Conservative radio host Neal Boortz stirred up controversy on Monday with a Twitter posting saying, “ObamaCare will do more damage than a successful terrorist bombing of an airliner …and kill more people as well.”
Source: UncoverTheNews
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation that fills the slot in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes , paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and “frisk” people at distance.
The way terahertz waves are absorbed and emitted can also be used to determine the chemical composition of a material. And even though they don’t travel far inside the body, there is great hope that the waves can be used to spot tumours near the surface of the skin.
With all that potential, it’s no wonder that research on terahertz waves has exploded in the last ten years or so.
But what of the health effects of terahertz waves? At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss any notion that they can be damaging. Terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionise atoms or molecules, the chief reasons why higher energy photons such as x-rays and UV rays are so bad for us. But could there be another mechanism at work?
Continued at Technology Review
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It was a holiday miracle for one family in Colorado Springs. Tracy Hermanstorfer’s water broke at 5:00am on Christmas Eve, several weeks early. She and her husband Mike were planning a natural birth, but things quickly changed when she went into cardiac arrest.
Tracy’s heart stopped, and she underwent an emergency c-section, with no time for anesthesia. Mike was in the room, in complete shock. He tells NEWSCHANNEL13 he was in complete shock after seeing one of the worst things manageable happen before his eyes.
According to doctors at Memorial Hospital, this type of complication during birth is rare, but when it does happen, there is hardly ever a positive out come. Once both Mom and Baby were stable, doctors examined Tracy to try and determine what went wrong, and how both she and her baby pulled through, but they were unable to find a reason.
The Hermanstorfer’s new miracle baby is named Coltyn Mikel. He weighs 7lbs 4 ounces, and is 19 inches long.
The family has two other boys at home, an 11-year-old and a 3-year-old. They say they now plan to go home and enjoy their second chance.
Source: KRDO
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Did America slip into a semiliterate, polarized, pre-fascist state over the past decade or so, allowing greedy oligarchs and corporate elites to run the government? Two books I recently read offer reasonably persuasive evidence and arguments that the country did, and a third suggests that dictatorial mindsets could besiege Americans, with an assist from the Internet, if they don’t come to their more deliberative senses. Each of the books offers an informed diagnosis of the dangers that widespread ignorance and ideological polarization pose for American democracy, though none offers a comprehensive treatment for the malaise.
I read the three books in less than two weeks; friends ask how that was possible. The trick is to avoid not only Facebook and Twitter but also: celebrity news, cable news, Oprah, Jerry Springer, American Idol, The Swan, other reality-TV shows, professional wrestling, violent pornography, positive psychology and right-wing Christian fundamentalism.
The latter list includes some of the spectacularly mind-numbing American pursuits that Chris Hedges examines in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Hedges submits that while they mesmerized large portions of the American citizenry, CEOs being paid millions of dollars a year to run companies that feed on taxpayer money usurped our government — with the help of elected officials bought by campaign contributions and tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists who now write many of the nation’s laws.
“Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports,” Hedges writes. “The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating clichés and slogans. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. … Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification.”
Of course, they did not get into this clueless state by themselves. They were manipulated by “agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion,” Hedges continues. “They are the puppet masters. … The techniques of theater have leeched into politics, religion, education, literature, news, commerce, warfare, and crime.”
I know those fools are out there — many millions of them. I might even be one. But what is absolutely maddening about this book is Hedges’ penchant for stating sweeping, generalized claims as absolutes. And yet this master of divinity turned New York Times war correspondent become sociological scholar often bolsters his summations with just enough research, statistical data and anecdotal evidence to make them plausible. The book takes readers to Madison Square Garden for an exegesis of professional wrestling; to the Adult Video News Expo in Las Vegas for lengthy interviews with porn actors and producers and an inflatable doll vendor; and to Claremont Graduate University in California for a seminar on positive psychology, which Hedges terms a “quack science” that “is to the corporate state what eugenics was for the Nazis.”
As a resident of Miami Beach, where the pornographic sensibility is a way of life, I wasn’t shocked to read that annual porn sales in the United States “are estimated at $10 billion or higher” or that DIRECTV distributes “more than 40 million streams of porn into American homes every month.” But I shuddered when Hedges documented not just a growing appetite for violent forms of porn in America but their remarkable visual similarity to photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. “Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society,” he writes. “The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy. … The Abu Ghraib images that were released, and the hundreds more disturbing images that remain classified, could be stills from porn films.”
Unfortunately, Empire of Illusion won’t enlighten or offend the large swaths of functionally illiterate Americans transfixed by smut, pro wrestling, reality TV or celebrity gossip, because those people won’t read the book. But this scholarly 193-page diatribe, which draws from a 100-author bibliography ranging from the late neo-Marxist Frankfurt School icon Theodor Adorno(The Culture Industry) to Princeton professor emeritus Sheldon Wolin (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism), would surely madden many proud affiliates and alumni of America’s elite university system.
Hedges, who attended New England prep schools, Colgate and Harvard as a young man, and later taught at Princeton, Columbia and New York University, asserts in Chapter 3, “The Illusion of Wisdom,” that Harvard, Yale, Princeton and most elite schools “do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think.” Elite universities are in the business of producing “hordes of competent systems managers” not critical thinkers. Those statements strike me as generally accurate. But I’d expect some fierce academic blowback from this notion: “The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive.” And Hedges suggests that these high-end schools “refuse to question a self-justifying system” in which “organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter.”
Hedges not only blames the elite universities for our mortgage-fueled financial crisis but is sure their alumni on Wall Street and in Washington have no capacity to really fix the economic system. “Indeed, they’ll make it worse,” he predicts, exchanging his reportorial register for the absolutist. “They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one.” (He includes George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Obama’s “degree-laden” cabinet members in this group.)
If Hedges knows how to fix the system, he doesn’t tell us inEmpire of Illusion. I hope that’ll be the subject of his next book, because in the meantime, “powerful corporate entities, fearful of losing their influence and wealth” are waiting for “a national crisis that will allow them, in the name of national security and moral renewal, to take complete control,” he warns, without citing verifiable evidence for his dire prediction.
What if PBS, Fox and YouTube organized a national debate featuring Chris Hedges, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, his predecessor Hank Paulson, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid? That panel is a little far-fetched, but it’s the sort of cross-ideological forum that Cass Sunsteinprescribes in Republic.com 2.0 as a way of preventing the nation from sliding into factional, perhaps even violent strife.
Sunstein is a law professor, author and perennial all-star in the world of public intellectuals; he took leave from Harvard Law School to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget. “The American constitutional order was designed to create a republic, as opposed to a monarch or direct democracy,” he writes. “Representatives would be accountable to the public at large. But there was also supposed to be a large degree of reflection and debate, both within the citizenry and within government itself.”
Of course, the Founding Fathers knew public debate could get ugly. Sunstein notes Alexander Hamilton’s belief that the “jarring of parties” was a good thing because it would engender deliberation and, over time, a “republic of reasons.”
Are we one today? Not as much as we could be, Sunstein thinks. His fundamental concern in Republic.com 2.0 is the Internet’s potential for impeding deliberation between groups with opposing viewpoints, eventually increasing ideological rigidity and polarization to a point of no return. It’s vastly easier to join like-minded Internet “enclaves” across the world than to drive across town for a meeting in which someone might challenge one’s pre-established beliefs and positions. Sunstein walks readers through behavioral studies finding that when groups of like-minded individuals are isolated from different viewpoints, they tend toward consensus on the most extreme position held within the group.
At worst, Sunstein says, Internet-induced polarization could lead to social instability. “The danger is that through the mechanisms of persuasive arguments, social comparisons, and corroboration, members will move to positions that lack merit,” he writes. “It is impossible to say, in the abstract, that those who sort themselves into enclaves will generally move in a direction that is desirable for society at large or even for its own members. It is easy to think of examples to the contrary, as, for example, Nazism, hate groups, terrorists, and cults of various sorts.”
Clearly, the Internet has potential to create political good. Citizens have access to vast amounts of information and commentary. Even like-minded enclave proliferation can be good: The more there are, the greater the potential for inter-enclave discussion.
But a study of 1,400 liberal and conservative blogs found the vast majority of bloggers link only to like-minded blogs. Worse, another study showed that when “liberal” bloggers comment on “conservative” blog posts, and vice-versa, a plurality of comments simply cast contempt on opposing views. “Only a quarter of cross-ideological posts involve genuine substantive discussion. In this way, real deliberation is often occurring within established points of view, but only infrequently across them,” Sunstein reports.
One cure for Internet-driven polarization lies with “general interest intermediaries.” By that terminology, Sunstein means media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, current affairs magazines, PBS, NPR and old-fashioned network news broadcasts: “People who rely on such intermediaries have a range of chance encounters, involving shared experiences with diverse others, and also exposure to materials and topics that they did not seek out in advance.”
Of course, these are the media that are in decline because of the Internet. Sunstein imagines a greater role for private and public institutions, including the federal government, in ensuring enough general-interest intermediaries exist to make the republic’s communications system “a help rather than a hindrance to democratic self-government” and a counterbalance to the echo chambers of the Web.
For the most part, Thom Hartmann’s Threshold: Crisis of Western Civilization functions as a general-interest intermediary in book form. Still, readers can be forgiven for wondering, at times, whether they are in a no-conservatives zone. Hartmann is host of the Thom Hartmann Show, a nationally syndicated “progressive” radio talk show.
Just the same, Threshold is so geographically and temporally sprawling that it offers material even progressive readers might not have chosen in advance: a refugee camp in contemporary Darfur in southern Sudan (Lesson: Famine leads to war and more suffering.); ancient New Zealand, where the Maoris exterminated the moa birds, forcing them to become cannibals (Don’t repeat this mistake.); contemporary Denmark, where people happily send 30 to 60 percent of their income to the government in exchange for free health care, free university tuition, yearlong maternity leave, ample unemployment coverage and more (Americans should consider this.); Caral in ancient Peru, where anthropologists have found no evidence of weaponry (”Maybe peace is the natural state of things.”); the Iroquois people, who made certain decisions based on how they would affect tribe members seven generations hence. (If only the rest of us Americans would do that.)
In sum, Threshold is 262 pages of scientific and historical anecdote suggesting that unregulated markets, undemocratic behavior and unecological practices lead to catastrophe. If you haven’t already read a good overview of topsoil depletion, the marine fisheries crisis, rain forest destruction, the democratic behavior of red deer, the 1888 Supreme Court decision that defined corporations as “persons,” the $15 million that 30,000 corporate lobbyists spend weekly when Congress is in session, President Eisenhower’s premonition of a military-industrial complex with “unwarranted influence,” the 2004 computerized voting machines controversy, the $1 trillion in tax dollars the U.S. government spent on war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not on infrastructure and schools, and the subprime loan/toxic securities debacle — you can find one in Threshold. Hartmann’s common-sense remedies include “recovering a culture of democracy,” “balancing the power of men and women,” “reuniting with nature,” “creating an economy modeled on biology” and “influencing people by helping them rather than bombing them.” His book offers few specifics on how these ends might be accomplished in the real world.
So are we drifting along in a pre-fascist state? Has our democratic system really fallen under the control of corporate America? Hartmann’s take obviously starts and stays (far) to the left of center, and we’ll just have to stay tuned and see whether future events support the dire view he and Hedges have of America’s political direction. Meanwhile, I’ll be on the lookout for a persuasive book telling me how it isn’t exactly so, and why America can escape from the economic and ecological spectacle it has made itself.
Source: AlterNet
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Reporting from Washington – Senate Democrats this morning passed a sweeping healthcare overhaul bill, setting the stage for reconciliation early next year with similarly historic legislation passed by the House last month.
The vote was 60-39. It came after months of bitter partisan warfare, culminating in a series of votes this week that thwarted a threatened Republican filibuster.
The bill, which is President Obama’s top domestic priority, would extend insurance to about 30 million people who now lack it, expand the reach of Medicaid for the poor, and impose new rules on health insurance companies. It would cost about $871 billion over 10 years, but raise more than that in new taxes and fees and cuts in Medicare.
Democrats were triumphant but weary as they passed the bill and ended a long, eventful year of legislating under the Obama presidency. “This is a victory for the American people,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said after the vote. “We affirm the ability to live a healthy life . . . is a right and not a privilege.”
But Republicans, whose delaying tactics and demand for extended debate forced Democrats to postpone the Senate vote until Christmas Eve, vowed to keep fighting the bill as it heads into House-Senate negotiations that will craft the final bill.
“This fight is long from over,” said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “My colleagues and I will work to stop this bill from becoming law.”
Underscoring the drama of the vote, Vice President Joe Biden presided over the roll call from the chair. Senators cast their votes from their desks of the Senate floor, a custom reserved for the most momentous occasions. Only Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) was absent.
Watching from the public gallery were others soldiers in the long fight for the healthcare bill – senior aides to Obama; Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), dean of the House and lead sponsor of the House bill; and Victoria Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the lifelong champion of healthcare reform who died earlier this year.
“This is for my friend Ted Kennedy,” declared the ailing, 92-year-old Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) before casting his vote.
Continued at The LA times
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New York Autopsies Show 2009 H1N1 Influenza Virus Damages Entire Airway
In fatal cases of 2009 H1N1 influenza, the virus can damage cells throughout the respiratory airway, much like the viruses that caused the 1918 and 1957 influenza pandemics, report researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. The scientists reviewed autopsy reports, hospital records and other clinical data from 34 people who died of 2009 H1N1 influenza infection between May 15 and July 9, 2009. All but two of the deaths occurred in New York City. A microscopic examination of tissues throughout the airways revealed that the virus caused damage primarily to the upper airway — the trachea and bronchial tubes — but tissue damage in the lower airway, including deep in the lungs, was present as well. Evidence of secondary bacterial infection was seen in more than half of the victims.
The team was led by James R. Gill, M.D., of the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner and New York University School of Medicine, and Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at NIH. The findings are reported in the Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, now available online and scheduled to appear in the February 2010 print issue.
“This study provides clinicians with a clear and detailed picture of the disease caused by 2009 H1N1 influenza virus that will help inform patient management,” says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.”In fatal cases of 2009 H1N1 influenza, it appears the novel pandemic influenza virus produces pulmonary damage that looks very much like that seen in earlier influenza pandemics.” The new report also underscores the impact 2009 H1N1 influenza is having on younger people. While most deaths from seasonal influenza occur in adults over 65 years old, deaths from 2009 H1N1 influenza occur predominately among younger people. The majority of deaths (62 percent) in the 34 cases studied were among those 25 to 49 years old; two infants were also among the fatal cases.
Ninety-one percent of those autopsied had underlying medical conditions, such as heart disease or respiratory disease, including asthma, before becoming ill with 2009 H1N1 influenza. Seventy-two percent of the adults and adolescents who died were obese. This finding agrees with earlier reports, based on hospital records, linking obesity with an increased risk of death from 2009 H1N1 influenza.
The researchers examined tissue samples from the 34 deceased individuals to assess how 2009 H1N1 influenza virus damaged various parts of the respiratory system. “We saw a spectrum of damage to tissue in both the upper and lower respiratory tracts,” says Dr. Taubenberger. In all cases, the uppermost regions of the respiratory tract — the trachea and bronchial tubes — were inflamed, with severe damage in some cases. In 18 cases, evidence of damage lower down in the finer branches of the bronchial tubes, or bronchioles, was noted. In 25 cases, the researchers found damage to the small globular air sacs, or alveoli, of the lungs.
“This pattern of pathology in the airway tissues is similar to that reported in autopsy findings of victims of both the 1918 and 1957 influenza pandemics,” notes Dr. Taubenberger.
The researchers also examined 33 of the 34 cases for evidence of pulmonary bacterial infections. Of these cases, 18 (55 percent) were positive for such infections. Not all of those individuals who had bacterial pneumonia along with 2009 H1N1 virus infection had been hospitalized, however, indicating that some had acquired their bacterial infections outside of a health-care setting. This raises the possibility, say the authors, that community-acquired bacterial pneumonia is playing a role in the current pandemic. “Even in an era of widespread and early antibiotic use,” write the authors, “bacterial pneumonia remains an important factor for severe or fatal influenza.”
Computerized tomography (CT) lung images were available in four cases of pulmonary bacterial infection. In all four cases, the CT scans showed an abnormality known as ground-glass opacity, which are patches of rounded haze not seen in normal lung images. It is not known, say the researchers, whether the abnormalities detected by CT in the four cases also occur in people who have milder H1N1 infections. They call for additional investigation into the utility of CT scans as a tool to help clinicians identify and better treat severe H1N1 infections.
Visit www.flu.gov for one-stop access to U.S. government information on avian and pandemic influenza. Also, visit NIAID’s flu Web portal at http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/topics/Flu/.
NIAID conducts and supports research — at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide—to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID Web site at http://www.niaid.nih.gov.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation’s Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov. Reference: JR Gill et al. Pulmonary pathological findings of fatal 2009 pandemic influenza A/H1N1 viral infections. Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine. Published online Dec. 7, 2009. {Note: Full text of the paper is available at www.archivesofpathology.org}
1 Gill JR, Sheng ZM, Ely SF, et al. Pulmonary Pathologic Findings of Fatal 2009 Pandemic Influenza A/H1N1 Viral Infections. Arch Pathol Lab Med. 2010;134:E1-E9.
Source: VacTruth
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‘Unchecked influence of health industry lobbyists’ means bill could be weakened in the future, union’s reps say
The newly-formed nurses’ “mega-union” has issued a scathing indictment of the Senate health bill expected to be voted on this week, calling it a “deeply flawed” piece of legislation that could make the US health care system’s problems worse.
National Nurses United, the US’s largest nurses’ union since it was formed earlier this month, issued a statement Monday implying that it doesn’t support the health care reform bill championed by the White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
“It is tragic to see the promise from Washington this year for genuine, comprehensive reform ground down to a seriously flawed bill that could actually exacerbate the health care crisis and financial insecurity for American families, and that cedes far too much additional power to the tyranny of a callous insurance industry,” said NNU co-president Karen Higgins, a registered nurse.
The nurses’ statement implied that it would be better if Congress passed no reform legislation, rather than the current proposed bill. NNU co-president Deborah Burger dismissed arguments that the bill can be improved in the future, and that it marks the start of a comprehensive overhaul of the US health care system.
“Those wishful statements ignore the reality that much of the expanded coverage is based on forced purchase of private insurance without effective controls on industry pricing practices or real competition and gaping loopholes in the insurance reforms,” said Burger.
And Jean Ross, another NNU co-president, said it’s likelier that the health care bill will be weakened, rather than strengthened, in the coming years, “due to the unchecked influence of the health care industry lobbyists and the lessons of this year in which all the compromises have been made to the right.”
The NNU’s statement lists what it sees as 10 major flaws with the bill, including the bill’s mandate requiring individuals to purchase health insurance, without doing enough to reduce insurance costs; no limitations on health insurance monopolies in certain states and cities; and “reduced reproductive rights for women.”
The NNU also points to little-discussed provisions in the bill it says put the lie to the idea that the bill will stop insurance companies from canceling policies on account of pre-existing conditions.
– Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail “wellness” programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions.
– Insurers are permitted to sell policies “across state lines”, exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states.
– Insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.
– Insurers may continue to rescind policies for “fraud or intentional misrepresentation” – the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage.
National Nurses United is a member of the umbrella labor group AFL-CIO. Last week, the AFL-CIO’s president, Richard Trumka, called the Senate health bill “inadequate and too tilted toward the insurance industry.” The NNU’s criticism this week indicates that the labor movement is lining up against the Senate version of the health bill, which — unlike the House version — doesn’t include any sort of public option.
Earlier this month, as the union was being formed, NNU Co-President Burger criticized the health bill — even before the Medicare buy-in was removed.
“What we’ve got now isn’t really health care reform, it’s a reshuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanicas far as our patients are concerned, and we’re going to make sure that we … have universal health care that is truly universal and has eliminated the insurance companies,” she told Reuters.
Source: Raw Story
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Crippling new bill will lead to a “rebellion”
Families struggling in the midst of a deep recession who earn a combined total greater than $88,200 and don’t have their health care covered by their employer will be hit with a mandatory annual fee of about $15,000 according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the final Senate Obamacare bill.
As we highlighted yesterday, the health care bill would introduce a raft of new taxes that would inevitably lead to higher costs that would be passed on to the public. A Boston Globe analysis revealed that there were at least 19 new taxes contained in the legislation which is set to be passed on Christmas Eve.
On top of this, a CBO analysis identifies five facts about the bill that will financially devastate families with an annual income greater than 400 percent of the federal poverty level.
Under Obamacare, Americans will be forced to buy government-approved health insurance and anyone earning a middle class wage will have to pay for it out of their own pocket. Federal subsidies will only be provided for people who are not offered coverage by their employer and earn below the 400 percent poverty level.
Employers will not be required to offer their workers coverage, being subject to a $750 annual penalty if they fail to do so, a figure most analysts say is not high enough to prevent employers from dropping their plans, meaning that more people will be forced to buy government health care.
“The Senate health care bill gives employers two powerful incentives to stop offering health insurance coverage to their workers,” writes Terry Jeffrey. “First, if an employer does offer coverage, its lower-wage workers will lose the federal insurance subsidy they would otherwise get. Secondly, if an employer does not offer coverage, the $750-per-worker fine it faces will be far less than the premiums it would pay if it did offer coverage.”
Costs are also set to soar as a result of insurance companies being hit with federal mandates that increase their risk.
“Policies purchased through the exchanges (or directly from insurers) would have to meet several requirements: In particular, insurers would have to accept all applicants, could not limit coverage for pre-existing medical conditions, and could not vary premiums to reflect differences in enrollees’ health,” according to the CBO.
This will inevitably force insurance companies to pass higher costs on to the public.
As a consequence of all these factors, families whose employers drop their plan will be forced to buy it on their own – at a cost of over $15,000 dollars a year.
“Average premiums per policy in the nongroup market in 2016 would be roughly $5,800 for single policies and $15,200 for family policies under the proposal,” states the CBO.
Jeffrey predicts that families being hit with a federally mandated $15,000-per-year insurance bill will provoke a “rebellion”.
“When that happens, the liberals will not say: We made a mistake. We never should have forced families out of their employer-based health insurance and required them to purchase a $15,000 policy,” he writes. “They will say: We told you so. We cannot trust these greedy insurance companies. We need a single-payer system so the government can provide everyone with health care. Just like they did in the Soviet Union.”
Source: PrisonPlanet.com
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You’ve heard it before, how the pharmaceutical industry has a giant “revolving door” through which corporations and government agencies frequently exchange key employees. That reality was driven home in a huge way today when news broke that Dr. Julie Gerberding, who headed the CDC from 2002 through 2009, landed a top job with Merck, one of the largest drug companies in the world. Her job there? She’s the new president of the vaccine division.
How convenient. That means the former head of the CDCwas very likely cultivating a relationship with Merck all these years, and now comes the big payoff: Heading up a $5 billion division that sells cervical cancer vaccines (like Gardasil), chickenpox vaccines and of course H1N1 swine flu vaccines, too.
So what’s the problem with all this? The problem is thatprivate industry and government health offices such as the CDC or FDA should never be so cozy. When they are, it creates an environment of collusion between Big Government and Big Pharma. We’ve already seen this with the government-led push for swine flu vaccines that are manufactured (and sold) by drug companies like Merck.
You might even say that the CDC already functions as the marketing division of the pharmaceutical industry. It was the CDC that pushed so hard for swine flu vaccines, even amid the obvious realization that swine flu was no more dangerous than seasonal flu. To this day, the CDC still hasn’t bothered to recommend vitamin D for the prevention of either seasonal flu or swine flu. It remains heavily invested in the lucrative vaccine approach — an approach that just happens to financially benefit the very corporationsthat are hiring ex-CDC employees like Dr. Gerberding.
Getting a job offer from Big Pharma, by the way, is one of the most-desired career paths for many CDC employees (and FDA workers, for that matter). It’s easy to accomplish it, too: Just operate in your government position as if you were a Big Pharma lackey. If you produce enough good businessfor the drug industry, sooner or later they’ll offer you a lucrative position that doubles or triples your government salary (or even better).
Now, I don’t want to lump all CDC employees in this same pathetic group, because there are indeed a great many bright, honest scientists working at the CDC who do excellent work tracking pandemics and trying to save lives. They are overshadowed, however, by those ambitious profit seekers who see their CDC job as merely a stepping stone for a far better-paying job at a major drug companies. And by any measure, Dr. Gerberding just cashed in big.
Her actual salary at Merck hasn’t been publicly released yet, but given that she’s heading up a $5 billion vaccine industry, it’s probably not chump change. I’d bet she’s now making at least ten times the salary of the President of the United States (and probably a lot more).
So now, Dr. Gerberding’s new job involves the incessant promotion of yet more vaccines — a job not very different from the one she held at the CDC, come to think of it. More vaccines for more diseases afflicting more people… it’s just another day at Merck, where the world is never so healthy that it doesn’t need one more mandatory vaccine.
As a special bonus to Merck in all this, Dr. Gerberding has a wealth of contacts not merely throughout the CDC, but also at the World Health Organization. When you’re the former head of the CDC, the top public health officials of the world are literally just one call away. But starting today, that call is a commercial, corporate-sponsored call, not a public health call. There’s a huge difference.
My question in all this is whether Dr. Gerberding has any real ethics when it comes to issues like vaccines and public health. If she does have such ethics, why would she accept a job with a company that has been engaged in outright scientific fraud? (http://www.naturalnews.com/027582_M…)
Why would she go to work for a company that maintained a “hit list” of doctors to attack and “neutralize?” This is true — it came out in recent court documents (http://www.naturalnews.com/027116_M…).
Why would she take a job with a company that has a pattern of threatening doctors who speak out against its drugs? (http://www.naturalnews.com/026420_M…)
Why would she be okay with the idea of working for a company that commits scientific fraud by hiding documents showing its drugs to be dangerous? (http://www.naturalnews.com/024072_Z…)
Why would she feel okay about working for a company that dumps chemicals and vaccine waste products into the public water system? (http://www.naturalnews.com/023124_w…)
Why would she want to collect a paycheck from a company that has been caught hiring ghost writers to pen “independent” science papers submitted to science journals, when they were actually crafted by Merck? (http://www.naturalnews.com/023052_M…)
Why would she feel comfortable representing a company that committed blatant scientific fraud with its Vytorincholesterol drug study? (http://www.naturalnews.com/022485_s…)
Maybe Dr. Gerberding is fine with all this. Maybe she has really “flexible” ethics. Or maybe she suffers from an “ethics deficiency” — an epidemic disease for which Merck apparently has no vaccine at all.
In any case, she’s now allied herself with a company engaged in so many repeated acts of fraud that in my opinion all its executives should be arrested and prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Those executives will now include Dr. Gerberding, it seems.
You might say, though, that she hasn’t done anything yet for Merck. But check this out: As a previous NaturalNews story explains, when a fourteen-year-old girl named Jessica died following a cervical cancer vaccine injection (made by Merck), the CDC covered for Merck and pointed the finger at the girl’s birth control pills.
Care to guess who was heading the CDC at the time of this maneuver? Dr. Julie Gerberding, now a top Merck executive.
You pat my back and I’ll pat yours.
For years, under the lead of Dr. Gerberding, the CDC has maintained a rather bizarre position that Merck’s vaccines are so safe that all side effects should be dismissed outright. This is explained in a Dallas Morning News article (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcon…), among other places.
The CDC, in other words, has been running defense for Merck for many years, downplaying vaccine side effects and insisting that Merck’s vaccines are safe. Now that the president of Merck’s vaccine division and the former chief of the CDC are one and the same, it brings up obvious questions of whether there was some level of ongoing collusion between the CDC and Merck and how deeply Dr. Gerberding might have been involved.
Some of the word games played by Dr. Gerberding demonstrate amazing Clintonian-like speech patterns designed to deflect blame from Merck’s vaccines. Listen to this exchange where Dr. Gerberding indirectly admits that vaccines can cause autism (or as she says, “Autism-like symptoms,” which is exactly the same thing, as the symptoms define the disease in the first place). Watch it yourself in this segment on YouTube — this is a must see video segment on the link between vaccines and autism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh-n…
That the CDC’s chief would be offered one of the very top jobs at Merck now makes me wonder just how deep the culture of collusion between Merck and the CDC really goes. How many other CDC employees are in line for future job offers from Merck — and what might they do in order to win those jobs?
There’s a solution to all this, of course: Pass a law that bans employees of the CDC, FDA, FTC, EPA or USDA from ever working for pharmaceutical companies. The people who run the regulatory agencies and public health offices should never be allowed to leap into employment at the very same companies they were once regulating. There’s just too much risk of cross-contamination of influence, which is why we have the corruption and collusion problems we’re seeing today with the FDA, FTC and CDC, all of which seem to be operating as marketing extensions of the pharmaceutical industry.
As long as the revolving door remains wide open between Big Pharma and Big Government, there will be a strong tendency towards corporate collusion that betrays the people whom government is supposed to serve. Instead of our government serving the People, in other words, it increasingly exists to serve the interests of Big Business. And big business doesn’t get much bigger than Big Pharma.
After all, inventing fictitious disease, creating pandemic panics, then selling questionable patented drugs to gullible consumers is a lucrative business model. And now the official job of the former head of the CDC is to make sure it all stays that way. So roll up your sleeves, folks: There’s a vaccine with your name on it, and Dr. Gerberding is here to make sure Merck sticks it to ya.
Source: Natural News
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