Tag Archives: Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)

A Positive Update

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On May 5, I posted an article about the federal government’s attack on Saint Francis Health System, the 12th-largest hospital in the U.S. (article here) The government was threatening to strip the hospital of federal funding unless the hospital extinguished a candle that represents the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty came to the rescue of the hospital, sending a letter to the Biden administration warning that the government’s threat was unconstitutional. Well, the letter did its job.

On May 5, Red State reported the following:

The Department of Health and Humans Services has folded on its demand that Catholic hospitals in Tulsa-based St. Francis Healthcare System extinguish the Eternal Flame candle burning it is chapel Confronted with a lawsuit that it was doomed to lose over an indefensible position contrary to law, HHS’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services agreed to grant a waiver to the bizarre inspection finding that concluded that a single beeswax candle on a wall sconce enclosed in glass constituted a fire hazard to patients.

…Because the hospital is Catholic, it has a chapel. The chapel has a candle that burns 24-hours a day. Under Canon Law, the candle has to meet certain specifications (like 50% beeswax). It can’t be replaced with a light bulb or an emoji. Whether the inspector had a hard-on for Catholics or he’d been told to f*** with the “mackerel snappers” is a matter of speculation. But the inspector made a beeline for the chapel and cited the hospital for a fire code violation even though the candle had been in the same place since 1960 without complain or conflagration.

On May 5, LifeNews reported:

“The game was simply not worth the candle for HHS,” Lori Windham, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, the religious freedom law firm representing the hospital, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Friday. “It realized it would be playing with fire in court if it stood by its absurd demand, so it chose wisely. We are glad Saint Francis’s can continue to serve those most in need while keeping the faith.”

Under the Biden administration (and previously under the Obama administration), the government has constantly put pressure on religious freedom. First Amendment rights have been challenged and matters of conscience have been challenged. If we are to remain free to practice whatever religion we choose in America, we are going to have to remain vigilant–the attacks on religious freedom will continue under the present administration.

 

 

The Continuing Attack On Religion

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On Thursday, Fox News posted an article about a legal battle between the federal government and Saint Francis Health System, the 12th-largest hospital in the U.S. It seems that the hospital chapel is a candle that represents the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

The article reports:

A religious liberty nonprofit is threatening the federal government with a legal battle after a Catholic hospital in Oklahoma was offered the choice of either extinguishing a sacred candle in its chapel or being stripped of its federal funding.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the law firm Yetter Coleman LLP fired off a letter to officials with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this week after the Joint Commission demanded earlier this year that Saint Francis Health System snuff out a candle that represents the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

The Joint Commission is an independent accrediting organization whose findings are often used to meet conditions for Medicaid and Medicare certification with the HHS-affiliated Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

…The letter maintained that the law requires flames be “placed in a substantial candle holder and supervised at all times they are lighted.”

The hospital entreated the agency in vain four times for a waiver regarding the candle, according to the Becket Fund, which noted that similar flames in the building such as pilot lights and those in gas stove heaters did not prove to be a problem.

“The government’s demand is absurd and unlawful — it is targeting Saint Francis’s sincere beliefs without any good reason,” Becket vice president and senior counsel Lori Windham said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. “The government has a simple choice: either stop this attack on Saint Francis’s faith or expect a legal firestorm.”

In their May 2 letter to the Biden administration, the Becket Fund urged the government to back off the sacred candle, which is encased in glass, covered with brass and located near sprinklers far away from medical equipment. The letter warned the ultimatum violates federal law and threatens to “cripple the operations of the premiere hospitals in the State of Oklahoma, simply because they keep a candle in hospital chapels.”

Note that the candle is in the chapel, away from medical equipment, encased in glass, and located near sprinklers. There are much more important things for the federal government to spend its time on.

Investigating Government Policies On Covid-19

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I seriously doubt that there was a perfect solution for handling Covid-19 when it appeared in 2020. However, I also wonder if the government actually got anything rights. An investigation into the government’s handling of the pandemic would be very useful in developing a template for handling future pandemics.

On January 19th, The Daily Signal posted a checklist for the House of Representatives committee that is investigating the government’s handling of the pandemic.

The article notes:

After three years, and more than 1 million deaths in the U.S. associated with COVID-19, a comprehensive, sober, and detailed investigation into the federal government’s response is a necessary precondition for restoring Americans’ trust in federal public health agencies.

Specifically, that includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Office of the Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services.  

A Heritage Foundation analysis of the federal public health performance identified 13 pandemic-related topics that deserve detailed congressional inquiry. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Here are some of the things that need to be investigated:

  • Why did the CDC, despite statutory requirements dating back to 2006, fail to modernize and upgrade its systems of data collection and dissemination? Dr. Deborah Birx, former coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under Trump, has already told Congress that “the No.1 public health issue in the United States today is that there is no comprehensive database or integration of data from laboratories, public health institutions, and clinics.”  
  • Why did federal public health authorities send out confusing messaging on the value of masks and mask mandates? Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the CDC and then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams initially insisted, very publicly and sometimes vehemently, that masking was unnecessary or ineffective. Previous studies on masking indeed failed to provide strong support for cloth masking, let alone mask mandates. Between February and April 2020, however, top federal officials did a U-turn, and insisted on the value of a masking policy that they previously opposed. What was the new scientific evidence, then available in the professional literature, for such a dramatic policy reversal in that brief period? Congress should find out.
  • Why did federal officials attempt to impose a set of unprecedented vaccine mandates on tens of millions of Americans without weighing the risks and benefits of vaccination for different cohorts of the population, based on age, the acquisition of natural immunity, or an underlying vulnerability to the virus?  Young and healthy persons faced little danger of severe illness or death from COVID-19. Robust findings in the professional literature demonstrated the strength of natural immunity. Recent research on vaccine boosters for young adults concludes that potential harms outweigh the benefits of the vaccination.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. America is supposed to be a representative republic–our elected officials are supposed to represent us and answer to us–it’s time they did.

One Judge Blocks Tyranny

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On November 10th, Cowboy State Daily reported that U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty struck down a vaccine mandate for federally-employed preschool workers, and a masking requirement for the preschoolers, in 24 states, including Wyoming.

The article reports:

U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty compared the vaccine and masking mandate to “tyranny.” 

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” wrote Doughty, quoting James Madison in his ruling against the mandate.

Doughty’s order, filed Sept. 21, forbids the U.S. Health and Human Services department from requiring Head Start preschool employees, classroom volunteers and contractors working with children and families to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19. The mandate also required preschoolers ages 2-4 to wear masks in preschools nationwide.

But Doughty’s injunction of the law only applies in 24 states, including Wyoming, which was among the states that sued the U.S. Health and Human Services Department for dispatching the rule.

The article concludes:

The federal bureaus argued, conversely, that they had the right to mandate vaccination and masking because HHS is allowed to “modify” its own programs, because Head Start staffers check on preschoolers’ health throughout the course of their duties, and because the HHS secretary can implement standards he “finds to be appropriate.”

The court rejected the bureaus’ arguments.

Doughty wrote that Congress gave the Department of Health and Human Services the right to tweak its programs, but not to make changes of “vast economic and political significance.”

“There is nothing in (laws defining the bureaus) which would allow Agency Defendants to make medical decisions for employees and volunteers, and/or to require 2, 3, and 4-year-old students to wear masks the majority of the day,” wrote Doughty.

He also noted that since there were no additional funds given for the weekly testing of exempted workers, a required provision under the department’s rule, the states or local workers would have had to cover the costs of that requirement.

This is only a small part of the battle to get freedom back for Americans. Remember, the vaccine is only approved for emergency use, and Congress has begun to fight back against a continuing state of emergency (article here). The scientific evidence shows that neither basic cloth masks or the vaccine works. Vaccine passports will be the next way our government attempt to control Americans and deprive them of the freedoms to which we have become accustomed.

Stopping The Mutilation Of Children

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On Saturday, The Daily Caller posted an article about a recent decision by a federal judge regarding the issue of gender identity.

The article reports:

A federal judge has reversed a Biden Administration rule that directed the Department of Health and Human Services to increase access to sex change surgeries and hormone therapies, including to children, in a Friday ruling.

Biden’s HHS said in May 2021 that it would interpret a section of the Affordable Care Act, which bars doctors from discriminating on the basis of sex, as covering sexual orientation and gender identity. Two doctors represented by the America First Legal Foundation brought a class action lawsuit against the Biden administration after the HHS took the action, arguing that the rule would interfere with their ability to properly practice medicine.

The judge argued that the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX to include “gender identity,” was faulty and could not be changed until Congress passed a law to that effect, or the Supreme Court ruled otherwise.

In recent years, we as Americans have subverted the lawmaking process our Founding Fathers put into place. Many, if not all, of our laws are being made by government agencies and Executive Orders rather than Congress. Executive Orders are easily overturned by subsequent Presidents, but laws by the bureaucracy seem to go unchallenged.

The article concludes:

The judge also added that by extending sex protections to individuals who identified with a sex other than their biological sex, the purpose of Title IX was compromised.

“Defendants’ reinterpretation of Title IX through the Notification imperils the very opportunities for women Title IX was designed to promote and protect — categorically forcing biological women to compete against biological men.”

Several states have moved to ban sex change procedures for minors. Florida’s Board of Medicine has voted to ban sex change surgeries and hormones for children under 18. Tennessee lawmakers introduced a bill to ban the procedures Wednesday.

The way to treat gender dysphoria is not to surgically confirm it–the way to treat it is to find the underlying cause or simply wait for the child to outgrow it.

Using Taxpayers’ Money For Illegal Aliens

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On Friday, The Daily Caller reported that Colorado will now use taxpayer dollars to fund healthcare for illegal aliens. It’s not that I don’t want people to get the healthcare they need, but the first priority for healthcare needs to be American citizens who are here legally. If you are here illegally, you need to go home. If home is a political nightmare, maybe you need to find people to join you in fixing it.

The article reports:

The program was approved under Section 1332, a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that allows states to create their own requirements for insurance markets. Both the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) approved Colorado’s waiver request, submitted in November 2021. The federal government will provide $1.6 billion in pass-through funding to the state of Colorado over a five-year period to facilitate its healthcare exchanges.

Colorado’s application makes clear that its new healthcare exchanges are intended to facilitate the sale of taxpayer-subsidized health insurance to illegal immigrants.

“The State will be implementing a State-based subsidy program in plan year 2022, aimed at reducing the out-of-pocket cost sharing for individuals and families purchasing coverage through the exchange. In plan year 2023, a new subsidy program will be offered to Coloradans not eligible for federal subsidies, including Coloradans without a documented immigration status,” the state wrote in its application of the Colorado Option.

The article concludes:

Congressional Republicans are calling out the approval, with Colorado Rep. Ken Buck claiming that it violates the “clear intent” of the Affordable Care Act.

“While Americans suffer at the pump, Biden gives their tax dollars to illegal aliens,” Buck said in a statement. “This is one more episode of the Biden administration’s almost unbelievable commitment to putting the needs of Americans behind everyone else.”

“Democrats are putting illegal aliens first and Americans last. While Coloradans struggle to pay for gas and are being destroyed by inflation, Democrats’ top priority is to take your tax dollars and use them to give illegal aliens free Obamacare,” fellow Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert added.

As long as we have Americans struggling to pay for health care, we should not be subsidizing illegal aliens. We are already diverting funds designated for veterans to other places (article here), we don’t need to spend more tax money on people who are not even here legally.

The Wrong Way To Go

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On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon reported the following:

The Biden administration is set to fund the distribution of crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its plan to advance “racial equity.”

The $30 million grant program, which closed applications Monday and will begin in May, will provide funds to nonprofits and local governments to help make drug use safer for addicts. Included in the grant, which is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, are funds for “smoking kits/supplies.” A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and “any illicit substance.”

What in the world is the administration thinking?

The article notes:

Sgt. Clyde Boatwright, president of the Maryland Fraternal Order of Police, said government resources are better spent on preventing drug abuse rather than making it safer.

“If we look at more of a preventive campaign as opposed to an enabling campaign, I think it will offer an opportunity to have safer communities with fewer people who are dependable on these substances,” Boatwright told the Free Beacon.

Funding for the “harm reduction” grant program is provided through Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, which the Senate passed along party lines after Vice President Kamala Harris cast a tie-breaking vote. Other equipment that qualifies for funding include syringes, vaccinations, disease screenings, condoms, and fentanyl strips. The grant program will last three years and includes 25 awards of up to $400,000.

An HHS spokesman declined to specify what is included in the smoking kits. Similar distribution efforts provide mouthpieces to prevent glass cuts, rubber bands to prevent burns, and filters to minimize the risk of disease.

It is against federal law to distribute or sell drug paraphernalia unless authorized by the government.

The idea of the government distributing drug paraphernalia is insane. I wonder if the Congressmen who voted for the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan knew what was in the bill. Illegal drug use is dangerous for a number of reasons–you have no idea what is in the street drug you are taking. If it contains fentanyl, even a small amount could be fatal.

This is a really bad idea that needs to be challenged quickly before it does major damage.

Questionable Priorities

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Yesterday Breitbart reported that the Biden administration is using money designated for healthcare initiatives toward the cost of caring for unaccompanied illegal migrant children.

The article reports:

“The Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] has diverted more than $2 billion meant for other health initiatives toward covering the cost of caring for unaccompanied immigrant children,” Politico reported May 15. The article continued:

The redirected funds include $850 million that Congress originally allocated to rebuild the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile, the emergency medical reserve strained by the Covid-19 response. Another $850 million is being taken from a pot intended to help expand coronavirus testing, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

…

In addition to transferring money from the Strategic National Stockpile and Covid-19 testing, HHS also has pulled roughly $436 million from a range of existing health initiatives across the department.

The article concludes:

Biden’s policy is being implemented by Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban-born child refugee who runs the Department of Homeland Security. Mayorkas frequently claims the United States is a “Nation of Immigrants,” not of Americans. He frequently argues the nation’s values require Americans to accept many migrants, poor or rich, old or young, as if there is no economic or civic cost to Americans from the inflow of foreign migrants.

The federal delivery of children to their illegal migrant parents, after their handoff at the border by cartel-controlled coyotes, has been an open secret in Washington, DC, for at least six years.

The secret federal cooperation with the coyotes and the cartels stopped when President Donald Trump used his emergency authority in 2020 to send the migrants home when they arrived at the border.  The cooperation has been accelerated by President Biden as his deputies seek to extract more wage-cutting workers, taxpayer-supported consumers, and high-occupancy renters from Central American into the United States.

“We’re complicit as a nation in human trafficking,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said at a March 26 press conference in Texas with 17 other GOP senators.

It truly is time America stopped cooperating with the coyotes and the cartels.

But There Is No Crisis

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It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that our southern border is being flooded with people entering American illegally. Many of those people are young children who have made the perilous journey and are now coming into the country looking for relatives who are already here. At some point, through chain migration policies, families will be reunited. At some future date, Democrats will magically make all of the illegals legal citizens. However, the current situation at the border is horrendous.

Yesterday Red State reported the following:

Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki has repeatedly told reporters that there is no crisis at the border. 

There is no surge at the border, people are merely “presenting” at the border.

They aren’t keeping kids in cages at the border, they are keeping them in “soft-sided structures” that they can’t leave.

While the people currently running this country have become the living embodiment of a CNN “mostly peaceful protests” meme, the crisis has continued to grow exponentially with no end in site. The Biden Administration is rumored to be in a bit of chaos behind the scenes as they struggle to message the deluge of illegal aliens currently streaming over the border on a daily basis.

The article continues with the following tweet:

Basically, the message in the tweet is:

Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking interested candidates to serve up to a 120-day voluntary deployment detail as part of the HHS, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), Unaccompanied Children (UC) Program, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and HHS are calling upon our Federal Agency family of exception public servants to lend support to this humanitarian effort through this detail opportunity. This opportunity provides a continuum of care for children, including placements in foster care, shelter and residential care providers that provide temporary housing and to assist with caring for and placing children without legal immigration status…

…Details will involve contact with migrant children and a variety of other federal and non-federal entities, possibly including U.S. Customs and Border Protection, American Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other HHS employees. This is a reimbursement detail. Travel, lodging and per diem will be provided.

Just finish the wall and the problem will drastically decrease.

 

Does This Concern Anyone?

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Yesterday The National Pulse posted an article about Dr. Rachel Levine, President Joe Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee will hold a nomination hearing for Dr. Rachel Levine. Dr. Levine was formerly the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Pennsylvania was one of the states that sent Covid patients into nursing homes. At the same time Covid patients were sent into nursing homes, Dr. Levine quietly moved one of her parents out of a nursing home to a safer location. Rules for thee, but not for me. However, that is the least of the problems with this nominee.

The article reports:

Most alarmingly, Dr. Levine has advocated for sex changes for pre-pubertal people, otherwise known as “children.”

A professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the Penn State College of Medicine, Levine has given lectures in various settings since at least 2012 on how to perform sex changes and gender conversion therapy on children.

According to Levine, children ought to be given the latitude to choose their own gender. Levine has advised adults to “try not to force them one way or other [sic]” and instead to follow the child’s lead.

“For prepubertal children,” Levine said in a 2017 speech at Franklin & Marshall College, “they might present in different ways. They might present at school in the gender they were identified at birth, or they might present as the other gender, or they might be more gender-fluid.” Levine has described children as young as five or six as “knowing” which gender they wanted to be.

Once, however, the child reaches the “young adolescent” stage, Dr. Levine recommends puberty blockers, a practice which Dr. Levine apparently followed at Penn State Hershey Medical Center as Chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine and Eating Disorders. In speeches, Levine describes prescribing puberty blockers and cross-gender hormone injections to children who expressed anxiety about the natural process of puberty.

Additionally, Levine has expressed doubts about the “controversial” requirement in some standards of medical ethics that patients receive psychological evaluations before undergoing such drastic medical regimens.

The current protocols for gender-dysphoric youth, Levine stated in a 2017 speech, outline a two-step process: the prescription of puberty-blockers during the first stages of puberty, and then, after continued counselling, the introduction of cross-gender hormones between the ages of 14 and 16. Then, around age 18, the patient may undergo surgery. But, as Levine noted, there are sometimes exceptions. In certain instances, Levine has said, surgical procedures may be performed on patients under the age of 18.

Dr. Levine is transgender. I guess she just wants to share her experience with children. This person should not be allowed to assume any leadership position in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under any circumstances.

Where Your Tax Money Goes

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Just the News posted an article today about ‘improper payments’ made by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2019.

The article reports:

The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just the News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s. 

This week, our award goes to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for spending $106.7 billion on improper payments during 2019.

Improper payments are defined under federal law as “payments made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason.”

The article continues:

According to a new report from Open the Books, improper payments from the Medicaid and Medicare programs have increased significantly in the past decade, in part due to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act — also called Obamacare. In 2011, when the act was signed into law, Congress declared it would help pay for the expensive plan by rooting out waste, fraud and corrupt spending within the Medicare and Medicaid sections of the agency.

Health and Human Services is the leading source of improper payments in the entire U.S. government, dwarfing by a magnitude of multiples the second-worst offender, which in 2019 was the Department of Treasury.

You would think that if they realized that they were ‘improper payments’, they would be able to get the money back. You would be wrong, but you might think that.

The article explains:

Once the taxpayer money is mistakenly spent, it is very hard for the government to claw it back. Of the $106.7 billion HHS squandered on improper payments in fiscal year 2019, it has been able to identify for recovery only $14.1 billion, or about 13.2% of the total. Of that $14.1 billion, the department has been able to “recapture” about $12.1 billion.

We need to put a bunch of accountants in charge of our government. Maybe they could straighten this mess out.

 

Transparency Is Always A Good Idea

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Yesterday The Epoch Times reported that Judge Carl Nichols with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that the Trump administration can compel hospitals and insurers to publish negotiated costs for health care services that are normally kept secret from patients. This is wonderful news for patients in hospitals although I suspect that the medical community is not happy with the decision.

The article reports:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) introduced a rule in November 2019 that defined “standard charges,” laid out the publication requirements for hospitals and insurers, and the department’s enforcement plans.

At the time, hospital and insurer organizations and advocacy groups objected to the agency’s proposals, disputing that the Trump administration has the authority to require the disclosures, which they believe are trade secrets. The hospitals also disputed that the policy would benefit consumers and lead to lower costs, countering that compliance would instead be too burdensome and “get in the way” of providing services for patients.

The finalization of the rule, which goes into effect January 2021, prompted the American Hospital Association (AHA) to sue, arguing that the White House didn’t have the authority to make the directive, had violated the First Amendment in its creation, and had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner.

The article concludes:

Trump’s executive order on improving transparency on health care prices and quality required the HHS secretary to propose a regulation to publicly post standard charge information “in an easy-to-understand, consumer-friendly, and machine-readable format using consensus-based data standards that will meaningfully inform patients’ decision making and allow patients to compare prices across hospitals.”

It also requires hospitals to regularly update the posted information.

David Mitchell, the founder of advocacy group Patients For Affordable Drugs, said in a statement to The Epoch Times in response to the ruling that he thinks “we have to get rid of our system in which prices are secret and hidden from those who must pay them.”

This is good news for the people who pay for hospital care.

The Impact Of President Trump’s Judicial Appointments

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Yesterday The Daily Caller reported that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that the Trump administration can continue stripping federal funding from clinics that offer abortions. Note that he did not shut down the clinics–he just said that they would not receive federal funding. That ruling is an example of the impact President Trump’s judicial appointments have had on the Ninth Circuit.

Yesterday Fox News reported:

President Trump has reshaped the “notoriously liberal” U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, according to Carrie Severino, the conservative Judicial Crisis Network’s chief counsel and policy director, who noted it was often referred to as the “Ninth Circus.”

The former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made the comments Monday on “Fox & Friends” in response to a Los Angeles Times article titled “Trump has flipped the 9th Circuit — and some new judges are causing a ‘shock wave.’”

The article said that when President Trump talks about his accomplishments in office, “he frequently mentions his aggressive makeover of a key sector of the federal judiciary — the circuit courts of appeal, where he has appointed 51 judges to lifetime jobs in three years.”

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which encompasses California, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Nevada, Idaho, Guam, Oregon and Washington, was a liberal bastion that has been aggressively reshaped into a more moderate court by the Trump administration.

The Daily Caller notes:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) followed the decision in June by alerting clinics that it would enforce the administration’s ban. Planned Parenthood withdrew from the Title X federal family planning program, thereby forgoing about $60 million a year, in August 2019 rather than comply with this decision.

The Daily Caller article includes a screenshot of a comment by Leana Wen, M.D., a former president of Planned Parenthood. She comments that she will continue to fight so that millions of women across the country can receive care. Note the vocabulary used here–abortion is being framed as care. In a stretch of logic I suppose you could consider abortion care for the mother, but it is definitely not care for the baby. By controlling the vocabulary, Dr. Wen seeks to control the argument. The government should not be funding clinics that lead women to abortions–they should be funding clinics that lead women to prenatal care and support for their pregnancy.

Dismantling ObamaCare One Rule At A Time

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One of the mixed blessings about the way ObamaCare was passed was the fact that it was an unread law passed strictly along party lines (Democratic Party) and then filled in by Executive Order and orders from the Health and Human Services Department. Many of the mandates and other parts of ObamaCare were not written into the law, but came later. One of the advantages of that fact is that what was put in place by Executive Order can be taken away by Executive Order. Since the Republicans in Congress have broken their promise to the voters to repeal ObamaCare, President Trump is taking it apart piece by piece.

Today Red State posted an article showing the latest piece to go. The article included the following tweet by the President:

The article explains:

President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order later this week that would allow people to pool together and purchase group insurance plans, according to The New York Times.

Association health plans allow groups such as community organizations, churches or professional associations to purchase health plans together. Many insurance companies oppose this kind of pooled purchase, as they argue the plans take healthy patients out of the individual markets.

The executive order is the first step in President Trump’s plan to issue another directive that would allow people to purchase insurance across state lines, though it is still unclear if he has the authority to do so.

“I am considering an executive order on associations, and that will take care of a tremendous number of people with regard to health care,” President Trump said late September, according to The New York Times. “I’ll probably be signing a very major executive order where people can go out, cross state lines, do lots of things, and buy their own health care…It’s going to cover a lot of territory and a lot of people — millions of people.”

Letting the free market reign in health insurance is a giant step back to sanity. Health insurance companies are in business to make a profit, which they are entitled to, and they use actuary tables to calculate those projected profits. If you bring back competition, they will have to compete with each other in the area of pricing, and all Americans will benefit. This is a big step toward making health insurance affordable for everyone. The less the government is involved in health insurance and healthcare, the better it is for all of us.

Remember what Milton Friedman said:

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.

Let’s get the government out of health insurance.

One Example Of Why ObamaCare Needs To Be Repealed Immediately

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The following excerpts are part of a Department of Health and Human Services Report from the Office of the Inspector General. The report states, “Colorado Did Not Correctly Expend Establishment Grant Funds For Establishing A Health Insurance Marketplace.” The report can be found on the Internet here.

The mission of the Office of Inspector General (OIG), as mandated by Public Law 95-452, as amended, is to protect the integrity of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) programs, as well as the health and welfare of beneficiaries served by those programs. This statutory mission is carried out through a nationwide network of audits, investigations, and inspections conducted by the following operating components:

Office of Audit Services

Office of Evaluation and Inspections

Office of Investigations

Office of Counsel to the Inspector General

The report explains why the agency did the review–the review was part of a series of reviews of establishment grants for State marketplaces across the Nation. You can read the details if you choose, but the details are not what is important here–what is important is that the Federal and State governments never work as well as the free market.

This is the list of what the review found:

1. The Colorado marketplace did not expend $9,678,635 of Federal establishment grant funds in accordance with Federal requirements. Specifically, the Colorado marketplace:did not adequately document $4,398,333 in costs that it charged to the establishment grants;

2. charged the establishment grants $4,504,799 for unallowable hardware and software operational support and maintenance contract costs whose periods of benefit occurred after December 31, 2014;

3. improperly transferred costs totaling $312,449 from one establishment grant to another without demonstrating that these cost transfers were performed to correct bookkeeping or clerical errors;

4. did not efficiently and effectively administer establishment grant funds totaling $463,054 consisting of improperly awarded executive and employee bonuses, overpayments to subgrantees, unallowable promotional giveaway items, excessive and unreasonable tips, vendor rebates that were received but not credited to the establishment grants, and unallowable social activities;

5. drew down establishment grant funds that it did not immediately use;

6. entered into contracts with consultants and other contractors that did not conform to Federal and State requirements and the Colorado marketplace’s own policies on contract administration, including approval procedures and required contract information; and

7. engaged in a number of procedures and practices that, contrary to Federal requirements and cost principles and, in some cases, to the Colorado marketplace’s own  policies, (1) required the use of personal credit cards to purchase equipment, supplies, and services for the marketplace, (2) permitted self-approval of purchases on behalf of the previous executive staff, (3) permitted incomplete and inadequate disclosure of possible conflicts of interest, (4) did not properly document inventory of equipment, and (5) allowed the use of establishment grant funds to purchase equipment for a previous Chief Executive Officer (CEO) who kept it for personal use when the CEO left the organization.

These findings were caused by a lack of adequate stewardship of Federal funds. Specifically, the Colorado marketplace had not developed, finalized, and implemented policies and procedures to ensure that it expended and accounted for establishment grant funds in accordance with Federal, State, and Colorado marketplace requirements.

This is a chart showing the bonuses given:

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted an article about this report today.

The article concludes:

Later in the report, the IG explains that this was spent on a holiday party, with “cake, punch, holiday cards, and decorations.” Why the Colorado exchange felt it necessary to charge the federal government for those expenses will be one of the more interesting explanations we’ll hear … if we ever do hear it. At any rate, such expenses are explicitly prohibited from federal grants, as the IG points out in the report.

The whole report is damning for the arrogance of the bureaucracy when it came to spending federal grant money, especially on a flop like ObamaCare. One has to wonder just how many other states have used their federal grant money in such a cavalier manner, and for little purpose in the end.

It might be a good idea to note at this time what the planned future of ObamaCare actually was. Had Hillary Clinton been elected as President, the Democrats in Congress would have acknowledged that ObamaCare had failed and suggested a single-payer (read that ‘government run’) healthcare program similar to what Canada and the U.K. have to replace ObamaCare. When Donald Trump was elected, things got complicated for the Democrats. As I write this, they are fighting to preserve ObamaCare long enough so that it can fail and be replaced by single-payer healthcare. Hopefully the Republicans will not let that happen and will repeal ObamaCare quickly.

Let’s get the government out of healthcare.