JOE BIDEN: LYING SOCIOPATH GAMER PARASITE LAWYER!
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania. JOHN BINDER
NOT ONE CRIMINAL LOOTING BANKSTER WIL EVER GO TO PRISON SO LONG AS THE LAWYER-POLITICIAN DEMS RUN THE ECONMY FOR THE BANKSTER CLASS.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Banking Crisis just got WORSE. Fed Reports $400 BILLION in Losses.
NOW WATCH CALIFORNIA ! NOT ! CUT ILLEGALS FROM 'FREE' HEALTHCARE!
'CREDIT CARD' Joe Biden Moves to Cut Medicare Advantage
President Joe Biden’s administration announced that it would cut Medicare Advantage, after the president has frequently claimed that Republicans want to slash Medicare and Social Security.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced this week that they would cut Medicare Advantage by 1.12 percent in 2024, which is not as significant a cut as what the administration proposed two months ago.
Bloomberg reported:
The agency will also phase in controversial changes that determine payments based on the severity of patients’ health problems. That policy will take effect over three years instead of one year, after the proposal drew fierce criticism from the industry.The changes add up to a near-term victory for the industry, which had argued that the Biden administration went too far in its initial proposal. But the policy may mark the start of a period of slower growth for a market that has doubled in size in the last decade, driving growth and profits at major insurers.
Biden has proposed these cuts to Medicare Advantage as he has frequently accused Republicans of wanting to slash Social Security and Medicare as part of a potential compromise to address the coming debt ceiling deadline.
Republicans such as Sens. Steve Daines (R-MT), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK), the chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), have called out Biden’s apparently hypocrisy.
Breitbart News reported that Biden sponsored a bill in 1975 that would sunset and reauthorize all federal programs, which includes Social Security and Medicare.
“We must… begin reviewing existing programs to determine whether they are still effective, and whether they are worth the money that we are putting in them. We must eliminate the wasteful ones,” Biden said when introducing the 1975 legislation.
“One thing that we have all observed is that once a federal program gets started, it is very difficult to stop it, or even change its emphasis, regardless of its performance in the past,” then-Sen. Biden continued. “It is time for us to require, on a regular and continuing basis, that both the administrators of these programs and we legislators who adopt the programs, examine their operations with care and detail.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
OBAMACARE WAS WRITTEN BY OBOMB'S BIG PHARMA CRONIES AND THEY'VE RAKED IT IN SINCE!
Obamacare: Still Killing People 13 Years In
On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed his namesake legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) colloquially Obamacare, into law. On March 23, 2023, the Biden-Harris administration celebrated the ACA's thirteenth anniversary. They should be holding a funeral, not a celebration party.
The ACA has caused countless avoidable American deaths. They are due to Washington's conflation of a piece of paper (an insurance policy) with a professional service: medical care.
Xavier Becerra, the Health and Human Services secretary, astonishingly missing during the entire COVID health crisis, declared the following: "As we celebrate the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act today ... this law has lived up to its name, providing a way for Americans to access quality, affordable health coverage."
The ACA did indeed expand medical insurance to more Americans. In 2000, Medicaid enrollment was 15.6 percent of the U.S. population. In 2022, that number has nearly doubled: 27.7 percent of Americans — 92,340,585 individuals — were enrolled in the taxpayer-funded, no-charge-to-enrollees program. Thus, nearly one third of the country has medical insurance and, according to Secretary Becerra, "have the peace of mind that comes with high-quality health care."
Note the conflation of care with insurance. Washington wants you to think having the latter means you get the former, presumably when you need it. Otherwise, what good is insurance? Having insurance does not mean getting timely care. In fact, there is a seesaw effect: as the number of people with government-provided insurance increases, access to care decreases.
Before the ACA, average maximum wait time to see a primary care physician was a unconscionable: 92 days. With ACA expansion of government-provided, no-charge Medicaid insurance, maximum wait times increased to 120 days and produced death-by-queue.
Death by queue is a phrase coined in the United Kingdom, meaning dying while waiting in line for care that is technically possible but unavailable in time to save lives. Death by queue has long been a feature of the vaunted British National Health Service (NHS) and has now become noticeable in the U.S.
In Illinois over three years, 752 Medicaid enrollees died waiting for desperately needed medical treatment. An internal Veterans' Affairs Department audit concluded that "47,000 veterans may have died" waiting in line for care that was technically possible but unavailable. Veterans are covered by federal Tricare insurance.
An accurate estimate of death by queue in the U.S. is not available. In Great Britain, at least "117,000 die[d] on waiting lists for NHS" in 2020 and 2021.
My wife may have been a victim of death-by-queue. She waited seven months before she could see her primary physician for her abdominal pain. The diagnosis was inoperable pancreatic cancer. She died 22 months later. Her case is certainly not unique. Numerous studies prove that delay in diagnosis of life-threatening conditions such as cancer leads to deaths that could be prevented. What is killing these patients is excessive wait times.
The reason for the long wait times and death-by-queue is Washington's repeated fixes applied to healthcare. First there are federal regulations. Physician time that should be spent on patients is consumed by regulatory and administrative burdens.
Second, there is "bureaucratic diversion," when money is taken from clinical care to pay for bureaucracy, administration, rules, regulations, compliance, and oversight. Each dollar spent on these non-clinical activities is a dollar that cannot be spent on patients. Estimates of this outlay range from 31 percent to 50 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending. In 2021, the U.S. expended $4.3 trillion on its healthcare system. Thus, Washington took roughly $2 trillion away from patients to pay federal (and state) activities that provide no care. Imagine how short wait times could be — can you say 48 hours?! — with an additional $2 trillion available to pay providers! Possibly my wife would be alive today.
For decades, Washington has been fixing health care with federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid (both created in 1965), the Emergency Medical Transport and Labor Act of 1986 (which created health care's unfunded mandate), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and the ACA (2010). Prior to 1965, the U.S. expended 6.5 percent of GDP on health care. Last year, it was 19.7 percent.
The end result of federal over-regulation and all that spending is what we have today: death-by-queue and impending bankruptcy of both Medicare and possibly the U.S.
Biden's "celebration" of Washington's healthcare achievements is a travesty. By constantly increasing government-provided insurance, Democrats increase the number of Americans who die waiting too long for life-saving care.
If we want to shrink wait times, see the doctor before it's too late, and save American lives, kick Washington out of healthcare (the system), stop budget-focused bureaucrats from dictating our health (medical) care, and reconnect patients directly with their doctors with no third-party decision maker in between.
Deane Waldman, M.D., MBA is professor emeritus of pediatrics, pathology, and decision science at the University of New Mexico. He is the former director of the Center for Healthcare Policy at Texas Public Policy Foundation and author of multi-award-winning book Curing the Cancer in U.S. Healthcare: StatesCare and Market-Based Medicine.
Image via Max Pixel.
Josh Hawley: Biden’s ‘Concierge Service’ for Illegal Aliens Comes at Expense of Americans’ Jobs, Wages
President Joe Biden’s “concierge service” for illegal aliens comes at the expense of Americans’ jobs and wages, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said this week.
In a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Hawley blasted the administration’s migrant mobile app — known as CBP One — that has released more than 30,000 foreign nationals into the United States since early January by allowing them to schedule appointments at the southern border.
Specifically, the migrant mobile app allows foreign nationals who are pregnant, mentally ill, elderly, disabled, homeless, or crime victims living in Mexico to schedule appointments at the border for release into the U.S. interior.
Hawley writes that the migrant mobile app is in effect “like making a restaurant reservation” and will have dire effects on Americans’ jobs and wages:
Under your leadership, the Department is marketing a new phone app, called CBP One, that allows unauthorized migrants to reserve a time to cross the border, like making a restaurant reservation. How convenient. I gather the app is meant to expedite asylum claims, or so your Department’s promotional material says. But I noticed you said nothing about asylum when I asked you at the hearing. And the Texas Monthly has recently reported that “[a]t no point does the app ask users ‘Are you seeking asylum?’” Worse, when migrants show up at the border to enter the country, they “are given no interviews and asked no questions about vulnerabilities they listed in the app or about why they’re seeking asylum in the U.S.—they’re simply released into the country on official parole.” [Emphasis added]
…I imagine there are plenty of Americans who would appreciate this level of service from their government. Your choice to spend untold sums of taxpayer money—you said you had no idea what it cost—on concierge service for illegals is baffling. It is also revealing. It demonstrates your priorities: open borders, no matter the cost to Americans; no matter the jobs lost, the wages lost, the drugs flooding our schools. [Emphasis added]
Hawley calls the migrant mobile app “a full-on institutionalization of an open border and the abuse” of U.S. asylum laws, pressing Mayorkas to disclose how many foreign nationals have used the app since its inception, how many are expected to use the app after border controls end in May, and if the app will be updated to ask applicants if they have legitimate asylum claims.
The tech companies involved in the migrant mobile app’s creation, Hawley writes, should also be disclosed to the public and Congress along with the taxpayer costs associated with the app.
Biden’s expansive Catch and Release network at the border is pumping hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, often illegal, into working- and middle-class American jobs. At the same time, fewer Americans are working.
As Breitbart News reported, at the end of 2022, there were nearly two million fewer native-born Americans working compared to the same time in 2019, while two million foreign-born workers have been added to the workforce compared to the same time period.
In particular, the decline in the labor participation rate among working-class native-born Americans has dropped to 70.3 percent at the end of last year compared to 71.4 percent in 2019, 74.8 percent in 2006, and 76.4 percent in 2000.
Working-class native-born American men, those without a bachelor’s degree between 25 to 54 years old, had only an 83.7 percent labor participation rate at the end of 2022 — declining consistently since the year 2000.
The Biden administration has largely ignored efforts to get native-born Americans back into the workforce, instead adding millions of foreign workers to the labor market which adds downward pressure, particularly for working-class Americans in terms of finding jobs and securing higher wages.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
A social and medical examination of Long COVID as a “mass disabling event”: Part 1
After three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the long-term consequences of infection with SARS CoV-2—called Long COVID or post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC)—remain a dire threat to humanity. Long COVID researchers and advocates have correctly referred to the pandemic as a “mass disabling event,” which is ongoing and deepening despite all the lies and propaganda that “the pandemic is over.”
The massive societal impacts of the pandemic are analogous to an iceberg, in which the acute mortality and suffering present on the surface are accompanied by the often hidden but even more numerically immense long-term toll exacted by Long COVID.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) shows that 671 million people have officially been infected with SARS-CoV-2 worldwide, resulting in 6.73 million deaths. Both figures are known to be vast undercounts due to inadequate testing and data tracking systems in most countries. Studies indicate that the majority of humanity has now been infected with COVID-19 and there are over 20 million excess deaths attributable to the pandemic.
An important recent scientific review, “Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations” provided a conservative estimate that beyond these acute deaths, a staggering 65 million people are now suffering from Long COVID worldwide. The widely read paper, published in Nature Reviews Microbiology in January, was co-authored by Eric Jeffrey Topol and Julia Moore Vogel of The Scripps Research Institute, as well as Long COVID patient-researchers Hannah E. Davis and Lisa McCorkell.
The researchers present a series of devastating statistics that highlight the criminality of what is being unleashed on society by the ruling elites. They note:
At least 65 million individuals around the world have long COVID… the number is likely much higher due to many undocumented cases. The incidence is estimated at 10–30% of non-hospitalized cases, 50–70% of hospitalized cases and 10–12% of vaccinated cases. Long COVID is associated with all ages and acute phase disease severities.
The characteristics of Long COVID still remain elusive due in part to its being associated with over 200 symptoms ranging from inconvenient to debilitating. The most common symptoms include extreme fatigue, difficulty breathing and shortness of breath, pain when breathing, painful muscles, heavy arms or legs, ageusia (loss of sense of taste) or anosmia (loss of sense of smell), feeling hot and cold alternately, and tingling extremities.
The Topol et al. review cites studies demonstrating that COVID-19 can attack and cause lasting damage to every organ system of the body, in particular the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, neurological, endocrine, respiratory, and genitourinary systems.
Significantly, COVID-19 can cause cardiovascular, thrombotic (clots) and cerebrovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, myalgicncephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and dysautonomia (dysfunction of the automotive nervous system that regulates the body’s internal environment), especially postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) associated with increased heart rate when standing.
The authors conclude that these symptoms can persist for a few weeks, to years, to potentially an entire lifetime, often making it impossible for sufferers to lead a normal life. The review states, “With significant proportions of individuals with long COVID unable to return to work, the scale of newly disabled individuals is contributing to labour shortages. There are currently no validated effective treatments.”
The immense social and medical impacts of Long COVID are the product of the homicidal “let it rip” mass infection policies that have now been implemented by every capitalist government throughout the world. The suppression and distortion of the science of Long COVID—which from the very first wave of the pandemic was known to be a devastating affliction—amount to one of the greatest crimes committed by capitalist politicians and the corporate media throughout the pandemic.
It is clear that Long COVID has accompanied each successive wave of the pandemic, and that it will continue to debilitate a significant portion of society for years to come. This review, as part of the World Socialist Web Site’s Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, will document what is known about the science and impacts of Long COVID, the lessons that should have been drawn from previous post-viral illnesses, and the refusal of world capitalism to address this massive and ongoing social catastrophe.
Identification of Long COVID
Long COVID as a condition was first identified by patients themselves, who were unable to obtain any meaningful treatment. The people who reported Long COVID symptoms during the first wave in 2020 were routinely dismissed as having a psychosomatic condition and ignored. This was in spite of Long COVID being totally predictable, as it is well known that viral and bacterial infections have long-term consequences that can emerge even decades after the initial infection.
A comment published in Social Science & Medicine in October 2020, written by professor of Human Geography at the University of Glasgow, Felicity Callard, and Honorary Research Associate at University College London, Elisa Perego, stated, “Thousands of patients collectively made visible heterogeneous and complexly unfolding symptoms: most were not commonly acknowledged within many healthcare and policy channels in early pandemic months.”
The authors argue that social media played an important role in uniting the growing cohort of patients internationally, enabling them to gain recognition for their condition. “There are strong reasons to argue that Long Covid is the first illness to be made through patients finding one another on Twitter and other social media,” they stated.
Importantly, Callard and Perego challenged the myth that COVID-19 is a mild condition as even in the early stages of the pandemic patients were reporting persistent severe symptoms.
In an online post published in May 2020, Callard took up Britain’s Home Officer Deputy Science Advisor Rupert Shute’s assessment of COVID-19 as “mild.” She wrote, “I have found myself chafing as a patient against the descriptor mild. The adjective can end up both revealing and hiding various logics at a moment in which thousands continue to die every day, world-wide, of a new and brutal disease.”
Perego recently spoke to the World Socialist Web Site. She is a principled scientist calling for the global elimination of COVID-19.
Long COVID advocate, immunologist and professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine, Akiko Iwasaki, related in an online forum last August in Knowable Magazine “Long COVID: A parallel pandemic” that in the early phase of the pandemic she investigated acute COVID-19, but that she frequently encountered people with persistent symptoms. She said:
We didn’t anticipate so many people becoming ill with long-term consequences. Hospitalized patients who are discharged may have 50 percent of those having long-term symptoms. Whereas a mild Covid or asymptomatic ones may lead to much less prevalence but still in the 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent range. So that’s a lot of people.
How many people have Long COVID?
Most of the people who get Long COVID have been relatively healthy and aged between 30-50 years old, often experiencing mild or no symptoms at all when they became infected. Estimates of the number of people with the condition vary greatly, as there is not a universally accepted definition for Long COVID. Last year, Nature commented, “So far, there is no agreement on how to define and diagnose long COVID.”
The World Health Organisation (WHO) published a “clinical case definition” in October 2021, but it has not gained approval with patient advocates or researchers. Academic studies continue to use a range of criteria to define the condition.
An opinion piece published in August in The Conversation by Betty Raman, Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford, noted that researchers calculated that somewhere from 5-50 percent of people infected with COVID-19 suffer from Long COVID.
In a study involving 76,422 participants, a research team led by Aranka V. Ballering, MSc, found that “post-COVID-19 condition might occur in about one out of eight (12.5 %) people with COVID-19 in the general population.”
A recent Brookings Institute report published in August estimated that in the US alone between 2 million to 4 million working-age adults have left the labor force due to Long COVID. The National Center for Health Statistics calculated that around 16 million working-age Americans (18 to 65) have Long COVID, or about 8 percent of this section of the population.
A study published last July by the Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “Long Haulers and Labour Market Outcomes,” estimated that out of the people they surveyed with Long COVID, almost 26 percent had either reduced working hours (at least 10 hours a week on a 40-hour week basis) or quit altogether.
The British Trades Union Congress (TUC) reported that 20 percent of people with Long COVID were no longer working, while another 16 percent said they were working fewer hours. Research published in The Lancet in July 2021 on an international cohort found that 22 percent of Long COVID patients could no longer work due to poor health, and another 45 percent had to reduce their hours.
The impacts of Long COVID on the nervous system
One of the most common Long COVID symptoms is “brain fog,” which some Long COVID advocates have described as a euphemism for brain damage. Brain fog is experienced by 20-30 percent of patients three months after initial infection, and by 65-80 percent of people with more long-term symptoms. Even people who have no symptoms or mild symptoms during their initial infection can develop this form of cognitive impairment, which makes it difficult to think or concentrate.
The adverse effects of brain fog are profound. An article published last September in The Atlantic, “One of Long COVID’s Worst Symptoms Is Also Its Most Misunderstood,” quoted the experience of Long COVID patient Hannah Davis, a co-author of the paper led by Eric Topol. She related, “Moments that affected me don’t feel like they’re part of me anymore ... It feels like I am a void and I’m living in a void.”
Joanna Hellmuth, a neurologist at the Public University in San Francisco, told The Atlantic:
At its core [brain fog] is almost always a disorder of “executive function”—the set of mental abilities that includes focusing attention, holding information in mind, and blocking out distractions. These skills are so foundational that when they crumble, much of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses.
A research paper published in Nature in March 2022 by Gwenaëlle Douaud, Associate Professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience, compared magnetic resonance imagining (MRI) brain scans of people before and after contracting COVID. They found that even with mild infections the brain had shrunk due to a reduction in the volume of grey matter. This is a part of the brain rich in neurons that enable the control of movement, memory and emotions.
Douaud noted importantly:
[T]here is an overall stronger decrease in grey matter thickness across the entire cortex in the infected participants, but … this effect is particularly dominant in the olfactory system (associated with the sense of smell). A marked atrophy of fronto-parietal (involved in sustained attention, complex problem-solving and working memory) and temporal regions (associated with processing auditory information and with the encoding of memory) can also be seen when contrasting hospitalised and non-hospitalised cases, suggesting that there is increased damage in the less mild cases.
The mechanism for SARS-CoV-2 impacting the brain is not clear. Although the virus is known to infect the central nervous system, this is not considered to be efficient, persistent, or frequent.
Scientists have postulated that the virus does not directly infect the brain but that inflammatory cells can travel from the lungs to the brain, thereby disrupting cells called microglia. These cells are macrophages (a type of white blood cell) that are found in the central nervous system (CNS). They remove damaged neurons and fight infections.
A study published last July in the journal Cell, led by researcher Anthony Fernández-Castañeda of the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University, found that brain fog experienced by Long COVID sufferers is similar to chemo fog, a syndrome of cancer chemotherapy-related cognitive impairment.
Fernández-Castañeda noted:
Examining the mouse hippocampus (brain structure involved in memory and learning) following mild respiratory COVID, we found robustly increased microglial/macrophage reactivity in hippocampal white matter (hippocampus associated with learning and memory) at seven days post-infection that persists until at least seven weeks post-infection. Consistent with previous observations that reactive microglia/macrophages can inhibit hippocampal neurogenesis, a stark decrease in new neuron generation was evident … at seven days post-infection and persisted until at least seven weeks post-infection.
One of the co-authors, neuro-oncologist Michelle Monje, drew the parallels between brain fog and Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and multiple sclerosis. She told The Atlantic that neuro-inflammation is “probably the most common way” that COVID-19 results in brain fog.
The impacts of Long COVID on the cardiovascular system
At a significant webinar hosted by the World Health Network last September, titled, “The Impact of Long COVID on Health, Society, and Economies,” cardiologist Rae Duncan gave a devastating presentation focused on the long-term effects of COVID-19 on the cardiovascular system.
She related that “COVID is predominantly, and certainly in the case of Long COVID, a vascular disease. It is a disease causing inflammation and clotting abnormalities in the blood and the blood vessels, which then has a knock-on effect on all other organs.”
Duncan cited several research papers that demonstrate the cardiovascular impacts of SARS-CoV-2 infection, including a major paper published by leading Long COVID researcher Ziyad Al-Aly and his team in February 2022. The study examined a US Department of Veterans Affairs national health care database identifying a cohort of 153,760 individuals with COVID-19 who were re-examined after one year, finding that the cohort had “increased risks” of cardiovascular disease after 30 days of being infected.
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