Tag: health care

Emails show evidence gender transition providers for kids hid what they do, misled journalists

The University of California San Francisco scrubbed its website of details on its provision of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical removals of healthy breasts and genitals for minors, following a query from then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show, according to a massive production to Judicial Watch in a California Public Records Act lawsuit.

The UC system’s designated campus for health sciences and University of Southern California-affiliated Children’s Health Los Angeles also hid the fact that a 9-year-old was part of their blocker study through the National Institutes of Health, when they corrected New York Times reporters who asked about an 8-year-old in the study.

The evidence of obfuscation, misleading and threatening the media – one official suggested suing Carlson before he reported anything – is sprinkled throughout nearly 2,500 pages of three-year-old internal conversations among so-called gender-affirming care leaders of UCSF and CHLA and both conservative and mainstream media. 

It suggests a pattern of withholding information that could cut the taxpayer and insurance spigot to the lucrative world of medicalized gender transitions for minors and set back gender ideology in U.S. medical institutions, which have resisted their European counterparts’ dramatic pullback on medicalized pediatric transitions.

CHLA researcher Johanna Olson-Kennedy admitted hiding the results of her NIH-funded study, that gender-confused children don’t see mental-health benefits from blockers, because “I do not want our work to be weaponized” by opponents. She also falsely characterized the study population to the Times to explain away her findings.

Much of the damage to the industry’s reputation and cash flow is self-inflicted, through its own public recordings of practitioners candidly discussing the gruesome and lucrative nature of surgeries, hormone therapy and the lifelong medical management they require, and how to overcome parental opposition to child transitions.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, which hid research on the importance of children seeing faces when it endorsed COVID-19 mask mandates, then claimed it was an accident, also banned a critic of gender ideology the morning of its conference last fall.

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Dems Want Medicaid For Millions Of Biden-Era Migrants But Use Sneaky Wordplay To Pretend They Don’t

The federal government shut down on Wednesday after Democrats refused to vote on a clean continuing resolution to keep the government funded for the next seven weeks. When Republicans pointed out that Democrats were unwilling to vote to fund the government without restoring health care eligibility for illegal aliens, the media and other Democrats jumped into action, “fact-checking” Republicans and claiming that wasn’t true.

These “fact checks” rely on the ludicrous claim that foreign citizens who were dumped into the United States by the millions by the Biden administration via blanket parole grants are not really “illegal” aliens.

Democrats refused to fund the government without a funding proposal that would, in part, rescind Subtitle B in Title VII of the One Big Beautiful Bill. That section had narrowed the eligibility requirements for government health care benefits (like Medicaid), restricting eligibility for certain foreign nationals, such as the 2.8 million otherwise inadmissible aliens who received blanket parole into the United States from the Biden administration.

But rather than acknowledge that Democrats’ proposal would extend federal health care to parolees, leftist mouthpieces insist that those millions of parolees don’t count as “illegal aliens” and therefore that no illegal aliens are getting Medicaid benefits.

That’s what Neera Tanden is doing when she insists the Affordable Care Act “bans care for illegal aliens.”

Or Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, who claimed: “Undocumented immigrants aren’t even *allowed* to access Medicare, Medicaid or ACA credits.”

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said in an X post: “‘Health care for illegal aliens’ is the new ‘immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield.’ The Republican playbook is simple: make up a baseless lie, repeat it every chance you get, hope and pray that everyone blames Democrats for the crises you created.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said: “To be clear, undocumented immigrants aren’t even allowed to enroll in federally funded health coverage.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNBC it is an “outright lie” and that “federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars to provide medical coverage to undocumented individuals.”

New York Rep. Jerry Nadler said on X that “undocumented immigrants are not eligible for the ACA. Period.”

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CNN’s Jake Tapper Corners Hakeem Jeffries on LIVE TV — Confronts Him on Hidden Provision That Gives Illegal Aliens Healthcare Through Emergency Medicaid and Asylum Loopholes

CNN’s Jake Tapper grills House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on live television about hidden provisions in the Democrats’ spending bill that fund emergency Medicaid for noncitizens, exposing the healthcare-for-illegals loophole Democrats don’t want Americans to see.

The confrontation came amid the ongoing government shutdown, where Democrats are blocking a clean continuing resolution unless Republicans cave to their demands for bloated spending, including the extension of Obamacare subsidies set to expire at the end of 2025.

But Tapper wasn’t letting Jeffries off the hook with the usual Democrat talking points about protecting Americans.

Tapper was forced to read aloud Subtitle E of the bill to Jeffries, a section Republicans have rightly exposed as a Trojan horse for open-borders healthcare handouts.

Jake Tapper:
Donald Trump blessed it as well. Let me ask you about a provision that the Republicans are talking about quite a bit. I know you want to talk about, and Democrats want to talk about, extending the Obamacare subsidies which expire at the end of 2025. But they talk about the provisions, and it’s right here—Subtitle E.

This has to do with the repeal of health care subtitle changes, and specifically what it is. How they characterize it is: you want to give health insurance to undocumented immigrants. I understand that’s not really an accurate depiction, but what it does do is—

Hakeem Jeffries:
It’s a lie.

Jake Tapper:
It’s a lie. But what you support does bring back funding for emergency Medicaid to hospitals, some of which does pay for undocumented immigrants and people who don’t have health insurance.

Also, there is this provision, and it’s not about undocumented immigrants. It’s about people with asylum seekers and people with temporary protected status, et cetera, et cetera, but about their ability to get Medicaid.

They’re non-citizens. They’re not undocumented, they’re not illegal. Why even include that in a bill, knowing that they’re going to seize right upon that and use that as a message?

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Govt Shutdown: Ro Khanna Admits Democrats Are Fighting to Get Free Health Care for Illegal Aliens

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) admitted that the government shutdown fight is over Democrats seeking to provide free health care to illegal aliens — paid for by American taxpayers.

In an interview with Fox Business this week, Khanna said the government has shut down in part because Democrats are looking to make it easier for illegal aliens to secure taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits.

Khanna, though, tried to downplay the issue by claiming only a small amount of taxpayer funding is going toward subsidizing healthcare benefits for illegal aliens.

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Scots patients forced to have electric shock treatment more than 1000 times.

Patients in Scotland were forced to receive electric shock treatment against their will almost 1,100 times last year – prompting calls for the NHS to stop using the ‘ethically unacceptable’ procedure.

In each case, people suffering from mental illness were compelled to undergo electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) even though they objected to the treatment or actively struggled to resist it.

The World Health Organisation and United Nations recently warned that involuntary or forced ECT risked breaching patients’ human rights – and could be regarded as a form of torture.

The procedure, which sees electric currents passed through the brain to induce a brief seizure, has been used since the 1930s but remains deeply controversial.

A new report shows that ECT was carried out in the Scottish NHS more than 4,000 times last year.

Women in their 60s were most likely to receive the treatment – while the most commonly treated condition was severe depression.

In around 2,000 cases, ECT was performed on people who, because of their mental state, were deemed incapable of giving consent.

In 1,081 cases, treatment was given to patients who said they didn’t want it or fought against it – but who were over-ruled by doctors.

While health chiefs in Scotland acknowledge ECT can produce ‘adverse’ side-effects, they insist it is safe and effective.

First developed in the 1930s, the procedure was infamously portrayed in the 1975 film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, in which Jack Nicholson plays a convicted criminal who feigns mental illness.

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Waste Of The Day: Veterans’ Hospital Equipment Is Missing

Topline: The Veterans Health Administration has lost an estimated 5% of its reusable medical equipment worth at least $211 million — including exam tables, computers and microscopes — and “will continue to do so if processes are not improved,” according to a new audit from the Veterans Affairs inspector general.

Key facts: VA hospitals own over 2 million pieces of nonexpendable equipment that is meant to be used for two years or more, valued at $12 billion. Federal auditors recently visited hospitals to see if the VA was properly tracking the equipment and found that thousands of items had disappeared.

The auditors estimated that a third of the equipment — 537,000 items — is in a different location than inventory records claim, and an additional 75,500 items are missing entirely.

It’s possible there is even more missing equipment, because the VA is only required to keep track of inventory worth more than $5,000.

Some of the nonexpendable equipment is tracked using electronic tags, but some of the tags have dead batteries or only show what building the item is in and not what room.

The VA also uses an “inventory by exception” system in which items that have their location recorded during routine maintenance do not need to be included in annual inventory reports for up to 24 months, even though most items are required to be logged every 12 months. Auditors wrote that “a lot can go wrong, including losing equipment,” because of the inventory-by-exception system.

There are also staffing issues contributing to the missing equipment. Some VA employees working on inventory could not search for items because they did not have the keys to all the rooms in the hospital. Some hospitals have staffing levels below 40%, which employees said made it harder to fill out inventory reports on time.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com. 

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Budget Office Estimates Tens Of Billions Lost To Obamacare Exchange Fraud

his space has previously reported on the fraud associated with Obamacare, particularly the enhanced Exchange subsidies passed in 2021 that Democrats want to extend. In recent weeks, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has now admitted that the law’s subsidy structure encourages enrollees to lie about their income.

These reports come on top of the fact that passing a subsidy extension could expand funding for abortion-related travel, in ways that undermine state pro-life protections. It’s all enough to make one wonder why Republican “leaders” are making noises about extending the enhanced subsidies before their expiration on December 31.

Impact of Skewed Incentives

Prior studies by the Paragon Health Institute have examined the incentives created by the Exchange subsidy regime to falsify income estimates. (Disclosure: While I have done work for Paragon, I had no involvement with this particular report, and am writing this article on my own behalf.)

Those incentives work in two ways: On the one hand, enrollees with income below the poverty level have an incentive to inflate their income up to the poverty level, because otherwise they will not qualify for subsidies at all. (This dynamic largely applies in the 10 red states that have not expanded Medicaid, because enrollees with below-poverty income levels in expansion states would qualify for Medicaid expansion.) On the other hand, enrollees with higher incomes — say, between two and four times the poverty level — have an incentive to understate their income, to qualify for the richest subsidies.

Paragon concluded that, in 2025, there are approximately 6.4 million people with incomes just above the poverty level with potentially fraudulent enrollment, either for over- or under-stating their income. In its estimation, these enrollees led to approximately $27.1 billion in estimated taxpayer losses due to Exchange fraud.

Budget Office Estimates

As part of its responses to questions from congressional Republicans, CBO recently revealed for the first time that it, too, believes enrollees are lying about their income to qualify for Obamacare subsidies:

Estimating the number of people who have improperly received subsidies for marketplace [i.e., Exchange] coverage is difficult. The agency has, however, specifically estimated that 1.3 million marketplace enrollees improperly claimed the premium tax credit [i.e., subsidies] via intentional overstatement of income for 2023; 2.3 million enrollees did so for 2025.

The budget agency went on to explain that it could calculate this improper enrollment “because it appears in enrollment data as an unusual concentration of enrollees reporting income just above” the poverty level.

For instance, CBO noted that the number of people reporting income between 100 percent and 105 percent of the poverty level in non-expansion states was 2.6 times the number of people reporting income between 105 percent and 110 percent of the poverty level. CBO also cited tax reporting data indicating that, in 2023, a large number (39 percent) of enrollees claiming the richest subsidies — which are calculated based on expected income — ultimately reported actual income below the poverty level.

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What’s Driving the Childhood Health Crisis

Nearly half of all American children are living with at least one chronic health condition—whether it’s eczema, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, asthma, obesity, or something more complex. That’s not normal.

Yet we’ve somehow come to accept this situation as the baseline for childhood health.

We’re told it’s genetic. We’re told it’s random. We’re told it’s normal.

It is not normal. Fortunately—as a pediatrician who works with families every day—I can tell you, we’re not doomed.

The rise in chronic illness isn’t a mystery. Nor did it happen overnight. It’s the cumulative result of a culture that treats symptoms instead of asking questions, that medicates before investigating, and that feeds children food-like substances instead of real nourishment.

However, there is good news—if the problem is systemic, then so is the solution.

From Sick Care to Root Cause

If we zoom out from diagnoses and look upstream, five major disruptors stand out as root causes of most chronic conditions I see in practice:

  1. Inflammation: Chronic low-grade inflammation is at the root of everything from eczema to autoimmune disease. It’s often fueled by poor diet, lack of sleep, and environmental toxins.
  2. Nutrient deficiency: Our soil is depleted, our diets are processed, and our kids are being raised on food that fills but doesn’t fuel. Micronutrient gaps impair immunity, mood, and development.
  3. Toxic load: From plastics and pesticides to air pollution, today’s children are exposed to thousands of chemicals—many of which have never been tested for safety in children.
  4. Microbiome disruption: C-sections, antibiotics, processed food, and lack of outdoor time have altered the gut health of an entire generation. The microbiome is central to immune function, digestion, and even mental health.
  5. Nervous system dysregulation: Constant stimulation, screen exposure, and lack of restorative rhythms are leaving children in a chronic state of fight-or-flight. When the nervous system can’t settle, the body can’t heal.

These aren’t fringe theories. They are well-documented physiological truths backed by research in immunology, endocrinology, and neurobiology. However, they rarely make it into a 10-minute pediatric visit.

The Empowered Parent’s Roadmap

Making changes in your lifestyle may sound overwhelming—but it doesn’t have to be. Parents are not powerless—they are the most important health advocates their children will ever have.

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Basic biology has become blasphemy – a call for true Canadian physicians

“I would beg the wise and learned fathers [of the church] to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration.”

Galileo Galilei.

What has Canadian health care come to? We could be talking about how an estimated 28,000 Canadians died on waitlists last year for surgeries and diagnostic scans. Canada is the only developed country that imposes a government run monopoly on citizens to get health care.

We could talk about how Canadian medical school admissions to train doctors have become about woke bigotry instead of merit. Canadians just want the best doctors – whatever their background.

No. The latest debacle of health care amounts to radicals toppling the leadership of Canadian evidence-based medicine at McMaster University.

As a result, I will describe three main aspects to this story. First, it has become apparent that our institutions have been hi-jacked by the equivalent of a woke church that cannot be questioned. Second, I will describe how other countries have dealt with this affront to common sense – in particular gender ideology. Finally, I will describe a call to action for true Canadian physicians – to bring back empirical scientific method and to end compelled speech.

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Trump Should Take Down The American Medical Association’s Licensing Grift

n the labyrinthine world of American healthcare, few entities wield as much unchecked power as the American Medical Association (AMA). While the AMA positions itself as the voice of physicians, in reality it’s largely a government-sanctioned medical coding monopoly that extracts billions from the health care system and funnels it into leftist political advocacy supporting transgender pseudo-science, climate radicalism, and racial quotas in medical education and practice.

It’s an arrangement that is not only anti-competitive but profoundly unfair, compelling doctors and patients to subsidize agendas they may vehemently oppose. Now that the Department of Government Efficiency has taken a well-deserved axe to the leftist nonprofit network living off government largess and the Trump administration has brought corporate monopoly power into its focus, the government-generated monopoly providing AMA with its millions in advocacy dollars seems ripe for the picking.

AMA owns the rights to something called Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes — a standardized system of five-digit codes that describe every medical procedure from a routine check-up to complex surgeries. Developed and copyrighted by the AMA since the 1960s, these codes are mandatory for billing under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (more commonly known as HIPAA). No doctor, hospital, or insurer can process claims without them, creating a captive market where the AMA charges licensing fees to everyone in the chain — providers, software vendors, and payers.

Moreover, because the federal government mandates CPT use for Medicare and Medicaid, innovators and alternatives are effectively locked out. And being a government-granted monopoly is rich business. In 2023, the AMA raked in $308 million from CPT royalties — more than half its revenue — dwarfing membership dues, which now account for less than 10 percent of its income.

It would be one thing if the monopoly rents charged by the AMA added proportional value to the system. But it appears these revenues flow directly from America’s medical community into shameless left-wing advocacy. In 2023, the AMA passed resolutions denouncing state laws restricting the mutilation practices known as “gender affirming care” for children, framing such interventions as essential despite glaring evidence to the contrary. This is, of course, in keeping with its history of pushing a rabidly pro-abortion agenda.

The AMA — which holds enormous sway over medical school accreditation and curriculum — is also fully in favor of racial preferences in medical education and practice, coming out in “unequivocal opposition to legislation that would dissolve affirmative action or punish institutions for employing race-conscious admissions.” The organization has also labeled basic diagnostic tools like Body Mass Index to be tools of “racist exclusion.” In 2021 it issued a strategic plan to “embed racial justice and advance health equity” — rather than, say, address the opioid crisis killing all Americans at record levels, regardless of race — as a critical focus for American doctors.

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