10 times bigger than the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals put together.

Mr. King said, "I don't think the public has any idea, and I tell you, I don't either, of the chronology of the events — what took place, and who was where doing what and why. And all the way down through — we still haven't seen an autopsy report on the ambassador yet. Simple questions that you would ask in the first 24 hours have not been asked yet."

King reiterated his support for a proposal put forth by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) who has called for a Watergate-style select committee to investigate the circumstances surrounding the attack, in which U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and State Department officer Sean Smith were killed.

The Washington Times reported Tuesday that live video from a drone flying over the consulate during the attack was monitored at a Defense Department facility, but was not given immediately to the White House.

Senior Defense Department officials argued during a Nov. 9 background briefing on the attack that the footage would not have necessarily provided solid enough information on the ground to warrant sending in a team.

A senior U.S. intelligence official also told The Times that the CIA's personnel in Benghazi "responded to the situation on the night of 11 and 12 September as quickly and as effectively as possible."

* FOLKS... WE KNOW THAT'S NOT TRUE. (*SHRUG*) BOTTOM LINE... KING IS RIGHT. BUT I KNOW... MOST OF YOU PEOPLE DON'T CARE. IF THE MEDIA TELLS YOU IT'S NO LONGER A STORY, THEN... TO MOST OF YOU IT'S NO LONGER A STORY.

December 16, 2012 at 10:01 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/12/15/clinton_wont_testify_on_benghazi_due_to_illness

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won't testify to Congress next week on Benghazi...

* WE KNEW THIS WAS COMING. AND OF COURSE, THE MSM WILL GIVE HER COVER.

* OH... AND GUESS WHO IS RUNNING THE HEARING? (*DRUM ROLL*) JOHN KERRY.

* FOLKS... THIS ISN'T MY AMERICA. IT HASN'T BEEN FOR A LONG TIME.

December 16, 2012 at 10:07 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/12/gov-dossiers-on-us-citizens/

In a secret government agreement granted without approval or debate from lawmakers, the U.S. attorney general recently gave the National Counterterrorism Center sweeping new powers to store dossiers on U.S. citizens, even if they are not suspected of a crime, according to a news report.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder granted the center the ability to copy entire government databases holding information on flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and other data, and to store it for up to five years, even without suspicion that someone in the database has committed a crime, according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story.

Whereas previously the law prohibited the center from storing data compilations on U.S. citizens unless they were suspected of terrorist activity or were relevant to an ongoing terrorism investigation, the new powers give the center the ability to not only collect and store vast databases of information but also to trawl through and analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior in order to uncover activity that could launch an investigation.

The changes granted by Holder would also allow databases containing information about U.S. citizens to be shared with foreign governments for their own analysis.

A former senior White House official told the Journal that the new changes were “breathtaking in scope.”

Under the new rules issued in March, the NCTC can now obtain almost any other government database that it claims is “reasonably believed” to contain “terrorism information.” This could conceivably include collections of financial forms submitted by people seeking federally backed mortgages or even the health records of anyone who sought mental or physical treatment at government-run hospitals, such as Veterans Administration facilities, the paper notes.

The Obama administration’s new rules come after previous surveillance proposals were struck down during the Bush administration, following widespread condemnation.

December 16, 2012 at 10:26 AM

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