Tag: health care

Doctors Group Launches Campaign Empowering More Healthcare Professionals To Join Drug Decriminalization Movement

A group of doctors who support drug policy reform is launching a new campaign aimed at equipping physicians and healthcare professionals with skills to play a greater role in advocating for the decriminalization of drugs. Organizers say there’s a need for more voices from the medical community to take part in ongoing discussions around cannabis, psychedelics and harm reduction issues.

Doctors for Drug Policy Reform (D4DPR) says it’s spent the past year developing its new advocacy toolkit intended for healthcare professionals and scientists on “Transitioning from a Criminal Justice Model of Drug Use to a Health-focused Approach.” It includes guides to help would-be activists craft opinion pieces and engage with lawmakers and the media in order to “educate on the failures and lasting harms of the War on Drugs” and “confidently reframe drug use through a compassionate public health lens.”

“We’re assembling a core group of ‘on-call’ health professionals who are willing to lend their voice when timely advocacy opportunities arise,” says a recent D4DPR email about the effort, funded through a grant from the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). “Now more than ever, we need healthcare professionals like you to speak up—especially when critical legislation is being debated.”

Bryon Adinoff, D4DPR’s president, told Marijuana Moment that it’s “imperative” that healthcare professionals take part.

“We want to health them speak up and learn how to do it in the right way,” he said.

Among the topics D4DPR is prioritizing with the new initiative are cannabis regulation, the decriminalization and therapeutic use of psychedelics as well as overdose prevention centers. By and large, Adinoff said, other medical professionals and organizations have “not been sufficiently active in this area.”

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RFK Jr. Announces “Health Insurance Breakthrough” That Affects Nearly 260 Million Americans

In a press conference on Monday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz announced a landmark agreement with the nation’s largest health insurers to tackle the number one healthcare problem plaguing hundreds of millions of Americans: prior authorization.

Prior authorization is the requirement for doctors and patients to get advance approval from insurance companies BEFORE certain treatments, tests, or procedures are covered. It was meant to control costs, but for 85% of Americans, it’s become a serious barrier to care.

“Doctors like myself are continually struggling with this issue,” Dr. Oz said, explaining how the bureaucratic process not only delays treatment but deeply frustrates both providers and patients.

In 2023 alone, Medicare Advantage (which covers about 32 million people) initially denied 3.2 million prior authorization requests. Dr. Oz made clear these are not just numbers: they represent “individuals who often, in the most vulnerable time in their lives, needed something done and it was denied.”

The burden also falls heavily on physicians. On average, doctors spend 12 hours per week on paperwork, handling about 40 prior authorization cases weekly. Dr. Oz said it contributes to burnout, slows down care, and “erodes public trust in the health care system.”

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Ivy League Researchers Scaremonger About GOP Health Policy But Say Nothing About Similar Democrat Plans

Ivy League faculty members have a leftist bias — would you believe it?

That sarcastic conclusion comes from the latest example of rhetorical scaremongering over the budget reconciliation bill being considered by Congress. When Republican lawmakers decide to scale back health care benefits, the professoriate loudly proclaims that people in their legions will die. But when Democrat lawmakers do the same thing, these same commentators decide to join the Witness Protection Program.

Deaths Metric

On June 3, a series of researchers affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Yale School of Public Health released a letter regarding the House-passed budget reconciliation bill. In it, they claimed that several specific provisions in the bill “would result in more than 42,500 deaths annually.” They further claimed that allowing enhanced Obamacare subsidies to expire at year’s end, as they are scheduled to do under current law, “will cause an additional 8,811 deaths,” meaning that “altogether, we project that these changes will result in over 51,000 preventable deaths.”

The letter leaves much to unpack. For starters, the idea that anyone can know with any level of certainty the precise number of deaths attributable to a specific policy — not 8,810 or 8,812, mind you, but exactly 8,811 — is absurd on its face. If the researchers know the specific number of people who will die due to one policy change, then why not tell us the names of said individuals, and where, when, and how those people will die, while they’re at it?

Second, the expiration of the enhanced subsidies at year’s end comes because of Democrats, not Republicans. When they controlled Congress and the presidency, Democrats passed provisions letting these subsidies expire. Democrats fully expected future Congresses to extend them but wanted to try to disguise their true cost, just like they tried to hide the full $5 trillion cost of the failed Build Back Bankrupt legislation. They should neither complain nor blame Republicans for not wanting to fix or extend Democrats’ bad law. (The same applies to Republicans when it comes to tax gimmicks they might include in reconciliation.)

Ideological Bias

But the real “tell” regarding this letter comes in the form of a question the researchers didn’t answer. I emailed the lead authors, Rachel Werner at Penn and Alison Galvani from Yale, with a simple question: “Do you plan on conducting similar analyses on the number of deaths associated with Gov. [Gavin] Newsom’s proposal to freeze enrollment of undocumented immigrants in MediCal, and charge existing undocumented enrollees a $100 monthly premium? Why or why not?”

Astute readers may not be surprised to learn that, even after following up, I received nary an acknowledgement, let alone a reply. The researchers might claim they never received my message or that they only published their letter in response to a request from Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for an analysis of the effects of the reconciliation bill. (Any Republican lawmakers in California reading this should please — please — ask the researchers for the type of analysis I requested, if only to highlight their hypocrisy.)

But it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to recognize the real reason for the disparate treatment. The letter was a headline — “Republican bill will kill X people per year!” — in search of a story and a justification. That’s why Wyden and Sanders requested it, and that’s why the researchers gladly complied. But when it comes to attacking Newsom, or Democrat Govs. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois or Tim Walz of Minnesota, all of whom have proposed scaling back taxpayer-funded coverage of illegal immigrants — not because they believe such benefits should go only to citizens, mind you, but because of skyrocketing costs — they suddenly become mute.

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Witness Alleges Hospital’s ‘Egregious’ Breaches of Standard of Care Killed Teen

Witness testimony continued this week in the wrongful death trial of Grace Schara, a 19-year-old with Down syndrome who died in a Wisconsin hospital days after being admitted for a COVID-19 infection. Grace’s sister and expert witnesses testified that doctors violated the standard of care and principles of informed consent.

Grace’s family sued Ascension St. Elizabeth Hospital in April 2023 and filed an amended complaint in July 2023, alleging the hospital’s COVID-19 treatment protocols directly resulted in Grace’s death in October 2021, a week after admission.

The trial began last week at the State of Wisconsin Circuit Court for Outagamie County. The lawsuit names several defendants, including some Ascension doctors and nurses and the Wisconsin Injured Patients and Family Compensation Fund.

Grace’s older sister, Jessica Vander Heiden, testified Tuesday that she was unaware that the hospital had placed a “do not resuscitate” (DNR) order in Grace’s chart until shortly before her death and that, in Grace’s final moments, hospital staff refused to intervene and did not honor her family’s repeated requests to revoke the DNR.

Expert witnesses for the plaintiffs testified that there were multiple violations of the standard of care by Ascension doctors and nurses.

Dr. Gilbert Berdine, an associate professor of medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, said that this was the first malpractice case where he testified as an expert witness for plaintiffs and explained why he chose to do so.

“The breaches of the standard of care were egregious, and I could not live with myself without answering the call to review and give advice on this case,” Berdine said.

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UK Turning Into ‘National Health State’, Says Think Tank

The UK is turning into a “National Health State,” the Resolution Foundation has said, after Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a £29 billion annual increase in NHS funding.

The think tank’s analysis of Reeves’s Spending Review estimates that by the end of financial year 2028–29, the health service will account for half (49 percent) of all day-to-day public services spending, up from 34 percent in 2009–10.

On Wednesday, the chancellor announced a record £29 billion funding injection, which the Treasury said will deliver on the government’s promise to cut waiting lists, improve patient care, and modernise services.

Resolution Foundation Chief Executive Ruth Curtice said in a statement, “Health accounted for 90 per cent of the extra public service spending, continuing a trend that is seeing the British state morph into a National Health State, with half of public service spending set to be on health by the end of the decade.”

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) noted in its initial response to the Spending Review that the funding increase for the NHS was substantial, but questioned whether it will be enough to get the health service back to meeting its 18-week target for hospital waiting times within this Parliament, something which the think tank said was “enormously ambitious.”

£6 Billion to Speed up Tests and Treatments

After the Spending Review, Reeves announced that £6 billion of the allocated funds will be used to deliver up to four million additional NHS tests, scans, and procedures over the next five years.

This will be spent on ambulances, new scanners, increasing diagnostic centre capacity, and more Urgent Treatment Centres.

The government will also invest £30 billion in day-to-day maintenance and repair of the NHS estate, with over £5 billion allocated for critical repairs over the next five years.

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The Statin Wars

We shouldn’t have been surprised that the Covid experience was so marred by financial conflicts where pharmaceutical industry interests called the shots—too often to the detriment of our health.

Some of us weren’t surprised.

For decades, I’ve been unearthing unthinkable scandals inside our medical establishment. They are stories that I wouldn’t have believed myself had I not spoken to first hand sources and whistleblowers, and seen the proof in hard data and documents.

The Statin Wars is one such example.

I began covering issues regarding cholesterol-lowering statins and conflicts of interest around 2004 when I was an investigative reporter for CBS News.

I continued covering these issues on my independent Sunday television program “Full Measure.”

The statin controversy began when a panel of government advisers decided our cholesterol levels should be lower than we thought. It turns out nearly every one of the “experts” — was paid by statin makers. Yet none of them initially disclosed this financial conflict of interest!

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Los Angeles Children’s Hospital Shutting Down ‘Transgender’ Youth Clinic Amid Federal Pressure

The Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) has announced that it will shut down the Transyouth Health and Development program by the end of July.

The move comes amid mounting federal pressure to stop mutilating and sterilizing children in the name of “gender science.”

There have been reports that CHLA is under investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for potential violations of new federal guidelines issued by the Trump administration regarding sex changes for minors.

The hospital is one of the few in the nation that will provide sex change surgeries and hormones to kids under 18 who receive taxpayer-funded healthcare.

“Federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, have made it clear there will be consequences, potentially civil and criminal, for entities pushing irreversible procedures on vulnerable minors,” the hospital wrote to staff.

“The threats are no longer theoretical,” the hospital asserted.

“CHLA has a responsibility to navigate this complex and uncertain regulatory environment in a way that allows us to remain open as much as possible for as many as possible,” the email continued. “This painful and difficult decision was driven by the need to safeguard CHLA’s ability to operate amid significant external pressures beyond our control.”

The Post Millennial reports, “CHLA is more dependent on public funding than any other pediatric center in California, making it especially vulnerable to changes in federal policy. Around 40 percent of all pediatric beds in Los Angeles are housed at CHLA, and executives say preserving access to care for the largest number of children, particularly low-income and chronically ill kids, must come first.”

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Democrat Governors Are Rolling Back State-Funded Healthcare for Illegal Aliens – Why is the Left Not Protesting Them?

Some liberal Democrat governors are starting to roll back state (taxpayer) funded healthcare for people who are in the country illegally. Why is the left not protesting them? Could it be simply because the left gives Democrats a pass? Do they even know this is happening?

Under Gavin Newsom in California, the state is so broke that they are being forced to do this because there’s simply no money for it and the program came in costing billions of dollars more than people were told.

The same thing is now happening in Minnesota under Tim Walz and Illinois under JB Pritzker, all far left Democrats.

NBC News reports:

Democratic governors seek to roll back state-funded health care for undocumented immigrants

A trio of states with Democratic governors viewed as potential 2028 presidential candidates have taken steps in recent weeks to freeze or cut government-funded health care coverage for undocumented immigrants.

Democratic Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Tim Walz of Minnesota have largely attributed the proposals to budget shortfalls stemming from original plans to expand health care to immigrants without legal status.

But the moves also occur against the backdrop of broader debate within the Democratic Party over how to handle immigration, an issue that dragged it down in the last election and that President Donald Trump and the GOP have continued to try to capitalize on…

The latest development came in Minnesota on Tuesday, after both chambers of the Legislature passed a bill to end state-funded health care for undocumented adults…

Newsom’s plan in his 2025-26 budget has called for freezing enrollment for undocumented adults to receive the full scope of the state’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal…

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NIH Director Gives More Details on New Government Medical Journal

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will start a new journal that will help change the culture of science, the agency’s director said in a newly released interview.

“The NIH can stand up and will stand up a journal where these replication results can be published and made searchable in an easy way,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in a four-hour podcast interview with Andrew Huberman, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, released on June 9.

Bhattacharya said he envisions people being able to see summaries of similar papers that looked at the same questions.

“A scientific journal put out by the NIH, a high-profile journal will then make publishing replication work a high-profile scientific, high-prestige scientific activity,” he added later.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in May that federal scientists would likely be told to stop publishing in medical journals and, if that happened, the NIH would launch journals that would publish the scientists’ research.

Kennedy said that the existing journals have problems such as not publishing all of the data that underpins studies, while Bhattacharya said the journals will not publish replication research. Both officials have said they want the government to devote resources to replication, with Kennedy estimating that 20 percent of the NIH budget be designated for that purpose.

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Catholics fight government surveillance in confession after wins against abortion mandate, tax

Catholic physicians and social service workers won over the Trump administration and Supreme Court, respectively, last week against their compelled participation in emergency room abortions and a state unemployment compensation program that costs more than their own church’s.

Bishops hope to make it a trifecta against a Washington state law that violates the seal of confession, threatening priests with imprisonment and fines if they don’t report suspected child abuse or neglect when “penitents” confess, but not lawyers who learn the same from clients.

Diocesan leaders filed a motion for preliminary injunction Thursday against Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nicholas Brown and county prosecutors in federal court in Tacoma to block SB 5375 at least 10 days before it takes effect July 27.

The Justice Department also quickly opened a civil rights investigation into the law as a prima facie First Amendment violation after Ferguson signed it, expanding the category of mandatory reporter to “member of the clergy,” defined as any regularly licensed, accredited or ordained minister, priest, rabbi, imam, elder, or similarly positioned religious or spiritual leader.

Denial of an injunction would likely fast-track the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and, if also rejected by the historically most liberal appeals court, to SCOTUS, which has rarely struggled to reach lopsided rulings upholding religious liberty.

The high court Thursday unanimously overturned the Wisconsin Supreme Court‘s ruling that found that a local Catholic Charities bureau’s work is primarily secular and hence it can’t get a religious exemption from paying into the state unemployment compensation system.

Justices unanimously ruled for Gerald Groff two years ago after the U.S. Postal Service threatened to fire the evangelical Christian for refusing to work Sundays under an Amazon delivery agreement, junking the “de minimis cost” standard that let employers easily deny religious exemptions but only appeared in a footnote in a 1977 ruling.

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