Tag: health care

Ontario Chief Coroner reports raise concerns that MAID policy and practice focus on access rather than protection

The Chief Coroner for Ontario recently released two new reports of its interdisciplinary MAID Death Review Committee: on Same or Next Day Provision of MAID and on Waiver of Final Consent.

The MAID Death Review Committee — of which I am a member — reviews cases of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) that are selected by the coroner’s MAID team for the common issues they raise. The review helps inform policy recommendations.

Committee reports contain case summaries and summaries of committee discussions, and the Chief Coroner’s recommendations. The newly released reports appear to confirm what is argued in several chapters in our recently co-edited volume, Unravelling MAiD in Canada: Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide as Medical Care, and in other publications: Canada’s MAID law, policy and practice focuses excessively on promoting access to death, not on protection.

Some of the cases suggest a troubling prioritizing of ending patients’ lives with MAID rather than a precautionary approach. In my opinion, they reveal an urgent need for more rigorous legal and professional standards. Committee members’ starkly contrasting views on the ethics of some of the practices, which can be gleaned from the anonymous summaries of the committee’s discussions, are striking.

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Human ‘bodyoids’: We will soon be able to manufacture brain-less human bodies to generate replacement organs

Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? … [In] large part from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically sourced human bodies.

[We are forced] to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can’t replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time.

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The Perfidy of 60 Minutes

It is a truism, a trope, a meme, common knowledge, a cliché, as obvious as a nose on a face, an actual fact and something so apparent that it is impossible in any way, shape, or form to deny unless utterly delusional.

But, somehow, time and time again, the major media players defy actual reality and try and try to substitute their own absurd version and – even more incredibly, like a lunatic accusing the clouds in the sky of conspiring against him – demand everyone within earshot to believe that it is true.

Typically, pointing out media propaganda is the same as pointing out that air exists – it is an atmosphere that we all must breathe and is typically specifically unremarkable due to its omnipresence.

But sometimes, when it is so egregious, so absurd, so literally dangerous, it must be challenged.

Which brings us to Sunday’s episode of the once-vaunted, now vile 60 Minutes.

The show that once intentionally made bad actors deeply uncomfortable by asking difficult questions is a shadow of its former self, with its story on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) a perfect example of the depths to which it has fallen.

The NIH has a new director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Even before he officially took over a few weeks ago, the Trump administration had already announced a few changes: dropping 1,200 probationary employees, putting new purchasing standards in place, and cutting the amount of “overhead” its research and academic “partners” can charge to conduct studies.

This, of course, led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth – not of course from the public, but from the staff, current, past, and future. 

Breaking down the segment into its constituent parts, one finds three main points.

First, a grad student is worried she may not get a job because of the looming budget cuts.

Second, a woman in an Alzheimer’s research study worries she will be negatively impacted by the cuts.

These two bits are rather silly but very heartstring tuggy. In the case of the grad student, she’s complaining about what may or may not be, as if she were entitled to a position somewhere.

In the case of the Alzheimer’s patient, it is rather telling – and may even be terrifyingly true – that she is worried that the study she is part of may face an overhead cut.

As the show notes – moments after her worried statement – the NIH has cut the amount it pays for overhead – administrators, paper clips, etc. – to institutions from an overhead of about 28% to 15%.

Note – the cut is not for the research project itself, but just to the administrative overhead. Second note – the much-vaunted Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (like almost every other funder of medical research) has always capped its overhead costs at 15%.

So, ironically, what the patient is – even if she does not know it – really worried about is whether or not the folks that run the study (being done by Duke University and UNC jointly) could actually prioritize paying administrators over caring for patients.

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RFK Jr: “Pediatricians who vaccinate 80-85% of the kids in their office, get these GIANT bonuses!”

This is perhaps the most important — and most dangerous — article I have ever posted.

But I have to print the truth wherever I find it.

Let’s start with this clip from RFK Jr. explaining how pediatricians are given an incentive to vaccine your children with ALL the vaccines produced by Big Pharma…

So to summarize what he just said, he claims that pediatricians are given a monetary payout — a BONUS — if they vaccinate a high rate of children in their clinic.

He claims it can be as high as $400/child….

But ONLY IF they maintain high levels of vaccination overall at the clinic.

Which is why they freak out on you if you refuse to get the vaccines or don’t want to follow the CDC schedule.

It’s not hard to imagine in this scenario where they start to see each little kid with a dollar sign over their heads instead of a patient!

RFK Jr. explains how the business model is to increase traffic into the clinic.

Unlike when we were kids, and you only went to the doctor if you got hurt, now you go all the time!

Why?

“BUSINESS MODEL”.

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Religion Is Not The Only Thing That Should Be Separated From The State

The Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared that King Henry VIII (and his successors) was “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England” and not the pope of Rome. The Treason Act of 1534 made it an act of treason, under punishment of death, to deny the Act of Supremacy. During the reign of Queen Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII, the Act of Supremacy was repealed, but was enacted by the English Parliament again in 1559 after Henry’s other daughter Elizabeth became the queen. The British monarch is to this very day still the head of the Church of England or Anglican Church, which is the established church in England. This is one of the main differences between the United States and Great Britain. Although the United States has a National Cathedral where some state funerals are held (most recently for Jimmy Carter), it is actually an Episcopal church (part of the worldwide Anglican Communion), not owned or controlled by the federal government. The “separation of church and state” is a hallmark of the American system of government.

The First Amendment

The Constitution was drafted in 1787, ratified in 1788, and took effect in 1789. It established the United States as a federal system of government where the states, through the Constitution, granted a limited number of powers to a central government. The Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) was ratified by the states in 1791 in response to criticisms of the Constitution by the Anti-Federalists that the Constitution contained no explicit protection of speech, assembly, religion, or the right to bear arms.

The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” It was President Thomas Jefferson who, in an 1802 letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, equated the religion clauses in the First Amendment with the “separation of church and state”:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

That the “separation of church and state” applied to just the federal government is evident by the fact that some of the states still maintained established churches at the time the Constitution was adopted. The phrase was resurrected by Justice Hugo Black in the case of Everson v. Board of Education (1947). But as Mike Maharrey of the Tenth Amendment Center has observed: “The federal government’s use of the First Amendment to prohibit religious displays in local parks, to force the removal of the Ten Commandments from public schools, or to ban prayers in public assemblies would horrify the founding generation.” Massachusetts was the last of the original states to fully disestablish its churches in 1833. The idea of the “separation of church and state” is now enshrined in all state constitutions.

But religion is not the only thing that should be separated from the state. Unfortunately, the very people who talk the loudest about the separation of church and state never call for the separation of anything else from the state.

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The False Claims of WHO’s Pandemic Agreement

One way to determine whether a suggestion is worth following is to look at the evidence presented to support it. If the evidence makes sense and smells real, then perhaps the program you are asked to sign up for is worthy of consideration. 

However, if the whole scheme is sold on fallacies that a child could poke a stick through, and its chief proponents cannot possibly believe their own rhetoric, then only a fool would go much further. This is obvious – you don’t buy a used car on a salesman’s insistence that there is no other way to get from your kitchen to your bathroom.

Delegates at the coming World Health Assembly in Geneva are faced with such a choice. In this case, the car salesman is the World Health Organization (WHO), an organization still commanding considerable global respect based on a legacy of sane and solid work some decades ago. 

It also benefits from a persistent misunderstanding that large international organizations would not intentionally lie (they increasingly do, as noted below). The delegates will be voting on the recently completed text of the Pandemic Agreement, part of a broad effort to extract large profits and salaries from an intrinsic human fear of rare causes of death. Fear and confusion distract human minds from rational behavior.

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Google’s Updated Local Services Ads Terms Spark Privacy Fears, Threaten Confidentiality in Medical and Legal Sectors

Google has once again raised considerable privacy and surveillance concerns – including affecting sensitive sectors like the medical industry – this time with its updated Terms of Service for Local Services Ads (LSA).

The LSA scheme is designed to give local business leads, like calls and emails, directly from local customers who search for their services on Google.

But an email sent to participating advertisers last week informed them that failure to accept the terms by June 5 will mean their ads will no longer appear either in the giant’s Search or Maps.

The new rights over advertiser assets benefit not only Google but also the company’s affiliates, and what they now can do is access all content in an LSA profile (including calls from potential customers) in order to use, modify, and display it across Google products and services.

This by no means exhaustive list of content includes business photos, entity name, location, phone number, category, site, and hours.

Google is also claiming the right to select, modify, display, and use content such as photos, provider bios, service descriptions, pricing information, and discounts.

That content is derived from phone calls and messages with end users routed through Google, and URLS identified and shared in the LSA account.

Ad agencies can be the ones to consent to the terms on behalf of advertisers, and in that case, the new rules apply to both. However, it is at this time not clear whether agency manager accounts can make this decision without letting the clients know how their data will be handled starting June 5.

When applied to advertisers representing legal and medical firms, Google having the right to record phone calls and messages means they would be unable to continue to use LSA without breaking confidentiality.

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Report: Thanks To DEI, Most Medical Schools Now Teach Doctors To Damage Patients

Speech First has uncovered records from more than 50 public medical schools across 46 states, revealing that these institutions are training left-wing advocates who prioritize race in treatment, promote gender identities contrary to biology, and downplay obesity’s health risks. As its report shows, under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), medical schools enforce conformity to leftist ideologies, such as labeling all white men as racists or disconnecting gender from biological sex. It also shows that free speech is on life support, with dissenters of these ideas and practices facing far-reaching consequences. 

Speech First reviewed hundreds of documented reports, including the case of Dr. Norman Wang, who lost his teaching duties for criticizing affirmative action — which the left uses to admit less qualified minorities to meet racial quotas. Speech First’s report also detailed the case of Dr. Allan Josephson, who was fired for questioning pediatric transgender procedures — which the left champions as necessary for affirming so-called “gender identities.”

The hope was that exposing the medical establishment’s intolerance for dissent would incentivize medical schools to restore open discourse. But records unearthed by Speech First reveal they are doubling down, enforcing loyalty to DEI tenets — anti-racism, gender ideology, and, bizarrely, “weight inclusivity,” which claims body weight is not tied to one’s health.

Of the more than 50 schools Speech First investigated, 99 percent mandate anti-racism dogma, branding whites as inherently oppressive and casting physicians as crusaders for historical redress. 

At the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, students must take an “Implicit Bias and Microaggressions” course, which uses a “Wheel of Power/Privilege” to frame white men as society’s ultimate oppressors, a narrative embedded across departments and continuing education credits, priming medical students to see patients through a racial lens, not medical need.

Eighty-nine percent enforce gender ideology, elevating self-proclaimed identities over biology and endorsing irreversible surgeries for children while stifling dissent. 

At the University of Arizona College of Medicine, students are taught that so-called “gender transitioning” in children, starting with social changes like cross-dressing and progressing to puberty-suppressing drugs, is normal, and harassment policies stifle dissent by mandating preferred pronouns. Then there are cases of pure absurdity. At the University of Missouri School of Medicine, an orientation video, “What Doctors Should Know About Gender Identity,” suggests that “a biological male identifying as a woman” may need a gynecological exam.

Thirty percent promote weight inclusivity, framing obesity as oppression and urging students to use euphemisms like “person of larger size” instead of “overweight.”

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Thieves rob Long Island hospital chairman’s house — and take only docs related to bombshell FBI probe: victim

The home of Nassau University Medical Center’s chairman was robbed Wednesday night — but the burglars apparently only stole documents tied to a bombshell FBI probe, The Post has learned.

Chairman Matthew Bruderman confirmed his house in Oyster Bay was broken into just two weeks after news broke that he was “cooperating” with the FBI and Department of Justice in an investigation of his claims that the hospital was robbed by state and previous county leaders of more than $1 billion since 2006.

The stolen documents were later recovered by Center Island police, who confirmed that an active investigation into the burglary is underway — but refused to release further information or say whether anyone was arrested.

Bruderman wasn’t home at the time of the robbery and only found out after police called to inform him they had recovered a binder with his name on it in a car driven by an unidentified couple, he said.

“I was confused because that was the binder I had on my desk when I left,” he said.

Bruderman said he later found his backdoor pried wide open.

The binder, he said, contained “sensitive” materials related to the ongoing federal investigation, including documents and records tied to the financial misconduct he claims to have uncovered while reviewing hospital finances and state reimbursements.

The chairman believes the timing of the break-in — and that nothing appeared to have been stolen besides the documents — raises red flags and serious concerns.

The FBI declined to comment on the investigation, which was opened in early April.

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New York’s Boom In Home Health Aides Is Just Another Medicaid Racket

Not long ago, I wrote in The Federalist about “labor unions’ racket,” as it relates to corruption within one Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local. But the “racket” doesn’t end there. It extends to the people who finance it: federal taxpayers like you and me.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Consider the following quote:

I’m telling you right now, when you look on TikTok and you see ads of young people saying, “Guess what, you can make $37 an hour by sitting home with your Grandma. You know, here’s how you sign up,” it has become a racket.

The speaker is none other than New York’s Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul, describing her own state’s Medicaid program. And the reason why she has suddenly changed her rhetoric and refuses to fix the problem has much to do with the union corruption I wrote about recently.

Union Dues Skimming

As with most things in politics, keen observers should follow the money. The New York Post recently criticized Hochul for reneging on her plan to attack the “racket” she described last year, with the Post alleging that she “switch[ed] sides with an eye on her re-election run” in 2026. 

The outlet explained that “the health care worker unions — above all, 1199[SEIU] — are a ginormous lobbying power.” The push to expand home health workers, including family members giving care, which Hochul previously criticized as a “racket,” has “morphed into a mass unionization drive,” as the Post noted.

Explosion of New Aides

That “mass unionization drive” comes as home health jobs within New York state have soared. The Empire Center, a conservative think tank, reviewed the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From 2023 to 2024, home health employment grew by 57,000 jobs in New York alone. That’s a 10 percent increase in home health employment within one year, with New York accounting for one-fifth of all the new home health aides nationwide.

On both an absolute and relative basis, the data reveals New York’s absurdly high number of home health aides. The Empire State has more than three times as many home health aides (623,000) as fast food workers (183,810), and more than four times as many aides as waiters and waitresses (140,890). On a relative basis, New York has by far the most home health aides per 1,000 senior citizens, more than twice as many as the national average and 24 percent higher than the next-highest state, California.

As one observer told Newsweek last year, the home health aide program started with good intentions by “allow[ing] family members and friends to get paid for providing home health assistance to loved ones using Medicaid and Medicare dollars. The problem is now you have individuals taking advantage of a pretty liberal, open-ended process for determining who qualifies.” 

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