Tag: health care

Ontario man dies of MAID after being assessed outside Tim Hortons

A London, Ont., doctor who assessed a patient with inflammatory bowel disease and a history of mental health issues for MAID outside a Tim Hortons location and later personally drove the man to the place his life was ended has agreed to a minimum six months’ supervision.

In another case, Dr. James MacLean failed to administer one of three drugs used in assisted deaths — one that paralyzes the body’s muscles, including the muscles involved in breathing. The patient resumed spontaneously breathing again after initially being pronounced dead, and after MacLean had already left the home.

As first reported Monday by the The Globe and Mail, the doctor’s case is raising new concerns about MAID’s oversight and accountability.

“What is striking is not only the seriousness of the concerns identified in these cases, but the limited regulatory response,” said Dr. Ramona Coelho, a family physician and former member of the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario’s MAID death review committee.

As part of an investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) into two public complaints made against MacLean, an independent assessor appointed to review a number of MacLean’s charts concluded that he “did not meet the standard of practice of the profession, displayed a lack of judgment and that his conduct exposes or is likely to expose patients to harm or injury in five out of twenty charts reviewed,” according to a summary decision of the college’s inquiries, complaints and reports committee.

MacLean was called before the committee to be verbally “cautioned” with respect to the MAID complaints.

In addition to agreeing to mandatory clinical supervision for at least six months as part of an “undertaking” with the college, MacLean will undergo ongoing review of his MAID patient charts and mandatory professional education related to MAID, consent, documentation, professional boundaries and professional behaviour.

Keep reading

DOJ: By Its Own Admission, Yale Med School Illegally Discriminates Against White, Asian Applicants

As Yale celebrated its 325th commencement last week, the institution’s medical school faced new scrutiny for alleged racial discrimination in admissions. The Department of Justice sent a letter to Yale School of Medicine on May 14 notifying it that “the Department finds that Yale continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race.”

That letter presents evidence that black and Hispanic students were significantly more likely to be admitted than white and Asian students with the same MCAT scores and grade point averages, an outcome that “cannot be explained by a coincidence.” Specifically, “Yale’s use of race resulted in a Black applicant being as much as 29 times higher odds of getting an interview for admission than an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials.”

The finding by the department that Yale Medical School continues to racially discriminate in its admissions was greeted by criticisms that seem to misunderstand what constitutes racial discrimination. For example, a radiologist named Jeff Anderson responded on X that all groups of students who were admitted to Yale Medical School had very high standardized scores: “Every last one of these are overly qualified I assure you. There’s just simply not enough seats.” The implicit argument is that once applicants have met a certain threshold on their scores, race can be used as a tie-breaker to allocate the limited number of spots.

But as far as the law is concerned, “good enough” is not good enough: Race simply cannot be used as a criterion in admissions decisions no matter how high applicants’ scores are. Yale Medical School is not obligated to accept the students with the highest test scores and is free to consider other factors, as long as race or ethnicity (or factors that are proxies for race and ethnicity) are not among them. Given the staggering differences by race in the odds of receiving an interview among similarly academically situated students, it strains credibility that Yale passes the test.

Neither the Supreme Court nor the Department of Justice is suggesting that test scores are the only indication of merit. But they are both clearly stating that the racial background of the applicant is not a lawful consideration for admission.

A prominent surgeon, Terry Simpson, seemed to confuse racial background with the merit of overcoming challenges when he argued on X: “If you have 100 applicants from privileged, high-performing educational pipelines with nearly identical scores, resumes, research access, tutoring, and opportunities, it is not irrational to also value the applicant who achieved similar academic success despite poverty, instability, underfunded schools, family hardship, or lack of institutional advantages.”

Dr. Simpson oddly assumed, with no information from Yale Medical School, that white and Asian applicants are privileged while black and Hispanic applicants are disadvantaged. But making this assumption is built on nothing more than racist stereotypes, attributing to all black and Hispanic applicants the merit of having overcome challenges based on nothing more than the color of their skin, without any other individualized evidence whatsoever. An applicant’s race, by itself, does not indicate this type of merit or lack thereof.

So, why does the Department of Justice believe that Yale has in fact used race in this impermissible way rather than having collected and considered information about personal challenges that happen to correlate with race? According to the DOJ, first, Yale gave its admissions staff a “holistic metrics model” developed by the Association of American Medical Colleges to guide the school’s assessment of applicants. That model specifically listed “race” and “national origin” as criteria for the admissions staff to consider, which is clearly prohibited by the Students for Fair Admissions decision.

Second, the Department of Justice noted that Yale Medical School’s test score differences between accepted students by race had not changed following the Students for Fair Admissions decision. More than three years ago in that case, Yale argued in its amicus brief that “no workable race-neutral alternatives [would yield] the level of racial diversity … necessary.” As the department notes, “Given this statement, the lack of any change in Yale’s admissions outcomes after Harvard [is] evidence [of] a willful failure to comply with that decision.”

That is, Yale asserted that its admissions demographics would change if the school ceased considering race; yet its admissions demographics have remained unchanged, pointing to ongoing noncompliance with civil rights laws forbidding racial discrimination.

Keep reading

When Behavioral Health IT Turns Children Into Targets

Epic Systems is often presented as a neutral software company. But public reporting, court filings, and Epic’s own product materials show something far more consequential: one dominant health IT company now sits at the center of how sensitive behavioral-health information is stored, shared, and used for outreach across major health systems.

That concentration creates two urgent public risks: security and the marketing of diagnosis.

The security risk is straightforward. Behavioral-health records are among the most sensitive files in medicine, and EHR-related breaches remain a widespread problem across healthcare. When Medicaid and behavioral-health records for large child populations are concentrated in a small number of digital systems, the issue is no longer just privacy.

Lawmakers, behavioral health lobbyists, and drug companies use stigma, HIPAA, even on dead shooters to hide psychiatric drug involvement in mass shootings. When a few digital companies control Medicaid and behavioral health records for millions of children, this isn’t a privacy issue, it’s a national security threat. Psychiatric diagnoses, psychotropic medications, and prescribing doctors systematically vanish from every crime scene. The IT behavioral health companies themselves, appear to be the exact security risk HIPAA was meant to prevent.

The legal cases against Epic show why concentration matters. Particle Health alleged that Epic used its dominance in electronic records and data exchange to exclude a rival from the market. Epic got many claims dismissed, but not the most important ones. In September 2025, a federal judge allowed core monopolization claims to proceed, meaning Epic still had to defend against the central allegation that it used market power anti-competitively. Reuters and other outlets reported that Epic failed to secure full dismissal and remained exposed on the core monopoly theory.

The public should also understand who holds this influence. Epic is privately controlled by founder and CEO Judy Faulkner, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 to the federal Health IT Policy Committee and served until 2014 as the representative of health IT vendors. This is not a partisan point. It is a power point. Faulkner had a seat inside the policy process while the modern national health IT framework was being built, and public reporting has described her as a major political donor with a net worth estimated at about $7.8 billion.

The second risk is how diagnoses become the basis for data-driven outreach. Epic has openly expanded into healthcare “consumerism” through its Cheers CRM platform, marketed as a tool for health systems to run campaigns using thousands of EHR data points. That may be called patient engagement. But when the underlying data include mental-health diagnoses, psychotropic medication histories, missed appointments, crisis visits, or suicide-risk flags, the line between care coordination and diagnosis-based marketing becomes dangerously thin.

This matters most in Medicaid behavioral health. Children in Medicaid often move through fragmented systems involving hospitals, school-based clinics, community mental-health centers, telehealth programs, and public agencies. Their records can travel across multiple settings while families have little visibility into how those records are used to trigger reminders, prompts, referrals, and program enrollment. This is a looks like a major breach on informed consent and certainly would be why HIPPA exists in the first place to protect the consumers medical records.

Keep reading

Trump Details White House Construction Beyond a Ballroom: Military Hospital, Research Facilities

President Donald Trump’s White House construction goes beyond a ballroom, the commander-in-chief told reporters on Tuesday as he stood outside the construction site detailing the complexities of the massive addition.

“You might want to take a look at the complexity,” Trump said as he gestured toward the construction site on the premises. He explained that the ballroom is only part of the story. In fact, he described the ballroom itself as a “shield” of sorts, protecting all of the space currently being built underneath. That includes a military hospital, meeting rooms, and much more.

“These are all different rooms out here,” Trump said. “They’re building a hospital. They’re building a military hospital. They’re building all sorts of research facilities — also meeting rooms and rooms that go hand in hand for the military, using the ballroom, and the ballroom is really a shield and protecting all of the things that are built here.”

Trump explained that the construction already goes “very deep” — six stories deep.

“This is down because we’ve already done these floors, but these are already down two floors. That is down about six stories deep. That’s fixed up normally,” he said, walking through other features and complexities of this design.

“It’s all knit together between the drone proofing [and] the missile proofing. We have had the drone capacity upstairs. We can have all sorts of military up, whether — I hate to use the word snipers, but we have great sniper capacity,” the president said, revealing that it is “built for our snipers, not the enemy snipers.”

“And because of the height, we get a very clear view of everything all over Washington,” Trump said.

Trump’s brief tour followed the Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough determining that a plan drafted by Republican lawmakers to provide $1 billion in funding for the White House ballroom project did not follow the rules, although Republicans say they have a fix underway.

Keep reading

George Washington, Father of the Country, Killed by Doctors

The grim circumstances behind the death of George Washington (1732-1799), America’s first president and popularly known as the Father of the Country, are not wholly unknown. The details have been reported by historians for more than two centuries.

What’s strange about this dry biographical knowledge is that it is not reported with shock and alarm and hence never conveyed to popular culture with lessons for our lives. This is because Washington’s physicians were following standard protocols when they bled him to death.

The facts: Washington came down with a throat infection. Three doctors, all convinced of the settled wisdom of the healing arts deployed since the Middle Ages, participated in draining blood from his body, to the point that they took 5 pints or fully half his blood, while giving him an enema on top of it all.

They literally drained the life out of him, not from malice but simply by following the established protocols as recommended by the best physicians at the time.

To invoke a popular phrase, where is the outrage? Nineteenth-century biographies reported the details but celebrated Washington for his bravery in enduring the treatment, then called phlebotomy, which was considered the best science.

John Marshall’s (later Justice) famous early biography, published in five volumes from 1804 to 1807, simply says:

“Believing bloodletting to be necessary, he procured a bleeder who took from his arm twelve or fourteen ounces of blood, but he would not permit a messenger to be despatched for his family physician until the appearance of day. About eleven in the morning Doctor Craik arrived; and perceiving the extreme danger of the case, requested that two consulting physicians should be immediately sent for. The utmost exertions of medical skill were applied in vain. The powers of life were manifestly yielding to the force of the disorder; speaking, which was painful from the beginning, became almost impracticable: respiration became more and more contracted and imperfect, until half past eleven on Saturday night; when, retaining the full possession of his intellect, he expired without a struggle.”

Necessary. Medical skill. Protocols. Best Practices. Standards of Care. Death. No one knows why: just a yielding to the forces of disorder.

Keep reading

Multiple States Begin Ejecting Illegal Immigrants From Subsidized Healthcare

The political left often betrays their true agenda in the legislation they choose to oppose.  The SAVE Act, for example, would require proof of citizenship to vote in US elections; a law which the majority of countries around the world enforce.  It’s widely supported by around 80% of the public, yet, Democrats stubbornly refuse to pass it.  

Why?  Because they know there are illegal immigrants voting in their favor, and they know that mail-in ballot fraud exists and often benefits them. 

By extension, Democrats aggressively attempted to block Trump Administration efforts to ensure that illegal immigrants could not receive healthcare subsidies.  Their argument was that “no illegals actually access those subsidies”.  Of course, if this was true, then it should not matter if Trump adds such restrictions – According to Dems, nothing would change.

In reality, progressive politicians know that around 1.4 million “asylum seekers” (illegal immigrants who entered the country under Biden’s open border policies and then took advantage of the system) were on the healthcare rolls at the end of 2024.  They also know that by offering welfare programs to illegals, they are buying the future loyalty of those migrants (as well as keeping them in the country to rig the census in favor of blue states).   

Today, this loophole is being rectified by a number of states that are now requiring proof of citizenship in order to qualify for public healthcare programs.  You would think this is common sense, but Democrats and some medical institutions are not happy with the changes. 

Hospitals across the state of Tennessee say they are receiving notice from the Department of Health requiring them to verify the citizenship status of everyone enrolled in public benefit programs. 

Opponents to the reforms say this includes Children’s Special Services, which provides access to care for children from birth to 21 years of age.  The process for disenrolling kids 18 to 21 has already begun, and there is a process underway to disenroll kids zero to 17. 

It is a typical Democrat tactic to target and isolate a single “vulnerable” group and use them to justify the existence of welfare benefits for all foreigners.  You don’t want to steal that wheelchair away from little Pedro or snatch life saving medicine away from poor innocent Gabriela, right?  It is also the case than many of these healthcare providers stand to lose millions in government subsidized payments if migrants are kicked off the rolls. 

Keep reading

Americans Who Can Are Dropping Medical Insurance

Have you observed what is happening with medical insurance in the United States? There is an upheaval taking place. You might be experiencing it yourself.

The Wakely Consulting Group has taken upon itself to track trends in the medical insurance market, both pricing and participation.

Their latest report has documented an ongoing and profound shift, one so dramatic that it portends something truly meaningful for the future.

Lacking serious reform of the system from Congress, it seems that consumers are taking matters into their own hands.

Congress declined to extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) starting in January. Consumers have examined their bills and plans in light of the price increases which range from 25 to 115 percent depending on conditions and levels. More than a million people have dropped their coverage entirely. More will do so through the end of the year.

Wakely comments: “Based on unique data collection from 80 percent of the ACA individual market, Wakely … estimates a material reduction in enrollment for 2026, ranging on average from 17 percent to 26 percent in total.”

This is happening because, fortunately, there is no individual mandate to be enrolled in anything since the Supreme Court deleted that portion of the program.

Individuals are downgrading their coverage to plans with fewer benefits and higher deductibles. Or they are just doing without and paying cash or shopping for crowdhealth options.

The implications for the ACA, also known as Obamacare, are profound.

First, this changes the risk pool calculation in ways that are disruptive. The whole machinery fundamentally depends on large risk pools that mask costs and separate premiums from actual individual circumstance. With such large pools, the architects hoped to take a sideways route to a privatized form of socialized medicine.

That scheme now lies in tatters.

Second, with so many people leaving (obviously those who don’t anticipate system needs) those who remain in the system are less healthy: the very people more willing to pay the higher premiums are those who expect to use the services. From an actuarial point of view, this change puts further pressure on prices. And with risk pools shrinking and data pointing to higher costs, we have a system that seems to be eating itself on both ends.

You would think that the implosion of the medical-care system of the world’s biggest economy would be big news. Somehow it is not. Why has this not been widely reported?

A theory as to why: It is happening too slowly and with too much data diffusion. It is genuinely difficult to get a handle on the pace of the increases because every state is different, every age group is priced differently, and the diversity of real-world experience not only differs on the household level but even on the event level.

Which is to say, you never know until it hits you precisely what you will pay given any particular medical-care event. As for the premiums and deductibles, people are remarkably unwilling to share personal stories of what they face due to privacy concerns and also some element of personal shame related to financial burdens.

The system as it stands is so enormously complicated that hardly anyone can really understand the whole, much less characterize the aggregate experience with the sector. It keeps growing larger, more expensive, and more exploitative, but also more complicated and diffuse, leaving writers like me ever less willing to make a judgment on it.

Keep reading

Academia’s Leftward March

Universities have leaned left politically since at least the 1960s. In itself, that’s not a problem. Different professions attract different kinds of people. Artists lean liberal. Soldiers lean conservative. Why should academics be any exception?

But there’s a difference between a lean and a monopoly – and American academia is rapidly approaching the latter. According to a recent paper by Nathan Honeycutt, 74% of US faculty identify as liberal, 15% as moderate, and only 11% as conservative. Remarkably, more faculty identify as “far left” or “very liberal” than with any position right of center.

This matters because intellectual progress depends on disagreement. When dissenting voices vanish, institutions don’t become wiser; they become more vulnerable to groupthink, motivated reasoning, and the comforting illusion that everyone sensible already agrees. If universities lose the capacity to challenge their own assumptions, their claim to be society’s truth-seeking institutions starts to look increasingly shaky.

In this post, I’ll outline five key findings about the political makeup and trajectory of academia, captured in five fascinating graphs.

Keep reading

Iowa Hospital Accused of Illegally Harvesting Air Force Veteran’s Organs, Skin, Eyes and Tissue – Daughters Sue for Malpractice and Emotional Distress

The daughters of a 69-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran have filed a federal lawsuit against an Iowa hospital, claiming staff improperly harvested their father’s organs, skin, eyes, and tissue without his prior consent or any authorization from his next of kin.

The lawsuit claims the harvesting was done without even attempting to contact his children.

Martin Gillespie, a proud Air Force veteran described by family as a loving father of three and grandfather of eight, was pronounced dead on April 1 at Alegent Health Community Memorial Hospital in Missouri Valley.

According to the lawsuit, obtained by Law & Crime, Gillespie never authorized any anatomical gifts or organ donation during his lifetime.

The complaint alleges that hospital staff made “no attempt to contact” Gillespie’s next of kin, his daughters, Christina Gubbels and Daun Stoddard, before referring his body to the Iowa Donor Network.

Hours later, on the same day, the Iowa Donor Network harvested his organs, skin tissue, and eyes.

Gillespie’s body was then transported to Hennessey Funeral Home in Missouri Valley for cremation.

Keep reading

How US hemp ban could criminalize CBD products – and derail Medicare plan

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently started a new pilot to reimburse patients for hemp-derived products – like CBD – but a hemp ban that Congress passed in November could derail the program.

The new program will make certain Medicare and Medicaid recipients eligible for reimbursement for up to $500 worth of hemp products each year and is intended in part to evaluate whether these products could reduce their other health related costs.

But the program’s definition of hemp comes from the 2018 Farm Bill, which created the loophole that has allowed so many cannabis products to be sold outside state-authorized dispensaries. Under the Farm Bill, hemp is any cannabis product derived from plants containing less than .3% delta nine THC. If the hemp ban that passed with last year’s spending bill goes into effect as planned on 12 November (it goes into effect one year after passage), all products containing more than .4mg of THC of any kind will become federally illegal.

This would criminalize “the vast, vast majority of hemp products, including most non-intoxicating CBD products”, says Jonathan Miller of US Hemp Roundtable.

Inesa Ponomariovaite, owner of Nesa’s Hemp, which specializes in CBDA hemp extract, met with members of Congress this week to advocate for laws that would keep her products legal.

“Congress is trying to pass laws on something that they’re not even fully understanding, and that’s really going to affect us,” Ponomariovaite said, who noted that during her meetings, she had to explain the endocannabinoid system to senators who had not heard of it before.

The endocannabinoid system is a system of receptors throughout the brain and other organs that interacts with cannabinoids, which appear in the cannabis plant but also form naturally in the human body. It helps regulate pain, memory, cognitive processing and energy, which is part of why cannabis products affect us the way they do.

Ponomariovaite says products that contain a wide array of cannabinoids have stronger therapeutic effects than isolated CBD, for example, which might be the only type of CBD available should the ban go through.

Lawmakers have been trying to pass legislation to delay the hemp ban or replace it with regulation since it first passed, Miller said. In December, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden re-introduced the Cannabinoid Safety and Regulation Act, which would replace the ban with regulation to ensure hemp products are safe and free of contaminants. Indiana Representative Jim Baird introduced a bill in January that would delay the hemp ban for two years.

Miller blames political tension as to why neither of these laws have yet made it through Congress: “Congress isn’t passing anything these days, it’s so polarized and so partisan that it’s hard for them to pass even the most obvious bills, and so we’re kind of caught up in that.”

While the White House hasn’t proposed any specific counters to the hemp ban, Trump has posted on Truth Social calling for Congress “to update the Law to ensure that Americans can continue to access the full-spectrum CBD products they have come to rely on.”

The Trump administration has taken steps to reschedule cannabis to acknowledge its medical potential, but has also faced political resistance to many of its pro-cannabis policies, including the Medicare-linked hemp pilot program. A group of advocates, including Drug Free America Foundation and Cannabis Industry Victims Educating litigators sued the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and the CMS administrator, Mehmet Oz, over the program, accusing them of establishing a plan to promote substances that may soon be considered federally illegal without going through proper administrative procedure. The court denied the lawsuit’s attempt to block the program.

Ponomariovaite says that lawmakers are worrying about the wrong thing when they focus their energy on trying to dissect the cannabis plant, making parts of it legal and parts of it illegal. Their focus should instead be on contamination.

“Hemp itself is like a natural soil cleaner. It actually grabs all the micro toxins, the mildew, bacteria, metals, and absorbs them within the hemp plant. So if you extract that plant for medicinal properties, that plant is going to be loaded with toxins,” she said.

Keep reading