RUTHFULLY YOURS

On May 7, the Obama administration boasted that ObamaCare was improving health-care quality for seniors, and it pulled out a bag of statistical tricks to prove it. But a closer look shows that it’s not improving care. It’s skimping on it, socking seniors with unexpected bills for “observation care” and likely shortening their lives.

President Obama’s Health and Human Services department announced that fewer seniors discharged from the hospital are returning for additional care within a month’s time. HHS claims that this drop in “readmissions,” from 18.5 percent in 2012 to 17.5 percent in 2013, signals quality improvement.

Nonsense. The 50 best hospitals according to US News & World Report’s Best Hospitals annual rankings have above-average readmission rates.

Nationwide, readmissions are dropping because Section 3025 of ObamaCare punishes hospitals if a senior returns within 30 days.

What happens to the senior treated for a heart attack who rushes to the hospital a week later feeling faint, possibly because of arrhythmia?

To dodge the penalty, hospitals put the patient under “observation.” It’s just a word on the chart. The patient may get the same tests and be put in the same room as if he had been admitted.

But unless he stays at least two nights, the hospital won’t bill Medicare for a stay, and the patient gets clobbered with the cost. Many seniors don’t even know they were under observation until they get the bill.

So much for HHS boasting about the drop in readmissions. HHS officials fail to mention that this coincides with a rise in elderly patients placed under “observation status.” It’s a hospital billing trick, and a dirty one for seniors.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-community-organizer-commander?f=puball

Soldiers and veterans interest me because I’ve never been one, and because many are regular readers of this column. When they allow it, I like to pick their brains. They’ve had experiences I’ve never had and never will have. I almost joined up after high school, but didn’t, and I’ve often regretted that. Even if they haven’t been in combat, soldiers have worked and lived closely with others who have, and it changed them in some fundamental way. My sense is that for most the change has been a net positive -especially for Marines and soldiers with elite training such as Special Forces and Seals. I’m curious how they feel about changes taking place in the government of the country they’ve offered their lives to defend. They are, or have been, instruments of that government, yet many I’ve talked to lately express profound dissatisfaction with it even before the VA scandal broke.

Washington has deep misgivings about veterans too. In 2012 the Department of Homeland Security under Janet Napolitano profiled what sort of people are potential terrorists and the list included Iraq veterans. Also mentioned were “extreme right-wing” organizations, people who “believe that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack,” or people who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and “reverent of individual liberty.” People of Janet Napolitano’s ilk consider the Tea Party an “extreme right-wing organization,” consequently this writer and many readers fit the profile.

So do virtually all conservative Republicans and Libertarians. Surviving veterans, many of whom offered their lives in service to these individual liberties, are indeed suspicious of an increasingly centralized federal authority so disdainful of them as to consider them potential terrorists. The irony here is that 95% of terrorists worldwide are Muslims, and over the last thirteen years thousands of American soldiers have died and more than a hundred thousand others have been wounded while fighting them. Yet, while the Obama Administration forbids profiling Muslim terrorists as terrorists, it has no problem profiling American veterans of the Iraq War as potential terrorists.Now consider that the VA gives “top notch medical treatment” to Muslim terrorists imprisoned at Gitmo – far better than it provides to our veterans. According to information a Pentagon insider provided to Judicial Watch:

MORE COMMON SENSE FROM THE “GIFTED MIND” OF THE HERO OF “GIFTED HANDS”- SEE THE MOVIE”GIFTED HANDS” ABOUT THE LIFE AND INCREDIBLE SUCCESS OF DOCTOR BEN CARSON…..RSK

More discussion on the topic of pragmatism and politics is critical. If conservatives decide to take their marbles and go home rather than fight to the bitter end because they feel their principles have been compromised, they will needlessly subject future generations to untold misery.

Voting for someone who agrees with you 90 percent of the time is far superior to voting for someone who disagrees with you 100 percent of the time. The latter is exactly what will happen if people refuse to exercise their civic duty and boycott elections because they feel betrayed. Personally, I am not supportive of abortion at all, but I can support people who feel differently if, in the gigantic scheme of things, they can help put an end to the murder of innocent babies. This is especially true of those who are personally inclined to save and protect life.

Perhaps an illustration is in order: Two armies are engaged in a war. Let’s call the good army that is trying to defend an entire society the red army and the bad army that is trying to invade and pillage society the blue army. The blue army occupies a superior strategic position and is composed of slightly more troops, putting the red army at a distinct disadvantage. Some in the red army feel that they are right and, therefore, should simply march directly into battle with the blue army because right always wins.

Fortunately, some members of the red army are wise and have a better plan. They send a battalion of troops to the base of the mountain occupied by the blue army to distract them while the vast majority of red troops approach the mountain from the back. They descend upon the blue army by surprise, completely vanquishing them and winning the war. The decoy red battalion may have sustained some casualties, but in the long run, the war was won, and the entire society was saved.

I hope this illustration is useful in helping some to understand that achieving a critical mass of conservatives and so-called RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) in office will ensure that we can get non-activist Supreme Court justices and federal judges in place who respect the U.S. Constitution. It is essential to achieve a critical mass of individuals in the U.S. House and Senate who can join with a president in upholding the Constitution. These representatives must believe in personal responsibility and creating a business-friendly environment, understand the balance between abundant fossil-fuel development and environmental safety, and yearn to elevate the government-dependent 47 percent rather than make them more dependent. They also must be totally pro-life and believe that the rule of law can undo a host of damaging regulations and restore the value system that made this nation great.

‘Where do you suspect the girls are now?” I asked Joseph, a pastor from northeastern Nigeria, as we chatted in a small, empty office building in north-central Nigeria. We were sitting in the dark because the electricity had cut out, as it intermittently does in Africa’s most populous country.

“I can’t imagine,” Joseph said, bursting into tears. “They have most likely been separated. But there is little chance we will get them back.”

I traveled to Nigeria a few days after the abduction of 276 Christian girls from a secondary school in the village of Chibok in Borno State. I was there with a small team of Christian humanitarian volunteers from the United States. My plan was to shoot a short documentary about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

But after we learned of the mass abduction, I refocused much of my attention on the lost girls, a story that had initially attracted little international attention but that was now making headlines. Our travels would take us to Abuja and Jos in the middle belt of Nigeria and to Yaounde and then Mokolo in northern Cameroon, about ten miles from Sambisa Forest, where Boko Haram, many believe, took the girls after abducting them.

I interviewed Philip, whose home in Chibok was destroyed by Boko Haram the very day the girls were abducted. Philip, who works in government security, has 15 family members among the kidnapped. He made a startling claim that highlights the government’s unwillingness to combat the extremist Islamist group. “After the mass abduction, the Nigerian government came out publicly to say that the girls had been found and returned home,” he said. “They even spoke to the secondary school’s principal to try to pressure her into backing the claim. She did not.” Of course, none of the girls had been rescued — only a handful had escaped, on their own.

“Some local citizens formed a vigilante group shortly after the abduction, despite the protests of the government,” Philip said. “They searched for the girls within Sambisa Forest. At one point they saw the girls with Boko Haram at their campsite in the forest. The group reported this to the military, but the military didn’t go.”

I’m a longtime fan of the Wall Street Journal. But I confess to mystification over why a paper with a staunchly pro-Israel editorial line consistently allows its news pages to be used for anti-Israel smear campaigns–and I do mean smear campaigns, not just “critical reporting.” A classic example was its assertion in an April 7 news report that Israel had agreed “to release political prisoners” as part of the U.S.-brokered deal that restarted Israeli-Palestinian talks last summer. The Journal was sufficiently embarrassed by this description of convicted mass murderers that it issued a correction in print, yet the online version still unrepentantly dubs these vicious terrorists “political prisoners.”

A more subtle example was last week’s report titled “On Middle East Visit, Pope Will Find a Diminished Christian Population.” While Israel is the glaring exception to this Mideast trend, reporter Nicholas Casey elegantly implies the opposite in a single sentence that’s dishonest on at least three different levels: “Syria has seen an exodus of nearly half a million Christians, and in Jerusalem, a population of 27,000 Christians in 1948 has dwindled to 5,000.”

First, while Casey never says explicitly that Jerusalem’s shrinking Christian population reflects the situation in Israel as a whole, it’s the obvious conclusion for the average reader–especially given the juxtaposition with Syria, which implies that both countries are treating their Christians similarly and thereby causing them to flee. This impression is reinforced by the only other statistic he gives about Israel: that Christians have declined as a percentage of the total population.

The truth, however, is that Israel’s Christian population has grown dramatically–from a mere 34,000 in 1949 to 158,000 in 2012, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. That’s an increase of almost fivefold. And while Christians have fallen as a share of the total population, that’s mainly because they have significantly lower birthrates than either Israeli Jews or Israeli Muslims.

Second, even his statistics on Jerusalem are dubious. Since he doesn’t source them, it’s not clear how Casey arrived at his figure of only 5,000 Christians nowadays. But the most recent figure published by Israel’s internationally respected statistics bureau, in 2013, put the city’s Christian population at 14,700 as of the end of 2011. It is, to say the least, highly unlikely that after remaining stable at about that level for 44 years (more on that in a moment)–decades punctuated by repeated wars, vicious terrorism and deep recessions–the Christian population would suddenly plunge by two thirds in a mere two years at a time of strong economic growth and very little terror.

Anybody can make a mistake, and that certainly appears to be what led to the Obama White House’s exposure of the top CIA official in Afghanistan this weekend. Unfortunately, as Roger Kimball details, this is not an isolated incident. In year six of the Obama administration, it speaks volumes about not just incompetence but immaturity and the skewed priorities that come with it.

Exactly because anyone can make a mistake, large organizations — presidential administrations included — build layers of vetting into the disclosure of information to the public. In this instance, because the commander-in-chief made a surprise visit to Afghanistan over Memorial Day weekend, the White House put out a list of government officials the president met with. Somehow, that list included the intelligence official’s name with the designation “chief of station.”

This error is so basic that it grabbed the attention of Scott Wilson of the Washington Post, the “pool reporter” who received the list. Regrettably, he’d already sent out the pool report by the time he noticed the station chief designation and thought to ask whether the White House press office had really intended to put out that information.

That’s how the administration learned about what it had done — from a reporter. Think about that. In the composition and disclosure of this list, many people on both the military end and White House end have to have known that such information should never be circulated. That’s not only true as a matter of principle and common sense; it’s empirically true: Fox News reports that this administration has already had to remove a CIA station chief in Pakistan (in 2010) because of an exposure incident. It is astonishing that such an obvious error was not caught.

It is, moreover, tough to be sympathetic because Democrats never are when the shoe is on the other foot. When Valerie Plame was outed as a CIA operative — apparently inadvertently, by senior State Department official Richard Armitage — Democrats turned the error into a major controversy that damaged the Bush administration. Ms. Plame had a desk job at Langley and there are no indications that her exposure caused much harm. (There were reports at the time suggesting that she had been exposed long before through a bureaucratic screw-up.) By contrast, the official just exposed by the White House is the current top CIA official in a war zone that presents tremendous challenges to the United States, one where intelligence gathering is at a premium. The gravity of this error thus appears far more serious than the one over which Democrats spent years demanding a Bush administration scalp.

Those looking for the real war on women–as opposed to the one promoted by the American left and their media enablers—should focus their attention on Pakistan and Sudan. In the former nation, a 25-year-old pregnant woman has been stoned to death by members of her own family, with her father dubbing the atrocity an “honor killing.” In the latter nation, a 27-year-old woman has been sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. She was also pregnant, and has given birth while awaiting her sentence to be carried out. The common thread in both cases is as predictable as it is disturbing: the religion of Islam and the endemic mistreatment of women practiced by far too many of its followers.

Farzana Parveen was killed in broad daylight by nearly 20 members of her family before a crowd of onlookers outside the High Court in the eastern city of Lahore, Pakistan. As she walked up to the court’s main gate with her husband Mohammad Iqbal, relatives waiting for the couple’s arrival fired shots in the air and attempted to snatch her away. When she resisted, the attackers, who included her father, two brothers and her former fiancé, started beating her and her husband, before escalating the attack with bricks obtained from a nearby construction site.

Parveen subsequently sustained severe head injuries and was pronounced dead at the hospital, according to police.

All of the attackers but her father, Mohammad Azeem, escaped. He surrendered to the police and admitted taking part in the killing. He had no remorse. “I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it,” the father was quoted as saying by police investigator Rana Mujahid.

Parveen had been engaged to her cousin, but married Iqbal instead, following an engagement of several years. In response, her family registered an abduction case against Iqbal, and Parzeen was to appear in court to argue that she had married him of her own free will, according to her lawyer Mustafa Kharal. Arranged marriages are the norm among conservative Pakistanis. Marrying for love is a transgression that ostensibly dishonors the family.

Iqbal, who started seeing Parveen following the death of his former wife with whom he had five children, claimed the couple was “in love.” He further alleged that her family wanted to extract money from him before allowing the marriage to take place. Instead, “I simply took her to court and registered a marriage,” Iqbal explained.

First Elliot Rodger murdered his three roommates with a knife, hammer and machete. Then he shot eight people, three of them fatally, and tried to run over several others in his car.

After the bodies were taken away, everyone on television agreed that it was the fault of the guns.

Rodger had been in therapy since he was eight and was seeing therapists every day in high school. He had a history of violent threats and psychical assaults and the police had already gotten involved. He was on multiple prescription medications and had therapists whom he alerted to his plans by sending them his manifesto.

A therapist reacted by notifying his mother who drove out personally. By then even more people were dead.

In a country where a little boy with a pop tart chewed in the shape of a gun triggers immediate action, the professionals who cashed in on the killer’s wealthy family were in no hurry to call the police. One even reassured his mother while the shootings were going on that it wasn’t him.

So it was obviously the fault of the guns… which he bought with $5,000 from his family. The BMW he used to commit some of the attacks was given to him by his mother.

Jenni Rodger, his British aunt, blamed America and guns for her nephew’s massacre. “What kind of a society allows this? How can this be allowed to happen? I want to appeal to Americans to do something about this horrific problem.”

Somehow the parenting failure of her brother is now the fault of an entire foreign country.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has a new book out. In keeping with the adage “there is no such thing as bad publicity” the title will not be mentioned. However, Clinton Inc. sycophants will do everything possible to hype her book onto any best seller list that they can think of or, at least at a minimum delay it from the very embarrassing remainders table at books stores.

Here is her Amazon introduction:

“All of us face hard choices in our lives,” Hillary Rodham Clinton writes at the start of this personal chronicle of years at the center of world events. “Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become.”

She is exactly right, so it is only appropriate that American Thinker readers look at her past participation in world events when she was the First Lady. In that role she directly engaged with the Peoples Republic Of China (PRC).

Johnny Chung was born in Taiwan but living in Southern California when he was given $300,000 by Chinese Gen Ji of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Military Intelligence because, “We like your president very much.” Among Chung’s objectives in using the money were to go directly to Hillary Rodham Clinton and request:

A tour of the White House

Lunch at the White House Mess

A photo op with the First Lady.

An invitation to attend the president’s radio address

He was very successful, and on March 11, 1995, Johnny Chung and his PRC friends attended President Clinton’s weekly radio address after Chung handed a check for $50,000 made out to the DNC to Hillary’s chief of staff following a March 9 1995 photo op with the first lady.

Dr. Scherz is a pediatric urological surgeon at Georgia Urology and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and serves on the faculty of Emory University Medical School.

“Proponents of the Affordable Care Act have long used the VA to showcase the benefits of federally planned and run health care. Doctors know otherwise—and it is no surprise that a majority of them have opposed a mammoth federal regulatory apparatus to control health care in this country. The systemic problems with the VA bureaucracy are a harbinger of things to come.”

With the recent revelations about the disgraceful treatment of patients by the Veterans Affairs hospitals, the public is discovering what the majority of doctors in this country have long known: The VA health-care system is a disaster. Throwing more money at the system, or demanding the scalps of top bureaucrats—Washington’s reflexive response to any problem of this sort—won’t repair the mess. What’s needed is a fundamental rethinking of how to provide medical care for America’s veterans.

The federal government runs two giant health-care programs—Medicare and the VA system. Medicare is provided by private physicians and other providers. Its finances are a mess, but the care that seniors receive is by and large outstanding. The VA health-care system is run by a centrally controlled federal bureaucracy. Ultimately, that is the source of the poor care veterans receive.

U.S. doctors are well aware of the problems with VA hospitals because many of us trained at them. There are 153 VA hospitals. Most of them are affiliated with the country’s 155 medical schools, and they play an integral role in the education of young physicians. These physicians have borne witness to the abuses and mismanagement, and when they attempt to fight against the entrenched bureaucracy on behalf of their patients, they meet fierce resistance.