Category Archives: The State

Death Panels, By Any Other Name (Ask Nurse Diesel)

Government, Healthcare, Regulation, The State

The consequences of one element of the Affordable Care Act to poor, elderly Americans are too horrid and painfully obvious to be dismissed as “unintended consequences.”

Government planners plan on penalizing hospitals that suffer from a condition these vile technocrats have labeled “EXCESS READMISSIONS.”

If we are to deconstruct this Orwellian “doublespeak,” what does “EXCESS READMISSIONS” mean?

Read how the repulsive (Hispanic) Nurse Diesel (NURSE TERESA) addresses a sweet 84-year-old lady, who has been admitted to hospital with pneumonia, and, given her advanced age, will likely need to be readmitted in the future.

Ms. Kerner, you see, has been flagged from what our enlightened technocrats also call a “frequent flyer list”:

NURSE TERESA: My name’s Teresa. I’m one of the nurse practitioners here. How are you?

FREDDA KERNER: I’m doing well thank you.

NURSE TERESA: I’m here to see you because you came up on a special list.

FREDDA KERNER: A special list of what?

NURSE TERESA: You’re on a special list of patients who are back here. To tell you the truth Medicare is now looking at this very closely.

EMILY SENAY [narration]: THERE’S A NEW PROGRAM HERE AT ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL IN NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY LIKE MANY OTHER HOSPITALS AROUND THE NATION. IT TARGETS PATIENTS LIKE 84 YEAR OLD FREDDA KERNER – WHO THE HOSPITAL CALLS A FREQUENT FLYER. THAT’S BECAUSE SHE KEEPS COMING BACK.
SHE WAS FIRST HOSPITALIZED IN JANUARY WITH ABDOMINAL PAIN. TEN MONTHS LATER IN NOVEMBER, SHE WAS READMITTED WITH PNEUMONIA.

EMILY SENAY: Did you know that you were getting weaker and having more trouble breathing at home?

FREDDA KERNER: Oh yes yes yes.

EMILY SENAY: Do you want to come to the hospital again?

FREDDA KERNER: No, as nice as they are, I really would rather stay home.

EMILY SENAY [narration]: THE HOSPITAL IS CERTAINLY INTERESTED IN PROVIDING BETTER CARE FOR PATIENTS…BUT THAT’S NOT THE ONLY REASON TO KEEP SOMEONE LIKE
FREDDA KERNER FROM BEING READMITTED. ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL IS ALSO TRYING TO AVOID MEDICARE PENALTIES FOR WHAT THE GOVERNMENT CALLS “EXCESS READMISSIONS.”

IT’S A NEW POLICY THAT WENT INTO EFFECT THIS PAST OCTOBER AS PART OF THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT – MEANT TO SAVE THE GOVERNMENT MORE THAN A QUARTER BILLION DOLLARS JUST OVER THE NEXT YEAR.

MORE.

Nurse Diesel:

Diversity Diesel:

Watch Frequent Fliers and Healthcare Reform on PBS.

UPDATE II: ‘Thank You For Your Service, Mr. Snowden’

Barack Obama, Ethics, Fascism, Propaganda, Republicans, Russia, Technology, Terrorism, The State

“‘Thank You For Your Service, Mr. Snowden'” is the current column, now on WND. Here’s an excerpt:

“A heroic American whistleblower chooses, oh-so wisely, to expose Uncle Sam’s usurpations to the veteran reporters of the British Guardian and not to the partisan hacks of the American press. This fact tells you all you need to know about US presstitutes.

Confirmation of the degree to which American media has been co-opted by power came on June 10, again, via a British newspaper. The Mail Online divulged that Edward Snowden had ‘first approached the Washington Post with his leaks but the newspaper refused to comply with his publishing demands.’

You see, the Washington Post had to hotfoot it back to Big Brother Obama before it would do its journalistic due diligence. ‘The Post broke the story on PRISM two weeks later, on Thursday, after consulting with government officials,’ confirmed the Mail Online.

Even after being scooped by the Guardian, the Obama embeds at the Washington Post saw fit to inform their readers about PRISM on a purely need-to-know basis, ‘eprinting only four of the 41 PRISM PowerPoint slides,’ and generally misrepresenting the nature of the program known as PRISM. The manufactured-in-America version of PRISM thus contradicts the ‘internal NSA documents’ leaked to the Guardian.

According to the guardian of American freedoms at the Guardian, reporter Glenn Greenwald, the 41-slide PowerPoint presentation he acquired from Snowden has been authenticated as a document ‘used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program.’ The presentation, pictorials with captions, handed out by the National Security Agency, boasts of having ‘direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, PalTalk, YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL, and other servers.’

Contrary to what you’re being told, ‘the world’s largest surveillance organization’ can and does ‘obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.’ And it is contrary to the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, in particular. It specifies that ‘warrants shall issue’ only ‘upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.’

Tellingly, the tools of Big Media and big government are not apprising you of these facts. Like a tortoise in its shell they’ve retreated from the watersheds that are the AP, the IRS and the NSA scandals, informing you only of what New York and Northeast elites think is important: “Most of you still like Obama” …

The complete column is, “‘Thank You For Your Service, Mr. Snowden.'” Read it on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE I: In his unrehearsed conversation with Glenn Greenwald, Snowden demonstrates analytical clarity, the kind you don’t get from his inferior critics. It comes natural for him to distinguish between NSA posturing for the national interest and reality; between intelligence gathered overseas and domestically; between surveillance of the foreign born and the domestic.

Snowden’s desperation—defecting and leaking as a last resort—is corroborated by other whistleblowers. When you blow the whistle through acceptable NSA channels you can expect cover-ups, heavily redacted reports and retaliation. This is what two veteran intelligence officers relayed to Sean Hannity at Fox News.

UPDATE II: From the Facebook thread. Memorial Day is a way to ensure men die for the state, not for their neighbors. It wasn’t always so, but it has become that. It’s the sad truth. Good men serve their countrymen outside the state. For example, Samuel Williams is an American hero. The same goes for the wonderful JOE HORN.

Join the conversation on my Facebook page.

‘The Republic Has Been Lost. It Is Now A Dictatorship’

Barack Obama, Constitution, Fascism, Intelligence, libertarianism, Liberty, Natural Law, Terrorism, The State

It’s plain as day. Last “Thursday morning,” Judge Andrew Napolitano has written, “we learned that the Republic has been lost.”

We learned, according to published reports, that the Obama Department of Justice, the same folks who improperly seized emails from Fox News and telephone conversations from the Associated Press, has nearly half of all adult Americans in its cross hairs.
We learned that the DoJ sought a search warrant for every phone call of every customer of Verizon in the United States, without showing evidence of guilt against anyone.
Verizon reports that it has 113 million customers and handles one billion telephone calls in America every day.
Since at least April 25th of this year, every one of those calls had the names of the callers and all persons on the calls, their telephone numbers, their locations, and the length of the calls identified and sent directly to the National Security Agency–America’s domestic spies–on a daily and an on-going basis. …
The Constitution doesn’t trust them. We have not seen as broad and wide and deep a violation of the Fourth Amendment in our history. But thanks to the Patriot Act–that’s the Bush-era statute that lets federal agents write their own search warrants in blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment–the feds went to a secret court and asked and received a warrant unknown to history and unheard of in its scope to monitor the behavior of nearly half the nation; and they did so without telling us.
…President Obama, who must have approved of this, Attorney General Holder, who must have authorized it, and U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson who signed an open-ended search warrant ordering it are so blind to personal liberty in a free society that they are unworthy to hold their offices.

AND on the genesis of a naturally illicit law:

When British soldiers were roaming the American countryside in the 1760s with lawful search warrants with which they had authorized themselves to enter the private homes of colonists in order to search for government-issued stamps, Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The soul searching became a revolution in thinking about the relationship of government to individuals. That thinking led to casting off a king and writing a Constitution.
What offended the colonists when the soldiers came legally knocking was the violation of their natural right to privacy, their right to be left alone. We all have the need and right to be left alone….
…After 9/11, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This permitted federal agents to write their own search warrants, as if to mimic the British soldiers in the 1760s. It was amended to permit the feds to go to the FISA court and get a search warrant for the electronic records of any American who might communicate with a foreign person.
In 30 years, from 1979 to 2009, the legal standard for searching and seizing private communications – the bar that the Constitution requires the government to meet – was lowered by Congress from probable cause of crime to probable cause of being an agent of a foreign power to probable cause of being a foreign person to probable cause of communicating with a foreign person.

Satan’s Little Republican Helper

Journalism, Liberty, Media, Propaganda, Republicans, Terrorism, The State

No wonder Republican Peter King ((R-NY) is gunning for former Salon journalist Glenn Greenwald, who facilitated Edward Snowden’s disclosures to the British Guardian about the NSA. (At the behest of Obama, the NSA has been eavesdropping on half the country with the aid of meta-data sweeps.)

Greenwald had done much to expose King as “one of President Obama’s most outspoken defenders and supporters,” when it comes to the violation of civil liberties (individual rights being the better term).

Via Jake Tapper (who credits his bare-bones report with being an “analysis”):

King told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Tuesday that he thinks the journalist should be prosecuted.
“If they willingly knew this was classified information, I think actions should be taken, especially on something of this magnitude,” said King.
“I think something on this magnitude, there is an obligation, both moral and also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something which would so severely compromise national security,” said King.
In response, Greenwald tweeted, “Is it true, as I was just told, that Peter King on CNN called for criminal prosecution of journalists reporting the NSA stories?”

The real news here is that CNN alpha female Anderson Cooper has assented to covering some news, as opposed to camping at the site of a riot or a shooting or a natural disaster or a baby/dog/cat/horse rescue to solicit sob-stories.