RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/09/12/medical-breakthrough/

Making conservative health reform popular

For a generation of Republican political candidates, Obamacare was a gift that kept on giving. The Democrats’ enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 gave the GOP historic gains in that year’s midterms; its bungled implementation handed them the Senate in 2014; and soaring premiums helped Donald Trump capture the White House in 2016.

But the Trump administration fell well short of its promises to replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” and many Republicans have become wary of entering a complex policy minefield. This aversion has had electoral consequences: Voters who cited health care as their most important issue cast their ballots three to one for Biden over Trump in November 2020 — accounting for much of the swing from 2016.

Any Republican hoping to win the White House in 2024 cannot simply run against Obamacare, but must have a health-care agenda that is compelling to voters — and, once in office, will need the ability to deliver on it.

With a combination of $1.2 trillion per year in private insurance and $1.9 trillion per year of public spending on health care, Americans enjoy the best access to cutting-edge medical care in the world — without comprehensive rationing of drugs, physician services, or hospital procedures. Yet America’s great willingness to pay for access to ever-improving medical capabilities has led it to neglect keeping costs under control. In November 2021, while 82 percent of Americans rated the quality of the health care they received “excellent” or “good” (only 3 percent judged it “poor”), 77 percent were dissatisfied with the nation’s health-care costs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/top-med-schools-weed-out-applicants-who-dont-support-dei-new-report-says/

The best medical schools in the country are weeding out applicants who are insufficiently devoted to the leftist creed of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), according to a new report released by the non-profit Do No Harm.

Do No Harm, a nonprofit dedicated to “protect[ing] healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology,” conducted an analysis of medical school application processes which found that these selective institutions are raising an additional barrier to entry on top of the strenuous testing and grade requirements.

“A review of the admissions process at 50 of the top-ranked medical schools found that 36 asked applicants their views on, or experience in, DEI efforts,” reads the Do No Harm report, which was obtained by National Review. “Many were overt in asking applicants if they agreed with certain statements about racial politics and the causes of disparate health outcomes.”

According to the report, medical schools are asking these questions in order to “turn ideological support for health equity and social justice initiatives into a credential that increases an applicant’s chance of acceptance,” “screen out dissenters,” and “signal to all applicants that they are expected to support this new cause.”

“Top medical schools have woven their commitment to woke politics into their application process, asking future doctors to prove their commitment to divisive ideologies or risk being rejected from medical school.” concludes the report.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb founded Do No Harm after serving as associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. In his view, the use of ideologically slanted application questions will stunt the development of those applicants who do make it through the gauntlet to enter a top medical school.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/yes_some_universities_are_emstillem_requiring_the_covid_shot.html

Rutgers University is one of many schools of higher education that will require masking and COVID vaccination for the coming school year.  Antonio M. Calcado, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Rutgers, has written that “face coverings are required in all indoor teaching spaces, libraries, and clinical settings.  Compliance is mandatory.”  And “all students and employees are required to be fully vaccinated, obtain a booster when eligible, and upload records to the university vaccine portal.”

In light of what has been learned about the COVID jab, for those parents who will be shelling out $133,828 in tuition for their Rutgers undergrads, this edict may come as an additional shock on top of the sticker price for an education.

Recently, Dr. Robert Malone cited an analysis titled “COVID-19 Vaccines and Informed Consent” by Mr. John Allison (J.D.).  Allison’s law practice was “devoted to the litigation of cases involving medical, toxicological, industrial hygiene and product safety issues.” He was “Assistant General Counsel in the legal department of a Fortune 100 company with overall responsibility for product liability, environmental and commercial litigation.”  In addition, he was also “the lawyer for the company’s Medical Department, including Corporate Toxicology, Epidemiology and Product Responsibility.”

Allison’s 53-page analysis should be mandatory reading when deciding to send a child to a university or college mandating the jab.  Below are some highlights of his analysis.

 1. Government misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, censorship of credible scientific and medical information about the risks of death and serious adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccination coercion are depriving people of their ability to give informed consent to vaccination.

2. Safe and effective drugs on the market for many years, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, have been proven by reputable doctors to be successful in the early treatment of COVID-19.  If those affordable drugs had been allowed to be more widely used in the United States before people needed to be hospitalized, many tens of thousands of people who died from COVID-19 would probably be alive today.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/monkeypox-outbreak-leveling-off-no-thanks-to-government/

People have incentives to protect themselves from infection without government mandates.

Something that apparently surprised government bureaucrats and left-wing commentators but is, in fact, completely predictable is happening: The growth in new monkeypox cases is leveling off and may be starting to decline, and the government had little to do with it. In New York City — the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak — the seven-day average of new cases actually peaked at the end of July and has been declining since. Similarly, new cases in California — the other most common site of U.S. illness — appear to have peaked in early August and subsequently declined.

Contrary to what some observers think, there is nothing perplexing about these developments. Economists have long known that people voluntarily change their behavior to avoid the risks and costs of infectious diseases. These changes in individual behaviors usually precede any government action and have a greater impact.

During the Covid pandemic, studies of cellphone-mobility data showed that people started to reduce their time outside the home and that businesses had declines in customer traffic before the government-imposed lockdowns. Canadian economist Douglas Allen reviewed nearly 20 studies that distinguished between voluntary and mandated lockdown effects. All of them found that mandated lockdowns had only marginal impact and that voluntary changes in behavior explained most of the changes in cases and deaths.

The current monkeypox outbreak is unusual in that it involves human-to-human transmission and has been almost exclusively between men who have sex with other men. We would expect members of the gay and bisexual community who value their health to engage in self-protective behavior.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_con_game_legal_tyranny_is_bad_for_babies.html

When Katie Chubb’s baby was due in early 2020, her husband Nicholas had to drive her from Augusta, Georgia, where they live, to a freestanding birth center in Atlanta — nearly 150 miles away.  During her pregnancy, she made 15 round trips to the center for prenatal care.  The Augusta area does not have centers for natural childbirth, so from her own experience, Chubb saw an opportunity for a small business to provide a much-needed service and decided to set up one.  But Georgia has denied the center permission to operate, so she is suing the state because the reason for denial — while valid under current state law — is unreasonable by the norms of free-market economics and violates important individual rights.

Imagine the authorities denying Wells Fargo permission to open a branch because the local Bank of America tells it the new outlet isn’t needed, as it would duplicate BoA’s services.  Seems unthinkable.  But Certificate of Need (CON) requirements in health care, created in the 1960s and in operation in 35 states and Washington, D.C., demand that hospitals in an area endorse the need for a new hospital or health care facility, even for the acquisition of new equipment.

For freestanding birth centers, which are legal in all states, CONs are required only in 15 states.  Such centers aren’t hospitals, but they handle low-risk deliveries on a midwifery and wellness model.  They do not provide general anesthesia or perform Cesarean sections or other surgical procedures.  Some offer alternative practices like water birth and lotus birth, with relaxing music playing and paternal participation in the process.  A doctor is on board for supervision and early identification of complications, and the centers typically have hospital transfer arrangements for emergencies.  Less expensive than hospitals, staffed with trained nurse-midwives, they provide a hygienic, low-stress setting for delivery.  Many women choose them over hospitals, and in poor or rural areas without hospitals, they serve to bring down infant and maternal mortality rates.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-court-blocks-biden-admin-from-forcing-doctors-to-perform-gender-transitions/

A federal appeals court blocked a Biden administration plan Friday that would coerce doctors to perform gender-transition medical procedures and abortions that violate their conscience or medical judgment.

The plaintiffs, a religious hospital and group of over 20,000 health-care professionals, launched the lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services in August 2016 after the federal government mandated that most health-care providers perform and provide insurance coverage for such procedures.

The district court had determined that HHS could not interpret or enforce Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits health-care programs that receive federal funds from discriminating against patients on the basis of sex, to compel Franciscan Alliance to insure gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions, according to the court filing. In May 2016, HHS expanded Section 1557’s definition of sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of “termination of pregnancy” and “gender identity.” Secretary of HHS Xavier Becerra appealed the district court’s ruling.

While Becerra’s appeal was pending, the Biden administration issued a “Notice and Guidance on Gender Affirming Care,” doubling down on its reasoning, which Judge Don Willett found on Friday to be flawed, that Obamacare mandates that hospitals perform gender-reassignment surgeries and abortions.

On Friday, circuit judges Jennifer Walker Elrod, Willett, and Kurt Engelhardt affirmed the decision of the district court that granted Franciscan Alliance a permanent injunction, barring the HHS from forcing it to provide gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions against its religious beliefs.

Earlier this month, Luke Goodrich, attorney with the Becket Fund who has been working on the case since the Obama-era rule was first issued, said in a call with reporters that if the plaintiffs had lost, the Biden administration would have declared “open season” on religious hospitals that object to gender transitions.

https://nypost.com/2022/08/23/good-riddance-to-fauci-and-his-calamitous-costly-career/

Whatever comes next in the pandemic, we all have cause to rejoice at the best news since the arrival of the COVID vaccine: Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, has announced his retirement. His long and singularly disastrous career ends in December.

Never in the history of the public-health profession has anyone been so richly rewarded for doing so much harm to the public’s health. Whether or not he actually helped start the COVID pandemic — by funding dangerous research in the Chinese lab that may have created the coronavirus — he promoted a series of policies in America and the rest of the world that did even more damage than the virus.

Except possibly for the Great Depression, the lockdowns were the costliest public-policy mistake ever made during peacetime in America.

Fauci got away with it by invoking the authority of science while violating its fundamental principles. Before COVID arrived, the world’s leading epidemiologists had warned that lockdowns would be futile and cause catastrophic collateral damage, but Fauci simply ignored that advice.

As evidence mounted of the policies’ failure, he persisted by deploying the skills honed during five decades in Washington: bureaucratic infighting, media manipulation and fearmongering.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/26/falling-life-expectancy-driven-by-flailing-failing-federal-health-baloney-aucracy/

“New NCHS report shows life expectancy declined in all 50 states and DC in 2020” – National Center for Health Statistics tweet

Life expectancy didn’t just “decline.” Per woke medical news site Medpage Today, it “plummet(ed).” By nearly two years, a gobsmacking statistic.

This commentator knows what you’re thinking. NBC News beat us to it: “The main reason for the decline, of course, was Covid-19.”

Of course.

Except … expectancy was already flat or down six times between 2012 and 2021. After steadily rising for generations.

Hmmm. Your correspondent is hardly the first to connect these dots, but guess what else changed in Health Care World in the early 2010s? Hint: starts with “O” and ends with “care.”

University of Colorado Boulder professor Ryan Masters, author of a previous life expectancy study (spoiler alert: lifespans dropped further in 2021) noted: “(H)igh rates of obesity and heart disease, along with inequities in access to health care, were already leading the U.S. to lose ground with respect to health and survival before the pandemic. ‘Those same factors made the U.S. more vulnerable … to the mortality consequences of COVID-19.’”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/26/death-despair-and-lockdowns/

The old saying that the cure is deadlier than the disease is a worn-out cliche. But that doesn’t mean it can’t make a point. The pandemic lockdowns are a perfect example of a banality being absolutely true.

Over about two-and-one-half years COVID-19 has killed a little more than 1 million Americans and another 5.5 million in the rest of the world. It’s a grim toll. At least its deadly effects will decrease as it becomes endemic.

The same can’t be said for the lockdowns. Their poison will be killing victims for years.

A recent article from the London Telegraph posted in Yahoo News tells the story of “​​experts” believing “decisions taken by the government in the earliest stages of the pandemic may now be coming back to bite.”

“Policies that kept people indoors, scared them away from hospitals and deprived them of treatment and primary care are finally taking their toll,” said the Telegraph.

For more than three months, excess deaths in England and Wales have averaged around 1,000 a week, and none are due to COVID.

It’s not as if the decision-makers weren’t warned. Robert Dingwall, a Nottingham Trent University professor and a government adviser during the pandemic, told the Telegraph that “the picture seems very consistent with what some of us were suggesting from the beginning.”

On our side of the Atlantic, “from April 2020 through at least the end of 2021, Americans died from non-COVID causes at an average annual rate 97,000 in excess of previous trends,” says a National Bureau of Economic Research paper.

It further contends that “excess mortality continues into calendar year 2022,” though it’s safe to say they will persist well past that date.

The authors, one from the University of Chicago Economics Department, the other a partner from a data and investment research firm, say “it should be no surprise that a widespread disruption to patient circumstances would degrade health and even elevate mortality from chronic conditions. Nevertheless, early in the pandemic some experts mocked this perspective as a ‘pet theory about the fatal dangers of quarantine.’”