Last year, we learned that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had granted 111 waivers to protect a lucky few from the onerous regulations of the new national health care overhaul. That number quickly and quietly climbed to 222, and last week we learned that the number of Obamacare privileged escapes has skyrocketed to 733.

Among the fortunate is a who’s who list of unions, businesses and even several cities and four states (Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee) but none of the friends of Barack feature as prominently as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). (Read more from washingtontimes.com)

* Chief Medicare Actuary on President’s health care claims: “I would say false, more so than true”

Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana. (Read more from guardian.co.uk)

As Dr. Maltsev says, the only healthcare in Cuba is to swim to Miami.

dvocates of fluoridated water insist that the chemical additive is good for teeth, but actual science routinely shows otherwise, including a new study published in the Journal of the American Dental Association confirming fluoride as a toxic substance that actually destroys teeth, particularly those of developing young children and babies.

When people are exposed to excessive levels of fluoride through sources like drinking water, foods and beverages and even swallowed toothpaste, it often results in a condition known as dental fluorosis. The internal uptake of fluoride into teeth over time causes their enamel to become mottled and discolored, the end result being damaged teeth that have essentially rotted from the inside out.

Dr. Steven Levy, D.D.S., and his team found during their study that “fluoride intakes during each of the first four years (of a child’s life) were individually significantly related to fluorosis on maxillary central incisors, with the first year more important.” They went on to warn that “infant formulas reconstituted with higher fluoride water can provide 100 to 200 times more fluoride than breast milk, or cow’s milk.” (Read more from naturalnews.com)

While hearing oral arguments about the constitutionality of the new health care law yesterday, a Virginia judge suggested that the legal logic underlying the law’s individual mandate, which requires everyone to purchase health insurance, could give the federal government “boundless” power over U.S. citizens. From The Wall Street Journal’s report on yesterday’s hearing:

Allowing [the individual mandate], Judge Hudson said, could open the door for the federal government to require residents to buy a car, join a gym and “eat asparagus,” he said. “It’s boundless.” (Read more from poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com)

This is what I said.

New York City may soon be a very dangerous place to die — and not only because of high estate taxes.

If Mayor Mike Bloomberg has his way, anyone suffering a heart attack will get responses from Emergency Medical Technicians…and special organ donation teams ready and waiting to take your organs should you conveniently not survive.

Equally barbaric and depravingly insensitive — nearly criminally indifferent — is the proposal to have doctors ready to swoop in on the deceased’s loved ones within minutes to ask for the organs.

And there’s little difference in practical terms between the government letting you die and pressuring your relatives to give you the organs, and a private third party brokering a sale of organs like one rabbi in New Jersey whose commerce in kidneys got him indicted by federal prosecutors who consider selling organs to be a federal crime. (Please – no New Jersey jokes — at least in New Jersey the organ brokers are candid enough to sell kidneys and do not pretend to be doing a public good.)

Such insensitivity was more the hallmark of truly barbaric cultures like the Aztecs, who would play sports involving kicking around the head of a vanquished opponent. This proposal shames those of us who treasure our commitment to human life — and to fundamental equality under both the eyes of a Supreme Being, and the Fourteenth Amendment. So much for America as an advanced nation.

All of this is under the guise of “helping” people…and if you are in cardiac distress you would be providing the help the most!

This dangerous proposal puts ordinary suffering City residents at the peril of having to trust that their paramedic is there to save them, not to go shopping for organs for a friend or family member. No regulation can prevent a paramedic from making his own warped triage assessment of you — oh, this one will die anyway, let’s see if his pancreas works because Uncle George has pancreatic cancer and needs a transplant.

The simple saying used by investigators and prosecutors — “motive and opportunity” — is also true here. Self-proclaimed saviors will have both the motive and opportunity to let you die in order to give your organs to someone else they prefer.

This warped and dangerous mentality was on display earlier this year, when New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (who ran unsuccessfully for Attorney General) proposed an “opt-out” requirement for New York drivers, who under his proposal would become subject to automatic organ harvesting upon death unless they opted out by checking off a box on their driver’s license. Thankfully, Brodsky’s bill languishes in Albany. (Read more from ericdixonlaw.com)

So, Obamacare turns into one more selectively applied regulation through which the government can pick winners and losers.

Yes We Can!

The vaccine industry has now decided that injecting senior citizens with the “standard” vaccine dose just isn’t working. (Gee, really?) So now they’ve decided the way to make it work better is to offer a quadruple viral potency vaccine that packs 400% more viral fragments into one toxic shot.

The target for this quadruple vaccine injection? Senior citizens, of course — the very people most likely to suffer the most serious side effects from a vaccine overdose. The FDA reportedly approved the new vaccine in April even though no scientific tests have ever been done to show it reduces flu symptoms. Then again, since when did vaccines have anything to do with real science in the first place?

Why do people need a quadruple vaccine all of a sudden?

What’s especially entertaining about all this is that the FDA’s approval of this quadruple potency vaccine is a blatant admission that single-dose vaccines just don’t work! Obviously, if the single-dose vaccine was working as advertised, then it would be 100% effective and there would be no need for a double, triple or quadruple-dose vaccine. But all of a sudden, now that the quadruple-dose vaccine is available, the regular single-dose vaccine “isn’t good enough.”

So all that propaganda about “get a flu shot and you won’t get the flu” just turns out to be marketing quackery, because what you really need is a quadruple shot now! Forget the single dose. It’s no longer strong enough for you. (Read more from naturalnews.com)

The Unraveling Of ObamaCare
Thirty companies and organizations get waivers from the new health care overhaul because otherwise they’d have to raise rates or drop coverage. The president said neither would happen. Hey, where’s our waiver?

When McDonald’s told federal regulators in a recent memo that it would be “economically prohibitive” for its insurance carrier to continue to cover its 30,000 hourly workers unless it received a waiver from the ObamaCare requirement that 80% of premiums for such minimed plans be spent on medical care, alarm bells went off in the White House.

Suddenly the “affordable health care for Americans” that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke of when she passed a bill no one had read was revealed to be an unaffordable fraud that threatened to throw untold numbers of young workers into the ranks of the uninsured in an already precarious election year.

So now McDonald’s has its waiver, for 115,000 workers, not just 30,000. Jack in the Box also has a waiver, as do 28 other companies and organizations. The largest waiver, for 351,000 people, is for, appropriately enough, a union — specifically the United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund, a New York brotherhood that covers teachers. (Read more from investors.com)

Lawsuits over health care law heat up
Matt Sissel of Iowa City proudly served in Iraq as a combat medic. But he objects to being “conscripted” into an overhauled federal health care system.

The uninsured artist is riled about a provision in the new health law that would require him to purchase insurance or pay a penalty starting in 2014. Last July, he filed a lawsuit to have the landmark act declared unconstitutional. “I don’t want the federal government dictating my personal financial decisions,” says Sissel, 29. “It can’t even run its own budget.”

In attacking the law in the courts, Sissel has plenty of company. A number of interest groups, state officials and ordinary citizens are seeking to have the health care law struck down in federal court, and action is heating up: (Read more from usatoday.com)

Did you know that the Fraser Institute publishes an annual review of hospital waiting times in Canada?

Here’s the 2009 report: WaitingYourTurn_2009.pdf

Excerpt:

The Fraser Institute’s nineteenth annual waiting list survey found that Canada-wide waiting times for surgical and other therapeutic treatments decreased in 2009. Total waiting time between referral from a general practitioner and treatment, averaged across all 12 specialties and 10 provinces surveyed, fell from 17.3 weeks in 2008 to 16.1 weeks in 2009.

. . . .

Despite a two week fall from the high reached in 2007, the total wait time remains high, both historically and internationally. Compared to 1993, the total waiting time in 2009 is 73 percent longer.

. . . .

Finally, the promise of the Canadian health care system is not being realized. On the contrary, a profusion of research reveals that cardiovascular surgery queues are routinely jumped by the famous and politically-connected, that sub urban and rural residents con front barriers to access not encountered by their urban counter parts, and that low-income Canadians have less access to specialists.

I posted this to reddit in /r/politics. It was downvoted into oblivion and received one comment: “I don’t trust political think tanks to be impartial.”

WTF kind of willful ignorance is this?

Big Pharma has almost reached the finish line of its decades-long battle to wipe out all competition. As of 1 April 2011—less than eight months from now—virtually all medicinal herbs will become illegal in the European Union. (Read more from gaia-health.com)

Dear socialists, please read this article carefully. It is yet another example of how abusive businesses BENEFIT from big government. Please stop suggesting that more government is the solution for everything.

Another lecture from the 2010 Property and Freedom Society Conference.

PFS 2010 – Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple), “Public Health” as a Lever for Tyranny from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

The inevitable consequence of central planning.

About a quarter of the swine flu vaccine produced for the U.S. public has expired — meaning that a whopping 40 million doses worth about $260 million is being written off as trash.

“It’s a lot, by historical standards,” said Jerry Weir, who oversees vaccine research and review for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The outdated vaccine, some of which expired Wednesday, will be incinerated. The amount, more than twice the usual leftovers, likely sets a record. And that’s not even all of it.

About 30 million more doses will expire later and may go unused, according to one government estimate. If all that vaccine expires, more than 43 percent of the supply for the U.S. public will have gone to waste. (Read more from theintelhub.com)

Most people know about the individual mandate in the new health care bill, but the bill contained another mandate that could be far more costly.

A few wording changes to the tax code’s section 6041 regarding 1099 reporting were slipped into the 2000-page health legislation. The changes will force millions of businesses to issue hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of additional IRS Form 1099s every year. It appears to be a costly, anti-business nightmare.

Under current law, businesses are required to issue 1099s in a limited set of situations, such as when paying outside consultants.

. . . .

Basically, businesses will have to issue 1099s whenever they do more than $600 of business with another entity in a year. For the $14 trillion U.S. economy, that’s a hell of a lot of 1099s. When a business buys a $1,000 used car, it will have to gather information on the seller and mail 1099s to the seller and the IRS. When a small shop owner pays her rent, she will have to send a 1099 to the landlord and IRS. Recipients of the vast flood of these forms will have to match them with existing accounting records. There will be huge numbers of errors and mismatches, which will probably generate many costly battles with the IRS. (Read more from cato-at-liberty.org)

The nation’s most influential small business lobby is joining a court challenge to President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, arguing that Americans cannot be required under the Constitution to obtain insurance coverage.

The National Federation of Independent Business will announce Friday it is joining a federal lawsuit filed in Florida by 20 state attorneys general and governors, NFIB President Dan Danner said in an interview.

. . . .

A groundswell of opposition to the law from small business owners prompted NFIB’s decision to join the court challenge, said Karen Harned, a senior lawyer for the group. “The second the law was signed, NFIB was hearing from its members: ‘What are you all going to do about this?’,” said Harned. “So we hunkered down. We looked around. This state attorneys general lawsuit made the most sense for us. It’s the only one that has a national presence.”