Ghoulish science + Obamacare = health hazard

via: onenewsnow

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tried to reassure citizens in New Orleans this week that Obamacare bureaucrats will make sound medical decisions for all Americans. She failed. Under the government-run plan, she promised, a team of healthcare experts will recommend what should be covered: “I think it would be wise to let science guide what the best healthcare package is.”

Gulp. It’s the Obama administration’s view of sound “science” that should send chills down patients’ spines. Case in point: The president’s prestigious science czar, John Holdren, refuses to answer questions about his radical published work on population control over the last 30 years.

Last week, I called the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to press Holdren on his views about forced abortions and mass sterilizations; his purported disavowal of Ecoscience, the 1977 book he co-authored with population control zealots Paul and Anne Ehrlich; and his continued embrace of forced-abortion advocate and eugenics guru Harrison Brown, whom he credits with inspiring him to become a scientist.

After investigative bloggers and this column reprinted extensive excerpts from Ecoscience, which mused openly about putting sterilants in the water supply to make women infertile and engineering society by taking away babies from undesirables and subjecting them to government-mandated abortions, the White House issued a statement from Holdren last week denying he embraced those proposals. The Ehrlichs challenged critics to read their and Holdren’s more recent research and works.

Well, I did read one of Holdren’s recent works. It revealed his clingy reverence for, and allegiance to, the gurus of population control authoritarianism. He’s just gotten smarter about cloaking it behind global warming hysteria. In 2007, he addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. Holdren served as AAAS president; the organization posted his full slide presentation on its website.

In the opening slide, Holdren admitted that his “preoccupation” with apocalyptic matters such as “the rates at which people breed” was a lifelong obsession spurred by Harrison Brown’s work. Holdren heaped praise on Brown’s half-century-old book, The Challenge of Man’s Future, and then proceeded to paint doom-and-gloom scenarios requiring drastic government interventions to control climate change.

Who is Harrison Brown? He was a “distinguished member” of the International Eugenics Society whom Holdren later worked with on a book about — you guessed it — world population and fertility. Brown advocated the same population control-freak measures Holdren put forth in Ecoscience. In The Challenge of Man’s Future, Brown envisioned a regime in which the “number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.”

Brown exhorted readers to accept that “we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that artificial means must be applied to limit birth rates.” If we don’t, Brown warned, we will face a planet “with a writhing mass of human beings.” He likened the global population to a “pulsating mass of maggots.”

When I pressed Holdren’s office specifically about his relationship with Brown, spokesman Rick Weiss told me he didn’t know who Brown was and balked at drawing any conclusions about Holdren’s views based on his homage just two years ago to his lifelong mentor, colleague and continued inspiration, Harrison Brown.

Weiss lectured me rather snippily about the need for responsible journalism (he was a Washington Post reporter for 15 years). He then told me not to expect any response from Holdren’s office to my question on whether Holdren disavows his relationship with a eugenics enthusiast who referred to the world population as a “pulsating mass of maggots” and championed a scheme of abortion and artificial insemination quotas. To date the office has maintained radio silence.

If this is the kind of ghoulish “science” that guides the White House, we can only hope that Obamacare is dead on arrival.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC

Advice to consumers re: healthcare reform: ‘Be wary’

via: onenewsnow

A healthcare expert is skeptical of hospitals’ claims that they are going to save the government billions of dollars over the next ten years.

Vice President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that hospital executives have agreed give up $155 billion in future Medicare and Medicaid payments to help defray the cost of President Obama’s government-run healthcare plan. The White House also says healthcare providers have promised $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.
 
James Lansberry is vice president of Samaritan Ministries International. Lansberry, a supporter of patient-centered healthcare reform, says the Obama administration is going to be working overtime to get some of the stakeholders back to the table.
 
He points out that while the American Hospital Association has not yet weighed in “vehemently” against the new plan, the American Medical Association has. “And the insurance companies are talking about…being against the new government option that’s coming out,” he adds.

A healthcare expert is skeptical of hospitals’ claims that they are going to save the government billions of dollars over the next ten years.

Vice President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that hospital executives have agreed give up $155 billion in future Medicare and Medicaid payments to help defray the cost of President Obama’s government-run healthcare plan. The White House also says healthcare providers have promised $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.
 
James Lansberry is vice president of Samaritan Ministries International. Lansberry, a supporter of patient-centered healthcare reform, says the Obama administration is going to be working overtime to get some of the stakeholders back to the table.
 
He points out that while the American Hospital Association has not yet weighed in “vehemently” against the new plan, the American Medical Association has. “And the insurance companies are talking about…being against the new government option that’s coming out,” he adds.

The government’s proposal for healthcare reform, he says, faces a difficult fight against the likes of the AMA and health insurers. “They’re all going to be looking to try to preserve themselves,” Lansberry explains, “and I think that as Americans we need to be looking for how to preserve the overall freedom of individual choice in healthcare — and not looking for ways that the government can get their fingers into more parts of the pie.”
 
Lansberry urges people to “be wary” when industry lobbyists say they are going to reduce costs, because “nobody gets hired by an industry to make their clients make less money.”

In a recent press release, the Samaritan Ministries spokesman criticizes one specific aspect of several healthcare proposals being considered in Congress: a mandate that employers provide health insurance for their employees. Lansberry contends such a mandate would impose “crippling costs” on many small businesses, resulting in a negative effect on the economy.
 
“An employer mandate will mean lost jobs — and those jobs will be lost in small, local businesses that we need to see thrive,” he states. “Small businesses are the strength of our economy, especially in the local area.”
 
He says if Congress is serious about preventing unemployment rates from increasing, it needs to pay attention to the costs associated with added regulations like an employer mandate.

Latest news: Conservative House Democrats are demanding significant changes before they can support a sweeping healthcare overhaul, forcing the House to join the Senate in delaying action on President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority. Read more 

Pastor: Obama has no ‘black experience’ to speak of

via: onenewsnow

A conservative black pastor and former NFL linebacker says he’s highly offended that President Obama would compare the plight of homosexuals to that of blacks during the Civil Rights Era.

On Monday, President Obama told a gathering of homosexuals at the White House that he is aware that many of them “don’t believe progress has come fast enough,” and compared their struggles to those of blacks during the Civil Rights Movement.

Ken Hutcherson, the senior pastor of Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland, Washington, says the comments are especially disturbing from an individual who is supposed to be familiar with “the black experience.”

“But I guess we…have to ask, ‘Even though he is black because his father was, what is his “black experience”?’ He doesn’t have any. He was raised by a white mother and a white grandmother, so this man has about as much black experience as my Doberman Pinscher — and I guarantee [that] my Doberman Pinscher doesn’t have any,” he points out. “There is nothing, nothing that compares between what the Afro-Americans went through and what homosexuals are going through now.”

Hutcherson expresses disgust with evangelicals who still support President Obama, despite his promotion of policies that are at odds with scripture. He says such individuals are part of the “evangellyfish” movement in America.

“A person can be as black as a piece of coal, [but] if he goes against God’s biblical views, I would not support him, I would not endorse him, I would not even give a smile in his direction so people could even think that I endorse him,” he states, “because God is my God, the Bible is my playbook, and I run it the way it is written.”

During his speech to homosexuals on Monday, Obama suggested that Christians like Hutcherson who oppose homosexuality on biblical grounds hold to “worn arguments and old attitudes.” (See earlier article)

Disorder in Iran — seeds of a revolution

via: onenewsnow

A best-selling author and critic of Islam says there’s a real possibility that the protests against the recent election results in Iran could be the seeds of a new Iranian revolution.

On Friday Tehran residents climbed on to their roofs and began to shout “God is great!”  and “Death to the Dictator!” in open defiance of Iran’s supreme Islamic leader. The late-night cries came hours after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned opposition supporters to stop protesting the June 12 election that they say was rigged in favor of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
 
The unrest continued on Saturday, when an estimated 3,000 marchers confronted a blockade of security forces in Tehran. Witnesses say police fired tear gas and water cannons, then chased down demonstrators with clubs, helped by volunteer militiamen on motorcycles.

Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, says the Iranian government is clearly threatened by the continued street protests.
 
“They feel that [Khamenei] has compromised himself by affirming the validity of Ahmadinejad’s re-election,” Spencer says, “and it looks as if there was election fraud on a wide scale, which implicates [Khamenei]. That’s a very serious problem for the Iranian regime that can’t really be minimized.
 
“And so it is entirely within the realm of possibility that a movement that is simply protesting the presidential election results becomes something much greater.”
 
Spencer says it looks as if there are some real possibilities that could be happening now.

Teacher fired for conservative website: “You refuse to conform” and “you just don’t fit in.”

via: onenewsnow

A Kansas teacher says he was wrongfully terminated for his conservative views.

Tim Latham has been teaching history and U.S. Government for over 19 years. But after teaching for just one year in the Lawrence School District in Lawrence, Kansas, Latham says his contract was not renewed because school officials did not like his conservative views — particularly a teacher website that Latham hosted and paid for himself. A teacher coach confronted him on that issue.
 
“She had concerns about it. I’ve never had a complaint about it — nothing but compliments. Parents love it because of their access to assignments, grades, etc. And she wanted a lot of the stuff that was on it removed. And when I asked why, I was told because it was too patriotic.”
 
Latham had an introductory video on the site where he stated that he wanted students to truly love the American way of life, and he says he was told to remove that as well because not everybody loves the American way of life. According to Latham, other complaints included that he was picking on Obama too much. When he asked for an explanation as to why his contract was not renewed he was told, “You refuse to conform” and “you just don’t fit in.”

“Those are word-for-word quotes given to me by the director of human resources, who says he is quoting what the administration told him — I refuse to conform and I just don’t fit in,” Latham notes.
 
He has since filed a grievance and is considering litigation if he does not get a satisfactory response.

ABC special – a White House infomercial?

via: onenewsnow

A healthcare expert is taking umbrage with ABC’s planned healthcare special this week.

ABC will air the special from the White House during primetime on June 24. “Prescription for America,” to be moderated by ABC News’ Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, will originate from the East Room and will feature the president explaining his plans for reforming the nation’s healthcare system. Officials with the network claim they will air opposing views, that the audience that will offer up questions for the president during the program will be made up of Americans “who have divergent opinions” in the debate on national healthcare.

However, critics think the network will basically be providing President Obama and Capitol Hill Democrats with a free infomercial to sell their healthcare plan to the American public.
 
Ron Greiner is with Save101.com, which sells and promotes affordable healthcare coupled with tax-free health savings accounts (HSAs). He wonders if ABC will follow through with their promise to air an alternative view to Obama’s health plan.
 
“The center piece of Republican healthcare reform is individual health insurance, portable insurance, and tax-free health savings accounts,” he explains. “And it’s just been reported from Time Insurance Company — America’s oldest health insurance company — that 40 percent of all [people with] HSAs had no previous health insurance. So it’s clear that HSAs get uninsured Americans insurance.”

Tax-free HSAs allow individuals to set aside money pre-tax, and at the end of the year those funds roll over with no penalties. Greiner believes linking that account with a health insurance plan that might have higher deductibles will allow people to purchase lower-cost health plans. With this plan, he says families can purchase health insurance for as little as $200 a month while building their savings account and generating wealth.
 
He adds that in Massachusetts, on which Democrats are basing the national healthcare model, healthcare costs some families as much as $1,000 per month — and if families or individuals do not purchase the insurance, they face stiff fines.
 
According to a CNSNews.com report last week, ABC rejected an alternative healthcare ad submitted for airing during the primetime special on Wednesday. A network spokesman said at that time it was rejected because ABC does not accept “advocacy advertising.”

Investigation requested of Tiller crony

via: onenewsnow

Operation Rescue is asking Nebraska’s attorney general to investigate the facilities and practices of abortionist LeRoy Carhart.

Operation Rescue president Troy Newman is asking for the probe after Carhart stated his intent to open a late-term abortion business. Newman believes conditions at the Abortion & Contraception Clinic of Nebraska — Carhart’s current facility in Bellevue, Nebraska — should sound an alarm.

“His abortion clinic looks like something that would be the epitome of a back-alley abortion clinic,” states Newman. “[It's] a disgusting place [where] you wouldn’t want your nails done — you wouldn’t want a pedicure at this place, let alone an invasive surgical procedure that could possibly take your life.”

In the past, Operation Rescue has released pictures showing Carhart accepting abortion patients while running the clinic on only an extension cord and a generator. According to Newman, the local fire chief described the abortionist as the type of person who “would put a gallon of gasoline on top of a furnace.”

“[Carhart's] garage was just stacked full of combustible material with furnaces,” Newman adds, “and finally there was a fire there.”

Carhart, who was once an employee of Wichita abortionist George Tiller, tried to revive his business, but the city shut him down temporarily over safety concerns. Newman is asking for the state probe in the interest of public safety.

Companies remove ads from homosexual blog site

via: onenewsnow

Two companies are expressing embarrassment for advertising their products on the blog of a militant homosexual activist who routinely bashes conservative Christians.

Borden Dairy and Quiznos both say they were unaware they were helping finance a blog that, during the presidential campaign, accused Alaska Governor Sarah Palin of having her first son out of wedlock and falsely claimed she forced rape victims to pay for rape kits.
 
Borden Cheese and fast-food franchise Quiznos recently purchased banner ads that appeared on Americablog.com, a site operated by homosexual Democratic political consultant John Aravosis, who is currently pressuring the Obama administration to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
 
Aravosis has frequently made inflammatory remarks about conservatives. He once referred to certain Republican congressmen as “GOP Nazis” and called evangelical Christians “America’s Taliban.”
 
Borden Dairy spokeswoman Janine Smiley says the company was completely unaware that it was advertising on Americablog.com.
 
“We do have a thorough process, though, that we have in place that has criteria set up for which sites that we’ll advertise on,” she notes. “And we also have a screening process, so we’re not quite sure what happened there, and we’re investigating and to [get] more information with regards to the buying network that purchases online advertising.”

Quiznos says it, too, was unaware that its banner ads appeared on the homosexual activist’s site. Quiznos spokeswoman Ellen Kramer says the restaurant “has taken steps to ensure the ad will be removed as soon as possible.” She tells OneNewsNow: “While we do advertise on thousands of sites to reach a broad base of Quiznos fans, that particular site doesn’t meet Quiznos’ site requirements, and we have asked our media-buying agency to revisit those requirements immediately.”
 
Other companies advertising on John Aravosis’ blog include AT&T, Capital One, and Matrix Direct Insurance.

Where’s $ for Obama’s healthcare plan?

via: onenewsnow

A congressman from Tennessee is questioning the true cost of President Obama’s healthcare plan.

Congressman Phil Roe (R-Tennessee), who serves on the Education and Labor Committee, says that group will begin hearings on Tuesday of next week on the much anticipated national healthcare plan. The plan currently being considered, he explains, will have a public option, individual and employer mandates, and will allow individuals to keep their own private insurance if they so desire.
 
But the congressman warns that the public option will be appealing to business owners because of the lower rates — and that, he fears, could have a snowball effect.
 
“What I’m afraid and fearful will happen is that more and more businesses, as private health insurance becomes more unaffordable, [will] drop it — and we’ll end up with a single-payer system such as England or Canada has now,” he laments.

According to Roe, the public option will be government-subsidized, and those who buy into it will essentially have a government bureaucrat making their health decisions for them — decisions he says are best left to the patient. The other aspect of the public option that concerns him is the funding.
 
“Now these plans have been scored as inexpensively as a trillion dollars to $1.5 trillion — and I’ll guarantee you that’s not all the costs yet,” says Roe. “[T]his is on top of a budget that’s already $1.8 trillion out of balance. And I don’t know where the money is coming from — I mean, we look at it and I have no earthly idea where we’re going to find the money.”
 
Witnesses at next week’s hearing have not yet been announced. Last week a subcommittee heard testimony on the single-payer healthcare option.

The Obamacare horror story you won’t hear

via: onenewsnow

The White House, Democrats and MoveOn liberals are spreading healthcare sob stories to sell a government takeover. But there’s one healthcare policy nightmare you won’t hear the Obamas hyping. It’s a tale of poor minority patient-dumping in Chicago — with first lady Michelle Obama’s fingerprints all over it.
 
Both Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois have raised red flags about the outsourcing program run by the University of Chicago Medical Center. The hospital has nonprofit status and receives lucrative tax breaks in exchange for providing charity care.

Yet, in fiscal year 2007, when Mrs. Obama was employed there, it spent a measly $10 million on charity care for the poor — 1.3 percent of its total hospital expenses, according to an analysis performed for The Washington Post by the nonpartisan Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. The figure is below the 2.1 percent average for nonprofit hospitals in surrounding Cook County.
 
Rep. Rush called for a House investigation last week in response to months of patient-dumping complaints, noting: “Congress has a duty to expend its power to mitigate and prevent this despicable practice from continuing in centers that receive federal funds.”
 
Don’t expect the president to support a probe. While a top executive at the hospital, Mrs. Obama helped engineer the plan to offload low-income patients with non-urgent health needs. Under the Orwellian banner of an “Urban Health Initiative,” Mrs. Obama sold the scheme to outsource low-income care to other facilities as a way to “dramatically improve healthcare for thousands of South Side residents.”
 
In truth, it was old-fashioned cost-cutting and favor-trading repackaged as minority aid. Clearing out the poor freed up room for insured (i.e., more lucrative) patients. If a Republican had proposed the very same program and recruited black civic leaders to front it, Michelle Obama and her grievance-mongering friends would be screaming “RAAAAAAAAACISM!” at the top of their lungs.
 
Joe Stephens of The Washington Post wrote, “To ensure community support, Michelle Obama and others in late 2006 recommended that the hospital hire the firm of David Axelrod, who a few months later became the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Axelrod’s firm (ASK Public Strategies) recommended an aggressive promotional effort modeled on a political campaign — appoint a campaign manager, conduct focus groups, target messages to specific constituencies, then recruit religious leaders and other third-party ‘validators.’ They, in turn, would write and submit opinion pieces to Chicago publications.”
 
Some healthcare experts saw through Mrs. Obama and PR man Axelrod — yes, the same Axelrod who is now President Obama’s senior adviser. But the University of Chicago Medical Center hired ASK Public Strategies to promote Mrs. Obama’s initiative. Axelrod had the blessing of Chicago political guru Valerie Jarrett — now a White House senior adviser.
 
Axelrod’s great contribution: re-branding! His firm recommended renaming the initiative after “internal and external respondents expressed the opinion that the word ‘urban’ is code for ‘black’ or ‘black and poor.’ …Based on the research, consideration should be given to re-branding the initiative.” Axelrod and the Obama campaign refused to disclose how much his firm received for its genius re-branding services.
 
In February 2009, outrage in the Obamas’ community exploded upon learning that a young boy covered by Medicaid had been turned away from the University of Chicago Medical Center. Dontae Adams’ mother, Angela, had sought emergency treatment for him after a pit bull tore off his upper lip. Mrs. Obama’s hospital gave the boy a tetanus shot, antibiotics and Tylenol, and shoved him out the door. The mother and son took an hour-long bus ride to another hospital for surgery.
 
I’ll guarantee you this: You’ll never see the Adams family featured at an Obama policy summit or seated next to the first lady at a joint session of Congress to illustrate the failures of the healthcare system.
 
Following the Adams incident, the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) blasted Mrs. Obama and Axelrod’s grand plan. The group released a statement expressing “grave concerns that the University of Chicago’s policy toward emergency patients is dangerously close to ‘patient dumping,’ a practice made illegal by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA)” — signed by President Reagan, by the way — “and reflected an effort to ‘cherry pick’ wealthy patients over poor.”
 
Rewarding political cronies at the expense of the poor while posing as guardians of the downtrodden? Welcome to Obamacare.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.