Medical Privacy | Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health

A New Era of Medical Blackmail

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 16:40:05 +0000

Be careful in seeking a second opinion about your child in a hospital. The hospital (through the government) may all too easily remove you as legal custodian.
Imagine your child is deathly ill. Doctors have a diagnosis and treatment plan. You, naturally, want a second opinion. When you mention the idea of moving your child to another facility, custody of your child is permanently revoked and handed to the state. You lose the ability to decide what drugs, surgeries, and treatments your son or daughter will receive.
This nightmare has become painfully real for parents across the country. Increasingly, hospitals are accusing caretakers of medical child abuse, also known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, in order to seize control of a child’s medical fate.
Medical child abuse, a very real and serious (although extremely rare) condition, is when a parent either fabricates or induces illness in their child in order to gain attention, or fails to obtain needed medical care. The abuse is considered most dangerous when it results in “needless medical intervention.” (Based on these criteria, however, it seems that many hospitals and doctors could rightfully be accused of medical child abuse!)
Perhaps the best-publicized accusation of medical child abuse is the case ofConnecticut teen Justina Pelletier. To date, Justina has been in the custody of the state of Massachusetts—separated from her family and friends—for the past sixteen months.
In 2010, doctors at Tufts Medical Center diagnosed Justina with mitochondrial disease, which is genetically inherited via the mother’s RNA (Justina’s sister was diagnosed as well). Justina’s symptoms included slurred speech, difficulty walking, and severe digestive problems. In 2013, Justina’s parents sought out a gastroenterologist at Boston Children’s Hospital to aid in her treatment.
Almost immediately, the doctors at the Boston Children’s ruled out mitochondrial disease and diagnosed Justina’s symptoms as psychosomatic—that is, they felt her symptoms were caused by mental illness and stress brought on by her parents, not a disease. Further, they accused Justina’s parents of subjecting her to dangerous and unnecessary medical treatments.
How absurd! If it was Tuft’s doctors who misdiagnosed Justina, why would the parents be held responsible for responding to that diagnosis?
When her parents disagreed with Boston Children’s diagnosis and attempted to discharge her, the hospital reported Mr. and Mrs. Pelletier for medical child abuse. The state of Massachusetts seized custody of Justina, and placed her in a residential psychiatric facility. Her condition deteriorated—in under two years, she went from being a competitive figure skater to being confined to a wheelchair—and her parents were permitted only hour-long supervised visits, while the Tufts doctors who diagnosed Justina originally were not permitted to see or evaluate her.
In March 2013, a Massachusetts judge awarded the state permanent custody of Justina, meaning they would have full control of her life until she turned 18. Based on “extensive psychiatric and medical testimony…the court has found that Justina suffers from a persistent and severe Somatic Symptom Disorder.”
Why is a state judge diagnosing a child? The diagnosis for SSD is highly subjective: it’s when a child, suffering from real symptoms, “display[s] a severe preoccupation with having a physical illness.” It seems obvious that a suffering child would become worried and obsessed about her illness—particularly when isolated from family and friends!
Further, in his ruling, Judge Joseph Johnson claimed that Justina’s parents were unfit for custody because they “stated their child was being kidnapped by Children’s Hospital,” and “threatened to have hospital personnel’s licenses revoked.” Essentially, the judge decreed that Justina’s parents were unfit because they were fighting to regain custody of their child and obtain proper treatment for their child—instead of standing meekly by until the state had finished with her.
On June 8, the Pelletier family released this video of Justina begging to go home:

On June 12, in what Justina’s attorneys are calling a “dramatic reversal,” the Massachusetts department of child welfare filed a motion agreeing that Justina should be returned to her parents. However, the courts will have to agree with the department in order for Justina to be released. A ruling should be made on or before June 20.
We wish that the Justina Pelletier case were an isolated incident. It is not—there are other, less well known cases where the facts are harder to discern. These cases have alarming implications for parents—particularly those in the natural health community. It’s easy to see how accusations of medical abuse could be a way of blackmailing parents who are wary of conventional medicine into accepting inpatient care, risky treatments, and even vaccinations. There are many parents who may wish to seek a second opinion before exposing their child to pharmaceuticals and dangerous hospital environments. Furthermore, as these cases become increasingly publicized, parents may become reluctant to bring their children to hospitals for care.
We’ll be sure to monitor and report back on this trend as it develops. In the meantime, you may want to brush up on your rights as a patient and as the parent of a patient. Don’t be surprised if you have a lot fewer rights than you thought.

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FDA Sharing Patients’ Private Medical Records in Order to Harass Integrative Doctors

Tue, 03 Sep 2013 17:00:06 +0000

ANH-USA has learned that the FDA is working with state medical boards behind the scenes—sometimes in violation of the law.

According to our sources, professional medical boards are launching investigative actions against integrative physicians not because of patient complaints, but because of materials forwarded to them by the FDA before they are made public. These boards are treating the FDA documents as if they were formal complaints.

In other words, the US Food and Drug Administration, which is barred from interfering with the practice of medicine, is in fact deliberately but secretly ignoring the rules—something practitioners and consumers alike need to be warned about.

We suspect, but cannot yet prove, that this is widespread and is being orchestrated by a shadowy private group called the Association of State Medical Boards.

Today we will offer just a few examples:

One doctor in Louisiana was accused by the FDA of not following his IND (investigational new drug study) protocol involving stem cells. The state’s medical board—prompted by the FDA—then went after his license. In the end, the doctor kept his license by signing a consent agreement. Demanding the signing of an onerous consent decree is a favored government tactic. Because the government has unlimited legal funds, it can threaten to bankrupt the doctor if the decree is not signed, and then include provisions in the decree that are not only humiliating but difficult to follow, so that further charges can be threatened or filed.

The system sometimes works in reverse as well. The California medical board notified the FDA about a possible contamination problem with intravenous garlic that a doctor was using to treat Lyme disease. The FDA started its own investigation and obtained the patients’ private medical records. When the agency closed its investigation, it then handed the patient records over to the medical board, exposing the patients’ private information. This is illegal in California, but sadly, not in most other states, where a state board may obtain patients’ medical records without their consent.

In response, a case was filed in Sacramento on behalf of the patients whose medical records were improperly given to the board by the FDA. For strategic reasons, it was a narrow action: the suit went after the medical board and its agents, not the FDA. California’s constitution includes the right to privacy, which the courts have interpreted to mean that absent explicit consent from the patient, the medical board has to prove good cause for a request for private records.

There are other areas in which the FDA is aggressively interfering in the practice of medicine. As we reported last year, the agency asserts that one’s own stem cells, when used in a medical procedure, are drugs—and therefore to be regulated as drugs. For example, a Colorado company offered a treatment in which stem cells were isolated from the patients’ bone marrow, processed, and the resulting cells injected back into the same patient to treat joint pain. The FDA said the company was “manufacturing, holding for sale, and distribution of [sic] an unapproved biological drug product,” and issued an injunction to stop the treatment. The company sued, but the court sided with the FDA, stating that the biological characteristics of stem cells are changed enough in the procedure that they warrant regulation by the FDA. The company plans to appeal the ruling.

In another attempt to regulate the human body, FDA tried to claim human excrement as a drug. No, we’re not kidding. There’s a medical procedure to treat gut infections by implanting the intestine with healthy bacteria from healthy family member-donors’ fecal matter. FDA said the stools were unregulated drugs, and would require investigational new drug applications and would have to be taken through the extraordinarily expensive approval process before doctors could continue to perform the procedure. In June, as a direct result of embarrassing publicity, the FDA said they won’t enforce the new requirement after all.

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Your Private Medical Records Are Being Sold to Drug Companies

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 20:00:41 +0000

Even worse, half of all US states leave enough information in the records that YOU can be clearly identified. Action Alert!
Hospitals and other medical organizations are supposed to be bound by HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) to keep medical records private. Patient information that is shared is supposed to be stripped of key identifying information (this is known as the Safe Harbor rule). However, HIPAA and other privacy legislation is riddled with loopholes—so many that it has been estimated that over 800,000 organizations can access your records.
Here is one big, fat loophole: state public health agencies are exempt from Safe Harbor rules when they sell private medical records as part of a health database. When this medical data is cross-referenced with other public information (such as news reports and other databases), it can reveal your identity.
Many states in the US voluntarily follow HIPAA guidelines when sharing electronic medical records, but at least twenty-five states leave some combination of identifying information that makes it possible for whoever buys the data to pinpoint anyone’s personal medical record—and then make it public. Records in Washington, New York, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Arizona were particularly vulnerable, according to records reviewed by Bloomberg News and Latanya Sweeney, director of Harvard University’s Data Privacy Lab.
Who would want this data? The drug industry, for one. Pharmaceutical companies are major buyers of these medical records—they use them to design ads to doctors and target potential patients. Other buyers include IMS Health, a provider of prescription data, also used by drug companies; OptumInsight, a division of UnitedHealth Group, the country’s biggest health insurer; and WebMD, which uses the data to tailor information found on their website.
As the public becomes more aware of just how vulnerable electronic medical records (EMRs) are, consumers may be more reluctant to seek medical care. Patients rely on doctor–patient confidentiality, and that sacred trust is meaningless if one’s information is sold to the highest bidder.
Case in point: there is a new form of gonorrhea that is resistant to cephalosporin and other antibiotics. This is a serious public health concern, and one that requires careful treatment (not to mention a great deal more research). While young people are at the highest risk for gonorrhea, they are also the most likely to hesitate to see a doctor—particularly for such a personal, potentially humiliating issue—if they fear their private information will be exposed.
In addition, EMRs can cost taxpayers money. The digital nature of the data means it is much easier for doctors to overbill, whether by mistake or through fraud. As we reported in February, doctors can claim to provide more services than they actually do; they can also cut and paste the same examination findings for multiple patients for the sake of expediency, even if those same findings only applied to one or two. EMRs can actually increase the paperwork burden, are subject to serious technological glitches, and of course are tremendously vulnerable to hackers and other security violations.
In an interesting new trend, many doctors are choosing to operate outside the system all together, providing “concierge” medical services to patients on a prepaid membership-fee basis rather than on a standard insurance model. Some concierge doctors stop accepting insurance altogether and can charge as little as $38 a month, though for most people the annual fee amounts to roughly $4 to $5 per day. This system can be a win/win for doctors and patients: patients’ medical records can more easily be kept outside of the huge medical record databases; it can cut down on unnecessary treatments and, of course, high insurance costs; and it allows doctors to see fewer patients and give the ones they have more personalized care.
Most of the medical industry, however, is still stuck in this miasma of messed up medical records, poor security, and legal loopholes that allow patients’ private information to be publicly exposed.
Action Alert! Ask Congress to amend HIPAA to allow patients to opt out—to keep their medical information from being sold or shared with any entity that is not currently giving the patient medical treatment.

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Your Medical Records Are Part of a $19 Billion Experiment

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:00:58 +0000

Fraudulent billing. Identity theft. Greater expense and inefficiency. Loss of privacy. And campaign donations from the companies benefiting most.

Electronic medical records (EMR) came into mainstream consciousness after a hardcore lobbying effort by the EMR industry. The result? A $19 billion (yes, that’s billion with a B) government incentive package was built into the 2009 economic stimulus bill just for electronic medical recordkeeping.
This package benefits the three largest EMR companies the most. The annual sales of Allscripts have more than doubled, going from $548 million in 2009 to $1.44 billion in 2012. Cerner’s sales increased 60% in the same period. Epic doubled its revenue to $1.2 billion from four years ago, making its founder a billionaire.
That EMR companies should be so favored will come as no surprise when you learn that the then-CEO of Allscripts, Glen E. Tullman, was the health technology advisor to the Obama campaign in 2008. In 2009, before the stimulus package was finalized in 2009, he visited the president at least seven times as Allscripts CEO, and personally donated over $225,000 to the campaigns of legislators like Sen. Max Baucus (chairman of the Senate Finance Committee) and Jay D. Rockefeller (chairman of the Commerce Committee).
Judith Faulkner, a controversial figure at the center of the electronic records mandate, is described by columnist Michelle Malkin as “[President] Obama’s medical information czar and a major Democratic contributor [who] just happens to be the founder and CEO of Epic Systems—a medical software company that stores nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population’s health data.”
In December 2008, the chief executive of an EMR trade association wrote an open letter to Obama calling for government investment of at least $25 billion to adopt EMR. The government ponied up $19 of the requested $25 billion.
Despite all the government funding, EMRs haven’t lived up to the promise of lower cost and increased efficiency—something we predicted back in 2009. On the contrary, the new approach seems to be increasing costs through overbilling. Electronic recordkeeping makes it easier to overbill for services. For example, the percentage of the highest-paying claims at Baptist Hospital in Nashville climbed 82 percent in 2010—one year after it began using a software system for its emergency room records. In general, hospitals that received government incentives to adopt EMR showed a 47% rise in Medicare payments from 2006 to 2010, compared with a 32% rise at hospitals that did not receive any government incentives.
Fraud is a huge problem with EMR. Some EMR programs can automatically generate detailed (but fake) patient histories, or allow doctors to cut and paste the same examination findings for multiple patients (a procedure called “cloning”) so it looks like they conducted far more examinations than they actually did. Doctors can also click a box indicating that a thorough review of patients’ symptoms had taken place, even though the exams Medicare is paying for were rarely performed.
Dr. Donald W. Simborg, who was the chairman of federal panels examining the potential for fraud with electronic systems, said, “It’s like doping and bicycling. Everybody knows it’s going on.” The Office of the Inspector General is studying the link between electronic records and billing.
While creating a nationwide records database might seem at first glance to be a good idea, the whole EMR policy was implemented quickly without anyone doing a careful study of potential problems. Patients and and their health records have become guinea pigs in the EMR experiment.
There are many serious difficulties with EMR, even outside of the fraud issue. Doctors have complained that the system is very time-consuming and inefficient. It can actually increase rather than decrease required paperwork. They say in addition that it’s not tailored to physicians’ needs, but instead fits the more narrow vision of Washington bureaucrats. Technological glitches and human errors have, for example, resulted in the wrong prescriptions being issued. Privacy issues make it difficult to get reliable data on EMRs, but it is estimated that EMRs will be linked to at least 60,000 adverse events. There is no industry standard of liability if a patient is harmed by EMR software problems.
In addition, computerized systems are vulnerable to crashes, and the larger the system, the greater the crash. Networking between EMR systems even within the same hospital system can be problematic. The internationally respected Mayo Clinic, which treats more than a million patients a year, has serious unresolved problems after working for years to get its three major electronic records systems to talk to one another, according to the New York Times. The technologies of different service providers—say, between the hospital and pharmacy—may be incompatible.
Even more worrisome, the EMR system is ripe for medical identity theft, as we reported two years ago—a problem that will affect an estimated 1.49 million people in the US, at a cost of $41.3 billion. And since the healthcare system is so fractured, it often requires going from hospital to hospital to get a billing problem resolved—something that can take years. Privacy issues complicate matters further: victims and their families sometimes can’t get files from doctors to clear up the issue. Most medical facilities simply don’t have policies in place to deal with medical identity theft.
Bloomberg reported the story of Arnold Salinas, a 53-year-old maintenance worker whose identity was stolen when someone took out medical care in his name. He’s been fighting his case since 2002, and fears his valid medical records will get mixed with the thief’s, possibly leading to dangerous confusion.
In 2009 we were promised that the EMR system would “cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests…it just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs; it will save lives by reducing…medical errors.” None of those promises have come true. The government, pushed by special interests, has rushed through an EMR system that costs American taxpayers more and makes our medical records—and possibly our health—far more vulnerable.
As we noted in 2011, allowing hundreds of thousands of parties to access your records, including mental health and other sensitive information, is by definition a serious invasion of privacy. When you apply for a government job, they ask you if you have seen a psychiatrist in the last five years. People who need help may be reluctant to seek it with their records available to the whole world. If everyone’s records are open for others to see, who will confide to their doctor anymore?

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Personal Identity Thieves Love Health Records

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:00:47 +0000

Security breaches are up 32%—but because of a loophole, if your patient data is stolen, you may not even be told about it!

Why wouldn’t an identity thief love electronic patient records? They are a veritable goldmine. Each record contains the patient’s name, Social Security number, birthdate, contact info, and insurance, not to mention private health and treatment data. Security breaches cost the industry $6.5 billion dollars—most breaches occur when a computer is stolen—with the number of thefts increasing dramatically each year; this year there were 32% more breaches, the New York Times reported this week.

That 32% comes from data reported to the Department of Health and Human Services. But here’s the zinger: Federal law requires health organizations to report data breaches to HHS only if they affect more than 500 people. And it requires disclosure only in cases that “pose a significant risk of financial, reputational, or other harm to the individual affected.”

Who gets to decide this? The company that was handling the data—and was responsible for the breach. It’s in their own interest, of course, to minimize their exposure. So a record listing your name alone would be ignored; 499 complete records may be ignored; and any number may be ignored if supposedly not posing a risk of harm. In these instances, victims would never be notified.

The CDC says about 57% of doctors’ offices use electronic medical records (EMRs); just last year it was only 45%. EMRs are a requirement of the Affordable Health Care Act, and as more and more hospitals and healthcare systems begin to comply, the problem will only get worse in the future.

In October, a desktop computer containing unencrypted records on more than four million patients was stolen from Sutter Health, a nonprofit health system based in Sacramento. The theft is now the subject of two class-action suits, each of which seeks $1,000 for each patient record breached.

You may recall that ANH-USA has consistently opposed a nationwide mandatory electronic records system. We believe that allowing hundreds of thousands of parties to access your records, including mental health and other sensitive information, is by definition a serious invasion of privacy. At the very least, patients should be able to opt out.

Another problem is that EMRs allow state medical boards to go on “fishing expeditions” targeting integrative physicians, because they can more easily search to see what treatments the physicians are using that may be outside some arbitrarily and vaguely defined “standard of care.” Fortunately, EMRs are only mandatory for doctors who participate in insurance or other federal programs; many integrative physicians do not take insurance and do not use EMR. Unfortunately this just means that the patients have to pay twice for healthcare, once for insurance they won’t use, and once in cash to the physician of their choice.

Of course, it’s not only electronic data that can fall into the wrong hands. In Minneapolis last month, sensitive medical information was found on the back of a child’s drawing she had made at elementary school—including the patient’s name, account number, birthdate, and job. An attorney’s office had donated old scrap paper to the school for an after-school program; the attorney had been hired by the patient after a car accident, and the office employee who made the donation didn’t think there was any personal information on the papers. The attorney apologized for the mistake, saying that the donation was a violation of the firm’s privacy policies.

The elementary school sent out a message to every child in the after-school program to check if any other medical records have ended up in students’ homes, and asked students to return them.

Of course, if some cyber-terrorist destroyed the electronic systems, then it might be nice to have paper records like the ones that ended up in elementary school.

The larger problem with government mandates is usually one of unintended consequences, especially when we are all forced into a one-size-fits-all pseudo-solution. If government would leave medical professionals alone, they might come up with more creative solutions to the record-keeping problem, solutions that protect our privacy and take into account our individual needs and wishes.

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Privacy and Federal Scofflaws

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:40:02 +0000

Privacy? What Privacy?
We’ve made no secret of our concern over the proposed national electronic records system. We agree with the Institute for Health Freedom that the proposed system will invade your privacy by allowing hundreds of thousands of parties to access your records. Here is a case in point:

According to news reports this week, North Carolina sheriffs want access to state computer records that identify people with prescriptions for powerful painkillers and other controlled substances, an idea that patient advocates oppose. “We can better go after those who are abusing the system,” said Lee County Sheriff Tracy Carter.
As things stand now, under the federal HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) privacy rule, your personal health information—including electronic health records (EHRs) and genetic information—can be disclosed without your consent to many third parties such as the following:

Public health workers
Data-processing companies
Researchers (in some instances)
Law enforcement officials
Federal government
Doctors (even those not treating you)

Under the HIPAA privacy rule all of the above are legally permitted to access your personal health and genetic information without your permission. Individuals do not have the final say in whether their personally identifiable health information is shared with more than 600,000 health-related organizations for purposes related to treatment, payment, and health-care operations without individuals’ consent.
The news reports went on to say that 30% of all North Carolinians had at least one prescription for a controlled substance in the first six months of 2010. Conventional medicine seems to be turning many of us into drug addicts.
USDA Thumbs Its Nose at the Law
Last month we told you that a US district judge in California ruled that the USDA cannot wave through approval for Monsanto’s new genetically modified sugar beets without a review of what they would do to the environment. Well, it seems that the USDA just went ahead and approved planting, despite the court decision!
So this week, groups opposed to genetically modified foods announced a lawsuit against the USDA over the agency’s recent decision to allow limited plantings of altered sugar beets.
The plaintiffs, which include the Center for Food Safety, argue in their lawsuit that these plantings could still contaminate neighboring crops. The suit asks the judge to forbid the planting of any genetically modified sugar beet plants.

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Deborah Ray’s Blog, Practicing Medicine without a License

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:39:36 +0000

It has become a perennial political argument. Is it wise to involve government in health care? Does the government practicing medicine help people to live longer, live better, or make healthcare more efficient? The Medicare regulations alone, more profuse than those from the IRS, have caused many a physician to say “I wouldn’t choose this profession again.” There is a host of other issues including medical privacy but to name one that cause many of us to question the wisdom of government-run healthcare.

The union groups representing about 6 million workers (Change to Win) has charged the pharmacy benefits manager of CVS with sending a letter to doctors urging them to add Januvia, a new, expensive diabetes drug to specific patients’ treatment. The letter mentions that Merck paid for the letter but not the fact that Januvia is 8 times more expensive than other diabetic medications.
It is reminiscent of the Rezulin drug recall. Thanks to the collection of prescribing practices by pharmacy benefits manager firms, a local TV outlet called a Jacksonville, FL diabetic to inquire about their reaction to the Rezulin recall, only to be told “How did you know I am taking Rezulin? My doctor’s office has not even called me yet.” Doctors have these firms looking over their prescribing habits and this information is sold profiting pharmacies and benefiting pharmaceutical firms in the long-run. Patient privacy appears to go by the wayside.
While Change to Win has charged that the CVS pharmacy benefits management firm is putting its interests ahead of the businesses that pay CVS to manage employee prescription drug benefits, there is much more to discuss. Where are the privacy rights of the patient here? What about the patient’s right to choose? What about raising the standard of care for the treatment of diabetes? Lifestyle based techniques to address diabetes along with the use of the older, cheaper drugs only when absolutely necessary work 90% of the time or better treating type II diabetes. Why has 30-years of government funded research on chromium and its ability to address insulin sensitivity and blood sugar control been dismissed by diabetic educators as ‘sounds good but let’s wait for more studies’?
These issues are medical issues, economic issues, political issues and health freedom issues. They are key to the practice of medicine in the U.S. where wasting resources is no longer financially sustainable. This small issue tells us that healthcare is not sustainable as it is now practice in the U.S. It is time to protect the right of the practitioner to practice and the consumer to choose. It is time to support the legislative efforts of AAHF.
Copyright © 2010 Natural Health Science News. Permission granted to forward, copy, or reprint with date and attribution to Natural Health Science New

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Please File Your Comment Against Electronic Health Records by March 15!

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:47:18 +0000

The institute for Health Freedom has brought to our attention the filing deadline for sending in your comments about the proposed national electronic records system. We agree with the Institute that the proposed system is a disaster because a) it will invade your privacy by allowing hundreds of thousands of parties to access your records and b) it will allow big brother (the government) to look over the shoulder of every prescribing natural health physician, which could easily lead to license revocation threats. Electronic records should only be allowed if privacy rights are guaranteed, privacy both for the patient and the physician.
To file your comment, please visit: http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#submitComment?R=0900006480a7c4a8

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Health and financial security

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:17:52 +0000

Health and financial security
According to an editorial published on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal Dec. 5, 2009: “The reality is that all health-care costs are ultimately borne by consumers, whether through more expensive premiums, lower wages or higher taxes”.
The editorial stresses that the Democrats’ plan to reform healthcare “can’t change the laws of economics.” A Blue Cross Blue Shield Association study found that the Obama administration’s plan to reform healthcare will result in health insurance premiums’ rising on average by 54 percent, but the media seem to have ignored the fact that it is we, the consumers, who will ultimately bear the cost of healthcare. An average increase of 54 percent in health insurance premiums affects the financial security of every American, already mired in a time of unemployment, rising taxes and a wobbly dollar.
Consider this: Congress and the Senate have declined to be covered under the same system contemplated for ordinary U.S. consumers. What’s wrong with this picture?

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Obama Talks of Cutting Healthcare Costs

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:00:52 +0000

President Obama has promised to trim the growth of healthcare-spending by 1.5 percent over the next decade, yet the New York Times stated on Nov. 10, 2009: “The [congressional] bills, including one passed Saturday night by the House, are unlikely to meet that goal, analysts say.” Also on Nov. 10, the Wall Street Journal declared: “No wonder many Americans are upset. They know they are being lied to about ObamaCare and they know they are going to be stuck with the bill.” The Journal’s editorial alluded to statements that John Cassidy of the New Yorker (who supports Obama’s plan) wrote on that magazine’s Web site: “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment. Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration…is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.”

Obama keeps repeating that the savings gained from reducing Medicare fraud would be used to fund healthcare reform. Yet, the office of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has provided records showing that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) failed to respond to half of the 30 warnings received from its own inspectors regarding the theft of millions of dollars by swindlers. One of most egregious cases was CMMS’ lack of response to the Department of Health and Human Services regarding complaints about a program under which Medicare patients whose home-medical equipment had been lost or damaged in hurricanes had their equipment replaced without first getting a physician’s order. A Houston-based firm, now facing indictment, billed Medicare for almost $1 million worth of power wheelchairs. Not one of the claims filed by this firm was legitimate, but Medicare paid out $5,000 per chair.
A federal report stating that more than $47 billion in “questionable Medicare claims” have been paid notes that new, aggressive action launched by the current administration has done little to combat fraud. Would this ineptitude be tolerated in the private sector?
According to the pollster Scott Rasmussen, writing in the Wall Street Journal, a poll conducted Oct. 2-3, 2009, found that only 45 percent of Americans favored the administration’s healthcare plan. “There is a clear bipartisan majority who favor a less costly bill that incrementally increases coverage, provides insurance reform involving pre-existing conditions, and experiments with tort reform and competition across state lines,” Rasmussen said.
The CEO of the National Associations of Health Underwriters, Janet Trautwein, noted on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal that, starting in 2013, the Senate legislation pushed by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., would impose a fine of $200 on anyone who fails to buy health insurance. By 2018 that fine would swell to $750. As Trautwein points out, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by the time the health-insurance mandate is in full force, the average individual health-insurance plan will cost $5,000 a year. This, she believes, will persuade many to cough up the fine and buy health insurance only when they require expensive medical care.
Given that Americans already spend more for health/medical care than does any other industrial nation, it would seem that staying well is the best antidote to a system that currently rewards sick-care. No wonder so many Americans are willing to pay out of pocket to see integrative practitioners with their common-sense approach to keeping patients healthy.

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