Tag: health care

The Vanishing Art of Presence

Medicine is always changing. In my career, I have seen intensive care units go from simple rooms with oxygen, monitors, and clinical intuition to places where artificial intelligence can predict problems before we notice them, bedside ultrasound helps us avoid guessing, and robotic systems help surgeons work with great precision. Telemedicine now lets specialists care for patients who are far away. These advances have saved lives, made care more accessible, improved efficiency, and helped doctors reach patients who might not have seen a specialist otherwise.

Many studies show how valuable telemedicine is, especially in underserved areas and critical care settings where specialists are scarce (1). I welcome these innovations and use many of them daily. I am convinced that artificial intelligence (AI) will become one of the most important tools doctors have ever had. Recent reviews also suggest that AI will help doctors make decisions, not replace them (2). Still, no matter how advanced our tools get, they should help us do our jobs better, not change what our jobs are about.

A recent lawsuit about the death of a very sick young man has sparked a lot of talk in the medical community (3). Reports say that one question is whether the doctor in charge ever actually examined the patient in person. The courts will figure out what really happened, so I won’t guess or assign blame. What worries me is not the lawsuit itself, but the bigger question it raises. Are we starting to think that because technology lets us care for patients from a distance, being there in person is no longer necessary?

When I started practicing medicine, this question would have seemed impossible. We took blood pressure by hand, read chest X-rays on lighted boxes, and depended on physical exams because we had no other choice. We were always close to our patients. We shook hands, sat with families during hard times, and listened not just to heartbeats and breaths, but also to the pauses, the worry in a spouse’s voice, the fear behind hopeful words, and the small signs that told us more than any lab test. Sometimes I think those moments taught us as much as any textbook.

Today, we have abilities my mentors never dreamed of. We can look at scans from across the world in seconds. A neurologist can check on a stroke patient from far away. An intensive care doctor can watch over several ICUs at once from a central location. Algorithms constantly review patient data and spot patterns we might miss. These advances are real progress, and many people are alive today because doctors were willing to try new technology. Ignoring these innovations would not just be unwise—it would be wrong.

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Little-Known Bureaucratic Procedure Pushed Medical Insurance To Be More Pro-Trans

Cultural shifts sometimes happen in ways you can’t help but notice, like the sudden growth of transgender themes on television. But there are also a bunch of quiet maneuvers you don’t see, producing change through obscure bureaucratic procedures.

To begin your introduction to one of those little-noticed avenues of change, take a moment to read the Independent Medical Review (IMR) obtained by California health care regulators in 2025 on behalf of a biological male (in the record, a “transgender female”) who wanted his health insurance company to buy him a prosthetic “vagina”.

The transgender patient had a history of depression, “with possible psychotic features,” and was taking anti-psychotic medication when his insurer denied coverage for a surgically created artificial vagina. (Surgical neo-vaginas are created by penile inversion, or less frequently by cutting out a piece of the patient’s bowels and sewing it into a surgical hole between his legs.)

Appealing that decision, the potentially psychotic patient asked the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC), which regulates health insurance plans, to conduct a review in which an independent medical expert would decide if his surgery was medically necessary.

A finding on an IMR is binding. Insurers must cover procedures an “independent expert” finds “medically necessary.” As the state’s IMR request form says: “Health plans must follow the IMR decision and promptly provide the service.”

In this case, a psychiatrist reviewed the patient’s surgical request, with no review by a surgeon. The psychiatrist overturned the insurer’s refusal to pay. A male on anti-psychotic medications got a surgically implanted fake vagina, in a procedure covered by insurance, because a psychiatrist found the surgery to be medically necessary.

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If You Want to Live, Stop Trusting the FDA, CDC, Corporate Media, and Jab-Pushing Doctors

If You Want to Live, You Have to Think For Yourself

I recently posted a flippant comment about not trusting the judgment of people who took the COVID jabs. The backlash was immediate and furious, and it only confirmed what I’ve known for years: too many people have outsourced their thinking to authorities who lie to them for a living.

The anger proves my point. When you confront people with evidence that their trusted institutions deceived them, they don’t want to hear it. They’d rather defend the authority that misled them than admit they were used as guinea pigs in a mass medical experiment. That’s not stubbornness; it’s deep psychological conditioning.

I make one exception: the active-duty military personnel who were physically coerced into taking the shots. The United States Coast Guard members who filed a class-action lawsuit against the Biden administration over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate were victims of medical assault, not naive volunteers. [1] Their “choice” was discharge, career destruction, and public humiliation. I have nothing but respect for the people who fought back.

The ‘I Trusted My Doctor’ Excuse Is Not a Defense

The most common justification I heard from angry commenters was some variation of “I trusted my doctor, the FDA, the CDC, the media, Fauci.” And that is exactly the problem. Your doctor was not the one who authorized an experimental gene therapy with zero long-term safety data. Your doctor was just the final delivery mechanism for a system that had already abandoned real science.

The Biden administration pressured the FDA to “change its procedures, cut corners, and lower agency standards” to approve Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines, according to a congressional report. [2] Emergency use authorization was never meant to bypass the entire clinical trial process, yet that is precisely what happened. Experts said that properly analyzing millions of pages of individual participant data would have required at least six months, so they skipped it entirely. [3]

Pfizer’s own whistleblower, Brook Jackson, testified that trial data were falsified, patients were unblinded, poorly trained personnel administered injections, and follow-up on reported side effects was significantly delayed. [4] Anyone with internet access could have found all of this information in real time from independent voices. Ignorance was a choice, and for too many people, it was a fatal one.

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Children’s Hospitals To Begin Offering Restorative Care For Detransitioners

When Texas Children’s Hospital’s “detransition clinic” opens in Houston, it will become the first facility of its kind, giving patients who regret life-altering procedures a chance at restorative care.

The facility, which has yet to announce an opening date, is part of an agreement with state and federal authorities to halt “gender-affirming care” at children’s hospitals while offering help to those who transitioned medically.

A 10-page settlement term sheet, recently obtained by The Epoch Times through an open records request to the Texas attorney general’s office, showed that services at the clinic will focus on multidisciplinary care.

Services are to include endocrinology, surgery, fertility counseling, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and speech pathology, among others.

In May and June, the Department of Justice (DOJ), along with the attorneys general of Texas and Ohio, secured settlements with large hospitals over allegations of fraudulent insurance billing practices related to “gender-affirming care” for children.

The hospitals denied wrongdoing in their billing practices or standards of care.

These agreements require the hospitals not only to cease transitioning procedures, but also to offer discounted or free restorative medical care to detransitioners.

Attorneys representing detransitioners and their clients praised the efforts of the DOJ and the states to assist those suffering from the consequences of life-altering medical changes.

Detransitioners are those who stopped or reversed a medical gender transition they started earlier in life.

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How Obamacare Pushes Big Pharma To Overcharge You For Prescriptions

As if our health care “system” wasn’t already complicated enough, here’s example No. 9,572.

I spent the better part of one year trying to ask a prescription drug provider one simple question about my prescription. Even as someone who works in health policy and with advocates on my behalf, I kept getting the run-around.

Unfortunately, as I found out firsthand, big conglomerates — in this case, CVS Health — make profits by keeping the system complicated, bureaucratic, and opaque. But (eventually) I found out there’s a simple solution: returning to good, old-fashioned cash transactions.

Mail Order Madness

The saga started last summer, when my physician prescribed a maintenance medication to prevent a recurrence of kidney stones. My doctor sent a prescription to CVS Caremark, requesting a 90-day mail-order supply of the drug. CVS is the pharmaceutical benefits manager (PBM) that administers my prescription.

When it arrived, I received the following note:

We filled your prescription with a smaller quantity than what your doctor prescribed. Your prescription plan has limits on the amount of your medication it will cover. We filled your prescription according to these limits. [Emphasis original.]

For the better part of 12 months, I communicated with CVS staff, trying to figure out the reasons for this decision. I also asked a representative from the District of Columbia’s Office of Health Care Ombudsman to investigate on my behalf. Every time my physician prescribed a 90-day supply of this medication, CVS Caremark sent me a 30-day supply of the drug, along with the same note described above.

A few weeks ago, I finally spoke with a CVS representative who could tell me the reason. While my prescription plan covered the drug, it did not cover it as a maintenance medication. This explained why CVS Caremark kept lowering the medicine supplied from 90- to 30-day supplies.

The representative informed me I could use an exceptions process, through which my physician could send a form to CareFirst (my insurer) providing clinical justification to use the drug for maintenance purposes. If approved by CareFirst, then CVS Caremark would honor the 90-day prescription, and provide me with a three-month supply of the drug going forward.

This annoyed me, because I had mentioned the exceptions process (which I know about from working in health policy) while speaking to CVS personnel last summer. That individual never provided me the information I had asked for, which could have saved me months of hassle.

I contacted CVS’ corporate office to ask two simple questions: why did the notices I received refer to “your prescription plan” — a wording that seems deliberately vague as to whether my insurer (CareFirst) or the PBM (CVS Caremark) made the coverage decision; and why didn’t those notices also include specific, written instructions on how request an appeal or exception for longer-term coverage of the drug?

CVS’s communications team sent back this response:

CareFirst is the plan sponsor, and CVS Caremark helps support the administration of the plan’s pharmacy benefit. This CareFirst plan relies on an expert third-party vendor, Medispan, to determine which medications are considered maintenance drugs versus acute. Because Medispan lists potassium citrate as a non-maintenance drug, it is subject to the CareFirst plan’s non-maintenance day supply limit of 30 pills. Members have access to an exceptions process, which is administered directly by CareFirst.

This response didn’t answer my questions about notice wordings. In fact, it suggests that a heretofore undisclosed third party (Medispan) made the decision that limited my prescription. Given CVS’s non-answer, a cynic would suggest the obvious yet unstated reason the notice omitted information about filing an appeal or exceptions request: If people knew about an exceptions process, they might use it.

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Christian Physician Assistant Fired for Resisting Transgender Dogma Gets $410,000 Lawsuit Settlement

A Michigan physician assistant (PA) who alleged she was fired after refusing to comply with hospital transgender policies because of her religious beliefs is receiving a $410,000 settlement in her wrongful termination lawsuit.

Valerie Kloosterman sued University of Michigan Health-West (UMHW) filed suit in 2022 after she was fired in August 2021, alleging the 200-bed suburban Grand Rapids teaching hospital was requiring her to go against her conscience as a Christian.

“All I wanted to do was provide the best care possible to my patients without being forced to violate my Christian beliefs,” Kloosterman said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

She was represented in the lawsuit by First Liberty Institute, which documented that Kloosterman had “received positive performance reviews throughout her employment before raising faith-based objections to mandatory gender identity training,” the news outlet reported.

The legal advocacy nonprofit reported she was terminated after requesting a religious accommodation from finishing training that “required her to affirm statements about gender identity that were in violation of her Christian faith.”

No effort was made to accommodate her, according to the institute which takes on civil rights cases to “reclaim religious freedom in America.”

According to Fox Digital’s report:

The lawsuit says University of Michigan Health-West officials called her to a meeting, where they disparaged her religious beliefs, called her “evil” and a “liar,” told her she could not bring her Christian beliefs into the workplace, and accused her of contributing to suicides among individuals with gender dysphoria.

The settlement also calls on the hospital to prevent such punitive behavior from happening again.

Under its terms, UMHW has agreed to formulate a religious accommodation policy that complies with the law, inform and train all employees, and give reasonable religious accommodations without retribution to those who request it, the institute said.

“This new policy ensures that providers of faith and employees at UMHW will receive religious accommodations so that they can provide excellent care consistent with their medical judgment, because all patients are created in the image of God,” Kloosterman said in her statement to Fox News Digital.

The PA’s lawsuit was not a frivolous pursuit, her attorney said, but based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination on several characteristics, including race and religion.

“Title VII prohibits employers from discriminating against and punishing employees for their faith,” Kayla Toney, counsel at First Liberty, said in a statement shared with Fox News Digital.

She continued, “Valerie is an exceptional physician assistant who cares for each of her patients. Employers cannot drive out people like Valerie just because of their sincere religious beliefs. We are grateful to have resolved this matter with University of Michigan Health-West.”

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Chaos Agent: Anthony Fauci Represents A System That Needs To Be Cleansed

I think nothing enrages Americans more than a lack of accountability from government officials. Yes, it happens often, and the public hasn’t taken up torches and pitchforks (yet), but I would point out that these incidents are cumulative and they light a growing fire within the collective memory. Eventually, people are going to snap if they don’t see action taken to rectify past wrongs.

This week, Dr. Anthony Fauci faced a flurry of questions from the Senate Homeland Security Committee over his handling of the covid response as well as his involvement in the gain of function research which likely led to the creation of the viral variant that spread around the world and nearly triggered a permanent Orwellian police state.

Fauci pleaded the Fifth over 100 times.  It’s not a sign of confidence in his own innocence.

He knows he’s untouchable legally, but I think what the man fears most is public judgment, and he’s not going to offer any confirmation that conservatives and the alternative media were right about him all along.  Unfortunately, even with substantial evidence, there is very little that any congressional committee or even the Trump Administration can do about him.

Fauci is well protected, and not just by the sweeping pardon “signed” by Joe Biden which covers the Doctor back to 2014. No, Fauci is also protected by the system – The bureaucracy and the globalist network of which he is a member.  Fauci is a chaos agent and he served his purpose well. They’re not going to let him face punishment.  If they did, then they might find it harder to procure the cooperation and loyalty of other bureaucrats in future schemes.

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Nutcase James Talarico Tries to Suggest the Bible Requires the Passage of a Government-Run Healthcare System

During a recent campaign event, Texas Democrat senate candidate James Talarico used the Bible to justify the idea of a government-run healthcare system.

This is what Talarico always does. He uses Christianity to justify left wing political policy. It’s the only time he ever discusses his faith.

You will also notice that when talking about this plan, he says that they must finish what Obama started, which is an admission that Obamacare was meant to be a Trojan Horse for government-run healthcare.

Breitbart News reports:

Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico said Scripture requires the government to guarantee health coverage, telling a Texas church crowd that the New Testament makes a public health insurance option a Christian obligation.

Talarico made the argument at a town hall he held at a DeSoto church on July 20, footage of which his campaign posted Saturday under the title “James Talarico Unveils Plan For Black Voters.” The Austin Democrat argued the country should “finish the work of President Obama” and pass a public option, then grounded the pitch in the Gospels.

“Because health care is a human right. It is not a privilege,” Talarico said.

Talarico told the crowd he wanted to speak scripturally, given the setting, and pointed to how Jesus spent his ministry.

“If you read our scriptures, if you read the New Testament, what does Jesus spend most of his time doing? It’s not preaching, it’s not teaching, it is healing. Healing the sick,” Talarico said. “And in Matthew 25, scripture says that’s how we will be judged and how we will be saved. By healing the sick, by feeding the hungry, by welcoming the stranger, by visiting the prisoner.”

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Canada: The Illusion Of Free Healthcare

With the rise in popularity of the Democratic Socialist movement in the United States, one of the promises made to voters is “free healthcare.” Advocates frame healthcare as a human right, pointing north to Canada as the example of universal coverage.

The slogan is simple, powerful, and politically effective: Canadians enjoy free healthcare. The belief that Canadian healthcare is free stems from the fact that Canadians do not pay at the point of service. Yet the question remains: Is it truly free, and what does “free” actually mean?

Anyone applying basic logic and common sense quickly realizes that a system as complex as healthcare, involving doctors, nurses, hospitals, equipment, pharmaceuticals, and administrators, cannot exist without someone paying for it. The real question is not whether money is paid, but how it is collected, who controls it, and how the system functions behind the scenes.

Canada’s healthcare system is often described as universal, equitable, and accessible. But beneath the surface lies a prepaid tax‑funded model controlled almost entirely by government. The mechanics of this system are not widely understood by the average Canadian consumer, largely because the costs are hidden within layers of taxation rather than presented as a monthly insurance premium or deductible.

In Canada, healthcare funding flows through a combination of federal transfers (CHT), provincial taxes, employer payroll taxes, and individual income‑based health premiums. These mechanisms create the illusion of “free” care because the consumer never sees a bill at the doctor’s office. Instead, the costs are embedded in the tax structure, quietly deducted long before the patient ever steps into a clinic.

One of the most significant components of Canadian healthcare funding is the Employer Health Tax (EHT)—a payroll tax applied to businesses based on total compensation paid to employees. In provinces such as Manitoba and Quebec, this tax can reach over four percent of payroll.

While the tax is levied on employers, its economic burden does not remain there. Businesses inevitably pass these costs on to consumers through higher prices, reduced wages, or slower hiring. Canadians may not see a healthcare bill, but they pay for healthcare every time they buy groceries, fill their gas tank, or purchase consumer goods whose prices have quietly risen to absorb payroll taxes.

Beyond employer taxes, individual Canadians also contribute directly through provincial health premiums and income‑based surcharges. Ontario, for example, includes a “Health Premium” on its tax return that can reach up to $900 per year depending on income. Other provinces embed healthcare funding within general income tax brackets, meaning a portion of every paycheck is siphoned into the healthcare system without explicit labeling.

This is why many Canadians believe they pay nothing for healthcare—because the payment is hidden inside broader taxation rather than itemized as a healthcare expense. In reality, most middle‑income Canadians contribute between $400 and $800 annually through these mechanisms, in addition to the indirect costs they incur due to higher consumer prices.

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EVIL: America Federation of Teachers Passes Resolution Supporting ‘Gender-Affirming’ Care, Vows Legal Challenges to Trump Policies

In the latest assault on family values Campus Reform is reporting “The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers union representing approximately 1.8 million members, adopted a resolution on July 19 supporting access to “gender-affirming care” across “all stages of life” and pledging to challenge Trump administration healthcare policies through litigation.”

This is an insult to the American public, who rejected these policies at the polls by voting for President Trump.

The resolution that this teachers’ union supported is called “Protecting Medical Research, Healthcare Access and Health Equity for LGBTQIA+ Communities.” Unfortunately, this means life-altering surgery for young people.

“The resolution was adopted as the Trump administration has moved to restrict “gender transition” procedures for minors. ”

This is Randi Weingarten’s teachers’ union, someone who has sadly been at the forefront of Woke in education.

She is known for her anti-Trump and left-wing activism. She became famous for her left-wing ideology during COVID.

President Trump was elected in part as a rejection of Wokeness by the American people.

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