Tag: health care

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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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‘Callous and Careless’: AAP Pushes Doctors to Vaccinate Hospitalized Children

As federal health agencies revisit childhood vaccine schedules and emphasize shared clinical decision-making, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is encouraging hospitals to use pediatric admissions as a “unique opportunity” to vaccinate more children.

A series of AAP publications released in March and April promotes offering routine, catch-up and seasonal vaccines during children’s hospital stays and around surgeries and medical procedures.

But some physicians and vaccine safety advocates say the approach raises medical and ethical concerns, particularly for children already sick enough to require hospitalization.

A March 9 article in AAP News described “perioperative or periprocedural vaccination” as “a novel way to vaccinate children who are in a hospital environment for other reasons.”

Another March report in Hospital Pediatrics stated that “pediatric inpatient hospital admissions are opportunities for catch-up vaccination.”

The push comes as the AAP and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have diverged on some vaccine recommendations, creating what an April AAP Publications report called “a more complex landscape for parental vaccine decision-making.”

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Texas AG Ken Paxton Scores Major Win — Forces Children’s Hospital to Open America’s First ‘Detransition’ Clinic

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a major victory for the state of Texas.

Texas Children’s Hospital has agreed to create the nation’s first dedicated detransition clinic, cut ties with five physicians, and pay $10 million to the state as part of a broader settlement.

The agreement follows a state investigation launched after Texas banned gender-related medical interventions for minors in 2023.

Earlier this year, Paxton sued the hospital, alleging that it continued to provide prohibited procedures and used inaccurate diagnostic codes to bill Medicaid.

Under the settlement, Texas Children’s will establish a clinic focused on treating patients who previously underwent gender-related medical interventions and are seeking care related to reversing or managing those effects.

For the first five years, the hospital will cover the full cost of services.

The settlement also requires the hospital to permanently sever ties with five doctors involved in providing such care to minors.

“This historic settlement reflects an institutional and fundamental cultural shift away from radical ‘gender’ ideology,” Paxton said in a statement.

“I applaud Texas Children’s Hospital for changing course and committing to being a part of the solution by agreeing to form a first-of-its kind Detransition Clinic that will help provide free care to those who have been victimized by twisted, morally bankrupt transgender ideology.”

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UCLA Medical School Accused Of Racial Discrimination In Defiance Of Supreme Court

We previously discussed a disturbing account of how medical students at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) were subjected to a bizarre class where one of the university’s “activists-in-residence” showered them with anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric. Now, the Justice Department has found that the university engaged in systemic racial discrimination in the admission of medical students. Given the university’s history, it is hardly surprising, but it remains unclear how the university will respond to the findings.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division announced that the medical school violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by giving preferential treatment to black and Hispanic applicants.

The investigation followed the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which barred race-based admissions.

In the DOJ’s “Findings” letter, black and Hispanic admits in some years averaged MCAT scores in the 66th to 72nd percentile, while Asian and white students averaged scores in the mid-to-high 80th percentiles.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon indicated that the Justice Department found that UCLA medical school leadership discussed how to achieve “diversity goals” and other strategies after the Supreme Court ruling.

After the historic ruling in the Harvard and North Carolina cases barring the use of racial criteria in admissions, administrators and academics admitted what they had long denied: that race was having a major role in admissions.

In anticipation of the rulings, many schools, including the California system, eliminated standardized testing. Without objective scores, there is less ability to identify the use of non-scholastic criteria for admissions. By eliminating or devaluing standardized testing, admissions offices can use the more subjective essays to achieve the same race-based results.

I wrote about how administrators were already preparing to use essays as an indirect way to achieve the same identifications and preferences in admissions.

The essay “prompts” encourage students to effectively self-identify by discussing incidents where they faced discrimination.

The shift to the essays would allow the removal of high-scoring students while elevating those with lower scores. That prediction was quickly confirmed, as top candidates were rejected based on their essays, while schools used essays to flag their backgrounds.

Faculty and administrators at UCLA and other schools remain adamant in using race-based admissions. They simply justify discrimination as equity and diversity. 

This is the same school that required medical students to sit through a raving lecture from “a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public.”

In her two-hour lecture, Gray-Garcia dismissed modern medicine as “white science” and told the medical students to engage in a prayer to “mama Earth.” Students were expected to pray and affirm that “Mama Earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped or played.”

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Vance demands all 50 states crack down on Medicaid fraud

Vice President JD Vance has warned that the government may withhold federal Medicaid funds from states that fail to crack down on Medicaid fraud. This comes as the Trump administration launches a crackdown on suspected fraud in state programs and defers $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from California.

The initiative came as people across the U.S. have expressed concern about increasing health costs and barriers to access, some of which come from the federal government’s own acts.

“We’re announcing that the federal government is deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from the state of California. And the simple reason is because the state of California has not taken fraud very seriously. We want California to get serious about this fraud,” said Vance at news conference.

The vice president was joined by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and other officials, who all outlined new requirements for Medicaid programs in all 50 states, including showing aggressive prosecution of fraud or risk losing government funding for their anti-fraud units.

Dr. Oz referenced data from the White House Fraud Task Force on rapid growth in California’s hospice and home health sectors and described a “stunning level of suspected Medicaid and hospice fraud” uncovered in California, such as a 1,500% increase in hospice claims.

“In February, we had the largest anti-fraud announcement from CMS. Today’s effort is larger. It’s much larger, and there’s a reason for that. Half of the fraud, we believe, in the federal government, could be coming out of health care services,” said Oz.

Vance also singled out Hawaii and New York as potential targets for Medicaid fraud as they have not taken the fraud issue seriously.

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UK Healthy Life Expectancy Plummets

People living in the United Kingdom will be spending fewer years in good health as “healthy life expectancy” plummets. The UK is going backward compared to most other “wealthy” countries.

Healthy life expectancy (HLE) in the UK has fallen by about 2 years, to just over 60 years for both men and women, making Britain one of only five wealthy nations where people live fewer years in good health, according to a new analysis by the Health Foundation charity.

This means that the amount of life a person spends in good health has decreased.

The findings, based on data from the Office for National Statistics between 2012–2014 and 2022–2024, show the measure dropped from 62.9 to 60.7 for men and from 63.7 to 60.9 for women, according to a report by The Guardian. 

Andrew Mooney, the think‑tank’s principal data analyst, has warned of “a significant economic cost, with poor health driving people out of the workforce and locking young people out of education, employment and training.”

The Health Foundation has blamed the decline in HLE on a combination of poverty, poor housing, obesity, the lingering effects of the Covid‑19 pandemic, and a surge in mental health illnesses, especially among young people.

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