Monthly Archives: October 2013

News

IRS exchanged confidential taxpayer information with White House

Leave a comment

ECM sent me this article from The Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

Top Internal Revenue Service Obamacare official Sarah Hall Ingram discussed confidential taxpayer information with senior Obama White House officials, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and provided to The Daily Caller.

Lois Lerner, then head of the IRS Tax Exempt Organizations division, also received an email alongside White House officials that contained confidential information.

Ingram attempted to counsel the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Email exchanges involving Ingram and White House officials — including White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz and deputy assistant to the president for health policy Jeanne Lambrew — contained confidential taxpayer information, according to Oversight.

[…]Federal employees who illegally disclose confidential taxpayer information could face five years in prison.

[…]Ingram appeared before Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee Wednesday and claimed she could not recall a document that contained confidential taxpayer information.

[…]Issa has requested unredacted copies of the emails, citing a prohibition from misusing Section 6103 “for the purpose of concealing information from a congressional inquiry.”

Ingram headed the scandal-ridden IRS office responsible for overseeing tax-exempt nonprofit groups before leaving to head the agency’s office in charge of Obamacare implementation.

I am not confident that any of the people responsible will face justice. Unless the Republicans are elected, all of this is going to be swept under the rug. Certainly, the media has no interest in holding the government accountable.

 

Related Posts

News

New study: NHS patients are 45 percent more likely to die than US health care patients

1 Comment

Wes sent me this article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Patients are 45% more likely to die in NHS hospitals than in US ones, according to figures revealing how badly England’s health service compares with those of other countries.

Previously unpublished data collated by Professor Sir Brian Jarman over more than 10 years found NHS mortality rates were among the worst of those in seven developed countries.

A patient in England was five times as likely to die of pneumonia and twice as likely to die of septicaemia compared to similar patients in the US, the leading country in the study, the data suggested.

The elderly were found to be particularly at risk in English hospitals compared with those in the other countries.

The figures showed that the situation had improved since 2004, when the death rate in English hospitals was 58% higher than that in the best performing country.

But NHS institutions still lagged behind in the most recent data, from 2012, despite reforms of the health service and increased funding.

Of the other six countries studied, only the US was named because of the sensitivity of the data.

Prof Sir Brian, who adjusted the data to take account of differences in the countries’ health services, did not initially release his figures because he was so shocked by them he at first assumed there must be a flaw in his methodology.

There was, however, “no means of denying the results,” he said.

“I expected us to do well and was very surprised when we didn’t,” the Imperial College London medic told Channel 4 News.

“If you go to the States, doctors can talk about problems, nurses can raise problems and listen to patient complaints.

“We have a system whereby for written hospital complaints only one in 375 is actually formally investigated. That is absolutely appalling.”

Previously, I had posted a summary of a book by Scott Atlas, a medical doctor at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. In that article, he laid out the reasons why the U.S. healthcare system was the best in the world.

Related posts

News

New study: IVF babies are one third more likely to contract cancer

1 Comment

The UK Daily Mail reports.

Excerpt: (links removed)

Children born as a result of IVF are a third more likely to get cancer, a major study found.

Scientists said those born after fertility treatments were 33 per cent more likely to have childhood cancer.

They were 65 per cent more likely to develop leukaemia and 88 per cent more likely to develop cancers of the brain and central nervous system.

[…]The research, in the journal Fertility and Sterility, reviewed 25 studies from 12 developed countries, including the US, the UK, Denmark, France and Israel, from 1990 to 2010.

‘The results of the largest meta-analysis on this topic to date indicate an association between fertility treatment and cancer in offspring,’ wrote author Dr Marie Hargreave, of the Danish Cancer Society research centre, Copenhagen.

‘The etiology [origin] of childhood cancer is still largely unknown, but it has been hypothesized that fertility treatment may play a role.’

In addition, IVF often results in abortions because unused embryos are discarded. And even worse, in countries like the UK, IVF is taxpayer-funded. I know that liberal groups in Canada and the U.S. would love to have taxpayer-funded IVF, as well.

Biological Colonialism

There’s also a story about the “colonialism” of IVF by Wesley J. Smith in First Things.

Excerpt: (links removed)

We already know that children born of IVF have poorer health outcomes than those conceived naturally. Yet, in the rush to allow these women to bear children, significant potential safety risks are being ignored.

Indeed, a study published in Science just revealed that three-parent mice and other organisms have significant health problems, including with “individual development, cognitive behavior, and [other] key health parameters.” The Scienceauthors strongly recommend more studies, but go on to suggest that despite safety concerns, families with “offspring that were severely afflicted” by mitochondrial diseases could decide “take the risk” anyway.

The willingness of some to do anything to have a baby has also spurred IVF biological colonialism, by which the fertility industry exploits the gestational capacities of destitute women in developing countries to fulfill the procreative desires of the well-off.

“Outsourcing a Life,” a recent investigative report published by the San Francisco Chronicle into India’s surrogacy industry, revealed the high cost paid by women so poor they are willing to gestate other people’s babies for pay. According to the story:

  • Women sign contracts requiring them to abort on demand of the biological parents;
  • Women are forced to leave their families for months and live in crowded dormitories with other pregnant surrogates;
  • Women are maneuvered into having medically unnecessary caesarean sections. Seventy-five percent of the surrogates in the clinic discussed in the story deliver surgically.
  • There may be adverse social consequences for the surrogate, who may become isolated by a disapproving family or culture.

An Indian study revealed other profound wrongs associated with commercial surrogacy—including sex selection, parents refusing to take the child after birth, and surrogates being paid a pittance, with most money going to so-called baby brokers. The report also found that surrogate mothers sometimes “feel attached to the babies even they were not biologically their own children.” Of course they do. Such feelings are a natural biological process associated with gestation. That’s part of biological colonialism’s cruelty.

[…]Indian surrogates have died giving birth to other people’s babies, orphaning their own children.

I found that article very distrurbing. Maybe if people want babies, then they should focus on preparing themselves for marriage EARLIER, finding a marriage-capable man EARLIER, and then having babies the natural way. It would be better for the babies, and cost taxpayers (at least in the UK) a lot less. I don’t understand why people are so selfish. You can’t focus on other things until you are 40 and then wreck everyone else’s life trying to fix your own choices at the last minute. It’s scary to me that people do this.