Obamaville - June 14, 2013 - Midterm Check Up

.

 Obamaville - June 14, 2013 - The Midterm Check Up

 

Halfway through the first year of his second term as President of these United States, just what have we realized of the Obama Dream we were given when he first ran to be chief executive, commander in chief, the husband of the First Lady or maybe biggest spender in our history?

 

Is writing this story a journalist's "dream" ticket to a Pulitzer, or a "nightmare" demotion to writing those dreaded obituaries?

 

My a lot can happen by the 5th year of a presidency --- or not.

 

First you have to get elected, and then elected again.  It means the people might have been fooled once, but they presumably knew what they were doing when they re-elected you.  Now what happens really is the fault of the people who voted for Obama.

 

Ages ago a newly elected Barack Obama promised a lot and did some pretty serious Bushwhacking in the process.  In his first year as the first minority to ever be elected president he promised to deliver things like comprehensive Immigration Reform and closing Guantanamo Prison in Cuba.

 

 

Of course the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would be ended immediately with a high degree of success.  The dastardly Bush recession would be fixed and everyone will keep their homes and get back their lost jobs.  In the meantime he would give everyone in our country health insurance and lower the cost of healthcare.

 

There might have been some mention of a new concept of redistribution of wealth from the "elite" class to the middle class, which in Obamaese means anyone making less than a million or two million dollars a year.  Truth is very difficult to find in the fog in our nation's capitol.

 

Now where I come from about a hundred miles from where Mark Twain grew up, if someone told me the middle class was everyone except the rich, powerful and very few "elite", I might scratch my head in wonder.

 

 

So if the middle class is everyone else, how many "elite's" are there?  Of course the wealthy "elites" have mastered hiding their money from detection by IRS or any other criminal or social tax deductible organization.  The truth is no one really knows this answer, including the All Omnipotent NSA since they REALLY are watching you all the time.

 

So it is a guess by anyone that 1-5% of Americans belong to the so called "elite".  Yet these people control all the wealth of America and much of the world according to those who know and speak the truth.

 

 

 

Now, back to my most recent line of thought, if no more than 5% are "elite" and we are going to redistribute their wealth so we all get what we deserve, then everyone becomes a card carrying member of the "elite".

 

Guess we might need all those illegal immigrants since none of the "elite" work like the middle class has been doing ever since we first drove out the British.  That's one way to drive down the unemployment rate, just eliminate the middle class.  Won't be any jobless if everyone is home managing their money instead of making it.

 

One other big Obama promise was to throw those crooks on Wall Street or Main Street, where ever they might be carrying out their predatory practices, in jail.

 

Then reality set in.  Suddenly, when he was elected president, he was expected to do what he said he would do.  Like nothing counted when he was just a presidential candidate.  Only if you were the final one elected would your promises have to be honest, truthful and delivered.

 

No first year Immigration reform or prison closings.  Five years later they are both just as he found them when he became responsible for all Americans as president.

 

 

 

As for ending the two wars being fought to end the bigger war on terror, our president's words of peace and cooperation for all Earthlings got him the coveted Nobel Peace prize a couple of weeks later as the one person in the world who did more than everyone else to bring about peace.

 

Clearly words speak louder than actions for a few weeks later he ordered tens of thousands of more American troops and billions of dollars in military expenditures in Afghanistan.  What a difference a few weeks can make.

 

Eventually, long after he had promised, we are pretty much out of Iraq.  Now that the war on terror between the US and Al-Qaeda is over the people of Iraq can finish their Civil Separatist war which is far more brutal and deadly than our Geneva Convention based efforts.

 

One thing the Obama administration did learn from all the war efforts is the value of drones, those unmanned airplanes that can successfully kill terrorists without risking the lives of American soldiers.  Any deaths of innocent civilians including children are just collateral damage to the mission.

 

Afghanistan, after billions in bribes, is just now winding down.  Both wars cost far too many lives of the brave American soldiers, men and women, sent to the war zones.

 

 

Fixing Bush's financial recession has been a little bit more complicated than Obama might have suspected since it seemed to take several years to find everything that could be blamed on Bush.

 

In Detroit he saved the world auto industry by transforming General Motors Corporation into the Government Motors Corporation.  His AIG bailout gave billions of dollars to those barons of Wall Street like Goldman Sachs.

 

Millions of Americans lost their jobs and millions of Americans lost their homes since Obama was elected.  The economy is declared to be stable and safe.

 

But people have not found new jobs or replaced foreclosed homes.  And those who have suffered most are the very middle class he promised to save.

 

Seniors saw their retirement savings vanish away.  Minorities by the millions lost their jobs and homes.  So did the Caucasians.  Ironically, many were the very special interest groups who overwhelmingly elected Obama to office.  I guess you can't bite the hand that feeds you when you are the one doing the feeding.

 

No major crooks have been sent to jail.

 

 

As for health care and costs, after a brutal couple of  years Obama Care did get approved but all the tough promises to keep were delayed until after the re-election campaign.  Now we are beginning to see that much of it is impossible to implement.

 

Neither health insurance or medical treatment costs have gone down but continue their upward trajectory.  Americans spend more being sicker than nearly all other developed countries.  We also spend far more on legal drugs than anyone else meaning we are either much sicker or love being legally "stoned".

 

 

Obama might have another first to his credit, not having a budget approved the entire time he has been president.

 

On the other hand, he has had a few trouble spots he did not expect.  The Benghazi attack in Libya left four Americans including the Ambassador dead.

 

The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) targeted Tea Party conservatives for harassment while the NSA (National Security Agency) targeted just plain people for about everything with their cell phone and internet tapping and hacking initiatives.

 

 

The Office of the Chief Executive and Commander in chief (the White House) of course knew nothing of such actions by their own agencies and people.

 

Then there is the Mexican drug war and Syrian civil war in which the big news is we have done nothing in either case.  As a result of our inaction or intellectual constipation 93,000 people have died in Syria and between 60,000 and 90,000 have died in Mexico.

 

Need we say more about the state of affairs of the nation?  To be perfectly honest there are a lot more good, inspiring or entertaining stories we need to cover.

.

Health Care in America - "Corruption at the Core of the Collapse

.

The Broken American Health Care System

What is the driving force behind the failure of the most expensive heath care system in the world to provide a better quality of life?  A lot of us have opinions.  So do the media, politicians and academia, but none seem to be addressing the reason behind every failure of an institution like medical care in society.

There comes a point when the institutions no longer serve the purpose they were created to address.  They evolve to a position where they believe the survival of the institution is more important than the mission of the institution.

When that happens, and inevitably it will when all good causes become their own bureaucracy, we have the seeds of corruption planted.

In America we spend about 9.9% of our disposable income on food.  Thirty years ago we spent 15% of our disposable income, meaning we spend over 5% less today on food than thirty years ago.

Now compare that to our experience with health care costs.

An article  was written June 28, 2009 by George Will titled: "Americans Will Regret Health Care Fix".  It described the cost of health care in America as follows.

The Hudson Institute's Betsy McCaughey, writing in The American Spectator, says that in 1960 the average American household spent 53 percent of its disposable income on food, housing, energy and health care. Today the portion of income consumed by those four has barely changed -- 55 percent. But the health care component has increased while the other three combined have decreased. This is partly because as societies become richer, they spend more on health care -- and symphonies, universities, museums, etc.

It is also because health care is increasingly competent. When the first baby boomers, whose aging is driving health care spending, were born in 1946, many American hospitals' principal expense was clean linen. This was long before MRIs, CAT scans and the rest of the diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal that modern medicine deploys.

In a survey released in April by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard, only 6 percent of Americans said they were willing to spend more than $200 a month on health care, and the price must fall to $100 a month before a majority are willing to pay it. But according to Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Americans already are paying an average of $400 a month.

Most Americans do not know this because the cost of their care is hidden. Only 9 percent buy health coverage individually, and $84 of every $100 spent on health care is spent by someone (an employer, insurance company or government) other than recipients of the care. Those who get insurance as untaxed compensation from employers have no occasion to compute or confront the size of that benefit. But it is part of the price their employers pay for their work.

During the past thirty years health care as a percentage of our gross domestic product has grown by more than ten times.  That does not include your taxes paid for the government expenditures on health care.  The cost now is over $2.6 trillion a year and rising, both in terms of treatment and insurance.

Make no mistake, health care, long a public service through churches, non-profit organizations, government owned facilities and other resources, has now become BIG BUSINESS.

Pharmaceutical corporations led the way into making health care a profit center, not a public service, and now virtually every aspect of our health care system is privately owned, profit centered, and financed by Wall Street.

Wall Street may be reasonably good at financing new businesses like the Internet companies and health care industry but once Wall Street takes control of the industry through controlling the financing, that company serves a new master, Wall Street profitability.

Before you get out your protest banners and decide to occupy hospitals, I mean it is fashionable to protest against anyone we think is ripping off the public, look in the mirror because you are the one embracing a system now under the control of the financial institutions.

My point is this.  Health care is more about serving Wall Street interests than the people's interest.  Of course this is America and we encourage capitalism and these health care capitalists are operating within the framework of the law.  I guess if you owned stock in enough health care companies you would be profiting from the gouging of the American public with excessive health care costs, but most of us don't own health care stocks.

Our health care industry has evolved to the point where moral and financial corruption permeate the entire system, even corrupting those in the industry who really want to help people.

The medical industry is dependent on funneling millions in campaign funds to politicians who have to vote on their funding, in bribing doctors to prescribe drugs, in bribing universities to compete on a cut throat basis for grants from private corporations for survival, and for encouraging doctors to own testing equipment which in turn has to be justified to keep.

Conflicts of interest and ethics issues dominate the health care landscape.  It has become so financially competitive that excessive and unnecessary treatment is the order of the day as a simple and nearly undetectable way to pad the revenue stream.

Why X ray a single tooth if you can X ray the whole mouth?  Why take one or two spinal X rays when you can take multiple X rays of the spine?  Why not set up follow up doctor appointments for reasons of billing for the office visits rather than transmitting test results?

If a drug company pays a doctor to prescribe their drugs, and the more drugs prescribed the more the doctor makes, don't you think more prescriptions will be written?

How can FDA employees fairly evaluate a New Drug Application (NDA) worth potentially billions of dollars in new revenue if the same employees can quit their jobs and go to work for the same drug companies for far more money?

The top five drugs in terms of sales revenue in America all make between $3 and $5 billion a year for the owners, the pharmaceutical company.  If new health research or treatment does not generate profits first and foremost, it is of little value to a profit driven health care system.

If congress or the president eliminated conflicts of interest in the industry, both in terms of the relationship between government workers and the industry and between the industry and practitioners, it would be a great start to cost reduction.

The same conflict of interest exists when doctors are convinced to own expensive equipment like CAT scan and MRI machines, blood laboratories, pharmaceutical offices and others.  If Medicare or a health insurance company allows excessive CAT scans and MRI analysis for the purpose of making sure people are diagnosed and the doctors own the machines, don't you think more screens will be prescribed?

There are a thousand and one ways to get caught in a conflict in an industry that is barely regulated.  Usually there are industry watchdogs like the Securities and Exchange Commission assigned to keep an eye on the system.  However, even they are subject to the same conflicts because the SEC failed to see the housing and banking crisis coming.  More than likely they just turned their back to it.

A comprehensive and fair conflict of interest law could be proposed by the president and approved by congress and a thorough ethics law could be adopted by the medical and health care industries and that would start to unscramble the layers of conflicts and ethics violations we face today.

Unfortunately, such leadership by our politicians and health industries is nonexistent and will be as long as the industry finances the political campaigns in Washington and through the nation.  So we also need campaign financial reform, meaningful reform, to fix that inherent problem.

Fix the conflict of interest, draw up enforceable ethics laws, and clean up the campaign finance mess and it will lead directly to reduced health care costs.  Once again, nothing has been proposed by politicians to correct this mess.

Isn't it about time to REALLY start fixing things?

Our Broken Health Care System - Whom can you trust and whom can you believe?

.

What a sad commentary to hear the news media talk about how our presidential candidates from Clinton to Christy, Bush to Fiorina, have suddenly begun talking about the dangers of prescription drugs and how addiction to prescriptions is causing a heroin epidemic in America.

Hillary should think about such things when her presidential campaign accepts all that money from Big Pharma and the Clinton Foundation accepts millions of more dollars from the same scoundrels.  One day the FBI will recover the missing emails and we will finally know the truth.

Until then, I have been writing articles for over a decade about the abuses in medicine and health care including the prescription drug explosion.  Demand our candidates tell us what they are going to do about it!  You will hear nothing.

This is the same road Barack Obama got away with when he took millions of dollars for his campaign from Big Pharma, then attacked them over health care.  Then he took $50 million from them to promote Obamacare when it was being debated and lo and behold, after it was approved the drug companies got everything they wanted and more.

I am reprinting the key articles I wrote exposing the dangerous condition of our health care system, all because it is grounded on profitability and not healing.  Obamacare is Eutopia for anyone desiring to keep people sick to maximize insurance payments and make no mistake my friends, they will do anything and everything necessary to make money by keeping you sick.

So your favorite family doctor gets a bonus when he prescribes certain prescriptions.  Where I come from they call that bribery, and millions and millions of dollars are involved.  Congress and the president make sure the doctors are exempt from liability if they prescribe these drugs, even if they lead to suicide or accidental overdoses.

Big Pharma pays off doctors to prescribe their drug and their drug leads to the death of the 

 user whether through adverse side effects or suicide from addiction to the prescribed drug.  So far you have committed bribery, used unfair business practices, had excessive prescriptions written, and killed your client, and you cannot even be held responsible.

Those lovable drug companies we see on television bring you relief from pain and drugs to help you sleep.  Sounds like a Columbian drug cartel to me.  As for the trusted doctors, they are the drug distributors, the ones condemning you to death, and there is no recourse for what either has done.

Well, we have a government allowing this insanity to take place, we have a health care system called Obamacare thriving on the carnage resulting from over-prescription, and we have health insurance companies paying the tab as long as the people paid their highly inflated premiums.

All of the assorted characters are responsible for the tens of thousands of suicides taking place and the hundreds of thousands of drug over-doses resulting in accidental or suicidal death.

"The Blood of American Victims is on the Hands of the People we Trusted most."

The following series of "broken health care system" articles explains how we, the people, are victimized, by a system with no morals, no ethics, and no justice, just profit and greed.

.

CPT Master Subject Index - Health Care Issues

.

 

The Broken American Health Care System Article Index

October 14, 2013

Health Care in America - "Corruption at the Core of the Collapse"

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=36650605#editor/target=post;postID=8214232287731538451;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=0;src=postname

 

 

 

June 14, 2013

Obamaville - June 14, 2013 - The Midterm Check Up

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=36650605#editor/target=post;postID=3652150078613629811;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=1;src=postname

 

 

 

March 07, 2012

Health Care in America - Illegal "Off-Label" Conspirators

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2012/03/health-care-in-america-illegal-off.html

 

 

March 06, 2012

Health Care in America - Increasing Criminal and Civil Monetary Penalties Against the Pharmaceutical Industry

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2012/03/health-care-in-america-increasing.html

 

 

 

March 06, 2012

Health Care in America - Big Pharma Convictions in Civil and Criminal Courts

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2012/03/health-care-in-america-big-pharma.html

 

March 06, 2012

Health Care in America - Big Pharma Fraud, Cover Ups & Corruption

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2012/03/health-care-in-america-big-pharma-fraud.html

 

 

February 29, 2012

Health Care in America - The Sword of Damocles - Antibiotics

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2012/02/health-care-in-america-sword-of.html

 

 

February 21, 2012

Health News You Can Use - Stay Informed & Stay Alive

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=36650605#editor/target=post;postID=8082353701027388736;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=146;src=postname

 

 

February 15, 2012

Did You Hear About This in the News?

America's Legal Drug Addiction

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2012/02/did-you-hear-about-this-in-news.html

 

 

February 06, 2012

Health Care in America - "Corruption at the Core of the Collapse

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2012/02/health-care-in-america-corruption-at.html

 

 

February 03, 2012

Health Care in America - "Possible Side Effects" Warnings

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2012/02/health-care-in-america-possible-side.html

 

 

January 31, 2012

Health Care in America - Where Politicians Fear to Tread

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2012/01/health-care-in-america-where.html

 

 

May 14, 2010

Now that we have a health care bailout - how about an American Health Care Reform?

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=36650605#editor/target=post;postID=6204075506765276783;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=0;src=postname

 

 

May 13, 2009

The Health Industry Capitulation - This Sure Ain't No Pythagorean Theorem

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=36650605#editor/target=post;postID=4826555608024492628;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=1;src=postname

 

LIBERAL HEADS EXPLODE: Kentucky’s New Lieutenant Governor Jenean Hampton

.

National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/426555/kentuckys-new-gop-lt-gov-black-tea-party-activist-john-fundRead more (38 lines)review.com/corner/426555/kentuckys-new-gop-lt-gov-black-tea-party-activist-john-fund
by John Fund

November 3, 2015 11:58 PM @JohnFund

Matt Bevin’s 53 percent to 44 percent victory tonight marks only the second time in 48 years that Republicans have won the Kentucky governor’s race.

 

 

But Republicans also made history in another way. Bevin’s lieutenant governor running-mate, Jenean Hampton, is now the first African American elected to statewide office ever in the state’s history.

 

 

Both Bevin and Hampton are Tea Party activists who have never held elective office. Hampton’s path certainly represents triumph over adversity. Born in Detroit, the 57-year-old Hampton and her three sisters were raised by a single mom who lacked a high school education and couldn’t afford a television or a car.

 

But Hampton was determined to better herself. She graduated with a degree in industrial engineering and worked for five years in the automobile industry to pay off her college loans. She then joined the Air Force, retiring as a Captain. She earned an MBA from the University of Rochester, moved to Kentucky and became a plant manager in a corrugated packaging plant.

 

Jenean and husbband

Then she lost her job in 2012. She used her free time to start a career in politics and becoming active in the Tea Party. She ran a losing race for state representative in 2014 but won an early endorsement from Senator Rand Paul. She was tapped by Bevin to be his running-mate earlier this year.

 

 

“I’m aware of the historical significance. People point it out … Really, I just never think about it,” she says.“We’re different races, different sexes, he grew up in the country, I grew up in the city. We represent a broad range of the Kentucky demographic.”

Bevin and Hampton were able to hold Democrat Jack Conway to only 58 percent of the vote in Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city and home to one out of five of the state’s voters. Ads featuring the Bevin-Hampton ticket and its support for school choice apparently enabled it to improve on the city’s normal Republican showing.

.