Tag Archives: health care

Biden’s Pick to Run the CDC

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With the current CDC honcho leaving the position at the end of the week, President Joe Biden (D) has picked Mandy Cohen, ex-North Carolina Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to run the agency. This is the woman who, while in the NC government,

  • acceded to Anthony Fauci’s words and directions unquestioningly throughout the Wuhan Virus Situation
  • idolized Fauci with a mask featuring his image
  • imposed harsh restrictions that disrupted everyday life with no medical—or any other—benefit
  • bragged about enforcing mass shutdowns

Nominees to the CDC Directorship aren’t subject to Senate Advice and Consent, so Biden can just appoint her.

However.

The Congress can have an impact on her appointment: the House can decline, through the appropriate appropriations bill, to fund the position of CDC Director and the Immediate Office of the Director, with the latter’s 10 Offices and Chief of Staff, until a suitable Director is appointed. The House can decline to fund the CDC as a whole. The Senate can pass the House’s bill and send the relevant appropriations bill to the President.

All that would take is the political will of the Republican majority in the House along with unified Senate Republicans in conjunction with the House declining to pass any sort of budget item via reconciliation.

“Be More Like Europe”

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That’s the mantra of the Left-Wing extremists who have become the center Left, and that was the rationalization of the Progressive-Democratic Party, of which those extremists have become the center, as Party pushed, those years ago, Obamacare, their precursor to socialized medicine.

Today, there’s this, from the part of Europe that is Great Britain. GB’s National Health Service, the Party’s model for what they want Obamacare to become has achieved this milestone:

More than 18,000 people died in Scotland last year [2022] while on NHS waiting lists[.]

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar pointed out that the NHS wait list death toll (already far too high IMNSHO) just six years ago was 7,868.

This is what socialist medicine does to honest citizens.

Typical Arrogance of the “Experts”

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US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryck, of the Northern District of Texas, has ruled that the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone must be withdrawn and the drug pulled from the market while an existing court case makes its way through, and he made his ruling nation-wide.

The Court does not second-guess FDA’s decision-making lightly. But here, FDA acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns—in violation of its statutory duty—based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions[.]

No, no, no—leave our precious technocrats alone is the Leftist Lawyer cry. Only Government knows best. How dare anyone challenge Government’s experts. Areta Kupchyk, ex-FDA Associate Chief Counsel:

If the court does not defer to FDA, it would undermine FDA’s authority and set a precedent for second-guessing by judges wholly unqualified to evaluate scientific data[.]

This is the typical arrogance of Government “experts.” No one but these bureaucrats who hold one or another science degree are qualified to reign over the scientific world—and over us citizens.

No. It’s time Chevron Deference-style foolishness was done away with. It’s time our Article III courts acted like the coequal branch of our Federal government that they are instead of meekly bowing and subordinating themselves to junior agencies of a separate coequal branch.

That doing-away may finally be beginning.

‘Unacceptable incompetence’

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That’s the description of CDC performance under the then and continuing management of Rochelle Walensky, the Sobbing Doomsayer.

The CDC found itself hoist with its own petard by making 25 basic statistical and numerical errors related to COVID-19, particularly with regard to children, while purporting to expose COVID vaccine misinformation, according to an analysis led by University of California San Francisco epidemiologists.

And they’re still at it.

…nearly as many [errors] were made in the first two months of 2023 as in all of 2021….

The JtN article went on at considerable length concerning the vast numbers of errors—often dangerous errors, especially for our children—the experts of the CDC committed.

TL;DR summary: the CDC is nothing but a bunch of government bureaucrats who happen to have medical degrees or this or that science degree. Nothing in the CDC, and no words from CDC bureaucrats, can be taken seriously as long as Walensky and her coterie remain in place.

The Purpose of Medicaid

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State Medicaid programs were created for the explicit purpose of providing health insurance coverage for State citizens on the lower rungs of that State’s economic ladder. The Federal government transfers Federal funds—the tax remittances of all of us citizens regardless of the State of which we might also be citizens—to support those Medicaid programs.

In California’s case, Federal transfers in support of Medi-Cal, that State’s Medicaid program, comprise more than 69% of the program. That amounts to 71.4 billion of our tax dollars.

Now the Progressive-Democrat governor of California, Gavin Newsom, wants Medi-Cal to pay the rent for the State’s homeless.

Newsom has proposed using federal healthcare funds to cover at least six months of rent for homeless California residents and those close to losing their homes.

The foolishness is spreading; California is not the only State pulling this stunt.

California is modeling the program off of similar programs in Oregon and Arizona that have been previously approved by the federal government.

Oregon gets 76%—$8.5 billion—of its Medicaid program covered by the Feds, and Arizona gets more than 80%—$14.3 billion—of its Medicaid funding from the Feds.

Newsom argues—and he’s actually serious—that this will save money in the long run because the State (as JtN cited him)

will not have to pay as much for these people’s expenses in hospitals, nursing homes and prisons.

This is a cynical non sequitur. Nursing homes and prisons aren’t centered on medical care, for all that medical care is a small part of those…services. Those services’ costs also are already factored into their budgets. Too, hospitals aren’t residences—and their medical service costs also are already factored into their budgets, including in part from California’s existing Medi-Cal.

Maybe it’s time to stop sending the Medicaid-related tax remittances of citizens of other States to these States.